James Stephens

I found this interesting article by Scott Kelby (editor of “Photoshop User” magazine) which is, believe it or not, published on the Microsoft website …
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This post talks about some differences between these two formats so that you may better choose which one to use.
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My preference is to shoot in RAW mode and to use Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) for conversion of the RAW sensor data into a tone-mapped image. The ACR plugin is installed with Adobe Photoshop CS2 but in my case ACR v3.3 was needed to support the Canon EOS 5D. I downloaded the plugin from Adobe.
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Most of the time that I work with an image in Adobe Photoshop CS2 the edits made are reproducible with little effort and in these cases I like to flatten images (Layer –> Flatten Image) in order to save space before saving as a tiff or a psd file. Even a flattened 13MP from a Canon EOS 5D can be 75MB in size.
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This post details a simple method that I use to add copyright protection information to the metadata of all RAW files as soon as they are transferred to the computer. The method works just the same way for any file format that Adobe Bridge is capable of dealing with. One can always add a digital watermark to the image at a later stage in Photoshop if desired.
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When saving an image for the web there are basically five things you need to do:

1. Convert the image mode to 8-bit color depth.
2. Convert the image profile to sRGB (and preserve it in the image).
3. Resize the image as desired.
4. Sharpen the image.
5. Save in jpg format.

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Sharpening is an important part of a digital workflow. I stated this once before in this post on digital RAW workflow but I thought it might be nice to illustrate the point.
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I use a multi-pronged approach to correct for various lens effects, comprising distortions and other anomalies.
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This post documents the workflow I use when processing RAW images from a Canon EOS 5D digital camera. It is a work in progress. A number of people have made useful suggestions via online digital camera forums. I welcome comments inline on this site too.
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