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You can use the Adobe Camera RAW Utility to open JPG files.  This simple and short video tutorial shows you how.

If you are a serious photographer, it is very likely that you are often not satisfied with the auto focus and exposure settings on your camera.  Whether you are a professional or hobbyist, you want more control over the finer details of your image.  The problem is that when you set your camera setting at the highest JPG or TIFF setting you are actually letting your camera decide key processes and settings when it comes to saving your image.  As it does this it decided which information is relevant and gets rid of the extra information.  So how do you get this control back?  The answer is Camera Raw.

There is no question that shooting in and working with RAW files offer photographers the greatest image quality – however this advantage does come at a price.  Understanding the disadvantages of working with RAW files will help you to avoid a major disaster.

One of the great benefits to shooting in RAW files is that making adjustments while in a RAW converter is a lossless process.

Clipping in digital images can mean several things – but for this article we are referring to the process of an image adjustment that is so extreme that it replaces slight detail differences with a pure replacement.

Most digital cameras on the market capture their data in 12-bit mode.  This means that 12 bits of data are captured per channel which roughly equates to a total of 4,096 levels of brightness in each color channel.  Before we get too fixed on numbers, think of this as the tonal information that is captured within your image.  The more levels that are captured within an image, the more tonal data you have to work with.  When an image is converted to a computer it is converted to either an 8-bit or a 16-bit file - but which one should you use?