There have been many things written and told about RAW and JPEG and there is a general mis-understanding among some people about the difference between the two formats and what they should be shooting. However, there is no need as it can be easily explained using a simple analogy - that of baking a cake.

Imagine you are going to throw a party for some friends and you want to provide a cake for the end of the meal. You head to your supermarket of choice and you have two purchasing options:

1. Death by chocolate double chococlate heaven delight cake (yes, I'm a chocoholic!) ready made in a pack and a small tub or hundreds 'n' thousands to sprinkle on top

2.  Flour, eggs, sugar, chocolate, and all the other ingredients that go into a cake. 

Now, depending on your purchasing choice, when you get home you have to do one of two things - take the readymade cake out of the pack and add some sprinkles, or bake a cake from scratch. 

In this analogy, JPEG is the ready made cake - for a lot of situations it will be fine, it will taste good, look good and be generally acceptable. However, if you wish to really spoil your guests, as the ambassador did at his reception (UK audience joke! - apologies to non-UK readers), then your ready made cake looks a bit limp and cheap. Instead, you could custom make your cake from all the RAW ingredients and really put some of yourself into it - and by that I don't mean chopped off ends of fingers! This, in case you didn't guess, is your RAW file. You can still add the sprinkles at the end of that, but assuming you know how to bake a cake, you can end up with a much more personal (and hopefully better) result becasue you've put your creative spin on it. 

Thought of like that, the RAW/JPEG decision is easier to make - if you want to spend time baking back home and you really want to extract the most you possibly can from the file to get the very best result, shoot RAW. If you're not sure about you 'baking' skills or you are shooting for something that doesn't need the most detail possible, JPEG will be fine - you can after all still add a little sprinkle to it if you want. 

There is a third way - the RAW+JPEG option. This really is having your cake and eating it.... you can hve all the ease of preparation of the JPEG file, but can still go back to a RAW file should you decide that you want to be a little more creative with it later. It come with a warning though - just as buying both a ready made cake and the RAW ingredients will eat up your resources (money and basket space) so shooting RAW and JPEG will consume your memory card space and hard drive space.

One of the great ironies of the last couple of years (from a Canon EOS photographic point of view rather than a global perspective) is the introduction of Picture Styles (PS). Before PS we had parameters, and they caused a lot of confusion. While we could sort of understand what contrast, saturation, sharpness and colour tone did, no-one ever seemed to do anything with them. So Canon came up with the idea of packaging them as Picture Styles, with some simple names to make them easy to understand. And yet we still have confusion... and people not changing them! 

So, here's a run-down of the 6 preset Picture Styles and what they are used for. They are split into three groups - Basic, Advanced and Monochrome.

Basic - for general shooting, these are aimed at users who either don't want to post-process their images, or who don't want to have to do too much work to their images. Basic includes Standard, Portrait and Landscape. Each setting offers a different level of sharpening, but it the other parameters (see that word creep back in?!) all seem to be 0, and yet if you take the same picture with the three different settings, they'll look different becasue of the tone curve applied to the image in settings you can't control.

Advanced - for those that want to post process their images and would like the images to be as untouched as possible from the camera. It includes Neutral and Faithful. Neutral gives natural colours and gentle tones without boosting the contrast or sharpness. Faithful adjusts the colours based on a 5200K colour temperature to try and match the colours accurately. Again there is no contrast or sharpening applied.

Monochrome - for black and white shooting. There is also the option to add toning or filter effects at the point of shooting. 

So what should you use? Well, if you use Canon's DPP software, you can change the  Picture Styles in the post processing as you wish. you can even create your own Picture Stlye in Picture Style Editor and apply that to your image to create a repeatable custom look. If you use a third party RAW software then with the exception of the latest versions of LightRoom/Adobe Camera RAW, Picture Styles will be completely ignored and it will be effectively the equivalent of shooting in Neutral - i.e. flatter tones, neutral colours and no real punch. 

So what about sharpening? Well, the thoughts on sharpening are that it is now a three stage process - capture sharpening, creative sharpening (optional) and output sharpening.  If you use one of the Standard PS settings that applies sharpening, this is effectively stage one done. If not, you'll need to do it in processing - this means also if you use third party RAW software that ignores PS settings you'll miss out on the first stage.

If you want to see what Picture Styles look like on an image, here's a comparison set with nothing done except to change the Picture Style on each one, and a resize to fit the page. 

Standard:

Landscape:

Portrait:

Neutral:

Faithful:

Mono: