Shooting in RAW?

Okay, I'm a pretty amateur photographer, and I was wondering if I should be shooting in RAW all the time? My biggest concern is the fact that I do not know much (actually anything) about white balancing. How effective is the AWB on my camera, and what are the biggest benefits to shooting RAW versus Large/Fine? I'm guessing the best thing to do would be to learn about white balance and manually set it... but until then...

I know my way around Photoshop pretty well, so if there is any easy way to fix white balance that would be better than shooting with AWB, please inform.

Thanks a lot!

AWB does a pretty good job on the XT.

Set WB take a shot of white paper, then hit set in custom WB

In PS with a JPG image>adjustents>curves click on the far right eye dropper then click on something white in your photo, do the same with black.

In ACR you can still "eye dropper" it, but the temp slider is a better way to see cause an effect. Sometimes you don't want the correct WB, you might want it warmer for example.

But the other thing about RAW is you can save some missed shots you would have a harder time saving if shot in jpg.

Bob

Must read:
http://www.ronbigelow.​com/articles/raw/raw.h​tm

First, I never trust AWB. More on that here: Gray card: Why your meter may be lying to you!
Notice that the very last exposure in the 2nd group was of a gray card.

While this thread started out with the AWB subject, there's a great illustration on page 2 (Post #58.) that illustrate easily seen information loss in a web jpeg shot in the camera & one derived from a RAW file.
Auto White Balance - works really well

Then there's this: Take 2 identical shots, one in RAW & one at max jpeg. Use a tripod to be sure each shot has the exact information in it. Convert the RAW file to jpeg. Look at the two file sizes.
A max jpg from my 20D is 2,754 KB. The exact same shot with the jpg extracted from RAW is 4,315 KB which is 1.57X larger.
Why throw those extra bits away?

RE: "MiSTeaKs" When I screw up...
Why I love RAW - '53 Ford Sunliner

-=The RAW Faqs=- RAW Processing info and links
https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=80337
-=The RAW Faqs=- RAW Processing info and links

The beauty about RAW as far as I am concerned is that you DONT need to know anything about WB per say. I do a CWB and then if I dont like it I can use the simple WB tool that comes with DPP. I just click on something I KNOW is white and it adjusts the pictures...

I found DPP MUCH more simple then any other program I tried, its gets alot of poopooing on here and I am SURE it doesnt do all the cool things that many other programs do, but it does pretty much all I need so far...