develop settings in schewe/frasers camera raw

[pliep]

I'm reading schewe/frasers Real world camera raw. ACR-settings apply to LR also.

Downloading schewe's files, I tried them in LR 2.4 to see if I could come up with the same results. That's not so easy.

Take (p187, exposure problem on Niagara falls).
The most logical step, as I've learned, is to walk through the basic menu and then work curves. That would give me an Exposure of about -4 stops to start with. fiddle with recovery, fiddle with blacks. Perhaps a little brightness.

Schewe does something else. He starts with blacks to +1'' and then brightness to -113. Indeed this makes a good develop.

Can any-one explain me schewe's order. why doesn't he work from top to bottom? I can see schewes after-edit-image is right, but his logic surpasses me.

thanks.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

I've just skimmed that page quickly. That's a pretty extreme example, so most rules go out the window. It's massively overexposed, so you're dealing with a tiny amount of data at one end of the histogram. The Basic panel sliders work best on 'average' images, and that's far from average, so he's just opened up the histogram fairly roughly using the Basic sliders, and then used the curves to adjust further.

 

[pliep]

thanks,

Indeed it is an extreme example.

I start seeing his idea's.
I guess he imports in Lightroom default-settings.
Then, before anything else, takes a thorough look at histogram & analyses it.
And after that, and only after that, decides his working order in develop.
That's good to know.

I take a brief look at the histogram and usually start pulling the sliders quickly to see what happens. I'll change my working order.

thanks again.