Posts Tagged ‘raw’

January 14th, 2010 Lightroom Tip – Setting your Camera Calibration and changing your Default Settings

Lightroom’s Default Develop Settings:

If you are anything like me, then you have spent all too long wondering a couple of things about lightroom (I use version 2.2) regarding importing RAW files and the default settings that Lightroom applies to them before you begin working on editing them.

Firstly, I wondered how to CHANGE those default settings that Lightroom applies – for example, it always applies certain values to the Basic settings as follows:

Note that the white balance is always defaulted to “As Shot” meaning it takes the setting from the RAW file each time.

I have taken issue with this in the past because a lot of my shots were starting off with the shadows clipped due to the combination of settings that were automatically applied. I could not find anywhere in the menu options that this could be changed and have previously  read on many forums that it is not possible to do so.

Camera Calibration:

Now the second thing that I have been wondering is about camera calibration. Since changing from my Sony A200 to a Canon 5D MkII I have noticed that a whole new bunch of options have appeared in the profile dropdown menu in the Develop module. Read the rest of this entry »

July 2nd, 2009 Recovering an underexposed shot

I originally posted this in the digital-photography-school.com forums, but in an effort to collate all of my best articles I am re-posting it here. The original read as follows:

Hey everybody,

I thought I would share with you my latest experience. I went out this evening with the intention of getting some nice dusk shots of the sea shore but left it a little late and it was pitch black when I got there. I took some shots anyway which turned out completely under exposed due to lack of light even at a 30 second exposure.

So I got them home, imported a RAW file into photoshop and after a little bit of fiddling about I came up with the image below.

Here are the steps I took to achieve the end result:

• Open RAW file in photoshop
• Increase the exposure by 2 stops and then “open image”
• Create an “Orton effect” layer by:
  • Duplicate background layer
  • Add gaussian blur to the duplicate
  • Set blend mode to Soft Light
• Add a curves adjustment layer to increase brightness
• Flatten, rotate to straighten and crop final image

I just wanted to share this really as an example of how awesome RAW files are in giving you the ability to recover a virtual complete disaster.

Before	After