I firmly believe that every photo we shoot deserves to be more than “straight out of the camera.” And many raw photos often require heavy adjustments to the exposure, shadows, highlights, blacks, and whites. All this work is just to make a photo look more balanced and natural. These basic settings can’t even fix any color issues and sometimes worsen the colors. And with significant shifts applied to the develop settings, you’re typically left with a flat, dull, and washed-out photo.

Raw files are fantastic. There’s no doubt about that. But if cameras can capture all of this information and we can then edit it in a non-linear fashion—sometimes pushing shadows and highlights to ridiculous amounts—then why can’t our raw files start optimized straight out of the camera? I mean, we’re going to change the image anyway, and by their design, raw files can be edited and reverted without any information loss. Why can’t my super expensive top-of-the-line camera develop my raw files for me? Why must we do so much work just to see what the camera could see?