Jpeg vs Raw

A picture is worth a 1,000 words. Upload one of you RAW+Jpeg pairs to somewhere like Dropbox. Let the Lightroom experts process the raw and show you their results compared to the in-camera jpeg.

Hopefully they will also share all the Lightroom settings they used. Perhaps, from that you can learn.

Also, the benefits of raw increase significantly when the original capture is less than optimum. Blown highlights, blocked up shadows, high ISO noise, color (white balance) errors.... all can be handled much better in a raw file than in a jpeg.

When the orignal capture is perfect, the in-camera jpeg may indeed be hard to beat. But it can easily be equaled from the raw.