I was out recently shooting the San Gabriel River. I went out and photographed where it intersects US highway 183 in Leander, TX. As usual, I shot both Raw and JPEG. First, I will post the JPEG unedited.
Next, here is the unedited Raw file.
As you can see both pictures are not very good.The highlights are blown out in each photo and there is no shadow detail. I actually underexposed this picture by one stop.
Now let’s compare the edited versions. I have brought down the highlights in both images and bumped up the shadows. I also have added saturation and vibrance in both images.
Here is the JPEG edited.
This is the raw edited.
As you can see, the highlights are blown in the JPEG. I brought down the highlights as much as I could, but they cannot be recovered. In this case, it paid off to shoot raw. The raw has more dynamic range, so I was able to recover the blown highlights.