RAW Files - What do you do first?

Hi Guys,

After a little bit of a nightmare with shooting in jpeg and then DPI questions etc i just want one thing cleared up without de-railing too much.

My question is:

What is the first thing you do with your RAW files?

You get home from your day of shooting in RAW only (not interested in jpeg anymore), you open your memory card on your computer and you see all of your files.

Copy and paste these to a folder on your desktop of External HD. Open your first file in photoshop (or whatever programme) and then......

Do you straight away save that image to a certain DPI, PPI, Height, Width?

Do you edit the image, crop to what looks nice?

As you can see I'm a little confused but want to get it right first off.

In the past I have literally opened the file in PS and edited away without thought and cropped to whatever looks nice. I am then stuck with 72dpi and save as a jpg which seems to be causing problems at the moment with friends that have wanted a couple of prints.

Any help would be great, I planned to keep this short and sweet but seen to have gone on a bit!

Thanks.

DPI is meaningless as thats a suggested output, but the actual DPI thats used is a printer setting. The thing you should be concerned about is PPI, pixels per inch. Optimally you would want 300 pixels per inch of size so look at the output and size and go from there.

As for workflow open the raw file via whatever conversion method (ACR, lightroom, or DPP) and make adjustments to WB, etc as needed at that point. send it to Photoshop and make desired changes there, then export to whatever size want to finish with.

This is what I do; not saying it's the correct, or only, way:

1) In DPP set initial sharpening, brightness, contrast, white balance, saturation. Use cloning tool to clean things up, if necessary.
2) Crop to print size (5X7 @ 300 ppi, for instance) or web size (960 ppi on the long end, maybe).
3) Convert and save (JPEG or TIFF).
4) final sharpening, convert and save.

Sometimes I'll switch 1 & 2.

If I'm going to do any serious editing (GIMP), I do that after step 1... or 2.

First thing? Import into Lightroom, with a second copy automatically sent to a second hard drive.

With digital images, the only thing that matters is absolute pixel resolution, your image can be printed any size you like depending on how much pixel density you find tolerable.

For example, a 5000x3000 pixel image would print out as a 16.7" x 10" print at 300ppi, which is high enough that you could press your nose up against the print and see a detailed image. But you can also print at 240ppi which would result in a 20.8" x 12.5" print; you would still get a fairly detailed image.

The number of pixels stays the same, but they are spread out over a larger area... ppi is really nothing more than a guide number that tells you how big an image could be printed assuming a user-set pixel density.

As to processing... I typically tweak various parameters to get the image looking neutral, and then output as a 16-bit tiff for further processing in Photoshop. I don't work like a lot of the photogs here, who typically use (and stay in) Lightroom for most of what they do, so sharing my workflow probably won't be of much help.

WB first, then exposure. First the forest, then the trees.

Custom profile
WB

Save two copies on to backup and one to lightroom. I then open LR and cull my images. Edit the few I like the most and dont do anything else till I know what I will be doing with the images. I dont crop till I know what frame its going into. If its going to FB, I export with long edge at 1040 (so I can post here as well), along with adding my watermark.

Its hard to say what the first step is for a raw file, since each outing is different.

Oh, and I never reformat the card until I backup the RAW files on an External.

If you use DPP the chances are high that in order to get the most from your image you will want to do more editing than DPP is capable of, so you will have to make a big 16 bit tif in order to preserve as much of the original data as is possible and then edit that tif in PS or whatever. I use Lightroom, so I can almost always finish all the editing there and I never need to save anything other than the Raw and LR's catalog where all the editing instructions are stored. The only time I ever make a jpg is when I post an image on the web or send it to a print lab or somebody else. After I send it off, I delete it. Ppi or dpi (call it what you will) is about prints (only prints have inches) so the only time I ever think about it is when I know what size print I want.

Most software is layed out in a suggested workflow order. In other words, start at the top of the adjustments and move down as needed. However I go in order of what needs the most attention and go from there. I.E. what is off the most... color balence? exposure? etc..etc..

Mark1 wrote in post #15676424
Most software is layed out in a suggested workflow order.

Maybe, except that with LR and PS, unless your default import settings has the profile and WB you intend on using, you have to go down and select it your profile, then do WB.

windpig wrote in post #15676458
Maybe, except that with LR and PS, unless your default import settings has the profile and WB you intend on using, you have to go down and select it your profile, then do WB.

Yeh, and that is weird because the profile fundamentally affects all the Basic edits.

Stuuk1 wrote in post #15676226
Hi Guys,

After a little bit of a nightmare with shooting in jpeg and then DPI questions etc i just want one thing cleared up without de-railing too much.

My question is:

What is the first thing you do with your RAW files?

You get home from your day of shooting in RAW only (not interested in jpeg anymore), you open your memory card on your computer and you see all of your files.

Copy and paste these to a folder on your desktop of External HD. Open your first file in photoshop (or whatever programme) and then......

You mention shooting in Raw, what Raw software do you use?

I don't convert to/save to an image file unless and until I am "outputting" -- I use Lightroom and my Export dialog is currently set to outputting at 300ppi, simply because I was planning a major printing project for which I wanted to resize the image to a specific print size @ 300 ppi. For most purposes the ppi doesn't matter to me, especially since I Export for uploading to my Web host in which case the ppi "tag" doesn't affect the display of my images. I'll crop for the "best" composition or for some other practical purpose, then when I Export for the Web Lightroom resizes the image to my specified pixel dimensions.

Sure, produce an image that is visually pleasing!

Canon cameras are "stuck" on a ppi "tag" of 72ppi. Fortunately that tag doesn't have a negative effect on most things, although some commercial printers will refuse to cooperate unless you change the "tag", typically to 300 ppi. In photoshop you can do this in the Image Size dialog -- change the ppi value without resizing/resampling the image -- the image resolution will remain the same, but the image "tag" will be changed in the Exif. Other apps let you set the resolution tag "on the fly" -- Lightroom during export, DPP during the Convert and Save operation.

After importing, the first thing I do is determine which ones I need to delete