For this test, I took a photo of a house at night, with the camera set to save both a RAW and a JPG file simultaneously. I deliberately underexposed the shot by 1 stop, to allow for the contrast between the dark background and the small bright lights. For the JPG, I applied some adjustments. For the RAW file, I first duplicated the process applied to the JPG - you can see that the resulting histogram is much cleaner than the one from the JPG. Then, I started from the RAW file again, brightened the image by applying +2 in the PS RAW utility and then applied some levels adjustment. The images, and the histograms, are shown. The second page shows the images lightened enough to show the trees in the background.