RAW processing advice please

[mike88888uk]

Hi,

Please can I have some advice on RAW processing. Files from my 5D seem to open up with applied settings ( brightness, contrast, etc) in CS3 even though set as "as shot".

I have checked that all camera defaults are "off" and I would therefore expect to see CS3 reflect that, with no applied
brightness, contrast etc. and have also used lightroom, Phase One, etc etc and all open the "from the camera" RAW slightly differently

any advice would be welcome as I want to have control over the processing from the off not have adjustments made before I start.

Many thanks

Mike

 

[Chappers]

Mike

I think these are default setting for the camera, as set by Lightroom. If you go to Saved preset in the library module you can select "general Zeroed". This will put everything back to , well Zero. The results will look a bit dark and flat though.

You can also select this in the import option so that all further images are brought in with no correction

Although I must say once you've seen the Zeroed results I reckon you'll go back to default.

 

[pxl8]

It's important to remember that a raw file isn't an image and that's it's down to the s/w to take that data and convert it into one. Every app will do this differently based on profiles for the camera, shape of tone curve, white balance calculations, etc. so it's actually very hard to get one app to produce the same result as another.

Canon's DPP will be the closest result to what you saw in camera but even then the LCD on the camera isn't a high quality display and what you see on these is just the embedded jpg preview so there will still be some differences.

Shooting raw means you have a starting point for processing the image data, not a final image straight out of the camera.