Amongst photographers there is an ongoing debate of whether or not it is "sufficient" to shoot with the camera in the jpeg mode, or whether there is a significant advantage in shooting Raw, which is a file type that retains all the data captured by the sensor, whereas when the camera creates a jpeg it selects "needed" data and discards the rest.

Recently I decided to shoot a scene from my deck that would challenge processing the various tones. it was a cloudy, mostly overcast day, with a pretty dim/dark "foreground". But the clouds had some definite features to them. The challenge was to get an exposure that would keep the detail in the clouds but also allow the foreground to be lightened.

This couldn't be done without finding some kind of "middle ground" photo and then processing to overcome the shortcomings. The question is could you replicate the results of processing a Raw file by trying to accomplish the same with a jpeg?

So, the first four shots were taken at four different exposures and quickly converted from Raw files in Canon Digital Photo Professional using the Landscape "Picture Style" and so are what an out-of-camera jpeg would have been .

I selected the last shot to work on, since it was the best for the foreground, so the fifth pic is from the Raw file for that shot, using a Neutral Picture Style.

In my Raw processor, I worked on the image until the sky was decent as well as the foreground, which is shown in the sixth pic.

For the next pic, I applied the same settings to the jpeg that I had to the Raw file, and as expected, the jpeg didn't handle the highlights well.

To show why, I totally brought down all controls affecting image brightness -- the first shot is from the Raw, showing that the brightest areas still have some "gray matter" in them. The next pic is trying that with the jpeg, showing that the brightest areas are just white -- not as much to recover!