Hi Lou and James,
Lou: I made a screenshot of the before and after settings, and combined them in one image. On the mac you just hit command-shift-4, and you pull a rectangle over the part of the screen you want to capture. The resulting capture presents itself on the desktop. On a pc you can hit printscreen, than open a new image in photoshop and hit paste, your screenshot will appear in the new image.
James & Lou: Yep, around about 80% of the shots are just run trhough ACR like this and that's it. Just resizing for web and adding my signature after that. The other 20% are either right on the money, great from the get-go and need no work at all, or the other side of the spectrum, meaning that they need ACR conversion AND some 10 to 20 minutes of Photoshop.
What I usually do in Photoshop is blending 2 renditions of the same file with differently rendered exposure values. Sometimes, enhancing local contrast, correcting haze-afflicted parts of the image, in a few cases even remove some annoying from the image entirely. Afer this I just hit save and the PSD file sits next to the original NEF in the same folder.
Here's an example of some Photoshopping:
On the top row of the resized screenshot, you see Rogier standing near Ubehebe crater. The middle image was the original, which I duplicated. I darkened the duplicated (left) image with ACR, brightened the original (center) image with ACR, and blended the two into the PSD file (right image), which is now properly exposed for foreground and background.
A more true photoshopping example is in the bottom row, you see the 2 cars, the left one is the original file, but I didn't like the way the cargo door was open, so I removed it and saved it as a PSD file (center image).
Thanks for sharing a lesson or three.