Desaturation

If I know I want desaturate the colours in a RAW file is there any benefit in doing it in the RAW conversion using ACR or can I just do it in Photoshop?

Mke

Photoshop is the best place for image manipulation.

I have wondered. The exception being sharpening the RAW file on conversion? When I use the lensbaby I do apply quite a bit of sharpening on the RAW conversion.

Mike

Not sure why you say that. I don't think adjusting colour balance, etc., is really "image manipulation" as I understand it, and I should have thought that there was no disadvantage to doing it in the RAW converter.

G

The general principle is to sharpen last in the process. The reason is that sharpening does potentially introduce artifacts into the image so we want to avoid doing that and then following up with more manipulation.

Most photographers I know switch off the sharpening in the RAW converter.

Really. I haven't turned it off because I used SilkyPIX for a while and the sharpening there was applied at conversion and then also at save to JPEG. Silky did a lovely job of the RAW conversion and I tried to emulate the sharpening from RAW in PS using the settings in the RAW converter.

Also I save at full size as a master and then change the size to suit the purpose and save as JPEG which will require some application of the unsharp mask after the inevitable resizing as I understand it.

George - not ignoring your post just waiting to see if others react to it

Mike

Sharpen, perhaps, but we are talking about desaturation.

G

They usually do.

G

Oh I understood RAW images always required sharpening as they were inherently soft.

In Lightroom all the editing is done non-destuctively on the RAW file and the last thing one does is export as a jpeg (or whatever). I don't even really notice I am using a RAW file apart from a greater ability to rescue imperfect files. The only exception is on the odd occasion when I want to do something fancier than Lightroom can manage and then Lightroom creates an Adobe .psd file which I edit, and then I still export the jpeg from within Lightroom. Conversion to BW can either be done in Lightroom's develop module or as a BW conversion layer in CS3. I used to do the conversions in CS3 until I finally worked out how the Lightroom set of tools worked.

IMO..... LR and ACR (from CS3 and higher) provide the best tool for desaturation or converting to black and white.(as Kris already mentioned)

When it comes to sharpening....? If the raw converter has a good tool for input sharpening, by all means.....use it.

Output sharpening (web and print) ideally should happen at the far end of the PP part. ( the exception being localized/selective sharpening)

Martin.

What else have you tried? And why should any particular program be better at reducing colour information?

G

Hi George,
I started of with IMO, right?

But to answer your question,
Silkypix, PSP 9, LightZone, Bibble 4 with plug-ins from Sean M Puckett, Photoshop from 6.0 up to CS 2. PS Elements from 3.0 to 6.0. LR 1xx and LR 2.4. And several plug-ins from alien skin and Fred Miranda.

And to answer the last part:
Because Lightroom gives you a unbelievable amount of control for each colour channel in a very intuitive way and user interface. Again in my opinion.

Hope it helps,
Martin.

Both lightroom and CS3 have the ability to click and drag on an area of the image and lighten or darken the underlying colour. For example, you can click and drag on blue sky to make it almost black similar to using a red filter on BW film.

Lee Frost did review a BW conversion program he rated even more highly (which isn't in Malo's list) but I cannot remember the name of it now. If only I had my stack of BW Photo magazines to hand...

So hold on is the consensus that the RAW file requires sharpening on conversion and then the processed file is sharpened as a last step?

And also that non destructive desaturatiuon is a better bet than an application at RAW conversion?

Mike