RAW files are like unprocessed film. The raw processing software you use to edit them is like the film developer.
Shadow recovery
Shadow recovery is a software technique that lets you brighten very dark areas of a picture to reveal otherwise unseen detail. It uses the extra image data captured in RAW files, so you have to shoot RAW to be able to do this later on a computer.
Dynamic range and exposure
Dynamic range is the camera sensor’s ability to capture detail in very bright and very dark parts of a scene. Cameras (or sensors) with a low dynamic range record dark shadows as a solid black or bright highlights as a featureless white. In the days of film, this was known as a film’s ‘exposure latitude’. […]