Tendy wrote in post #10222228
Ah now youre wrong there! I WAS unable to shoot RAW and previously never intended to but now I CAN shoot RAW and I'm going to try it!!
OK, then if you want to do this and you are memory-card challenged, I would suggest you approach things in a careful, planned-out way -- in other words, rather than go out and "take a whole bunch of pictures" like one would with small jpegs or big memory cards, try taking the time to take pictures that would not just be "good pictures", but would also illustrate the benefits of shooting Raw.
For many or most of your shots you don't need or want to shoot Raw+jpeg because you don't want to max out your card space. You can see a lot if you use DPP, set your camera to what would produce a pleasing jpeg (White Balance, Picture Style (playing with the Contrast, Saturation and Sharpening settings) and Noise Reduction. Then, in DPP, when you load the picture, DPP will by default use all those settings to render your Raw preview and to "pre-set" your DPP settings for all the above. But, instead of those things being "fixed" like they are with jpegs, with Raw they are just pre-set with total freedom to change as you wish, and DPP gives you a Raw development tab that is not available with a jpeg or a tiff. So, right there you have things that can be freely changed with Raw in its own "space".
Now, for this learning period, I'd suggest there are three scenarios where it could be beneficial to shoot Raw+jpeg (or to do a quick conversion of a Raw shot with the default settings to produce a jpeg, either one will work) -- you may want to see for yourself how the latitude of Raw compares to the latitude of jpegs with 1)White Balance/Color Tone adjustments, 2) Highlight and Shadow recovery and adjustments and 3) "Rescuing" under- and overexposed images. These are three areas that Raw has a pretty defined advantage in, and you may want to test this out for yourself before going too far down this path (and commiting more resources). Take test shots for each that test the bounds -- for instance, take an indoor shot that is lit by tungsten lighting but with your camera set to Daylight White Balance -- not as uncommon of a mistake as you might think -- and then compare how a jpeg can be adjusted compared to how a Raw can be adjusted (much more latitude with the Raw).
Take shots in bright sunlight with shadows that you want detail to show while not blowing the highlights and compare how easy it is to lighten up the shadows but also recover highlight detail between the two formats. Note that "clipping" occurs earlier with jpegs -- they discard image data that doesn't "fit", whereas Raw keeps the original data. So, pay attention to end results between a jpeg and a Raw. It may be more dramatic with some scenes, less than dramatic in others.
Then, take some under- and overexposed shots and see how the jpeg handles "rescuing" these compared to a Raw file.
Taking your time to test these things out, as well as your "regular" photography will help you to grow in your understanding and appreciation of this area.
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