RAW Image processing Newbie Question...

[MT Stringer]

I've just started working with RAW images from my Canon XT...soon to be 20D. I don't have Photoshop but use Corel Paint Shop Pro XI. I've been using Digital Photo Professional to process my images, but they sure take a long time to convert to .jpg format when batch processing.

My workflow appears similar to "dschae1":

1) quickly mark for keep/delete based on quality of the shot (2-3 passes)
2) white balance adjustment across a set of similar lighted images
3) level, darken or lighten the exposure result
4) sharpen
5) Saturate or add Vibrance slightly as needed
6) output the finished set to .jpg specifying quality and resizing for web publishing

Final tweaks (sharpen, straighten, crop, resize., etc) are made in PSP.

Any suggestions would be appreciated to help smooth and speed up the workflow.

Thanks
Mike

[Duffy Pratt]

I would recommend not converting to .jpg until the end. I don't know what formats PSP takes, but I would try to get from .cr2 to some lossless format to go into PSP. With Photoshop, I convert from raw to a .psd first. The pictures then only get moved to .jpg when they are ready to go to the Web or to E-mail for viewing by friends.

I also have my doubts about sharpening in DPP, but I don't use the tool so I'm not sure. Is the sharpening you do here something akin to Fraser's idea of capture sharpening? Or are ou doing something more?

Duffy

[MT Stringer]

Sometimes I sharpen in DPP and sometimes I don't. I can't tell any difference.
Mike