Good idea or Bad idea

[Scott Frye]

Is it a good idea or a bad idea to do the following in Camera Raw. I have always avoided doing the processes in Raw feeling that I will address these steps in the processing anyway and don't know of any advantage to do these in Raw.

1) Cropping and straightening

2) Sharpening

3) Noise reduction

[Nancy A Elwood]

When I have the RAW file in front of me to post process, I do one global sharpening step. Cropping and straightening and noise reduction is after I have Save As, my RAW, to 16-bit tiff.

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

Is it a good idea or a bad idea to do the following in Camera Raw. I have always avoided doing the processes in Raw feeling that I will address these steps in the processing anyway and don't know of any advantage to do these in Raw.

1) Cropping and straightening

Depends on how you feel about starting over from raw if your crop is wrong.

2) Sharpening

I think some sharpening in RAW processing is a good idea. Some folks disagree. It is not all the sharpening you will do... sharpen in raw processing, post-process, sharpen in post-processing (sharpening is last step for target output).

3) Noise reduction

I don't think noise reduction in RAW processing is a good idea because often you only want to do noise reduction on a portion of an image.

Cheers,

-Michael-

[Peter Hawrylyshyn]

Scott
Each new version of ACR has allowed more and more processing of your image - so why not use it if you intend to create a new master file.
Fully agree with Michael's comments but would add:
-if you open as a smart object, then very easy to go back and make changes/corrections
ACR processing becomes even more useful if you can batch process "similar" files

[Michael Pancier]

I try not to crop when downloading raw files. I prefer to use Lightroom and I'll crop, straighten, etc. and then save as a tif in case I change my mind later.

[Roger Clark]

Scott,

If your raw output is a 16-bit tif, then I would leave your 3 steps to post processing. If 8-bit output, I would do as much as I could in the raw converter. What does need to be done in the raw converter:

chromatic aberration correction.

black point set not to clip.

white point set not to clip

highlight recovery if needed.

Roger