Quote Originally Posted by steelerdirtfreak
I've only shot RAW a few times, and the results have been extremely underwhelming. There was no contest that jpeg's were far and away better than RAW images.

So, a couple of questions, since I really know nothing about RAW...

Since I shoot for a local race track and have to get 4 to 5 action shots of every car competing each week, I end up shooting 800 to 1200 shots in a 3 to 4 hour period. Is RAW a practical choice or consideration for this type of shooting?

What program do you use to edit your RAW images? (My regular editor is Photoshop Elements 5)

How did you learn to edit RAW photos? The few times I have experimented with RAW, the results, as mentioned, were not good. I figure it's probably because I have no idea what I'm doing, and probably using a less than optimal program. (I used something called Raw Shooter Essentials)

Thanks for any answers, thoughts, or suggestions; they will be greatly appreciated.
Joined this conversation a bit late. To reply to the original poster:

I use Nikon NX. If I know I'm going to do the same correction to some or all of the images (example: conversion to black & white) I do that first in Batch mode.

In your case with 800-1200 images to process I might shoot JPG as long as I could use the D300 which gets the JPG's pretty close to perfection in many cases.

I guess I learnt how to use RAW during years of scanning film. The basic parameters you're adjusting are the same, but you can do A LOT more with a pure digital image. It's quite amazing sometimes how you can take something that looks awful and turn it into something normal.