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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tdodd" data-source="post: 1421433" data-attributes="member: 55450">Imans, Roy's answer is a good one. I was actually going to reply along similar lines myself. In response to your comment above, shooting raw does not need to be time consuming at all, or even need hand crafted editing of any kind. You might be able to get away with simply running a batch process to convert all your raw files to JPEGs without any other human meddling. For example, when you shoot with a Canon camera you have choices for camera settings such as Picture Style, White Balance, Sharpening, Saturation, Noise Reduction and some other things. When you shoot to JPEG these settings are applied to the data from the sensor to create the JPEG file. The raw data is forever changed within the camera. You can change the data further by editing but you can never get back to the state before the camera messed with the data. When you shoot to raw all those settings are saved as data fields in the raw file. They do not actually change the data at the pixel level at all. If you open up your raw file in DPP it understands the values of those settings and will apply them before your eyes to the raw data to generate the image as though you had shot it that way in the first place as a JPEG. However, because you shot raw you can freely change any of those settings within DPP and the picture will be recreated with those adjustments applied. You can make such changes over and over and over again and the original pixel data is never changed. You are just changing the values of some data fields. If you like you can perform a couple of mouse clicks to restore a raw file back to the way it was originally shot. So, if you process your raw files in DPP, without edits, they will look just like they would have if you had shot to JPEG in the first place. If you don't want to edit the files at all you do not have to. You can simply highlight th images you want to convert and press CTRL-B to bring up the batch process window. This will give you some basic options, such as destination folder, size and quality for your converted files. Depending on the speed of your computer it might spit out between 5-20 converted files per minute, so make a cup of tea or have a beer while you wait, or if you have thousands of images just leave them converting overnight. You can use raw converters other than DPP, such as Lightroom, which is my preference. Lightroom completely ignores the camera parameters and applies its own default settings for picture style, brightness and contrast, sharpening and noise reduction. You can create your own edit presets or change the defaults to whatever you like. With my files, if I have shot an image well, all I normally need to do is tweak White Balance (I never bother to set it accurately before shooting because I always shoot raw). The rest of the adjustments can probably be left alone. If I need to correct an exposure error, or want to jazz up the image then I can do that within Lightroom, DPP or any other raw editor without harming the original raw file. But I only have to do such things if I want to, or if I screwed up. If I screwed up then rescuing a raw file is usually easier than rescuing a screwed up JPEG, especially if the problem is overexposure that has clipped highlight details such as sunlit white feathers, or severe underexposure (say 2 stops or more). If you want more information on the merits or otherwise of raw vs JPEG then a Google for "raw vs JPEG" should yield plenty of (hopefully) helpful results.</blockquote>

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