Here's a comparison between a Death Valley RAW file seen at default settings, and the RAW file seen after I made the ACR adjustments.



The picture was of course taken, on the Badwater Saltflats.

On top, you see the settings at 'Camera Raw Defaults', what is different from the standard settings however, is the fact that I have saved adjustments to my 'Calibrate' tab to represent the D2h color profile. I learned about doing this at dpreview.

The below view shows you what settings I adjusted in ACR, most importantly you see a boost of contrast and saturation. This is of course a personal taste, I'm still trying to find a style I like. I tried raising shadows without blowing highlights by reducing the exposure and increasing the brightness, finally I tuned WB slightly, but pulled up the tint all the way to +50 for a very punchy sunset horizon. The image also looks good with a tint setting of +25 (more natural look) but I opted for this one instead.

Additionally, I've added a vignette from the 'Lens' tab, with the settings -35 & 0.

This is a pretty typical example, hope someone has any use of this.