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Develop RAW before making other changes


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Hello - I was watching one of the amazing Affinity tutorials on Vimeo - working with under exposure on a RAW image. Only a couple of changes were made to the RAW image then it was developed into a JPEG for further work.

 

My question as complete novice is - why were not all the changes made to the RAW image.

 

Complete Novice who takes mostly Drone Photos..

 

 

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The way I think of a RAW file is that it's just unprocessed sensor data from the camera. The only thing that needs done to "that" data are simple adjustments for exposure and/or noise in order to bring out as much information as possible from the sensor.

 

After that is done, the real magic (the idea in your head of what you want your image to say), is done in the Photo Persona, where anything goes. I don't believe you are working with a jpeg at that point, more like a TIFF file with all the information still intact but enhanced by the RAW Develop Persona.

 

Getting to the output/export portion is what decides the final file type. JPEG if that's what you need or TIFF or whatever.

 

I'm sure more experienced people will chime in soon and give you better examples.

 

 

p.s. If you ever get into drone videos you should check out this guys youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/fhagan02/videos. I've helped my son test a lot of drones that he built. He's moved beyond diy drones at this point but the youtube channel I linked is full of good information on the hows and whys of shooting drone video no matter what software you use or what drone you fly.

Skill Level: Beginner, digital photography, digital editing, lighting.

Equipment: Consumer grade. Sony Nex5n, Nikon D5100, (16MP sony sensors)

Paid Software: Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, Lightroom4

Free Software: NIK collection, Sony CaptureOne9, Cyberlink PhotoDirector6, Hugin, ImageJ, MS Ice, Davinci Resolve

Computer: Win10 home, CPU Skylake I7-6700, GPU Saphire HD7850 1G, Plextor SSD

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It really is not possible to make any meaningful changes to RAW. Theoretically might be possible to tweak sensor data but what is the use? (Some claim RAW is uneditable so it is good for legal use..) Some minor metadata can be changed.

 

When you develop RAW in AP it is practically an unsaved Affinity Photo file (I guess some of it in RAM, some in disk). It is not a JPEG until you export it to JPEG.

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 Only a couple of changes were made to the RAW image then it was developed into a JPEG for further work.

 

My question as complete novice is - why were not all the changes made to the RAW image.

 

The main reason is that currently, the Develop persona has only relatively few adjustment tools compared to the Photo persona - simply put, you can do far to the image after export (I'd advise exporting to tiff, rather than to jpeg, incidentally) than while in the Develop persona.

 

The way I think of a RAW file is that it's just unprocessed sensor data from the camera. The only thing that needs done to "that" data are simple adjustments for exposure and/or noise in order to bring out as much information as possible from the sensor.

 

Not exactly. In fact a number of Raw converters today (Lightroom Capture One, for example) provide so many "image editor" adjustment tools that many users find them entirely sufficient in themselves, without any need for further processing in an image editor.

 

Indeed, a number of adjustments to an image are far better done during the Raw conversion stage than afterwards - white balance, highlight and shadow adjustments, exposure compensation, lens distortion, CA fixing - are all best performed on the Raw data.

 

Funnily enough, there's far less of an advantage to dealing with noise at the Raw stage, if you then intend to further post process the file in an image editor. 

Keith Reeder

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In terms of what should be done in RAW or not.

 

Generally, I would recommend 'as much as is necessary' to give you the image you want as far as image quality is concerned. As for the rest; image manipulation may be needed to produce the'final image' but the quality of the original/base/negative cannot IMO be improved by that manipulation.

 

It may be that after manipulation you, as the producer, are happier with what you see but as far as its production is concerned less is more. The less your software interposes itself into the equation the more quality you are likely to retain. The very best software has a light touch. :)

 

Strictly my personal taste and goals decide where I muck about with the RAW file but the above covers most of it.

 

Regards.   Sharkey

MacPro (late 2013), 24Gb Ram, D300GPU, Eizo 24",1TB Samsung 850 Archive, 2x2Tb Time Machine,X-t2 plus 50-140mm & 18-55mm. AP, FRV & RawFile Converter (Silkypix).

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