When shooting RAW photographs, the full range of color and brightness captured by the camera's sensor is preserved, along with additional metadata such as white balance, exposure, and contrast settings. This allows for much greater flexibility in post-processing and editing of the image, as well as the ability to recover details in highlights and shadows that may be lost in a JPG file.

JPG images, on the other hand, are compressed and discard some of the original data to reduce file size. This compression process can result in a loss of detail and color information, particularly in areas of high contrast or fine detail. Additionally, once the data has been discarded in a JPG image, it cannot be recovered.