@Sujoy: Shooting in RAW is not about batch conversion. In that particular area they are equals.
The argument boils down to the 'amount' of PP that needs to be done. I have seen the 'banding' issue before in Jpegs. Didnt know they were avoided by RAW.
@Amlan : I am not fully convinced. I think the way to compare them would be to see if the two images can be brought to the same visual quality instead of comparing the output after applying the same fixes on them, since each image needs different PP (I am assumeing thats what you did) even if they are from the same RAW-FPEG pair. Thats why I wanted the parent-untouched files.
Also I see that the RAW has clipped white highlights on the pillars while the Jpeg has banding...
@Anirban : Does PS have options like DPP to get the camera-JPEG equivalent of the RAW so that batch processing is a viable option ?
My whole point of not shooting in RAW basically revolves around the number of tools I have to switch between for a single image at this point : Camera -> DPP (get JPEG equivalent RAW) -> PS to do most else (I dont particularly like DPP so :>)
My current setup looks like : Camera -> Picasa or Paint.NET (depending on the level of PP needed)
Follow the process i gave above and you will be using only PS for the entire process. I mostly use PS.
I use DPP only when i dont need any kind of fine tuning to be done on the RAW apart from adjusting exposure, WB, etc. on the whole image.
in PS Camera RAW, there is an adjustment brush where in you can select a region in the pic and adjust the exposure of that region. there is also selective coloring, grad filters and many more.
for me the process is Camera -> Bridge.
@pranav & anirban ...for me batch conversion will be way more important ...when I used to go for birding my whole morning went in photographing and whole afternoon in post processing and selecting from those 300-400 pics ....now u want me to convert those pics into jpeg first with some equal settings and then crop and pp again ....it seems its increasing my time ...I will see ...and I will surely try in 1-2 day itself
for those exact needs i use Bridge+PS.
Both Bridge and PS have Camera RAW, so adjustments can be done anywhere.
and i shoot only in RAW.
