From the course: Enhancing Your Images with Photos for macOS

Setting RAW files as the default originals - Photos for OS X Tutorial

From the course: Enhancing Your Images with Photos for macOS

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Setting RAW files as the default originals

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- We've already taken a look at the benefits of RAW files but sometimes you may find yourself with both a RAW and a JPEG file from the same camera. Now by default, photos is going to favor the JPEG file but you can switch this so the RAW file is the preferred option. Let's import two new images from a camera to show you this. I'll go ahead here and double-click to exit out to the overview and I'll choose File, Import. Navigate to the exercise files that you've downloaded and go to the images folder and choose RAW JPEG. In this case there's just two copies of the same picture they're exactly the same but one was a JPEG and one was a RAW file. I'll choose review for import and bring them here into the Croatia album and click import new photos. When you do this, you'll notice a badge on the corner for that image. Let's double click on it here, it goes full screen and then we'll go back. Let's go to the Croatia album as well and you'll see that in the upper corner here there's an indicator that there's two files stacked together, RAW plus JPEG and the JPEG is being treated as the original file. Well, this is done because photos for Mac OS is by its nature aimed at consumers first but it does allow those who've taken the time to shoot with a better camera to access that data. If you're shooting on a lot of cameras it's not uncommon to get both a RAW and a JPEG file unless you tweak your menu settings. In this case what I want to do is favor the RAW file so I can go under the image menu and choose use RAW as original and you see that it switches. Now for this to work, you need to have the individual photo active so when that photo is selected this menu toggles between use JPEG as original and use RAW as original, and it updates there. That works out quite nicely so now when you open and edit this image, what you'll see is the full RAW data is accessed. This will give you more flexibility as you work with key details. For example, as I try to maximize the dynamic range here pulling up the shadows in the black point as well as emphasizing the contrast. You'll see that we had more data to work with and the subtle gradation is handled quite nicely on the file. Remember when you have a RAW and a JPEG file imported you'll see a small badge in the upper corner otherwise just take a look at the file names and you'll get a good idea of what's happening. This is a little tricky because it still says duck JPEG even though the RAW file is the one that's being treated as the original. Make sure you pay attention to your file names as you're working and if you see the original file name this will give you some indication of the type of image that you're processing.

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