What are the benefits of shooting RAW photos?

I have a Nikon D3000 and it has the option to shoot RAW, but I don't yet know what the benefit of shooting RAW is. Can someone tell me?

Shooting raw allows you to control a lot more of the aspects of the photo in Photoshop than does shooting in JPEG.

RAW is the unprocessed image from the sensors, not compressed or anything so they tend to be quite large.

If your shooting highly detailed pictures or need to later enlarge them to poster sizes, you might opt to shoot RAW.

You need a good computer and software that can handle RAW images.

Contrary to popular belief, RAW images are not uncompressed. But they are compressed using a lossless compression algorithm.

The only situation where I wouldn't shoot in RAW would be if I was making a time-lapse video, and I had to capture 4, 000 still images in one go that are going to be turned into video anyway. That is because and HD video frame is only 2 megapixels.

There are some other situations such as if you are a newspaper photographer, and you want to be able to quickly send images to an editor and you don't have time to process them. Sports photographers sometimes show with a wi-fi card in their cameras, that can basically instantly upload an image to a website as they shoot.

However, in the above situation, I would should RAW+JPEG.

I also shoot RAW+ JPEG at weddings sometimes, because I will put the memory card into a TV there to do an instant slideshow.

Pretty much in every other case I can think of it, always makes more sense to shoot in RAW.

* RAW files are processed outside the camera with more control by the photographer
* The processed RAW files can be saved as JPEG, TIFF or DNG files
* If you are using Lightroom, you can profile the files based upon the camera and lens used.
* If you wish to custom white balance the shoot, you need to start with RAW files.

Here is how custom white balance works

http://www.xritephoto.com/ph_learning.aspx?action=webinarsarchive&eventid=803&eventdateid=4460

The TIFF and DNG files are what publishers usually request to make the best colour separations before going to press.