Just out of curiosity

[Harald]

Hi there you good people,
Just out of curiosity.....
I shoot my images directly to the hard drive in RAW and import them to Lightroom. I export to full size 16bit TIF and stack them with Zerene Stacker.
Do you do any processing in Lightroom before stacking, or do you use the files as is?

[Beatsy]

I do the same as you (though I've started using other programs for RAW import and TIFF conversion as Lightroom 4 doesn't support my camera's RAW format).

Occasionally, I will crop all the pictures before stacking (usually to square) just to save a bit of time. But any other processing is done on the final stacked and (sometimes) retouched result.

[austrokiwi1]

Also the same in principle( my Raw engine is Capture one pro) I process in Capture one pro and then export as 16 bit Tiff. For stacking in Zerene I just batch process in Capture one pro( not sure if "batch process" is the correct term)

[rjlittlefield]

Do you do any processing in Lightroom before stacking, or do you use the files as is?

I use Lightroom's raw development controls to sharpen and noise reduce, and often to adjust exposure. If my sensor has gotten dirty, then I also use Lightroom to do batch dust removal by cloning from nearby areas that have the right colors. All of this is before stacking.

In my thinking there's no such thing as using a raw file "as is". The only choices are to either accept Lightroom's default values for the development controls, or set different values that are more appropriate for the stack at hand.

I shoot under widely varying conditions, from micro to landscape, and I find that the best raw development settings are quite different from one stack to another.

If you shoot many stacks under similar conditions, then probably they could all use the same raw development settings, so you could set those as Lightroom defaults and use them all the time.

--Rik

[Smokedaddy]

I use Photoshop ... File -> Scripts -> Image Processor, then Select Folder (for the output TIF files the script generates), then check Open first image to apply settings, check Save as TIFF ... then pick RUN. Then I can manipulate the first image to my liking and it more or less batch processes the rest of my RAW files for that stack. It automatically creates a TIFF sub-directory below my image stack directory. So a typical directory structure for my Diatom image stack will look like this. Setup info is just a Notepad TXT file and maybe a few other odd ball things. My naming convention might be unusual but it works for the way my mind works and it's simple.

--- Diatom Triceratium DIC 40x Leitz NPL Fluotar
- Setup info
- Zerene processed
- Helicon processed
- TIFF
- Depth Map

-JW:

[Harald]

Thank you for your comments.
What I meant by "as is" is that I´m not doing any adjustments in Lightroom.
I will try to do some just for the comparison and see what I end up with...