RAW Workflow: A Pro’s Approach
The following post was submitted by Carl Ebrey from Carl Ebrey Photography.
Following on from the recent JPEG vs RAW discussion, I offered to write a short article for the Digital Photography School on my RAW workflow. So, here it is. First of all, though, some background and disclaimers:
I am a wedding photographer in the UK. I shoot entirely digitally on a Canon EOS 5D. A typical wedding (if there is such a thing) uses around 5 to 6GB of Compact Flash. The images are processed on a 20″ iMac with 2GB RAM. This article is about my workflow. It works for me; it may or may not work for you. If, after reading this article, you feel you want to go out and shoot RAW, great. If you don’t, that’s fine too. I’ll tell you what I can fit into some sort of logical order, but don’t expect this to be a crash course in wedding photography.
Let’s also get something out of the way about “why RAW”:
1) RAW images have (more often than not) greater colour depth than JPEGs. The RAW output of most cameras is 12 or 16bit, whereas the JPEGs are only 8bit. This means that there can be a greater tonal range in the resulting image. It doesn’t mean that there always *will* be, as you’ll learn from many people who’ll tell you that they’ve compared the same image taken as JPEG and as RAW, but there are situations (usually higher contrast images) where it will be the case. This also means that you’ve got a little bit more room to move. In terms of nailing the exposure, digital cameras have a similar exposure latitude as slide film. That is, you have to get it bang on to get the most out of it. Negative film has a greater latitude, which means that any minor mistakes in the exposure can be corrected during the printing stage. When we come back to digital shooting, that just means that with RAW you can recover from any minor mistakes you make. As a landscape photographer that might not bother you, but as a wedding photographer I can’t go back and ask them to just do that again (well OK, sometimes I can).
2) Everyone shoots RAW. Yes, you do. The only difference is that if you think you shoot JPEG, actually you just leave the RAW processing to your camera. Given that once you’ve taken the photos you’re more than likely going to view them on your [far higher powered] computer afterwards, it seems a bit strange to me that you’d let your camera deal with the RAWs.
3) Saving RAW for special occasions, like the “Sunday Best” of digital photography seems crazy to me. When I first got into photography I took an awesome landscape. The sun was setting, I had some lovely warm-up filters on the front of the lens. Everything was Just Right. The resulting image, as fantastic as it was, was a JPEG. The large print which came from it wasn’t so hot. It’s now a canvas print hanging on my wall downstairs, and it does look good, but it’s only around 20×16″. The point is that you never really know when that awesome shot’s going to come, and once you’ve got the Compact Flash (or SD or whatever) then shooting on it’s free.
4) Processing RAW images doesn’t take forever, so there’s no reason not to use it all the time. Admittedly it’s not necessarily as quick as just dropping the shots into iPhoto (or whatever package you choose to use), but given the advantages abound when it comes to adjusting photos, the short time penalty is one which I’m more than willing to pay.
In the interests of balance, there are a few good reasons to shoot JPEG instead. The biggest one for me is brought up by sports photographers who have to shoot many frames very quickly. That’s fair game: shooting RAW can slow down the continuous drive of a digital camera, and the buffer can fill up quickly. However, newer cameras coming onto the market are addressing that issue, and whilst they might still be well out of some people’s price brackets, they will get cheaper over time.
Let’s talk about processing RAW Images
Let’s pretend that we’ve got back from a successful day’s shooting with our Compact Flash cards all ready to go…
Obviously, the first thing we need to do is get the photos off the card. For this I use a dedicated card reader, rather than having to plug my camera into my computer and sit there draining camera batteries. Each wedding has its own folder in my Photos directory. Inside there are (usually) three more sub-directories: RAW, TIFF and Finished. Obviously, the shots straight from the camera (none of which are deleted during the day, despite how bad some of them might look on the camera’s screen) go straight into the RAW directory.
Once we’ve got the shots onto the computer, the RAW directory is backed up to DVD. Twice. The first copy goes in my storage case. The second one is sent up to what I lovingly refer to as my “offsite backup storage facility”. It’s my parents’ house! What can I say? If it ain’t broke… This is a massively important stage. It ensures (as best as we can) that we can always revert to the original shots taken on the day if we need to. There’s the obvious (though fairly unlikely really) risk of my house burning down and losing the shots, right through to the slightly less obvious but probably more likely event of my hard drive dying sometime during the editing process, leaving me with a bunch of useless, corrupt bits! Repeat after me, “backups are good.”
Right, got those backups sorted? Great. Let’s do some editing. I use Adobe’s Lightroom for my RAW processing. It’s not the cheapest RAW management package, but I’ve been using it since it was first released as a beta and now have a full copy of version 1.0. If you have it, great, but there are other equally capable, I’m sure, RAW processors available. Anyway, back to it. We need to remove the crap from the good stuff. A slideshow is best for that, where you can rate each shot as it’s shown. This way you can plough through the shots fairly quickly and opt to delete all those which scored less than a certain value. Once that’s done, we can start to work on the “keepers”.
It’s now time to work through each of the remaining shots in turn. I do any colour correction that might be needed, along with some exposure tweaking. I might convert an image to B&W, or tone it, or maybe add a vignette. I also do my cropping at this stage. I rarely find myself needing to do “spot” changes to an image, such as cloning, so the vast majority of manipulation happens to the RAW before it’s made it any further. Incidentally, everything gets cropped to 10×8. That’s the most common size that I sell, and I can either crop it further to get an 8×6 or go back to the original if I’m not happy with that (another advantage of RAW is that the changes you make are non-destructive, so you can revert to the original shot at any time). This is the longest stage in my workflow, but it’s also the one which deals with the majority of the processing. Everything from here on in is plain sailing…
Once the photos have been edited, it’s time to convert them from RAW to something else. Lightroom takes each RAW image in turn and applies the changes you’ve made to a copy which is then saves as either JPEG or TIFF. I save everything as a 16bit TIFF, because the job’s not quite done yet. This part can take a little while, if you’re processing 200-300 images, so it’s the perfect time for a cup of tea (well I /am/ a Brit).
So let’s recap as to where we are. We’ve backed up everything from the day, so that’s safe. We’ve been through the shots and removed anything we know we don’t want to keep. We’ve been through the rest of the shots colour correcting, changing exposure, converting to B&W etc and cropping. Now we’re happy after our cup of tea and are looking at a directory full of 16bit TIFFs.
If there are any shots which need to be worked on in Photoshop, this is when it happens. A 16bit TIFF is typically a big file, but it’s lossless (meaning the file doesn’t degrade every time you save it like a JPEG does) and is full of yummy data to play with. The TIFF is loaded into Photoshop and the work is done.
Most of the time, though, there’s no Photoshop work to be done. In that case I just skip straight to the next step, which is Noise Ninja. This little beauty is a noise reduction package. I set it to batch process the images, profiling each one as it goes. It loads each of the 16bit TIFFs, identifies the areas of noise and filters it out, saving the result as a JPEG file in my JPEG directory. This is another process that I can leave running, so it’s another good time for tea.
Finally, I can delete that bulky TIFF directory, though I’ll want to save any that have been worked on in Photoshop. The rest of them can be recreated by simply re-exporting the shots from Lightroom again. The finished JPEGs are backed up to DVD and stored with the DVD of the RAWs (again, two copies are made) and I can send them off to my clients knowing that they’ll be thrilled with their fabulous wedding photos.
That’s it. It’s easy when you stand back and look at it: Lightroom -> Noise Ninja -> done. And there’s no reason that you can’t do this with the occasional snapshot either. Just drop your RAW file into Lightroom, export it straight away and there you have it: a beautiful JPEG.
I hope that hasn’t bored you too much, and hopefully one or two people will take something from it. A key thing to remember here, I guess, is that taking a photo is just the start of photography really. Before digital came along a lot of time was spent in the dark room making test prints, playing with chemicals, tweaking temperatures, cropping and so on. All we have now is the same process but in an office.
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Great article. It’s certainly nice to have an insight into a pros work flow.
David
That tutorial was really great - thanks.
I tend to shoot JPEG at the moment on my 350d.
In the summer I plan to get a Macbook Pro (up from my Powerbook at present) and Aperture with that, and start shooting and processing raw from there.
Really handy to know your workflow.
Thanks
It was really nice to learn how to practically handle a pile of incoming photos.
Thanks for writing the article.
Thanks for the Tutorial, since upgrading to the Nikon D80 in December I have been shooting RAW and experiementing with software packages.
Adobe Camera Raw is fantastic and really helped me save images when getting the exposure or White Balance slightly off. Thanks for your tips, keep up the good work!
Good stuff. I like hearing other people’s workflow.
I always shoot in RAW+JPEG. That way I have semi-decent JPEGs for the everyday stuff (family snapshots), but then I have the option to start from the RAW file if I plan on printing or selling the photo. I do like the RAW+JPEG option.
good insight. i also only shoot RAW. i use Aperture and Lightroom, depending on how i’m feeling :)
i don’t see the point of spending a few grand on a DSLR, only to have the camera do your processing, for me, the PP is half the fun..
That backup thing is more important than you think. We only have the proofs from my wedding (10 years next week :) because the photographers studio burned down before we ordered the prints. :(
Now, granted, this was back before digital, but still. Backups are good. I keep three on-line, and one off-line. I need to work on moving them from the same 4 foot area….
I have been thinking on upgrading my camera. And your article really made me think of why and how I will use it. (Hopefully making a paid hobby out of it.) Also it has made me realise what work is ahead of me.
I’m finally convinced to try RAW Processing. Clearly this is for serious and professional photographers only; most point-and-shooters don’t edit.
Carl is an excellent writer, and we should invite him back. Perhaps he’d give us more information on the various programs, and some details on getting started with digital tweaking, store options, etc.
We think along the same lines :-) Am interested in Noise Ninja, thanks for bringing that to my attention.
http://myapplestuff.com/dslr-workflow-the-end-of-the-journey-or-just-the-beginning/
Thanks for a really good explaation of why I should shot RAW. It was simply written so a new camera owner and amateur like I am could usnderstand it, but an artice I should be going back to again and again. I will never be a pro, but I would like to be a good amateur and help frm pros is wonderful!
Thank Carl. It was a very educational article. I do backup, but honestly, I don’t have it offsite so after I read the comment of Don, I made and took it offsite right away!
Thank you,
Frederic
Great article! That’s really inspired me to look at my workflow! I’m a wedding photographer and I’m all set except for the Lightroom/Apeture Photoshop combo - I only have PS so my work flow is a lot more concoluted!
Thanks again! Long Live DPS!
What is Noise Ninja?
Prior to reading this article I *had* no workflow – at least not a rational one. ;-) Thanks to Carl Ebrey for this intriguing article!
I use Aperture, and will now try to figure out how to incorporate that program into Mr. Ebrey’s style of workflow. (Aperture doesn’t, to my mind, deal with referenced external files, rather than databased files, as well.)
Thanks once again. I have to echo Mike Pearce: DPS rocks! :-)
Noise Ninja is an excellent noise reduction software. It is a separate software from Photoshop or Lightroom. Type in Noise Ninja into Google and you can find it. They have different versions depending on your need.
Dear Carl,
Great work, and really nice to know how digital photography is developing and has so much to do after shooting ! I am just a biggener with a very simple Smart Zoom DSC-P92 SONY cyber shot. I keep shooting every thing, flowers,clouds,sun rise,sunsets,kids playing in rain, still photograpgs of paintings for artists,weddings but all non professional. I just wonder how I can learn more about it.I also use a NIKON AF 2020 with films and was doing well with digital just am learning.
Thanks for the details but really dont know how and when I will be able to use the tips.
Vijay
India
Great article, and a Brit too :>)
I had no workflow as such when i started shooting RAW a year ago, but soon realise it was necessary to get the most out of each shot. In the interest of a pro versus am comparison here’s my purely amateur method:
[Windoze and a Dell Laptop or Desktop running XP and PShop CS2]
- Get the images off the camera using Canon’s EOS Viewer.
- Put the RAW’s in a folder with the date of the shoot.
- Go to Adobe Bridge, view the images, score them, label them etc.. until i have weeded the good ones out.
- Ctrl R - Open the keepers in Adobe Camera Raw [CS2].
- Set the white point using the eyedropper.
- Adjust exposure, contrast, brightness etc..
- Zoom to 100%, adjust sharpness.
- Open in Photoshop, do any final amends; levels, warming filters etc..
- Save out as a .jpg into a ‘processed’ folder in the same folder as the RAW’s.
The obvious difference between my approach and Carl’s is the lack of backups in my workflow, something i have to sort out TODAY. Also i think the tip about saving TIFF is a good one that i shall be using from now on.
Thanks again DPS for another great article.
Thanks for the great write up! My work flow is similar (I use the old Pixmantec Rawshooter for the conversion though). I had never really understood why I would use TIFFs as the size of them is prohibitive for long term storage - suddenly it all makes sense! Time to update my workflow to TIFFs prior to noise reduction - thanks heaps for the tip!
For those looking for other Raw editing programs, Capture One is an excellent option. Buy a Sandisk Extreme 3, and you’ll get it for free… (the LE version anyways). Good tips, thanks.
Excellent article Carl. I just got into digital about a year ago and haven’t had too much time to get a good grasp on it yet. The one thing I CAN say that has been somewhat annoying to me, is not having a good system for dealing with the photos once taken. Your article helped a lot…thanks.
Great writeup!
I actually just finished reading The Art of Raw Conversion by Juergen Gulbins and Uwe Steinmueller. It’s a easy read that gives you workflows for various raw-capable softwares (Adobe Camera Raw, Rawshooter, and Aperture are the big ones), and is highly recommended for anyone just getting into shooting RAW. The only drawbacks are, if you’re already experienced / have somewhat of a workflow, this book is probably too basic.. and it’s coverage of Lightroom was lacking (it was only at beta1 at the time the book went to press, I think).
It’s a great, and fairly short read which I’d recommend, but I don’t think I’d buy it if it wasn’t on sale ;)
And yes, once you go RAW, you won’t go back.
Isn’t this Bail from Dps forums?
a great insight into RAW processing.
I’ve had the beta of Lightroom for a while now, I just haven’t gotten around to using it extensively. you’ve got my interest peaked again to use it!
thanks for posting!
Thanks for a great article. I recently started shooting RAW, and wonder now why I resisted so long! Whatever hesitency that may have remained is now safely put to rest. What impressed me the most however, was the author’s treatment of the issue of backups. What benefit is gained from shooting RAW if the file gets lost? Immediately making dual backups and storing one off site is an excellent way to reduce this chance to a minimum without adding a bunch of file handling chores to the workload. I treat EVERY piece of unique data I generate the same way - including those that may seem to have no conceivable use. The cost of storage is so low, and you can never know what may someday become valuable. Treating backups as a separate task only generates a whole new chore that is too easily put off in favour of more interesting activities. Don’t wait for a loss to motivate changing your file management habits. By then it is already too late!
great article, nice to hear how a pro does it, however, this did raise some questions, the basic advantage of RAW, is that you “can” get a wider color range, and it does not degrade over couple of saves, however, I see that you did not take into account the size/quality ratio, for example, me not being a pro, I cannot afford 4×2Gb Cards, I have 2×2Gb cards (well, Im special and I get review samples) but if I had to purchase them myself, I would probably only have a 1Gb card, so shooting RAW is really not a possibility, its either 50 RAW shots, or 150 JPGs, so, here the situation is very different, what would you say about this?
thanks Carl for the wonderful article.
may i ask how to convert a series of RAW to same exposures, same color range and so on…? i like to take panorama shots so i normally need to apply same settings to all pix.
is it easy to do it in lightroom ?
cheers
the problem to shoot in RAW is that the files are very big and you need a lot of memory cards. the memory cards should also be fast otherwise you have to wait between shots. what I find is that when I shoot in jpg with my 10megapixel camera (panasonic fz50), use lightroom to correct exposure, colour etc. the quality is just as good as shooting with Raw.
any comments?
Good to hear of someone else who keeps double backups in separate physical locations. I thought I was the only one!
First of all Carl, this is one great article, it clarified many of my doubts. But still there are some…
I’m a recent user of digital photography and I’m using JPEG. The RAW has doubtless advantages but the post processing is longer, so the choice is conditioned by the amount of time spent on the computer (even with JPEG is long enough…).
Your workflow is similar to the one I was thinking
As I don’t know the available softwares I don’t know which one should I get. I’m thinking on: Nikon Capture or Adobe Lightroom or CaptureOne (I have the free version).
As I’m starting I want to choose the right product so I leave some questions.
Which one has a better learning curve?
Which one provides faster workflow?
Which one is easier to use (I’m a above media computer user)?
Have you another advices?
I Carl, again
Still some questions more, sorry.
- Do you rename your photo files (with which software)?
- How you organize them (you certainly have a lot…)?
I hope that I hadn’t bored you too much and forgive the bad english
thanks Carl! Great work btw.
Mike - memory cards really aren’t that expensive anymore.
I don’t know where you’re based, but in the UK (which is never a cheap place) a 2GB Sandisk Ultra II SD card can be had online for 15 pounds, including postage [play.com]. And it’s less than a tenner for a 2GB, standard speed, no-name card. Compact flash is around the same price.
I am a novice with Nikon D70. Nikon recommends RAW and I didn’t really understand why till rading your article. Thanks! Every little bit of knowledge helps.
Article was great. Recently bought a camera that shoots in RAW. Wasn’t sure if I should use it or not. Article answered most of my questions.
I like your article, but do you find that Lightroom has a tendancy to run a little slow? Thats what I thought with the beta, but maybe it was just my computer…
thoughts?
Good article. However, I’d point out that DVD backups really aren’t a reliable means of backing up. Short term yes, but as slow as they are, as unreliable most of them are (especially cheap ones), it’s like - what’s the point? Hard drives are vastly more convenient. Just get a mirror RAID setup, so instantly you have two copies using that as your primary volume. Then rotate out one of the mirrors weekly or monthly depending on your volume, that you keep off-site.
And be wary too even with the latest and greatest hard drive technologies. The huge drives can potentially data in as little as 2 years unless you read the data and rewrite it to the drive. Right now still, 250GB drives (and smaller) are the most reliable for long term storage.
It should be noted that most of the hassle with RAW is from using third party software like Lightroom. Amateurs often complain they have to do more work when shooting RAW, but with my Nikon and Capture NX (or Canon and DPP) the RAW files open up EXACTLY like an in-camera jpeg. If it looks good you’re done. None of this fiddling around color correcting everything or adjusting hues, etc. Most people don’t realize this fact.