Doing things twice?

Hi all

Just a quick question about post processing principles. I usually shoot in RAW then use the ACR in Elements before opening the image in Elements itself. Is there any harm in making similar adjustments, such as tonal adjustments and sharpening, in ACR and again in Elements?

For example, having already adjusted the shadows and highlights in ACR I am sometimes tempted into using the adjust shadows/highlights in Elements as it seems to have a more dramatic effect. My gut feeling is telling me that making such adjustments only once is a much better policy, but I'm not sure what evidence I'm basing this on!

Any thoughts would be appreciated

Thanks

Paul

Where possible you are much better off making adjustments to both brightness levels and colours while still in the RAW processor.The main issue with the version of ACR shipped with Elements is that other than the basic and sharpening/NR panels most of the advanced tools from the full version have been stripped out. This can make processing in ACR only a much harder option.

Personally I use Lightroom for RAW processing as it has the full range of tools available. Doing this enables me to be able to process over 95% of my images in the RAW processor only. About the only time that I have to move an image to PS (I use CS5) is for major cloning work that is impossible with LR4's spot healing brush (LR5 has an improvement in that tool too which could reduce the need for PS even further). The other option is when needing to use layers. Mostly that is when I have an image of an aircraft in flight and it has a horrid just off white background from the very normal British summer overcast/haze. I can add a better colour in over the sky, usually using a blue gradient fill in combination with different blend modes, and a layer mask.

Here's an example, shot RAW with my 20D and processed in LR4 first. When I shoot I expose to the right to ensure that I have really good detail in the shadow areas, which I usually sort by then pulling back the highlights (-100 often) and midtones (exposure slider back by anything up to -2 stops) Usually the shadows then get a really big boost too. Because I exposed to the right though the shadows finish up at about the same level that they were exposed at so do not get any added noise, while the highlights and midtones are then much darker. I get everything right regarding levels and colours in LR before moving to PS. In this case in PS I added a blue gradient (sampled from another image with a nice colour in the sky on the same day). I used a Blend mode of Darken and IIRC reduced the opacity to about 70%. I then masked out the Typhoon using a layer mask. As it is quite well defined I usually set the mask to black (blocking everything) then use the paint bucket tool set to around 25 to fill the sky back in with white. Then it is just a matter of tidying it up with a brush around the edges.

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/eaXn​QQ

Hi Alan, Thanks for taking the time to describe your work flow, it was very useful and interesting. I think you're right, a move to lightroom will probably sort this problem out for me. I've thought about it and put it off for ages as I've been using DPP for run of the mill stuff and Elements for special pictures for so long that when I downloaded the LR trial it seemed to slow me down.

Nice typhoon shot by the way!

Thanks again

Paul

Yes it's that magic word Workflow. I really do have a workflow system, that enables me to get the best from a program like LR. Getting this aspect right from the start really helps to. I import all my images into LR and sort them for initial keepers, or rejects, and to get some sort of feeling for those that might get immediate attention and those that I will keep for later, well from a big days shooting anyway. As part of this images will get keywords added which makes finding them again later easy, and I use a whole load of collections and smart collections to do it. All of this is done in the Library module. The Develop module pretty much works the way that ACR dose, but in this case it has all of the tools available. So as well as the Basic, Sharpening/NR and I think basic lens corrections tabs you also have tools for adjusting Curves, HSL, and the really useful Local adjustment brushes and Filters. These can usually allow you to do quite complex dodging and Burning and other local changes to the image. Hence why such a small percentage of images actually need to go off to PS for further editing.

Even when I edit in PS though the image is brought back into LR for final finishing. All of my images stay in LR, either as RAW files or as .PSD files with all the layers intact. I only generate final output files from LR as I have a need for them. Also once they have been used they are deleted from the local drive. LR is helpful here too as most of my finished images will end up on Flickr. LR has publish services that can act like smart collections and automatically select images that have the right metadata associated with them. These images can then be directly uploaded to Flickr with a single click without leaving files hanging around on the local computer. LR allows virtual copies, which as well as enabling you to have different processing applied, such as colour and monochrome conversions, can allow you to have different crops so that you can quickly print to different aspect ratio papers. I find LR's Soft Proofing function much easier to use than that in PS too. The nice thing about VC's is that they are just a few lines of text in the database, no need for whole copies of the image file.

It really helps to work in a way that is complementary to the design ethos of LR, as it enables you to get the most out of it. LR dose not force you to keep images in any specific location, but it has initial settings that you might want to change to fit the way you would like to organise things. Also because it uses a database system outside of the file system to keep track of both the location of and edits applied to images it is always best to use LR to manage your images. Moving images with the file system breaks those links, although it is not too hard to fix them afterwards.

I hope this is useful to you.

Alan

Since I was talking about my workflow I quickly was able to go back and have a look at the Typhoon image, and open the .PSD file. As well as the colour gradient layer, which was from colour to transparent. I was wrong about the opacity that I used in this case it remained at 100%. I will often reduce the opacity what I do this kind of work, as it helps to maintain some of the underlying detail in the sky.

I also added a High Pass Sharpen layer. To do this I duplicated the bottom two layers and merged them. You can do this in one go in PSCS5 by using the keyboard command Ctrl, Shift, Alt, E. You then change the blend mode to Overlay. Then apply the High Pass filter to the layer. I usually have this set to a value of 5.0 pixels. In this case I applied the layer mask that I used in the grad layer, with the image of the Typhoon added in too. I then inverted the mask so that it blocked the sky, and allowed the darkest areas of the Typhoon to be sharpened more than the light areas. I did this as it corresponded to the areas with most detail getting the sharpening. This I think worked better than using the more normal edge detect filter for masking the sharpening. I reduced the overall effect by reducing the opacity to 50%.

I also thought you might like to see the way it looks straight from LR with no processing in PS. Again with LR really easy to produce this, took about 30 seconds of work.

HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/gif' | Redirected to error image by FLICKR

I'm with Al as to getting the most out of your Raw processor.

As to the Elements version of ACR, well as Al said the "advanced" tools of the full version in Photoshop and Lightroom have been left out -- I mean, hey, Elements is a cheap package, although it really does have some great tools it has "inherited" from its big brother!

As to your Raw processing, well the Elements version of ACR has the full functionality of the Basic tools, which means that cropping and then global adjustments for White Balance, Exposure, Contrast, Highlights Shadows, Whites, Blacks, and, I believe the tools for Clarity and Vibrance are there as well as the Saturation tool, oh, and does Elements have the Spot Removal tool?...when you think about it, there is a whole lot you can do with those tools, and ACR has become quite effective in developing those tools. So, unless and until you want to do something "selective", you can stick with ACR!

Now yes Lightroom does come up, and in fact it does have various "selective" tools that can come in handy, both in working selectively with colors as well as "tones", and so you can do more with your Raw processing before resorting to the image editor.

As to your workflow question about going to the Elements editor to "touch up" some things, well, my question there is what are you wanting to accomplish? If you can do everything in your Raw processor, then I'd stick with that, since you then can stick to the "original" Raw file and not get "version" files in your system (whether tiffs or psd files). But, of course, as soon as you want to do something "selective", whether it be working with the color/tone channels or, well, whatever, then sure jump in to the editor!

And then, you can also look at alternatives, Lightroom of course, but then the Canon software DPP does have some tools that I'd say are more advanced then the Elements Basic tool set, although the ACR tools are more effective in some things than DPP. You have to make the choice, one Raw processor for one (or all) image. But even then, a hand-off to the Elements editor is painless until you look at the resulting file, although with Elements because it ends up with an 8-bit tiff or psd, the files won't be as huge as they could be.

By the way, the second image doesn't show up. We haven't heard from Alan yet about the "currently unavailable" image but I did PM him with an answer:

To open that image you need to be a Flickr member. I'm not a Flickr member, and so can't click and open the image using the link provided, and then POTN is not a Flickr member so I believe that's why we can't see it here!

Of course, if someone sees this who is a POTN member and can't open it by clicking on the link, then we should hear about it!

Do everything you can in raw, but there's no harm doing what you're doing IMHO.

Thanks to everyone that has replied so far, plenty of food for thought. I think it's time to move to Lightroom and get my work flow sorted out.

Thanks again

Paul

Sorry about the missing image. Looks like Flickr haven't properly fixed the difficulty of posting links to "private" images. Although I did try swapping from private to public a couple of times last night. I didn't really want the "before" image showing up on my public Photostream. It got late last night when trying to fix it. I asked Tony to check it as I was not sure if it was only me who could not see the image.

Alan

Alan, it does show up now, so swapping it to Public must have done the trick!