I have a confession to make. Until I got the XSI – I shot only JPEG. Honestly, I’ve honed my JPEG manipulating skills to the point where there isn’t much I could do to a RAW image that I couldn’t to a JPEG. Photoshop has tons of tools and you have to miss a photo pretty bad to be stuck with an unusable JPEG.

With the XSI, I got a big honking 8GB memory card. It was capable of holding something like 1500 JPEG’s. I knew I’d never need to hold 1500 JPEG’s so I figured it might be a good opportunity to start shooting RAW and messing with the format. (Actually, I Now shoot JPEG+RAW)

The catch was that I needed to upgrade to Photoshop CS3 to handle the files coming from the XSI. My aging PC barely handles CS2. No biggie, I suppose. I bit the bullet and made the change.

On and off for the past month or so, I’ve been taking photos of mundane things (trees, birds, grass, cars) and playing with the RAW tools in CS3 to get a feel for it. Honestly, it was a lot like I expected – you had to miss a shot pretty bad for the flexibility of RAW to really feel more useful than just shooting JPEG.

I kinda dragged my feet on it. I’d force myself to mess a little with it every now and then. Over time it sort of started to grow on me.

Finally this past weekend I saw the light. I shot a bunch of stuff at Kings Island and upon dumping it onto my PC started playing.

It wasn’t the exposure or color correction tools that won me over (for the last time, I can do pretty much the same crap with a JPEG), it was the clarity, the sharpness, the quality of the RAW image that was a noticable improvement even after I compressed the image to JPEG that got me. Things seems more vivid, more crisp, more defined than before. I was sold.

The final validation came just a few minutes ago. I stopped by CoasterBuzz and saw that the KICentral guys had gotten their photos from the weekend up. I’m always interested in how other people see the same event I attended so I headed over and took a look. Tons of coverage…and uncannily some very similar photos to a few of mine. Naturally, I couldn’t resist some comparisons. I opened their gallery in one tab of my browser and my pics in another and flipped back and forth.

Did I mention I’m now totally sold on shooting RAW?

Everything I said earlier now seemed more true – my photos felt more vivid, more clear, more “you are there” than they ever did to me before. Some comparisons:

Flag Jumper – Flag Jumper
Sky Jumper – Sky Jumper
Clown Band Guy – Clown Band Guy

That’s not to take anything away from the guys at Kings Island Central. They just happened to put a ton of photos up and I just happened to take some shots similar to theirs of the same subjects.

They have great coverage of the day – WAY more photos of the jump than I bothered to take. I encourage anyone reading this to head over and look at all of their stuff. They got it covered.

I’m just excited because it feels like I might be taking my photos to a new place and I have to admit, it’s been fun to switch up my workflow a little too. It’s been a while since I’ve been excited about post work on my photos. I had it down to an assembly line-like process. Now it feels fresh again and I really feel like the quality of the photos are higher than they’ve ever been.

So yeah, if you’re not shooting RAW, it might be something to look into. This curmudgeon was sold.