Interesting food for thought there.

Both my old Canon 10D and the new 40D give me options for controlling the way

the JPG is generated from the RAW. So I am not bound by what the Japanese boffins offer.

On the 10D I did change those settings, but have not felt the need, yet, with the 40D.

Though I did need to pull the exposure +1 stop when using the internal flash over Christmas.

Here again was the advantage of the digital. I could see the problem and rectify it

before I took all the shots.

Our friends on Pbase.com gave me a link to a Free program for Raw.

THe Experimental RAw Photo Editor

Downloaded it and will take a look when I have some time to spare.

Mentions the cameras as well that you can use with this program and examples. My newest camera is not mentioned, but will have a look anyway.

Yours truly,

Kan Win

Example that jpg can be more than sufficient for professional photojournalists: http://www.karlgrobl.com/index.htm

I shoot everything in raw myself, but I'm not professional, I don't shoot a lot of images, and I have time to play around with the raw file

Another *strong* vote for Lightroom and Raw.

Very strong.

I use Lightroom, take most of my images in RAW, or TIFFs. I only convert images over to JPEGs if I am going to put them on a website or sending to someone. TIFFs offer a larger range of colours than a JPEG. One of the forgotten or ignorred benefits of Lightroom is that you can set it to save all your files in the .DNG format which is useful if you are using more than one make of Camera and don't want the hassles different RAW file formats. Recent versions of Photoshop and PaintShop Pro will edit .DNG files, I have both of these, but due to it's greater user-friendliness, prefer using PaintShop Pro X.

The new Photoshop CS 3 has a nice RAW program built in, just like the program found in light room. The same Raw program can also be accessed in Bridge CS 3. The nice thing is the the preferences can be set for the Raw program to be use for JPEG and TIFF as well. I find That I make frequent use this powerful program.

I'm very new to Aperture (my blood pressure goes up when I use Lightroom ) but it seems to take most RAW programs without any fuss.