cpb145 wrote:So I have the ability to shoot in RAW, but am currently using the highest quality jpeg setting. I have tried RAW when I first got my camera, but the size of the converted file was smaller than the size of a high quality jpeg....by a lot. So I figured why bother? Someone please tell me why I should bother, or better yet, what am I screwing up?
You should not be seeing such a difference in file size. Either you did something wrong, or you converted files that were compressed a bunch when converted to jpeg due to not having that much information, as in lots of blue sky, or snow, or some such thing.
I mainly shoot raw for two reasons - I can adjust the white balance easily, and I can recover detail in shadows and blend photos together, as Matt says in another post. That does take some work and some experience and some software. I think Lightroom has a tool that lets you do this without the blending business (I'm using Elements to do that). Partly depends on your tolerance for doing post processing I think, and how serious you want to get about photography. Present day cameras usually do a good job of getting exposures and white balance correct, so in undemanding scenes a jpeg is usually quite good. But in landscape photography you often have a greater dynamic range than the sensor can handle (the human eye sees a much greater range of light to dark than a camera can), that's where the raw file is invaluable.
