Once upon a time I shot the same giant tree, outdoors, in JPEG and RAW.
I put both imagines up on my monitor, saved them both as JPEG so that they would print at the lab, and made prints.
The only difference was the person in the RAW shot, who I had there so I could tell which frame was which.
But I too have been curious about the advantages of RAW, so I bought new software to prcess RAW images, and it wouldn't work with my camera.. Wasted a weekend.
Now I have other software.
SO FAR, the only difference is that you can be careless with RAW and perhaps reccover.
BUT MORE EXPERIMENTS ARE TO BE DONE; I've shot some buildings with the sun shining on the front, but inset doorways in shadow. I've been able to lighten the dark doorways using the RAW software (Canon's free stuff),
and I must say it's a lot easier than didging and burning a doorway in a darkroom.
But I think I could do the same doorway lightening with a JPEG files and Photoshop Elelments. Ijust have not got around to trying.
About white balance. It's handy to be able to click on the screen and see what the picture would look like with different white blanaces, but I've been able to click on"Variations" in Elements and see pretty much the same thing, or use the color cast eyedropper, or just change hue and saturation settings.
One big advantage of JPEG for sure is that I can pull the card from the camera, walk into the store, and come out in ten minutes with a print.
Whether this matters depends on whoyou are and what you shoot, of course.
With RAW you're back to a computer for a while, guaranteed.
I look forward to seeing the side by side shots you requested, too.
BAK
