Preprocessing TIFFs in ACR

[Eric James]

I learned here from Frank P that you can process TIFFs in Adobe Camera Raw. If anyone can provide tips or successful stategies for TIFF conversion in ACR I would appreciate hearing from you.

Specifically, I've been trying to reduce grain in some Nikon Coolscan 5000 scans of Velvia. I have been unable to dial-in effective grain reduction using the luminance settings. I have had success with chroma noise, but the luminance algorithms don't seem to recognized the pepper grain I get from Velvia on the Coolscan 5000. I'm using Vuescan.

[sanking]

One way to do this is to navigate to the file in Bridge, then from the File menu select Open in Camera Raw. This will open a window with the image, and the Camera Raw correction menu. At the top, just below the histogram, you will find a selection of icons that will open new windows. Click on Detail, which is third from the right (arrow form), and you can apply sharpening, control grain, etc.

Sandy

[Greg Miller]

I have not found the noise/grain reduction tools in ACR or Photoshop to be highly effective. I don't do much of this type of work, but when I do i go to a dedicated noise tool - they jhave much more sophisticated algorithms for handling noise and grain. I personally use Noiseware from Imagenomic.

[Eric James]

That's helpful, thanks.

It occurs to me now that I misstated the problem. My problem isn't with Velvia grain, it's with the digital peppering artifacts from the Coolscan 5000. Regardless, I won't be finding the answer to this in ACR.

I'm still interested in learning some tips for converting TIFFs in ACR.

[Peter De Smidt]

Eric, you might try diffusing the scanning light.

[andy]

From what I understand, the real perk of using ACR is that you can bring your tiff into photoshop as a smart object, which allows better, non-destructive editing and you also get the power of the ACR tools. It wasn't the way I learned to edit, so I'm still figuring things out, but it's handy--I find that I'm able to get to a final image with cleaner color more quickly using ACR than my normal curves layers in PS.

[towolf]

I’ve been editing Vuescan TIFFs in ACR a lot. Started out with Vuescan DNGs but somehow ACR always interpreted the linear Gamma files wrong. Then I tried linear Gamma "raw" TIFFs ("raw save film" option ticked) and those were interpreted wrong as well. Then I switched to working with 16-bit Vuescan gamma "corrected" TIFFs and those can be edited alright.

The cool thing with ACR is that you can do basic edits non-destructively and the edits are stored in an XMP header in the TIFF file. There’s no need to create another PSD file with edits and there’s no need to create additional TIFFs with edits baked in. I also prefer writing the data to the file vis-a-vis the database approach of lightroom.

Advantage of TIFF is also that it can be opened with other software directly vis-a-vis DNG, which usually needs to go through some kind of "Raw" programme.

The basics are all there and usually I never open them in Photoshop itself. Only problem is that it can only do round dust spotting and cloning out long linear scratches is not possible.

[towolf]

One way to do this is to navigate to the file in Bridge, then from the File menu select Open in Camera Raw.

You can avoid this step by chosing this option "Automatically open all supported TIFF files"

[Greg Miller]

The cool thing with ACR is that you can do basic edits non-destructively and the edits are stored in an XMP header in the TIFF file. There’s no need to create another PSD file with edits and there’s no need to create additional TIFFs with edits baked in.

If it's already a tiff file, then you can edit in Photoshop without creating extra files too. Just do your edits non-destructively in layers and re-save the tiff file. tiff will retain your layers, and your pixels have not been touched. If you open the tiff file from Bridge as a smart object, then you can always choose to use the ACR tools from within Photoshop too by double clicking on the smart object.