halman wrote:
I like your equation of Raw = negative.
h2
That is natural for me since I still shoot film and develop and print my own stuff. I belong to a group known derisively as "the dinosaurs". I also do a lot of digital, all for my own pleasure. Each discipline brings its own set of frustrations, but for me film and the darkroom provide the most person satisfaction.
halman wrote:
I must agree... being an old forgetful one as well. I usually keep my storage setting on jpeg+RAW. Best of both worlds. h2
I used to do that until I realized that the JPEGs were never used and just took up space. I use Lightroom now and work straight from the Raw files. Most of the images that I use end up being JPEGs sized for display on a computer monitor, but they all start out as Raw files, converted to DNGs and then exported as TIFFs or JPEGs, depending on how I want to used them. I keep the Raw files in an archive. Regards.
Did you ever shoot film? Did you ever have your film developed at a kiosk/shop and throw the negatives away and just keep the prints? That's what you are doing when you capture your digital images in JPEG only. You have discarded your negatives in effect. If you are happy with your JPEG "prints", always get perfect images and don't expect to ever need anything better, that's great. However, many experienced photographers prefer to work from the negative, i.e. the RAW file. I do. RAW files include a lot of pictorial information that is discarded to make the JPEG and you have no control over what is discarded and will never, ever, be able to retrieve it. One reason I capture RAW only is that I mess up a lot. I'm 78 years old and forget stuff, like resetting the White Balance from my last shoot. When I discover that I have a card full of images with a blue or green cast, if I am in RAW, fixing them is a piece of cake. If I only have a JPEG file to work from, it's going to be a struggle and I may never get it right. If my flash doesn't fire on a critical image and its a JPEG, it's probably going to be a cull. If it's in RAW, I can probably save it. And so it goes. Life is already enough of a struggle, I prefer not to do things that make it even more frustrating. I shoot RAW. I also convert my RAW files to DNGs. RAW will never be obsolete.