RAW Images

[Cayce Lee]

I was wondering if anyone knows why some RAW photos are 1 MBand some are 5 mMB but my camera can take up to 10.1 MB so why aren't all of my images 10.1 MB if i'm using Raw & Large format???

[Jim Bryant]

what camera, make and model are you using?

[BryanC]

File sizes are in MB (megabytes), your camera is 10.1 MP (megapixels), two different things.

[jli]

Originally Posted by Cayce Lee

I was wondering if anyone knows why some RAW photos are 1 MBand some are 5 mMB but my camera can take up to 10.1 MB so why aren't all of my images 10.1 MB if i'm using Raw & Large format???

Most likely, your camera has a 10.1 megapixel sensor, meaning the biggest image it can take has around 10.1 million pixels (e.g., 3888 x 2592 = 10,077,696).

The file sizes of your images are measured in bytes, not pixels. A 5mb file is 5 megabytes (around 5 million bytes). Images vary widely in how big they are for lots of reasons. With jpg, which is a lossy compression format (it throws away data in order to save space), you can change how aggressively images are compressed, so you can have low quality images that take up less space or higher quality images that take up more.

With raw, no data is thrown away, but I expect that the data is still compressed (losslessly). File sizes still vary in this case, because some data is much easier to compress than others. To really explain this would require some non-trivial math, but as a simple example, you can imagine that an image that's almost completely black (like if you forgot to take off your lens cap ) is easier to "describe" with fewer "words" (data) than a really complex landscape with a sunset and lots of colors.

Hope that helps!