Photoshop and Lightroom Beginner Questions

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Permalink Reply by Gary Vernon on September 28, 2010 at 4:58am

To Jermaine,
I'm not sure i follow your thinking here,
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"You shouldn't edit in .jpg in photoshop, but it's okay in lightroom.
I can't explain why, I just follow orders."
"Take a look for yourself, shoot the same picture in raw and jpg, then edit in lightroom. You will see that there is no difference".
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Are you saying that a jpeg in Lightroom allows you the same latitude to correct white balance / blown
highlights / extract detail from underexposed areas?
They may look the same side by side, but when you are faced with highlight detail loss in for example a white wedding dress or your Caucasian / Asian skin tones are slightly off and if your file is an 8 bit jpeg - it's cooked! as opposed to being able to use all your raw data for correction.

If you export from raw (Lightroom / ACR / Capture One / to 16 bit .tiff into CS5 you have 65,536 levels to work with compared to only the 256 brightness levels of an 8 bit jpeg!
During editing a jpeg file breaks down significantly quicker than a .tiff file and the artifacts and colour shifts due to the file format only having 8 bits is very evident when after curves / levels etc you interpolate (resize / up resolution) your image up to for example an 16x20 print..

Saving as jpeg and in srgb colour space should only be done to a duplicated copy if you are emailing your images or compressing them for inclusion on a website.

Re: non destructive:
both Lightroom and CS5 are Non destructive, if you know how to use Photoshop you will understand smart objects and layers..

Disk space is so cheap the larger file size of raw and tiff should never be an issue, quality should be and the benefits of .raw and .tiff are self evident..

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Permalink Reply by CameraClicker on October 5, 2010 at 8:09am

If you actually have 16 bits of data, you have 65,536 levels. Canon and Nikon typically provide 12 or 14 bits of data which would provide 4,096 or 16,384 levels. Still, a lot more than the 256 available from 8 bits.

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Permalink Reply by Gary Vernon on October 5, 2010 at 9:32am

CC, it's not how much info is in the 14bit camera data :-)
What 65,536 levels gives you
is the latitude to perform curves / levels adjustments etc in post processing without making huge jumps. So transitions between colours are smoother, tonal banding is reduced and posterization less likely to occur.
For me, all printing is 16bit Tiff so jpeg doesn't figure in the workflow..

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Permalink Reply by CameraClicker on October 5, 2010 at 3:49pm

OK, if you say so..... but if that is the case, you should see the same benefit when starting with an eight bit JPEG and editing in sixteen bits?

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Permalink Reply by Gary Vernon on October 6, 2010 at 6:07am

"but if that is the case, you should see the same benefit when starting with an eight bit JPEG and editing in sixteen bits?"
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Yes that is the case CC and it's very easy to show the difference on a calibrated monitor.

Below is an image i just made from the same .jpeg file (srgb colour space)
The image on the left is the result of 5 basic steps in editing.
The right part of the image is exactly the same .jpeg converted to 16bit .Tiff and run through the same identical editing settings, then converted back to jpeg for the web.

This is not excessive editing and any more processing would see the jpeg literally fall apart.
Had this been a raw converted to .tiff from the start, the result would obviously contain far less tonal banding, and posterization.

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Permalink Reply by CameraClicker on October 6, 2010 at 6:47am

Cool demonstration, even on an uncalibrated monitor the difference can be seen. What are the 5 steps?

I will have another look at it when I get back to a machine with a calibrated monitor. I will also have to locate where the conversion is set when a photo is passed from Camera Raw into Photoshop CS5. I know I have it set to go into Photoshop Elements as 16 bits but there are many things Elements will only do on an eight bit file so at some point you have to convert it to eight bits. CS5 does not seem to have that restriction but some tools are in different places, labeled differently or perhaps just not there. I got CS5 at the end of August and am still finding my way around.

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Permalink Reply by Gary Vernon on October 6, 2010 at 10:02am

He he! - it's quite alarming if you compare the .jpeg against a .tiff from a raw file.
Adjustments were shadows and highlights / curves / Gaussian blur 30 percent overlay blend / sharpen / each one saved once during the edit / bicubic resize and save at maximum quality.
Many more people would by Elements if it was 16bit all the way, but there again it is cheaper and does retain 80 percent of it's big brother.

Gina it you are going for a.tiff workflow it's better all round to go from raw, that way you are starting from 14 bit (depending on cam) and not 8 bit..

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Permalink Reply by Gina Michaels Photography on October 6, 2010 at 6:59am

ok so i have been editing in CS3 in TIFF files (still shooting in jpeg and then i convert it to tiff in lightroom- just need to amkes ure im doing it in 16 bits not 8),then when i finish editing them i flatten them and save back to jpeg and the maximum quality. is this correct?

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Permalink Reply by Matt Needham on October 5, 2010 at 6:04am

"You shouldn't edit in jpg in photoshop, but it's okay in lightroom. I can't explain why..."

In Photoshop the person doing the processing must implement the non-destructive (basically non-permanent) processing techniques. Lightroom implements the non-destructive processing techniques on it's own so the photographer doesn't have to worry about it.

"...shot the same picture in raw and jpg, then edit in lightroom. You will see that there is no difference."

Raw does not guarantee better results. It only offers the possibility of better results. Whether better results are achieved or not depends on the raw processing skills of the photographer.

A short video with landscape photographer Joseph Holmes discussing the potential advantages the photographer can realize by doing their own raw processing rather than letting the camera do it.

http://www.silberstudios.tv/videos/joseph-holmes-raw-photo-tips

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Permalink Reply by Matt Needham on October 5, 2010 at 6:30am

In the end it's just a personal choice of tools and workflow. Jpeg and raw workflows are obviously both valid or there wouldn't be any controversy and they wouldn't offer the choice in high end cameras. The darkroom geeks always insisted that doing the processing and printing themselves gave them more options and higher quality than they got from labs, yet since the day it was introduced more than 99% of film has been dropped off or mailed to a lab for fairly automatic, uniform processing and printing. I was a BW darkroom geek, so I shoot raw because I like individually processing every shot. I get into it. Other folks hate that. Someone who preferred shooting slides might choose a jpeg workflow.

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Permalink Reply by CameraClicker on October 5, 2010 at 8:26am

I shot almost exclusively slide film. I liked the look better and knew what to expect when I got the slides back. With prints someone at a lab would crop and adjust and tweak. With slides the film went though an automatic process and so there was consistency. It was also easier to show photos to a group. Now the slides can be scanned and adjusted the same as from a digital camera.

I usually shoot raw now, the exception being when I want a really long burst. You can get 8 or 10 times the number of frames in JPEG that you can in RAW depending on the camera model, before the buffer fills.

It was always about convenience and control. With digital, a photographer can have total control with a high level of convenience, once the tools are understood. A slide show can be presented right from the computer monitor or via projector, and printing can be done locally or sent to a lab.

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