CCD-RAW is not a standard image format that can be imported into typical image display or manipulation software. Instead, it must be processed, typically by proprietary software supplied with the camera and run on a computer, to produce a format such as TIFF or JPEG. Since the details of the CCD-RAW format and the processing required are likely to differ for different brands and models of digital camera, this may give problems for some computer users if their computer can't run the software (e.g., under Unix) although there is a portable open source program, dcraw, that reads most if not all of the raw formats.

Access to the raw information from the CCD allows the photographer much greater control over how colour information is treated in the final image. Even a "lossless" image format like TIFF are the result of the camera's electronics processing the image to map the colours into TIFF's 8-bit RGB color space; manual control over this process can result more in tune with the photographer's intent. For instance, the conversion can be used to compensate for problems with exposure levels, or colour temperature, better than working with an already-processed TIFF or JPEG.

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