What does RAW mean in a photographic context?

Question: What does RAW mean in a photographic context!?
Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:

It is a digital capture method employed by some cameras!. It does not compress as does JPEG and allows the user to do more complete editing of the photo in post production!. RAW files are not usable until they have been converted to a format such as Jpeg or Tiff in a software program!.

steveWww@QuestionHome@Com

When light passes through your camera lens it falls onto a sensor!.This converts the light from the thing you see into digital data!.Most cameras processs this information into a form that is viewable as a picture!.RAW files keep the data with the minimum amount of processing!.This enables the user to process the data in order to produce the idea that they tried to photograph as nearly as possible to that idea,rather than let the camera make those decisions according to some preconceived idea of the camera programmers!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

"RAW data

RAW data (which Nikon call NEF data) is the output from each of the original red, green and blue sensitive pixels of the image sensor, after being read out of the array by the array electronics and passing through an analog to digital converter!. The readout electronics collect and amplify the sensor data and it's at this point that "ISO" (relative sensor speed) is set!. If readout is done with little amplification, that corresponds to a low ISO (say ISO 100), while if the data is read out with a lot of amplification, that corresponds to a high ISO setting (say ISO 3200)!. As far as I know, RAW isn't an acronym, it doesn't stand for anything, it just means raw, unprocessed, data!."

http://photo!.net/learn/raw/Www@QuestionHome@Com

RAW is a picture type (like JPEG or Bitmap) except that IT has had nothing at all done to it by the camera!. It is absolutely exactly what was in front of the lens when you pressed the button!.
JPEGs lose information as they are saved in a smaller size where it makes assumptions about the state/colour/shading of some pixels based on others around it - so as to be able to fit to a smaller file!.
RAW files make no assumptions and do nothing (no clever camera computer stuff) leaving it up to you to edit the file in whatever way you want on your computerWww@QuestionHome@Com

if you shoot in raw!. when you upload to pc, you can change the colouring a lot better, it takes a lot less effort to change certain shades of your photo, you can use lightroom, etc without having to spend hours in photoshop, also it saves your exif data, so if you upload it to flickr!.com or opens it in lightroom, you can see details on the way you took the photo, speeds, and info about what camera you used, and whether flash was on, and the date!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

a little more flexibility in what you can do to the image in post, and a lot more work!.Www@QuestionHome@Com