Digital SLRs let you measure White Balance when you photograph, but it is not always easy to do in the field, especially when you’re shooting nature scenes. Your best bet, therefore, is to set the White Balance to Auto for all cameras and adjust it later in the RAW converter. This is only one of the myriad of tips, tricks and knowlegde bits the book “The Art of RAW Conversion” written by Uwe Steinmueller and Juergen Gukbins contains.

This book on RAW conversion covers the basics of RAW conversion, discussing RAW and how to convert into other formats, using any conversion program, while the bulk of the book discusses the many different RAW converters available today. The authors discuss how RAW differs from JPEG and how digital cameras create a JPEG file, the basics of colour management, and the best way to set up a RAW workflow.

The book covers mainstream applications such as Adobe Camera RAW, but also some lesser gods like Bibble and RAW Developer 1.4. Although the book was released quite late in 2006, the authors must have had a considerable lead time: they still cover RAWShooter as if it were Pixmantec’s RAW converter. In June 2006, Adobe took over Pixmantec’s technologies. These are integrated in Adobe Camera RAW, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the current beta of Camera RAW 4 contains much of Pixmantec’s power.

The book also contains a lot of information on Digital Negative and on profiling the camera to get the best results.