Curious what all the hoopla is about RAW Format? Increasingly common in even consumer level camera's today, RAW Format is often a better choice when shooting--especially if image quality is your main concern.
Many professional photographers believe JPEG formatted images (the most common default format used by consumer level digital camera's) have been compromised by the in-camera processing that the camera has applied.
According to the definitive website on the topic, RawFormat.com:
The JPEG processing compresses your photos and creates visible artifacts.
Conversion to JPEG shrinks your image data from 4,096 possible tones
per channel into only 256 tones.
JPEGs commonly have "first-pass" tonal, sharpening, white balance,
and other key adjustments that are usually different than what you
would have set in Photoshop (given the chance). As most pro
photographers already know, second pass adjustments usually are
discouraged, as the image data has already been shifted significantly
by the first corrections.
The secret of RAW files is the fact that they hold ALL the data that the camera has captured. This advantage is demonstrated, for example, when you try to brighten an underexposed JPEG image--and end up getting lots of unwanted noise in the process. Try it in RAW, and you cannot help but be impressed by how much better the results are.
