- We talked about the benefits of shooting in RAW,
but to really take advantage of those benefits,
we need to process those images
in a dedicated RAW conversion software.
So let's talk about that in detail here.
Shooting RAW versus shooting JPG,
that conversation seems to be everywhere these days.
And if you shoot digital, you do shoot RAW files.
It's just that when your camera saves a JPG file,
it's already converted it from RAW.
It's chosen all the settings for you
that we're going to talk about in this movie.
There's quite a few sophisticaed RAW processors out there,
including the one that came with your camera.
So, we're not here to talk about the virtues of each one,
but more just to talk about the settings
that go into a RAW conversion.
Right here we're looking at Adobe Camera RAW,
which is one of the popular ones.
But all the settings that we're going to talk about
will translate to the RAW processor you're using.
For our purposes, there's two main considerations.
Our panoramas are bracketed,
so the way we're gonna process them
is going to have impact on the settings
that we're gonna choose in these steps.
We're also looking at fish eye lenses in this movie,
so there's going to be particular settings
that will be important for that kind of lens, as well.
My intention here is to choose RAW settings
for one of my files, and then go ahead and apply it
to all of the files that make up this panorama.
So we're looking at the source bracketed images.
If you recall from when we were shooting,
we took nine bracketed images, but I've cut it down to five.
The reason for that is really just because
for a demonstration like this, it gets too messy
to have so many files on the screen.
And besides, this is as if I had shot it
at two exposure value spacing.
So in other words, if I had changed the bracketing two stops
every time instead of one.
This is the way that many cameras operate.
In the end, it's about the same result
where we still cover the full dynamic range.
We just don't have as many images in between.
The top row shows our first set of brackets.
And we took four sets of brackets to make the full 360.
In addition, I took a bracketed set of my color target
so that I can use the middle gray black and white
to set my color, if I wish to.
And the last one is just covering part of the floor
where the tripod was, in case I decide to add that in
to my panorama later.
First we're going to open up one of the bracketed shots
that has the color target.
I'll choose the one that's probably the best exposed.
Now, when I was capturing these images,
I did go ahead and set a custom white balance.
So all of my images are going to have
the white balance you see over here,
the temperature at 4800 and the tint at +10.
Now, I could change that with one click
of the color tool here.
That's going to give me probably the most accurate color.
However, I do like how I chose, because it's a bit warmer
and a bit more pleasant.
Those are a couple of ways that you could choose
a good color temperature.
But whatever we choose, we're going to go ahead
and copy it over to all the images so they're consistent.
Our project is going to consist of exposure fusion
later in the workflow.
Exposure fusion is another HDR-type process,
except it doesn't have the full process
of combining into a 32-bit HDR in a tone mapping.
Rather, it works on the individual sourcing
if it's directly combining those.
So, when we're using exposure fusion,
we have a lot of leeway to do the kind of pre-processing
that we want to, the kind of RAW processing that we want to.
So, in addition to setting a color temperature,
I could adjust exposure if I wanted to.
In this case, I like to go ahead and pull out
a little bit of the highlights, bringing them down,
and the opposite with the shadows, bringing them up,
just to pull out a little extra detail in the images.
And these are general settings that are supposed to apply
in a very general way, and that's why I am choosing
somewhat arbitrary numbers of -20 and +20.
I like to bring down the blacks for just a little bit,
as well, because I feel like having real blacks
in the image retains a lot of the natural look that way.
But again, those settings are very much
up to the individual.
But these are ones that I can set
when using exposure fusion.
In this case I'm going to leave off a tone curve.
But if I wanted to, that would be a perfectly acceptable
adjustment to make, as well.
What I think is really important in the RAW step
is to add a little bit of noise reduction.
Even when we were able to shoot here at 100 ISO,
so the noise is not really going to be a problem,
but there really is noise in really any image.
So, adding a little bit of noise reduction
at the RAW step, I think, is very good.
Sharpening is another one of those
where we're going to do that later.
So I'm going to leave sharpening off.
Lastly, what I find really important
is our lens corrections.
If we were not using a fish eye image,
we could go ahead and choose to enable
the Lens Profile Correction.
But if we do that here, it's going to try to remove
the fish eye effect.
But we're going to process these in a high-end,
professional stitching program,
which is going to take care of that for us.
So, here there's no need for that.
In the color tab in the lens corrections section
is a very important option,
and that's the removal of chromatic aberration.
Now, if you're not familiar with chromatic aberration,
you can see it in usually high-contrast areas of an image
when you zoom in to at least 100%.
Like here we see these kind of pink band and green band
surrounding this lamp.
And it happens for reasons of physics
with different wavelengths hitting the sensor
at different angles.
But all of that's rather technical.
What we need to know is how to get rid of it.
And that, luckily, is not technical or difficult.
We can usually get rid of it by just checking
the Remove Chromatic Aberration option
in most of these modern sophisticated RAW processors,
which is great.
In this case I see there's still a little bit left there.
I'm just gonna uncheck it again to look around again.
It's surrounding the lamp, it's surrounding areas
of this window, including these blinds.
You can see these pink bands.
And in our final result, this really starts to jump out
at you, especially if you're using other processing
like HDR, which notoriously is going
to exaggerate the effect.
So, getting rid of it now is really important.
So I'm gonna check that box.
And it still feels like
there's a little bit of color fringe there.
We can increase it a little bit more manually
by adding a little bit to the purple and the green.
And looking at that, it looks quite clean at this point.
And those kind of simple settings are also very good
for applying to all of our images.
It should take care of it throughout our panorama.
Now, the last thing I wanna touch on in the RAW processor,
in this processor is down here at the bottom.
It looks like a link.
If I click on that, we see some other options
that are related to the size and the quality
of the saved processed image.
We are going to have to save these images as TIFs or JPGs
in order to apply all of these settings.
If I were to just apply these settings in RAW,
and then load those RAW files in another processor
that is not Adobe, then none of these adjustments
that we're making are going to be recognized.
And that's because the tool we're going to be using,
which PTGui, doesn't have the same RAW processor built in
that we're using now.
It has a different RAW processor that's much more simple.
That's why we're making all these adjustments now,
saving them as JPGs or TIFs,
and then we'll load those as our source images.
So, there's just a couple of things in this dialog
that has to do with color space.
This is something that individual photographers
will choose.
I like to leave Adobe RGB through my workflow,
and then only saving my final result as SRGB,
which is the most generally used
for a presentation on the web.
The bit depth can be saved at a higher or lower bit depth.
And this, to me, depends up on how much
post-processing you plan to do.
If you do heavy post=processing,
it's a good idea to use 16 bits per channel,
because you retain so much information.
We're not going to do so much, though.
I feel comfortable with eight bits per channel.
Saves a lot of file size, as well,
and the kinds of editing that we're going to do
don't really require the 16 bits per channel.
So I'll leave it there at 8 bits.
If I wish to resize, I could do that now,
but we're interested in keeping the full resolution
throughout our processing, all the way up
until we finally output it.
And I won't add sharpening.
Can click OK.
Now, my settings are all chosen for my RAW processor.
In this case, I'm going to click done.
And when I switch back over to Adobe Bridge,
I'll see this little icon that shows me
that the settings are indeed there.
They're currently only applied to the one image.
So now I'm going to apply those to all the images.
In my experience, any dedicated RAW processing software
allows you to do something like the following,
where I can take this one image
where I've chosen my RAW settings.
I can copy those settings.
And then I can apply them to all images.
So if I hit Command-A to choose all of the images,
and I'm hitting click-command to unselect the one
which already has the settings.
Now I can apply those settings by pasting them.
This dialog is asking me which settings in particular
I want to include.
And it's basically all of them.
The ones that are unchecked don't apply, anyway,
because I didn't apply any Crop, or Spot Removal,
or Local Adjustments.
So I click OK, and that's going to go ahead and copy
to all my images.
If I deselect, I can see that the little icon
showing the settings is being applied to all of them.
Now, all I need to do is save all of these
as a TIF or a JPG.
In this software, again, I choose which images
I want to save, and that's all of them.
Go up here to Tools,
PhotoShop, Image Processor.
And that brings me up a dialog
that's very much a batch dialog.
For this, let's go ahead and save the images
in the same location.
Let's us JPG just to save ourselves some time
and space this time, at full quality, which is 12.
These things down at the bottom are up to you.
In that case I just have my name and the copyright there.
So I click Run.
That's going to open up each one individually
and save it as a JPG file.
And that JPG is going to have all of those adjustments
that we did in the RAW conversion.
So after this processing is done,
we'll be able to combine those resulting images,
and we'll do that in a future movie.