A method of arranging the red, green and blue-sensitive photo sites on a digital image sensor. A Beyer-pattern sensor that the majority of cameras use, has a greater number of green sensors since the human eye is more sensitive to green than red or blue.

Finding your cameras dynamic range:

JPEG – the most common file type: You will have seen the .jpg extension on many images it is the most common of the file formats, it derives its name from the creators ‘Joint Photographic Expert Group’ JPEG is the default saving file type for nearly every digital camera, it allows small file size while keeping a high quality image.

JPEG achieves small file sizes by using compression, similar to how a MP3 music file will take assumptions of what the human ear cannot hear and remove those bits - the JPEG file does the same except for bits it determines the human eye cannot see. This process is known as ‘lossy compression format’ whenever you discard digital information be they music bits or photographic bits you have a trade off in overall quality.

Once you have removed information from the original RAW digital image it has gone forever, and as most cameras save in JPEG as default you have lost this information before you have even taken the image off of the camera.

Another downside with the JPEG format is every time you resave the file you are loosing more quality, overall although in the lowest compression mode JPEG produce good results, it can be better to use another format if possible. Furthermore using the JPEG format takes away many of the advanced processing capabilities of the final image once we get to our processing software like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop to name but two.

The TIFF format ‘Tagged image file format’ produces the most faithful representation of the photographed image after processing the RAW file.  TIFF is a lossless file format and although still offers some compression it does not discard any data.  Another advantage of the format is the depth of 16 bits per colour channel, compared to 12 bits for RAW and 8 bits for JPEG.

This equates to all the data produced from a RAW file will fit in a TIFF file and truly represent the captured scene. TIFF is by far the best choice for saving your RAW files into for either final processing or printing into stunning large format photos.  If you are doing your final processing in TIFF format you can make large changes to the image without running into the dreaded posterisation and stepping ruining the image.

The only draw back from using the TIFF format is the simply huge file sizes if you take a typical 8-megapixel image you can expect the TIFF file to eat around 40MB of disk space. A best practise for the most stunning and faithful shots is to shoot in RAW save to TIFF for final processing and then to JPEG if needed.

Learn your cameras white balance, it allows you simple and amazing creativity over any given shot. Most dSLR cameras allow for manual selection of the white balance. Play, take photos with different white balance settings and see how the different light temperatures affect the final image. Below is a handy chart that illustrates some common light sources.

• 1000 – 2000 K Candlelight
• 2500 – 3500 K Tungsten bulb (the old house light globe)
• 3000 – 4000 K Sunrise / Sunset (clear skies)
• 4000 – 5000 K Fluorescent tubes
• 5000 – 5500 K Electronic flash
• 5000 – 6500 K Daylight clear skies overhead sun
• 6500 – 8000 K Moderately overcast sky
• 9000 – 10000 K Shade or heavy overcast sky