Do you sharpen/saturate/etc. in the RAW conversion or later?

~Jan~

I just recently became comfortable with (and in love with) shooting RAW. Do you all do the sharpening, saturation, and all of that when you do the RAW processing or later in Photoshop? I wasn't sure which was better....also, do you use the picture styles and what do you set the white balance at?

SloYerRoll

Congrats on getting to know raw. Once you get really comfortable w/ these files, you won't understand how ppl shoot jpeg.

Not sure what you mean by picture styles.

I always do any saturation in raw. This gives the most flexibility to me. When I want to selectively saturate, I use something like Nikon capture NX.

This part is the most critical.
Always sharpen as the last step right before you save or print.
Never sharpen in your work flow until the last step.
All your post production work should be complete before you sharpen.
Notice the theme?
I'll happily explain in detail why you want to sharpen as a last step if your interested in knowing. I'm just not up to typing that up unless you'd get something out of it.

Richard

~Jan~ wrote:

I just recently became comfortable with (and in love with) shooting RAW. Do you all do the sharpening, saturation, and all of that when you do the RAW processing or later in Photoshop? I wasn't sure which was better....also, do you use the picture styles and what do you set the white balance at?

Lots of questions. Let's see...

Conventional wisdom is that you do sharpening last, meaning in PS. The amount of sharpening you apply will vary depending on the intended output medium (print or Web).

I almost never apply a global saturation adjustment, either in RAW or in PS. Saturation is better controlled using curves, especially if you work in LAB color space.

If by picture styles you mean the preset parameter sets on the 30D, I am fairly sure these only affect JPG files, not RAW. My 20D does not have this feature, but I'm sure someone will correct me if I am wrong about that. Or are you talking about something else?

I find white balance much easier to correct in RAW than in PS. This is one of the biggest advantages of shooting in RAW. Unless I am shooting indoors in weird light, I just leave the WB on auto. I rarely have to correct an outdoor shot.

In general, I only correct WB and exposure in RAW and leave the rest for PS. What you do, though, depends on your own workflow and what gives you the best results with least hassle. There really aren't any rules, so you should feel free to experiment. I don't have the latest version of ACR (thanks, marketing guys, for preventing it from running on CS2), but I understand that it has a number of slick functions that are worth checking out.

Hope this helps.

Mike Lane

First what version of ACR are you using? If you're using the latest version, ACR4.1, I'll have to disagree with rsinmadrid and SloYerRoll's sharpening suggestions. The newest version of photoshop has an absolutely amazing sharpening feature and you should most definitely use it for your capture sharpening step. More here. Creative sharpening and output sharpening should wait until later in PS; however, capture sharpening is an important step to take before you bring your image into PS.

Also ACR 4.1 has the clarity and vibrance sliders. These are great and I don't feel the least bit worried about using them in ACR before I get into PS.

Frankly, I'm finding that I've got less and less to do in PS than ever before. Heck with the new ACR 4.1 I can even take care of any nasty dust spots and any red eye (which is mainly reserved for my wife's P&S - yes ACR 4.1 lets you fix up jpgs too ).

Do not use picture styles. Pretend they aren't even a part of your camera. Just shoot in raw and set your white balance to auto. If you've got a canon camera set your whitebalance to tungsten light when you're shooting in ... well ... tungsten light. You'll get better results as Canon likes a waaaaaaaaay to yellowy goo look for their auto tungsten white balance. Other than that auto WB is golden.

David_S85

Sharpening varies on how and where the image is displayed.

I always sharpen last. Sharpening is dependent on many factors, picture size (in pixels) being one of them. The smaller the file (like those we post here - 600 or 800 pixels wide) might need a just a little bit of sharpening (Amount = 60 to70 or so), whereas a huge image for printing might need 120 to 150 or more.

arodney

Sharpening should be done in stages:

http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/20357.html

Do all the heavy lifting (color, tone, saturation) work globally in the raw converter. Faster, better quality, unique properties of editing on a linear encoded data source (raw), ability to copy and paste metadata instructions that define the edits to other, similar raw files.

SloYerRoll

Mike Lane wrote:

The newest version of photoshop has an absolutely amazing sharpening feature and you should most definitely use it for your capture sharpening step. More here.

Thanks for that nfo Mike. I'm sticking w/ CS2 until I can purchase CS3 (very hard to do sometimes w/ torrents all over the place).

That's one of the things that has been ingrained into my workflow since PS5.

SloYerRoll

Jan, another helpful tip is to use your sharpening tool w/ a layer mask.
This allows you so much more control than just clicking on the sharpen tool and seeing global changes happen.

claudermilk

There's two schools of thought on sharpening. The first is the one-step sharpening where you do it all as the final step before output, as everyone in this thread besides Andrew has mentioned.

The second is the three step sharpening method as Andrew linked to. I tend to go with this one, so Ido a very light sharpen from the RAW converter, then a final sharpen at the very end.

As everyone mentioend, pretend the picture styles don't exist--they are irrelevant to RAW processing anyway. I've been tempted to just scrape off the silkscreen on my 20D's knob to the left of the green box.

All the rest of the adjustments get done as much as possible in the RAW converter.

~Jan~

Thanks so much for the advice! The picture styles I am referring to are not the on-camera ones, but the ones in the RAW converter. I'm guessing I should ignore these, too?

Anyhow, I am using Canon's RAW utility. I looked at that ACR but can't seem to figure it out...I download it and it won't run. I only have Elements 5.0, is that why?

Thanks again for the tips!!

Mike Lane

~Jan~ wrote:

I looked at that ACR but can't seem to figure it out...I download it and it won't run. I only have Elements 5.0, is that why?

LiquidAir

As I see it, the two most important things to achieve in a RAW conversion are to get the white balance right and exposure right. Sharpening as part of the RAW conversion is a nuance, but in some situations it can pull out detail that can't be recovered later.

I use Lightroom for my RAW conversions which has a moderately good tool set, and for family snapshots and the like I can often get everything I need without bothering with Photoshop. If the shot is destined for a print larger that 4x6 (landscapes, formal portraits, competition photos, etc), I generally go with minimal processing in Lightroom and head straight for the larger tool set in Photoshop.

Given that your toolset is DPP and Elements, I think the workflow will be somewhat different. I don't know what Elements 5.0 is capable of, but my intuition is that most of my standard technique aren't possible there. Even so, I think the best strategy is to get as accurate a conversion as you can out of DPP and save all the creative adjustments (contrast, saturation, etc) for Elements.

Generally my recommendation with Canon bodies is to set the in camera picture style to "Faithful" and use that in your DPP conversion. I think it is best to start with the most accurate color and make any shifts from there by concious choice in your post process. Also, I think the color histogram (which I recommend using and appears to be based on the in camera conversion) is more accurate with the camera set to "Faithful." The only sliders I would play with in DPP are the exposure and white balance settings. Everthing else I would do in Elements.