Color Space, Raw, and all that Jazz

[TheBender]

First post! I took a long time to convince the little lady that a 20D was the camera for me. I'm glad it took a long time or I would have ended up with the 10D last year. I had a Nikon 995 to cut my teeth on digitally. I am, I believe a serious amature, having taken numerous weddings as well as portraits. I used an A2 so I had quite a few EOS lenses. I love the 20D. Shooting with a digital SLR is really improving my eye. Instant results make all the difference in the world, at least to me. Here's my question. Does it make sense for me to shoot RAW RGB given the fact that I am not going to upgrade to a really nice monitor and color calibration software? I have a powerful computer and Photoshop CS, C1Pro, DC Pro and access to any software I need, but I can't spend money on the monitor and spyder right now. I love to tinker with the images and have been shooting RAW RGB, but I have read some of Rockwell's stuff as well as many posts in this forum and still don't know which way to go. Any opinions would be helpful. Forgive the length of this post. Thanks in advance.

TheBender

[Jon]

If you want to play around with stretching/manuipulating the colour balance and dynamic range of your photos, RAW will be easier to work with than JPG. You don't need to have a calibrated system to use it, although getting consistent results across camera, monitor and printer will be easier if your system is calibrated (but this is also true of JPG). So, whether you're calibrated or not, use the best data format for what you want to do. If that's mucking about with PhotoShop and playing with exposure/colour balance, by all means go RAW. If you want to get it all dead on in the camera or just do minor adjustments, then use JPG.