I often come across
digital photographers who shoot all their images in Jpeg. This makes it
easy to process the images, sure, but also means that you're unable to adjust the images as well later on without losing quality
Raw files
are like a digital negative. You can work on them without impairing quality
much, whereas working on a Jpeg, you lose quality with each adjustment.
Always shoot Raw, then convert to Jpeg back home if you want, but keep
the Raw file intact. As your processing skills improve over the years (and as RAW software gets better), you'll be able to go back to the Raw file and create better images from it, and print those images larger than you would a Jpeg, without so much quality loss.
Jpeg's compress the image but lose some information. RAW contains more information, and you can bend and tweak them much more than Jpegs. They do take up more space on your memory card though.
Raw images mean more work later in processing, but my preference is to shoot raw, process the image in Photoshop, then save as a Tiff. Then I have a Tiff master file to print from, and can make a smaller Jpeg for web viewing from the Tiff.
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