>>2591558>Where will I see the difference?Any time that you need to push or pull the exposure, you'll see much better quality in the RAW image, especially in the colors. If you ever correct white balance even a little bit, you'll notice that the RAW is dramatically better. You won't notice much more detail unless you have noise reduction turned up on your JPEG processing in-camera.
Basically, colors will be much more flexible, and exposure will be somewhat more flexible.
There's nothing wrong with GIMP either. Don't worry about it.
Think of it like this:
Your finished photo is like a pizza that you're getting from the grocery store.
When you're shooting in JPEG, you're getting a cooked pizza with everything baked together. You can pick off pepperonis, or sprinkle some other seasoning on top, but you're going to be messing up the pizza if you do that. Leaving holes in the cheese, or un-baked seasoning on top.
When you shoot RAW, you're leaving the store with with a bowl of dough, a bowl of cheese, a plate of pepperoni, and a bunch of little piles of different seasonings. Yes, it's less convenient, and yeah, you have to go home and bake it yourself, but you can decide exactly what you want on it, and where you want it. You can decide how long to bake it, etc.
The RAW is just all of the data from the sensor. A JPEG will tell you that a certain pixel is light pink. It doesn't know why, or how bright the light was, or anything, it just knows LIGHT PINK. So if you try to adjust it, it has trouble. But a RAW image will say that the color in that pixel is actually red, but it's got a bright light shining on it. So if you lower the exposure, your light pink will fall to red. In the JPEG, if you try to lower the exposure, your light pink will just fade down to a gray pink, and then a dark pink, because the JPEG doesn't have the information to tell the software what color it WOULD be in a different lighting situation.
