Has digital camera development hit the wall?

Hmmm .... this raw business, I have never got it quite right in my head.

As I understand it - raw gives you the raw sensor data plus all the metadata information to be able to re-create the image shown on the preview screen, which must be the raw capture adjusted to whatever the camera settings are?

I might be wrong, I am happy to be corrected so that I can understand this subject better.  The first image produced on any PP software must be the original raw data of the capture as modified by the metadata to try and replicate the in-camera pre-capture or review screens as a jpg file image?  Cameras without internal processing of their capture file cannot show a review image.  Grumbles were made about the nominal low resolution file attached for this purpose when raw-only capture was introduced on Ricoh products.

Then the raw data can be manipulated much more than any in-camera processed jpg subsequently can (top marks!).  Therefore capturing in raw is a great idea for fixing errors in camera settings, brushing up camera technique or just plain finessing an already good capture.  I am not so sure that the raw data is just a snapshot of what is actually on the sensor in it's wild and woolly state and I would be pretty sure that such a very raw image would be raw indeed.

I did download the free to download Adobe dng raw file specification from the Adobe site and confess that I did not entirely understand it and that it was yawn-inducing.  But I did understand that there is a huge amount of information captured and used beyond the basic information from the sensor.  This includes amongst many other things for example, the sensor manufacturer's "noise profile" and also the individual camera manufacturer's own "noise profile".  After reading the dng file specifications until my eyes glazed and I went on to more productive subjects I came to more better understand why there are so many "raw formats" and why there is no such thing as a truly "raw" raw file.

However I agree that many in-camera settings have nothing to do with the basic raw file but some of these settings do go into metadata which is actually part of the raw file itself.  It is the "digital negative" but better, you can only process a negative from it's captured state but a raw file does allow the even more basic elements to be altered as much as the original film might be processed in different ways at development stage. Perhaps "digital film" with a separate internal data file of many in-camera settings that can be modified might be a better analogy.

What puzzles me, for example, is if you change the colour balance in-camera does the raw file still record what it "sees" or do the captured pixels become modified by the balance applied.  If there is no colour balance correction applied then does modifying this later in PP from a raw file any different from doing it in-camera?  On saying this I agree that it is best to correct colour balance in PP ather than hit or miss in camera.  Although custom colour balance settings set in-camera are generally pretty reliable.  If you set a crazy in-camera white balance then the first image you see in PP software is equally crazy as the PP software is instructed to give it's version of the processed jpg imge that was seen in-camera.  Any camera setting mistakes are duly replicated and the raw file is not the serene and pristine file that prevails over all ham-fisted errors.  It can be properly corrected from the raw data of course and this is the undoubted big plus for capturing an image in raw file format.

I am not opposing, it is just that I have trouble getting my head around just why raw file capture alone is such a good answer.  At the very least conversion in-camera versus later PP is a tug of war over whether in a properly set-up capture the camera does a jpg better than the PP product steered by the image's owner.  A matter of personal choice at the end of the road.  Myself I find that the jpg from the camera is generally "good enough" but I shoot in raw so that I can improve some selected captures and repair others where the photographer was not up to the first challenge of capture.

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Tom Caldwell