Adobe Camera Raw

When opening up a RAW file into Photoshop, it will initially open into the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) window. It looks like this (click to enlarge):

Be sure to click the text at the bottom to set your resolution to 300. Leave everything on "DEFAULT" so you can control the quality of all aspects of the image. When you move each slider, the adjustments are saved into a "Sidecar" .xmp file that is stored in the same folder as your RAW file. If you toss this .xmp file, your image will go back to how it was when you had just downloaded it off your camera.

The main adjustments you want to make for most images are:

• Temperature
• Exposure
• Highlights
• Shadows. 

In the image below, I made it a bit warmer by moving the temperature slider to the right, and I brought out detail in the shadows by moving the exposure and highlights sliders to the left and the shadows slider to the right.

If your exposure is off, you can save yourself sometimes if the image was shot in RAW. Because this was shot RAW, we are able to pull a lot of detail out of the blown-out areas. Were it shot JPG, we would not be able to do that.