Comments about oreilly The Art of RAW Conversion:

At first glance, the casual photographer might look at this book and reject it as useful only to the professional photographer.

I claim that is not necessarily true. For anyone who enjoys the technology as well as the artistry of digital photography, this book is for you.

Chapter 1 (Introduction to RAW Files or Digital Negatives), Chapter 2 (Basic Color Management) and Chapter 3 (A Basic RAW Workflow) contain excellent information on such topics as White Balance, Sharpening, Color Models, Color Spaces, Camera Setup, Histograms, File Transfer (from camera to computer) and much more.

Chapters 4 - 8 provide in-depth discussions of various image editing software applications, including Adobe Camera RAW, Apple's Aperture, and others. The comparisons are especially helpful. But don't look for information on the very basic image editing applications such as IrfanView or Picasa.

Chapter 9, Perfecting Images, is a gold mine of information on such software tools as sharpening, noise reduction, distortion removal, and others. What is particularly noteworthy about this chapter are the supplemental notes that describe camera techniques to minimize these problems, as well as the explanations of how to use the software tools.

There is more (5 more chapters). If your camera does not provide the RAW format, or you have absolutely no interest in editing the images from your camera, then do not spend your money on this book. For the rest of you, the information in the first 9 chapters alone is sufficient for me to say that I highly recommend this book.