Introduction The A6000 is one of Sony's best selling mirrorless cameras, even with its successor the A6300 now in the market. The compact E-mount camera is a diminutive powerhouse, with its 24mp sensor and wide range of features. Shooting in Sony's RAW format and working with Lightroom gives you a great degree of flexibility to work with your images. Having previously shot with the Sony NEX-7, I got my Sony A6000 shortly after it was released. In that time I've shot thousands of images with it. I've photographed everything from landscapes, to street photography and travel images. It's an incredibly versatile little camera. Over the time that I've had it, I've honed my process for developing the RAW files from the camera in Lightroom. I've come up with settings that I use as defaults, and!1
I've tweaked the calibration options to give better colours. I've also come up with a range of settings to help optimise sharpening and noise reduction for various ISO levels. While working with Sony RAW files in Lightroom may seem like a fairly straightforward process, there are lots of things that you can do to optimise your workflow. There are some aspects to the way Lightroom handles Sony RAW files by default that can benefit from tweaking, such as the default colour calibration. With a few simple techniques you can get the best out of the camera and the images that you have taken with it. In this guide we will look at all these things, and give you the knowledge you need to get the best from your Sony RAW files, no matter what the situation. This guide is designed for Sony A6000 users who have a basic working knowledge of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. It will not cover every use of the software, and it assumes you know the basics, such as how to import images, work with the Develop module and so on. It doesn t assume that you are an expert however, and where possible, I ve tried to write it to appeal to as wide a skill set as possible. This guide also assumes that you are shooting RAW. It will discuss some aspects of working with JPEG files briefly, but the bulk of this guide deals with working with photos shot using Sony s ARW RAW format.!2
What you will learn In this guide we will look at a number of ways you can optimise your settings and workflow to get the best from your A6000 RAW files. Here are some of the topics that we will cover: Whether you should Shoot RAW, JPEG or RAW + JPEG. Setting common settings, and creating an import preset. Recommended settings for noise reduction, sharpening and lens correction. Setting the colour profile and custom calibration. Getting better colours. Fixing distortion and chromatic aberration. Controlling dynamic range. Creating HDR images.!3
Table of Contents Introduction What you will learn 3 Table of Contents 4 Chapter 1: RAW vs JPEG vs RAW + JPEG 5 Managing RAW and JPEG files in Lightroom Setting the preferences to import both RAW and JPEG files A note about Sony s compressed RAW format Chapter 2: Setting Basic Settings and Creating an Import Preset 13 Setting the picture profile 14 Black levels and contrast 17 Setting lens correction Noise reduction Sharpening Creating a preset and some recommended settings My Settings Summary Chapter 3: Fixing Common Problems 24 White balance and its importance 25 Tweaking the values in-camera Adjusting the white balance in Lightroom Tinting shadows and highlights Manually selecting lens distortion settings for adapted lenses Fixing Colour Fringing Reducing Banding & Odd Colour Patches Blotching Banding How to Reduce Shadow Noise using Lightroom and Photoshop Summary 45 Chapter 4: Creative Adjustments 46 Creating Black and White Images 46 Matching the in-camera options Expanding the Dynamic Range Adjusting the Shadows and Highlights HDR 51 Summary 54 Chapter 5: Conclusion 55 More Information 56 Appendix A: How to install Presets for Lightroom. 57 Appendix B: Details of the included presets 58 1 7 7 12 18 19 20 20 22 23 26 28 29 34 37 40 40 40 41 48 49 50!4
Chapter 1: RAW vs JPEG vs RAW + JPEG The A6000 will let you shoot in three different formats. You can choose to shoot just JPEGs, just RAW files, or RAW and JPEG. Shooting JPEG has its advantages, the most obvious of which is that the files are ready to use as soon as you take them. They have all the sharpening, colour and contrast settings already baked into the file. This however can also be a disadvantage, as it means you are stuck with whatever settings you used when you took the photograph. There are some other disadvantages to shooting JPEG on the A6000 that are specific to the camera itself. For a start, the actual quality of the files that the A6000 produces can be quite poor. When the camera creates a JPEG file, it uses its on-board processor to do the necessary adjustments to the image and compress it for output to a JPEG file. This process applies sharpening, noise reduction and the picture profile, before compressing the image into a JPEG on your camera s memory card. While you!5
can adjust some of those settings, the problem is that the quality of the noise reduction is quite poor and can result in a very artificial looking image, especially at higher ISO settings. Images saved as a RAW file don t have this problem. While some of this is a matter of personal taste, in my opinion, the JPEG output from the A6000 does not represent the quality that the camera is capable of producing. While the RAW files from the A6000 are compressed, it s not quite the same as JPEG compression, and the images themselves don t have all of the settings baked in. The quality you will get from a RAW file from the A6000 will be much better than the JPEG file most of the time. So the obvious solution is to shoot RAW all the time, right? Well, there is a third option. You can shoot both. This may seem like a waste of space if you re only planning on using the RAW files, but this approach has its advantages. For a start, if you want to use the wifi functionality of your camera to share your images with your smartphone or tablet, this will only work if you have JPEG files. By shooting RAW + JPEG, you can have the best of both worlds. This can be very useful if you want to post to social media, or Instagram when on the go, for example. The second advantage of shooting both RAW and JPEG is that it gives you something to compare the RAW files to if you re having trouble matching the colours, or if you prefer the way the JPEG looked in the camera. By having both, you can compare the results afterwards. To set the A6000 to shoot RAW + JPEG go to the Menu on the camera and on the first screen of the camera menu (the first menu icon), you can set the option in the Quality setting. Choose RAW & JPEG.!6
Managing RAW and JPEG files in Lightroom By default, Lightroom will only import the RAW files, even if you shoot RAW + JPEG. It treats the matching JPEG files as sidecar files. If you want to use both the JPEG and RAW files together in Lightroom, you can change this behaviour so that it will import both. However, doing so will bring the RAW and JPEG files in together in the same folder, and they'll be side by side in Lightroom. To make this easer to manage, you can use one of two methods to easily separate them. This will allow you to quickly view just the JPEG files or just the RAW files. I ll cover these shortly, but first let s look at how to set up Lightroom so that it will import both RAW and JPEG pairs. Setting the preferences to import both RAW and JPEG files To set Lightroom's preferences so that it imports both RAW and JPEG files together, here's what to do: 1. Go to Lightroom menu and choose Preferences (Edit menu on the PC). 2. Make sure you're on the General Tab. 3. Tick the box that says "Treat JPEG files next to RAW files as separate photos. 4. Now when you import RAW+JPEG pairs into Lightroom, it will import both sets of files. Note, if you have already imported a folder of only RAW files, but you had shot RAW + JPEG, then you can reimport the JPEG files by setting the above settings and then right clicking on the folder in the library and choosing Synchronise folder"!7
Creating view filter presets to switch between JPEG and RAW The first method of easily switching between the two, involves using the Library's filtering options to view only RAW or only JPEG files. You can save these settings as a preset and quickly access that preset from the Library module s filter bar. Here s what to do: 1. Make sure you re in a folder containing RAW + JPEG files in the Library module 2. Switch to the Grid view in the Library module (press the letter G on the keyboard) 3. If you don t see the Library filter bar at the top of the screen press the \ key on the keyboard to toggle it. 4. Select the Metadata tab 5. This will bring up four columns from which you can filter the view by various metadata.!8
6. In the first column, click on the column heading. This will bring up a pop-up menu where you can change which metadata that column is showing. Select File Type. 7. You should see RAW and JPEG listed in the File Type column. 8. First select RAW. This should now hide any JPEG files in the view and only show the RAW files. 9. To save this as a preset so you can access it quickly in the future go to the pop-up menu at the right of the filter bar that should say No Filter or Custom (beside the lock icon) and at the bottom of the menu choose Save Current Settings as New Preset. 10. In the window that pops up, give the preset a name. Call it RAW or something similar, and click Create. 11. Now select JPEG from the File Type column and repeat the steps to create a Preset for JPEG files. Once you ve created these presets, you can quickly switch between them by selecting them from the Preset menu at the right of the Filter bar. You can also use these presets from the pop-up menu on the right hand side of the film strip too, and it doesn t have to be in the Library module either. You can switch between RAW and JPEG with this method in the Develop module too by choosing the presets you just!9
created from the pop up menu on the top right of the film strip at the bottom of the screen. Using collections to split RAW and JPEG files Another method for managing RAW and JPEG pairs is to use collections. To start, you should create a collection set for the whole project, and then you can create separate sub collections for RAW and JPEG files. Here s what to do: 1. Start by creating a collection set for whatever project you re working on. In the Library module go to the Collections panel (Press Ctrl + Shift 3 to quickly go to the panel) and click on the + button for a pop-up menu. 2. Choose Create Collection Set to create a new collection set. If you haven t used collection sets before, this acts like a directory into which you can put other collections.!10
3. From the pop up window give your new collection set a name. 4. Now, while still in the folder of images, use the method outlined above to show only the RAW files. Once you ve filtered the view so that you only see the RAW files, select all of them by pressing Command + A (Ctrl +A on a PC). 5. With the files selected, from the + menu on the top of the collections panel, choose New Collection. You can also create a new collection by pressing Command + N (Ctrl + N on a PC). 6. From the window of options that comes up, give the collection a name and tick the Inside a Collection Set check box and select the collection set that you previously set pop up menu. Make sure to also tick the box that says Include selected photos. 7. This will create a new collection with only the RAW files in it. Now go back to the folder of images, and repeat the last few steps for the JPEG files. This will now give you a collection set, with two collections in it, one containing the RAW files and one containing the JPEG files. You can view just one or the other by selecting the corresponding collection, or you can view both, by selecting the collection set.!11
A note about Sony s compressed RAW format There has been a lot of debate online about the merits, or lack thereof of Sony s ARW RAW files. The RAW format used by Sony in the A6000 is a compressed RAW file, and uses a lossy compression. Without getting too technical, it basically uses a type of compression on the data within the RAW file which makes the file sizes smaller, but may result in a small amount of data loss. Some people are concerned about the affect this has on image quality compared to non-compressed or lossless compressed RAW files. While there can be some artifacting due to the compression used, in my experience, you should almost never come across this. In posts about this online, users have typically pushed their RAW files to extremes, increasing exposure by 4-5 stops before noticing this. Personally, I have never seen this as an issue in any of my images. So, while you may come across it, it s unlikely to affect you in normal, every day use of Sony s RAW files.!12