stupid raw noob quick question

neastguy

so after your done touching up your .raw file in CS3... do I just save it as a jpeg? or does that defeat the purpose? thanks:dunno

SloYerRoll

Your talking apples and oranges
Keep the raw file for later editing and as a digital negative archive. This raw data will never be output to anything. *It can be, but that's high end stuff.

Use the jpeg to publish your masterpieces.

pathfinder

Some folks who have carefully crafted a masterpiece from a RAW file, will save a detailed .psd file, complete with all the layers, so that the final jpg can be easily repeated or edited later if needed.

Like Jon, I usually just save the RAW and the final jpg, but I am giving more consideration of saving *.psds of of complex edited images also. They take a lot of file storage, but can be very useful if you need/want to re-create some jpgs that you have previously created several editions of Photoshop previously.

susanbudge

I usually have a little PS editing I like to do outside of Camera Raw so I tend to save to tiff. I tend only to use jpeg for website or email purposes.

jfriend

neastguy wrote:

so after your done touching up your .raw file in CS3... do I just save it as a jpeg? or does that defeat the purpose? thanks

It depends upon what I'm doing with the image. My workflow is different than some because I keep the images as RAW files until I have to have some other format. I find that advantageous because I don't have multiple files to keep in sync if I change the rating, add keywords, want to delete it, etc...

After editing a RAW file in Camera RAW, it depends upon what you want to do with it next. If all your edits were in Camera RAW and you don't have any immediate output in mind, then I just hit OK in Camera RAW and leave it as an edited RAW file.

If I'm printing it, I open it in CS3, decide if I want any more tweaks in CS3 (often I do final sharpening there) and then print. Most of the time I won't bother to save the final image (because it's easily reproduced anytime I want), but if I did something special to it in CS3, I will save it as a JPEG.

If I'm putting it on the web or sharing the image file some other way, I will save as a quality level 10 JPEG.

If I take it into CS3, do a bunch of work (that isn't easy to reproduce) on it or I'm not done editing it yet, I save it as a PSD with layers until I am done.

For example, if I'm collecting shots for a soccer season, I will make a pass through a day's shoot, assign ratings, delete non-keepers, set white balance, tweak exposure, color and contrast, set keywords all in ACR. I then leave the resulting pics as RAW files. At the end of the season, I combine all the shots from the season, decide which ones are going up on the web and then batch generate JPEGs for just the ones going on the web.

For example, I take a day's worth of shots while skiing. I get back, process through them and identify 20-30 I want to put up on the web to share with the family. I select those and generate JPEGs for just those. I then upload them to the web.

For example, I go shoot birds for a few hours at the local marshlands. I process through them when I get back, assigning ratings to the ones that look the best. Since I'm not doing anything else with them for now, I just leave them as processed RAWs. Then, sometime later (perhaps months later) when I decide to pick out a few for my birdlife gallery, I generate JPEGs for just those and put them in my gallery.

arodney

I think its important to point out none of us are processing Raw files, they always remain untouched, just a data source for new colored pixels, based on rendering instructions (EXIF data).

I also wonder why some people seem to need to spends so much time in Photoshop these days, considering the huge, fast and effective Raw rendering tools we have today (not to mention what really WAS time consuming, dust busting scanned images).

This is a new article on the Adobe site worth looking over:

http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/pdfs/non_destructive_imaging.pdf

Duffy Pratt

Even with the other tools, which sometimes are good enough, the rendering tools still do not do the best job with sharpening. Unless something has changed very recently.

Duffy

arodney

Duffy Pratt wrote:

Even with the other tools, which sometimes are good enough, the rendering tools still do not do the best job with sharpening. Unless something has changed very recently.

Duffy

The rendering tools most certainly can't do anything close to 100% of what we need (today). Output sharpening, soft proofing, true pixel level editing, blending modes, layers. There's a lot of work we'll need Photoshop for, none the least being true retouching work or compositing. But an awful lot of work we used to do (stuff I think could have and should have been done in the scanning stage and wasn't due to sloppiness or the love of Photoshop) is no longer necessary. By the time you're done rendering, you should be able to get 90% or so of all the big work done, certainly all the global tone and color work. Output sharpening and hopefully soft proofing, at least in Lightroom will come some day.