raw shooting info/help

[rjw72]

hi as i have become more into photography i have started to look at ways of improving my pictures, i have read a little about shooting in raw, would this be a good option for me? i mostly shoot underwater using a olympus c8080.
how do u convert them back to jpeg and when you do does it loose the quality ie will it be simlar to the jpeg the camera would have produced anyway. sorry if they are rubbish questions! :help:

[PC_Bod]

If we're being picky it will be better than the jpeg produced by the camera.
RAW is basically "As the camera sees it".

There are many upsides to shooting in RAW, with really only one downside, that of space. If you have the storage, I recommend shooting RAW if you can.

Obviously there are other considerations like write times, should you need to shoot in high speed mode.

Also, cameras get things like white balance wrong, but this can be changed when you convert it to jpeg yourself. If it's only been recorded in jpeg and the white balance is wrong, then you are stuffed.

[rjw72]

is it easy to convert or could i keep them as raw and print them etc?? what do u lose when i convert the to jpeg?

[Mr Biggles]

You could resave the RAW-files as maximum-quality jpg's or tif's if you're worried about loss of quality. I use photoshop cs to open and tweak all my RAW files, then save as photoshop psd's or jpg's if they're going online.

[stormywhether]

you keep the original RAW file fella. That doesn't change. When you add whatever "recipe" you crafted in the RAW processing program, you then save it as a TIFF or a JPEG which is a permanent record of your PP.

If you're looking to keep images, you should save from RAW to TIFF. If you need to amend anything you should do it to the TIFF, and save it as a JPEG.