Re: New & interesting RAW converter

[Paul Stenquist]

The PSCS RAW converter provides excellent control over exposure. i use 
the exposure slider to control the brightest highlights. The shadow 
slider adjusts the deepest shadow areas. Then I use the brightness 
slider to adjust the midtone values. You can bring up the midtones with 
the brightness control without affecting the highlights. That's great. 
Finally, the contrast control will move the ends of the histogram away 
from the middle or toward the middle. The sum result is control that's 
more accurate than levels and curves and more intuitive as well. I 
can't imagine working any other way. Sometimes, I'll provide a little 
fine tuning with  the shadows/highlights tool after converting to tiff, 
but generally I do almost all my adjustments in the PSCS RAW converter.
Paul
On Feb 21, 2005, at 6:53 AM, Frantisek wrote:

MR> I just filled in the form on their web site. It says they'll email 
me a
MR> link from which to download the software. It's been a couple of 
hours
MR> and still nothing. How long did it take for you?

It arrived in few minutes... Perhaps they are overloaded now. Bit of a
warning though - for me it doesn't work. I can't get the 100% zoom
image to work. There has been some talk about problems on Athlon
machines.
One thing I miss in it are the curves and levels. I have not been a
big fan of them, but after I finally learned how to work with them, I
would have to learn to use other controls ;-) Same thing I disliked
about PS CS - it has that many different controls to adjust exposure!
Just too many - especially in ACR it's different from normal editing.
I admit that the shadows/brightnes/... sliders in ACR worked quite
well, and probably the few sliders in RSE2005 will work quite well
too, but it's pain learning completely different ways of adjusting
exposure again :(
I would have most liked just "grade 00-5" and "time", with plugin 
options
for "split-grade" and "two-bath print developer" ;-)

This brings a question - what's your favourite way of adjusting
exposure? What is the most natural to you? In digital "developing" of
course :)

Good light!
           fra