Good Evening,
So this is a discussion that I get into often when talking to people just getting into photography. It usually starts off with "how do I fix this?" or "why do the pictures look different?" It is usually a white balance issue and people leaving it on Auto White Balance (AWB). My response is usually turning off AWB and setting it for each shot. Which then delves into fixing it after the fact, I ask if it is a jpeg or raw file. Often the response is "what is a raw file?" or if they know what it is they say they use jpeg because they are a smaller file which means they can take more pictures.
I compare it to having a negative and having a print. With the negative you can make wide adjustments to a picture, brighten/darken, increase/decrease contrast, apply filters, change it to B/W, etc all without making changes to the negative. Can't really do much of that with a print unless you take a picture of the print and make it into a negative.
Now for those that haven't ever dealt with negatives I say it is basically taking all the combinations that you can set up between changing the WB 6 and Picture Style(Canon) or Picture Control (Nikon) or Creative Style (Sony). Each one has around 6 WB settings and 6 picture settings which is like taking 36 pictures with one shot because all of that can be changed later on without altering the original file. Granted this latitude comes at a cost of time the images have to be processed before being used.
If you want a quick picture take a jpeg, if you want a lot of range take a raw, if you want both you can probably do that too with a raw+jpeg setting.
~Scott