Raw conversion and workflow with the tools I have?

Having never really benefited from using a camera forum I've been reading around about workflow. Capture 1 and Silkypix come up a lot and I've seen a few examples which prove their worth. Budget being limited, for the moment I need to make best use of the tools I have, those being acdsee 8, CS2 and Pentax's photo lab.

Now what I had been doing was using photo lab to convert from Raw to Tiff and then work on the Tiff in CS2 as a psd, saving back to Tiff at the end when flattening (even as I'm typing this, I'm thinking it can't be the best way).

I'd picked this up because most of my digital workflow was from slide scanning, which scan to Tiff. So my question is, is this the best method or is there a better way?

When you have CS2 you also have Adobe camera raw, it can opens the raw file directly and you can do many things with it. The same things you can do in capture 1 or silkypix, for example.

I suggest you import the photos from the card with camera raw, if i'm correct it can automaticly do that and convert them into DNG. DNG is also an raw file so you won't lose any data but it's higher compressed and it can be opend with more programs. DNG can for example be opend by CS2 without limitations that you have with some other files.

When you're done with the photo I would keep the DNG since it holds more info as tiff but save as tiff or loseless compressed JPG when you won't make any changes to it.
JPG isn't as good as tiff but it saves space on your harddisk and the quality is comparable and you won't see it.

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Stefan


K10D, K5
DA* 16-50, DA* 50-135, D-FA 100 Macro, DA 40 Ltd, DA 18-55
AF-540FGZ

The workflow you outline Dogpaws is fine.

We don't all do the same thingbut there are some good general principles. You have correctly identified that saving as a TIFF retains all the image data as this is a lossless save.

However, this is already changing and I mentioned elsewhere that fotoLibra are now insisting on JPEGs as that is what the book and magazine publishers who buy from them want.

Just do what you do and I'm sure it will work for you, but as mentioned above think about using Adobe's built in RAW converter.

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Best regards, John

Well good to know my workflow is fine. I shall explore the .dng option and do some comparisons to see if it's an improvement.

Interesting what you say John about libraries wanting JPEGs. I presume though a converted JPEG is better from a high quality original than a medium quality one, so a dumbing down but not the green light to shoot in JPEGs. Not that matters to me, I have no inclination to submit my shots simply because I just don't produce enough, I am an occasional photographer (It's also the reason I have my workflow written down because when I come back to it, I've already forgotten what to do). Still I hope to cart the camera about more, it's one of the reasons I signed up here.

I have added Silkypix/Capture 1 to my, like to have list but it's behind my need for a new printer and a longer lens.

Anvh, I just compared a file opened in photolab and saved to Tiff with the same one directly opened with CS2. The CS2 file was much better, a smoother histogram and better pixel representation (don't know if I'm describing that correctly), less fringing i.e. the outer edge pixels were more correct from CS2 whereas the edge was harsher on the Tiff. From now on I shall use Photoshop to open my PEF files. Haven't explored dng yet.