Struggling with the need for RAW photography

 In learning about new camera technologies, it's easy to stumble across fervent opinions online on how glorious RAW format is for storing your photo files instead of having your camera spit out JPG files. So far I'm not buying it.... for my style of very limited editing of photos. 

Manual post processing of photos feels like homework, the more photos I take, the more Photoshopping I'm supposed to do.  I'll leave Photoshop experts to that. In fact, I don't own a subscription to Photoshop.  

I'm currently using ON1 Photo RAW, but not using it to do RAW editing. I'll let it do auto adjustments of contrast, highlights, and tones, I do some cropping here and there, but that's it.  Maybe there are cases where I could dramatically improve a photo with RAW editing, but they double the amount of storage (a valid concern when my photo library size is in the hundreds of GB), and it's a time investment for me. 

For instance, maybe this photo could have been a lot better, maybe the details on the foggy shoreline could be brought out, maybe I could find a camera profile that really makes it pop. But I'm struggling with investing the time to learn and use the tools, and get all creative with them. 

There are computational advances in photography that are super helpful. Things like Night Sight, fake Depth of field, and the auto 'AI' adjustments (probably not technically a trained AI, thus the quotes) make my life much easier because they speed up the time I have to spend fussing with photos. 

So I'm struggling with shooting 25MB RAW files, and for now will probably keep shooting 13MB JPG files, since JPG is so easy to work with, and an actual open standard. See, even in retirement I still see the value of Open Standards!