Tiercel said:

I never really got to grips with shooting in the RAW format, it just seemed like making unnecesarily hard work. Is there a significant difference in the end result?"

 mti

One big difference between JPEG and RAW is bit depth. JPEG, while it technically has millions of colours you'll never have such colour depth in a JPEG, it's closer to 8 bits. Also, since data is dropped/compressed out, the information in the low and high brightness areas that could otherwise still be used, is lost.

RAW, as the name somewhat implies is the raw data from the CCD (Very simplified!!) so every pixel gives you it's data, it's kept and it's bit depth is much larger. In my case, the Nikon D200 has a depth of 12, newer cameras have 14 and even more. This means that overexposed areas, and underexposed areas most likely still have data in them.

If I take a picture of a nearly dark room and try to tweak a JPEG of said room it odds are you'll get a less than useful image in the end up with poor colour, JPEG artifacts and nasty looking contrast.

Do the same with a RAW image and it's very likely you can rescue the image as if it was properly shot from the get-go.

A great test of this is my moonlit road. Take the image here as a jpeg and boost shadow, exposure and vibrancy to make it look like it's a daylight shot. Note the flat, pasty blacks and poor details in the shadows. Look at the gentle sky gradient, it's all blocky now. This is because the details have been lost to the compression and the data no longer exists to be boosted. Look at the double yellow line on the road, compare it to the RAW. Notice how it's no longer smooth? The data that would have made a gentle curve was lost and isn't regainable.

Next, go to the following image http://www.furaffinity.net/view/2280404