Have I been making a mistake all along? ACR => CS5

Quick question that hopefully warrants a quick answer, I thought about this the other day and its been bugging me.

My general workflow, slow as it may be, is to browse my images in Bridge and open them in ACR from there. When Im finished in ACR, I click "open" and it brings the image to CS5 as a .CR2 file. Then, I proceed to work on my images in CS5 and when Im finished, I save as a TIFF for archiving without any re-sizing/sharpening and a re-sized/sharpened JPEG to my desktop to load to SmugMug.

So, my question is - should I be using the "Save As" function in ACR and editing the TIFF file in CS5 or is there virtually no difference between doing that and just hitting "open"? Something in the back of my mind tells me I should use "Save As" in ACR, but I dont know why. Im hoping some of the Adobe suite guru's could put my mind at ease.

Thanks!

Well, in general I'd say what's "best" is what's best for you.

Bear in mind, though, that Bridge does keep track of the editing you do in ACR, so there is no real need to Save when you are in ACR, unless you want to save an "output" file for something like printing, Web posting, or some other type of sharing, and for those purposes a big tiff file may not be the best!

As to opening in Photoshop, if you need the editor to produce a "final product" then sure, saving a tiff before flattening and resizing will preserve your "project". You might consider at some point converting to 8 bits-per-channel once you have done all your major tonal adjustments either in ACR or the editor, because that will save in file size/storage.

Makes no technical difference whether you use open or save as.