It's not unusual in our data highway, industrial community for technology to blend into brand names so you may associate 'Camera Raw' with Adobe as an Adobe application.
If you look up 'camera raw' in Wikipedia, it begins: "A raw image file contains minimally processed data from the image sensor of whether a digital camera, image, or motion photo film scanner."
T1i Canon
Technically, camera raw is a digital negative just like film negative was the unfiltered unaltered image. I like to think of camera raw in reverse. We have grand photographic tools available to us, 'point and shoot' cameras, camcorders, Slr cameras and they all have settings designed for most life situations such as light and dark, motion, and portrait. It is great to have cameras that help us take expert shots but... What if you don't like the preset setting your camera is using, what if you want more shadow on your field and less light. Perhaps you want the tree next to your field to be as much of the focus determination as your subject. For these and many more reasons, having raw quality simply gives you more choices and operate over your final image.
A raw image is the unaltered image and I like to think of it as a pure image that hasn't been adjusted by your camera settings. Adobe does have a camera raw editor and it is specifically for editing raw images. It comes with the latest Adobe release, Cs5 and was available in the Bridge application of Cs4.
Before you introduce yourself to the camera raw application, it is most important that your camera has a 'raw' setting and can even take raw pictures. Most Slr's do have this quality but make sure! You can't use raw software if you didn't get a raw image in the first place.
I will be working with Canon Rebel T1i and it provides an selection to take both a jpeg and raw image at the same time. This is particularly useful to compare the exact same shot, with everything exactly the same except the recorded medium. Using the two versions of the same shot, you can begin to search for what the camera raw editor provides and how you can begin to learn it's capabilities. Adobe's camera raw editor is designed with the adjustments presented in the order in which you will typically pick in the steps of evaluating your image.
We'll learn more about the editor features and how they can help enhance your final image but be sure you have a camera raw quality and you'll find it very useful if your camera provides the selection to yield a filtered (jpeg) and raw version of the same shot.
Adobe Cs5 and Camera Raw, an Introduction