Thanks for the insight. Actually using DPP is not so bad, it just doesn't have all the awesome and powerful creative tools that ACR does. I think that to maintain overall sharpness I may endup just doing a lot more of the processing from the JPEG that comes out of DPP from now on, though. You really wouldn't believe how much image sharpness is being lost from ACR applying it's noise algorithm...did a lot of side by sides with DPP noise reduction set to 0 and ACR, and man, it's bad. Oh well...another day with digital, another hurdle to overcome I suppose.