Shooting RAW

This is kind of on the teardown Tuesday series -- but more of a process and processing teardown than anything.When I first got my Canon 5D-mkII I, like most people, shot JPEGs. It's the easy choice and you get to shoot a ton on a single card. Why wouldn't you shoot JPEG? The camera takes awesome pictures and things are good. Right?Well... not so fast.This was shot a few weeks ago and one of these was previously posted. All are of the same scene taken from the same location. The only thing that's different is the exposure settings and the post-processing.I'll start with a shot that looks pretty much like what I would expect from mashing down the shutter normally -- because, well, this was when I first got to the scene and mashed down the shutter.It looks pretty good. The foreground is well-exposed and contrasty. The problem is the sky is all blown out. Beyond that fact, there's little to no detail in the sky at all!Ok, let's drop the exposure by a bit...Remember that I'm shooting RAW -- every pixel is actually 12-bits-per-color rather than the normal 8. Now lets process: Ignore the artificial blueness of the sky. This was me overcompensating for the lack of detail from the sky. Even with raw mode, I ran out of highlight bandwidth.Drop a bit more...Of course this looks flat... but let's fix that!Here's where RAW really shines. As I start to alter the local contrast of each part of the exposure, the detail remains and I don't get any strange banding. Every "normal" color has another 4 bits of additional depth to play with! Since each part of the shot was of wildly differing exposure levels, I don't think I could have successfully taken this shot and gotten to the same end result.So, the downside? Size! Every time I hit the shutter I'm out around 25-30 MB of space instead of 3-4 MB.But, drive space is cheap. The cost of my 3TB drives are around $150. That's $50/TB, or $.05/GB, or $0.0000005/MB. Each photo costs around $0.0015 of drive space. I'm not losing any sleep over that.I'll go into some more details into this later with some side-by-sides on this later.