Tiger's "half-baked" RAW handling

Paul Thurrot, writing for Connected Home, takes Mac OS X Tiger's touted support for RAW images to task, noting "Apple's support of Raw images is half-baked at best, but it's better than nothing. I advise photographers who use the Macintosh to skip iPhoto and instead use third-party tools such as Adobe PhotoShop or PhotoShop Elements to manage and edit Raw images." What's the beef, sir?

Well, iPhoto does something sneaky when you import RAW images into your iPhoto Library. It tucks away the original RAW file in a separate folder and makes a JPEG copy of the file that shows up in your Library. Why is this bad? Well, "when you edit a Raw image in iPhoto, you're actually just editing the JPEG version, not the original. Thus, each edit you make will likely impact the overall quality of the finished product." This is antithetical to the entire purpose of the RAW format, which is supposed to protect against image degradation. The only saving-grace of this method is that the original RAW image is still tucked away nicely, un-degraded, in case you need to retrieve it after doing one too many edits.

[via MacDailyNews]