Originally posted by sprocketdog23 No, it doesn't make you a bad photographer at all. I think that there is a misconception amongst a lot of DSLR owners that shooting RAW will always save the day, which can lead to some lessening of the craft, and lack of real skills and knowledge. If you work hard to get your exposures and compositions spot on during a photoshoot, then RAW gives you that little bit of extra personal control over your own imagery. Personally, I mostly shoot jpg, but choose RAW when the lighting is really tricky or I'm unsure my camera will cope if I shoot jpg
Looking at your bio, I'm actually surprised that as someone who teaches photography, you advocate shooting jpeg over RAW. To say that RAW gives
that little bit of extra personal control is surely an understatement. Yes it is a given that shooting RAW is not a substitute to getting exposure correct but to extend the argument that it
can lead to lessening of the craft is preposterous. Surely capitalizing on capturing the widest possible dynamic range and the most amount of image information
as the starting point is what shooting RAW is all about.
If you didn't know, an 8 bit jpeg file only offers 256 tonal values per channel while a 12 bit RAW file offers a whopping 4,096 tonal values per channel. That's a big tradeoff when shooting jpeg.