Holiday shots Raw ofr Jpeg

As i am off on my travels soon (morocco & Florida), Just wondered what the pentax crowd do whilst on holiday, Think i will shoot in jpeg , but the stuff i know that i will want to play with shoot in raw, good job there is the handy Raw button on the k10d

RAW for me, always. Memory cards are cheap (and usually easy to find if you do run short) and it's not as if you can go back easily to get that shot you "missed" - at least with RAW it may well be recoverable

It depends on how much you prefer RAW, and how much storage space you will have.

RAW should be no problems if you have loads of large memory cards, or can upload the files to a hard drive via a computer or some other device.

I shot everything RAW while away for four weeks. I had plenty of 4gb cards and an image tank. I did buy one more card whilst I was away, so that I didn't need to delete photos from a any card. Wouldn't have been a problem with them on the image tank as well, but it just gave me a better feeling knowing I had them all double.
The biggest downside is the processing of thousands of images when you return home. I am still not finished with them.

All Raw for me.

JPEG for virtually everything. Convenience to just get on with the images without messing about with converting plus a quality level which is so good that it really makes no practical difference.

Some of our best photographers at ADAPS shoot in JPEG and their prints are stunning.

As we've discussed before, RAW does make a practical difference with certain post processing, particularly when the image is much under or over exposed. That is mainly what it's for, rather than images that are excellent to start with.

When we did Route 66 on Honeymoon, the consensus was that it would be a once in a lifetime trip, so why compromise? RAW all the way.

RAW all the time I've never used jpeg for years now

I now only shoot RAW now. When using Lightroom you don't even notice that there is a conversion stage! Almost everything is done in Lightroom (levels, colour, curves, dust spotting, cropping and straightening) and then I export the lot when I have finished tweaking them. Even the work in CS3 is from a file exported from Lightroom and then automatically updated within it and then exported as a jpeg of the right size. As Pete says, for unproblematic photos I doubt there is much to be gained but with difficult shots (either ones I have messed up taking or ones with a wide dynamic range) RAW seems to work better than jpeg.

I suspect that John does an extremely good job in camera which means he doesn't need the safety net of RAW. One of the reasons I still shoot a bit of film is to stop myself becoming even lazier!

Best wishes, Kris.

Agree with John. The quality of JPEG is good enough for me most of the time, saving all the hassle of converting from RAW and saving a lot of disk space (and don't throw me the "disk space is cheap nowadays").

Larger files do slow down your system unless you have a super duper top-of-the-range computer and graphic card.

I'm also in the RAW camp. JPEGs are superb, but because I convert most of my shots to mono I find I get more control over contrast and tonal range and find it much easier to boost shadows when necessary.

(Yes, I've spent too much time in ver dark rooms!)

I agree with Womble. There's virtually no hassle to converting RAW beyond any adjustment you would do to JPEGs anyway, and, well, disk space is cheap!

It's true it's not so suitable for an old low-power computer, but the cheapest modern PCs are up to the job. It's not even a problem for my laptop - which is near the bottom of the DELL range.

RAW + JPG

Then if you want to show them to someone or do a full screen viewing whilst away you only need a basic PC and no processing software.

My PC always goes with me - work reasons and I will copy to the PC and burn a CD/DVD too.

I guess we could have an argument ad infinitum about performance.

My stationary computer runs a Core2Quad processor on 4 GByte of RAM and has a high-end GeForce graphic card. There is a noticeable difference in loading JPEGs versus RAW files in Photoshop Elements. I doesn't run slow, but JPEGs are much quicker anyway, and I want things to happen at the press of a button, if not earlier