Raw photography comparison

Let's say I took the same picture and save it both with JPEG and raw. Actually, let me really do that.Now, both of these look very similar. The raw has a bit of light fall-off on the corners that was corrected in-camera -- and I would do that manually if I were using this picture for real. Interestingly, this was a simple exposure that the camera saved twice; this is, in fact, the perfect scenario!The thing you get with raw is super dynamic range. What is dynamic range? It's the difference between the brightest thing that you can record and the darkest. Additionally, raw stores more bits of information per pixel. While JPEG stores 8 bits-per-pixel-per-color, raw will store 12-14 bits. For ever color that JPEG stores, raw will store between 16-64 colors!So, let's see how this can work in real life.What we're going to do to both the JPEG and raw is to zoom in on the brightest bit of the picture. Let's try the JPEG first:The sky, which looked white originally, turns out is actually white!Let's see the raw version.Holy crap! Other than accentuating the vignetting, there's detail in them thar skies! Not only is the sky not blown out, the banding that was ver apparent in the JPEG is completely gone!Here's a zoomed side-by-side:That is why you should shoot raw if you can!