Originally posted by reh321 Be careful about using Western standards to all users of Pentax equipment, but even here in the West, some of us would rather have automation do the work than labor at a computer and hand-labor the work ourselves.
My comment was not targeted at Western standards but simply focused on the sort of heavy-duty macro shooters who use tripods and 15 to 20 image focus stacks in creating macro shots.
This is really not a discussion about Raw versus jpeg. It is simply saying that people who do high numbers of focus stacks are probably less likely to shoot jpegs for those specific images. Personally, I am a RAW shooter, although I usually have the camera set to write jpegs to the second card. I also use a tripod for landscape images and use pixel shift. I have experimented with the dynamic pixel shift available on the K-1 II and I did not continue using because (1) It took too long -- the processing time per single image was in excess of a minute (I could see the same thing being true of a 15 shot focus stack). Quite simply, I would rather have my computer do that in the background while I'm doing something else, rather than wait that long on a single image. (2) The end image was a jpeg. For all of that trial and travail, I didn't end up with a file that was any more malleable or had more latitude for development than if I had taken a single RAW image at -1.5 EV and worked on that.
Anyway, I am not an intensive macro shooter -- 3 or 4 image focus stacks is the most I have ever done. How people get these amazing shots of moving critters is beyond me, unless they are putting them in the freezer for a little while before they shoot them.