RAW Troubles

table1349 · Sep 25, 2008

What camera are you shooting. They usually come with a disk with their own software that will handle RAW files. If it Canon you should have a disk with Digital Photo Professional on it. It is a RAW and JPG editor and converter. A good place to start is what you got with the camera.

ANDS! · Sep 25, 2008

+1 to the above. Just use the software that came with your camera. It has two benefits:

1 - It can actually effortlessly view the pictures.
2 - It was designed to read your cameras raw files. I don't know the working relationship these manufacturers have with Adobe and various other software companies, but the person who designed it first will usually have the best algorithm for reading your cameras RAW file.

Lightroom, as far as I'm concerned, is a waste of time. Although, if you don't have Photoshop, I can see how it might be of use to you.

paigegreen916 · Sep 25, 2008

i have a Sony Alpha. i do use the RAW converter that come with the camera, but i can only see one image at a time and can only save the file one at a time. i will look into the lightroom tutorials, but if i could cut lightroom out of it and just mass covert to TIFF so i can work just in photoshop that would be ideal for me.

ANDS! · Sep 25, 2008

You don't get a fully fledge image editing program with your Sony Alpha? CaptureNX is the Nikon variety and (to me at least) does a much better job of handling Nikons RAW files than a straight Camera Raw import into Photoshop. Plus, it has the added benefit of being able to adjust the pictures "settings" in a much more natural way than Photoshop.

Big Mike · Sep 25, 2008

but if i could cut lightroom out of it and just mass covert to TIFF so i can work just in photoshop that would be ideal for me.

Lightroom could do that for you...just import all images and then export to TIFF. However, you would be bypassing a lot of the benefits of shooting RAW in the first place. When you have a RAW file, you can change the white balance, and adjust several other things, without doing much 'damage' to the image. In other word, you have lots of flexibility. Once you convert/export the image to TIFF or JPEG, those things are applied to the image, so when you change them it's 'destructive editing'.

It doesn't have to take very long. In Lightroom, you can apply changes globally or to selected images. This makes it very fast to apply tweaks to many images in a short time. You can also view, rate & tag images. So this way, you can select the ones you want (or just the ones you don't) then ignore (hide) them and work only on keepers.

It really depends on your personal style of editing, but if you do the same sorts of things on a lot of image, you can do that a lot faster in Lightroom that opening them one by one in Photoshop. You can batch things in Photoshop and run actions, but Lightroom has presets, which are basically like actions.

Kegger · Sep 25, 2008

If you are using CS2 you can do a batch process. You can correct exposure and white balance then save them to .TIFF, one right after the other. Then go back later and edit away.

paigegreen916 · Sep 29, 2008

this has all been really helpful. thanks everyone!

cecilc · Sep 30, 2008

paigegreen916 said:
i shot in RAW for the first time last week.

Well ... considering that this was your first time shooting in RAW, it's not really surprising that you're experiencing a little frustration at processing those files ...

But that can all be fixed, you know ....

I'm with Mike in recommending LightRoom .... I shoot nothing BUT RAW files and my post-processing time has actually decreased by using LightRoom. But you need to be comfortable in using LightRoom - and it sounds as though you're not really comfortable using ANY RAW processor right now .... which may account for much of your frustration. Your comments about LightRoom indicate to me that you don't know anything about how LightRoom operates .....

Go to Amazon and find a book about how to use LightRoom and get it and take the time to go through the book with one of your own photos and see just how LightRoom operates. I will bet money that if you invest some time to learn how to use LightRoom that you'll find your processing time actually becomes worthwhile instead of a struggle ....