Having many years ago scrutinised the differences between a RAW file against a carefully made jpeg at low ISO and found there was little benefit as far as I could see, so I've never shot in RAW. Until today. I got a used DP2M and so adamant are other Sigma Merrill users that nothing less than RAW will do with the Foveon sensor I doubted what I was finding and shot some, just in case, as back up. As I haven't gauged the accuracy of the camera's LCD yet or become au fait with the settings so mucked up a fair few of the jpegs (with blown highlights in particular, and terrible colour - I stupidly set cloudly white balance as it was very cloudy, before eventually remembered that is always a recipe for disaster, and reverted to AWB). These screwed up exposures were largely salvageable in RAW whereas in the jpegs the highlights were completely lost proving RAW is useful when you screw things up at the time of taking. The (low ISO) jpegs I had got right were as good as the RAWs. The 'extra' people write about is also available in good jpegs, too. I'm attempting to prevent the camera over-cooking them (smearing detail) and keeping everything neutral and un-sharpened, and with low contrast. The processing power of a computer can do a better job afterwards, much like with RAW (where the files are over 50 MB compared to fine jpegs which are about 8 MB).
But this is a RAW where some tonality of the sky was still to be found, whereas the jpeg had nothing.
But this is a RAW where some tonality of the sky was still to be found, whereas the jpeg had nothing.