Camera Raw adjustments

[nobigdeal]

How much camera raw adjustments are acceptable within the rules of farktography?

This shot was processed only using the sliders in ACR (Adobe Camera RAW) no other adjustments beyond resizing.

DSC_9403 by MusicInPictures.net (Ken Cote), on Flickr

This is the original SOC shot.

DSC_9403-1 by MusicInPictures.net (Ken Cote), on Flickr

[linguine]

I’ve never used adobe camera raw so I don’t know what you were doing, but just by looking at the end result I would be ok with allowing that unless adobe has some crazy manipulation stuff in it that you were using, it mostly looks like you were giving the photo a kind a sepianess.

[nobigdeal]

ACR is pretty straightforward, but there is a ton more adjustment room than you get with the Nikon software or GIMP.

This shot I adjusted the exposure, WB, sharpness, color tone, saturation, contrast, black point, white point, fill light, and vibrance. So there is a lot of manipulation, but it is done technically within the parameters of the rules I think. I’m not sure I would be comfortable using a shot like this though without the communities input.

[Kestrana]

I’m fine with it but I’m generally one of the more open people

[CauseISaidSo]

The only parameters I’d question are fill light and vibrance. I’m not sure what exactly those do. The others are all pretty standard and have direct equivalents in your accompanying DSLR manufacturer’s software for RAW-to-JPG conversion (or at least Canon does; I’d guess Nikon does, too). I personally consider those part of the “developing” process for digital images.

That said, I don’t have a problem with the processed image and I’d likely not even have thought about the manipulations performed on it had I not seen the original, aside from possibly wondering how you did the vignetting.

[nobigdeal]

Fill light brightens the shadows. Vibrance is somewhat like saturation.

[swampa]

It seems to me that the vibrance slider saturates the blue/green/purple channels while the saturation slider saturates the orange/red/yellow channels

[linguine]

Fill light is the one Im not quite sure about since I don’t really know what it does and how it works, is it something that is applied all the way across the image? That said, Im having trouble figuring out what fill light did in you image since the edited version is contrastier and I’m not finding any shadowy areas in the original that aren’t darker in the edited version.

[sleeping]

Fill light = highlight recovery for shadows, basically – it does about the same thing at the other end of the histogram.

[swampa]

Fill light will lighten dark objects. It is useful in the case like where you capture a photo of someone where the background is perfectly exposed but the face is a bit under-exposed. If you use the exposure or brightness setting then you will blow out the background, in this case the fill light setting will lighten the face without affecting the background (it applies to the whole image but you may only notice sections of the image being affected, like when a specific colour channel is selected for saturation)

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