The outstanding thing to note about Mikkel Aaland's book Photoshop CS3 Raw: Get the Most Out of the Raw Format with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Bridge is that is organized very systematically. Instead of being a breathless description of everything you can do with the software, Aaland focuses on why you would do something and how to do it. It's an effort that is fun to read and easy to reference.
Each page in the book has two-thirds of its horizontal space dedicated to screen shots and pictures. Often, menus and tabs are broken out and overlaid on the images to explain procedural instructions. A third of the same page is devoted to text. The text and pictures are lined up really well so that you don't have to endure a lot of flipping back and forth.
Sometimes this layout leaves little space for some detail that would be enlightening. But in keeping with the spirit of the book, Aaland applies the same level of consistency to the amount of information he provides - which focuses on the digital photography instead of digital processing or photography itself.
The first chapter contains a really neat, concise explanation of RAW files. A highlight of this is that Aaland dissects the pros and cons of using RAW files in a very practical way - concluding that both RAW and JPEG have a place in the lives of a professional photographer (and even provides some nifty examples). This really drew me into the book. I also liked Aaland's segue on how to use a color target in a quick and dirty way to level set your camera's color processing.
Chapter two shows you how to use Adobe Downloader to grab pictures from camera to computer. Chapter three shows you to organize them using Adobe Bridge. This chapter also contains a nice explanation of picture metadata and why it is important (for example for checking exposure, which Photoshop doesn't have a tool for). Aaland then shows you the basic workflow of editing a photoshoot in RAW.
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