I would urge everyone with a camera that shoots RAW to do so. Even if you can not afford the time or money for Photoshop presently, then shoot RAW + JPEGs if the camera allows. It was 2002 when I first shot RAW and I was underwhelmed. Now that I have Photoshop CS5, I have returned to those images and am able to pull astonishing images from them. Software has improved dramatically, and so have my skills with it. The most recent revisit was to shots taken in a pizza place primarily lit by neon. The colour balance changes to the point that two people sitting side by side may require a quite different white balance. CS5 handles it with eloquence and grace. Seven or eight years ago, these were culls. Now they are fine images.
HDR did not exist back then either. Instead, I used a complex scheme of layering and layer masks to provide protection for highlight detail, as I added layer after layer of shadow detail. One sunset sequence was ruined when a taxi drove through. CS5 let me bring in the whole sequence and do a proper white balance then did an HDR merge. There is a selection box to zap ghosts, which I selected, and the taxi was gone.
RAW has been called a "digital negative", since it records exactly what comes off the sensor for later processing. All cameras shoot RAW, but many do the conversion to JPEG in the camera itself. Compared to the settings in Adobe Camera RAW, the RAW processor that comes with Photoshop, control is very coarse. RAW conversion software bears little resemblance to what existed in 2002 and I really wish I had had the foresight to realize this. What I considered a cull back in 2002, in fact has everything in it to produce really fine quality in 2010.
