RAW workflow, never seen this before!

Mad Badger

Mad Badger

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Name
Steve
Edit My Images
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5vA0yk37IU&feature=related

I learnt my camera RAW workflow from cover discs off magazines and help on this forum, then found this guy Chris Collins on Youtube.

He basically advocates ditching all adjustments in ACR in order to get your histogram as perfect as possible in RAW, avoiding all clipping at any cost, even though the image looks even flatter than the ACR defaults, and then doing everything else in Photoshop. He even removes all contrast, brightness, clarity or sharpening.

Sounds plausible, though it takes him an age to process one shot! anyone else use this approach?

He also used unsharpmask to add global contrast which looks very effective.

:thinking:
 
An intersting workflow in ACR. Will have to watch all the videos now before I come to any conclusions. As you say, the priority has been given to the histogram, but I'm not sure all defaults need to be set to zero in order to maintain a decent histogram. Interesting workflow, now for the Ps adjustments.
 
Can't say I'm convinced by this, I often let some extreme highlight clipping get past me, as it's not vital to the overall, and did you see how long it took him to process one picture, 17 steps!

lol
 
Mad Badger said:
He basically advocates ditching all adjustments in ACR in order to get your histogram as perfect as possible in RAW, avoiding all clipping at any cost, even though the image looks even flatter than the ACR defaults, and then doing everything else in Photoshop. He even removes all contrast, brightness, clarity or sharpening.
Click to expand...

I do something similar to this with most of my shots.
 
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Some excellent images there Rob, 5DMkII..........nice

I'll be trying the "preserve the histogram in RAW" approach over the weekend.

Cheers

Steve
 
Something is puzzling me here. He reduced the exposure to get rid of the clipped highlights. But surely if they are clipped they are clipped, and nothing you can do in PP will bring them back? Or am I missing something?
 
That's the beauty of RAW, you can recover far more than a jpeg would ever allow.
 
OK, I get it now. When LR shows clipping on the screen, it isn't necessary clipped in the raw file, but would be clipped if converted to JPEG at the current exposure setting. Thanks. :thumbs:
 
What on earth is the point of shooting in RAW, to preserve all the data, and to then chuck everything away apart from exposure levels?

Utterly bonkers!
 
DemiLion said:
What on earth is the point of shooting in RAW, to preserve all the data, and to then chuck everything away apart from exposure levels?

Utterly bonkers!
Click to expand...

I wanted to say this but assumed that I was missing something :D
 
Well; the whole of the Lightroom processing is effectively tossed out for a start (ACR processing and Lightroom processing being essentially the same). He seems to have no idea about the concept of capture sharpening either.

This is a perfect example of how the Internet is a source of mediocre and inaccuracy as well as excellence...

Anthony.
 
DemiLion said:
What on earth is the point of shooting in RAW, to preserve all the data, and to then chuck everything away apart from exposure levels?

Utterly bonkers!
Click to expand...

My sentiments exactly .....
 
DemiLion said:
What on earth is the point of shooting in RAW, to preserve all the data, and to then chuck everything away apart from exposure levels?

Utterly bonkers!
Click to expand...

I suppose he would argue that he's not thrown away data, he's modified it by altering exposure, but it's still there, attached to those pixels in the RAW waiting for him to return to it and later enhance that data in PP...........maybe?

Help me out here
 
Mad Badger said:
I suppose he would argue that he's not thrown away data, he's modified it by altering exposure, but it's still there, attached to those pixels in the RAW waiting for him to return to it and later enhance that data in PP...........maybe?

Help me out here
Click to expand...

Nope. Once you convert with ACR and move into PS, you've thrown all of the extra data away. It isn't magically hidden somewhere, apart from in the original RAW.

You might as well just take Jpegs on a Neutral setting, whilst making sure that you have a balanced exposure.

Note the word balanced, not correct, by the way.
 
Thanks, got it now. Once you move into PS, that's the key innit!

:thumbs:
 
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