Photo editing: procedure sequence

[johnnievw]

Provide a "best practise" procedure for editing RAW format photos. One gets a RAW editor with the camera, there is Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop (CS or Elements). Al these have similar functions! It seems you can only do white balance in the camera's RAW converter and ACR. Canon's editor allows direct conversion to CS. SHould you first do things in the RAW converter or should you just use the converter to convert directly to CS? Also: is there a preferred sequence of the manipulations: histogram / contrast / saturation / sharpening. I see some articles warn against sharpening early on. Also: one sees that manipulating the graphs (histogram) affects the colour and contrast (or not?). Please have a good article on all this. Johnnie van Wyk, South Africa

[Matt Bennett]

We have a RAW feature coming up in Issue 126, out in September!

[ALwin]

1. There is no 'best practice', it all depends on the image you want to create.
e.g. If you want to make a black and white photo, you convert to black and white before you change any other settings.
There isn't any fixed or rigid rule about the order of the settings you need to change. Just think about how you want your final output to look and then consider which settings should be adjusted. And finally you need to understand what each setting does to the image.

2. Adobe Camera Raw is not just about adjusting white balance. You can adjust the exposure, contrast, highlights, noise reduction, sharpness, etc.

[photographer39]

Well , Subgroups come from similar types of images in several ways. They can be similar activities, similar feelings, similar objects or things, a progression of time ... Each body of work tends to produce different types of subgroups. Arrange the subgroups in rows going away from you.