What are the advantages of RAW or NEF?
RAW mode contains the raw data from the sensor before any image processing algorithms have been applied. This means that it contains more bits per color channel than your typical JPEG or TIFF and, more importantly, no irreversible image transformations have been applied yet. Many of the things that your camera does before saving a file as JPEG or TIFF are hard or impossible to reverse. Even though TIFF is a lossless format, it is lossless after several irreversible transformations such as sharpening have been applied. You will be able to do extreme corrections with RAW files that are difficult or impossible to do as well starting with a JPEG or TIFF because information has been discarded already by the time you start working with a JPEG or TIFF. An additional advantage of RAW is that it lets you benefit from improved image processing software that may exceed the capabilities of what is running on the firmware in your camera. Even if you think that your camera is doing well enough compa
