Originally posted by house This all depends on what software you use. With Rawtherapee for instance all those steps are transparent including demosaic algo. Of course raw data is of no use as an image. 0100100 etc isn't all that communicative
but being able to choose your pipeline is.
Agreed
As well as Lightroom, I use Darktable 2.4.2. It's very transparent and selectable, very easy to switch
everything off. But here's a for-instance - even in Darktable and RawTherapee, you have to select a demosacing algorithm. There is no such thing in any RAW development software (RawTherapee included - and I
have used it, occasionally still do for testing) as an import that doesn't involve a demosaicing algorithm (it has to use
something, right?). And you've obviously seen the significant difference that such algorithms can have on an imported image. Then there's the base tone curve, or - if no base curve is applied - the software's
interpretation and rendering of the data to whatever the developers
believe is a neutral tone curve.
I could go on... but I don't think that's necessary
My point is, no-one's probably seen "RAW" for real... because every rendering of a RAW file, by any piece of software, involves the developer's interpretations...