[!@#$%!]

well yes and no---about the last part. a good picture must always work in gradations of light and darkness. so just desaturating a good color picture doesnt make a mess, and often works just fine. desaturating wouldn't revert to the flat raw file. the left side of the picture above is less awesome than the right side but hardly "a mess."

reason raw works so different is that film already came embedded with its own pregrading--you had fast film, slow film, high contrast film, etc. you could always refine later but it came with a kind of limiting preset.

the awesome thing about raw vs compressed digital is that you can manipulate the file absolutely without destroying the image at all--impossible with prosumer cameras and earlier codecs. (but soon we'll get there--in the consumer/prosumer i mean).

but anyway yeah since raw is infinitely tweakable, because all the original information always remains, all you really care about is not burning your whites or crushing your blacks-- hence you shoot for the middle and *that* looks a mess ungraded