Absolutely new to Digital, question

[Zurenborger]

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Hello,

 

I am totally new to digital photography. I picked up my new M8 with 28mm yesterday 2.8 and had most of my other lenses corrected. I took a lot of pictures, actually a 1gb card full. I am now trying to un-Raw my DNG's and get a decent image which I can print on my epson 2400 printer.

 

When I browse through the net or read magazines they talk about sticking to a workflow. Sound logical to me, but I have yet to find a workflow I can actually stick to. Everyones workflow seems to be different.

 

Now for the question:

 

Is there a standard flow for leica Raws using C1-trial software?

 

Is this workflow similar to the one after having scanned slides in TIFF, I use photoshop CS2 for that, but have no real logical flow in the way I do it.

 

If there is no standard flow of work can somebody just give a few pointers or lead me to a (simple and understandable) book.

 

I realize that I can find these answers on the internet, believe me I have tried but there is so much information, and they all seems to differ from each other. If somebody is able to help I would be most gratefull.

 

I was under the impression that digital is easy to process seeing that 75% of the world population makes digital images, but the scope of the possibilities of both the M8 as the software has overwhelmed me a bit.

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[larrysultan]

Well, here´s a very basic workflow, hope it helps:

 

1) Download RAW images to your hard drive. Label them reasonably.

 

2) Sort out the files you want to keep / work further with. (Keep the rest in a backup subdirectory.)

 

3) Adjust white balance, contrast, color for each RAW file to your liking. (You dont have to touch an image necessarily. If it looks fine out of the camera,... fine.)

 

4) Sharpening comes last. I never sharpen for print but I do sharpen for web after the image has been resized to the final dimensions.

 

5) Export as TIFF for print, resized JPG for web. (Do not delete your RAW originals. If you want to make changes you can always come back to RAW and start from scratch)

 

My directories are like this

 

NAME OF THE SHOOT / DATE

- good RAWs, JPGs / TIFFs

-- backupped RAWs

 

Otherwise, there is no standard rule for image processing. White balance may be right in one shot, it may be off in another. Same is for exposure.

[Zurenborger]

Thanks a deal,

 

is there any order in which all these actions are to be done, I do understand sharpening comes last, but how about the others?

[grober]

Thanks, Johan, for the question and, Frank, for the great answer!

 

-g