Не очень понятно почему тут многие считают, что As Shot уж очень хорош. На D70 например As Shot JPEG гораздо хуже D50, сравняются только в RAW.
Вот занятные выдержки о RAW. Отметьте, тут поясняется, почему JPEG из камеры менее резкий, более шумный, и более муарный. И поясняется, что артефакты JPEG не столько в резкости, сколько цветовые, резко усиливаемые в случае коррекции.
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Noise reduction, antialiasing, and sharpening. Problems can arise with very small details in an image. If the detail is only captured on a red-sensing pixel or a blue-sensing pixel, the raw con¬verter may have a hard time figuring out what color that pixel should really be. Simple demosa¬icing methods also don’t do a great job of maintaining edge detail, so most raw converters also perform some combination of edge-detection and antialiasing to avoid color artifacts, noise reduction, and sharpening.
All raw converters perform all of these tasks, but they may use very different algorithms to do so, which is why the same image may look quite different when processed through different raw converters. Some converters will map the tones flatter to provide editing headroom while others will try to achieve a more film-like look by increasing the contrast of the curve.
Generally, there is no one single “correct” interpretation of a given raw format. Vendors make a relatively subjective determination of what the best “look” is, and then adjust their converter to produce that result.
How JPEG differs from raw
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JPEGs offer fairly limited editing headroom—large moves to tone and color tend to exaggerate the 8-by-8-pixel blocks that form the foundation of JPEG compression—and while JPEG does a decent job of preserving luminance data, it applies heavy compression to the color data, which can lead to issues with skin tones and gentle gradations when you try to edit the JPEG.
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Raw converters, however, have undergone radical improvements in the 10 years or so that color filter array cameras have been around, and there’s little reason to think that the next 10 years won’t see similar improvements. Shooting raw will allow you to exploit these improvements as and when they happen.
Bruce Fraser