For several reasons, I have designed these tutorials to first cover shooting in raw, and on a second pass to discuss JPEG shooting. This is probably the reverse of what people might expect, and I do it for two reasons.

The first is that there are a lot of camera settings that pertain to JPEG shooting that can simply be ignored if you are going to shoot in raw. Many people are surprised to learn that picture styles, sharpening, choice of color space, and other settings all pertain to the conversion to JPEG that is done in the camera. If nothing else, my approach will server to make this clear for people. It also makes my first pass through camera settings shorter and simpler.

A footnote is in order here though. Even if you have your camera set up to do only raw captures, the camera does do a JPEG conversion (that it never saves on your flash card) to display on the LCD screen and to derive the histogram from. The JPEG settings that I am eager to ignore do affect both the LCD preview (which we have all been taught not to trust) and more importantly the histogram. A fellow recently advised that you set up the camera's jpeg parameters to give low contrast, low saturation, and low sharpening; with the color profile set to neutral. This yields a more reliable histogram.

The second is that this is the way that I am now shooting in most situations (and it is the way most serious photographers work). This is not an elitist statement. This is the way I am working and so it is what I am best able to comment on. This does assume that you will be dealing with some issues later during post processing. In particular I advocate an ETTR (expose to the right) approach to exposure that would not necessarily lead to the best JPEG images out of the camera, but would lead to the best raw captures for later processing.

None of this is to say that shooting raw is always better. Many serious and/or professional photographers shoot JPEG for specific reasons. Some event photographers will set their camera up to produce JPEG images that they can deliver to clients almost immediately after a shoot. This makes their clients happy and saves the photographer time (hence money). Action photographers who want to capture long bursts of images with one of the cameras that can shoot at 10 fps or better will want to shoot JPEG. Anyone who expects to shoot lots of images and faces limitations of storage on media may want to shoot JPEG.