Just a litttle aside about sharpening in Photoshop:

Sharpening is the last thing that should be done, if you use the Unsharp Mask. But there's a trick that adds a little sharpness non-destructively.

Create a duplicate layer of your background. Use Filter>Other>High Pass. Move the slider until you have mostly outlenes. Then change the Blending Mode to Soft Light. Flatten the image, and you can start from a sharper original. Keep the duplicate layer, and you can remove it any time you wish!

In ACR, I just click the left-most eyedropper on the top and click on a neutral area (sometimes a bit of a gray card I stick in the frame). Never had a problem, I don't even try to set white balance on the camera, I let ACR deal with it!!

Any camera can use a good CLA once in a while!

I don't put much stock in AWB, it's better to set the WB for the conditions you're shooting in.

You can run a test by shooting a scene that consiste mostly of a gray card, and see if it truly is gray.

Formatting in the computer leaves a tabla rosa, which does not contain the necessary directory structure. Pentax cameras are smart enough to create the necessary directory structure, but it is still much preferred to format the card in the camera. This can prevent problems, and this way you know the card is ready for the camera.

In Windows XP, you'll probably get a prompt asking you what you want to do with the files. You'll have an option to copy them to your hard drive, using Windows Explorer.

Create a direcrtory (folder) on your hard drve and copy the images to it. Then you can remove the card and format it in the camera so it'll be ready for the next shots.

If you have Elements, you probably have ACR. But if you try to compensate for a severly underexposed image in Camera RAW, you'll get lots of noise.

I suggest you do some reading, and there is a forum on the Adobe Website for Elements where you can get answers specific to Elements.

Another thing to do is to make sure you read the documentation that came with Elements, to make sure you're using ACR correctly.

Rarer than a brown Edsel with cuffs!!

(in-joke for old geezer Americans)

Would somebody get rid of these spam posts? I hope this isn't a new trend in spamming, it'll make forums virtually useless.

I suggest a forum rule agreemnt that specifies monetary damages for posting such crap. Once or twice is funny, three times is just stupid!

I do beleive you're right. I found these defenitions of varifocal lens:

Varifocal Lens
A projection lens containing movable elements to permit focusing of the image by varying the focal length. (Not a zoom.)

Varifocal lens:
Contains several movable elements to permit manual adjustment of the effective focal length. This type of lens allows you to adjust the size of your field of view.

So a varifocal lens is similar to, but perhaps not exactly the same, as a zoom lens. Note that one of the defenitions concerns projection lenses.

Thanks for the info!