Good to see your blog moving again!

Don’t get too enthralled in Photoshop, it can chew up man-years of your time without really trying. I agree with your RAW idea, do it myself, and have Photoshop, but only use it when pressed. These days, there are far more photo-centric apps out there that do the important stuff well with RAW files. I use Adobe Lightroom, and it rocks for doing the raw conversions, and also cataloging all your images. You’re not a mac user, but if you were’ I’d point you at Aperture, which is a Mac app in the same vein. Well, that and Lightroom, because unlike Aperture, Lightroom runs on Mac and Windows…

The raw files are large, and you do need to manage them sensibly if you want to avoid losing them down the track. I keep a copy automatically on my linux server (samba) and use a freeware app called Image Ingester to suck the files from the memory card, back them up, and put them in Lightroom’s path…

Seeing as I’m into software recommendations today I’ll also recommend you have a peek at Photomatix once you are shooting raw. It can do wonderful stuff with extracting the max dynamic range from your images (either pseudo hdr from a single raw file, or combining several differently-exposed images of the exact same scene (need tripod) to produce a HDR (High Dynamic Range image) Search flickr etc for HDR and you will get the idea.

anyway, good luck with it,

Regards,

Michael