And if you shoot raw and open your photo with Nikon Capture NX-D (or NX2 or View NX2) it will apply all your camera settings anyway. If you are happy with the result you can just save it, without any other editing. I find that ideal for holiday shots where I only need to tweak a few for display, the rest can be left as they are.
Yes. Same applies to pretty much all post processing software AFAIK - it picks up the in-camera processing parameters from the Exif data and applies them automatically, so if you shoot both Raw and JPEG together, when you open them up in PP they both look exactly the same. In other words, if you don't want to fiddle about with the Raw, just leave it as it comes and you have the same result as an in-camera JPEG, but with the advantage of more processing flexibility with the Raw if/when you want it. Win-win
This thread reads a bit like shooting Raw is an advanced technique and a bit of a leap in the dark - but it's not, and nothing could be easier. There are some good reasons for shooting to JPEG, but unless they apply to you, Raw is the better choice.
Reasons to shoot JPEG:
- you need to 'wire' images immediately, say direct from a football match to a newspaper.
- you need finished images direct from the camera, without even going near a computer.
- you're running out of memory card, so switch to JPEG and you'll have space for at least four times as many more shots. In that situation, I often quickly delete a few Raws that are obviously duff and easily find space for a couple of dozen extra JPEGs. Then get some bigger cards, they're cheap
- you're PC hard drive is almost full. Get a bigger hard drive - you'll need it sooner rather than later, and they're also cheap
JPEGs also have some scope for post processing, more than some people give them credit for, eg a tweak of colour balance and exposure adjustment is no problem at all. Worst thing I find is JPEGs chop off a least a stop of highlights, so if the blinkies are flashing on say a bright sky, that'll be blown and lost on the JPEG, but can quite likely be recovered from the Raw.
