[atupdate]

Yes. Common problems that should be addressed in the RAW file & then what can be done and what *shouldn't* be done to the RAW processed jpeg file to improve the picture.

If you look in your camera menu, the main jpeg controls you can adjust are sharpness, contrast, and saturation. Those are the same basic things you need to adjust on a raw image.

If you know how to add a curves layer to your background image, a simple S-curve will boost both the contrast and the saturation. If the saturation still needs more adjustment, there is a hue/saturation adjustment feature available on many of the programs.

Here is screenshot showing a simple S-curve. I use Paint Shop Pro instead of PSE so the screen will look a little different for you.



Levels is similar to curves but I use it most for boosting the brightness of the image (bump the gamma level - the center point) without blowing the highlights.

You always save sharpening until last. The sharpening setting will differ from photo to photo and between full size photos and those that you resize for posting on the web. I find after resizing for the web, I like to use Unsharp Mask for sharpening (radius around 1 at 75-100% Strength)

If anyone would like to work through an image or two, we can do that using the Post Processing Challenge MediaFire account to give you a place to post your full size Raw images.

Tim

[45 Mike]

This is my first attempt to convert from RAW and actually using some kind of intelligent intention and process.
The top is a tiff file from the raw data, that is as unchanged as I could get it.
The next is the jpeg the camera gave me.
The bottom is my output from RAW after GIMP process.

[atupdate]

This is my first attempt to convert from RAW and actually using some kind of intelligent intention and process.
The top is a tiff file from the raw data, that is as unchanged as I could get it.
The next is the jpeg the camera gave me.
The bottom is my output from RAW after GIMP process.

You did a nice job of bringing out the details from the Raw image. Here is my tweak of your Gimp processing using Paint Shop Pro.

1. Modified S-curve layer. I locked the upper right quadrant to prevent the curve from blowing out the detail in the sky.



2. I did a little sharpening with Unsharp Mask (Radius 1 and Strength 100)



I think this gives an equivalent pop like the in-camera jpeg with a bit more detail (thanks to your processing)

Tim

[Liney]

I have to admit I'm becoming a fan of RawTherapee, in fact I've probably ended up using it more than GIMP which i used to use. The general process of post-processing is more or less the same regardless of the application you use, so I guess my advice would be learn the basic (or make yourself a checklist of what actions) then try each application until you find the one that you feel happiest with.

[Rondec]

I think there are two big things with post processing -- seeing your image and knowing your program. The first thing is to see what you need to "fix" on your image. Do you want to bring up the foreground and darken the sky a little? Do some sharpening? Dodge or burn this area or that? Fix odd white balance? All of these things can be done fairly quickly in most programs, but first, you need to see what isn't right about your photo.

Then, for instance in Lightroom 5, it is fairly easy to drop a preset on that will do some auto correct features. Most of those are things are learnable with a book like Scott Kelby's Lightroom book. But first, you need to bring your image down into what you want to do with it.

[arkav]

Try Faststone.

Its free, give quick results, and is an excellent first step to prepare you for the complexities of Adobe. In fact I think Adobe products are a bit too complex for most PP situations.

I give this suggestion a BIG endorsement.

Faststone is a great tool for quickly browsing/culling photos, and doing simple adjustments. It has most of the basic editing functions the average person needs without all the overhead
of something like PSE. In particular, I like the way it uses your whole screen for the image, and all the command menus only appear when you mouse over to the boundaries of the screen. Once
you learn the keyboard shortcuts to your mostly frequently used commands, you don't even have to do that anymore. I think all the editing tools have a button that allows you to see what the image
looks like before the adjustment in question is applied, so you can quickly do a before/after comparison. Yes, there's all kinds of fancy stuff that FastStone can't do, but that's the beauty of it.
With a single keystroke you can send an image to a more sophisticated editor like PSE if you need to do something beyond FastStone's capabilities.

Another of FastStone's strengths is that for browsing RAW files, it uses the embedded JPG previews, so it it's faster than anything else when it comes to bringing up the contents of a folders. Great
for quickly locating images, comparing similar images side by side, etc.

I've got PSE 9, and it has certain tools that I need from time to time, but I find it doesn't do a great job of converting the RAW files from my K200D - sometimes, it doesn't render certain colours "correctly".
I send those RAW images to PDCU, which seems to be better in that respect, though the interface leaves something to be desired.

I've never been a big fan of Lightroom. GIMP is great for graphics, but I just don't see using it for applying adjustments to photos.

Generally, FASTSTONE is my starting point for everything. That's my default photo browser. From there, I launch whatever other program I use. Often, I don't need any other program.

Cheers

---------- Post added 02-11-2014 at 09:28 AM ----------

I don't need a "click this" tutorial, but more of a general discussion of what common problems are encountered and what general solutions are used to solve those.
How to tell if you went too far, what are the rules? When to break them? etc. etc.

This is a tough question to answer, because so much depends on the kind of photography you do. I wish I had the skills that some posters have when it comes to working with RAW files, but
everyone is going to have slightly different problems to tackle, so one person's approach isn't necessarily going to work for someone else who has different photographic challenges.

My K200D was a bit slow at writing to the SD cards, and was prone to having issues with certain cards, so using
RAW+ wasn't a viable option. As a result, I would just shoot RAW. As a result, I've got several years worth of shooting that is strictly in RAW format.
Now, with my K30, I can use RAW+ and to be honest, it's pretty tough to better the JPG generated by the camera with either
Silkypix 3 or PSE 9. I have the RAW files if I need them, but the JPGs are often fine.

I mostly do nature photography, and I find that when I actually need to resort to tweaking a RAW file, it's due to a problem with either the White Balance, or the Exposure. Maybe I had the camera set
for Daylight WB and a cloud happened by, so the WB is off in a photo. I find the WB presets in most programs are useless, so tweaking WB can be a challenge ( if there's a known gray element in a scene, you can set
WB on that using an eyedropper tool ). PDCU's 5 point gray point setting feature is great for this.

For exposure, maybe there's a particular element in a scene where the highlights were blown out in the JPG, so I go to the RAW file and see how much detail I can recover ( by either easing back the exposure, or using
a highlight recovery tool ). Or maybe there's too much contrast between highlights/shadows on my subject, and I need to even things out a bit by adjusting levels, or curves. You can make those kinds of adjustments on
a JPG file, but RAW gives you far more latitude - there's a lot more information to work with. Often, you have to use a combination of tools to get a satisfactory result. For example, if you fix blown highlights by decreasing
the exposure, you might have to adjust levels so that the image isn't too dark. Once you start playing with multiple adjustments, the shortcomings of JPG start to show themselves as the image degradation accumulates. This is why you do your major adjustments as part of the RAW conversion.

If your original photo looks pretty good straight out of the camera, then you can probably make minor adjustments directly on a JPG image. With RAW, you have a lot more latitude for making adjustments, so if you look
at your original photo and think to yourself "that's gonna take some work", then you probably want to go back to the RAW file and start there. The only way to get to a point where you can make that kind of a call is to practice.

If you practice making simple adjustments to JPG images for a while, you'll become familiar with what the various tools do. Eventually, you'll come across a photo that you just can't "fix". You'll know what it is you want to do, but you won't be able to do it the tools at hand and/or JPG as fodder for them. Then you can try going to the RAW image and you can see if you can "fix" the image using more sophisticated tools.

Another approach might be to deliberately screw up some photos and see if you can fix them in RAW. For example, take a shot of a white flower and blow out the highlights a little. See if you can recover them from the RAW file. Take your camera out on a sunny day, and take the same shot with WB set to "shade" and "sunny". Using the RAW file, see if you can "fix" the shot where you had the WB set incorrectly.

Take a scene with extremes of contrast - expose images for the highlights, and for the shadows. Compare the different exposures, and see if you can make a good "compromise" photo from one of them by either recovering the highlights or the shadows. Try to do this from both the JPG and the RAW files, and compare the results. Challenge yourself to see if you can see how the RAW file gives you additional latitude.

There's a lot more to working with RAW files, and there's certainly lots of folks on this forum who know way more about it than I do, but as far as answering the question of "What does RAW give me that JPG doesn't", I think for most people, it boils down to latitude for adjusting WB and exposure. If you nail those to start with, it's harder to see why you would bother. It's when you screw them up that the advantages of RAW become apparent. So as a learning exercise, you can either try pushing the envelope in your shooting to give you images where you need to play with the RAW images, or you can deliberately screw up some photos.

Once you get a handle on what you can do when you start with the RAW image, you might be in a better position to start to be creative about it. ( in other words, exploit RAW creatively rather than as a way to fix
shots that you've screwed up )

[dansamy]

Thank you Rondec & arkav. Both of those are helpful.

[millsware]

Honestly, if you are completely new and don't want to do anything crazy, PP is pretty easy. 90% of the time all I do is adjust the levels to match the histogram. If I could only do one thing, that would be it. It's amazing how much of a difference that makes.

Other simple things are adjusting curves, cloning to remove blemishes in portraits, cropping. Just about any program will help with that.

[dansamy]

Honestly, if you are completely new and don't want to do anything crazy, PP is pretty easy. 90% of the time all I do is adjust the levels to match the histogram. If I could only do one thing, that would be it. It's amazing how much of a difference that makes.

Other simple things are adjusting curves, cloning to remove blemishes in portraits, cropping. Just about any program will help with that.

See that was a foreign language. What does that mean? Adjusting levels to match the histogram? I know what the histogram is. That's the little graph. What are levels & curves? I understand the concept of cloning out blemishes or smoothing out skin or cropping a picture to get rid of distracting elements, etc.

[arkav]

What does that mean? Adjusting levels to match the histogram? I know what the histogram is. That's the little graph. What are levels & curves?

NOTE: I've updated this post to include some illustrative images. I would have normally used FastStone to do a simple level adjustment like this, but Faststone is great for doing a quick and dirty screen capture, so I used PSE 9 to illustrate the Levels tool, and I used FastStone to do the screen capture and draw the arrows. FastStone has an almost identical Levels tool.

This is where playing around with a simple editing program can help. Most photo editing programs have a tool called Levels. The short answer is that you use this tool to adjust how
your dark/bright pixels are spread over the available dynamic range ( and you can usually do this separately for each colour channel ). It's one way to adjust the contrast of your photo.
Usually, this tool will have little pointers at the bottom for the black point, gray-point, and white-point that can be adjusted. Basically, it allows you to set what is going to look black, what is going to look white, and what is going to look gray.

"to match the histogram" might not be the best way of wording it, but one way to "improve" a photo is to use a levels tool to adjust the black point and white points so that they align
( respectively ) with the darkest and brightest pixels in your image's histogram. It might not be appropriate for every photo, but it works a fair amount of the time. It's hard to describe, but it's a
fairly simple concept if you look at the tool, or by example...

I once took a photo of frost that had formed on glass - you know, the interesting vegetation like patterns. Now, it looked kinda cool, but the patterns didn't show up as well as I'd hoped. There was nothing wrong with the way the image was exposed - it's not the camera's fault that I shot white frost on a gray background. Looking at the histogram, all the pixels were bunched together in one big hump in the middle - not really making much use of the dynamic range available. There wasn't enough contrast between the whitish frost lines and the grayish background to really bring out the pattern.

Here's what the JPG out of the camera. Note how the histogram is a lump in the middle of the range, with no pixels truly white, and none truly black. Just shades of gray:



There are a number of ways of adjusting a photo like that to make it more interesting. You can just take a "contrast" slider and bump up the contrast. That might work, but you don't have precise
control because you don't know what it is that the software is adjusting. Another way is to bring up a levels tool ( see image above ), and grab the black point and slide it up so that it touches ( or nearly touches ) the lower end of the histogram distribution. Then you grab the white point, and bring it down to touch the upper end of the histogram. Then slide the gray point back and forth to get the overall tone where you want it. Alternatively, the PSE levels tool has the eyedroppers that allow you to go and select a spot in your image to be each of the black, white and gray points.

Here's the adjusted image - arrows indicate how I've moved the black point up and the white point down. ( this is what the other poster meant by "matching the histogram" ):



Once you hit "ok", the histogram should look "spread out" across the full dynamic range of available, from black to white. In effect, you're converting what was darkish gray into black, and what was bright gray into white, and spreading out all the shades of gray in between.

By invoking the levels tool a second time, it shown the histogram after the levels adjustment has been applied:


Now, I've done this with a JPG image. Note that the histogram of the adjusted image is a series of spikes spread across the tonal range rather than a smooth curve. I think that's an indication that there's some posterization going on. Does it affect the appearance of the resulting image? Probably not in this case, but it might have if it was an image of a skyscape of varying brightness. The camera might have had 12-14 bits in the original RAW data, but it converted that to 8 bits for the JPG, and the shades of gray might have only occupied a few levels in that range ( hence, the narrow histogram ). When you try to expand those shades of gray out to something closer to black-to-white, there isn't enough information to give you smooth transitions. If you started with the RAW, you would probably have more resolution to work with, and therefore, you'd get better granularity when you expand your "shades of gray" image to something closer to a full black-to-white image.

It's not that you CAN'T make these contrast adjustments on the JPG image, it's that the results might not be as good as they might be if you started with RAW. Obviously, there's all kinds of other adjustments that can be made to an image like this to make it more interesting.

Now let's say that you aren't happy with just moving the black, white, and gray points. Maybe there's one shade of gray in particular that you want to brighten or darken, without moving any of the
others. That's where a curves tool comes in. The curves tool offers a higher degree of control compared to the levels tool. You can selectively brighten or darken particular sections of the tonal range. How you use the curves tool to do this is even harder to describe without pictures. There's gotta be a tutorial on YouTube that shows how to use the levels/curves tools.

This is a simple example where the subject is sort of monochromatic, and therefore, you might only play with the levels/curves in the rgb channel. You can use these tools to make the same
kinds of adjustments to the individual red, green, and blue channels. If a photo looks a bit cool, you might tone down the blue channel a bit, or bump up the red channel.

Hope this helps.

[dcBear78]

I'm a massive advocate for Lightroom and shooting RAW. I couldn't imagine doing it any other way. I've got my processing routine down and I can usually do each image (without superfine attention to detail) in less than a minute. I had very little idea of what I was doing for the first year. Just pressing Auto and making slight adjustments from there. But now I do the lot myself anf the results are much better. You can pull so much detail from a RAW file that I don't understand why anyone would go to the effort of taking multiple exposures and combining them.

For me I have learnt the most watching Serge Ramelli's Youtube videos. He has a basic process that he pretty much follows for most photos. Obviously they will not all be treated the same, but the basic are there.

Essentially it goes like this:

Highlights -100
Shadows +100
Hold Alt and move White slider up until blown out dots appear and back off a bit
Hold Alt and move Black slider until back sections appear, leaving a few
Adjust exposure
Bump up clarity and vibrance
Chose white balance as desired
Lens Corrections - Profile and Remove CA
Add Noise Reduction Luminance depending on the noise of shot (minimum 10)
Add sharpness (100-Luminance amount)
Hold Alt and move Masking slider until the parts you do not want sharpened are black (ie sky)
From there you can crop, straighten, adjustment brush, and minor adjustments to anything else as needed/wanted.

Might sound like a bit, but once you are used to it it is very easy and quick process. And if you have a selection of shots at the same place you edit one photo and then sync the setting across to the others.

Some examples, before and after of how I have used this technique to either fix an image or in the case of the second example apply an artistic touch to my photo (wanted softer, desaturated feel).








And this is probably the most dramatic example I have. This is one of the first ever photos I took with a DSLR, probably still in auto mode. But I have been able to resurrect the RAW file into something quite nice.