PP in RAW Editor

[Boatman]

I have been reading Real World Camera RAW and practicing the things I have been learning. The following photo was edited 100% in RAW except for resizing and final sharpening for screen viewing.



My initial reaction was that I had done pretty well. In addition to converting to monotone I adjusted the tones and contrast individually on the headstone, the shadow, the plant and the background. I was considering printing the image. However, when I took a closer look at the image I saw some flaws that I would consider unacceptable in a normal Photoshop conversion.



This is a 100% crop from the image. My concern is the mottling you see in the mid-gray area. I'm not sure what is causing this. I used the adjustment brush with auto mask to select the area. The flow and density were set at 50 and 50. Is this the effect of less than 100% selection of the background area?

Since I have not printed this yet, I can't say if it is going to show in the final print but is fairly apparent in the Photoshop print size view. Comments are welcomed.

[TonyCooper]

You have good contrast in your black and white, so from that
perspective the post-processing went well. I would ascribe the
mottling to lichen. That's normal on old gravestones.

Two things that do bother me, though: In the 100% crop it looks
like you've left brush strokes in your attempt to eliminate the
mottling. They don't show up in the full image. Also, there's some
incised lettering on the gravestone. I'd put more time in trying to
bring that out than I would on removing lichen.

[Boatman]

I slept on this one and had some answers for myself in the morning. What I am seeing are holes in the mask where the original exposure shows through. This series of screen shots will explain it quite clearly for anyone new to Camera Raw:

This the full shot and you can see the six Adjustment Brush zones that I have created. The zone active, noted by the pin withe the dot, is the background zone that displays the defects.



This is the same screen with the Show Mask option turned on.



Here is the area with the defects again at 100%, note the settings in the adjustors - they are strong.



Since RAW retains your settings, I was able to go back and re-paint the defective areas using the brush settings at 100% flow so that they did not darken the areas I went over. This removed the defects but would be tedious to do over the entire photo. It also caused issues along the edges.

]

A better solution was reset all the sliders to zero for the mask in question. This removes the blemishes, proving that the problem is the mask.



I then reset the mask being more gentile.



So, the lesson learned is that you do not want to be too aggressive with your mask settings. If you are, you will make the 'holes' in the mask very obvious. An option is to go back and paint over the holes (set density to 100) but this may create a lot of work for you and create new problems in the detail and along edges.

What is really nice about the RAW editor is that it will do a good job auto selecting even in a black and white image. The mask painting process does require developing a techniqe to do, but once you get the hang of it, it works quickly and well. Selection in black and white is something that I've found difficult to do in Photoshop and this tool is a good alternative.