How do you use RAW?

Scam · 23 Oct 2006 at 14:04

How do *you* use RAW?

EDIT: Gah realised the thread title isnt exactly gonna get me a lot of views. I meant 'how do you use RAW'. i.e. what applications, in what order.

Hello all. I got back from my travels yesterday and like we've all experienced, am faced with a huge amount of photos to sort through (some happy snaps, some worthy of posting here hopefully!). I've taken a lot in RAW, and was wondering what everyones workflow was.

Before, i simply opened them in CS2 and got to work, but i've discovered there are a few decent tools within Nikon PictureProject. Problem is, if i tweak anything in there, then open it up in CS2 -- it reverts back to the original. How can i stop this? Whats everyones workflow with processing RAW files?

Thanks.

rpstewart · 23 Oct 2006 at 14:47

The problem you're seeing is that all RAW converters store the tweaks outside of the RAW file itself so when you open the RAW again in CS2 it starts from scratch. This is great in that it means the RAW is never contaminated with processing errors but also means that processing is not portable across applications.

Personally I do the following:

Download from CF using Downloader Pro - folder per date, RAWs & JPGs in separate folders
Browse RAWs in RAWShooter, first pass deletion of real howlers
Backup to external HDD (sometimes before the first pass delete if I've got a lot of shots)
Second pass through in RAWShooter, bin or keep the "maybes", exposure tweaks, white balance corrections, some colour and contrast tweaking
Backup again, depending on how many shots this can be interleaved in the processing. This catches the RAW conversion settings
Batch process the RAWs to TIFF, sometimes do this in-line with the processing if I'm only doing a small number.
Backup the TIFFs
Browse through the TIFFs and correct as necessary in CS2 - rotation, cropping, final colour tweaks and sharpening
Backup to external HDD or to DVD if I've got enough to fill a blank.

SDK^ · 23 Oct 2006 at 15:25

Check out Adobe Lightroom or Bridge which is part of Photoshop CS2
Lightroom has all the functionality of Bridge but does it a lot quicker and has a much more intuitive interface.

FranchiseJuan · 23 Oct 2006 at 15:59

Personally I find bridge a little slow, but then I am on a notebook so that might effect it. I still use breeze browser for file management. Old habits die hard, or something like that.

I have lightroom installed and have not had time to set it up properly, but it seems quite good.

Joe T · 23 Oct 2006 at 19:31

Unless the pic is very under/over exposed I convert my RAW files straight to TIFF in RSE. Then open up PS and play with the TIFF from there.

Scam · 25 Oct 2006 at 11:44

Thanks for the info guys. I'm starting to have a play with Bridge which seems quite funky. Might have to read up on the 'proper' way of doing things, but its useful being able to delete the howlers straight from there anway.

Saving RAWs as TIFFS is a good idea (keeping high-res, processed versions would be useful), but what settings/compression do you use? When saving to TIFF in CS2 they come out at 17Mb! :confused:

rpstewart · 25 Oct 2006 at 13:18

Scam said:
Saving RAWs as TIFFS is a good idea (keeping high-res, processed versions would be useful), but what settings/compression do you use? When saving to TIFF in CS2 they come out at 17Mb!

I save them uncompressed (25Mb a pop), TIFF support LZW lossless compression which will give you some savings but not a lot.

FranchiseJuan · 25 Oct 2006 at 14:13

For me the main reason to use Tiff is not the image quality, but it allows me to keep a copy with all my layers intact, so I can come back and produce a slighly different copy really quickly.

mrk · 25 Oct 2006 at 16:02

All my colour/exposure tweaks are done in RAW (ACR 3.6beta) and I very rarely do any other editing (other than removing the odd mark on peoples faces and sensor dust etc)

My workflow is:

> Transfer card images to my M:/Album/RAW Dump/*current date*/
> Load the moved RAW files into ACR
> Do my tweaks to all RAW files and save to JPEG 100% into M:/Album/*current date* - Topic/
> Resize or work on the JPEG in 100% quality mode if work is to be done on them.

This makes my life easier, if friends/family etc request copies I just send them the JPEG images and that's it, no converting needed
Quality is superb at all times for me and now I see things even better on the new Dell 2007WFP

I used to use Tiff because of layer support but ever since migrating to a total RAW workflow I have had no need to use layers at all so instead save disk space and use 100% jpeg.

I also see little to no difference between 100% jpeg and TIFF visually, a difference to make an impact on the end result anyway which is the important thing.