Is there a single "correct" workflow?
rutt
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Karine Seneca as The Dying Swan
Boston Ballet
I think there is not. Is Ansel Adams' workflow outdated? The books are still well worth reading even in the age of digital.
Dan Margulis has written about quite a few different workflows over the years. Are these outdated by a more powerful ACR and some new ideas about how to use it? I would say not. Dan's ideas are deeper than the workflows which implement them. And there are many things one can do with his techniques which cannot be accomplished in just ACR (at least I don't think they can be.) The effects of these techniques may or not be what the photographer wants for a particular shot. But why not have them in your toolbox?
I heard a radio piece recently discussing Picasso, Monet, Miro, Van Gough, and Mattie. The art critic made the point that these guys were classically trained painters and could paint in whatever style they wanted, including the very realistic classical pre-impressionist style. But that's not what they chose to do.
So here is my post-processing manifesto: learn the various techniques to make all things possible and then choose deliberately which you actually want.
Rendering by Lyle Kroll
If not now, when?
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I too would feel pretty inhibited by restricting myself to a single "anything". A single lens or camera or software or lighting setup can get pretty dull.
Let your knowledge set you free.
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Some folks adjust the parameters in their cameras and shoot jpgs baked in the camera. Is this a bad technique? Not if done with exquisite care for correct white balancing and exposure. I suggest that, while a custom white balance may be needed for this technique to really work well, for lots of working wedding shooters, PJs, sports shooters, and some wildlife shooters, in camera jpgs are a necessity due to the numbers of images shot and the time available for editing.
Some folks move beyond 'in camera jpgs', to Lightroom or Aperture, which are basically global editors and digital assett managers. Lightroom allows one to shoot in RAW, and do the RAW conversion via the mechanics of Adobe Raw Converter, and this is a real, valuable assett. Lightroom, also, has numerous built in routines for altering images either in color or B&W that can create lovely images.
Beyond these workflows, one ventures into Photoshop and Adobe RAW Converter and other major image editing programs, which allow editing on selected areas of the image. Editing selections is the fundamental reason for Photoshop and implies learning to use Photoshop with some skill.
The discussion of RAW conversion is a lengthy topic, with whole books devoted to it. The best is still Fraser's and Schewe's "Real World Camera RAW with Adobe Photoshop CS3" which is dedicated to explaining in detail each of the settings available in ACR. My following discussion is strongly derived from it.
Getting an excellent conversion from ACR is the first step in a workflow dedicated to high quality images. My concern, here, is editing high quality images - sharp, well exposed, initial color balance good, and well composed. Poorly captured images should be deleted in the camera or in Bridge and never get to ACR.
The first requirement is a calibrated monitor, so that you can interpret what you see with some degree of credibility. It helps to have a degree of understanding what pixel data in RGB or CMYK or LAB mean when the numbers on a single pixel are examined, Whites, grays, and blacks should be recognized at the pixel data level in RGB and LAB at the very least, so that one can evaluate the data directly, without looking at the LCD screen also.
Once an image is opened in Adobe RAW converter ( heareafter ARC), the first step is usually setting white balance, if the image has not been shot with a custom white balance. The plain eyedropper on the upper left of the tool bar can be clicked on an area of the image that is thought to be a neutral color, white ( but not real white ) or gray, or even some highlevel blacks may work if a white cannot be found. Including a black, gray, white WhiBal card in an image is a trick used by many wedding shooters to insure accurate color balance at this stage.
The Temperature slider and the Tint sliders can be moved to find a setting that looks correct OR preferable. The color balance does not allways have to be 'correct' so much as preferable or look better. There are drop down choices available also, Sunshine, Shade, Tungsten, Flash etc. Sometimes I look at several choices, say shade, flash etc and pick a set of numbers somewhere in between for Temperature and Tint. We come back to color balance again when in Photoshop we set a Black and White point for our final color correction.
Once the color balance is acceptable, the Exposure slider is adjusted with the mouse while holding down the option/alt key which will display areas of the image that are being clipped by the editing. White areas will be clipped in all three channels and hence 255,255,255, colored appearing areas indicate clipping in two or more channels. The Exposure slider is basically a white clipping adjustment tool - remember that one-half of all the image data is in the highest 1 stop of the histogram so we do not want to clip much of this data. Increasing the Exposure slider more than +0.75 stops, increases noise in the lower quarter tones.
The Highlight Recovery slider is a very important and useful tool - It enables one to recapture pixels that were clipped in one or two channels by sliding the exposure slider to the right earlier. Holding down the alt/option key and sliding the Recovery slider to the right one can see the white,clipped areas being pulled back out of clipping and the histogram is compressed slightly to the left at the same time.
The Fill Light slider adjusts the lower quarter tones, rather like a fill flash was used during exposure. It does this by creating a soft edged mask, real time on the fly, and hence, requires a fair amount of computer horse power to do. Quad core machines do this very nicely. PowerPC machines do not like this tool at all. It can add real detail in the shadows, but if overdriven runs the risk of introducing halos in high contrast areas.
The Black slider is the black clipping slider, as you slide it to the right, higher and higher pixel values will be clipped just like sliding the Levels Black slider to the right.
Sliding the Black slider to the right will increase color density very quickly, and add density to images. Values from 2 - 8 or so are typical, but some images require much higher values, especially if they image is going to be converted to B&W ultimately.
The Brightness slider I rarely alter very much. It moves the center of the histogram to the left or the right, without altering the white or black points. Sometimes I slide it to the left to decrease the Brightness of the image if the image was shot hot and "to the right" on the histogram in the camera.
The Contrast slider adds an S curve the the image data. The Brightness slider and the Contrast slider are rather crude tools. Better success can be had with the Tone Curve controls in the next panel in ACR, shown here
The Clarity Slider uses a mask to add mid-tone contrast. A small amount 12-25 can help many images.
Vibrance imcreases saturation of non-saturated colors, other than skin tones, so that it won't destroy facial tones.
The Saturation is best avoided, or used with a gentle touch.
The Sharpening Panel is devoted to 'capture sharpening' , restoring the image sharpness that was degraded in the camera for digital capture. To really SEE what is being accomplished with the Sharpening controls, you MUST zoom the image to 100% image size in ACR. The simple way to do this is Cmd-option-0(zero). Now if you hold down the option key, while adjusting one of the sliders, the image will appears B&W to better help seeing the effect of the shaprening process.
The Amount key controls the amount, the intensity, the degree of sharpening. 0 means no sharpening has been applied. 150 is way over the top. I frequently use values from 60 - 110. How this looks will be affected by the other adjustments available.
Radius defines how many pixels on either side of an edge the sharpening is applied. The range is from 0.5 - 3. I find values around 1 pixel most often used.
Detail is similar the USM's Threshold command. At its largest setting, 100, it resembles USM, but as it is moved to the left, it decreases the sharpening halo intensity until at 0, the halo is almost entirely gone. I rarely move this from the default value.
The Mask slider I find extremely useful. The area masked out in black in the B&W preview image will receive no sharpening at all, and the white areas will be sharpened. I tend to use the Mask slider at a fairly high value to that the sharpening I do is limited to the main contours of the image. This is highly image dependent of course.
The Mask slider creates a mask on the fly real time like the Clairity slider, so requires an up to date powerful computer.
The HSL/Grayscale panel can be used to alter specific colors, or to convert an image to a B&W rendering in ACR with the RAW data.
The lens correction panel I find quite useful. One needs to examine the image at 200+% to see significant chromatic aberration with good lenses. With 24mm T&S it can be seen at times, and there is a red/green border around sharp lines at the edges of the image. The Red/Green slider can be moved until this red/green border is gone or at least minimal. Yellow/blue is usually less of a problem, but i see it occasionally in files with my G9. Some images do not seem to have any chromatic aberration that I can identify, so I look for it and correct it if I see it, but if I don't I just move on. I set the Defringe command to Edges only.
I use the included Adobe profiles for my cameras, I have not profiled them separately at this time, although I have considered it.
At this point I am ready to open the image into Photoshop for further work as needed. I open my files as 16 bit ProPhoto color space images. This is chosen by clicking in the link below the image screen in ACR. This is a brief discussion of how I work through ACR on my way to Photoshop to edit my images.
In Photoshop, my initial edit is to set a Black and White point as I linked up above in this post. From there, each image is evaluated and edited as needed. I, frequently, look at the red, the green and the blue channel gray scale images to see how the contrast scale is in each channel. I may use these channels for a luminosity blend later in the image.
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Thanks for your quick response and for taking the time to respond in detail. It will take me some time to digest all this but it was helpful. I haven't experimented much with ACR but I can see there is much to do and learn. I'll be back with more questions. The sample images you chose really helped me as they are like a lot of images I already have.
There seems to be so many ways to do things, its hard to remember them all. I've been a smugmug member for a couple of years now but I haven't used many of the tools available. I'm just starting to do so. It seems that everytime I browse these forums, I find there is more to know.
I've finally got a good backup system for my images. My next step will be to invest in some tools for calibrating my monitor. Meantime, I'll experiment withthe ACR and see what I can learn.
Thanks again
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A few years ago, I was using ACR v3 in Photoshop CS2 fairly comfortably ( it was much more limited in its capabilities ) and, initially, I assumed that ACR v4 would not have changed that much in CS3, and I would not need to learn any new skills. I was very wrong in this assumption.
After reading Fraser and Schewe's book, as well a taking a couple workshops which helped a great deal, I found that I needed to learn to use the new abilities in ACR 4.4, and thus changed my changed my workflow, to where the majority of my editing is done in ACR.
I guess that makes sense, as that is why lots of folks like Lightroom so much. (I am just unable to give up the ability to edit selections, so I am sticking with Photoshop even though much of my editing takes place in Adobe RAW converter.) I prefer the screen and sliders in ACR in Bridge or Photoshop to the screen display in Lightroom, even though the engine and controls are exactly the same in ACR in Lightroom.
I will be happy to try to answer any questions if I can. If I cannot, I am certain there are folks here, far more knowledgeable than I, who can.
Rutt's suggestion to learn different techniques for editing images is a valuable one, devoted primarily to what to do with an image AFTER it has entered Photoshop. Some of the techniques he refers to were attempts to do in Photoshop, what can now be done in the RAW converter on unaltered RAW data. This would seem to be a good thing to me, unless it causes some unexpected changes in the image quality.
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PSE is nice but it doesn't seem to be the fastest way to make a first pass through a group of images. I downloaded Picasa last week. I'm hoping it will help me making that first sort faster.
One thing that concerns me is the amount of time I am spending in front of a monitor even without a formal workflow. Between the editing, keywords, etc it seems to take a lot of time per image.
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THAT was extremely helpful and good information! I really had no idea.
Okay, so I got stuck on using Aperture ... please, please no debates on Aperture v. Lightroom ;-)) ... mainly for it's organizational abilities, especially when working assignments with quick turnarounds.
I import the raw files into Aperture (where it preserves the "master" file untouched forever), maybe make a few minimal adjustments, and then use the Edit with external editor to open and edit a new version of the image in Photoshop. The new PS edited file is then stored (with layers preserved) and grouped with the original in Aperture.
So, it would seem with this workflow I am not able to use the Adobe Raw Converter ... and after reading your information that appears to be a mistake, at least with some images, since I suspect the ARC conversion is much superior to Aperture conversion. Would you agree? Have you seen documentation on this?
How can I, or can I, incorporate ACR conversion into my workflow while still using Aperture? I MUST keep workflow simple, and I want ALL versions stored in Aperture for ease of organization.
Any help or suggestions would be most appreciated (aside from dump Aperture ;-)
That is my quandry. I am constantly torn between keywording, what level of detail, photo editing, etc. There seems to be no end of the work you can do on a single photo. Its hard to know when enough is enough. Then when I multiply that by 100 images or more each week. It doesn't seem to leave enough time for being outside, which is why I started down this path in the first place. I guess I'll eventually find what works for me.
They say keeping your mind active and challenged, is one way to prevent Alzheimer' or denentia. At this rate , i don't think i'll have a problem there.
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I think you will find that you will save many workflow steps if you use the same piece of software for RAW adjustments as you do for organizing your images. I can't imagine using ACR for RAW adjustments and Aperture for everything else. In fact, I don't even know how you'd do that because ultimately you want your RAW file and your "developed" image to be catalogued in the same tool. If you put your RAW file into Aperture to keep track of it properly, you'd have to separately import it into ACR/Bridge/Lightroom adjust it there, generate a TIFF/JPEG and then reimport into Aperture. That sounds like a nightmare workflow to me.
If you stay in Aperture, you just import RAW file, make RAW adjustments and (optionally) generate a JPEG and you're done.
If you stay in Lightroom/ACR, same thing.
If you go back and forth, you add a whole bunch of extra workflow steps because both programs have to separately keep track of your images.
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Okay, that's what I was thinking as well ... just wasn't sure i was correct. And you are right, that would be a nightmare, would not work. Thank you for clarifying that
I am still very interested in comparison of RAW conversion in Aperture vs. ACR.
I got Aperture before the release of Lightroom, and was reluctant to switch, but I do like LR much better ( altho the book making ability of Aperture is very, very nice.
The big advantage of ARC 4+ is the Recovery sliders, the Fill slider, the Sharpening panel, Chromatic aberration corrections, HSL adjustments, and B&W conversions etc. I use these on every RAW I run through. I would miss them if they were not available.
They are present in Lightroom of course, since its RAW converter is exactly the same as in PSCS3. One other asset of ARC and PSCS3 is the ability to create SmartObjects - which are image files that can be moved in and back out of ACR over and over to alter images based on the unaltered data in the RAW file. In other words, a jpg that has been edited in PS, can then be taken back into ACR and edited further in ACR more than once if it is a Smart Object. Where we used to create a jog for highlights and a jog for shadows and then blend them in PS, now we can do all that as SmartObjects in RAW.
I cannot give you a really good comparison of the Aperture versus Lightrooms RAW converter. The capabilities of ACR4+ I have not found elsewhere, but then I have not been exploring other RAW converters either.
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I'm a Lightroom user since I'm on a PC and thus can't use Aperture.
Check out this Google search for LOTS of articles on LR vs. Aperture. Some of these are a bit dated so what you really need is something that understands the latest advantages of both. LR 2.0 is already in beta and it has some fantastic improvements too. It seems likely that it will be out this fall. There are zillions of web articles on that too if you want to search. I'm particularly excited about filtering improvements and localized adjustments in LR 2.0.
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Thanks Pathfinder
Aperture 2 picked up recovery. It has always had fill (it's called "shadows"), HSL, sharpening (it has very good edge sharpening, but less tunable masking than LR which is good if it does a good job, and not so good if you don't like its edge detection), and B&W conversions. Aperture has 6 points for HSL (which you can pick), whereas LR has 8 (including orange and cyan). The effects you can get from both are similar. Aperture has R, G, and B for B&W conversion, plus you can set filters (e.g. standard orange filter), which adjusts as you'd expect. LR gives you again the 8 sliders you can tweak. Is more better? I don't necessarily know -- you can get very similar results with booth tools.
I also doubt you do both HSL and B&W on every photo
I was very put off by LR's default conversions of the red/orange/yellow part of the spectrum with my Canon 1D Mark II and 1Ds Mark III. I shot some poppies that were just flat-out the wrong color, and had very little tonality (yes, because the poppies are so saturated and because I shot them at sunset they were a bit blown in the orange-red channel). I could back off the exposure and get some detail back, but Aperture 2.0's conversion was markedly better -- and the color I expected from the conversion. By contrast, many of my shots from Antarctica that had glaciers and lots of blue were fantastic and very sharp with LR -- it took me more work with Aperture to get similar results.
In the end, I used Aperture for 1.5 years, was swayed to LR for a few months but never totally happy (I wasn't sure if Aperture was going anywhere), but Aperture 2.x has swayed me back. The workflow and quality conversions I just find... more comfortable and better. And given I use a Mac I am free to choose which tool I prefer... no Windows shackles for me. Which means I also don't have to worry about where that darn correct msvcrt80.dll has gone to
However, I think the highlighted sentence is in error. It's a nit, but may be significant. I believe that white areas represent those areas of the image where all three channels are blown; that is - where all three channels are registering at 255. Where you have color, that's where one or two channels are blown. For example, if you have a yellow area showing, that would indicate that both the blue and green channels are blown (combining blue and green light makes yellow light).
FWIW - this is consistent with the way luminosity data is shown in the histogram as well.
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Scott - you are correct - I see the error and will correct it. Thank you for pointing this out.
A minor correction..... I believe that red and green make yellow; blue and green do not combine to give yellow, do they?
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Yes and no. No in that, each Raw converter is proprietary. You can't move the metadata instructions that Aperture builds and have them utilized in Lightroom, or Bibble etc. You can render the images (build Tiff's) and import that into Lightroom but then the toothpaste is out of the tube. Rendered images are baked pixels, you can't remove the ingredients and rebake them as you can do with the Raw converter you start with. The power of Raw processing is that you're not altering pixel directly as you do in Photoshop or Elements. You're building instructions that tell the Raw converter how to render (bake), create from scratch, new virgin pixels. Since the instructions and the rendering engines are all unique and proprietary, you want to find one converter and stick with it, at least to render images.
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White is relative to the current slider(s). You can see white "clipping" and of course pull that back by altering the sliders. At some point, you can't of course, you've truly over exposed and fully saturated the sensor.
IF one of the three channels actually has data, LR and ACR can rebuild the other two using that data. That's essentially what Recovery does (Exposure can too).
Colors show saturation clipping. Yellow would mean Red and Green are clipping. Red, Green and Blue colors indicate that color's clip. Complementary colors show a combo of two colors. The easy way to figure this out is take the color (say Cyan) and take it's opposite, complementary color (Red), the other two are the colors that are clipping (Green and Blue). Or think of it as "Red not clipping" or "Green and Blue are clipping".
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Also, I want to learn. I have evolved a workflow for ballet pictures over the last 4 years which gives me results I like. But perhaps I'm stuck in my ways? The technique is based on Dan Margulis' portrait workflow from the LAB book, but I have adapted it to my purposes in many places. So it is definitely something Andrew (and others) would consider dated. Maybe I can do better or get the same results easier? It would be a great thing to know that.
To help keep the discussion concrete, I want an image that we can all work with. I want a ballet image, but there is a problem. Nobody is allowed to make any money from these images. We'll use the honor system just this once. If you do make any money, you have to donate it to The Dancers' Resource Fund; and if you don't what's wrong with you anyway?
With that out of the way, here is a link to the raw image.
And here is the best I could do following Pathfinder's guidelines:
[size=+1]Roman Rykine in Boston Ballet's Swan Lake 2008[/size]
I have to admit that I cheated a little and did the crop and straightening in photoshop because it wasn't immediately obvious to me how to do this in ACR and it's not particularly relevant to this discussion.
Then just to be fair to Pathfinder, I followed his advice and did some channel blending in photoshop. In particular, I used the green channel for a luminosity blend. I had to use the blend-if sliders to keep this from turning the bright red areas black. Here is the result:
(Full sized originals of all these images can be downloaded by replacing the L with an O at the end of the URLs.)
OK, so these look pretty nice and it was very easy to do. I used the eyedropper to color balance on the white tights (I know they are white), hit the auto button and then punched up the vibrance. And my sharpen amount was probably a little high (40%) but I didn't intend to output sharpen. Oh, and I did turn up the luminance noise reduction to 40. Shadow noise is often a big issue for my ballet shots and this does seem to have helped.
Next I'm going to process in my old fashioned way and see what I get. Stay tuned, as I'll do that in a separate post.
I see things differently then many (most;
There is a red/magenta strip on the top of the dancer's hands, and his flexed thigh. My first thought was that this is chromatic aberration, but it does not respond to the lens correction tool in ACR, so I think I would call this red fringing instead, due to the high contrast, and not chromatic aberration in the lens.
When I download the RAW file you posted the link to, I get a different image with two males dancers in white tights. Is this the correct file, or is there an error in the link? It shows the same red fringe along the thighs, but again in the Lens Correction panel I cannot get it to be altered, and I routinely use the Lens Correction panel for removal of chromatic aberration in images of mine, so I believe I am familiar with the tool
In regard to noise reduction, I tend not to use it in ACR, as I prefer to use NoiseWear on a selection in an adjustment layer in Photoshop. That way I ONLY remove noise in areas where it is critical to be reduced, and do not degrade the image anywhere else. Skies frequently need de-noised long before the rest of landscape shots.
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It's not huge, but the green luminosity blend does bring out more definition in the subject's face. If you had to vote you'd pick it.[/quote]
I noticed this as well. I plan to see what I can do about it in my photoshop oriented workflow. It's taking me a while to get around to anything that isn't outdoors these days.
Fixed now. Here is the correct link.
Dealing with noise in a focused fashion (so as not to degrade sharpness) is a big part of my workflow. Stay tuned.
Blending of at least 4 various filters (DCSpecial's ICE4 filter, GREYCstoration (a GIMP filter), Impressionist, GIMP's Dilate filter, among them) with a lot of layers and selective erase throughs and some smudging. Other color/sat/contrast adjustments and an applicaion of canvas texture to finish it off. It was fun though.
John, your new link for your ballet image does not seem to work for me, and I would still like a shot at editing it, and continuing this thread if you are still interested.
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