[ihikebighills]

I bought a Canon S50 a few months ago, and love it! I've been shooting straight jpgs, which I'm familiar with. Now my question is, what, exactly, is RAW format? Advantages? Disadvantages? Should I use it?

[Sore Feet]

RAW is data straight from the sensor, without any sharpening, color adjustment, etc, done by the camera. Upsides are you get more details (highlights are less blown out, shadows are not as dark), and the pictures are usually about 50 pixels wider or taller than the JPGs (because the camera crops the pictures to a 4:3 ratio). Downsides are the files are usually bigger than JPGs, and you have to do all the post processing yourself. Canon's RAW converter isn't bad, but I prefer a third party option (I use one called PowerShovel, but PS CS also comes with a good one if you happen to have it).

[Tom]

RAW is a digital negative. When you shoot in JPEG you essentially specify up front the white balance, sharpening, saturation, contrast, etc. If you shoot in RAW you get to choose all these after the fact when you convert the RAW to JPEG or TIFF which gives you more flexibility to the extent the camera (or you) would have guessed a priori. If you use Canon's RAW converter (or a RAW converter like Breeze Browser that uses the Canon SDK) you basically get the same thing you would have gotten shooting with JPEG to the extent you choose the same white balance, sharpening, saturation, contrast, etc. as the camera (or you) would have a priori. As Sore Feet pointed out, RAW gives you additional flexibility from third party software. My experience has been the non Canon SDK converters aren't worth the headache for most of the shots, but there are cases when you may find the flexibility valuable. Any extra pixels you get don't really help much to the extent you want a standard 4:3 aspect ratio for the final product.

[ihikebighills]

Cool, thanks a bunch guys.