Last Saturday I had the privilege of assisting Kevin (of Tampa Photo Weddings) in shooting an event their studio was hired for. Among other things I’ve learned that night, Kevin convinced me to start shooting RAW.

So, as I’m learning my ways around Nikon Capture NX and Adobe Photoshop CS2’s RAW capabilities, I’m kind of beginning to like the idea. First thing that jumped out was the fact that Nikon Capture NX handles it’s native RAW files (NEFs, to be precise) a lot better than Photoshop. This, of course, could easily be due to my lack of experience with either product. Nevertheless, I feel that after few days of messing with them I’m beginning to iron out my first workflow of the RAW postprocessing. So far these are the steps I noticed myself repeating more or less consitently: 1) Loading RAW (NEF) files into Nikon Capture NX 2) Correcting Exposure (if I have to, and for this event I actually had to bump it up all the way to +1EV, on the portrait shots only though) 3) Correcting White Balance (I only had to do very minor adjustments) 4) Correcting (dialing down) Saturation

All of the steps above are basically un-doing some of the in-camera setting I had that night. And the fact that up to this point I’m still operating withing the native settings of a RAW file means that the image has suffered no degradation in quality thus far.

5) Export resulted file into Photoshop (File->Open With… in Capture NX - don’t even have to save an intermediate file, straight port from Capture to PS - very nice)
6) Photoshop gets the imported image in TIFF format, which is really good, with TIFF being 16 bit data source as opposed to 8-bit JPEG
7) Cropping as needed
8) At this point, I only tweaked the firework shots a bit more - I curved them really hard (brightening up the highlights and darkening the rest) and sharpened them (using unsharpen mask) also quite heavy - up to 5px radius.
9) Switch image mode from 16 bit to 8 - getting ready to save a JPEG
10) Save the final JPEG, ready to upload online.

It’s actually not that bad… I’m sure in the future, as I get more comfortable with the Capture NX I will be doing the rest of the steps in there, but as of now I have a lot more experience in Photoshop, so it actually works out better for me using it for anything that has to do with “cooked” (non-RAW) files.

Oh, yeah, the 4th of July gallery is here. Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.