Vito,
Welcome to the world of RAW processing. First of all, to establish a realistic workflow, you should think about what your output intentions will be. If you wanna share some web images and maybe print a few 8x10's on the home inkjet or maybe at a walkin lab, you could stick with a simple 8 bit sRGB oriented workflow. If you want the absolute highest quality from your images, want to do a lot of creative editing and plan on printing larger sizes, then a larger working space like Adobe RGB and 16bit TIFF output is the best way to go.
The first thing you should do is make a backup CD or DVD of your images. Some people run through the images first and then burn a backup. It depends on how many images you have and also the subject structure. I always burn all images first and then go through and cull.
You should then white balance the images. This can be simple in C1 as you can apply a selected WB to any or all images at once. The same for exposure and sharpening.
Cropping can be done in C1 and also you can output low rez JPEGs for email and web use that have the same settings as the RAW.
You can then process all to a selected folder or open them into Photoshop for further retouching and printing.
There are a lot of little in between steps and there really is no exact method of processing. It all depends on your needs.
HTH,
VG
VitoM wrote:
> I spent the weekend in the city taking a bunch of NEF's. I figured
> I would start working on my postprocessing skills.. Once I
> downloaded the files to my pc I began wondering what to do first...
> I started with Adobe RAW and wasnt sure exactly what to do with it,
> so I jumped to PhaseOne Capture 1.. It was a little more intuitive
> to use and I was able to save my pics from NEF to JPEG.
>
> My question is what steps do others do once they get home with a
> bunch of NEF's?? Do you run them through a workflow or work on
> each NEF one by one like I was doing(which is painfully slow). How
> do you save your JPG's? Full quality or lower quality? When do
> you use PS if at all?
>
> Thanks in advance...