By Charlotte Reeves

As a kid, I loved creating masterpiece paintings that ended up proudly stuck to the fridge. My personal mission was always the creation of beautiful new colours. Carefully squeezing out worms of cobalt blue and blood red, I mixed them carefully to create a gorgeous rich and vibrant purple. Combining sunshine yellow and deep red, I conjured bright traffic light orange. My painting sessions always ended up the same way though - the longer I painted and the more times I rinsed and dipped my brush, the more tainted the colours became, ending in a palette of murky browns and greys, so different to the bright, happy colours I'd started with.

Raw files remind me of the end result of a painting session. So much colour, so much data, so much potential, but all mixed in together and tainted and blurred and obscured.

The beautiful thing with raw files is though, there is a special way we can extract that information and reverse the muddling process. We can bring out colours and tones from the muck, restore hidden detail and resurrect our images from that grey soup of mixed colour.

That's how I like to think of it, anyway.