How far in Raw post processing do you go?

[bbodine9]

I am curious as to what adjustments forum members perform on their files in the Raw processing portion of PWP5 versus processing a bare tiff / jpeg of the same file in the rest of the program? Which process seems to give you the best end result ? Do you for instance sharpen in Raw or wait till later in post? Also is their another location on the net where one can see processed files with PWP that anyone knows of? Thanks!

[keithrj]

I stand open to correction on the technicalities but these are my thoughts when I process RAW images:

1. As long as you don't clip any highlights/lowlights and keep the output file as 48-bit TIFF then you can do anything in post-processing that you can do in RAW (besides de-mosaic which is part of the RAW to TIFF conversion).

2. The last thing I do is sharpen so I leave that step to post-processing and don't do it in the RAW dialog.

3. I always keep the original RAW file so I can start again if anything goes wring.

4. The amount of processing I do in RAW depends on the purpose of the output. If it is to print simple small images then I do as much in RAW as possible otherwise for more serious work I get the image looking acceptable in RAW and then do final tweaking etc. post-RAW.

Hope this helps

[Dieter Mayr]

I work mostly like Keith described above.

Adjusting in RAW for a acceptable looking inage and do the fine tweaking in post processing.
Sharpening always as the last step on the final image, depending on the usage (printing or for monitor display).
I normally keep the RAW and the processes 48 bit TIFF, the later is faster to open and because it already has acceptable quality it is a good base for working in almost any case instead of reprocessing the RAW.

For a image source, maybe have a look at flickr, searching for "PWP" or "Picture Window Pro" gives a lot of images from which are for sure some processed from RAW. There also is a PWP group, but not very active.

[MikeG]

This is a bit off topic but may be of interest:
I have a Panasonic G1 and have given up, more or less, RAW processing in PWP.
Now I batch process RAW to 48bit Tiff in SILKYPIX, generally using default settings in SILKYPIX and do all further processing in PWP.
SILKYPIX SE (special edition restricted to Panasonic cameras) comes bundled with the Pansonic G1 and is set up to use data that the G1 stores in the rw2 RAW files to automatically make a number of corrections for lens aberrations. This definitely includes automatic barrel distortion correction. Here's a quote from a dpreview review of a GH1 lens: analysis of this lens's performance is complicated by the fact that some fairly extensive software correction of lens aberrations is clearly going on 'under the hood' - with the camera removing geometric distortion and lateral chromatic aberration from the final image, in a fashion which will be completely transparent to the vast majority of users.
Obviously this saves me a task, and, no doubt, does a better job than I could achieve.
If I have blown highlights that I want to try and recover I do this also in SILKYPIX. And occasionally I'll use SILKYPIX for noise reduction, too.
Obviously Panasonic have taken the lead in marrying computer and camera, and, in my opinion, this 'automatic' lens correction approach is likely to be adopted by others in time.

Mike.

[keithrj]

For those who want to correct barrel/pincushion distortion as well as chromatic aberration automatically based on camera and lens then take a look at PTLens - http://epaperpress.com/ptlens which is a relatively cheap application which works both as a standalone application and as a plugin for photoshop & lightroom.

Of course PWP can do all this but not automated like PTLens although I have made some suggestions for PWP to have some sort of automation based on EXIF lens and focal length info.

[JML]

I’m new to PWP raw conversion (but not to raw conversion in general) so the following is subject to revision.

The principle is that the conversion should contain maximum information for the image w/o clipping and w/o having to reverse out a change downstream. To that end I do the following:

Color
I seldom use the Color Balance probe and generally set the color temperature where I think it should be. The reason is that I often don’t like the results of the probe in raw and instead defer to the excellent Color Balance Transformation as the first step after raw conversion.
On rare occasions, I adjust Tint.
Saturation is generally set in the 30% - 48% range.

Gray
Most of the time, I use Exposure to bump the histogram to the right leaving a comfortable working distance. I do not push the histogram to the far right side both to avoid clipping and to leave headroom for downstream transformations.
Occasionally, I use the Shadows slider to lift the shadows a small amount.
Highlight recovery does not seem to be a strong point, and if I need to recover highlights, I go elsewhere.
I don’t use the midtones slider because the result is too flat compared to other methods available in PWP after raw conversion – much the same with the rest of the gray controls.

S&N. Occasionally, I might do a light sharpen as capture sharpening and as an aid to better judge the effect of the rest of the raw controls. NR is deferred to downstream operations.

The result of the PWP raw conversion is that on some images (but not all), I can render more detail, more accurate colors, less noise, and better shadow detail than with the converter I have been using for several years. Better detail with PWP raw conversion can be achieved in a high percentage of images. These gains do take more work.

Jim