RAW vs JPG

[JAS_Photo]

I shoot raw and download directly into Lightroom. I can quickly look at everything and do preliminary edits. Lightroom has built in presets that are no brainers that can be used for a starting point. You can even choose to auto edit everything as it is downloaded if you want to. Oh yeah, non-destructive editing means you can go crazy with edits and just reset if you don't like it.

[AntZ]

I battled this debate with myself for a while, but have found the range in RAW files save me a few times. I figure memory and hard drives are cheap so the size is not a problem for me any more. I find the ability to recover detail in nearly blowout or dark areas worth the extra space.

Its like when I got my first 6mp camera years ago. I though I would be clever to save memory and only use the full resolution when I thought I would want to crop or blow up an image. But the number of times I wanted to zoom in on something but lacked the resolution saw me quickly give this up. It is kind of the same thing. Trying to only use RAW when you think you need it doesn't work.

Lightroom handles RAW seamlessly, so that is not an issue for me. The only time RAW is an issue is burst mode when instead of a buffer of about 70 images it is about 17, but I rarely use burst mode even when shooting sports.

I am more ruthless in deleting dud images now.