RAW inspector reference set

One frame kept in four states, so the RAW inspector's development can be judged against a known reference rather than from memory. All three come from the same Sony ARW: no other capture is involved.

1. The RAW file, as sensor data

The inspector's undeveloped view, reached with the Tune button: the photosite values straight off the sensor, 5168×3448, with only the transfer curve needed to make them visible on screen. Flat, dark and green-biased, because none of the development below has happened yet — no black level subtraction, no white balance, no colour matrix.

GPD03619.ARW (37 MB) — the camera's own file, untouched. This is what the inspector reads: photosites, a filter pattern, black and white levels, white balance and the camera's colour matrix. The JPEG the camera embedded in it is not used by the developed view.

2. Developed in the inspector

Saved straight out of the inspector with vibrance at 100 and exposure at +1 EV, AdobeRGB output. Nothing else is applied — no sharpening, no contrast curve, no noise reduction — so the gradients are the sensor's own. Compared with the camera's embedded JPEG the transitions are notably smoother and the colour less pushed; it is also softer, since no sharpening is done.

3. Developed, then edited elsewhere

The same developed JPEG taken into a third-party editor. This is the intended workflow: the inspector's job is to hand an editor a clean, honestly developed starting point in a wide gamut, not to be the editor.