Have question about ACR presets

Hello,

ACR and actions in Photoshop are as different as a car and a television... just to give you an idea.

ACR is Adobe Camera Raw to develop raw (and tiff and jpeg) files with some easy sliders and sophisticated algorithms. To put it in simple words, presets do activate the sliders for you in a certain manner. Even that you can work on parts of the picture, there are no layers as in Photoshop, so there is no notion of opacity.

Since version CS6 (?) of Photoshop, it is possible to use ACR as a filter inside of Photoshop, which is a great enhancement, because some parameters easily changeable in ACR are much more complicated to achieve in Ps. And that is, where you could hook in, if you want working with transparency in ACR. You create a smart layer, apply the ACR filter as you wish and you can then use layer mask (or the smart filter masks) to work on.

Actions are simply automated steps in Photoshop to do some repetitive editing. They are a great tool to modify pictures in a certain way (like adding a frame to the picture). There are also actions that you find on the internet to be downloaded, both free ones and commercial ones. I once used an action to create a snow effect very easily.

So I suppose you need to use both tools for creating amazing artwork.

To help you string-up with Photoshop, I recommend the very good tutorials from Julianne Kost (Julieanne Kost, Principal Digital Imaging Evangelist, Adobe Systems, Inc. ). They helped me a lot.