Originally posted by mrpackerguy Thanks. That's great advice, exactly what I was looking for. You're right, I would have another 10-day grace period if you will. During my 7 hours with the 100d yesterday, I shot both in RAW and jpeg. Having never shot in RAW, that was a bit of an adventure when it came time to work with it, having only ever worked with jpeg before coming from a Canon IS2. But I got the hang of it and had to spend some time with that Pentax software, too.
OK, quick note about raw. This too repeats stuff I've blabbed on about in this forum in the past and if you want the long version you can use the search tool.
You shoot raw whether you mean to or not: raw is what the camera's sensor sees. The only issue is, do you want to keep everything the camera's sensor sees and make your own decisions about what to do with it, or do you want to let the camera make irrevocable decisions about what to keep and throw away the rest (which is a LOT of stuff getting thrown away)?
Put that way, it sounds like a no-brainer: keep everything! But the question has some teeth, for two reasons. First, the camera's eensy teensy computer actually does a good job most of the time converting the raw data to a jpeg. The other reason is that raw files are quite a bit bigger than converted jpegs, so you get fewer photos on a storage card and your hard disk fills up quite a bit faster. There is also a third reason, or there used to be a third reason, namely, that dealing with raw files was difficult, because you couldn't even see the raw files until you had "converted" them to jpegs.
The third reason doesn't exist any more. In most of the post-processing apps you're likely to use now, there's virtually no difference between working with raw files and working with jpegs. You can view your raw images immediately and without conversion in LightZone, Lightroom, Aperture, Bibble, in the Pentax software, and just about every other program I can think of. I don't shoot many jpegs, but occasionally I have to open one in LightZone or Lightroom -- and often, I don't even notice at first what the file's format is. So if you have somewhere picked up the idea that "raw is hard", you can trash that idea now.
As for the other two putative disadvantages of raw, the first one -- that the camera does a good job of converting to jpeg for you -- is specious. Once the data has been thrown away and you're stuck with the jpeg, if you're happy with it, well, that's fine, but there's no question that you've surrendered a tremendous amount of options. I've taken really badly exposed images -- dramatically overexposed images in particular -- and been able to turn them into usable prints, because I save the raw data. And even when the image is perfectly exposed to begin with, if you save the raw data, you'll be able to tweak the image in post-processing much more than you would if you had only the jpeg data set to work with.
Which leaves file size as the only real knock against raw. I do wish raw files were smaller. But storage is relatively cheap these days, and personally, I find the advantages of saving raw files so clearly outweigh the disadvantage of the file size that it's not a difficult decision to keep the raw data. With my K10D, I shoot PEF/raw because the files are smaller than DNG, the other raw option. (The PEFs get compressed, and the DNG files don't.) I then batch convert to DNG in Lightroom and save even more space.
Anyway, good luck and have fun.
Will