Make adjustments in Camera RAW first before PS?

[dianajenna]

I have CS2, and I am trying to retouch my first RAW image. What I am wondering is what adjustments should I do on the Camera RAW screen before I open the image in PS as a .psd file to start dodging and burning. I'm having a lot of trouble with evening the skin tone, which I don't usually have on a jpg file. It's driving me nuts, and I dunno what I could do differently to the RAW image file before I start d&b.

I googled to try to find some info and I got the idea that anything you do on the RAW screen is optional and that you could just go straight to PS for any adjustments, etc. Can someone tell me if that's right, or what do you do on the RAW screen first?

Thanks,
Diana

[CJ Swartz]

Originally Posted by dianajenna

...I got the idea that anything you do on the RAW screen is optional and that you could just go straight to PS for any adjustments, etc. Can someone tell me if that's right, or what do you do on the RAW screen first?

Thanks,
Diana

Your post is days old, so you may no longer need to discuss this topic, but here's my experience -- You do not have to make any changes to the image while you are in the raw converter -- it just gives you more options to make changes such as exposure and white balance if you see a need. If your camera does a lot of noise filtering on jpegs, you will probably see more noise in a raw file, but otherwise it should look like the jpeg would have looked if you had shot jpeg. My current camera overdoes the noise filtering, so I use raw format a lot so that I can choose the amount of de-noiseing for each image.

Hope this helps, and I hope you were able to get the skin tones evened out to your satisfaction.

[dianajenna]

There doesn't seem to be any noise in the image. It's very clear - almost too clear. In other words, every skin imperfection is there. An experienced photographer shot the picture so I'm guessing he knew what he was doing with the white balance, etc. That's why I didn't want to mess with any of those settings if I didn't have to, because I'm not a photographer and I was afraid I would mess things up. I'm glad to know you don't have to make changes in the converter if you don't want to. I'd much rather work in PS, since that's what I'm used to.

I've almost got the skin tones evened out. It's taken me a loooooooong time, though. That's what caused me to be worried about all this. It seemed to go a lot faster for me when the exact same image was in jpg.

Thanks for your help!

Diana