What are your ACR default settings?

Say, to folks who use ACR/Bridge CS3 for your RAWs, what are your default slider settings?

Do you leave them at the default Brightness 50, Contrast 25, Blacks 5 or do you zero them out and then adjust the Exposure, Blacks, Brightness and Contrast to taste?

I've noticed that ACR set to 50/25/5 seems to be about the same as Canon's DPP with Exposure set to 0. ACR set to all zeros look to be underexposed.

500 x 1859

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I use the defaults, but I bump the contrast from 25 to 35. After color correction I often increase the vibrance, but I do that last as if you do it before color correction it messes things up.

Absolutly to taste...Using default kinda defeats the purpose of Raw/ACR.

My defaults are set to 0. I have made several presets for different ACR tabs that I use depending, such as 1 preset for portrait sharpening and 1 for landscape.

Default set to all zeros....

I leave them as they come by default, but adjust them to taste... very rarely have I come upon a RAW file that didn't benefit from SOME adjustment... I suppose if I saw I was consistently changing a setting to another value I'd definitely set it as a new default for my camera.

Also, I'm using the ACR beta profiles and have one of them set as my camera default.

Never use them. I guess if you are shooting in controlled lighting set up it may work, but if the lighting and the exposure changes, even with the defaults, I think you would have to adjust those things anyway.

neumanns wrote in post #6587773
Absolutly to taste...Using default kinda defeats the purpose of Raw/ACR.

Using the defaults is like telling to show how a camera would do a basic JPG, it's a good starting point. I see nothing to gain from zeroing it out, you're going to have to adjust every single image that way. The defaults are good enough for many images.

Maybe I misunderstood the question, I leave them on default when opening the image in ACR. But rarely are they still on default when I hit open image. I would like to claim I always get them perfect in camera...I don't. But In retrospect I usally don't change the three sliders mentioned unless I feel the image neeeds it. But I do go to the curves tab and adjust there wich is essentially the same thing just more controlled.

In the image above I would adjust the exposure+ blackpoint+ and then give it more contrast not with the sliders but in the next tab by adjusting the curve, But it's still contrast just targeted.

I zero out the sharpening defaults but leave the rest as they are. They don't really matter, because with all the new camera profiles in 4.6, default settings will be blown away.

My first stop is with the camera profiles. I choose the one that has the best effect toward whatever I'm after, and then go back to the basic panel and begin making adjustments there.

Since I am going to change them anyway, I leave ACR at it's default setting. The first thing I do is use the Adobe Nuetral Profile. I then check/adjust color temp if I used a flash, bounced, indoors. I may hit Auto... sometimes it doesn't work well. If the results are decent, I leave it on Auto.

I'll set black point, white point clipping level, Recover, if needed, Fill Light, if needed, and that's about it.

If the image looks soft (maybe I misfocused slightly), I set Sharpening Amount=80, Radius 0. If it sharpens real well, I put the sliders to 0 and Open the image in PS.

blssdwlf wrote in post #6587609
Do you leave them at the default Brightness 50, Contrast 25, Blacks 5

Yes, that. For flash photos, I'll immediately bump the Contrast to 35 (and sometimes higher). I also use a default +20 Clarity, and for my indoor theatre performance photos I use +40 Vibrance by default (which tends to look really good with the costuming). Additionally, I'm using the "Adobe Standard" beta profile for everything.

bohdank wrote in post #6590111
Since I am going to change them anyway, I leave ACR at it's default setting. The first thing I do is use the Adobe Nuetral Profile.

My process is very similar to some of the posts here...

I too find that I end up using Adobe Neutral Profile most of the time now...

I also find that I end up boosting contrast to 34 or 35 most of the time...

So I set those two as my defaults.

Other than that I manually play around with the other settings per picture. I boost the Clarity and vibrance sliders a little on almost all pics - I think they both make the images 'pop'. But clarity can hurt on portraits (makes the wrinkles and stuff much more apparant) so I don't use it much on those... For non-portraits it's great!

Thanks for all the responses.

I've been using the new profiles Beta1, Camera Standard and Camera Faithful and find them to match up to DPP very well (enough to return ACR into my workflow).

It seems that ACR Brightness +50 is the same as DPP Brightness 0.

If I mix and match ACR Exposure (white point) and ACR Brightness (mid) I can get almost the same exposure as DPP Brightness 0. ACR Exposure 1 stop = 50 points ACR Brightness. So ACR Exp +0.5, Brightness +25 looks to be about the same as ACR Exp +1, Brightness 0 or ACR Exp 0, Brightness +50. The variations just appear to be where the white point is clipping as the overall histogram between the mixtures looks very close.

I think I will leave it at zero/zero/zero as a starting point and adjust to taste because by adjusting the white point first, it seems to alter where I'd put the brightness setting anyway. One thing I'll see if I can post up when I have a moment is whether going a particular direction might incur more noise. A minor thing would have been nice if ACR's Brightness was calibrated to "50" and started at zero

My LR starting point:

"Camera Neutral"
Sharpening varies.
NR: 0/3
Vignetting: -10/20