RAW/PSD files eating up too much of my drive space...

i am curious about your RAW workflow and how you prevent your drives from getting cluttered up too much from all these big RAW/PSD files.

my workflow so far:
shoot RAW, import into Lightroom, rate photos, five stars go into PS for more detail work. So I end up with 2 files in Lightroom: the RAW file (around 60MB) and the PSD that sometimes tops out at 200MB.

What do you do next? Keep both just in case you need to fiddle with the settings/layers again? Or do you export the PSD as a DNG or TIFF, then import this new file into Lightroom and blow the PSD and RAW away to make room? Seems kind of too many steps.

So what is your workflow for files you know you won't change anymore?

ChrisA said:

First off some math...

I notice today in the paper 500GB drives are selling at Frys for about $150 each. That works out to $0.0003 per megabyte. So that 10MB file costs 1/3rd of a cent to store. 100 of those files 30 cents and 10,000 of those files only $30.00 So don't worry about it. When the disk fills up buy another disk. Storage space is the cheapest part of the whole photographic system.

Now if the problem is not the space but management of the space then you need to change you cataloging system. That's different issue. The hard parts are 1) comming up with a good keyword/comment/rating system and 2) actually using it

Don't worry about the space files take up.

Click to expand...

You are write, space is actually the secondary issue. Clutter of having 2 or 3 different versions of the same file in different stages of the post process is the thing that ticks me off. That's why they introduced STACKING, I guess.