Ask Tim Grey - Image to RAW

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Today's Question: As I continue to organize photos in Lightroom, I have discovered a number of instances where I have a .psd file but no RAW file. Is it possible to recreate a RAW file from a .psd file by opening the .psd, going back to the open step (thus effectively undoing all the layer adjustments), and saving as a RAW file (NEF in my case)?

Tim's Answer: The short answer is that no, you can't create a RAW file from your PSD image. A RAW capture isn't a true image file, but rather a data file that contains the actual sensor values gathered by your digital camera when the photograph was taken. You can't create that original RAW capture data from the final converted pixel values.

Of course, my first concern here is how you lost the RAW captures in the first place. There is nothing in a normal Lightroom-based workflow that would cause you to lose the RAW capture when you create a derivative PSD image. Obviously if you created the PSD file and then deleted the original RAW capture for some reason, that would explain the loss of that RAW capture. But it is also possible that you have simply put the PSD and the RAW capture into a stack in Lightroom, and thus aren't seeing the RAW. It is also possible that you removed the RAW capture from the Lightroom catalog without deleting the file from the hard drive. In other words, there are a variety of possibilities, and if you didn't actually delete the RAW capture then you may indeed have access to the original file.

You could go back to the PSD file and remove all layers except the Background image layer, and that would get you back to the image as it was initially converted from RAW capture to actual pixel values, which at least would get you reasonably close to the original RAW capture. But if the RAW capture file has indeed been deleted without any backup copies available, then that original data is lost, and you can only work with what you have in any derivative images such as the PSD file.

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