Is it possible to photostack and remain with a raw file?

[impr_pht]

<p>Hi,<br>

Is it possible to focus stack and remain with a RAW file output, so i don't loose the RAW possibilities?<br>

Just like you can make HDR in lightroom and it remains a DNG file??<br>

Thank you in advance</p>

[phule]

<p>What reason would you have to not work with the RAW files prior to building your stack?</p>

[impr_pht]

<p>it is easier to work with one file then with 3 (for example)<br>

lets say i am using brushes, why should i need to brush each individually?<br>

i can't copy the settings from one to another as it is not the exact spot...</p>

[JosvanEekelen]

<p>I read somewhere (don't know if it is true or not) that you can't do HDR or stacking with a RAW because it is just a file, not an image yet. Following this thought RAWs should be converted to JPG or TIFF before doing HDR or stacking. I'm curious if anyone can shine a light on this.</p>

<p>Apart from that you can often output a TIFF file. It's very large but you don't loose much as compared to a RAW.</p>

[frode]

<p>Hi<br>

The short answer is no. There is however at least one camera that can make multiple exposures into one single raw file, both for simple multiple exposures and for in camera HDR. As with ocus stacking, HDR is much more complex than simple pixel value adding or averaging as is done with ordinary multiple exposure. Therefore HDR is fully automatic - as would focus stacking have to be - and you loose any control of the merging itself (except for a simple "strength" setting). Most of the complex work in HDR and focus stacking is done on each single layer (including their layer masks) before they are merged.<br>

I haven't heard of any raw file format that supports multiple layers. You would therefore have to merge the files before you could save them to a raw format. But to merge them you will have to convert them to an image format supporting layers first, and then put each image to a separate layer and merge these layers into a single layer. However, then there would be no need to go back to raw format since now you now already have a single layer and can edit the way you wanted on this layer.</p>

<p>And then there is that Lightroom and Photoshop do not edit raw files. They keep the raw files unchanged and change a layer (or probably a set of layers) between the raw file and the image displayed on the screen (i.e. they change the transform itself via transformation layers). To you this is transparent, except that you in fact can have several conversions from one singe raw file at the same time. If you were to save back to a raw format you would have to do a "reverse raw conversion", i.e. reverse bayer interpolate. reverse gamma correct etc. And you would have to do this for every change you made to the image. At best you would not gain anything by doing this, at worst you would ruin your image after repeated conversion and reverse conversions. And you would have to make a copy of the raw file if you wanted to keep the original raw file and also for each version you would like to make from the same image, for example color, b&w, different styles, different crops, high resolution print, low resolution web image etc. etc.</p>

<p>Hope this was understandable and of any value. If not, print it out, curl it up and throw it in the waste.</p>

<p><br />Cheers,</p>