Basic Photoshop settings for RAW JPEG conversion.. EX2F?

frascati wrote:

Certainly a subjective question. But regarding any criticism of EX2F camera jpeg quality, inconsistent, overly/artificially sharpened, and other... for now I'm going to work with RAW for a while.

First. Can anyone disabuse me of any facts on this? Were these the subjective observations of a few reviewers and already not highly reliable? Was any improvement to JPEG out-of-camera made with the latest firmware?

No idea, I've never owned that particular camera, nor do I really know how reliable the reviewers are.  I didn't hear about any firmware improvement, but there could have been, I haven't followed EX2F.

While I decide to shoot in manual and RAW for a while, to better learn photography and to allay any fears about ex2f jpeg IQ, can anyone provide me with a good 'starting set' of photoshop adjustments when postprocessing EX2F RAW images?

Not me.

Something that provides a reliable platform that addresses any known imbalances mal-adjustments in this camera's RAW files?

I thought the problems were only in the jpegs?

Or is there such a setting native to PS?

I think it has defaults that work out alright?

I'm brand new to RAW.

I actually don't recommend Lightroom, I don't really use it, so someone else could probably be more helpful on that.  RawTherapee (I think on OSX?, Linux, and Windows) is probably what I would recommend for absolute quality, and Darktable (available on OSX and Linux... not so much on Windows) for flexibility in editing with it's advanced masking.

For Darktable... I should really get around to submitting data for the NX lenses to get added to the lensfun database (so they'll get profiles for lens corrections).

Thanks for any help. Sorry for any confusion. I'm just learning the vernacular.

For RAW processing, probably the most basic adjustment you can make that will make a large different is the tone curve, I think LR with have a decent default tone curve, but feel free to adjust it to your tastes.  Play with it a bit to get a feel for how it changes the image, the left side is shadows and the right is highlights with midtones in between.

Something you'll probably notice when looking at the RAWs is both more detail and more noise relative to the jpegs.  So good noise reduction is perhaps the next thing to look into.  Try to find a method in your program of choice that reduces the noise while keeping the details.  I think a heavy criticism of the jpegs is that the noise reduction is used pretty liberally resulting in heavy loss of detail.

Color adjustments, to taste really in my opinion.  Some people like accurate white balance and some like their arbitrary tints.

Sharpening, this can be a tough one to get right, doing so increases the visibility of noise but some should usually be done as RAWs can be a bit soft.  Usually it should be done looking at the image at roughly your intended output size and viewing distance for the final image.  It can be easy to go overboard with it, raising it, "oh, that looks a little better," raising it some more, etc...  Oh, also I think you can use it with a mask in LR that will prevent it from sharpening solid areas to keep down noise in things like skies, etc...

Saturation, can make the image a bit punchier, but like with sharpening, be careful not to go too far.