Shooting in RAW format

[Scottwdw]

When I first got my D70, I spent a lot of time researching and adjusting camera settings to get very good JPEG images straight from the camera. If the scene didn't have to much contrast, I was pretty happy with the results.

Now, I am shooting RAW to get more latitude when post processing my pictures but have not changed my in camera settings. The Nikon freebies, View and Editor, are very limited in what they can do with RAW but the images still look fine once the software loads in the camera settings. Very easy to create JPEGs and such.

I've been reading and I'm now confused as to what settings I should now turn off. I have sharpening at +2, Auto WB with a -3 adjustment and an exposure adjustment of -0.3 (Nikon sensors are known for underexposing as they try to perserve all highlight details.) Should I be setting these back to zero and then let software like Nikon Capture NX do the post processing for all these settings?

How do you set up your cameras to work in RAW processing? Thanks for helping someone looking to get better results from his equipment.

 

[Tim]

i use everything at +/- 0. wb is a non-issue because you can change it after the fact, unless you want one less thing to have to set later. exposure adjustment is the key here because to want to properly expose the image as best as possible, regardless of the RAW latitude. garbage in, garbage out on that aspect.

 

[Roger]

Usually RAW means nothing is done to the image - except like what Tim said - your actual exposure is the starting point. If it's underexposed, it'll be underexposed. If you are finding that the sensor does overexpose the image generally, I would leave your exposure compensation at -.3 then.

Sharpening, White balance, etc. is usually done in the RAW processing. And I leave that to Bibble. Although I may have to go back to DPP.

 

[idarknight]

I'm working through pictures from my last trip that was the first that I shot all RAW. I had absolutely horrible light outside with bright gray skies that at best gave no shadows, and at worst have caused loads of extra processing time. But I have to say that shooting in RAW has helped saved many shots that would otherwise have details that would have been blown out in the processed JPG, but after a bit (or more) of tweaking in Aperture, I've been able to recover considerable detail - though some are better than others.

To help in processing later, I set the camera so that I wouldn't have blown out areas on the camera preview - that usually meant -.3 but sometimes +.3 and then shot from there. The other thing that helped (when I remembered) was to properly set the metering modes. Spot metering can be really good at times, but it can lead to blown out backgrounds, evaluative metering can help with the backgrounds, but then the subjects might be really dark.