birdman wrote:
If you shoot raw, and you should, you need to understand what the raw coverter does and what PS does.
This differs from one Raw converter to another, and from year to year. For example, there are about 30 settings that can be made in ACR 3.1. But there were far fewer in ACR a year ago.
Blanket pronouncements about PS becoming a plug-in for the raw converter are non-sensical and reflect the working habits and prejudices of individuals.
Jeff Schewe and Bruce Fraser, who originated and publicised that statement, are both widely recognised as experts of both ACR and Photoshop. But anyone is welcome, of course, to call what they say "non-sensical".
Their aim was to reset expectations, about what is best in ACR and what is best in Photoshop, in a humorous way. I quoted their statement as a counter-balance to the original query "Why should I edit in Rawshoot rather than simply convert the RAW to a TIFF and edit (ie sharpen, colour balance etc) in PS?"
It would be possible to re-ask the question as "why should I edit in Photoshop rather than sharpen, white balance, etc, in ACR?" Increasingly, there is a lot of overlap.
It is indeed possible to take a straight shot and do most basic image corrections in a raw converter before opening the image in PS or some other imaging program. You still need to sharpen in order to print. I find there are very few images that are optimized only by the global manipulations that can be made in a raw coverter.
And no one is saying otherwise, as far as I know. (Do you know of someone who has said differently?)
The ability to make regional adjustments to an image is why one tortures with PS to begin with.
"Regional adjustments" is one thing that Photoshop has and ACR doesn’t (yet). You can’t select areas in ACR and apply adjustments just to those selections. But when you use selections in Photoshop, the different effects achieved inside and outside the selections may have originated in ACR. It is possible to use Photoshop’s regional adjustments as a substitute for having selections in ACR.
For example, suppose you take a picture inside a tungsten-lit room that includes a window to a daylight-lit scene outside. It would be useful to select the window in ACR and so apply a different white balance to the outside scene from that of the room. But we can’t. Should we just choose one white balance, say tungsten, and pass the problem to Photoshop, perhaps then trying to compensate, using inadequate tools, for converting with the wrong white balance for the outside scene?
A better method may be to use 2 conversions in ACR, one with tungsten white balance, the other with daylight white balance, and make these separate layers in Photoshop. By deleting the outside scene in the upper layer, the proper white balance, achieved in both cases by ACR, may then be obtained. Photoshop has then been used to compensate for not being able to do selections in ACR. (The same method can be used for exposure, noise reduction, and lens aberrations, or combinations of these).
If you can afford it upgrade to CS or CS2 and use the Adobe raw converter in conjunction with PS.
There are many video tutorials on the web, many of which are free, that demonstrate and explain what the raw converter does.
You have to develop your own workflow to be able to decide what is best left to the raw converter and what is best accomplished in PS.
Yes to that last point. But what I advocate is that anyone attempting this judgement should be aware of the extremes of what can be achieved by either, or by both in combination. CS2 and ACR 3.1 are pushing at (and beyond) the boundaries that some people believed applied to Raw conversion. (A year ago, how many people would have thought about cropping and alignment as ACR features?)
And, although Raw conversion currently applies globally, it is useful to think about what could be achieved if it were to apply regionally, then think about how to achieve that by using a combination of ACR and Photoshop.
—
Barry Pearson
http://www.barry.pearson.name/photography/ http://www.birdsandanimals.info/ 
