Correcting exposure in RAW

[breakdown]

I've noticed that ACR always corrects for what it thinks is the right exposure. It seems to be around -0.50 on most of my shots and I'm assuming that's because I shoot to the right. I'm wondering, if I take bracketed shots with the plan of using a darker sky for one of my pictures, should I still use the exposure correction or should I uncheck that? It would seem that ACR would try to make both the pictures have the same exposure.

[Beau Hudspeth]

You can do the bracketing for sure to get a better tonal range across the images, but I would turn off the AUTO option for RAW. That is it's power - you can control the results.

In the situation your speaking of - getting a darker sky - just open the same image TWICE in RAW and set one for the exposure you want as the main, and the other for the sky. Photoshop will allow you to open the same image twice this way. Then just drop the sky layer over the correct one and mask out all but the sky. Also, you also don't have to worry much about injecting a lot of additional noise in to your image when you go darker, like you do when you lighten an exposure.

[tim]

See the RAW FAQ, linked from my sig or from the top of the RAW forum. You need to turn off auto adjustments.

[breakdown]

Thanks for the responses.

The transition from shooting black and white film to digital has been a bit tougher than I expected. There is just so much to learn on the post processing end of it. I have to say though, it's amazing to watch a picture transform before your eyes as you adjust various things in Photoshop.

[tim]

I have a thread about my recommended books linked from my sig too, some of them will help you out a lot.