How DO people study openings?

I couldn't easily find a thread of the sort, but I'm curious as to how people usually study openings (if there is some kind of common ground). I've never really studied openings in depth in my life, even after returning to competitive chess, so I'm rather clueless on this.

For what it's worth, openings are not my main concern but I often have some nagging questions or some variations/ideas I want to find more about (ex: c5/Bb5 idea in Caro-Kann Panov, Qd2/O-O-O variations in the Queen's Gambit, or finding functional repetoire against c4 or something) but Googling for a lot of these is horrendous (searching "c5 Bb5 Caro-kann" was fun...) and otherwise it seems like I'm stuck with looking through MCO or some opening database at a bunch of variations. Admittedly, I'm not very patient so I'd rather read some words and then try stuff out on my own, but I feel like others have better ways. Just wondering what others are doing (for background, I am 1950 USCF but I'm curious as to anyone else's ideas).

Thanks in advance for replies. :)

Tl;dr never study openings, how do people do it?

I read a lot of opening books. I have 3-4 repertoire books that I pick and choose opening lines from for white. For black defenses I usually own at least 2 different books on the opening, for me that is 2 books completely on accelerated dragon lines and 1 book plus a repertoire book on the dutch defense.

I mainly choose the books I buy based on which got the best reviews on amazon.

In general I recommend getting opening books that include complete games, so you can see how each variation leads to a middlegame and even the endgame as well.

Then after I play the opening in  blitz or a long game I'll go back and make sure I remembered the book's recommendation and if I screwed it up I replay over the particular line my opponent chose.

Perfecting an opening repertoire is a very gradual process but can really help.

http://www.chess.com/blog/pawpatrol/learning-openings-thoroughly-with-lucas-chess

1. Look into and understand every move as much as possible. Yes it takes a long time, but then the remembering becomes "automatic". It's a bad habit to learn lines by heart without understanding.  

2. Did you ever notice how extremely good players not only know the move, but who played it and when? Who cares about that right? Well like memory champions in other fields construct stories to help them remember things, I've come to think that it actually may form a big part in top players' remembering ability. It may seem like it's adding to your memory load, but it adds a type of character and "story" to each thing you remember. For example if you remember Steinitz played it, then you can conjure up this image of Steinitz playing this "correct" move, it's best if it's in the character of the player. 

Excellent point.  

YouTube has tons of opening videos. Once your familiar, a good book will help with understanding the theory of that opening. What I did was I picked a handful of openings and only played those for a long time. For example, I play Sicilian EVERYTIME white plays 1.e4 and have done so for the last year. I then analyze every game, first on my own, then again with stockfish. Be patient because it's a lot of work. Just the Sicilian alone you have the classic, Dragon, accelerated Dragon, hyper accelerated Dragon, najdorf and more plus all the stuff white will throw at you. Yugoslav attack, English attack marocy bind, grand prix attack and on and on and on. My head hurts just thinking about it lol.