I had some spare time so I thought I would show a good comparison of what is possible when shooting in raw to really make your images pop, or at least a good starting point before diving deeper to retouch.
I'm sharing what I know, please keep in mind everyone has different styles and processing techniques.
First picture is SOOC with no sharpening. Second picture is with minor adjustments in camera raw, auto contrast and smart sharpening.
1 - SOOC.
SOOC
by Dave Polette Photography, on Flickr2 - After Edit.
RawEdit
by Dave Polette Photography, on FlickrSo what did I do?
Step1. Open Image in Camera Raw
Step2. Adjust Temperature Control Slider.
I usually make this warmer to suit, keep a close eye on the skin tones you don't want to go too far and turn people yellow.
Step3. Recovery Slider.
Make sure that your highlight clipping warning is turned on. If its turned on, any areas that are over exposed and contain no detail will be red. To turn this on, goto the top right hand corner of the camera raw window in the histogram box and click on the black triangle. It will have a white box around it when turned on.
Adjust your recovery slider to reduce as much of the clipping red areas as possible.
Step4. Fill Light Slider.
In the above picture I set fill light to 25. Play around with this setting. This does the opposite to the recovery slider, it brings out more detail in the blacks, this is important because in the next step we are going to increase the contrast by adding more blacks and we don't want to lose any detail.
Step5. Blacks Slider.
Adjust this forward until you start losing detail in the dark areas, this will depend on how much fill light you use so keep playing around with both until you get the effect you are after. My setting was 18+, It should make the colours really start to pop.
Step6. Clarity Slider.
The clarity slider adjusts the mid-tone contrast. Its good for bringing out detail, I only use a little. For this photo I used 10+.
Step7. Vibrance & Contrast.
These again will depend on personal taste, for the above photo I used 5+ for each.
Step8. Open into Photoshop.
Once you are pretty happy with the image click the open button to open the image into Photoshop for the final touches.
Step9. Auto Contrast.
I find I never really get the contrast perfect in Camera Raw, so I use the Auto Contrast from the Image menu in Photoshop. It doesn't work with all images but for the above image it just brightened it up slightly.
Step10. Resize.
Most of my images go on the web so the second last step is to resize the image, i usually go for around 800 pixels wide.
Step11. Sharpen.
Always make sure you sharpen at the resolution of the final image. I use smart sharpen from the Filter -> Sharpen menu. The settings for this image were Amount 20%, Radius 1.0, Remove: Lens Blur. Be careful not to over sharpen, if you share you images with flickr they will have some additional sharpening added to them once uploaded so keep that in mind.
Thanks for reading. Please feel free to add to what I've already said and also for those much more knowledgeable than me, correct my mistakes.
