Do Level Adjustments Replace Saturation?

[Booncha57]

Hello,

I have been forcing myself to shoot RAW, but have some questions on the processing. I just read the post from LeeR called "Levels: Getting the Professional 'Pop'" and have been playing with this a little bit today. I'm wondering if by changing these settings, am I changing the saturation in the photo or am I just affecting the white balance by changing the levels? Do you adjust levels AND add saturation?

I guess part of my problem is that I'm not quite sure exactly what is left for me to process by shooting RAW. Are you just supposed to be correcting the color and sharpening it?

Thanks!
Matt

[RecurrentNerve]

Shooting RAW essentially means you are doing all the processing! When your camera is set to JPEG, it applies sharpening and colour adjustments automatically according to what Picture Control you have set (Vivid, Landscape etc). RAW does away with that and just provides you with the information as the sensor sees it.

When you adjust the Levels you are essentially adjusting the brightness of 3 different aspects of the image: shadows, midtones and highlights. This is entirely different to white balance. To answer your question, you would normally adjust the levels and adjust saturation separately.