RAW Conversion


	A Great way to edit RAW?


	Written by:- Siegfried Seierlein Last Updated:- 7th December 2008




		Picture taken with the Panasonic L10 in RAW

	It all start in the Camera Lets assume you own and use a advanced compact or a SLR camera. The reason I say that is that its typically one of said type digital cameras that will enable you to select the RAW file quality. I use two setting on my camera. These two I always save in the custom settings of the camera. The one setting use file type JPEG and the 2nd setting use file type RAW and JPEG combined. Memory is not expensive today and its worth it getting an external hard disk to save your pictures on. If you use the 2nd custom setting a lot like I do, then you will be happy to have this external hard disk. Now that we covered the basics, now we can sit back and discuss a better better way to edit your RAW files.

Photoshop Elements 7


			What is the advantage of using RAW? I think this is an open question. Many photographers use RAW and many never look at the RAW file option. Correctly you can ask, if its that great then please tell me what is the advantages of using RAW? My intention today was not to discuss the merits of using RAW but rather to discuss a better way of editing RAW files. I think important is to keep in mind that your digital camera always work with RAW files. With some camera models you just have the opportunity to decide, should the RAW file be developed in the camera or do you prefer to develop that RAW file on your PC. Personally I use a very simple argument. The camera has limited processing power and your PC has significantly more processing power in reserve. Using your PC to process RAW files will also enable you to use different editing software to process RAW files and not only that of the manufacturer. There are more technical reasons for using RAW files, for this article I will not discuss those.



		Picture taken with the Panasonic L10 in RAW

I decided to write this article with respect to PSE7. Version 6 use the same RAW converter as PSE7 and what we discuss here will therefore apply to PSE6. Elements 5 does not have access to the most recent RAW converter but what we discuss will also apply to version 5.

When you in the RAW converter then you will see the Slider controls like in the picture to the right. These sliders determine your typical RAW work flow. One will typically work from top to bottom. This is important and you should practice to develop your workflow from top to bottom. For example, do not first adjust the Brightness slider and then the Exposure slider.

I like to remind you of one more critical setting. The setting is ISO and it is important that you check your ISO setting before taking pictures. If you planning to do a critical shoot, rather set your ISO on 100 than leaving it on the Auto setting.

Another interesting aspect to remember is that all of the adjustments in the RAW converter is non destructive. For example if you do levels in the normal Photoshop Editor then the adjustment will damage your JPEG file. Adjusting the white balance and exposure in the RAW converter is safe and will not damage the RAW file.

The first setting to adjust in the RAW converter is to reset all the sliders to the “Camera RAW Default” state.

To your left you can see how to do that. Click on the button next to the dot in the picture to the left. A drop down menu will follow. In the drop down menu select the “Camera Raw Default” setting. On the picture you can see that the “Custom Settings” is selected, that is a different setting to what I proposed.

The “Camera RAW Default” setting will apply a set of default values to a group of sliders that are default values associated with the specific camera you use. This effectively mean that amongst other settings, that your camera color settings and white balance settings will be loaded into the RAW converter.

Step 1

The first step is to adjust the white balance. This is a an important step to master and its only with practice that you will master this step. One option is to can use the drop down menu in the picture to the right to adjust the white balance. In the drop down menu you can then select daylight, shade, clouds or any option that was closest to the conditions in which you took the picture.

The next option is to move and adjust the Temperature and the Tint sliders in order to find the correct white balance. Personally I never use this option because it is nearly impossible to find the correct settings moving these two sliders. These sliders really come to their full power when used in a creative way

The better option for adjusting the white balance of a RAW picture file is to use the White Balance eye dropper in the above picture. Click on the white balance tool and move the curser over a white point in the picture and select that white point. The Kelvin temperature scale will change plus the temperature and tint sliders will move into new positions. The challenge using this method is to learn how to identify the correct white or neutral gray points in the picture. A good method to help you practice finding the correct white point in the picture is to place a white piece of paper in the scene when you take the picture.

You can for example start with the drop down menu. If the sun was shining at the time you took the picture then select the Daylight option from the drop down menu. Look at the colors in the picture plus have a quick look at the color temperature value in the exposure slider box. Now you will have a good idea of where about the final setting should be. Select the white balance dropper and point to the white point you selected in the picture. If the colors improve and if the color temperature does not change to extreme then you moving in the right direction. If not then find another white point you can use. I have learned that one has to consider if the white point is in the shade or not, or when there is no white point in the picture then a “neutral gray” point will do the trick. As said before this is a matter of practice. For more information finding a neutral gray point in a picture see the article I wrote in the Photoshop section of this web site.

Pro Tip:-

The White Balance setting will ensure that all the colors in the picture is adjusted correctly. Many people think the white balance setting will only remove a color cast. That’s correct, but more important is that finding the exact right spot will also correct the fine color nuances in the picture.

When the white balance is adjusted correctly then you will see that both the Temperature and the Tint sliders will be in different positions. For example often one see the tint setting change and if you try and mimic that yourself then you will see just how complex setting these two sliders can become. That’s why its better to master the white balance tool.

Pro Tip:-

The most important tip is to always look at the picture when doing adjustments. Don’t just believe or trust the software, best is to believe your eyes. Many people use the drop down menu, then select a setting like daylight and even though they see the color is incorrect, they still trust the software without trying another method.




		Picture taken with the Panasonic L10 in RAW




	Picture A

Step 2.

The next step is to adjust the Exposure. All the Sliders in the picture on the left are used to fine tune the exposure. Please remember to work from the top to bottom when adjusting the exposure.

When looking at the histogram you will see 2 triangles above the histogram, one to the left and one to the right. Click on both of them and move the exposure slider to the left and right. As the picture under expose you will see the under exposed parts turn blue. The same will happen for the over exposure parts when you selected the triangles correctly. This function will help you to find exactly the correct dark (black) and bright (white) points when adjusting the exposure.

In the picture to the right you can see the triangles discussed above. You will also see the histogram plus at the bottom of the picture you will see three buttons.

The button to the left opens the adjustments page we are discussing in this article, the button in the middle is used to adjust the sharpness and noise. The button on the right has an interesting function. It is possible to download the original camera profiles from the Adobe web site and to install it in Elements. These profiles will adjust the RAW converter to the original manufacturer profiles. This is especially interesting to Canon and Nikon guys because some models has more than one profile to try. The E520 for example has only one profile with the manufacturing setting.


	Picture taken with the Olympus E520 in RAW

Lets have a look at each of the Exposure settings and what their functions are. Please take a few moments to carefully read the next few paragraphs because that will help you master exposure. Working from the top to bottom will help you to follow a specific enhancement workflow.

Exposure Slider:- (See Picture A)

The exposure slider let you adjust the exposure of the RAW picture file. The exposure adjustments are expressed in f-stops, similar to setting the exposure in your camera. The exposure adjustments are expressed in EV values. That means a value of 1 in the exposure box is equal to “One” full stop. There are several ”Assistants” in the software that will assist you finding the best exposure setting. The first assistant is the over exposure triangle at the top right of the histogram and the under exposure triangle at the top left of the histogram. It is important to look at these exposure warning signals when adjusting the exposure.

The second assistant is a general rule. Do not move the exposure slider more than 2 stops up or down. Two stops adjustment is already serious and will result in a big change. If you exceed 2 stops then the risk of degrading the picture increases. I found that any adjustment made in the RAW converter has to be made in small steps and after each step one should wait a moment to see the impact of the change.

I always adjust the exposure between half a stop and one full stop to the right. One can always recover “over” exposure with the Recovery Slider. Exposing to the right also reduce the risk of having noise in the shadow areas of the picture. You can apply this technique also when taking the actual picture. To read more about this aspect page to the Adobe web Site at:- http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/pdfs/linear_gamma.pdf

Pro Tip:- The 3rd assistant is the Alt Key. When adjusting the Exposure and the Blacks Sliders press the Alt Key and the screen color will change to help you “see” the over and under exposed areas in the picture. With this method it is easy to decide by how much and where in the picture you will accept over and/or under exposure in the picture. Keep in mind that a over exposure warning will turn the over exposed areas to “white”. An over exposed area that was turned into white will have no detail in the over exposed areas. Those areas will have the color white. The same is true for under exposure.

When you done with the exposure slider then you can move to the Recovery Slider.With the recovery slider it is possible to recover most or all the over exposed areas in your picture. Keep in mind that I advised you to over expose between half a stop and one full stop. Moving the recovery slider to the right will recover the purposely over exposed areas in the picture. The correction you will make with the recovery slider will depend on how much you over exposed the picture. Personally I try to limit the final (Recovered) over exposure to a absolute minimum. I basically only over expose areas like small parts in clouds or other bright parts in a picture. That’s typically in favor of retrieving important shadow detail. I will not over expose just because I have to. The interesting fact using the described method is that by over exposing with the exposure slider will brighten up shadow areas and the recovery slider will then recover only the highlight areas in the picture.




		Picture taken with the Olympus E520 in RAW

The “Fill Light” Slider:-

The fill light slider prepares the picture for the final Black Slider adjustment. Often at this point in time you could still have “under exposure” warning areas in the picture.

Moving the Fill Light slider to the right will lighten up the dark or shadow areas in the picture. You can also look at this slider as your secret HDR (High Dynamic Range) slider.

Brightening up the shadow areas will reduce the black or under exposure warning areas. Do not move this slider to far to the right because it could result in poor contrast and a under saturated look.

The Final Exposure Adjustments:-

The last adjustment is the Blacks Slider. With the exposure slider we adjusted the “maximum white” point in the picture and with the black slider we will adjust the minimum black value in the picture. Similar to adjusting the histogram in the normal editor, moving the black slider to the right will increase the contrast of the picture. Care must be taken that important detail is not turned into black by moving the black slider to much to the right. Pressing the Alt Key while moving the black slider will help you determine the best position for the black slider.

We have now completed the final exposure adjustment. The exposure will now be set correctly between the most white (left) and the most black (right on the histogram) point in the picture.

Now you can adjust the Brightness of the picture. Don’t confuse brightness with exposure. The exposure is set and all the brightness is, it will adjust the final brightness of the picture. The brightness adjustments will typically be small adjustments to fine tune the final look of the picture.

It could happen that you need to go back and do small adjustments to the recovery and the black sliders. This concludes the exposure adjustment of your picture. If you correctly exposed your picture when taking it in the field plus if you followed this procedure correctly then you will have good shadow detail with minimum noise.

The next slider is the Contrast Slider. Similar than with the normal editor I found it is important to only apply small adjustments to the contrast Slider. Personally I avoid making adjustments to the contrast and if I do then I never go into double digits. The contrast slider increase the contrast at high contrast points or areas in the picture. Its function is similar to the sharpening function and will prepare the picture for sharpening at a later stage.




		Picture taken with the Olympus E520 in RAW

The Clarity and the Vibrance Slider:-

Please keep in mind that working from the top to bottom its important to first adjust these two sliders before making any adjustments to the Saturation slider.

The Clarity slider will increase contrast in a clever way. Different to the contrast slider, which increase contrast over the complete range between the black and the white points of the picture, the clarity slider will only increase the contrast at the detail parts of the picture. I normally make very small adjustments to the contrast slider and larger adjustments to the clarity slider.

The Vibrance Slider will increase the saturation of the picture. It will target only the “weak” parts in the picture and not the complete picture like the saturation slider will do. Unlike the saturation you can use the vibrance slider more aggressively.


	Sharpening and Noise Reduction

The following description is short and most probably the most powerful of the complete article on a great way to process RAW files. I especially found the method I describe in this section of value to SLR owners. The reason is that higher quality SLR cameras typically gives a “soft” picture output. The reason for this is to “protect” the picture from any over sharpening. It is up to the photographer to tune and sharpen the output of the RAW file.

There are different arguments for sharpening RAW files. Some say one should only do little sharpening to RAW files, others say no sharpening at all. The reasons for applying different degrees of sharpening is complex and I will not discuss it in this article.

If you a beginner or if PSE 6 or 7 are your only picture editor then my advice is to use the RAW sharpening because its accurate and powerful.

I read many articles and I enjoy reading about photography. Not once did I read about this simple but highly effective method to master sharpening. I am not going to describe each slider to you because the above sliders represent a typical un-sharp mask and you can find the info on many places on the web.

Pro Tip:-

I call this a pro tip because that is what it is. Again work from the top to the bottom. First change the view to 100%. This technique will only work with a 100% view. Move the picture in the view such that you can see the key parts in the picture that needs sharpening.

Then with every adjustment you make, first press the Alt Key and then drag the slider. The screen will turn gray and you will see a similar screen than the one on the right. Do small adjustments at a time and keep on monitoring the “gray” screen carefully until you happy.

Important is to do small steps at a time and to look at the result before continuing. You will clearly see the result and with a bit of practice you will become a master with sharpening at this level plus you will start to enjoy sharpening your pictures.

The Detail Slider will do exactly what it says, look at the screen while adjusting the detail slider and you will see. The most interesting slider is the Masking Slider. When moving it to the right, while holding down the Alt Key, all the parts in the picture that will not be sharpened will turn from gray to black while continuing holding down the Alt key. This will help you to avoid “sharpening” flat surfaces and thus increasing noise on those flat surfaces. Only the remaining gray parts will be sharpened after applying the mask. Again be careful and look while adjusting the mask slider.




		Picture taken with the Olympus E520 in RAW

The final step is to convert or open the picture into the normal Elements Editor. Normally I will open the picture in 8 bit format into the normal editor. When opened in the normal editor you can do a number of additional steps or adjustments to your RAW file. In this article I will not discuss the different output settings. That we can discuss a next time.

Folks there is still a lot we can discuss on the Elements RAW converter. What I described here will change your experience with RAW files drastically, especially if these techniques are new to you.

In a next article we will look at another few interesting aspects of working with RAW files.

Kind Regards

Siegfried

Reader Question

Similar to previous times when I wrote an article I posted the link to the article on the well known photographic web site DPReview for comment. A few Oly and Panasonic guys commented, thanks guys. Amalric from Rome, Italy also commented and I decided to copy his questions at the bottom of the article because I believe they could assist others with similar questions. Thank you Amalric.

Amalric wrote:-

Hi Siegfried,

As always I enjoy your terse style in divulging the basics.

Personally I have always used the RAW development page in an intuitive way, working top to bottom with sliders as you suggest. However in so doing I missed certain parts that you explained well.

The first I almost never use is the White Balance slider, and that is because I trust the 'as shot' box. However the eyedropper tool is a good suggestion. I tend to use it only later in the workflow to remove colour casts.

Amalric many people trust the “As Shot” box. There is nothing wrong in doing that. The next step will be to look for a more precise and color rich way of setting the white balance and that is using the white balance eye dropper tool.

That brings me to another consideration. In my PE4 or & version for Mac usually the software makes the initial choice automatically. For instance the Recovery amount. Can we generally trust that IYO?

To give you a short answer on your question, the manufacturers build a exposure curve based on the general JPEG output the camera will have. The advantage of having RAW is to rebuild the exposure response to what we want.

Amalric this question can also be combined with your next question. I will answer it in two parts. Abobe together with the manufacturers developed a camera profile beta which will set the RAW converter to the default camera settings. To take advantage of these profiles it is necessary to download the beta profiles from the Adobe web site and to install them. Once installed you will find the default camera on the 3rd page of the RAW converter. I made mention of this page at the start of this article. http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Profiles

You also suggest to select the 'Camera Raw settings'. Will this reproduce faithfully Oly colours?

The setting I suggested is the “Camera RAW Defaults” Yes this will select a unique setting that will include the unique Oly colors found in the Oly profiles.

I, instead, use 'Custom Settings' since I inserted the Olycoly settings in PE, just to make sure I wouldn't miss the carefully chosen Oly colours.

The moment you make any changes to the temperature slider or the tint slider then you have a custom setting You can now select to save this custom setting to become a new Camera RAW Default setting or profile. This is not something I will discuss in this article, I like to do that in a next article. At this stage I prefer to reset the RAW converter to Camera Defaults.

Is it a different way to achieve the same result? Amalric, I think you will find your answer in the above discussion.

I will also learn to play with the histogram the way you suggested. I had no notion the the Alt key could be put to good use.

Amalric the Alt Key is the most important tool when working with the RAW converter. You say below that you prefer to use another sharpening software. I like to invite you to try the Alt Key in combination with the sharpening tools of the RAW converter as I discussed in the article. You will be surprised at its power.

I still don't understand in the text the difference between adjusting exposure and brightnesss, although again I tend to trust what the program chooses by default for brightness: sometimes it chooses very high values, perhaps because I tend to underexpose to save highlights.

This is a interesting question. Up to the point that I get to the Brightness Slider I normally do not give much thought on the exact brightness of the picture. The first few slider I use in a more theoretical way, keeping an eye on the over exposure and under exposure warnings, monitoring the histogram as I make adjustments and keeping an eye on the shadow detail and deciding what I want. (In a way one can look at the brightness slider as having a similar effect as what the gamma slider will have in more advanced RAW converter. Please see the updated description in the article.)

It is only when I get to the Brightness Slider that I really give notice to the overall brightness of the picture. I then only do fine adjustments with the brightness slider. If you mastered the first few sliders then you will not have to make large adjustments with the brightness slider.

Instead the program never alters automatically exposure, but it makes good sense: it is a conservative approach, but you seem to suggest differently.

It is possible to instruct the program to automatically adjust the exposure, just hit the “Auto” button above the Exposure Slider”. Again nothing wrong in doing so. Its when you become more advance that you will start doing it yourself or when you start to stretch the exposure curve. Then you will also start to use the exposure sliders.

Down to the bottom, a part which helped me is the Clarity/Vibrance. I take it deals with micro-contrast and micro-saturation, in details, right? I never used it, possibly because I don't pixel peep at that stage.

Amalric these are two great sliders and as you correctly says, they only do small adjustments at exactly the right places.

The part on sharpening is less interesting to me, because I use FocusMagic at a later stage. So I leave masking to zero and the other defaults as they are.

You right, its good to use a dedicated sharpening program. For those guys who use the PSE RAW converter, please check out the power of using the Alt Key plus take a look at my description of the Masking Slider. This sharpening function is of particular interest to E520/420 users.

Noisewise my PE version automatically corrects only for chroma noise, while luminance is left to 0. I usually don't go into that unless shooting high ISO, and then using the NoiseNinja plugin.

RAW 5,1 and RAW 5,2 does allow the user to adjust both the Chroma and the Luminance Noise. The secret is to do small adjustments at a time. The Luminance Slider is self explanatory and the Color Slider will adjust the Chroma noise. Chroma noise is the random type color noise one find in a picture and Luminance is the grayscale type noise found in a picture. The solution lies in the combination of these two sliders and the best way to find that combination is to do small adjustments at a time.

I really appreciate your effort to keep everything simple and in a conversation style. It makes reading much easier than complicated or sanitized tutorials, which I tend to avoid.

Thank you very much.

Am.

Photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/amalric

Amalric thanks again for your kind feedback. I am sure it will assist many others to better understand the article plus the PSE RAW converter.