When you shoot a photo in ProRAW, what big advantage does it give you for making bright and dark parts of your picture look better later?

When you shoot a photo in ProRAW, the big advantage for making bright and dark parts of your picture look better later stems from its ability to capture and retain significantly more original light information across the entire image compared to standard compressed formats like JPEG or HEIF. A ProRAW file combines the unprocessed, rich data of a traditional RAW file with Apple's computational photography enhancements, such as Smart HDR and Deep Fusion, which are designed to optimize detail in highlights (bright areas) and shadows (dark areas) even before saving. A standard RAW file records thousands of distinct levels of brightness, or a high "bit depth," directly from the camera's sensor for each color channel. In contrast, a JPEG, for example, processes and compresses this information into a much smaller file, typically retaining only 256 levels of brightness per color channel. During this compression, a lot of the fine detail in very bright or very dark areas is permanently discarded, making those areas difficult to adjust later without introducing visual imperfections like banding, color shifts, or noise. Because ProRAW maintains this much larger pool of unprocessed data, especially in the extremes of the dynamic range—the full spectrum from the brightest to the darkest parts of the scene—you gain substantial flexibility during post-processing. You can effectively "recover" details in overexposed highlights that might otherwise appear completely white, or "lift" and reveal hidden details in underexposed shadows that would look completely black in a compressed image. This robust data retention allows you to make precise, non-destructive adjustments to the exposure and contrast of bright and dark areas without degrading the image quality, resulting in a more balanced, natural, and detailed final photograph even in high-contrast lighting conditions.