RAW and Photoshop Workflow

[RegRoy]

Is the RAW processing supposed to be the bulk of your work before photoshop? I mean why would you do all this work in RAW and then go into PS to seemingly do a lot of it over again? It seems to me (and again I have zero experience with this so this is still conceptual for me) the same concept I asked about in a previous thread about LR and PS Softproofing. Why do all of this work in lightroom, only to export to PS where you have to do it all over to soft proof?

 

[Garbz]

You don't.

Lightroom is an engine based on Adobe CameraRAW, which is the plugin that opens RAW photos in Photoshop.

When from Lightroom you click "Edit in Photoshop" Lightroom instructs photoshop to open the NEF file in CameraRAW, apply all of the Lightroom edits to the image, and open the resulting "finished" image in Photoshop for further editing.

If the Photoshop version looks different to Lightroom with all the edits applied then one of the programs isn't setup properly. This is also why you will get an error if you update Lightroom to the latest version but don't update the CameraRAW plugin at the same time.

 

[RegRoy]

If the Photoshop version looks different to Lightroom with all the edits applied then one of the programs isn't setup properly. This is also why you will get an error if you update Lightroom to the latest version but don't update the CameraRAW plugin at the same time.

And should RAW be the bulk of your adjusting?

 

[Garbz]

As far as practical. RAW processors like Lightroom / Aperture work with the RAW data often in a colour space that is designed specifically to manipulate the linear data that is recorded by the sensor. All settings work on the full original data, and some things such as highlight recovery simply don't work outside of a RAW processor.

RAW processors are simply the best tool for doing the gritty conversions, like big changes in tone (exposure, saturation, contrast, etc). However they are still quite limited in what they can do overall (though getting less so with each new program that is released).

 

[Steve01]

Above all, the thing to remember is what every you do in ACR it's non destructive.
With that said a RAW image in the camera is basically all the data captured by the camera before you tell the camera to bake in specific settings referring to exposure, contrast, white balance, sharpening, and much, much more.

You can adjust all of these and a lot more in a "NON DESTRUCTIVE" way in ACR.
It's not redundant. The more you can accomplish in ACR (non destructively) the less you do in PS.