Fro Knows Photo RAW edits

Jared Polin over at Froknowsphoto.com has a great program going on right now with his blog. He's posting one RAW photo every week or so for followers to edit and resubmit to his website for critique and such.

I don't think I'm going to join the forums and submit mine for edit and stuff like that... but I might post a few on here (and link back to the fro of course). RAW is something I want to get some more practice with. 

Here's my first try. My edit on the top, the original on the bottom. I like the crop a lot. The background is interesting but ultimately unnecessary in my opinion. I decided to give it a really high contrast and grungy look. Lowering the saturation and boosting the vibrance is a pretty cool way to get to that, not-quite-black-and-white area.   

Camera RAW

It's becoming pretty clear that one way to make my photos way better is to shoot in RAW and then work in Bridge/Photoshop/Camera RAW . The RAW files end up so big... I know it's a one way ticket to great photos (HDR too), but I have a hard time with my post production work flow. I think I'm just generally too excited to get the photos processed and up on the site for the world to see, but I really should slow down. 

Anyone have any tips for working in camera RAW? I've only experimented with a few of the tools. Time to really buckle down and learn.