I think there should not be an issue of RAW vs. JPG. There is a place for both.

There is great value to RAW photography mostly because it provides wider –much wider– features for colour adjustment and colour correction. Anything from the hues, tones, casts, shadows, mid-tones, lights, white balance, etc. can be manipulated and adjusted to a finer level of detail. This provides great opportunity to improve the quality of photos, even when they are good photos to start with.
There is also good value in keeping the RAW files as the ORIGINAL SOURCE from which other images are generated. At different times and under different circumstances or intentions the same image may be required to be reproduced in a different format and size for a different type of ‘publication.’ (‘publication’ being to web/digital or print to paper).

That being said, and because of file size, one must think what type of photographs are best to be shot in RAW mode. For instance, I tend to shoot family gathering photos mostly in JPG because the intended use is just to share a memory in an easy, quick way. However, if I want to shoot a memorable photo of a family member, then I may shoot a mix of RAW and JPG to keep my options open. I can always keep RAWS of the best shots and discard the ones I don’t totally approve. Nowadays, with the larger size memory sticks one can still shoot hundreds of photos with both RAW & JPG. The issue here is mostly organizational and of developing a process in which sorting to keep only the best RAW shots is part of the photographic process.

To me, it will depend on what I intend to do with my photo and what process and/or media I will use to ‘publish’ (web, desktop printer, large-size colour printer, or commercial printer) and I will look to immediate needs and future possibilities. I can adjust the photo to my liking in RAW, then save to JPG to print in my desktop printer, or even to send to print to a photo finishing lab or save it to CD for distribution. If that same photo was to be used for a publication going to print to a commercial printer, then I would, from the RAW version, save it as a TIFF, as TIFFS are the recommended format for printing photographs in a commercial printing (most printers and most documents prepared for commercial printing, will not accept JPGs, PNGs or RAW files). Nowadays, one can save to PDF and PDFs are accepted in the ‘ripping process’ of images going to commercial print. So, although you might think you only want to have a few reproductions printed now, you may want to think forward and prepare for future possibilities –in case you become a famous photographer and will need to publish a book sometime in the near or far future… who knows?! ;-)

However, if you were to print your photos in some of the larger “colour copiers” then JPG still is an acceptable format. If you intend to post your photo in the web, then PNG or JPG are the formats to use. So, in summary, the best format will be dependent upon the intended use for the photograph, and for the same reason, it only makes sense to keep a RAW image (which will always keep the most options for colour adjustment depending on the type of print) as the SOURCE file.

Just to close and going back to JPG degradation, just think about the scenario in which you have a perfect JPG, unfortunately, the output equipment you are using is not matching the colours of the JPG you see and like in your computer. Then, even if it is only for printing on that machine, you will need to adjust the colours of your JPG. So you then save it again even if it is as ‘save-as’ and in doing that, you are producing the next generation of JPG. Therefore new compression will take place and the image will lose quality.

And in my view… that is how it goes and goes….
Rocío López-Bretzlaff
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

JPEG compression is only re-applied to an image who’s data is either manipulated or re-cropped with a top left cropping coordinate that is not a multiple of 8. That’s right, you can even re-crop a jpeg without losing quality, provided you pick a top left point that is a multiple of 8 so as to not break the 8×8 grid division that JPEG internally uses to sample the image. If you do nothing to the image and simply re-save it, no compression would be applied. If this isn’t the case, your image editing program should be deleted immediately because it’s very obvious/easy for software to decide not to re-compress an image if nothing has changed.

This is actually all very well documented in the wiki article on JPEGs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG).

If I want a art photo and I want to tweak this thing in PS CS2 and planing to make a fine art large print from it i will shoot Raw. But I know some professional photographers who take 10000s of 10000s of pictures only shoot in JPG. Processing all these pics will make you insane. How about making a great shot in the first place as a real photographer rather than trying to fix your boo boo in photoshop.

So I shoot 90% JPG and 10% Raw