I shoot in RAW with all my cameras, except on the odd occasion when I snap with my Samsung A12 mobile phone. I typically use exposure compensation settings of up to -1 stop, occasionally more, to retain detail in skies, or areas of high brightness (I photograph church interiors a lot, and stained glass windows can be very bright). This, predictably, tends to produce slightly dark images.
I use LightRoom Classic for all my post-processing and, like most I suspect, have a fairly regular set of actions that I use to edit the majority of my photos. How typical they are I have no idea. But, for the record, they are:
- Use the “Auto” exposure adjustment to normalise the exposure
- Set the Highlights slider to 0
- Set the Shadows slider to 100
- Use the Dehaze slider to boost the contrast in the image to an appropriate level (which seems to work better than the Contrast slider itself).
- Adjust the Exposure slider to get the right final balance.
- After achieving the exposure levels I want, I’ll use the Crop and Alignment settings to achieve the desired composition.
- If I’ve used a high ISO setting and the image has noticeable noise, I’ll set the Sharpen slider to 150 (which seems counter-intuitive, as it can accentuate noise) and the Mask slider to about 65. Then, depending on how noisy the image is, I’ll use either the Luminance setting for less noisy images, until I get an acceptably smooth image, or for noisier images, I’ll use the new AI Denoise feature, which is absolutely excellent. It can clean up horribly noisy images and produce really smooth results, although it does take a while, so I only use it when I have to.
- By now, the images are usually pretty close to what I want. I may vary saturation and luminance on the different colours, especially green, which can look a little artificial after Dehaze is applied.
- As a last resort, I’ll use the removal tools – either clone or the AI Removal tool to get rid of any unwanted artefacts.
And, after all that – voila! The finished image…