Getting the RAW to look anything like the JPG

[Xzenor]

Hey,

This is more of a technique question. Not a problem with Affinity Photo.

So, I dove into the RAW pictures and I'm running into walls here. My phone can shoot RAW but also creates a JPG from that and somehow, I can't get the RAW to look decent. The jpeg that's autogenerated by my phone always looks better, and it's not even a really great camera.

Now I'm not saying the JPG looks great.. It isn't. But it's better than what I can make of it for some reason.

Can anyone learn/help/teach me to make something decent of this? I added the jpg and the raw.. I'm used to working with png and jpg for photomanipulation but working with raw is fairly new to me..

IMG_20210414_165109.dng

[James Ritson]

Hi @Xzenor, I was interested in what the RAW file might look like so I had a quick go at processing it. The out of camera JPEG has some very harsh highlight rendering which is completely fixable in the DNG file. I actually ended up doing everything with layers in the main Photo Persona to keep it all non-destructive: I would recommend trying this approach rather than trying to do too much in the Develop Persona, you can have a lot of fun experimenting once you change your mindset slightly.

I've attached the JPEG of my attempt, which I tried to keep fairly natural in appearance:

 

All I did for the RAW development was bring the Highlights slider down to -81. The rest was all layer work which involved masked negative clarity, masked sharpening, various adjustment layers, some brush work to selectively darken areas of the image, and a little bit of live perspective to straighten up the background slightly.

I could probably sit and type out a more detailed breakdown at some point, but if you wanted to check the .afphoto document out I've put it on Dropbox here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5gy11lu4ptu6qi1/IMG_20210414_165109.afphoto?dl=0 (it's around 100MB, too big for a forum attachment). All the layers are labelled and everything is non-destructive so you can tweak everything and have a look at the parameters and blending options used.

Hope that helps! If you wanted a more hyper-real edit that's also achievable, but I tried to keep it neutral. It's a slightly tricky edit since the bright background and water detail both fight for attention in the image, so everything has to be done in moderation..

[Xzenor]

Hi James,

Yes, I've seen enough of your videos to know you prefer to do as little as possible in the Develop persona :)
I prefer non-destructive as well but I didn't mention any of it to keep all options open.

The highlights in the jpg were indeed terrible but the raw was dark and flat. Brightening it gave it a washed out look and the colors were terrible overall. Worse than the JPG (with my experience) even with the saturation to the max (I'll admit, that was in the develop persona)

I downloaded the afphoto file. Thank you for your time and effort! This is very educative! The result looks kinda like what I tried to achieve. The grass actually looks green instead of something close to white and the swan still looks like the black swan it was, instead of a dark black.... thing... with  white spots and a beak.

I am curious though.. I get all the changes, except the perspective layer at the top. Why did you change the perspective? Not out of criticism but purely out of curiosity..