Duncan

While I'm a strong advocate of RAW, you'ld be surprised how much you can pull out of that jpg. I've applied a fairly severe shadow/highlights adjustment (I think this is only available in CS2), then to further bring out the shadow detail, I duplicated the layer, set the blend mode to soft light and then applied filter/other/ high pass and then flatterned the image to get this
Attachment 483 (I've probably got the greens a bit too strong ;) )

The RAW you shot is definitely less noisey and given the additional control, not only over exposure, but also over white balance, I always shoot in RAW and accept the post processing time penalty. I very rarely print a "straight" shot (but then in the darkroom how may of people did a straight print) so the ability to convert in 16 bit also gives more post processing headroom

Hi there.
You've done quite a job there. I posted the jpeg just for comparison to show how the scene looked through the viewfinder, to give an example of the amount of "hidden" information that can be extracted.

Your P-P skills are far greater than mine, I would never have thought of doing all the steps you did to extract the detail from the jpeg. In this particular case, the raw processing time overhead was far less. I just loaded the raw file into ACR and checked the "auto" tick boxes on everything.

Duncan.