TIF or JPEG? i read that TIF can be editted repeatedly with no loss of quality. why wouldn't i use it? i hope to move to RAW once i get my camera technique down. not ready for too much new at once. thanks, neeley
You're right about being able to open TIFFs multiple times and not lose quality. TIFF is what's called a "lossless" compression format, which means it does not discard any of the original image data. JPEGs will throw away a bunch of extra data that viewers are unlikely to notice, in order to make the image size smaller. This means that if you try to go back and edit a JPEG image, the image won't look as good as if you had edited a TIFF (although depending on how much you do to it, this might or might not be perceptible). The downside to TIFFs is that they take up a LOT of disk space compared to JPEGs. So it's really up to you whether you want to go for tip-top image quality, or if you want to conserve your hard drive space.
If you have the ability to shoot in RAW definately do, it will just afford you more options when it comes to editing. You can always save a raw file into a Tiff.
If you have RAW available, I'd shoot in it. Nikon's RAW files are compressed (and I would imagine Canon's are too, but I haven't used one to verify this), which translates to the RAW files from my camera being often 1/6 the size of a TIFF file while containing more data.
