M
Mitch Alland
Guest
I'll start by repeating a posting on my B&W processing that I made in another thread:I suggest someone start a thread on Ricoh DNGs and RAW processing. There's a lot of knowledge here, collectively, on this topic...
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I use Lightroom as a contact sheet or light table, looking at the RAW files in colour, with a bit of sharpening (25) and some increase in contrast. Sometimes I convert the pictures to B&W in Lightroom, but only to see how they look: I do the actual conversion and all the post-processing in LightZone.
In doing the conversion in LightZone I usually place the point in the yellow section of the colour wheel, towards and top and right of the yellow section; but in high ISO pictures (800 and and 1600) I've put the point into the blue section which reduces grain a bit. I have not been doing any chroma noise reduction, but am experimenting with this for high ISOs.
I tend to be very aggressive with sharpening and often apply the sharpening tool, which is USM, twice at 20/50/0 to bring out mid-tone contrast; but for some pictures this is clearly too much and creates problems with high-contrast edges, in which case I only do it once, or apply this double sharpening to only a part of the pictures. As I find GX100 files quite soft I often also apply the sharpening tool a third time at 100/5.0/20, which also sharpens the grain; but often I have to pull back on the 5.0, which is very radical, to 2.5 or 1.5. Alternatively, I pull transparency/opacity slider to 50% or 25%.
In setting the tones my first move is to add a Tone Mapper with Hard Light or Mutiply to get a rich gradation. But I then add more Tone Mappers lightening the pictures, as well as doing selective dodging and burning. To control highlights I often add Relight with a selection of the high tones.
Of course all this could be done in Photoshop but I find it much easier to work in LightZone. Also, I save a good number of LightZone Styles and apply them to pictures that have a similar look to the picture that the Style came from. I then edit the selections in the various tool to get them in the right place for the second picture; and add or subtract tools as required to get the picture to look like I want it to.
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A question: Wouter mentioned that sometimes he shoots at -1.0 EV to preserve highlights: the few times that I've shot a -0.7 EV I found the files difficult to process, but that may be because I was trying to apply the same method as to my other files— any hints on how to deal with such underexposed files?
Please feel free to talk about colour as well as B&W processing.
—Mitch/Bangkok
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/