DISCUSSION Processing RAW Photos

[gieffe22]

 

Basics of raw.

This will be an easy guide to start editing your photo's in a more fine and better way, compared to stock processing of the camera did you used till now.

1. RAW: enable raw in camera settings did you use, jpeg is not raw, even if you use libpatcher in gcam, raw is non processed file; it means that image is the one that camera sensor see directly without any processing added over it.
   
2. Editors: to edit a raw, or to convert in jpeg you need a editor. The best way is to use a pc to edit, smartphone screen are to small to edit properly a raw and look the imperfections. I counsil to use Photoshop with camera raw, or lightroom, or raw therapee, or many others desktop grade programs. If you need to edit on mobile there are some basics good editor, the best are snapseed and lightroom mobile.
   
3. Light: When you open raw you need to equalize the light that sensor have captured before, raw can appear over or underexposed, you can tune the image with the sliders (most important are highlights, shadows, exposure, white balance, black levels, white levels).
   
4. Colors: this is the most important part, most of the times the programs have a detailed section to fine-tune every single color frequencies and saturation of single colors, this is NEEDED to have the best results; of course you need to trust your eyes and your tastes, there’s not a specific way to render colors. Optional, DCP: if you have a specific color space profile (dcp) you can use it, generally it is created with a calibration tool, is a very precise and better way to render colors (even if you need to fine tune in every case to have a more detailed and realistic image); photoshop or lightroom (lightroom mobile too!) support dcp, just importa dcp file in the programs (to use on photoshop in camera raw you have to copy dcp in roaming>adobe>camera raw>camera profiles; other applications just have a import function that is easier generally). After you have imported dcp in your editing application you will find new image profile in profiles section, you have to select and you are done, very easy. Then you can fine tune again colors as you like if you find some problems. If your camera does not have dcp is not a big problem, you can still tune colors with the help of your eyes, using the per-frequency sections on camera raw/lightroom.
   
5. Noise: Raw can be noisy, there are two type of noise most of the time, luma and chroma. Luma is the black and white noise (easy explain), chroma is the most colorfull (and difficult to remove) one, because contains green, violets, reds, blue and many other type of colorfull grain. The easy way is to increase the chroma noise reduction before starting the luma noise reduction; in this way you will “convert” colorfull noise in black and white, that is much easier to remove, but there’s a big problem, bigger is the chroma denoise bigger is the loss of color information, so try to balance the need to clean from noise with pure colors details. The editor you choise to use of course have a specific section to denoise image, and it can be different in every apps.
   
6. Final touch: At this point you have done the base of raw development, you can pus hit further adding some effect or luts (some type of filters). The last thing is to export, you can export in jpeg or even other types.