Is it worth shooting raw for me?
I'm 15 and I'm very into photography. I want to start shooting raw and I have a nikon d5000 and photoshop CS2. I can't afford a newer photoshop and the raw plugin for nikon d5000 is not supported by cs2. I spent a day shooting raw and then converted them to tiff, then saved the tiffs and deleted the raws. Then edit the good photos as tiffs and save to good quality jpegs.
Is it worth saving as tiffs to edit or should I just shoot jpeg?
If hard drive space is not too much of an issue, then shoot RAW, keeps the RAWs raw, and use the TIFFs or even jpegs to edit and such. RAW seems to be the most future-proof at the moment (more so than TIFF, although some people might disagree), and if you also keep the history of your CS2 edits, you'll be able to reapply them when you do get to use CS9 (or whenever it'll be).
Happy shooting!
One of the biggest benefits of RAW is that it is unedited, the "source code" of any image. This means that you can go back and make any changes and edits or switch to any other format with no loss of quality or other problems.
Here is a good beginners guide to RAW format basics:
http://myphotographylessons.com/raw-format-basics/
So whatever you decide to do, you should always save the RAW format images too so that you can always go back to them in the future. External harddrives are so cheap these days you can easily pick up a few terabytes to store many many thousands of full RAW format images on.
If you download the free Adobe DNG converter and convert you NEF file to DNG CS2 (or more accurately Bridge) can open them, Pentax cameras can record in this format in camera.
DNG is not a compression format so all the files will be the same size.
As a student you qualify for discounted software from Adobe. For under $100 you can buy Adobe Lightroom 3.5 and it can process not only the RAW files your fine camera produces, but can process them in batches as long as the white balance does not change.
Shooting in RAW is always advisable, since those files contain All the image data collected by the cameras sensor. It the future, any old RAW files you have will be able to be processed using the newer technology. This is why you NEVER should delete RAW files. If they are taking up too much room on your computer, you can either get a nice 2 tb external drive (under $100 on sale) or save all the RAW files to a DVD as backup.
OR
You can download the free Adobe DNG converter and use your CS2 version of Photoshop to process them.