3.1 Adobe Camera Raw 4.5 Guide

This is not an expert camera raw guide, but one intended to be useful.

Adobe Camera Raw (Photoshop) vs Canon Digital Photo Professional:
So you’ve chosen to shoot in RAW, but now what?  Well Canon supplies a free program Digital Photo Professional with the purchase of your camera.  It has the ability to control the white balance, sharpness, noise reduction, hues, curves, picture style and many other settings.  Its a great program for free, but its effectiveness is limited by its lack of flexibility.  Photoshop is a far more powerful program that allows you to focus on certain areas in a photo, not affecting the entire image.  This greater flexibility is something I value greatly, and so I tend to stick with Adobe photoshop and its camera raw plugin.  DPP will allow you to better your images, and obtain great results, but without the added abilities of photoshop – you may never achieve the perfection you seek.   
Many people use DPP because Canon has included its ‘picture style’ settings, which alot of users seem to enjoy.  It helps them achieve results easily, and is a great feature.  Until recently, people would use DPP because of its ability to use picture styles, but Adobe is now offering camera profiles in their Camera Raw application.  This allows the exact same picture styles to be used in Adobe Camera Raw, a great addition which reduces the number of applications and steps required to begin editing your raw files.

Adobe Camera Raw 4.5 and greater allow you to import your camera raw files into photoshop.  They also allow you to edit a variety of image settings including but not limited to: hue, contrast, curves, brightness, exposure, sharpness, noise reduction, white balance, picture style, crop, rotate, luminosity. 

Adobe camera raw is updated consistently, and the new version provided with Adobe Photoshop CS4 which is Camera Raw 5.0  now allows even more customization of your images through the use of localized edits.  The ability to alter user defined spots of an image, so that the customizations you make do not necessarily apply to the entire image.  Sharpen one area, leave the rest,   change the color of a shirt, but not the entire scene.  This is a very useful upgrade, and used to require the use of layers and masking in photoshop.

I do not yet have CS4, so I will explain adobe camera raw 4.5 and Adobe Photoshop CS3 use.