High Sierra Topix

How many of you shoot raw vs jpeg? And if you shoot raw which
converter do you use?

I shoot raw with olympus, convert it from raw to tif using olympus studio, and then finish it up with GIMP at that point. Losts of steps but haven't bothered to spend the money on Photoshop at this point yet.

MountainLight did you blend two photos in you Laurel Creek shot
or did you use a ND filter?

I shoot in the RAW mmmmm errrrrrr.... I mean I shoot RAW and convert in Photo Shop CS2.

I shoot Raw and convert in most of the time in PSCS2 and sometimes in Raw Shooter.

I almost always shoot raw, the main reason being that there is lossless compression and I can control the white balance settings after the fact. With jpgs you get lossy compression and the white balance is set at write time. I use canon, and just use Canon's software to transfer the raw to tiff, where I use photoshop for postprocessing and saving as jpgs if the need be.

Maverick,
I try to do as much as I can in camera. The colors and tones are much much better that way. So to answer your question the shot of Laurel Creek used an ND grad filter.

I shoot mostly large JPEG but if there's a sweet shot I have to have, I'll set it on RAW+Large JPEG. Even then I have never had to use the RAW version, the JPEG nails it just as good if you get it right. As for losslessness (is that a word, ha!), if you save your JPEG as a TIFF then you don't have to worry about it. I find RAW takes up a LOT of unnecessary space (for me anyway) and is more time consuming to work with. I don't like spending time with images. I still prefer Fuji Velvia 50.

The biggest advantage to RAW that i find is white balance. Digitals are getting better at it, but depending on the conditions, like snow etc, it can be off quite a bit, and getting it back to how you saw it in RAW is very easy without loosing image quality.

I do see Bucks point about getting it right in the camera the first time, sometimes we all rely too much on being able to just shoot the scene a ton instead of figuring it all out first before taking the shot.

Well, I don't always get it right in the camera the first time, I usually bracket the h-e-double-toothpicks out of an image that I really want so one of them is bound to come out, ha ha! I find RAW especially useful if I'm shooting people shots inside so I can adjust white balance afterwards because I never change my settings in camera. If I did, I would always forget to set it back. I don't like to complicate things too much. Otherwise I find JPEG gives me what I would've done anyway. The Canon gods are pretty smart dudes.