Hi

It is useful that you have discovered this for yourself, however there is nothing new for those who have used RAW and can process to produce a better image than the camera's jpg.

Many people struggle to improve the RAW file beyond the jpg.

As to former experienced photographers used to film cameras being disappointed with the digital image. This is often the case for a number of reasons. The digital camera does not offer the range of control available in an older type camera especially in the aperture range.

Digital photography is also much more complex in the initial set up. Previously you only had to select the film type, put it in the camera, consult an exposure meter and set the parameters and shoot. No strange interruptions or warnings of this and that. A different kind of knowledge was required.

happy Christmas.

This is an age old question, jpeg or RAW and one I have debated many times. My own preferance is RAW every time. There are 2 reasons first the technical reason. Images captured in RAW are what can be described as digital negatives. They are unprocessed and contain all the data captured by the sensor. jpegs on the other hand are processed with a lot of the image information compressed, they therefore leave less room for image processing, recovery. With the price of decent sized memory cards being so reasonable there is no problem with RAW images being large. On another note, a more personal reason shooting in RAW saved a days shooting when I left my white balance on tungsten setting and spent a day shooting winter landscapes. As the images were RAW no problem with correcting the white balance with Adobe RAW editor when opening in Photoshop. If I hadn't shot everything in RAW it would have been a wated day, and some good shots would have been ruined/lost forever.

Ray

One other thing to remember is, ACR is a generic RAW processing package, and not dedicated to Fuji RAW. As a Canon user, the difference between ACR and Canons own RAW processing software, is very noticeable. Canons dedicated software processes the RAW data far better, and also takes in to account some data that ACR can't.

Not sure what the Fuji RAW codec renders like in ACR when compared to a dedicated application (such as Finepix Studio). But maybe Fred could fill us in on any parts of the RAW data not used by generic RAW converters?

It was a little unfair only to show the merged/HDR result from RAW files, you should have done the same with bracketed JPEGs for a real comparison.  Most of the users should use multiple JPG files instead of multiple RAW files for the best HDR and Fusion quality.

The reason is that with every new model of camera the developers spend a considerable amount of time and money on improving the actual in-camera processing which now includes lens correction (both colour and geometric distortion depending on the lens model), de-noising (using often proprietary algorithms, special exposure and hardware dependent tricks) and white-balance and exposure settings that far more depend on the scene (this is less trivial than it may seem).  Nothing from this gets to the RAW file.

When you are using RAW files you are not only throwing away more than half what you actually spent on the camera, you also believe that the external third party software will do a better automatic RAW conversion job than the camera. This was true probably at some point in the past but today it is not so.  (It has been demonstrated that default automatic RAW conversion in most third party software usually produces less dynamic range and more noise than the JPEG from modern camera).  The only exception would be if you manually adjust RAW files in advanced RAW conversion software.

There is only a little gain in the usable dynamic range if you use multiple RAW files and multiple JPG files because the different exposures overlap in wider range than is the usable gain in RAW vs. JPG.  Modern large sensor cameras will produce images with nearly 9 EV range dynamics. If we use three images from -2EV to +2EV we will get covered area of 12-13 EV dynamic range which is significant improvement over the single image. If we use raw files we may push it to 14-15EV in absolute terms but for a little extra dynamic gain we are trading in much higher noise which we have to deal with some other way. A denoising on each step will effectively reduce the dynamic range to similar what we would get from JPG files, except it will take much longer.