RAW processing question Photoshop CS

[m21s]

Hi All

Took a few shots today using RAW (everything until now has been large .jpg)

Opened the images up in CS and was looking for a little help.


-Is there a good baseline to start with the settings it prompts you for to adjust the image. I'm fairly comftable adjusting an image once its loaded in CS but was curious if there was a good start when you first open the RAW image.

They throw so much at you I was wondering what if anything is really a priority before you hit ok to load into CS.

Any help would be great!

Thanks
Mike

[chris.bailey]

One tip is to try and get the levels largely sorted in CS. If you hold down the ALT key as you adjust exposure and shadows you will see on the screen what is being clipped in the highlights and shadows respectively. Its also useful if you can get the white balance sorted, I often put a grey card in the first of a series and then apply the resulting white balance (from the ey dropper) to adjust all the others.

I tend to push the saturation up a bit and for most shots put Luminance Smoothing up to about 25 (50 for outside shots with sky). I also do a bit of sharpening in the conversion process (about 25).

I leave the rest for CS but do convert in 16bit and then work in 16bit as long as I can.