Raw or Jpeg

I'm a bit of a programmer and I've been following the articles too, and so I do believe what some of them claim! A good rundown of myths and facts is here.

But agreed, JPEG is not the best format for long-term archiving, especially if you plan on doing any retouching/editing in the future. Best to use some kind of uncompressed format.

Anecdotally--

Since RAW shooting was one of my main reasons for moving to DSLRs, it's been a while since I've shot in jpeg.

Recently, though, I've been doing a lot of sports shooting, following the kiteboarding sport around the Pacific Northwest.

So, on an impulse I decided one day to do a short shoot shooting RAW+jpeg -- about 300 shots, so ~600 images to deal with.

I wish I hadn't...I found myself ignoring the jpegs, but when I'd do a batch operation such as a white balance adjustment half of my shots (the jpegs) would be out of whack, and were cluttering my workspace, and are a hassle to delete.

So, if you want to work with RAW, prepare yourself to be spoiled!

Tony, I found the same thing to be true for me.

One more thing if it hasn't been said already, raw edits are non-destructive, even crops. You can go back to the original file at any time as long as it still exists.

Well, essentially, you can not edit a RAW file, only the jpg the RAW editor puts on the screen as a preview. Your editing the preview and not the actual RAW file and all the settings are saved in the .xmp files.

But I also agree with Tony. I started out shooting jpg, then went to RAW. A year later, I got CS3 and saw I could edit a jpg in the RAW editor interface. So I went back to shooting jpg only, for one month. I will never try that again. At first, things seemed OK, but then it slowly dawned on me that there was just something missing from the jpg files themselves. Maybe that 14bit RAW from the 40D was only a 12bit jpg, but it was something you could see after being use to RAW.

I agree for some quick and dirty stuff, jpeg is fine (like newspaper/paps) but for most everything else that you might care about a lot, RAW is the answer.