George Schaub

There's no doubt that digital allows you to blithely shoot away without concern for film and processing expense and to record every possible angle and compositional permutation, with bracketing to boot. In that, it has freed the image from the implied cost of every snap of the shutter--not to worry, you paid for most of that up front. Now what you get to spend is time...

For those who have been working with the latest digital cameras--both
integral and interchangeable lens types--you've probably seen an
option called Raw among your file formats. Unlike JPEG and TIFF, Raw is not
an acronym and therefore we don't capitalize it, and is just what it states--the
"raw" image date received by the sensor and digitized within the
microprocessor of the camera. It is not "raw" in the sense that
it is unfettered or unrecognizable, but it does take image processing software
other than what's in the plain version of some image processing programs
to see it. That Raw software converts the Raw image file format to an image
on the screen and allows you to save it to a format other than Raw--such
as TIFF or JPEG.

...

There are quite a few differences between film and digital imaging. One main difference is that when it comes to film you are dealing with dye and density; with digital it's all a numbers game. Once exposed and developed, film has measurable and fairly fixed characteristics. With digital it's pretty much up for grabs. That's because digital images are composed of...