So do you all shoot in RAW?

[barP]

all good, valid points, but it still comes down to this:

can your eye see it?
can the customer's eye see it?
can your printer see it?
can your paper reproduce it?
how much time/software/knowledge do you have?

wp.

[Gordon]

these sorts of arguments always seem to fall along two lines. Mainly on the use of the digital darkroom to either 'fix' a bad capture, or to improve an already good capture.

Photoshop gets used by a lot of photographers to fix screw ups.
It also gets used by a lot of photographers to finish already excellent captures.

RAW is an extension of this idea. Yes you can use it to 'recover' from mistakes, but the result is never going to be as good as if you'd gotten it right in the first place.

RAW can also be used to take a perfectly correctly exposed image and make it better than is possible with a JPEG capture.

In all of this, you should be striving to get it as right as you can, in camera, then make it better.

Giving up one half or the other is always going to get you less optimal results than you could have gotten.

[Collins]

Fair enough!