A picture is worth a thousand words. One image--of a market in Changsha, China selling dogs and other delicacies.

The first is SOOC. I shot it raw and converted to jpg with no correction except a bit of warming up.

The second is taking that jpg and doing what I could. Note the blown highlights.

The third is taking the same raw, doing some corrections in Adobe Camera Raw, and opening in PS, then saving as a jpg. The highlights aren't perfect, but if you can't see a difference with the last file, then you should continue to shoot jpgs...

Oh, man, did they brainwash you!

The largest consumers of photographic paper in the world — school portrait photographers, "department store" itinerant and fixed studio portrait photographers, and other mass-market portraitists — ALL use JPEG capture. In the USA, Lifetouch alone is over a billion dollar a year industry. Just one of its seven labs can crank out over 900,000 packages of portraits per week, and all of them start life as JPEGs.

There is no hard and fast rule that makes one file format "better" than the other. Better FOR WHAT? Each is there for a really good and valid reason, has its appropriate uses, and its limitations, its costs, and its benefits.

I hear and read such silliness all the time. When you need a hammer, use a hammer. When you need a wrench, use a wrench. Raw capture is a completely inappropriate format for certain types of workflows, and the only one that works well for others. In other cases, you could record both, and use whichever one makes sense.

We all know the *limitations* of JPEG — It uses lossy compression, it's only 8 bits per color channel, sRGB is the only *practical* color space "standard" for JPEGs, you have NO overexposure latitude and maybe 2/3 stop underexposure latitude, etc.

But there are advantages, for those who learn, understand how, and discipline themselves to use them!

A few years ago, Photo educators Will Crockett and Jared Polin got into it over this.

Jared is a "raw Nazi". He probably has pulled the wool over more eyes about JPEG than anyone. While technically correct in his approach, as far as it goes, he completely ignores whole photographic industry market segments.

Will is a practical commercial photographer, portrait photographer, and hybrid photographer (stills + video + audio + graphics). As a gentle poke at Jared for being so dogmatic, he briefly sold T-shirts that said, "RAW is for ROOKIES".

WILL's point, with which I obviously agree, is that you can learn reasonably well with raw capture, because it is so forgiving. It will get you excited about photography, and give you total control over the results.

However, if you want to learn to work efficiently in high volume, high pressure environments, you have to flip that switch and at least add JPEG capture to raw capture.

This requires you to RTFM — Read The Fine Manual. You have to understand how to — and then actually *use* — virtually every one of the menu settings on the camera! This is known as PRE-Processing. You also have to understand how to control the scene lighting and brightness range, and then actually control it, while metering appropriately.

In other words, to truly work well with JPEGs, you can't be a rookie! You have to learn the laws of physics that apply to photography, and respect them, apply them, and use them to stay within the limits of the JPEG.

If I'm doing landscape photos, SINGLE product photos, high end studio portraits, or any sort of photography where the light is uncontrolled and exposure is changing frequently and unexpectedly, then I am going to capture raw images. But in these instances, I'm using JPEG:

• Hybrid portrait photography such as e-cards and talking portraits and talking business cards) (so my stills and videos MATCH in color, contrast, brightness, etc., and I can edit them together seamlessly)

• Mass-market portrait photography (so I can photograph a new subject every 45 seconds, or 16 poses of a high school senior in 15 minutes).

• Parts catalog photography (so I can capture a thousand photos of small parts quickly, and put them in an online database, without any post-processing.

• Event location photography or "photo booth" photography (so I can crank out a dye-sub print on site, immediately).

There are hundreds of reasons to use raw and JPEG capture, and not cast aspersions on either one. You just have to understand the tools to figure out which to use, and when! And if you record both, simultaneously, you can delay that decision.

Not quite. PS works within whatever you throw at it.

ACR allows for presets but nothing obligates you to use ACR to adjust anything if you set it correctly. The limitations ACR has are self imposed, sorry.

To see the options on color space, color depth, size and what not click on the underlined 'menu' in the middle of the bottom status bar. This is where you set everything up.

All global adjustments you mention are a choice one make and not an obligation. If these were obligations PS CC and ACR would be pieces of crap not worth a second look.

Excellent in more ways than just photos. It shows a great deal of cultural differences. Different people do different things for food. I once frequented a Chinese restaurant owned by people that were Hakkah (spelling?). They told me stories that they loved to see rats around the grain bins getting big. That was the only meat they got in China. They served me many different things that many Americans would probably never eat. Some were internal organ meats. Others they could not explain, but they laughed when I joined them after hours to eat their traditional meals of things I had never seen before, as I guess they never imagined a round eyed person so open to exotic foods. God only knows what I ate there, but it was all pretty good, I can say that. Americans have no clue what food means to people of different cultures.