A consistent RAW editing workflow begins with white balance, then exposure, highlights, and shadows, followed by the white and black points, a tone curve, HSL and color grading adjustments, sharpening, noise reduction, and finally local adjustments. Lens profile correction applies a one-click fix for distortion, vignetting, and chromatic aberration based on the specific lens model. The tone curve can be shaped into a gentle S—slightly lifted shadows and slightly darkened highlights—which adds contrast without crushing blacks or blowing whites. Clarity, texture, and dehaze are three distinct local-contrast tools: clarity is medium-radius midtone contrast, texture is small-radius detail, and dehaze targets atmospheric reduction.
Sharpening and clarity are not the same thing. Sharpening enhances edges at the pixel level and should be applied last, while clarity adjusts midtone contrast and is applied before sharpening. Masking restricts sharpening to high-contrast edges and avoids amplifying noise in flat areas. Two kinds of noise reduction exist: luminance, which smooths grain, and chroma, which removes color speckles. Apply color noise reduction first and more aggressively, and keep luminance noise reduction light to avoid a waxy look. Luminance noise is grain-like and often tolerable, while chroma noise—the random color speckles—is usually more objectionable.
For high-contrast scenes, exposure bracketing captures three, five, seven, or nine frames at varying exposures, and tone mapping compresses the combined high dynamic range into a viewable 8-bit image; local tone mapping preserves more local contrast than global. Two-stop brackets are standard, though three-stop brackets may be needed for the most extreme scenes. Clipping warnings in editing software, often shown as a blink or overlay, make it easy to find pure-black shadows or pure-white highlights that need attention. The dehaze slider can rescue flat landscapes but can introduce noise and edge artifacts in already-detailed areas.
Astrophotography requires attention to the maximum exposure before stars trail. The 500 rule—maximum exposure of about 500 divided by the focal length in full frame—gives a starting point: a 24mm lens on full frame allows roughly 20 seconds. The more accurate NPF rule accounts for aperture and pixel density: maximum exposure equals 35 × aperture + 30 × pixel pitch in micrometers, all divided by focal length. Star stacking combines many short exposures to reduce noise without star trails, while a motorized equatorial tracking mount counteracts Earth's rotation for much longer deep-sky exposures. Dark frame subtraction removes thermal noise by subtracting a long exposure taken with the lens cap on, and modern cameras do this automatically for long exposures. Reciprocity failure, a phenomenon in which long film exposures lose efficiency, is essentially absent in digital sensors, though it remains a concern for very long exposures on film.