How do you use RAW?

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How do *you* use RAW?

EDIT: Gah realised the thread title isnt exactly gonna get me a lot of views. I meant 'how do you use RAW'. i.e. what applications, in what order.

Hello all. I got back from my travels yesterday and like we've all experienced, am faced with a huge amount of photos to sort through (some happy snaps, some worthy of posting here hopefully!). I've taken a lot in RAW, and was wondering what everyones workflow was.

Before, i simply opened them in CS2 and got to work, but i've discovered there are a few decent tools within Nikon PictureProject. Problem is, if i tweak anything in there, then open it up in CS2 -- it reverts back to the original. How can i stop this? Whats everyones workflow with processing RAW files?

Thanks.

 

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Thanks for the info guys. I'm starting to have a play with Bridge which seems quite funky. Might have to read up on the 'proper' way of doing things, but its useful being able to delete the howlers straight from there anway.

Saving RAWs as TIFFS is a good idea (keeping high-res, processed versions would be useful), but what settings/compression do you use? When saving to TIFF in CS2 they come out at 17Mb!