In the past I have almost always used Nikon's Capture NX2 as my RAW editor. In that, it's immediately obvious how to get back to the original NEF camera image, or even choose to go back to different stages in the editing history.
There seems no obvious way to do this in ACR. For example I made a mistake in a RAW edit, but when I reopened the RAW image again from Bridge I got the edited version with the unwanted error.
I would appreciate some guidance on this. In an ideal world, I would like ACR to do what Nikon Capture can do.
I have also just found that, when trying to assign a keyword to this file in Bridge, I got got an "...error writing metadata" message. All the other NEF files in that folder (none of which have yet been edited in ACR) accepted the keywords with no problems.
Since writing the above, I have found that this "error writing metadata" is a common issue for which there seems no solution - it extends back to earlier versions of Bridge (I have CS6 64-bit with vety latest updates).
I have deleted the sidecar file for the file in question, but the error remains.
I cannot help being a little concerned about what ACR actually does to the file. Maybe I'll go back to Capture NX2 (not without its own problems) unless there are some solutions to these issues.