Double Process RAWOptimize RAW files twice—once for highlights and once for shadows—for a better tonal range |
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 One of the big challenges of photography has always been how to best capture the tonalities and brightness of the real world. Every film, every sensor (and its processor) will interpret it slightly differently.Photographs coming straight from the camera often miss the tonal or brightness detail of a scene. Simply put, no existing, readily available photographic-capture technology can handle the extremes of light and dark that many scenes have. In addition, the camera and sensor will often see the dark and bright areas of a scene differently than our eyes do, both in terms of tonality and color. A camera interprets a scene based on algorithms designed by the camera engineers. That interpretation may be perfect for your purposes, or it may miss what you think is important about the scene.  A Different ProcessA great answer to this is to process a RAW file twice, once to optimize the highlights, then again to emphasize the shadows, and afterward, you combine these two processed files in your image processor. You can use any RAW converter to do the RAW processing, then any image processor to combine the files, as long as it has layers. For the example here, I’m using Adobe Camera Raw for conversion and Adobe Photoshop for the combination. It’s true that you can do all sorts of fancy things in Photoshop to try to duplicate this technique. You might try elaborate adjustments to the Tone Curve in Camera Raw, you might try Shadow/Highlight in Photoshop or even layers with multiple blending modes, as well as color and tonal adjustments. This sort of work isn’t particularly intuitive to the photographer, and it often leads to a compromise, since getting the best from a highlight may change how a shadow is affected. Double-processing lets you focus specifically on the important tonalities and colors and then process them so they look their best without compromise. The key is to ignore what’s happening to the rest of the photo as you “develop” the specific tones and colors that you want to favor. RAW offers a lot of power in making strong adjustments that favor only a certain type of tonality. In addition, if one of your versions of the image isn’t quite right, it’s easy to process the photo again because Camera Raw remembers the last conversion settings. You simply change those settings and reconvert the file (the original RAW file is never changed). Analyzing The File   |
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