Adobe Camera Raw

[Nikonoff]

@ Harry ....

Sorry Mate, I got caught up in my own dilemma and overlooked your query on how ACR comes into the equation. Thanks to Hawthy for chiming in. When I open a NEF file in Photoshop it first defaults to ACR but I can't remember whether I set it up that way or if it's the standard default.

One habit I've got into is to make a copy of the RAW file to use for PP so I have a clean copy of the original in case of stuff-ups. Another thing I do is to save a .tif file of the finished job before resizing and compressing in case I want to have it printed. I also have most of my files on a separate drive, or two if you count the back-up, and am thinking about using the cloud storage as well

All good champ
I can see how the individual applications relate to one another now. I mistakenly thought that it was an unforgiving linear progression from one application to the next and missing one step would result in catastrophe. As I mentioned earlier we've been toying with LR as a standalone import, edit and export application and for the most part it's working well, which made me wonder why I should need anything else, as it turns out, I probably don't - not at this point anyway.
From what I've seen so far, LR in CC is really targeting professionals with it's workflow component, which is all well and good unless you already have a filing system that is functional, which is sort of where I'm at. Ideally I'd like Lightroom without the verbose filing and cataloguing nightmare that Arthur referred to earlier.