Some people have asked me how I do my RAW file conversion.
I let you look into my kitchen!
When I go out for a typical photo-walk, I tend to shoot for 2-3 hours and may end up with about 200
RAW files.
At home all the post-processing and "digital negative development" is done with
Adobe Lightroom (LR), and since version 2 is released, there is hardly ever the need for me (!) to use Photoshop (PS) in parallel. To say it right away, I love Lightroom, probably more than anything else that is installed on my machine (and there is loads), but I won't go into this right now. Although this is a very subjective statement, there may be a lot of people out there who are able to objectively (?!) tell you why LR rocks.
So, here's the workflow I tend to follow:
First thing, import and convert on the fly the vendor specific
RAW files into "quasi" standard
DNGs files. Next, I force myself to bin (and I mean delete!) at least 3/4 of all the pictures. I feel there is no point in keeping mediocre images and clutter my photo library.
Then I start to develop one picture "roughly", hence adjust exposure, contrast (using curves) and brightness if necessary. Done with this picture, I tend to sychronise the develop setting to pictures that were shot under similar conditions (just hit the "sync" button and you're done). I keep doing this for the remaining pictures. The synchronisation helps a great deal to speed up. After maybe 3-5 minutes the 50 pictures are crudely developed. Now I tend to have another look over the pictures and bin again those that do not get my attention.
Now, after this rough tour, I start to look more closely at each individual picture, do the B&W conversion carefully and if necessary make a few local edits. Now with LR 2.0, the amazing thing is that for local edits I don't need PS any more and all is non-destructive, such as brighten the eye sockets, eyes or dark hair, slightly burn the background highlights or add a gentle vignette etc etc etc. Infinite possibilities. It just feels all so natural and it makes one feel like almost being back in the darkroom, developing the B&W prints, though it may not be as romantic and smelly (sorry folks) and most importantly, it is all non-destructive applied dynamically on top of the RAW data (unlike
Aperture from Apple). Impressive job Adobe!
After development is done, you can keyword, sort, catalogue, print and upload to the web.
I have made a few screenshots to demonstrate the development process of one picture below, including the new and lovely local adjustments tool.
Step 1: B&W conversion.
Step 2: Cyclist too dark: push 1 stop. Also, added clarity and sharpness.
Step 3: Background too bright, -1.3 stops and lower contrast.
Step 4: Vignetting (I like that style).
Very rough mask for this demo, but with the maximal feathering result is still OK.
My Cactus set for example only worked within a range of 10 paces! However, there are many suggestions out there, particularly within the Flickr Strobist group on how to overcome these limitations. Many suggest to use an external 433MHz antenna (Jeremy Kuster), but alternatively there are people who suggest a simpler solution that seems to work as well (Strobemonkey) and therefore I gave it a shot, with slightly different parameters though (figure on the left for illustration):
