Raw question.

[Donb10]

I tried shooting raw awhile back and then switched back to shooting in jpeg. I can't remember why, but I want to try raw again and have forgotten a few things ( senior moment). My questions are:

Does it matter what white balance setting you use or should you just use the auto WB and make corrections when converting in photoshop. Sometimes, when shooting outdoors in bright light, I shoot with my exposure compensation set to a minus 2/3's. Is this still necessary or can that also be correct in ACR.

Any advice is welcome

[jeffkohn]

Setting the white balance in-camera is not critical, because you can change it later in the raw convertor. Even so, it's a good idea to set the in-camera white balance to be at least "in the ballpark". The reason is because it affects in-camera image review and more importantly in-camera histogram. It's possible that you could be over- or under-exposing one or more color channels, and if the in-camera white balance is way off it could mask this and mislead you to thinking you got a better exposure than you really did.

As for setting EV in-camera versus in the raw convertor, I can't really give you any rule of thumb about what it should be set to but you definitely want to get the exposure as accurate as possible while shooting. Although you can make "exposure" adjustments in the raw convertor, this should always be a last resort. Boosting the exposure on an under-exposed image will often increase noise in the shadows, and if you over-explose an image there's no getting back that clipped data.

[Donb10]

Thanks for the reply. I think I'll start off by using the same settings I used with jpegs and see what happens.