Thank you Bruce, it is gratifying to know that you have found something useful in this thread. I hope you have a good experience with Nikon NX-D. It may not matter in which order you make the RAW adjustments because once you press the button to convert the image, the software itself will probably prioritize the necessary operations. The main objective is to get a clean conversion with some useful noise reduction, good colour rendering and minimal demosaic artefacts. Nikon should know how to achieve these objectives on NEF files better than anyone else. And if you are not satisfied with NX-D, then you can still use LR.

Regarding the publication of my notes, BLP is like an iceberg, there is a lot going on that we don't see and what may seem important to us is not necessarily important for others. Rob is away at the moment so I have not tried to get an update from him on his plans for my notes.

thanks very much Ian, I echo everyone else's comments - we really appreciate you writing these tips up.
I have a color calibrator coming in the mail any day now, and will be revising my old images, along with your processing guidelines.

Hi Ian,

Thanks for posting this series. You say;

(IW The subject I have chosen to illustrate these notes is an Eastern Yellow Robin where care needs to be taken "to prevent the yellow breast from saturating in the red channel".) (MD, how have you determined that the red channel is saturating? Excuse my ignorance if this is glaringly obvious)

(IW The first example is a screen shot snipped from the Canon DPP4 RAW conversion and adjustment editor. The values of the RGB numbers from any pixel in the image can be viewed in the top right area under the colour channel histograms. By moving the cursor around the image one can quickly find the brightest pixels which in this case are on the bird’s yellow breast.) (MD, I use Lightroom for initial processing and cannot readily see or find the colour channel histogram values in the 200's like you show on the screen shot. On some green wing feathers I am seeing R 24.1, G 33.8 , B 21.5%. Maybe I need to work out how to set those % values to DN.)

(IW I have then used the brightness slider to raise the overall image brightness (+0.67 stops) so that a few pixels on the breast are saturated with R = 255 DN.) (MD, do you mean "so that only a few pixels on the breast are saturated with R = 255 DN?)

Thanks for your time and consideration,

Mark

Hello Mark,

Saturation occurs when the digital number (DN) at a particular pixel reached 255 DN. The most direct way of checking for this condition is to run your cursor over the brightest parts of the image and look at the DNs that appear in the tool palette. With LR, saturation in a particular channel is registered in % so if R = 100 then it means the red channel has reached saturation (100%). In ACR and DPP4 the actual DN is displayed, that is 255 DN for saturation. With LR, ACR and Photoshop you can also look at the image through a 255 DN threshold screen which will show you exactly which parts of the image are saturated.

With LR you do not need to change from % to DN provided you know that 100% = 255 DN. I don't understand why LR uses this dumb convention especially as ACR uses the more sensible DN output.

Regarding your final question, yes, I mean that only a few pixels are showing saturation. There is no point raising the brightness further as many pixels would be saturated resulting in the loss of detail in the red channel and eventually in the other two color channels.

Hope this helps, best wishes, Ian

HI Ian,

I have started using the ACR plugin in Photoshop with success. Thank you. On to the next part of Lighting and Colour Adjustment 101. Mark

Hi Mark,
Glad to learn that you are having some success with ACR. If you don't mind me asking, I am wondering why a Canon shooter would choose to use LR or ACR for RAW adjustment and conversion rather than DPP4? The best reason I am aware of is if you are already a longtime LR/ACR user with thousands of images already catalogued but otherwise it is not obvious to me.
Cheers, Ian