RAW Processing

[rbustraen]

Okay, I have a question.

I normally just play around with the first settings on my RAW images. The exposure, etc but don't touch the sharpness and curves here and do it in Photoshop itself. Is there a preferred way or does it matter?

Comments?

[Santosh]

Okay, I have a question.

I normally just play around with the first settings on my RAW images. The exposure, etc but don't touch the sharpness and curves here and do it in Photoshop itself. Is there a preferred way or does it matter?

Comments?

I really dont think it matters much as long as you have a good sharp image to begin with. I do the sharpening in elements 4. I do the exposure correction in RAW. But sometimes elements give me more control I feel ( like burning and dodging). Now, I dont do pixel peeing and I have printed 8X10 prints and they look fine.

[Don B]

Hi Randy
I do 99% of my processing in Adobe camera Raw (ACR) I switched to ACR for my editing a year or so ago, after watching tutorials on the advantages of ACR. My Photoshop edits consist of resizing and a little sharpening.

[raghunath]

Sharpening too early in the workflow is not recommended. However, using DxO Optics Pro as a first sharpener seems to work well. The software has camera and lens specific presets for most Nikon and Canon combos. Final sharpening in CS5 appears to be the best bet to prevent haloing and pixelating.

Raghunath

Canon D90 with several lenses

[Dennis]

Randy, this question is a good one.

Crop
Noise Removal, I use Nik Define
Adjust levels CTRL-L from Photoshop, See my Blog on how this works, I have CurveMeiser to adjust my levels and works very well.
Adjust Hight lights, Shadows, Saturation etc. Again I use Nik Viveza for this.
Sharpen last thing, as mention also by raghunath. You can use Photoshop to do this, but I use either Photo-kit Sharpen Pro or Nik Sharpener Pro. Reason is that you can use a brush to sharpen the areas you want in an image lets say just part of a building or in many of my images the bird only and leave the backgrounds un-touched

On the Nik sharpener software you can do a per-sharpen of an image that just applies a small amount of sharpning to the over all image, sometimes I have used this, but just don't anymore but I will have to visit this again and run some tests to see if in fact it would be worth doing or not.

[rbustraen]

Thanks for the feedback. It's one area I'm trying to improve on is my post processing and playing around with PS a little more.

[Dennis]

Thanks for the feedback. It's one area I'm trying to improve on is my post processing and playing around with PS a little more.

I find that small simple steps and understanding what you are doing works before you go on to the next step. Once you start knowing more, you want to make sure that your process remains the same all the time in the steps you use and as you add more steps to your process and there should not be all that many and last thing is sharpen. One thing to remember, it is best to do all your post processing in layers, this way if you need to make a change you just need to goto the layer, rather than starting all over again. Any more questions Randy just ask and there will be some one to answer it for you.