I must say that I was intially afraid to shoot in RAW but once I tried it and saw what it allowed me to do there has been
no going back....actually I normally shoot JPEG/RAW so that if I don't have time to process my pics I still have the JPEG images if I need it in a pinch...

So here goes....a friend sent me Flat Stanley for his daughter so I could take some pictures of him around Williamsburg:

In the JPEG pictures you will notice how "blown out" or overexposed he is....the RAW photos(which do get converted to JPEG) allowed me to adjust the exposure (you can adjust exposure on the entire picture or just parts of it...in these photos I adjusted just FS except for the pic of him on the lawn in front of the Palace where I also adjusted the exposure on the sky)

JPEG: FS with Fife Drummer
RAW: FS with Fife Drummer (I did increase the exposure just a bit to much)

JPEG: FS at the Capitol
RAW: FS at the Capitol (cropped a bit)

JPEG: FS at the Palace (This pic FS was exposed very well but the sky wasnt)
RAW: FS at the Palace (cropped a bit and the exposure was changed on the sky and the top of the Palace...and as you can see now I cloned grass in around FS to cover up the tripod....not the best job on the cloning but without seeing the original you probably never even noticed it)

Well these are far great processing but they do show just how valuable shooting in RAW can be....give it a try and trust me you wont be sorry.

FWIW, Keg...I only shoot in RAW to save some space on the card. Your point is well taken about in a pinch. After I d/l the pics to my PC, I will batch process them in PSE to JPG so that I also have 2 copies. Same result...different method.

BTW...nice comparisons.

while I do think shooting in RAW is a good idea, I do think your side-by-side comparisons are a little flawed, because a lot of the adjustments you made would have showed up nearly as well if you made them on the jpeg. a more telling comparison would be to, say, take the jpeg of first photo with the overexposed stanley on the drum, zoom in on stanley, and use the same adjustments as you used on the raw file (gotta love that PS recovery tool!) and see what you come up with. there WILL be a significant difference, but I don't think it will be quite as stark as between the unprocessed/overexposed jpeg and the processed raw.

true on all accounts

not to make this a LAMP thread, but here are some pics from when stanley visited me in denver. the only one I actually like as a photo is this one.