There is a debate in another thread about file format, in particular “raw” versus “RAW.” Not wanting to “hijack” that thread any more than it has already been hijacked, I am starting this new thread that might accurate information to people who do want to know the correct way to write the term.

Several people thought that the correct term was raw, not RAW, as JPEG and TIFF stood for the names of actual file formats, so they were acronyms, whereas RAW was not. But the standard for naming is not based on acronyms, it’s simply based on a given name. Thus, a Photoshop file is called a PSD file (Photoshop document), which is sort of an acronym but not completely as Photoshop is one word). Often the letters are based on acronyms, but not always. Canon uses CRW, Nikon uses NEF and Fujifilm uses RAF (RAF actually stands for “Fuji Raw Image” file, why not FRI?, maybe because that commonly stands for Friday???). The standard is simply to write camera file name types in all caps, thus RAW is the correct way to write RAW if you want to use the proper letters for a RAW file format. But when referring to raw data, it is simply raw data.

Does it really matter? It only matters if you want to use correct language when you write something and you want people to clearly understand what you are referring to. Words do matter in any context. It’s an easy mistake to make, to think that all file formats have to use an acronym but it would be a mistake to believe that as it is apparently not the naming standard for file formats.

In the end we can all use whatever term we want, of course, but we should not expect others to use the term if they know it is not correct. And perhaps we should not correct others on the use of the term and just assume they want to use the term incorrectly as they have a right to do that.