RAW

What a great file formant! I couldn't ask for anything more. Well, except for the fact that I can do just as much with a jpeg and Photoshop (or The Gimp [or PaintShop Pro {or Paint.Net}] if you prefer). As an amateur "photographer" (meaning I expensive toys called SLRs) I am pressed with the question of jpeg or raw. All the article written on the topic are inconclusive and vague if they clame to have a conclusion.

Raw is the file format where the camera, instead of converting the sensor data to a image format, stores the exact data from the image sensor. So raw, while an image file, is much more than that, it is like a negative that you could do blackroom work with and not a finished product. Because of the nature of the format, it should be superior to jpeg or whatever format the camera in question saves their images in.

JPEG is the format where the image data is compressed. The image in question is usually not as high quality as if it were saved in a raw or lossless format. This is because when data is compressed, especially audio or image data, information is loss. For music there is less dynamic changes; for images artifacts form and the images looks very bad. Fot the internet this isn't too bad because it increases load time, at the cost of some pixels (unless the site is an art portfolio, but that's another story) but for artwork, like digital photography I would much rather work with a more accurate image. Usually with High quality digital cameras (and even medium quality) however, the jpeg quality is almost identical to the raw image after it has been converted to a editable format (like .psd, .png, or .tiff).

With RAW one must convert it to the editable format. This isn't too much of a problem especially if you know what you are doing (if you don't you shouldn't shoot RAW) or if you use the "auto" settings. This takes a little bit of time, but gives you the ability to do some minor exposure adjustment as well as white balance, contrast, and tint. I guess this doesn't really have any point or conclusion other than that you should use RAW only if you know what you're doing... and I still struggle to know what to use. So my best advice is to try and keep trying to learn what best suits you....