Trying to Make Sense of Photoshop CS2 and RAW

jlg84

I hate to post a request that is probably WAY too basic for the crowd here, but hope you'll be patient with me!

I shoot with a Canon 20D and have been evangelized to switch to RAW rather than JPEG format. I am also using Photoshop CS2 to process my photos, and love the control that it affords me. However, I wonder if I am doing something wrong, since each time I start to review my photos it seems that the exposure is always a bit off. I thus find myself having to tweek each individual photo to produce an appealing photo, sometimes having to reduce the exposure, other times having to increase it.

Is this a normal thing, or am I shooting the photos improperly? The histograms for the photos look fine when I review the shots, btw. And is there a quicker way to adjust the photos, rather than doing it all individually? Or is this just a 'feature' of the RAW processor?

Andy

jlg84 wrote:

I hate to post a request that is probably WAY too basic for the crowd here, but hope you'll be patient with me!

I shoot with a Canon 20D and have been evangelized to switch to RAW rather than JPEG format. I am also using Photoshop CS2 to process my photos, and love the control that it affords me. However, I wonder if I am doing something wrong, since each time I start to review my photos it seems that the exposure is always a bit off. I thus find myself having to tweek each individual photo to produce an appealing photo, sometimes having to reduce the exposure, other times having to increase it.

Is this a normal thing, or am I shooting the photos improperly? The histograms for the photos look fine when I review the shots, btw. And is there a quicker way to adjust the photos, rather than doing it all individually? Or is this just a 'feature' of the RAW processor?

Hi,

You have to set your Camera Raw defaults, so that when your photos arrive in ACR, they are not far from where you want them to be with the Auto settings.

But that said, the purpose of RAW is for YOU to make decisions, not the camera makers...

pathfinder

Hi jlg,

Compact Flash continues to drop in price.

With a 4 Gb chip in a 20D, it is very easy to shoot in RAW + Large jpg.

Doing that will let you see how the camera processes the image, and how you can process the image from RAW.

If your straight from camera jpg is fine, then you're done.

But I suspect you will quickly see how much better you can create images from RAW. With a little practice, it really doesn't take much more time than editing a straight jpg, because even straight jpgs can be tuned up in PS.

Learning to use Photoshop well, is a fairly large undertaking. You will be able to learn new techniques with Photoshop for a long time. No one here at dgrin ( and I include Andy our house PRO:D ) knows ALL there is to know about PS. Even the authors of the software are taught new techniques discovered by the users in the field.

Just take a little bit at a time and you can cover a lot of ground. If you use the search tool here on dgrin, you will find tons of material about RAW conversion. Andy, and Rutt and I and others have all posted about RAW conversion techniques over the last couple of years.

Andy

pathfinder wrote:

No one here at dgrin ( and I include Andy our house PRO:D ) knows ALL there is to know about PS.

Man, don't I know it and that's why I read, religiously, Layers Magazine, Photoshop User, and am attending classes and seminars all the time.