Thanks for the info Gromit
Winterkill had sent me a pic that looked very screwed up when I tried to open it in PS. I was guessing a bad palette (since I had never heard of a 3 channel .raw file, which I just learned PS Help explains hehe) and didn't know what PS was trying to use for a palette anyway. When I tried capturing a screenshot from Gold Mode on my comp, I was able to view mine in PS, which just confused me more.
I tried opening the pic Winterkill sent me again as Gromit suggested and now I think I understand.
By selecting the 3 channels when openinig the file in PS, you end up using 8 bits for each of the three RGB channels (red, green, blue). You can look at each channel separately in PS.
Unfortunately, the original pic Winterkill sent me appears to have a 'bad' green channel, this may have been the only problem viewing the file all along, I had never even considered the file might be corrupt.