I've been using Photoshop since version 3 back in the early '90's, and I'm used to the fact that I still am learning it. I enjoy finding a new technique or a new way of applying a change within Photoshop. I started using Camera Raw a few years ago, but used it initially just as a way of converting my raw files for use in Photoshop. I soon started using more of the basic features - adding fill light, using recovery to reduce over exposure in the highlights, adding contrast and reducing noise, adding sharpening and changing luminosity levels of colors within the image - but I still saw ACR as simply a quick stopover before opening the image in Photoshop for important changes.

Camera Raw has added features and I upgraded to Photoshop CS5, so I've been going through as many tutorials as I could find to learn the new features. What surprised me most of all is finding out how to use some of the features that I've simply ignored - in Camera Raw. I would sometimes do a crop in ACR instead of Photoshop, but I hadn't seen the dropdown menu for aspect ratios until today (Andrew Rodney wrote in a post here that it could be done, and I started looking for instructions on how to do it.) That will help a lot when I'm trying to prepare an image to print on a particular size paper. I can now see that using the graduated filter (like using a graduated neutral density filter on my camera - which I have yet to add to my camera bag) or the spot removal tool in ACR is a good idea. If I wait to do these things in Photoshop, I'm going to be actually pushing pixels around with my computer, and it's going to take time. Also I will have to make sure that I work on duplicates and protect my original image. With ACR, the computer can take it easy because all it's really doing is writing down a list of instructions for work that it's going to do later on the image.

If anyone else out there has ignored all those tools in ACR or if you're just getting started with Photoshop and ACR, here's a link to an excellent training video by Adobe's Digital Imaging Evangelist -- Julieanne Kost. Adobe offers it for free. I picked up good info at Lynda.com's training (Chris Orwig does the training for Camera Raw 6), but it costs to take their training UNLESS you buy a new Adobe upgrade and get 30 days training for free (big smile).

Just thought I'd share my ignorance so that I could also share my enlightenment - photography and post-processing continue to give me reasons to smile every day while I try to figure them out.