I've been playing with all the options on the 30D, and today tried RAW+JPEG to see if it is useful. I didn't like the images it produced, but something interesting did come of it: an exercise in highlight recovery.

The whales were having a tea party on the deck and to record the event I shot one frame of RAW+JPEG. I imported the images and accessed the JPEG sister by control-clicking on an image and selecting New Version from Master JPEG:

Here is a part of the JPEG version:

It's not sharp and I don't like the colors. But I can see detail in the white fin on the left. Now here is the RAW as processed by Aperture:

Sharper and nicer, but the fin is blow out. The blown out pixels are on the right of the histogram:

The JPEG version doesn't have this, so I know it's not inherent in the image:

How do I get the fin back? And why did Aperture do this to me?

First I turn the exposure way down. That brings the highlights back, but it kills the rest of the image. So I move the brightness and saturation up to compensate and then twiddle with the contrast to get a reasonable image with some loss of shadow detail:
Finally I get the shadows back with the Highlights and Shadows control:

And my final result is pretty pleasing:

The bucket is much better and the yellow color can be seen reflecting in other objects. The fin is how I want it, but the rest of the whale is visible too. The histogram looks entirely different now I have finished:

I wonder why this is so hard to do? Did I just use the wrong technique, or is there something missing from Aperture here?

Here is a crop (screen capture from Aperture) from an image with a lamp pointing directly at an iPhone. It was shot hand-held at 1/25 at f6.3, ISO 1000 with a Canon 30D and a 17-55 f2.8 IS lens:

I can't see an iPhone -- where is it? It's the big featureless white thing directly below the lamp. It must be an iPhone because it has no buttons. It should have buttons, but again Aperture has washed them out horribly, so there are none to be seen. Now I convert to monochrome using the Monochrome mixer and the image is just the same, not surprisingly:

After much twiddling I get what I am after. It improves the keyboard, the mice, and the curtain too:

Here are my final settings:

Again the technique is pretty much the same as before: Exposure way down, Brightness up, corrections with the Contrast, and Highlights and Shadows for the final touch.