Not agreeing or disagreeing but Different scenes require different settings, say a portrait over the cloud shot you used, wouldnt you have to use different settings for each? then you might be back to changing anyway, I dont leave mine in the default mode but dont change to much untill Im ready to print it, then I move the sliders, I do try to achieve as accurate a white balance as I can in the camera because some scenes might not have a good white or grey to click on. I will experiment with some of the sliders when I get a chance
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
I am curious about your setting of 50 as the default for Brightness. Just yesterday I began experimenting with setting the brightness to 0 as a default so that I won't be "deceived" by that first look at the file. So far it seems to work for me since while I do add some brightness, it is usually a lot less than 50 and I'm personally more comfortable managing highlights when starting from a neutral point.
However, I'm still in the early stages of trial and error and open to understanding how that default of 50 can make sense. It's there as the default in Lightroom as well. Why?
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Brightness. Unlike its image-destroying counterpart in Photoshop, Camera Raw's Brightness control is a non-linear adjustment that works very much like the gray input slider in Levels. It lets you redistribute the midtone values without clipping the highlights or shadows. Note, however, that when you raise Brightness to values greater than 100, you can drive 8-bit highlight values to 255, which look a lot like highlight clipping, but if you check the 16-bit values after conversion, you'll probably find that they aren't clipped.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Going back to Noel's original post, I have to agree that the *default* settings that come standard in ACR are not optimal, in particular the noise and sharpening sliders (25-0-25 is the default - ick!). It's easy to reset the defaults to anything you want, and save those settings for that camera model. The point is that the 'defaults' are in no way the 'best' settings -- yet I have seen many photographers talk about processing their raw files using the 'default' settings and getting bad results. (And then questioning the quality of the raw files or the raw converter.)
Moving on to Exposure versus Brightness. There's a section in the Bruce Frazer book about this very topic, and IIRC he demonstrates the difference pretty well. In his example, boosting Exposure keeps more detail in the brightest highlights, while boosting Brightness starts to push the midtones into the highlights and reduces highlight detail.
--Ken
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
To add my 2 cents. I usually adjust a group of like images by first making an adjustment on a single nominal image from the group and apply the settings to that group accordingly, based on the adjustments of that first image. I don't believe that you can globally adjust all images based on one image if that image does not fit the parameters of light and exposure on the same card or cards. I will like most photog's have images that do fit a model of light and exposure and for a similar group, I find it is easy to apply the same settings. Whether that be WB, Exposure, brightness increase and de-saturation adjustments.
Angel
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Linear Mode
