What adjustments do you make using raw conversion software and which ones to you leave to photoshop?

Question

What adjustments do you make using raw conversion software and which ones to you leave to photoshop?

Answer 1

I hardly ever need to adjust white ballance, but do adjust exposure, contrast, blackpoint e.t.c. and for higher ISO's and long exposures noise reduction is a must.

I very rarely use the sharpening in camera raw, as I find it doesn't offer much control, although it is sometimes suitable for the first stages of sharpening, and I generally prefer to leave saturation and vibrance till later.

For black and white images I may use more options.

Which options I change depends on what I want the finished image to look like, I tend to take the image as far as I can towards being finished without making destructive changes that reduce detail or may give unwanted effects when further adjustments are made (as is often the case with saturation and vibrance if adjustments to exposure or levels e.t.c. are made afterwards)

Answer 2

I usually only adjust white balance with Adobe camera raw, occasionally I also adjust the contrast and saturation (Usually I don't need to do these because I look at them carefully while I take the picture, in-fact the white balance is also usually almost perfect).  I'm not a big photoshoper, I hardly fix people, I almost only use photoshop to fix backgrounds (remove cigarette butts) and edit the mood of a picture (clipping, adjusting contrast, blurring, sharpening...). Also I only occasionally shoot RAW, most of my work is satisfactory in high quality jpegs.