RAW! What is it good for?

I finally bit the bullet and now only shoot in RAW format on my D200. RAW format, for those who don't know, is the file format used to save images on digital cameras which are the least processed. JPEGs the most common picture format used, is actually a photo that has been compressed. That compression results in some data being lost - in fact, every time you re-save a JPEG image you are losing data. Save it enough times, and you will notice a visible degradation in the quality of the image.
RAW format though is totally lossless ie. no data is lost no matter how many times the file is saved. TIFF images are also lossless but the difference between RAW and TIFF is that the RAW files hold a lot more information about the photo and how it was taken than the TIFF. Things like exposure compensation values, white balance, colour balance etc. This information can then be used in post-processing to tweak the image with a LOT more control than JPEGs or TIFFs. Not only that, the RAW format also maintains the image quality - unlike JPEGs.

Anyway, the reason i switched to RAW exclusively now is that the image quality is just unrivalled by JPEG. Why pay for quality Nikon bodies and glass and then shoot JPEG and lose all that quality? It didn't make sense. Anyways, that's what I've been doing the last couple of weeks... Some pix that were shot and processed in RAW are the flower in the 'Nature & Wildlife gallery' and 'The Duel' and 'Climbing' in the projects gallery. The images had to be converted to JPEGS to be posted on the net, but this was done as the very last step so that the image quality was only degraded at the end.

One of the drawbacks to shooting RAW is that each file is extremely large. While a JPEG image might be about 4MB, the same shot would be 16-20MB in RAW. Shooting with such a large file format means my 4GB memory cards get used up fast. To avoid this, I picked up a 40GB USB drive, which i can plug my compact flash cards into, click a button and copy all my files into. Thus the card can immediately be re-used again. This is a very convenient little device which I recommend to anyone out there who needs memory on the run. The other drawback was that the computer needed a lot more memory to handle large images in photoshop, so I also upgraded my memory to 1GB. Yes, this hobby is expensive :(