So here’s my first spin with shooting RAW during lunch in downtown Hartford.  Not my finest work but I am stunned by the difference between shooting JPG and RAW in terms of image quality.  There is no comparison.  JPG looks so noisy now and RAW is buttery smooth.

I grabbed this one behind the main drag in West Hartford Center.  I played with duplicating layers in Gimp and then boosting color ranges with the hope of making the white pop a bit more from the brick.

The challenge, as I see it now, is workflow.  I typically shoot between 100-200 pictures in a give “camera day” and processing that many from RAW to JPG (doing color correction and cropping) is going to be difficult and time consuming.  What it likely means is that I am going to have to get very selective about what I “keep” and what gets “tossed”.

My current system is pretty much keep everything unless it is a complete disaster of a shot, ie shots with my thumb over the lens.  With the work involved with RAW I’ll likely make more use of scanning thumbnails, cherry picking my favorites, working them over, importing to F-Spot, and exporting to Flickr.  Any way that I look at it RAW will definitely mean more work in terms of preparing to publish but it feels worth it considering the flexibility and quality it offers.