I am an avid photographer and have a Canon 10D camera. I shoot in only RAW data mode, because the picture quality is so much better. After shooting about 140 photos one weekend, I color corrected them all on a PC. I proceeded to bring them home and put them on my Mac. Much to my frustration, the Mac version of Adobe CS would not register any data associated with the color corrections I had spent so much time on. I found out that this is because the PC uses some odd side-file with a .HTM extension (I believe). Anyway, since I have a Mac and a PC and wanted to store my photos on a network box accesible by both, I needed a new solution. I found one, and it works great. Here it is...
Open up a RAW image file in Adobe CS on the Mac or PC. When the window comes up, there is a radio button that says Normal or Advanced. Set it to Advanced. Now go to the little arrow button next to the Settings drop-down menu and select Preferences. When the next window comes up under the drop-down menu that says "Save image settings in," choose the one that says Sidecar '.xmp' files. Then just hit Okay, and cancel the RAW window.
Now when you open your next RAW file and make your color corrections, it will create a separate file with that photo that will be automatically recognized on the Mac or PC version of CS. Hope this helps someone!
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050312120528558