I don't have Photoshop or Lightroom and don't really want to buy them when it's unlikely I'll do anything worth the expense. I'm not planning to go pro or anything, but would like to tinker around with it. If you want to dramatically increase the quality of your photos, invest your time in learning proper composition.I'm most likely going to get a G4 and have been curious about shooting raw. Unless you are serious about the processing part of photography, I'd stick with JPG. That's the magic sauce that makes the G4 camera so good. Why? The biggest reason is that the G4 software does a great job in creating the JPG. On my G4, however, I typically just shoot in JPG. Part of my photo workflow involves culling and processing images in Lightroom to be later processed in either Lightroom or Photoshop. I almost always shoot with my dslrs' in raw. If you want to dramatically increase the quality of your photos, invest your time in learning proper composition.

In order to get a photograph from raw YOU have to process it with appropriate software. That's why 2 different makes of cell phones using the same camera sensor can have such dramatically different picture quality. It's the phone's software that processes the images and compresses them to JPG. Having access to this data is something that is new to smartphones. In fact ALL digital cameras capture the image in a raw format. Raw is just the basic data picked up by the sensor.

I would be surprised if dropbox automatically reads a dng file and compresses it to JPG. I can't speak to dropbox but Google drive will transfer dng files. Raw files are almost 20 mb where the JPG should be around 5 mp.

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