So far I had let my Sony NEX-7 convert all pictures to JPEG format in-camera. However, professionals say the professional thing to do is to use a digital camera’s raw image format that precisely captures the original sensor data. There are two problems, though. First, raw images are several times as big as JPEGs, with a corresponding increase in transfer time and storage space. Second, you still have to convert them to JPEG for publication, which is universally supported and more compact for uploading.
The extra transfer time is annoying but even the JPEGs were big enough that you could make some tea while the USB 2.0 transfer was running, so it’s not that much worse. Conversion does require extra software but Sony provides its Image Data Converter as a free download. On the upside, the IDC knows all about Sony’s cameras and lenses, so it can e.g. correct the rather sizable distortion of the SEL-18200 zoom lens and generally exactly reproduce whatever the camera itself could do. On the downside, the application is rather sluggish, taking several seconds to process every single change to an image. It also fails to remember recent settings, and crashes regularly after editing a few images. That’s the 64-bit version on my Core i7 920 with 6 GB RAM and an AMD 6970 graphics card, for the record.
Nevertheless, I managed to convert a few practice shots from raw to JPEG. I probably could have done these simple adjustments in JPEG, so the pictures aren’t anything special. I decided to upload them anyway because one of our neighborhood squirrels happened to pose for me and everyone loves squirrels, right? Raw Squirrels is a set of seven pictures, all taken in raw format on an overcast November day and then adjusted to a color temperature of 5800 Kelvin to give the impression of sunshine. They are also cropped from 6000×4000 to 4000×3000 since I wasn’t close enough for a frame-filling squirrel, despite the 200 mm zoom lens. As usual the Google+ gallery provides all images at full (cropped) resolution, with optional zoom and EXIF data. Here’s a low-resolution sample of the first picture:
