For those that have finally seen the light!
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This is the third time that I have gone out and shot in raw. I posted one of the images in my gallery.
http://www.prestophoto.com/photos/image/807703

Every time, I have found that the skin color is washed out on my images. Now if I was in Elements I would adjust skin tone. Give me some feedback on what kind of adjustments you make in camera raw?

Not just to help me with my skin tone problem... your basic work process?
~kimi~
Gone Crazy... Back Soon...


Gallery ~ a la kimi

My Blog

kimboustany.com
Kimi,

Great pircure.

About a month ago I purchased Lightroom and have just about made the switch entirely to LR and have been shooting RAW for the last 18 months.

One of the features of Lightrooms implementation of the camera raw feature is the option that lets you click and drag directly in the image to adjust the tone curve and also for Hue Saturation adjustment. That is what I tried with your image - clicked on the adjust Hue by Dragging in the Photo, then clicked on the skin area in the neck of the young lady on the right, chose an area that wasnt quite highlight. A click and drag adjusts the Hue of those tones only and done!

I am usually after just a nice looking picture, so no standard workflow, but adjust the Basics - exposure, recovery, filllight and blacks, usually a little hue and saturation looking at the Histogram, then adjust the Tone Curve and Hue /Saturation using the click and drag feature that only seems to be available in lightrookm.

Here is my quick adjustment using the click and drag. By the way, more latitude in thge original RAW image, and with the "original" eye, but here it is.

Image
John
Kimi, any chance you can post the original RAW image on sendspace.com so we can try applying ACR? Personally, I like the tones of your original - they look very natural to me. John's rendition looks great as well. Super photo!
Chuck
LR2/CS3/PSE6/Canon 450D, G10/Panasonic LX3
Chuck... I can give that a try tomorrow. I am sneaking on right now. :bigwink:
~kimi~
Gone Crazy... Back Soon...


Gallery ~ a la kimi

My Blog

kimboustany.com
I'm gonna tell.......... :woohoo:
Chuck
LR2/CS3/PSE6/Canon 450D, G10/Panasonic LX3
Kimi,

Read somewhere that when you shoot jpeg, your camera adjusts a whole bunch of things, starting from the RAW sensor data and processes it into a jpeg. But, when you shoot RAW, what you get is sensor data, no processing, no twiddling.

So, the boost in saturation, sharpening, etc that takes place in most cameras when thety process the sensor data to RAW doe not take place, therefore you use the Hue and Saturation adjustments to tweak the colors and saturation to where you want them to be - either a faithful rendition or an atristic interpretation.
John
Kimi,

I believe John's post is the key point that needs to have emphasis... RAW is unadjusted pixels. You need to make the same kind of adjustments that your camera does automatically when you shoot in Jpeg.

I don't have Lightroom or Photoshop so I rely entirely on Elements. My workflow, rightly or wrongly :D , is to use ACR only for white balance and overall exposure adjustments. I am more comfortable doing everything else (sharpening, color adjustments, shadow/highlights, additional levels adjustments, dodge or burn, etc) in Elements because I can use masks to target those adjustments to very specific parts of the image.

If and when I get better at ACR, I may well do more there.

Rusty
There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness" - Dave Barry

If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough. - Robert Capa

www.prestophoto.com/photos/gallery/19932
Not sure how well this might illustrate what you're looking for, but this is a strictly LR fix of a photo I took earlier today. I used no presets on this:
Image

Original was shot in RAW in aperture priority mode, 1/30/f8, ISO 250. No flash. Light is from a window.

My workflow on this one was:
1. Adjust Exposure, Recovery, Blacks, and Fill light.
2. Corrected WB
3. Adjusted brightness
4. Set Clarity and Vibrance
5. Adjusted Darks and Shadows in the Tone Curve.
6. Adjusted color saturation in HSL -> Saturation
7. Some sharpening
8. Added a vignette

That's it in a nutshell.

Also, more often than not if I need to crop I will also do that in LR, but this shot is not cropped.
GeneVH

My SmugMug
My PrestoPhoto
Now on Flickr

CS5/LR4/Nikon D300 & D70s/Win7
Kimi, I tweak exposure and temp settings or change white balance in acr. I also am very fond of the clarity,vibrance and sharpening in raw. Once the image is processed, it opens in pse and that's where I'd adjust for skin tone. The subscriber area at PET has a good video on acr.
jlwilm wrote: Kimi,

Read somewhere that when you shoot jpeg, your camera adjusts a whole bunch of things, starting from the RAW sensor data and processes it into a jpeg. But, when you shoot RAW, what you get is sensor data, no processing, no twiddling.

So, the boost in saturation, sharpening, etc that takes place in most cameras when thety process the sensor data to RAW doe not take place, therefore you use the Hue and Saturation adjustments to tweak the colors and saturation to where you want them to be - either a faithful rendition or an atristic interpretation.


John, that's a good summary. The in-camera processing to JPEG, while obviously a time saver, can be a little too strong, resulting in some cases (not all!) where detail is lost that could be preserved if the image had been saved as RAW and post-processed in ACR and Elements. RAW images also have the potential for more dynamic range (i.e., the range of detail from darkest to lightest in a particular image) because they have 12 or 14 bits of information for each tone while the JPEG is reduced to 8.

BUT....these theoretical advantages are not a big factor in images that are properly exposed with an appropriate white balance. They really come into play with under- and over-exposed images and ones where the white balance was set wrong or the camera's auto WB guessed wrong. Elements can fix a lot of this, even with a camera-processed JPEG as a starting point.

Anyone not shooting RAW - or anyone with a camera not capable of capturing RAW images - shouldn't feel like they're missing out on the best thing since sliced bread.... :D
Chuck
LR2/CS3/PSE6/Canon 450D, G10/Panasonic LX3
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