<<<my undestanding of the shooting in RAW preference for many was that they used this as a corrective tool after the fact, relying on full information capture to compensate for having set the camera up poorly before shooting.>>> I guess that's one take on it ;o) <<<Maybe I'm being too critical, I don't know, but for me I have a distrust of relying on any auto functions to make mistakes for me >>> But then you come down in favour of raw. Raw gives you the option to process things the way you want and not rely on optimized-for-speed routines inside the camera. Also, more importantly, if you intend to do any post-exposure tweaks on colour, saturation, levels, curves ets - you have access to all the fine levels from the original image. <<I also understand the distrust of jpeg stems from the hazards of post image making when manipulating the image>> <<<This of course can easily be overcome by immediately saving the image as a TIF once downloaded to the 'puter (and not the post-photoshop 7 TIF either*) then with all the data intact, >>> No, you missed it again. TIFF (as implemented on most cameras) only gives you 8-bits per channel. With the EOS 10D for instance RAW (after decoding) gives you 12-bits per channel. Oh, raw files tend to be smaller than TIFF too (even compressed TIFF). Bob
