In this work, we study the impact of orbital relaxation on liquidphase XAS by comparison of CIS and TDDFT, which use the ground-state reference, alongside EA-CIS and EA-TDDFT, which use the core-ion reference. This comparison allows a straightforward assessment of the impact of orbital relaxation on the XAS spectral profile because the former two methods encode very little orbital relaxation into the resultant spectrum whereas the latter two approaches have relaxation explicitly built into the reference orbitals. All calculations are done within the Tamm-Dancoff approximation. The EA-TDDFT approach begins by self-consistently optimizing the density of a core-ionized configuration that hosts a core hole in the orbital of interest. The missing electron is then reattached to reform the n-electron system without changing the molecular orbitals (thus preserving the orbital relaxation obtained from the initial optimization). This is followed by a calculation of the nelectron linear response that is corrected for particle-hole selfinteraction error by means of an exact first-order decoupling of the n-electron response from the response of the core orbital. The working equations for EA-TDDFT incorporate orbital relaxation and correct particle-hole attraction and take the form,