My fancy new camera has 2 media slots, one for a CF card and one for a
SD card. Among other options, it also has the ability to record the
same sensor capture to both media with different settings. Although I
have shot RAW almost exclusively for years, I wanted to compare RAW
and JPG on the new camera. To do this I shot a bunch of stuff today
recording a "standard" style JPG to one media, and simultaneous RAW to
the other. These are not separate shutter activations; they are
literally the same exposure recorded to different places.

Now, I suppose that this isn't "fair" because I did process the Raw
image in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, while the JPG was just resized
from the file that came out of the camera. On the other hand, the real
question is, do I want to save time and storage and rely on the
off-the-camera processing of the JPG "picture style", or continue to
do my own processing with RAW. While I suppose that I could have
fooled around with the JPG in PS too, I figure that there isn't much
point to that since the manipulation of a RAW-based file carrying
14-bits of data per channel (in my case) should produce better results
than manipulating an 8-bit/channel file with lossy compression that
will degrade with every "save". The question to be answered is; will
the difference in quality be worth the file-size and time of RAW
processing, or should I just shoot JPG and not worry about it.

In case anyone wonders, this is an Oenothera speciosa (showy
primrose).

JD
Canon 1D-mkIII
EXIF Data Included
e-mail: blissful-wind(at)usa.net

Additional images at;
http://www.flickr.com/photos/john-pa/