Do you ever finalize your pictures?

The digital era has brought a lot of new and convenient features in our picture-taking and processing methods, which allow us photographers to do things we never thought possible in the past. Being a newcomer to "digital photography" (in the sense that until a little while ago, I never altered my digital pictures in the computer), I am amazed by the ways you can improve your images these days, after they are shot.

Some clarifications are in order: I started shooting pictures at the age of 17. My first camera was a Russian "Zenith B" which was soon replaced (thanks to Dad and Mom) by a Nikon F2 Photomic. I kept shooting pictures until about 10 years ago, when during a trip to Hawawii, I got tired of lugging around a bag with two camera bodies, 4 lenses and the associated paraphernalia and sold all my film gear. I replaced them with a Sony point-and-shoot camera and became a ... "Japanese tourist", shooting only family photos. I did upload them and stored them in a computer, but that was all I did to them.

That was until about eight months ago when some friends from my internet sites, showed me some pictures of my old love, the Nikon F2. That reignited the flame. Very soon, I was heavily into cameras and lenses again, and started taking pictures the way I did when I was in my twenties.

Of course, the digital aspects of contemporary photography were not ignored and I got interested in image processing, filing etc. I knew Photoshop from the past, and I knew it was rather difficult to learn, so I never gave it a shot. When I was using Windows computers, my favorite image editing program was Paint Shop, but that was not a photographer's tool. Since I had switched to Macs last January, I tried to find out what programs were there for post-shooting processing of digital images. I soon got an evaluation version of Apple Aperture, which I found very intuitive and powerful. So I stick with it for my picture processing needs.

Now, I have all my pictures stored in my Mac (even my slides, thanks to a Plustek film scanner I got) and organized. And of course, I used Aperture's capabilities to edit some of these pictures, to improve them. As you probably know, Aperture editing is non-destructive. In other words, your editing never affects your original image, unless you want to. So far, I never finalize my pictures, in the sense that I never save copies of my edited pictures in TIFF or any other format. My edits are saved in Aperture library and my initial raw files are saved as shot. In that way, if I later change my mind about some edit I've done (too much contrast, or too underexposed, or too much vibrancy etc), I can always change the edits to something I like more.

While I very seldom change my mind and re-edit my pictures, I read somewhere that a well-respected photographer finalizes his images, by producing PDF files of his pictures, and stores those PDFs for archiving purposes. The reason he used PDF files is not important at this moment. While it is not important if you finalize your images by creating TIFF files, or PDF files, or whatever, the question is:

Do you guys finalize your images?

And if you do, why?

Or do you create "final images" but also keep the raw files in case you decide to do some different editing in the future?

I can understand that professional photographers, who sell their images to customers, want to have the ability to print the same image again and again. So a PDF file which includes both the image and the printing formatting instructions is something very convenient for a pro, but for amateur use, is there any reason why you should finalize your images?