Originally posted by civiletti Some programs work on RAW images, but do not output in RAW. If they work on a copy, then the RAW remains. If they convert the original, it's gone away.
??? No programs output RAW (well, I think there might be some sort of lens correction preprocessing programs somewhere that do, but no regular RAW processing programs). All RAW processing programs work by reading in the RAW file, applying some adjustments internally, then either outputing a converted file or just remembering the adjustments and reapplying them every time you view that image, but they *never* overwrite your RAW data. If you use DNG as your RAW format, some programs will store the settigns you made within your DNG file, but the RAW data remains intact. it is never overwritten by any RAW processing program. And that means you can *always* recover your original image - because it was never lost in the first place. It is right there in the original file where you left it, no matter what RAW processing program you use.
The (sort of) unique thing about LR is that it also uses this model for *JPEG*. It's only sort of unique because at this point, quite a few other programs do this too - non-destructive JPEG processing is perhaps now even the norm. But for RAW, it's not "perhaps now even the norm" - it is without exception the way it is and and always has been done.