Originally posted by Lowell Goudge I think the OP wants to know specifically what type of PP really demands RAW, you have made some good points in the past, such as sharpening, contrast and saturation beyond what is possible in camera, etc...
You're right, I didn't read the post carefully enough, and thought it was just a question of wondering why he couldn't see a difference.
In m experience, the things most likely to show you a noticeable advantage to shooting RAW are large-scale white balance changes (eg, the sort of thing I do virtually all the time in concert photography with strongly colored lights), exposure changes of a stop of more (which I do routinely because my camera maxes out at ISO 1600, so push processing is the only way to get faster shutter speeds), and also changes to the exposure *curve* - lightening just the shadows, or just the midtones - by similar amounts.
That much I would imagine would be true no matter what software you use. I also find I can get better results from NR and to a lesser extent (a much lesser extent, actually) from sharpening if I work from RAW, but that seems more likely to be software-dependent.
Quote: I can also envision high key and low key portraits because there is too much risk of getting blocks of tones as opposed to smooth transitions when working at either extreme of the histogram in JPEG.
Yes. Also it's pretty common to have "hot spots" where detail is blown out even though the overall exposure is more or less where you want it, and you need to use highlight recovery tools - that's another area where RAW provides a definite advantage.
Basically, any time you need to use PP to "correct" less-than-ideal lighting, you're looking at a situation where RAW can give better results, although how much better depends on how much "correction" you are doing. I put it this way because all too often, one hears that one doesn't need to do much PP if one "gets it right" in camera. I'm talking about situations. where I might have perfectly captured the scene as it was, but I want it to look *better* - the way it would have looked had I been in control of the lighting.
This is the sort of thing I routinely do with curves or local contrast enhancement tools. I might have a face that is partially in the spotlight and also part of the background is in the spotlight, but I don't like where/how the transition from light to shadow on the face takes place, or I wish to darken that background, or lighten part of the performer not receiving direct light from the spotlight, etc.
In contrast to all this, in my landscapes I rarely do anything remotely like this. Maybe a lightening of a shadow, or rebalancing the distribution of values in a scene that exceeds the dynamic range of the camera, or backing off an overly enthusiastic AWB that tried too hard to remove the color of the lighting that I wanted to keep (setting WB to "flash" in PP is one of my favorite techniques here). But here I'm usually talking relatively small adjustments that I wouldn't say RAW provides a significant benefit. Maybe in terms of recovering detail in clouds in a scene that exceeds the dynamic range of the camera?