Hi I use Photoshop elements 7 and am just trying to figure out if you are just doing some processing and no major editing to a photo e.g Straighten WB Exposure adjust Recover Highlights Contrast Colour (vibrance slider) Sharpen Crop then should you just go ahead and do it all with Adobe Raw. All the above acts can be done by my Adobe Raw so is there any benefit to not doing some of these tasks in Raw and then converting to tiff and then carrying out these tasks? Thanks for any help T
And the reason for that is, ACR doesn't change the pixels. All the adjustments are non-destructive. If you straighten the image in ACR it will be cropped when in opens in Photoshop. If you have your ACR preferences set to the 16-bit color depth any further editing done in Photoshop remains non-destructive. If you want to use the Filters you'll see many of them 'grayed out' because they are not available for use in the 16-bit color depth. You can click on Edit>Mode> and select 8-bit color depth mode to use the other filters. But note: edits done in 8-bit mode are destructive. You will be altering pixels at that point.
I swear that certain functions in ACR do NOT work as well as they do in Photoshop... particularly sharpening and contrast functions. I tend to stick to exposure, temperature, brightness and vibrance. Generally I'll do everything else in PS.
These are all best done in ACR, assuming the "sharpening" you are refering to is "input sharpening". Sharpening is generally something done twice. Once in the initial editing of the file, before any pixel editing, and a second time at the very end. The last sharpening step is print size specific, done after the image is resized appropriately for the intended print size. You often do this separately for each print size you make, saving separate size specific copies of the file. BTW, editing in an image editor (e.g. Photoshop) is still distructive editing when working in 16 bit mode. Its just less distructive than working in 8 bit. The only non-destructive "editing" in Photoshop occurs when using Adjustment Layers.
