I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to be penalized for my work-flow. I feel shooting in RAW file format is a necessity and here’s why:

  1. Flexibility - Once you’re at the point where you are downloading and reviewing your photos, it’s all over. You can’t go back and re-do. I’m a perfectionist and I don’t like having my photograph’s quality altered from the get go. With RAW you have the freedom to tweak your photograph’s exposure and/or white balance, while maintaining your photographs up most quality.
  2. Quality – You are not hindered with 8-bit color depth, so now you are working with more color depth @ 16-bit. This is great for printing your work, but be sure to save out your RAW file as a .Tiff, because JPEG format doesn’t support 16-bit color depth.
  3. Safety – Each time you save a JPEG file you are compressing it more and more, but this is not the case for RAW files. When you tweak your RAW file you are not causing irreversible damage to the file and you can always reset the file back to the way it was originally.

There are a few disadvantages to shooting RAW however:

  1. Size – Shooting in RAW will take a toll on your hard drive, but fortunately large capacity hard drives are cheap now-a-days. $75 gets you 1,000 gigabytes.
  2. Usage – You might just not have a use for the extra capabilities of RAW. It does require extra knowledge with the usage of RAW, being that you don’t send these files to the customer or share them on website. You’ll end up outputting them to JPEG or TIFF formats.