Pros and Cons of Shooting in RAW as a beginner

The thing that comes to mind,

 

that photo of the house. The original image you can see it was taken late at night. The modified image, looks like you either took it 5 hours earlier at twilight, or used quality flood lights

 

I suppose it's all a matter of interpretation of the scene.

 

That is a house my aunt(and late uncle) have lived in for better than 50 years. It's only every few years that I'm down there(and not for this reason) as the east coast of North Carolina is a good ways away from me, and obviously I wasn't going to go and visit a family member in her 80s now.

 

It was sort of an opportunity but also intentional that it was taken at night-I wouldn't have had another chance to do it if I hadn't taken it then(this wasn't a photography trip). More to the point, though, my aunt specifically wanted a photo showing her "candles" in the windows that she'd put out for Christmas.

 

In lighter ambient light, I don't know that the candles, much less the lights/details inside the house would have come through.

 

There's also some interplay there that I like from the porch light illuminating the tree at the side, and moonlight shining through trees at my back casting the interesting pattern on the front of the house. None of those would have been obvious in twilight.

 

Leaving the exposure "dark" would have obscured both the details of the house(which was a lot of the point) and also would have left out the leaf shadows in particular. Twighlight wouldn't have captured some of the details it did.

 

That's one of the beauties of a RAW file, though. What I showed was how I wanted to interpret the photo(and again how I printed it). If that wouldn't have been your choice, you could have processed it differently. We can both take the RAW file and get what we want.

 

(BTW, my cameras use RAW, not Raw, in their menus).

Thank you everyone for all of the information.....

I'll add a 'like' to that post in 4 days time.

 

If you're referring to the tartan rug effect, bottom left, then that appears to be due to file corruption. Could be due to a faulty memory card. Try swapping the card. If that doesn't work, change your RAW file settings to 'uncompressed'.

 

Or have your camera exorcised!

Yes, for us lucky Nikon shooters, NX-D does a fantastic job because it uses Nikon "secret sauce" to process the RAW data. Something I didn't know until recently is you can also load a RAW file back into the camera and reprocess the JPEG with any setting you want. Haven't tried it though.

There is a Picture Control Utility 2 app that lets you upload settings from your computer back to you camera. As an example of its functionality, I wanted to boost my Saturation by .25 on my D500 OOC JPEGs that I send to people using SnapBridge, but the camera only allows single digit increments (whereas the NX software allows the quarter digit increments), so I was able to do that using the Nikon app. I wouldn't put my Raw files back into my camera's memory other than to "trick" the camera into changing the numbering sequence of the files.

I can think of a disadvantage of shooting only JPEG vs only RAW though it's a bit esoteric. RAW files are much larger, but given the incredibly cheap cost of memory nowadays, that's not much of a disadvantage. However, there are situations when the large file is a negative, namely in the time it takes for the camera to load the files into memory. I'm often shooting in burst mode to try to capture birds in flight or other wildlife on the move. It can take a few seconds for the camera to process and load the files following the burst, during which you cannot take a picture. So, there's the possibility of losing some interesting shots while the camera is busy. Admittedly, I've never actually tested this idea since I always shoot JPEG and RAW but I'm assuming loading just JPEG files would take less time than RAW files. Anyone have any data on that?