Here’s a great example of why shooting RAW is a good idea.

Yesterday a magazine requested the image on the left.  It was very bright and in the middle of the afternoon with the sun to her back (this was an incidental test shot they really liked for some reason).  As it was, it wasn’t up to my standards and had I shot jpeg, there would be very little that could have been done about it.  Look how blown out the sky is, and how dark she is. How day-glow the grass is…

The image on the right is what I ended up with after an hour or so of fiddling.  Developing the RAW into two images, one for the sky and one for her blended together in photoshop along with a bunch of curves adds up to the final image on the right.  All that information is in there in that RAW file.  Most of the time it’s not necessary and we or the camera throw it away.  But damn if it isn’t handy in a pinch.