DNG Viewer help + misc workflow

[MartinLipton]

Background:
Within the past 3 months I've been shifting as much of my work (and all of my play) as I can manage from Canon dSLR to Leica M8. Also, upgraded to CS3, having skipped CS2. Also, home OS is upgraded (?) to Vista, but work machine is still XP. I shoot RAW/DNG exclusively.

In simpler unimproved days, I viewed and did first-cut edits via Microsoft's free download RAW viewer. Worked fine for my purposes. Now I can't figure how to make the MS viewer work with CS3 on either Vista or XP. Is there a CS3 preference/option that I'm not finding?

Question(s):
1. How do you preview DNG files with Vista and/or XP?
2. What's your initial shot-selection, rough-cut workflow (CS3-based)?

Thanks

[Jamie_Roberts]

Hey Martin--

This is a really good question, but here's my workflow answers.

First, BreezeBrowser Pro has incorporated a system where if you have a DNG and a corresponding JPEG (same file name) then when you load it up it will treat them both as the same file for editing, moving, timestamps, etc...

Brilliant--I shoot RAW/JPEG with the M8 and dump the cards. Then do a cull with BreezeBrowser Pro and finally dump the JPEGs.

I've found virtually no slow down in writing to fast SD cards, better focus confirmation when I need to chimp (because the camera can use the higher quality JPEG instead of the DNG thumb when zooming), and I gotta admit having the JPEG makes me get more stuff right in camera than I used to....

The wrinkle here is that C1 has improved its speed of preview so much--especially in the beta version of C1 4--that I'm not sure I'll need BB for a cull (though I'll still need it to synchronize camera timestamps and stuff).

Hope that helped!

Jamie

[MartinLipton]

Here's one answer to my question. Free download to home users and nice features. I think it's what I wanted. I downloaded the "portable" version on my portable flash to use when I'm shooting elsewhere and might want to review or show files on someone else's PC. I've been disappointed before with buggy or expiring freeware, but this looks pretty good.

FastStone MaxView - Tiny and Very Fast Image Viewer