1:24 amOff
Camera Raw is not Just an Import Plug-in (Anymore)
Back in 2002, when Adobe Photoshop 7 came out, it featured a new plug-in called Camera Raw 1.0, to provide support for reading raw files. At the time, the functionalities offered by Camera Raw were very limited, and it was used basically as a mere import plug-in for raw files. Camera Raw started to be a more serious tool at around version 3 (with CS2), and by version 4 (with CS3) it had matured into a pretty powerful raw processor.
If you've been shooting for a long time and actually went through the transition from film to digital (I have not), you've had to relearn your post-processing workflow many times over to adapt to the rapidly changing technology. You've likely started to work with digital long before digital cameras (and raw files) even existed, and your basic workflow meant scanning negatives/slides into high resolution TIFF files and going straight to Photoshop to do all the processing. When serious digital cameras came out and you started using them, you've been told that raw files contained much more information than JPEGs (or even TIFFs, for some cameras used to optionally shoot straight to TIFF), so you've gladly begun shooting raw.
Now even you are advocating shooting raw to preserve all the information the camera can capture — which is good — but you may still see the raw processing step as a mere intermediary to Photoshop, where all the serious stuff goes down. You'll say things like "Well, you see, here you have all these sliders that you can play around with to change your exposure, white balance, curves and all — kind of a simplified version of the basic functionalities you get in Photoshop... But, you know, we are all eager to bring that file into Photoshop, a much more powerful tool anyway, so we'll go right ahead and press 'Open'." You'll then lecture on using the Threshold adjustment layer to find your black and white points, using Color Samplers to locate them, and use a Levels or Curves adjustment layer to set the clipping with the black and white eyedroppers — you won't fail to mention that one should probably aim for 10 black and 245 white at most, because printers cannot manage further extremes; you'll add a Color Correction adjustment layer to fix the color cast; etc.
Now that's what is known as old think.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying this won't allow you to achieve satisfactory results — go right ahead and use whatever you are more comfortable with. Daniel Malka said it best when he said: "If it looks good, it's good, right?" If you've been looking at Joey L's early work, for example, and have been blown away by the results he achieved, you wouldn't really care to know that his Photoshop techniques were, at the time, profoundly lacking (as even he acknowledges).
But still, if that is the way you see your typical workflow, you are missing out on what raw files have to offer; you haven't fully embraced the digital workflow to the fullest; you have kind of a half-assed approach to image processing that is tainted by your past experience; you aren't extracting all the detail you can out of your files. Even a 16-bit, ProPhoto RGB TIFF file only has a fraction of what the raw file has to offer, for the simple reason that as soon as you leave the raw file, you are working with a baked file: everything you'll do to the image from this point will be destructive, and you'll never be able to extract all the detail that was available in the source file. That's because a raw file has not been demosaiced, it's still in a linear gamma, and all the settings you play with are only parametric: they are not affecting "pixels" yet.
For optimal results, ideally, you should be doing as much of the work as possible on the raw file (be it using Camera Raw, Lightroom or any other raw processor) and only open the image in Photoshop once you've exhausted all the possibilities, for more complex local/pixel-level editing (when needed). Camera Raw and other raw processors now even provide some level of parametric local adjustments (especially since Camera Raw 5, Lightroom 2, etc.), so there is no excuse. The white and black points (referred to as "Exposure" and "Blacks" in Camera Raw/Lightroom) are particularly important, because you cannot recover blown highlights once the image has been baked, no matter the bit depth and color space...
But don't take my word for it. For an excellent primer on the raw processing workflow, you should definitely read the first three chapters of the Real World Camera Raw books by Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe — even if you're not working specifically with Camera Raw. (Note that Lighroom uses exactly the same processing engine as Camera Raw.) Or you can always watch one of the comprehensive video tutorials with Jeff Schewe and Michael Reichmann back at the Luminous Landscape.
1:28 amOff
Exporting JPEGs for the Web from Lightroom
There seems to be quite a bit of confusion regarding the exportation of JPEG files from Lightroom. The "Export" window itself is rather straightforward, but you still have to know which setting is more appropriate for your needs. In particular, three settings may need further explanation.
Screen Sharpening
In a complete image processing workflow, there are commonly three different kinds of sharpening applied at different stages and for very different purposes.
It is important to understand that most of the sharpening is necessary even if one does not want to apply it "for effect", because of various limitations along the workflow. It should be noted that a basic sharpening workflow is not aimed at correcting soft images (caused by focusing error or motion blur), but at maintaining optimal detail in files that already contain as much as they can.
- Capture Sharpening (or Input Sharpening) is applied first and is necessary to restore loss of detail inherent in digital capture. That is particularly obvious when anti-aliasing filters are placed in front of image sensors to reduce moiré, as is very often the case (except on most digital backs, the Leica M9, and others). That is why the default behavior in Lightroom/Camera Raw and other raw processors is to systematically apply at least a basic amount of capture sharpening, which must then be refined manually (depending on various factors such as frequency). Note that this is true only when shooting raw files—shooting JPEGs means that the camera has already applied sharpening, so additional work on the file must be done carefully.
- Creative Sharpening is usually applied locally on specific regions of an image that require it most (such as the eyes and mouth when working on a portrait). This is the only kind of sharpening that is applied "for effect", where the photographer decides whether he wants his image to look natural or more crunchy.
- Output Sharpening is applied at the very end and is totally dependent upon the destination of the image. Luckily for us (and thanks to the work of Bruce Fraser and the guys at PixelGenius), Lightroom makes it incredibly easy to properly perform this task, which used to require a lot of trial and error. The thing is that if the image is going to an inkjet printer on glossy paper, the sharpening applied is not the same as the one applied for matte paper, and is not the same depending on the resolution of the print, and is very different from the one applied for viewing an image on screen. On one hand, inkjet printers inherently introduce a certain loss of detail because of the nature of the technology itself, so some additional sharpening must be applied—sharpening that would definitely look ugly if the image were to be viewed on screen. On the other hand, images need to be resized to be of an appropriate size for viewing on screen, and resizing an image calls for interpolation algorithms, which also means a loss of per pixel detail. This is why Screen Sharpening is required, not "for effect", but to maintain optimal detail when the image is to be viewed on screen.
Applying a "Standard" amount of screen sharpening to JPEG files exported for viewing on a web page is a very good idea—not to make the images look crunchy, but to retain an optimal level of perceptible detail.
Note that whether you intend to export images for the web or to print them, output sharpening is not something Photoshop will do automatically or even offer. When you want to do it yourself in Photoshop, the burden is on you to apply the optimal sharpening for a given destination—good luck! Do yourself a favor and just don't do it that way... Either print/export from Lightroom, or use PixelGenius' PhotoKit Sharpener and skip output sharpening altogether in Lightroom.
Resolution
When exporting images for viewing on screen, the resolution of the file has absolutely no meaning, so whatever value you put in that field has no importance and, contrary to what you might have been told, will have no effect on the exported file—files won't have more or less detail, and file size will not be affected at all. The important factor when exporting files for the web is the size (in pixels), not the "resolution".
Traditionally, images consumed on a computer screen have been set at 72 ppi (so you might as well put that), but that really depends on the resolution of each monitor—something you have no control over when you publish images on the web.
Color Space
If a file is going on a web page, because we cannot know if the browser used to view the image will support color management, we should aim for the common denominator (it won't support it) and choose the sRGB color space (the default presumption when color management is not supported).
The gamut of the sRGB color space is smaller than the gamut of the AdobeRGB (1998) color space, which itself is smaller than the gamut of the ProPhoto RGB color space—that much is true. But "color spaces" must not be confused with "color models".
The fact that most commercial printers offer very limited gamuts has nothing to do with the fact that they work in CMYK (a color model, not a color space). One simply has to have a look at Bill Atkinson's book to realize that commercial printers are technically able to achieve excellent gamuts and color fidelity when they put in the required effort.
In other words, the CMYK color model itself does not define the gamut, so it would simply make no sense to state that "CMYK has a smaller gamut than color space X".
2:56 amOff
Apertures for high-contrast ratios
It's been said that in order to be able to setup lights in high-contrast ratios (say, 16:1), the aperture f-stop used should be large enough to allow the fill to be mesured. The rationale behind this is that if the main light was setup for an aperture of say, f/4, then we wouldn't be able to read the fill, which would be four stops down.
In this case, this is flat out false, as f/4 -> f/2.8 -> f/2 -> f/1.4 -> f/1 is enough to do a reading (the light meter cannot display anything below f/1, a feat achieved only rarely in the history of photographic lenses in any case — altough you may be among the few who can afford a Leica Noctilux f/0.95).
But what if we wanted to use f/2 for the main, to produce a very shallow, dreamy depth-of-field, yet still maintain a 16:1 ratio?
The fact of the matter is that light intensity has no limitation in "dimness" — and the depth-of-field we want to achieve is more important than some mathematical restriction, after all! Although we must use an aperture our lens will ultimately be able to yield (for the exposure), it doesn't matter what "aperture" corresponds to the fill light, as long as it is enough stops below the main so as to maintain the desired ratio.
Since the light meter cannot display apertures below f/1, we can simply raise the light meter's (not the camera's!) ISO setting a couple of stops higher. For example, if we raise the light meter's ISO from 100 to 400, just for the sake of calculating the ratio, we gain two more stops that can be displayed. The main would register as f/4 (two stops higher than our desired f/2 at ISO 100, just like we expect), and our fill would register as f/1. No problem!
(Just remember to set the ISO back to 100 when you are done calculating your ratio...)