"Craig" said:
I am going to go against the grain here:
I do not believe in pushing people to shoot raw. My opinion is that if they are having difficulty getting good pictures, than adding the weight of post-processing will just push them right out of a fun hobby.
Hopefully I'm not one of those! ???
Anyway, I see RAW as a logical extension of continuing photography. Kind of like my path:
110/Disc -> 35mm manual everything -> APS SLR (yes, for a time I thought it would survive, and I liked the fact that it imprinted the shooting data on the cartridge) -->35mm AF SLR -->digital
And you used to grow from store brand/Kodak Gold to the professional style print films (try getting Reala at most stores back in the day, or the Agfa lines...) to slide film. And then maybe onto MF.
Now I'd say shooting JPG is like shooting negative film and shooting RAW is like slide films. There is nothing wrong with staying with JPG, and heck I know of one major website owner who thinks that you really won't be able to tell the difference with today's cameras - esp. since you have much more control of how the "print" film is developed, vs. the old way of figuring out which photo lab had intelligent people working behind the counter (and machines that expose the pics based on the bell curve, so what you saw in the VF isn't always what you'd get in the final.
While with RAW you have to work more on the image (in post, rather than in pre-shot decisions), but with a slide, what you saw is what you got. On both kinds you could push or pull process (increase/decrease exposure), but with slides, you (unless you had your own darkroom) determined the final colors based on the film type, speed, exposure, lighting, filters, etc., while print films could and were usually adjusted by the processor to neutral tones.
I've found that I'll spend about as much time correcting a JPG as I would with a RAW image, so there is no reason to switch back. I didn't start RAW until I noticed it as an option with PSE 2, but it was very basic, and that's when Adobe lost favor with me. (oh, we're sorry, you can't process RAW with your version, you have to buy the new version).