After a period of time away from using Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) in Photoshop CS3, I have returned back to it because Adobe finally fixed their color problems with Canon RAWs.

Read more for comparison.

So, when experimenting with different workflows, I set the ACR sliders to all zero as a starting point instead of the default Brightness=50, Contrast=25, Black=5. What I found was that at zero, all my RAWs are now 1 stop underexposed compared to DPP at the zero setting.

Why all set to zero? So I can adjust the white point via the Exposure slider, black point via the Black slider and the mid-point via the Brightness slider. Of course doing that, it seems to be about the same as just using the default setting of Brightness=50, Contrast=25 and Black=5!

I'll run some more tests on different RAWs to see how consistent the default setting is for ACR. What I'm wondering now is whether by increasing brightness or exposure in ACR brings in more noise compared to if processed at zero in ACR or DPP.