RAW Processing for beginners

[Robegul]

Hope this "article" helps a few people.  I felt compelled to write this after my struggles with RAW.   Didn't know where to publish this, so here goes:

If you’ve been into photography for a while you have probably read that you need to shoot RAW.  You understand the basic concept that all the data is preserved, and you have more flexibility editing a RAW file than you do with a JPEG, but I found that this advice is missing a key piece of information – hot to process the RAW files.

For quite some time I dabbled in RAW, shooting what I thought might be my better shots in RAW + JPEG. 

I have an Apple iMac with the Apple Photos app.  Apple Photos “supported” the Canon RAW files that I had.  It could open the files no problem.  But what surprised me was that the photos often looked mediocre at best and in many cases worse than the out-of-camera JPEG, even after editing.  My computer and software did “process” the RAW files, so what’s wrong?  (I am GUESSING that similar included free photo editing software on other computer products might have similar shortcomings.   So, this article probably applies not just to Macs)

All the advice says, “shoot in RAW”, but what they leave out is the second and equally important part – you need good software to process the RAW file.

Apple Photos displays it, but it really does a poor job with RAW files processing.  It has no lens correction information built in, so the pictures look less sharp than the JPEGs.  The Apple-processed photos also have other issues like chromatic aberration (color fringing) that the JPEGs don’t.  On top of this the highlight/shadow sliders and other controls are way less advanced than good RAW processing software.

My next step was to try the free Canon DPP software that came with the camera.  Wow!   All of a sudden my RAW pictures popped!  Sharper pictures, no fringing, ability to fine tune the tone curve for highlights, midtones, and shadows!  

But the Canon software is a bit slow. 

My final step was to get some dedicated RAW processing software to see if that worked better, and it did.   I set some criteria that helped me narrow down my search:

1. I would not pay a monthly fee for the software – I’m just a casual shooter.
2. The software had to have lens correction data built in.  After seeing the difference it made in Canon DPP, this was a must for me. 
3. It had to work well with Apple Photos as I planned to use that as my library for storing photos indefinitely.

I ended up with DXO Photolab.  It met all the criteria, and it stores its photo files simply on your hard drive – not in some proprietary database.  That last point was very important to me.   Apple’s files are hidden in their proprietary database, and I didn’t want two proprietary databases.  I did not evaluate other software packages, so not saying the DXO Photolab is the best – it just worked for me.  I do still use Canon DPP occasionally, but less so.

Here is a set of photos that shows a case where the RAW file was deliberately underexposed to preserve the highlights.  The DXO photo is the first one.   

Apple Photos was unable to recover the shadows, while DXO was. 

DXO Processed

Apple Photos Processed

And here is the original out-of-camera image exposed to protect highlights, but processed as standard JPEG without any shadow recovery.  

Out-of-camera JPEG

As I said, you also get other benefits (versus Apple Photos) like reduced/eliminated color fringing and sharper images, which shows up more in some pictures than others.

My workflow for integrating RAW pics with Apple Photos was fairly simple:

1. I shoot RAW + JPEG
2. I import the files into a file location on my hard drive
3. I look at the files in DXO Photolab.  If a picture has potential, I delete the JPEG and work on the RAW.   If it doesn’t, I do the reverse.
4. I then export everything when I am done to Apple Photos as JPEGs.
5. I leave the RAW files on my hard drive so that Apple Photos only has JPEGs.

Again, I am not saying that DXO Photolab is the best for this.  It just worked well for me.  (And not to forget that Canon DPP is free!)

But I think a lot of the advice that I heard over the years seemed to have been simply to “shoot RAW”, assuming you knew what to do next! 

I am finally happy with my setup and workflow and have been able to take my pictures to the next level.  

Thanks for reading – I hope I help some readers get through the long RAW learning curve I went through much quicker!

Rob

[Sjab]

Thank you for posting this - really helpful. I am trying to work out a workflow using the Apple photos app where I currently download my R6 RAW photos. I naively assumed I could just open these raw files in DXO pure raw 4 to reduce noise etc and then export to Affinity 2 to process and then export back to photos. 
Moving forward I will try the above once I have updated my Mac mini ( intel 2018 version which is not up to the job !). 

[jrhoffman75]

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@Sjab wrote:

Thank you for posting this - really helpful. I am trying to work out a workflow using the Apple photos app where I currently download my R6 RAW photos. I naively assumed I could just open these raw files in DXO pure raw 4 to reduce noise etc and then export to Affinity 2 to process and then export back to photos. 
Moving forward I will try the above once I have updated my Mac mini ( intel 2018 version which is not up to the job !). 

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Since your objective is to use Affinity 2 you should not import into Apple Photos. Just download the photos into a folder using Image Capture. Apple Photos is basically a closed system. Images downloaded to Apple Photos are not easily available to other software. 

[jrhoffman75]

DxO is very good, but it is a quasi-subscription product in the sense that updates are released every year and features are not added to the previous versions. If you want the latest features you must buy the update. But, if the current version is doing everything you want then it is a one and done purchase. 

[kvbarkley]

Raws are problematic, but JPEGS are fine:

Somes apps have Photos plug-in front ends to allow them to be used.

[johnrmoyer]

Also, on Linux, rawtherapee works well.

For me, the biggest advantages to using DPP are "digital lens optimizer" and DPRAW tool and the support for Canon "picture styles".

The biggest advantages to rawtherapee for me are the Richardson/Lucy deconvolution in "Capture Sharpening" and the ability to process separately either of the 2 DPRAW images and the ability to choose among several de-mosaic algorithms.

I use SMB file sharing to share files between my iMac and my Debian Linux machine.

I have tried Apple Photos.app and it seems to work well enough, but I prefer to use the file system to organize storage and not the Apple Photos library.

I wrote this web page to describe how I processed one photo: https://www.rsok.com/~jrm/eagle.html