Raw Files vs. Jpg's

Greetings -- This is my second post.  If you know you are going to work with your photos in Photoshop, should you be taking pictures in RAW format or in JPG?  I have read that every time you save a JPG in JPG format, that you further compress the picture and chip away at its quality.  Whereas this does not occer with a RAW file as long as youy keep it as a RAW file.
ZU

For what it's worth, every serious photographer that I know of (and I know of a lot of them) shoot in RAW format. I do too. As I understand it, the reason is that in RAW your camera's built in processing essentially leaves the digital image you shot alone. Consequently, the image's digital information is, for the most part, untouched, which means that when you download the image to your editing software (such as Photoshop Elements), you have an image with all the information on it that you originally shot. And this means that any additional processing you do, begins with a "pure" image. In effect, a RAW image carries all the information your camera captured when you shot the photo; JPG does not because the camera did some processing and compressing as you took the shot.
I suggest that you experiment. Shoot the same subject using the same settings on your camera, except shoot one in JPG and the other in RAW. Then download them to PSE (or whatever) and see what you think. One caution: the JPG image may look better initially than the RAW image, because of the camera's processing into JPG. So, use PSE to futher manipulate the original images and see if it makes any difference to you personally.
By the way, I also understand that working on a JPG file over and over can deteriorate the image. That is, if you open a JPG, work on it with PSE, save it, and then open it again to work on it, save it again, and so on, the JPG file will begin to show bad things. This doesn't mean that you can't open a JPG file over and over; instead, it means that if you open it and process it further, deterioration will occur.
I'll bet someone else can clarify and expand on JPG vs. RAW better than I can.

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