[silkstone]

RAW is just the 'raw' sensor data, and it can be read by Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) which is a front end to Photoshop, although you need the version which supports your camera.

By default the images may be rather soft - you always need some sharpening with digital images to counteract the effect of the anti-aliasing filter in front of the sensor. The in-camera JPEG conversion has quite a bit of sharpening built in. You can set DPP to use one of the conversion styles available in the camera - 'Standard' has quite a bit of sharpening and should produce a good result although perhaps a bit too contrasty for some purposes. 'Neutral' has a flatter tone curve and less sharpening iirc.

I use Bibble to produce a full-size, low-compression JPEG, and then resize for the web using Faststone (Windows) or gThumb (Linux). Most people use Photoshop (with ACR) and/or Lightroom. The ideal sharpening does depend on the resolution, but I find that resizing from a final full-size TIFF or JPEG usually gives decent results.