[lcraft]

One thing these raw workflow apps have going for them is they gently force you to think about organization.. If you use the facilities they provide it becomes pretty simple to weed through a few hundred shots, cull the bad ones and rank/give metadata to them all which would take forever (as in I'd never do it) if I was just processing in Photoshop or Bridge.

Since I use Macs, I drank the kool-aid and went with Aperture. At first I was about 80% pleased with it and as time has gone on I've become more and more happy with it.. I suspect a lot of my happiness with it has also happened since doubling my system ram and buying a new video card - since Aperture uses CoreImage, and that will use the GPU on the vidoe card for rendering graphics.

I also did a stint with Bibble Pro.. I love its engine, highlight recovery and fill light are extremely good but the UI on it really stinks and it drives me nuts - so it only gets used on those images I really think would benefit from it. Then the original RAW goes in Aperture's library along with the TIFF copy that I created in Bibble. And then the bibble settings file has to be stashed somewhere safe in case I ever want to revisit i.

I've also spent some time with Light Room. I think if I was to ever abandon Macs I'd probably switch over to that. No way I'd opt for using Bridge/Camera Raw unless that was my absolute only option - say at a job..

I could seriously get buy easily with Photoshop 7. Adobe probably doesn't like that idea too much.