Usually, when working with jpegs or similar image file types, when we open them in photoshop and start editing some of the detail may seem missing. This is due to the compression methods used in jpegs and other file types as mentioned in my "On Digital." post.
Import a RAW image into photoshop instead and you will be greeted with this adjustments/import window, which will grant you the "Lightroom" tool-set, allowing you to manipulate the data that is currently attached to the image. This manipulation can be colour correction; brightness/contrast adjustments, clarity, saturation, lens corrections (countering any negative associations your lens may create), white balances and the difference between manipulating these features in a jpeg and manipulating them in a RAW is that these adjustments are made using information already attached to the image.
Whereas in any other file type these details are forced on the image and may result in aggressive detailing, all which could result with our image "Looking Shopped"
This image was taken over exposed and its looking rather flat and colourless, on import, we can adjust some of the exposure and white and dark levels by manipulating the Histogram. Before we do that however, If there had been a grey card in the image, or another image of the same set, we could use that in conjunction with the colour picker tool to adjust the white balance according to the theoretical grey card. failing this, we can adjust the colour temperature at the sidebar.
The histogram will allow us to see where the cutoffs of certain aspects begin and end, on the far left of the histogram we have Blacks and on the far right we have Whites. When we move the Blacks slider of the histogram inward, we are allowing the black areas to brighten up by pulling it to between our bracket, thus showing us the detail that was previously too dark.
after dropping the exposure slightly, too far would have noticeably detracted from the image detail, so instead i dropped the highlights, as the image is over exposed anyway dropping the highlights will not flatten our image when used in conjunction with some other tools. As you can see the water was previously greener, and I had two options when deciding what to do with the water; Leave it as it is or possibly boost the greens a little bit, Or try and balance the colours in the water. I ended up dropping the saturation of Yellow in the HSL section, this removing the green effect from the water, whilst still keeping the yellows that are predominantly in the picture.
This is but an example of RAW capabilities before even importing to a new document, and this set of tools is also available in its own program, Adobe Lightroom, which could be considered more of a work-space to fine tune your RAW photographs to incredible degrees.