rtwo wrote:Nigel... I've used RAW to some degree ... how is it 'better' than making similar adjustments in PS after loading image into the program?
What castledude said. To expand, if you use anything other than RAW, the camera is making judgments for you about white balance (if in auto mode), contrast, saturation, sharpening etc, and while the JPEG results can be very good, I prefer having the extra control over the image that the RAW format gives you. Think of it as a digital negative, one that you can manipulate much more than an analogue negative in a darkroom.
RAW does have a couple of drawbacks: it takes time to work on the images, and you cannot print (nor would you want to) a RAW file directly from camera to a printer, but neither of them is a problem for me. I save images as uncompressed TIFF files and print from them, and also save smaller sized JPEGs for e-mail and for posting on PBase.