Colour in Develop Persona

[CharlesG]

Hello Folks,

I have a question about adjusting colours in the develop persona.  I have a fairly good grasp of what I am trying to do with exposure, white balance, contrast, shadow/highlights when developing a raw image.  One thing I haven't quite come to grips with is the best way to handle colour when editing a raw file.

Is it best to have a fairly neutral/true to life representation before developing and moving on to the photo persona?  Or should vibrance and saturation be adjusted earlier rather than later?  I intuitively don't like to raise saturation or adjust  the separate colour channels on the tone curve before developing, for some reason I think that there is more nuanced control of colour in the photo persona.  But I also fear that if I am not adjusting saturation or vibrance in the develop persona then perhaps information is being baked into the image that won't be available in the photo persona. 

I am ready to be wrong on any or all of these points, and I'm sure there is differing opinions on this, but would love to hear some thoughts.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[NotMyFault]

Very few functions are working better in Develop Persona.

All the rest can be done in photo Persona, with the big advantage of non-destructive workflow. Since V2 you can re-edit RAW, with some constraints (must use Serif RAW).

• basic exposure, highlights, shadow adjustment to get everything into 0 to 1 range (in histogram)
• White balance works different in both Personas
•  chromatic aberration
• Lens correction 
• Clarity works different in both Personas
• Noise reductions works different

So the advise is do as little in Develop, then switch to Photo.

But on the other hand is a question of personal preferences and style. If you want to, do more in Develop Persona.

[user_0815]

I’d agree with the above points. 
Especially clipped highlights and true white balance can’t be recovered. 
Except when you develop into 32 HDR which retains highlight values above 1. 

Usually I do shadows & highlights, WB, noise and adjust saturation to be roughly where I want it. Sometimes I add a little bit of detail to improve sharpening later. That’s basically it. 
Then I develop in 16 or 32 bit where all that can be pushed and pulled quite a lot.