RAW Camera Pictures ... which software program to buy?

If you want to use RAW files I suggest using Lightroom. You can use Photoshop or pretty much any photo program, but Lightroom was designed to be used with RAW and IMO it's the best on the market.

 

iPhoto will work. So will Photoshop. If you're doing any quantity, I would look at Adobe CS6, which bundles Bridge and Lightroom with Photoshop and a lot of other tools.

You'll find that RAW files have a wider amount of data: more shades of colors, and more to play with.

I'm not sure a lot of people would see the difference between RAW and JPG or TIFF capture. I shoot everything in JPG, but big files. (RAW is often much bigger than JPG in data size.) The compression is quite good in most modern cameras. RAW was a bigger deal several years ago.

 

I have to disagree, the amount you can "push" a RAW file goes so far beyond what you can do with a JPEG. Going for image quality? Sure, you can probably get just as sharp of a picture out of a JPEG. Want to pull something out of those shadows, tweak white balance perfectly, good luck with JPEG. Even if you don't need RAW storage is so cheap these days you might as well use it, I guarantee you that you could salvage a bad RAW far far better than a JPEG.

 

You "can" get a lot more of a RAW file. If you are looking for image quality it will be negligable. If you want to learn to properly edit a photo a RAW file will go a long way. Lightroom is pretty simple to learn. It's a completely self contained non-destructive program. You import your photos and the actual editing is done in the program and saved. Let's say you have a photo on your desktop, you import it to lightroom and mess around with it. The file on your desktop is still exactly the same as it was before it was imported, all the editing was saved in lightroom. This is pretty important as you can do whatever you want and never ruin a photo and you will always have your original. Everything you change about the photo is done right before your eyes and all the editing tools are contained on a single toolbar so it really is easy to use.

 

I don't see where we disagree.

 

My 02c;

- I slightly prefer Apple Aperture to PS - Particularly on the Mac.
- There's no doubt that there's more "info" in a RAW file and it can be "manipulated" further, but unless you're "unhappy" with your JPG's, why deal with the pain? If poster sized prints look good, why bother?
- By "pain" I mean the *huge* file sizes - Even with modern H/W pulling in a few hundred RAW images takes orders of magnitude more time - Everything just slows down.

Unless you've got good reasons, I think you're just making more work for yourself.

FWIW, and I've posted this before; I was at a seminar where they had four 20x24 JPG image prints shot @ ISO 400 from both Nikon & Canon;

Two were at JPG "High" and two at JPG "medium". I *guarantee* there was no (none!) difference between the two - Even when studied with a loupe.

The significance is file sizes are reduced by ~ half - Everything therefore runs *much* faster with no downside, even when printing big images.

Cheers,
Ian