keith smith

if you loaded your tank properly, there is no chance of film 'sticking together'

There is a general principle, in terms of editability, of raw files vs. other formats including jpegs. RAW files contain all the information the sensor could capture at the moment the shot was taken. When you view the shot on screen, you are really just looking at a 'facsimile' of the shot. Some of this is due to the limitations of the equipment you are using to view the shot; some has to do with the software through which you view the shot. The point is that there is loads more information in the image 'capture' that can be taken advantage of. You will need specialized software...sometimes from the camera manufacturer (but not always) to 'drill down' in the image data and bring that data to something included in the photo you actually see. All of this implies that the RAW file is the largest file of the photo. The fact that it might contain more information than you need or can use is the basis for changing the format of the photo from RAW to other, smaller, formats like jpeg. Jpeg is a popular format and contains most of the photo's "main" data. In many cases a jpeg format is perfect for your needs. When you reformat from RAW to jpeg, you throw away all that 'extra' data in a RAW file. But since you have already decided that extra data is not needed, there is no loss....other than (sometimes) many megabytes of file size. Unfortunately, although you can slim down a RAW file by changing the file to jpeg, you cannot 'fatten' a file after conversion to get the formerly unused RAW data back.