Lesson 5 Part I: Why Shoot RAW?
Let's start with the downsides of shooting RAW: post-processing on the computer is absolutely required, which consumes time, automatic post-processing settings in the camera that you may be used to won't apply to the RAW file and will have to be done by hand later, consuming time and effort, and it has something of a learning curve to get used to, requiring time and effort. It's obviously harder to shoot RAW than to shoot JPG.
So why would anyone want to go through the hassle?
The answer is that you get advantages in flexiblity, control, and dynamic range. When you shoot straight to JPG in the camera, you discard a lot of data. JPG stores 8 bits worth of data, values from 0-255, whereas RAW stores 12 bits, values from 0-4095, and in addition, JPG compresses that data in a lossy way, discarding still more information. (Note for the technically advanced: I am deliberately not going into JPG gamma adjustment and real-vs-theoretical RAW ranges at this time to keep things readable.) Certain post-processing decisions made at the time of shooting (such as sharpening), when you can't see what the actual result will be very well, are practically irreversible in the JPG. Applying it later gives you better control over exactly how much sharpening to apply. In addition, there are some quirks to the way information is stored by the camera that can be taken advantage of when shooting RAW, but not so well when shooting JPG that we'll get to later.
