> The histogram tells much more of the story (if not the whole truth). I feel that this is worth expanding on. Because a raw file isn't actually image data an

> The histogram tells much more of the story (if not the whole truth). I feel that this is worth expanding on. Because a raw file isn't actually image data and instead just straight readouts from the sensor, it doesn't make sense to show the histogram of raw data; the data has to be manipulated into a jpeg first. The histogram in the camera will show the lightness values for what the in-camera image processing computer does to convert the raw file into a jpeg, but the in-camera image processor is usually not as advanced as a desktop image processor. It's probably running older image processing algorithms and has to worry about battery life among other things. So generally what this means is that if your camera is telling you that parts of your image are over or under exposed and therefore clipped, it might still be possible to recover those parts of the image in a more powerful image processor. It's also worthwhile, if you've got really old raw files, to go back and reprocess them with modern software. Raw file processing has come quite a long way in the past decade!