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Why use camera raw?

Most people who purchase a digital SLR immediately seek advice from a friend or colleague who “knows a bit about digital photography”. Time and again, the most common advice they
receive is to “shoot in JPEG mode; stay away from raw, it’s too confusing”. If you want to take a lot of holiday or birthday party snapshots, bring your memory card to 'Boots' or 'Tescos' and have prints or a CD made for you, I agree with that advice. However, if you want to adjust your images on a computer, and want to get the maximum quality out of your camera, then I strongly suggest you start shooting in raw.

Shooting in raw offers the photographer some very powerful tools to improve their images. Raw images are to digital photography what undeveloped film is to traditional photography. Only unlike film, raw images don’t require expensive chemicals, enlarger and a darkroom and so on. With digital photography, the computer becomes your darkroom, and it offers you a vast degree of flexibility and latitude to express your creativity in your images.

The advantages of using raw instead of JPEG are numerous. When you shoot in raw, you can:

Make large adjustments in image exposure
Recover highlight or shadow detail
Correct white balance easily
Edit your images without damaging them
Make bigger enlargements without compression artifacts
Apply saved settings to batchs of image files
Undo all your in camera settings, if you so choose...