Since I started with digital photography I was mixed on the raw vs. jpg wars. RAW is clearly superior but such a pain to deal with huge files when compared to the compressed jpeg renderings. Such a pain, that is, until the advent of Lightroom. Lightroom leveled the playing field by making dealing with either file type a seamless operation. Since that day I have switched full time to raw and never looked back.
Life was good, load all my .CR2s into LR, convert to DNG, and very light processing in LR to get them ready for the web. Since installing Lightroom I had always kinda fudged my way through the develop module tweaking and turning different settings until I got something that roughly resembled a good looking image. For any heavy lifting I would always turn to Photoshop, of course then I not only had a 10mb raw file to archive, I now had a 40ish meg PSD file to keep track of. Even with cheap disk space that seemed wasteful and because my computer is in desperate need of an overhaul, the less time I spent waiting for Photoshop the better.
So I finally broke down and bought a book, it has turned out to be the best purchase of my insanely successful photographic career (aside from Lightroom, of course). The book is Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS3. This book has filled in the pieces to the puzzle that I never knew existed in my mind. It takes you step by step and simplifies each section of the all-powerful ACR4. I now do 90%+ of my post processing directly in Lightroom and PS is reserved for special cases like panoramas & HDRs. The LR & ACR combo is unbeatable.
From one hand it can spit out technically impeccable jpegs, sure to appease even the pickiest of istock noise & artifact nazis. On the other hand you are free to make your creative vision come to fruition with the entire suite of adjustments available at your fingertips.
Below are some of the more "artsy" images that I have created solely in LR (click for larger view).
I especially like the control you can get into with the grayscale conversion, makes it possible to give the photo a real textured feel that has eluded me in the past.
