RAW Primer

I've read through all the various threads on shooting RAW versus high quality JPG - so I'm not looking to rehash those.

However, I'd like to begin shooting RAW and developing an efficient workflow for processing and archiving.

I have Photoshop CS and have used its Browser as well as its RAW processor to experiment a bit - but my results are far from consistent.

For those of you out there that are shooting RAW, what Photoshop workflow tips might you suggest that will get me rolling in the right direction? Do you find that tweaking the XXXX by xxxx each time puts you in the ball park, etc. Can you describe your workflow process in 'developing' the RAW images?

From an old post...

1)Shoot pic with camera
2)Upload pic to computer
3)Open and edit with photoshop
3a) RAW Conversion
3b) Crop
3c) Remove Noise
3d) Convert to 16-bit
3e) Convert to AdobeRGB
3f) Capture Sharpen
3g) Clone Tool/Blemish Removal etcetera
3g #2) Shadow/Highlight correction (3g #2 because I forgot it)
3h) Color Correct
3i) Contrast Correct
3j) Creative Sharpen
3k) Save Corrected Copy
3l) Resize
3m) Output Sharpen
3n) Soft Proof
3o) Re-saturate/Fix out-of-gamut
3q) Save Print Copy
4)Print on photo printer

Most of those steps are if necessary. And I may have missed a step....


As for tips... Hmmm.... If your results aren't consistent then use Adjustment Layers as much as possible. Then you can just go back and tweak the adjustment layer's setting and nothing else gets touched. Always work in AdobeRGB and 16-bit.

Don't do too much at once - especially using Adjustment layers since you can go back and tweak each one. Work on one correction at a time - if you try to correct 3 things at once you'll just dig yourself a hole.

And that also means don't do too much correction at once. If you get max contrast before final sharpening then you may find that the final sharpening pass blows out highlights and such.

You might not do all those steps above - if fact I highly doubt you will. But the order is a good order. For instance, color correction can sightly change your contrast, so color correct before contrast. Shadow/Highlight can totally mess with contrast AND color, so do that first. And so on.


We have a Sticky post above which lists a number of tutorials. They're worth perusing at the very least.

There are so many tips....let me start with saying if you have many similar shots, you can save your raw tweak for one and then in the browser, select all like shots and apply that raw setting.

I shoot allot of indoor with bounced flash, I started noticing I was always had a certain WB temp of 5100K, so I use the "K" mode on the camera on WB and manually set it to 5100K and that pretty much eliminated having to do tweaks for these shots. The more I shoot, the less post processing is needed.

There is also a trick that you can get away with more sharpening if you convert to LAB color and only sharpen the lightness channel instead of all the channels together.

I break my actions up into little modular parts (must me my software engineer side coming out). I have one action that just opens the RAW file...I then call this action in another action....so you see if I have allot of simular things going on, I can tweak just the one to affect all that call it. One thing to note is that you can have sets of actions, and if you move an action from one set to another, the action that calls that action will have to be fixed because it calls actions from a specific action set. It's important when your create a "open raw" action to make sure you have "selected image" (or something like that, don't have PS open at the moment), and not "camera default" so that the raw will open with your tweaked changes.

Oh ya, and if after your tweaked your raw file in the raw converter and when it opens in Photoshop it looks faded....you don't have your working color space set to Adobe RGB. If your opening your raw as Adobe RGB, you should set your working color space to that or it will look different. You can always then covert it to normal RGB for web in an action or something.

I bought a book called 'Real World Camera Raw' http://www.amazon.com …-6774173-8916750?v=glance

It's a pretty short book, I read through it in a few days... but it does a good job of telling about the different functions and which ones you should use and which ones you should avoid. It is a little repetitive as one of the reviews says, but even so I feel a lot more comfortable using PS Camera Raw after having read the book.

I bought this book just before I left for my trip to the Rockies. It arrived while I was gone, and I've been reading it now I'm back. I recommend it to anyone who shoots RAW and uses PS (either 7 or CS). It will at the very least give you food for thought about your workflow habits, and very possibly it will help you change some of them, and for the better.