I have a question about something I just actually discovered. I’ve been playing around with Luminar and noticed that when it loads my raw files the image is really terrible, underexposed, washed out, the histogram looks terrible. In poking around I found out this is normal. Apparently Luminar removes any adjustments or anything your camera made and just shows the raw sensor data. Is that correct? I saw people on their forums saying that the same images images in photoshop looked much better. In my playing around it seems that if I open the file in pixelmator it looks like I expect it to.
So, my question is could someone explain this to me? Does all software strip out whatever the camera does? What are the things the camera is actually doing? And if I actually want my staring point to be the image the camera produces should I be shooting in JPEG and editing that? I kind of thought the point was that with RAW all that extra info is there and you can adjust it. I am surprised how much the camera is actually doing to the image.
Thanks