Finally decided to take the plunge and shoot RAW. Wow! A couple of shots I made were horrible in terms of lighting and the WB was off. But those wonderful little sliders in PS made it so easy to correct. I really don't think I will go back to jpeg. Although I admit, having to post process every single shot does get tedious.
Shooting in RAW sure ate up my 1 GB card. Luckily Sandisk is having a mail in rebate sale. I picked up a 2 GB Extreme III SD card from BH for $30 (inc. s/h) after the mail in rebate.
Don't let the post process get you down on RAW. You really don't have to process everything by hand . . . .
My personal work flow is:
1. Take a gazillion pictures in RAW 2. Move them to the HD as RAW 3. Batch process them all to JPEG (while keeping the original RAW file as well; basically make a copy of everything as the camera would have processed it) 4. Go through the JPEGs to see which pics have the most potential. 5. Process the RAW files for the pics that I chose in step 4.
Actually, the 1 GB card forced me to delete the bad ones after viewing them on the LCD screen. The screen is big enough to tell if the picture has potential or not. If it looks good I keep it and then download it to the computer where the processing begins.
As Rich said if you use Lightroom or Aperture there's no need to convert them to jpegs unless you're going to email them or post them on the web. The default RAW settings which those 2 programs apply shows you everything you need to see after you import the RAW shots. Other then increased storage requirements there's no reason not to just deal with RAW all the time. I don't know if Lightroom does this but Aperture will actually allow one to use all the RAW adjustments on jpegs as well now, you just don't have the latitude in dealing with shadows/highlites.
Linear Mode
