Why should I shoot in RAW?

If I can open my Photoshop Elements, and open a JPG as a Camera Raw file, and take it through the RAW process?

If i'm not going to be printing anything larger than 8x10's most of the time, and I can just use a JPG in the RAW software for color correction and etc., then why else should I shoot in RAW?

I have Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 and a Nikon D200 if that helps.

If you do heavy post procession, or generally need to adjust white balance or apply noise reduction, then RAW is a better place to start. RAW is All the data captured by the sensor. Jpeg is modified and compressed by the camera, which means you are not starting with all the data from the sensor.

If you do not need to make major changes or adjustments, then Jpeg is just fine.

One good reason is that RAW (apart from being uncompressed/lossless) gives you more control over the final image. No in camera processing is applied at all to a RAW.

The catch is that you may find Photoshop Elements kind of lame for working with RAW files. You could use the View NX program provided free by Nikon to convert to an uncompressed.jpg and use the Photoshop Elements to tinker with it from there. To get the full benefit of RAW you probably need a more expensive program like Capture NX2.

JPG images are altered by the camera firmware to attempt to give you a suitable image. It takes a linear light space image and tries to adjust it so we perceive the image the way we think is normal. JPG is also an 8-bit (256 levels) per color image which uses lossy compression to reduce file size. Minor post editing a JPG image generally is fine for home use.

Raw format is either 12 or 14-bits (4096 or 16384 levels) per color. There's no spatial compression applied to the image and it is the unprocessed image information from the sensor. If you need to edit the image, it is best to shoot in raw. If you are doing serious panorama or HDR photography, purists like to stitch/process linear light space images, then convert to something like a gamma of 2.2. You have much more latitude in editing a raw image over a JPG image. Adobe Camera Raw is an excellent tool for editing raw images.