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DSLR cameras have the capability to be used by a complete novice and almost immediately be able to produce professional looking pictures using some of the automatic features.
Once familiar with the cameras automatic features there are all the manual settings to start on that can help produce even better images, but there is also a picture quality feature that goes beyond that...
Certainly anyone who owns a DSLR digital camera wants only to produce the best images that the camera is capable of while also understanding that this knowledge cannot be learned overnight.
It is not difficult to understand what these cameras are capable of picture wise, but capturing good images with all the right qualities takes a lot more than just a good camera.
Some people have an eye for what will be a good picture while some others will have to achieve this by trial and error.
Starting to use or using the manual settings on a DSLR digital camera really does open up a whole new world it is like a journey of discovery, but it is one that takes plenty of patience to get familiar with.
The desire for better picture content and quality continually pushes digital camera owners forward.
One way a subjects pictures quality can be enhanced is by photographic it in a format called RAW, and while there is a very technical explanation as to exactly what this signifies the results are much more impressive than the explanation.
There tend to be four picture quality settings, Fine, Standard, RAW/JPEG, and RAW.
The majority of the time pictures are taken with the setting on Fine, which tends to be the universal setting for the least amount of memory used as well as clear quality JPEG pictures that a majority of computers software can deal with without any additional downloads.
Also with the Fine setting most computers are able to edit some of the characteristics of the pictures being imported from a cameras memory card.
Switching the quality to RAW takes the picture quality another big step further, but for improvement there is a little downside too.
The RAW picture quality setting is basically exactly what you see is what the image is going to be, although some of the other settings have to be correct or it can be ruined or wrong just like any other time.
ISO, Aperture, and Focus are three settings that should be worked on before even attempting to take pictures in RAW.
On some camera models RAW will work in fully automatic mode, which can be an added bonus.
When buying a DSLR digital camera there is normally a CD that accompanies it for the computer.
More often than not this will also have the software on it that a computer needs in order to display images taken in RAW format, if this is not the case it is not the end of the world as most of the time a download can be found online.
Taking pictures in RAW/JPEG is a good way to go as this tends to produce two pictures one of which can be edited with a standard windows viewer and the other needing a more sophisticated viewer, but should be able to be viewed in the windows viewer.
One of the biggest downsides of taking any variation of RAW picture is that they use quite a bit more memory than a normal JPEG picture in some cases more than four times as much, so unless there is an eight gigabyte or higher memory card in the camera taking pictures in RAW may not be practical.
This will also be the same once the pictures are imported to a computer, each one will use between seven and twelve megabytes of memory, which means if you do not have a fairly sophisticated computer memory then it will start to get slow very quickly.
So taking pictures in RAW has advantages, but also a few disadvantages which is why most people tend to stick to the Fine settings for ease and convenience.
Unless you have been around picture taking for a while and seen samples of different variants that can be adopted a picture taken in RAW is going to appear much the same as if it was taken in Fine.
It is always good to know these things up front rather than jumping in without really knowing what we are letting ourselves in for.
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