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 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.

(BTW, this is not a perfect test obviously because it's STILL been uploaded as a jpeg to FA)

A great example of this is my moonlit road. Take the image here as a RAW and boost shadow, exposure and vibrancy exactly the same amounts to make the image look as if it's shot in daylight as http://www.furaffinity.net/view/2280391 . Note the blacks and shadows are well detailed with leaf texture being far more realistic. Look at the double yellow line on the road, compare it to the JPEG. Also note the sky's gradient between this one and the JPEG.