For years, you've heard that shooting in RAW is better than shooting JPEGs. Your camera's RAW mode packs significantly more visual information, so it offers the potential to capture better photos. That comes at a cost, however, since you need to do extra work to coax better photos out of your camera. To help you do that, most photo editors come with some sort of mini photo editor that you can use to tweak RAW images. Photoshop Elements calls it Camera Raw; Corel PaintShop Pro calls it Camera RAW Lab. If you've always ignored such programs, give them a second look.
Why Use a RAW Editor?In a word, convenience.
This is the same reason that I recommend programs such as Lightroom or AfterShot Pro--they dispense with all the graphical-design baggage packed into a full-featured image editor like Adobe Photoshop, and include only the stuff that's important to photographers editing photos. In the same way, a RAW editor is a photo editor stripped to the bone, sporting just the features you need to correct color and exposure. A lot of the time, you could make a few tweaks in the RAW editor and be done, never needing to mess with the bigger Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or PaintShop Pro.
