On Mar 7, 2007, at 6:19 PM, Markus Maurer wrote: > ... As far as my understanding regarding raw processing goes so > far, as much > adjustments as possible with the exception of sharpening and maybe > denoising > should be made in the converter and not later in Photoshop to get > the least > quality loss and best result, is that right?
If you work in PHotoshop CS2/Camera Raw/Bridge, as close as you can get to final results with the RAW conversion processing before editing in Photoshop proper is the right way to go. I never do sharpening in Camera Raw ... CS2's Smart Sharpen filter is much more adept. Sharpening in Camera Raw I have set for preview only. Most of the time I have had no need for noise reduction other than a very minor tweak in Camera Raw, but again PS CS2 has noise reduction and there are plenty of plugins. With Lightroom, I find that I only need to do further adjustment in CS2 about 5% of the time so I complete most of my work in Lightroom and then edit a rendered copy of the file in CS2 only when necessary. > Is there a difference quality wise between Lightroom, Camera Raw > and Pentax > Laboratory or other raw converters? Subject of much debate. Lightroom and Camera Raw share almost all their RAW conversion algorithms under the covers. Pentax Lab/Browser uses the Silkypix conversion engine, but is a piece of junk as far as useability goes. Silkypix' user interface is utterly impenetrable to me ... total garbage ... but some folks love its rendering. There are other choices as well. My testing put out the best A3 prints with Lightroom, even better than I was getting with PS CS2/Bridge/CR, so that's what's doing most of my work now. > Camera Raw seem to be the simplest for me on first sight and if > it's auto > settings are good enough I could batch process pef's with Bridge/ > Photoshop, > any opinions on that? It is very rare that the auto-defaults of any of these things produce the best results. By and large, I built up my own set of defaults for Camera Raw and automated most of the grunt work of my image processing with PS CS2/Bridge/CR for a couple of years to very good results. Now I'm using Lightroom and finding it about 3-5x more productive as an environment, and FAR more productive on printing, sorting, assembling, making publishable/saleable sets of photos. There are no easy answers. Learning image processing and workflow takes time and effort, study. What works best for one person may be anathema to another. Needs differ. Godfrey www.gdgphoto.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
