How to edit a RAW photo

Develop a RAW photo in seven steps

1. 1

   Open the RAW file

   Go to lilcactus.app and choose File› then Open… (Ctrl+O or ⌘O), or drag the file onto the window. Instead of opening straight away, a RAW file opens the Camera RAW dialog: a preview on the left, and on the right the camera, size, ISO, aperture, shutter speed and focal length read from the file. To follow along, open the sample RAW from this page.

   The preview is a reduced copy, so it updates quickly. Judge fine detail after the photo opens.

   1234567

2. 2

   Choose the white balance

   White balance decides what counts as neutral gray, and so how warm or cool the whole picture looks. Because it is applied to the sensor data here, before anything is cut off, even a large change keeps clean color.

   • As Shot: the setting the camera recorded. Start here.
   • Auto: calculated so that the picture as a whole averages out to neutral gray.
   • Daylight: a fixed balance for midday sun, the same for every photo.
   • Pick neutral point: click the button, then click something in the preview that should be gray or white, such as a wall, a cloud or a gray card. It averages a 64 × 64 pixel patch.

   Auto is not always right. A sunrise is meant to look warm, and because Auto pulls the whole picture toward gray, on the sample it turns the warm fog cold blue-gray. Keep As Shot.

   Tip Some camera formats can’t be sampled. The dialog then says so under Pick neutral point; use Auto or Daylight instead.

   

3. 3

   Rescue blown highlights, then click Open Image

   The sun, a bright sky or a lamp often pushes one or more of the sensor’s red, green and blue channels to their maximum. Highlights decides what happens there:

   • Clip (the default): the full channels are cut off. Bright areas often turn an unnatural yellow or cyan, because only some channels ran out.
   • Blend: blends the clipped areas toward white. Clean and neutral, but the color there is gone.
   • Recover: rebuilds the missing channels from the ones the sensor still recorded. It may keep more color in large bright areas such as a sky, but can leave colored edges around a very bright light.

   On the sample’s sun, Clip leaves a thick yellow rim, Blend gives a clean white disc, and Recover thins the yellow rim but adds magenta patches along the edge. For a light source like this, Blend is the cleanest, and it is what the rest of this page uses; try Recover on bright skies and clouds and compare.

   Leave Exposure at 0 unless the photo is clearly too dark or too light: it works in stops, so +1 doubles the light and −1 halves it. Tick Repair isolated hot pixels only for long exposures with single bright sensor spots; it can also affect stars. Keep Output space on sRGB unless you print and manage color yourself.

   Then click Open Image. Lil Cactus develops the full-resolution photo, which can take half a minute for a large file, and opens it as a 16-bit image: the status bar at the bottom of the window reads 16-bit working. The choices in this dialog are now fixed; to change them, open the RAW file again, which starts a new document.

   

4. 4

   Open Photographic Development and set the light

   Choose Filter› then Photographic Development… A large workspace opens with the photo on the left and the controls on the right, in groups: Light, Color, Effects, Detail, Lens, Color grading, Curves and Local masks.

   Work down the Light group. Each slider runs from −100 to 100 (Exposure (EV) from −5 to 5) and starts at 0. The values below are the ones used on the sample:

   • Exposure +0.3: overall brightness, in stops.
   • Contrast +15: spreads the tones apart, darker darks and brighter lights.
   • Highlights −45: darkens bright areas, judged by their surroundings, so the glowing fog brightens less than the rest of the photo as Exposure and Whites lift it.
   • Shadows +35: brightens dark areas the same way, opening up the heather under the trees.
   • Whites +20 and Blacks −25: move the brightest and darkest tones. After Highlights and Shadows have pulled the tones toward the middle, these restore a full range from deep black to clean white.

   Use the histogram at the top as a guide: it shows how many pixels sit at each brightness, dark on the left, bright on the right. A tall spike against an edge means pixels there have no detail left. On the sample, the spike comes from the patch of sky between the trees, which the camera already clipped, and from the sun’s glow, where the red channel reaches its maximum. A spike is fine for a light source or for sky that was already clipped in the file; it needs attention when your sliders create it on detail you want to keep, such as clouds or a white shirt. Tick Before above the photo to compare with the photo as it opened, and double-click the photo, or choose 100% detail in the Fit menu above it, to check fine detail at full size.

   

   123456

5. 5

   Add color and detail

   Close Light and open Color and Effects.

   • Vibrance +25: strengthens muted colors more than colors that are already strong, so the heather deepens without the sun turning garish. Saturation strengthens every color equally and overdoes things quickly.
   • Temperature and Tint: fine-tune the white balance, warmer or cooler, greener or more magenta.
   • Texture +15: crisps fine detail such as the flower heads.
   • Clarity +12: adds contrast to medium-sized shapes, which gives depth. High values look harsh and gritty.
   • Dehaze +12: cuts through haze and fog. A little adds depth; a lot would remove the mood this photo is about.

   The groups further down hold the rest: Detail (sharpening and noise reduction for high-ISO photos), Lens (distortion, vignette and color fringes, set by hand), Color grading (tint the shadows, midtones and highlights separately) and a Curves graph.

   1234

6. 6

   Apply the development

   Click Apply development. The layer becomes a Smart Object: the developed photo is shown, and the photo as it opened is kept inside it with your settings attached as a Smart Filter. The Properties panel now calls the layer a Smart object.

   On a large RAW the canvas can keep showing the undeveloped photo for up to a minute, with no progress bar, before the result appears.

   

7. 7

   Save or export

   • File› then Export› then JPEG… for sharing, email and the web. JPEG holds 8 bits per channel, which is plenty for a finished photo.
   • File› then Export› then TIFF… or File› then Export› then PNG… keep all 16 bits for printing or further work in another app.
   • File› then Save As› then Lil Cactus Project… (Ctrl+Shift+S or ⇧⌘S) keeps the development editable. File› then Save does the same for a photo opened from RAW: a camera file can’t be written back, so it is saved as a project.

Change the development later

Select the layer and choose Filter› then Photographic Development… again: the workspace reopens with your settings as you left them, including any masks.

The other route is the button under the Layers panel. Click Smart Filters (1)…, select Photographic Development in the list and click Apply stack and open development… That list also lets you switch the development off with its tick box, to compare, or remove it with the ×; click Apply stack to keep either change.

Darken or brighten one part: local masks

The sliders so far change the whole photo. To change only part of it, open Local masks in the development workspace and add a mask:

• Radial: an oval, for a face, a subject or a bright spot.
• Gradient: a soft band, for a sky or a foreground.
• Brush: paint the area by dragging on the photo.

Drag on the photo to place a radial or gradient mask (or type its start and end positions), then use Local exposure (EV), Local temperature, Local contrast and Local saturation. Mask feather softens its edge, Invert flips it, and Show mask under the photo tints the masked area red. On the sample, a gradient with Start Y (%) 100 (the bottom edge) and End Y (%) 55 (positions are measured from the top) and Local exposure (EV) at +0.7 brightens the dark heather in the foreground; the fade sits in the bottom third, so the trees and the sky don’t change. Each development holds up to 16 masks, and they stay editable like everything else.

Why RAW holds more than a JPEG

Think of the sensor data as a negative and the JPEG as one print made from it. The camera chose the white balance, how bright to make the midtones and how much contrast to add, then threw away whatever didn’t fit into 256 levels. If it guessed wrong (a color cast, dark shadows, a bright sky that is close to the limit) the JPEG has little information left to bring back. The RAW file often still has it. Only what the sensor itself clipped, such as the sun and the white sky beside it, is gone in both.

Developing in 16-bit keeps that advantage. Every slider stretches some tones apart; with 65,536 levels to stretch, smooth gradients such as fog and sky are much less likely to break into bands.

Fix common problems

The sun or sky has turned yellow or cyan

Some channels clipped and Highlights was left on Clip. Open the RAW file again and choose Blend for a light source such as the sun, or try Recover for a bright sky or clouds.

The colors look washed out after opening

That is normal: a RAW file has none of the contrast and color a camera adds to its JPEGs. Add Contrast, set Whites and Blacks, then Vibrance.

The whole photo is too blue or too orange

Fix it at the start with Pick neutral point on something that should be gray, or afterward with Temperature and Tint in the Color group.

Grain and colored speckles in the dark areas

High ISO photos are noisy. Open Detail in Photographic Development, raise Color noise first, then Luminance noise only as far as needed, checking at 100% detail.

The tones look banded or posterized

Check the status bar says 16-bit. A RAW file always opens in 16-bit; if you converted it with Image› then Mode› then 8 Bits/Channel, undo that and develop first.

What to do next

• Shape contrast and color precisely: how to use Curves.
• Sharpen for print or the web: how to sharpen a photo.
• Clean up a high-ISO photo: how to reduce noise.
• Combine several exposures of the same scene: how to merge HDR brackets.
• Make a smaller copy for the web: resize the image.

RAW formats by camera maker

Coming from another editor

Photoshop

RAW files open in the Camera Raw dialog, and Filter › Camera Raw Filter… edits a layer later. In Lil Cactus the opening dialog is Camera RAW and the later edits are Filter› then Photographic Development…

GIMP

GIMP opens RAW files through darktable or RawTherapee, if one of them is installed. In Lil Cactus, File› then Open… on a RAW file opens the Camera RAW dialog.

Mac Preview

Preview opens many RAW files and offers Tools › Adjust Color… In Lil Cactus the equivalent controls are in Filter› then Photographic Development…

RAW photo editing: questions and answers