Digital Light & Color

I used to develop my Canon G16 raw images in PWPv8 before doing anything anything else. Then by accident I found that applying Color Curves to the raw image produced a tiff, very much like the tiff produced by the raw develop transformation.

Does Color Curves simply apply Raw Dev. before applying the curve, or is there an advantage in raw processing first? As an amateur, I'm not an advanced user (no color profiles etc.).

Raw Develop does not do anything (i.e. its output image is just a copy of its input image) unless you supply it with a lens and/or camera profile. Unfortunately, while it provides tools for creating these, Picture Window only ships with profiles for a very small number of cameras and lenses. It is on my list to make the open source Lensfun database work with Picture Window at which point at least lens profiles will be available for most cameras and lenses.

In the meantime, while you can open raw files in Picture Window I recommend using some other raw file converter and saving the files in TIFF format.

Your options for raw converters include Lightroom or Photoshop, DxO PhotoLab or Pure Raw, Raw Therapee, or whatever software came with your camera.