Pre vs. Post develop editing pros/cons?

[BeauRX]

Im new to digital photography processing and have a basic question regarding pre and post-develop editing. Given the non-destructive capability of editing with layers post develop, I don’t see any reason to do more than the minimum of global edits available prior to developing. Is there something I am missing?

My understanding is that the “develop" process de-mosaics the individual R, G, or B sensor pixels to uniform pixels each with R, G  and B values. From what I read the developed native Affinity Photo format can accommodate 16/32 bits per channel, so it would seem that there is no loss of dynamic range until generating/exporting to an 8 bits per channel format e.g. JPG.

Is there a technical benefit to doing some of the edits beyond the most basic ones, e.g. exposure, before developing? The only reason I could imagine, is the changes would somehow be done before or as part of the de-mosaicing process. My class instructor is using Camera Raw and Photoshop, but I think the same apply.

[James Ritson]

Hi Beau, by the time you start editing your image in the Develop persona, it's already been demosaiced. Anything done in Develop offers two technical advantages:

• The development is done in 32-bit float, meaning pixel values aren't clipped until you click Develop and move to the Photo persona.
• It uses a wide colour space for development called ROMM RGB (essentially ProPhoto), meaning you can intensity colours without clipping them—very useful for imagery with lots of artificial lighting like night time/low light shots.

Both of these can be carried over to the Photo persona, however. 32-bit processing can be specified in the Develop assistant (the little suit icon on the top toolbar), and you can also click the Profile option and change the final colour space from sRGB to ROMM RGB. Also, in Preferences>Colour, you can set the default colour profile to ROMM RGB so that processed images will always default to that colour space. Be careful with this if you bring in images that aren't tagged with a colour space (e.g. screenshots) as they will automatically be assigned the default profile.

Honestly, I wouldn't recommend touching 32-bit unless you're doing something that demands precision above what 16-bit offers, e.g. close-ups of clouds or skies, HDR, subjects with very fine tonal gradations etc, but it brings about other issues into your typical image editing workflow. For 99% of imagery, 16-bit is more than sufficient.

Editing in a wider colour profile I would recommend though, as you get benefits even if your final output is going to be sRGB. Check out the video I did for more info on this:

 

Just as an insight, my typical workflow involves opening a RAW file, removing the tone curve (you can do this through the assistant menu) then using basic adjustments to create a flat image that makes the most of the available dynamic range. I'll then develop that so it becomes a 16-bit image with a ROMM RGB colour profile and do most of the editing in the main Photo persona. To that effect, I only use Develop to create a flat image, and sometimes add initial noise reduction depending on the image.

Hope that helps!