help saving images from silkypix

JPEG in camera - processed by a relatively low power processor doing minimal work to get your pictures to look acceptable. And it actually does a pretty good job.

But often, you can do better by making your own decisions with more powerful software on your computer.

JPEG is 8 bit color.
RAW contains 12 or more bits of color information.
With that you can do more adjustments using 12 bits of data with less noticeable degradation. Then when you finally convert to 8 bit JPEG, you have a nicer image.
12 bits of data also holds more information about the image especially noticeable in the brighter and darker areas. Thus when an image appears blown out in JPEG, you cannot do anything about it. If you had the RAW file, you can make adjustments that might bring those blown out areas back into a viewable range - within limits of those 12 bits. It isn't magic.

Adjustments done within RAW software can be modified an unlimited number of times. The RAW file itself is not modified. Instead a second file containing your requested modifications is created. These mods are then applied to the RAW image data as it is developed (or displayed internally), thus never actually touching the RAW file itself.
Go wild with RAW software and dont worry about degradation.

As you probably already know, opening and saving a jpeg repeatedly causes loss of data each time it is opened, re-saved, closed and repeated. Eventually resulting in total garbage.

There is more to it than that. With a RAW file, not only do you get the raw unprocessed data, but there are many more bits to that data too. There is more information to do with luminance and colour, so there is more you can do with it. To simplify, it's like there is hidden data that you don't see normally with a JPEG, but can see from a RAW when processed. For example, there is more scope to rescue underexposed shots. You can also control highlights better.

I don't know about those two programs, but with Silkypix, the number of times a particular setting is altered has no effect on quality because the program automatically redoes all the processing from scratch (with your settings), in the optimum order, at the time of "development" (conversion to JPEG or TIFF). Quality is only lost if a setting is pushed beyond a reasonable limit, or settings are combined in a strange way.

It's simpler and can save time and having to deal with, and store, large RAW files. You may also just happen to prefer the way they look. Otherwise I can't think of any advantages over a good software package.

I posted a demonstration of camera-JPEG versus Silkypix-processed RAW here (sorry about the horse snot!):

www.pentaxuser.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7175&highlight=snot

I only spent a few minutes on it. I could have done better still with some more time. Also for that example I didn't try processing the JPEG with Silkypix (which is possible) - but I know from previous experience that I couldn't have made it look quite as good as the processed RAW images.

EDIT: added text in red.