The Canon Powershot S3 is a great camera.  It has surely brought me from being a novice photographer to a lot less of a novice.  One thing that it is missing, that I didn't realize I would want or need, is RAW support.  Well, tonight I solved that problem.  I loaded CHDK onto it, and wow was it easy.  The beauty of this software is that it doesn't brick your camera or change your firmware, instead it is just like running a program on your PC.  Here are the features that it added that I am now enjoying, keep in mind it does a lot more:

- RAW support

- Continuous Battery Status

- Scriptable language (you can program your camera)

- On screen histogram

What I did with the RAW file once it was on my machine was to convert it to a DNG using dng4ps2.  I was trying this out to see the quality of an HDRI from a single RAW file with changing the exposure.  Here is the result, which is a lot more washed out than I had hoped (don't judge the mess, it is clean now):

The RAW feature is cool, but what is cooler is the scripting language that it runs on your camera.  It is called UBASIC and it allows me to program my camera, I make something as simple as this:

set_av 3

press "zoom_in"

shoot

That would change the aperture, zoom in, and then take a picture.  How cool is that.  You can learn more about the scripting language here.

There are also some nice scripts that already exist, such as the ability to bracket more than 3 photos (the canon limit was 3) with varying exposure.  So now I can run a script that takes 7 pictures each with 1 difference in exposure between them, perfect for HDR shooting.  There is even scripts for taking pictures of lightning.

This program has definitely changed this $350 camera into a semi-professional camera.

I haven't taken any impressive photos yet with the new features, I have been inside looking at all it can do (I think I need some new batteries soon).  Here is one that I took with this new bracketing script.