Very interesting to see everyone's different workflows, whenever there's a thread like this
Here's mine, which is aimed at minimal number of photos for me to edit (I can't over use my wrists, so I have to choose carefully how much to edit) and at dumping unneeded DNGs to conserve hard drive space (it may be cheap, but I still have hundreds of gigs already!):
* I shoot in DNG+JPEG - that way if I get a "snapshot" quality pic (worth having, but not worth spending time editing) I have a jpeg already. If I've captured something worth editing, I have the RAW for it.
* download from the camera via Picasa, sorted by date.
* review the photos in Picasa (which can read DNG files, very handy) and start deleting. Since Picasa can show me my photos full screen, I can really see what's worth working on and what's not.
* Once I've eliminated all the obvious misses (OOF, bad composition/exposure/whatever) I make my next pass. If a pic is snapshot quality, I delete the DNG. If a pic is worth editing, I delete the in-camera JPEG. If I've got multiple photos of the same setting (I usually shoot a couple to be sure of good focus), I can easily see which one is the keeper, so I'll dump all the unnecessary duplicates at this point.
* Any DNGs left are worthy of my time
I start with the ones that are going to be the easiest to tweak, so that I'll know what works best for those same lighting conditions on the more difficult photos I took at the same time/place.
* Open the DNG in Elements and adjust fill light, highlights & any white balance issues there. Next I use some judicious unsharp mask & overlay techniques. And if I want special effects, I use Nik Software for the fun goodies
If I make up any workflows in Nik that give me something spectacular, I document all the settings involved & make presets for it.
* I save as a full size jpeg (my jpeg naming system gives me a quick shorthand for what processes I used, so I can recreate them if I want to generate another jpeg with some different tweaks). If the photo is one I consider Best In Show, I keep the DNG as a back-up or to use new techniques on in the future.
* I back up all my DNGs and jpegs onto an external hard drive.
It's not a question of if your main computer hard drive will fail, people, it's only a question of when! Back it up!
* Upload any salable prints to SmugMug