I take a lot of photographs.

My main camera is currently a Canon 20D digital SLR camera, with lots of shiny lenses in the arsenal.

For convenience, I have normally had the camera set to produce the best quality JPG files that it can do. But it has always looked somewhat lackluster.

Recently, I've also had the camera simultaneously producing RAW files (more or less a dump from the sensors, with very minimal in-camera processing -- the opposite of a JPG file). These are huge, ugly files, that require much care and tending to convert (or "develop") into usable prints -- which is all that I've used them for (printing).

Just for fun today, I reprogrammed my website scripts to reprocess the RAW files and create JPGs from them, instead of just using the JPGs that the camera itself provides. This is totally automated and DUMB -- no special care or human intervention per-photo. I'm using the dcraw program, something I've been twiddling with from time-to-time for a few years now.

The results? Here are some (much downsized) samples from this past weekend.

The full-size (8mp) files are even more impressive, but I think these thumbnails still tell the story.

I'm convinced. From now on, the camera will be set for RAW only, rather than RAW+JPG. The JPGs will get generated later by the automated scripts.