How do you process RAW images?

Rather than hit the sharpening at 60, better off doing it 6 times at 10 (Or rather 5 times at 10 to get the same force). The difference is visible and better. Likewise USM, 3 x 10 is better than 30. I use High Pass filter at about 70% opacity then an USM – 2 at 5.

+60 is sharpening on the RAW file where there’s no option to adjust the radius. When I do use USM, the radius I use is dictated by the size of the image. The larger the image, the larger the radius, so for an image 1024 wide I use 0.3. For an image straight out of my 350D or 30D I might use 0.8 or 0.9. In all honesty my sharpening technique works perfectly (for me and seemingly for JP) and it takes me literally seconds to do. That being the case, I can’t really be bothered doing loads of passes of USM when I can do one stage of sharpening in RAW, apply one more tiny bit of sharpening after I’ve re-sized and have a pretty much perfect image, with the possible exception of a little subtle selective sharpening should it be required (which only maybe 1 in every 25 photos actually does).

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. 🙂

Paul

Open RAW file in CS3.

Adjust white balance (if I need to, which I ususally don’t)

Crop (or tell the program where I want it to crop)

Adjust exposure/blacks according to what the histogram tells me

+16 saturation

+60 sharpening

Convert to JPEG

Heal out dust spots

Re-size to 1024 wide

Apply USM at 30%, a radius of 0.3, threshold 0.

Upload to JP…

There may also be some subtle dodging, burning and selective sharpening if needs be.

Paul

Rather than hit the sharpening at 60, better off doing it 6 times at 10 (Or rather 5 times at 10 to get the same force). The difference is visible and better. Likewise USM, 3 x 10 is better than 30. I use High Pass filter at about 70% opacity then an USM – 2 at 5.

Open RAW file in CS3.

Adjust white balance (if I need to, which I ususally don’t)

Crop (or tell the program where I want it to crop)

Adjust exposure/blacks according to what the histogram tells me

+16 saturation

+60 sharpening

Convert to JPEG

Heal out dust spots

Re-size to 1024 wide

Apply USM at 30%, a radius of 0.3, threshold 0.

Upload to JP…

There may also be some subtle dodging, burning and selective sharpening if needs be.

Paul

I trust you are downloading the RAW images direct from your camera to your external drive via the PC and not doing any processing on the camera/card 😮 first.

Absolutely no not ever.

USB drives are laboriously slow. Is the Maxtor 500 IDE (PATA) or SATA? If SATA I would invest about £20 into a dual USB2/eSATA enclosure [click], then you’ll have the best of both worlds. If PATA I would mount it internally for the best copying speed, if at all possible

If your PC doesn’t have an eSATA socket, you can get PCI cards that will provide the functionality – probably from the same place.

That should increase speed somewhat – but you can also get eSATA card readers, and they should give an improved copy speed too.

Of course all that’s a load of b*ll*cks if it’s a laptop, very few have eSATA, and none can take a 3.5″ drive internally!
Not laptop, a real computer!

Forget about printing dimensions – when copying from your camera you want to copy the entire file, thus image print size isn’t relevant at this stage.
Yep, as per my answer above.

Always keep the original file copied direct from the camera (work on a copy) – you might want to go back and have another go at getting the image “just so” as your image manipulation techniques improved.
Yes, that’s always been the case since I went digi many years ago. It’s only recently I’ve gone to RAW – I used high qual. Jpegs and printed to A3 (Often cropped too) with a quality that was winning me competitions. But alas I’ve decided to go RAW and play more with the extra quality 🙂

Answers within your text.

I trust you are downloading the RAW images direct from your camera to your external drive via the PC and not doing any processing on the camera/card 😮 first.

USB drives are laboriously slow. Is the Maxtor 500 IDE (PATA) or SATA? If SATA I would invest about £20 into a dual USB2/eSATA enclosure [click], then you’ll have the best of both worlds. If PATA I would mount it internally for the best copying speed, if at all possible

If your PC doesn’t have an eSATA socket, you can get PCI cards that will provide the functionality – probably from the same place.

That should increase speed somewhat – but you can also get eSATA card readers, and they should give an improved copy speed too.

Of course all that’s a load of b*ll*cks if it’s a laptop, very few have eSATA, and none can take a 3.5″ drive internally!

Forget about printing dimensions – when copying from your camera you want to copy the entire file, thus image print size isn’t relevant at this stage.

Always keep the original file copied direct from the camera (work on a copy) – you might want to go back and have another go at getting the image “just so” as your image manipulation techniques improved.

I too use DPP (tis an under-rated software imho) I use a Canon 400D with a Sigma 100-300f4 lens. I shoot in RAW onto Sandisk Extreme III 4gb CF Cards.

Downloading is via a card reader & computer into a Maxtor 500gb external hard drive. Both the card reader & Maxtor are connected to the computer via the USB2.0 leads. On a 4gb card I can get circa 400 images (RAW) & to empty the card as described normally takes about 5 mins.

Perhaps the problem is the 450D uses SD cards which I seem to recall (from somewhere) are not so fast due to the number of connections?*

*I stand to be corrected

Your resolution seems very high!
I normally go for 96dpi @ 800 pixels wide for general stuff
For printing I go 350dpi @ A4

Do you print ALL of your images????

I stick the SD card into a card reader which is USB’d to the PC.
Not sure what you mean by the number of connections involved with an SD card.When I Batch process, the screen has a choice of File Format, mine is set at TIFF 16 bit. I want the Tiff but I don’t know if I should be using 8 or 16 bit.
The output setting, what exactly does this do? Does it simply resize the measured dimensions of the image…..i.e if the image is 2560 wide my 1200 will give me an image 2.13 inches, whereas your 96 will give you one that is 26.67 inches wide. It’s the same volume of information so it shouldn’t make any difference in transfer time should it?

Printing, I only print about 1% of what I take. Usually at A4 but about half of that 1% gets framed up to A3. I have my mounts pre-cut on a machine with a defined aperture size (1cm less than A3 all round and perfect every time), I print 1mm larger than that all round (Mounting takes me 2 minutes!)
I define all these sizes on photoshop, and just let the DPI sort itself out (I never choose the option to resample the image. I get an image at 1200 dpi which is about 2.5 inches long in CS2. I alter that to 15.5 inches and the DPI drops. If I chose an output resolution of 96, them my image would be 35 inches or so, which when reduced to 15.5 inches the DPI would naturally increase to 217. If I “Chose” a dpi of 350 then my image would only be 9.7 inches long. If I chose 350 DPI AND chose 15.5 inches long, I would be resampling the image, thus letting extra pixels to be added by photoshop by whatever interpolation method I had also chosen (Bicubic smoother or whatever).

I too use DPP (tis an under-rated software imho) I use a Canon 400D with a Sigma 100-300f4 lens. I shoot in RAW onto Sandisk Extreme III 4gb CF Cards.

Downloading is via a card reader & computer into a Maxtor 500gb external hard drive. Both the card reader & Maxtor are connected to the computer via the USB2.0 leads. On a 4gb card I can get circa 400 images (RAW) & to empty the card as described normally takes about 5 mins.

Perhaps the problem is the 450D uses SD cards which I seem to recall (from somewhere) are not so fast due to the number of connections?*

*I stand to be corrected

Your resolution seems very high!
I normally go for 96dpi @ 800 pixels wide for general stuff
For printing I go 350dpi @ A4

Do you print ALL of your images????