Darkroom days in the Digital Era

During this digital photography era, the darkroom
of the days of film, is now based in computers:
I use Apple Aperture as my Digital Assets Manager(DAM).
All images are captured raw and are stored in Aperture.
Most often I expose my shots on a tripod.
I bracket all my shots capturing both the highlites and the shadows.
I then merge the bracketed images into one image,
correcting the image for lens barrel and pincushion distortion.