Originally posted by MSL Okay, I'll put Drink Whisky first. Happy to share one with you too.
After that can you elaborate on a couple of steps - what do you use to calibrate the monitor (although I'm sure this has been covered in other posts). When you check for white balance (WB) what are you looking for? When you adjust for levels and noise reduction, is that to find something that is more pleasing to the eye, or are there specific targets - specifically for the highlight/shadow clipping?
I use the Pantone HueyPro to calibrate my monitor. It plugs in via USB, and after taking a reading of interior light levels, you suction cup it to the monitor. The software directs the monitor to show varying levels of white, gray, and black, then red, blue and green, which the little suction cupped sensor 'sees'. The software then sets the color, contrast, and brightness, and white balance of the monitor. There are various calibration tools on the market, and I'm sure there is a thread here listing them somewhere.
I tend to use custom white balance when I can, and the in-camera presets when applicable. If I completely screw up the white balance in-camera, I'll use a preset in Adobe Camera RAW as the baseline, or use the dropper on a neutral (white or black) part of the scene and tweak from there. I'm typically looking for any suspect green or purple cast to the scene, and if there are people involved, I'm looking at skin tones.
Adjusting for levels has to do with maximizing the dynamic range of the image. On dreary, low-contrast days, I'm making shadows darker and highlights brighter. In high-contrast images, I'm trying to lighten the shadows and darken the highlights to capture as much detail as possible. Sometimes getting the best exposure for the subject will clip some background highlights or shadows, and there is nothing you can do.
Noise reduction is primarily to taste. Any noise that is left in the image may end up being enhanced when I sharpen the image later, so I try to reduce as much as I can without losing detail.
Below is an example of an image I tried to take at sunset, of a lighthouse, a park light, and a park bench. Tried really hard in camera to preserve as much shadow detail as possible without blowing out the sky.
In the As-Shot RAW image you can see by the Histogram that I barely kept the shadow detail and still blew out some of the highlights. The red channel is clipped.
Using the 'Recovery' tool (which darkens highlights) I was able to bring that back down. The 'Fill Light' tool brought up some shadow detail. I believe I also set the white balance off the sailboat, as the preset for 'cloudy' was too red for my liking.
And here is the final image after a slight crop/leveling of the horizon and a curves adjustment.
There are times that a JPG will give an accurate, detailed rendering of the scene. When the light is more challenging, I am always very glad to have the RAW file to work with.
I don't buy the 'I don't like to manipulate images' argument with regard to processing RAW files. Trusting the JPG settings of the camera to perform the JPG conversion simplifies things, but it doesn't make one any more accurate than the other. In fact, nothing that I did above would keep that image from being printed in a newspaper - it is all the digital equivalent of working in the darkroom.