Image Format That is Legally Accepted Internationally: *RAW
Why RAW image format is important in forensic science?
From the first ages of photography, we can observe that photography has become an important instrument for the police forces and forensic scientists. Used by many fields in forensics such as identification, criminal recordings, crime scene investigations, forensic laboratory investigations, ballistic investigations and autopsies, we can understand that it is a crucial process.
Sample Photographs showing examples of crime scene photography.
Because of the rapid growth of technology in this field, the importance of photography increased exponentially and because of this advancement in technology, there are important issues because in our day and age we use digital photography instead of traditional photography.
In traditional photography, the first image achieved is the negative as the master Image, from which, all of the positive prints are developed. As In traditional photography, there is also a master image format in Digital Photography and this format is named RAW Image Format, also known as “digital negative”.
The negative film used in traditional photography
Although the RAW files are not negative images, they fulfill the same purpose as negatives in photography as being the master image. Just like the negatives in traditional photography, they are not directly usable as an image but have all the information from the camera’s sensor that is needed to create the image such as colors and light intensity. This information is radiometric characteristics of the scene that are captured at the best of the camera sensor’s performance. On the other hand, other image formats such as *jpeg, *tiff, *Jif are developed, compressed images with loss of pixels, colors and valuable information compared to its undeveloped form, RAW. For this reason, these image formats are less trustable because they can be easily edited and they will show much less quality and fewer data in the end-run.
Technical Specification differences between *JPEG image format & *RAW image Format
An Image Demonstrating the possible quality loss when decompressing an image from *RAW format
An image showing the possible loss of color and lightning between *JPEG & *RAW
