Post processing order

If there is a thread for this already, can you link it and I'll ditch this thread.

Just wondering if there is a preferred or recommended approach to post processing RAW files. Such as, if you see that your picture needs sharpening, noise reduction and straightening, would there be an order that these should be done in?

Any other examples are very welcome.

there are different "types" of sharpening--capture and output sharpening are some of them (can't remember the others).

capture sharpening is done (at the beginning i believe) to cancel out the AA filter and maybe the "softness" from the lens (lenses tend to be softer wide open, for example)...this is just to reduce the softness, so don't go overboard w/ it yet.

output sharpening is something you do at the end (after resizing), to get your photos sharp (as sharp as you like). You have to do it after resizing because resizing tends to soften photos (unless you're using bicubic sharpen when resizing in photoshop).

I only really do output sharpening, personally...mostly because I don't understand how much I should sharpen for capture sharpening.

I do noise reduction before resizing, that way if there are any "artifacts" created from the noise reduction it becomes less apparent after you resize. I also tend to do noise reduction after mostly everything else because things like adding contrast and brightening your photo adds/emphasizes the noise in the shadow areas.

I try to do straightening in the beginning if I think it needs to be straightened. Sometimes I have to go back and straighten it after if I thought it looked ok, but realized it wasn't later.

Depending on the picture, I also try to crop first/early. My reasoning is that if there is less "image" in memory, it will help speed up processing. Really depends on the picture though. Also because of that reasoning, if I have a lot of images that I'm working on, and feel that they don't need NR, I would resize before I do stuff like adding contrast. My actions to add more midtone contrast really speeds up when the image is only 1/4 the size. So I do that when I'm being lazy about my PP :P

When I'm loading the RAW in ACR, I try to adjust the exposure to my liking...normally starting w/ auto and fiddling w/ the settings from there. I tend to ignore stuff like clarity and saturation, because I do that kind of stuff in photoshop. also, clarity sometimes leaves halos around objects, and I rather use layer masks instead of the adjustment brush. In photoshop I add "midtone contrast" as a replacement for clarity, but it's not exactly the same.

I have no idea if what I do is recommended or not...it's just what I do.

Lightroom follows the Raw processing model of non-destructive editing, meaning that your development adjustments are not actually applied to your image files but rather stored in the memory of the catalog (and in image previews) until you do an actual Export which converts the Raw data into an RGB image and saves that image to a file. It also follows this model with non-Raw formats (tiff and jpeg files).

What this means in practice is that in a very real sense it "doesn't matter" what order you do things because your editing settings are at the time just discrete chunks of data.

But, what can matter is how you approach adjusting those chunks and in fact there have been numerous discussions out there about what are considered "best practices".

One that goes a long way back is the suggestion to simply follow the LR interface down the Develop panel -- this goes back to the LR1 days when the first thing you saw was the White Balance and Basic sections and those were as good places to start as any. Now we see tools like the cropping tool and brushes and such at the top which makes the above advice a bit more confusing!

One helpful idea has been the suggestion that if the shot needs cropping, then it can be good to do this first so that for other adjustments you are visually working only with the needed image. That can help, but only if you need to crop -- I like images that don't need to be cropped!

But, the idea of starting with the Basic controls is still pretty solid -- you wan to do whatever global adjustments to the color and exposure-type things before jumping into more selective "stuff". At least I do that typically Certainly White Balance if needed, then things like Exposure, Recovery, Fill, etc, all if and as needed are global, making the overall image "right". From there, well, it is doing things that you want or need to do and there is less of a "guiding rule" and more of learning to use the tools in the best way to get the best results.

There is a lot of discussion out there on sharpening in Lightroom -- just do a forum search and a Google search for "lightroom sharpening" and start reading. You will see that in this and other topics there are different opinions and approaches and there may be few settled "best answer"s, but there are a lot of things to try and learn from. An, like I said above, "it doesn't matter!"! You can work on an image and do all kind of dramatic things, then move on to something else, and you can always go back to the prior image and change things around and try new things, because the original data is unaltered!

I agree with tonylong. In an application like Adobe Lightroom, it technically does not matter in what order you do what edits because of the program's non-destructive wizardry. It's pretty fancy-pants.

http://lightroomkiller​tips.com …m-workflow-doesnt-matter/

Lightroom does, however, lay out a pretty decent foundation to start in terms of how to go about post processing your images by following the sections of various control sliders in the Develop Module from top-to-bottom. Matt Kloskowski (sp?) did a decent video regarding his basic sharpening 'work-flow' on the site, Lightroom Killer Tips.

http://lightroomkiller​tips.com …ng-workflow-in-lightroom/

Thanks for the info. I use Aperture and I believe it works the same as Lightroom where you work off a preview and dont actually edit the original.

I was asking the question purely to know if I would get better results if I did things in a certain order.

Well, Aperture is a different app for sure, although yes it does preserve the original Raw files.

I suppose people develop a "preferred" workflow for Aperture like they do for Lightroom, and a lot of those preferences may be shared between the two user groups -- I dunno. But, since we who have responded to you are using and referring to Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom, I guess you would benefit from hearing from some Aperture users!

There have been plenty of threads on Aperture -- I just did an "Advanced" forum search, typed "aperture" in the keyword box (using the "Titles only" option) and then just scrolled down the list of sub-forums/sections and clicked on this sub-forum and a bunch of threads came up. I'd suggest you do the same, and maybe post this question in a thread that has a generel discussion on things.

And, if you look at the bottom of this page in the Simlar Threads section, you will see four threads that contain the words "processing order" (three with "post processing order")! That would also be a good direction to go!

Very generally, I approach things in this order. Crop, straighten, tone, color, contrast.

Tone is roughly white balance.

Contrast includes sharpening, if any.

What was written above about "non-destructive", or more properly "parametric", editing applies equally to every RAW conversion application. The order of the workflow may be more or less efficient, but it makes no difference to image quality.