RAW vs jpeg - no difference for a pro?

Absolutely - informal portraits of the bride and groom, adding more of a "moody" feel to a shot; definately gives you a great latitude of further choices.

RAW is great. Should I archive the my RAW? Then create copies of the files as I work on them. As to have an untouched orginial file to return to on another date.

Well, that would be the equivalent of "archiving" your original negatives - I've still got mine from 1970.

I currently do this with the RAW disks from my wedding work, as well as the "corrected/modified" JPG disks that I send to my commercial lab. Space consideration is certainly less an issue than with physical negatives; you just have to make sure you have a well organized file system for all the disks, as well as equipment to read media. Of course, that whole "equipment" issue is grist for another, lengthy discussion.....

I would strongly suggest saving JPGs as well as RAW files, since I suspect JPG files will be able to be read long after the 10D/20D/30D etc RAW format is dropped. DNG is another option, but JPG's smaller and the quality's good enough for 99% of applications.

Gee, I hope they keep the 5D RAW format around for a while.... but who can tell . Industry is fickle......

On Saturday I took about 500 shots at the National Radio Controlled boat races. I would ay 90% raw + large jpeg. (I did play with the "sports setting a little bit just to see what it would do) I use three 1 gig cards and get about 70 shots per card. I use a digimate III tank that fits in my pocket. Fill a card, swap it out, start dumping as I keep shooting. Takes about 5 mins to dump 1 gig. My tank (total cost was about $145) has a 60 gig capacity and I have never filled it in one day. When I have a few minuits I reformat all 3 cards and keep on going! When I get home the first think I do is burn the tank to DVDs, that way I don't have to worry about what I start playing with.

heh, Glad I have a point and shoot.... I get around 397 shots per 1 gig card... with great quality... and even better that I hardly have to touch photoshop to make my pictures better.

I've been getting better with photoshop and as I improve I'm finding RAW less useful than before.

RAW vs JPG is all about the workflow. I had a photographer working for me who shot JPG and overexposed 20% of the photos, since they were JPG the photos weren't useful, with RAW they'd have been ok. The repairs I managed to do took a lot of time in photoshop, especially since the white ballance was also wrong.

This thread really fired me up a while back, but I never really explained myself well, so lets try again.

I shoot RAW + JPG or just RAW when I need speed or don't have memory card room.

JPG is for the fast workflow. RAW is for editing to get the most out of an image. RAW has many IQ advantages if drastically changing the image, while JPG has the IQ, but this drops off more dramatically when major edits are done. That's why the "no difference" statement burned me up.

Now most people don't know how to take advantage of RAW and even the ones that think they do still probably don't realize some of the advantages. I know I didn't at first.

See ...

https://photography-on-the.net …php?p=1641947&p​ostcount=8

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=180366

In summary....

RAW can get you extra pixels of resoultion.
RAW can get you extra detail by exposing to the right due to the non-linear conversion from RAW data to JPG or other formats.
RAW can allow repeated changes to the same RAW file without affecting the original info.
RAW is non compressed so image data is not lost allowing greater changes while minimizing gaps in the histogram.
RAW files must be edited, since they do not have the camera parameter processing (color, statruation, sharpness, contrast, noise reduction) done on them like JPG files do.

Great information

To be truthful, I'm honestly finding photoshop's new Exposure adjustment to be about as good as bringing down exposure in RAW.

I use Adobe Bridge as my main application for working with RAW files. The one thing that speeds up my workflow more than anything is being able to copy settings from one RAW file to all the others from a group of similar photos. I used to think that shooting RAW took longer, but now with software like Adobe Bridge and RAWShooter, I think that shooting RAW is faster.

your 20x30's must look amazing

Where's that in Photoshop? I've never seen it. Like I said the advantage of RAW is you can operate on batches instead of individual files, invaluable for high volume work like weddings.