Post-processing a RAW file is not a corrective step — it is a development step. The camera sensor records raw data; the RAW file stores that data along with embedded metadata. Every image that leaves the camera as a RAW file is intentionally underprocessed. The choices made in post-processing determine colour rendering, tonal relationships, noise character, and sharpness — all of which were at best approximated in-camera.
This guide describes a sequential workflow applicable to landscape and travel RAW files from the Czech Republic — a shooting environment that spans low-contrast overcast days in Šumava, high-contrast summer midday in Prague, and the cool amber light of late autumn in the Krkonoše foothills. The workflow is software-agnostic in principle but references Adobe Lightroom Classic and RawTherapee as the two most commonly used tools among photographers in this region.
Step 1: Import and Organisation
Before any adjustment, establish a consistent folder structure. A date-based hierarchy (Year / Month / YYYY-MM-DD Location) produces a searchable archive that does not depend on software-specific metadata. At import, apply only lens correction profiles and camera calibration — no creative adjustments yet. Lens profiles correct for geometric distortion and vignetting that are optical facts of the lens, not creative choices.
Culling — selecting the frames worth processing — should happen before any adjustment. Working on images you will ultimately discard is wasted time. A three-pass approach is efficient: first pass removes obvious failures (blur, incorrect exposure beyond recovery); second pass marks the best from each group; third pass reviews marked images for final selection.
Step 2: White Balance
White balance determines the colour temperature assigned to the neutral reference point in the image. Shooting in mixed artificial and natural light — a common situation in Czech town centres — means there is no single correct white balance. A decision must be made about which light source to treat as neutral.
For forest and meadow scenes, auto white balance on modern cameras performs adequately. For direct sunlight at golden hour — particularly in the Pálava hills around Mikulov, where the low sun against chalk and limestone produces very warm light — auto white balance often overcorrects toward neutral, removing the warmth that defines the scene. In these cases, setting white balance manually to 6500–7000K in post preserves the character of the light.
For architectural work under mixed artificial lighting (Prague by night), setting white balance to match the dominant light source — typically 2800–3200K for tungsten, 4000–4500K for modern LED — and accepting that other light sources will shift is usually the most coherent approach.
Step 3: Tonal Adjustments
Tonal adjustment in RAW development follows a specific order to avoid compounding errors:
- Exposure: Set the overall brightness. Use the histogram to avoid clipping highlights.
- Highlights: Recover blown highlights — rolling this down to –50 to –80 recovers detail in sky and water surfaces.
- Shadows: Open shadow detail — but shadow lifting increases noise in dark areas, so this should be matched by noise reduction in a later step.
- Whites and Blacks: Set the contrast range. Holding Alt/Option while adjusting shows clipping warnings.
- Tone curve: Fine-tune contrast in midtones without affecting extreme highlights or shadows.
For Czech forest scenes with dappled light, the typical starting point is: Exposure +0.3, Highlights –60, Shadows +30, Whites +20, Blacks –10. This is a starting point — specific images will require adjustment.
Step 4: Colour Grading
Colour grading affects hue, saturation, and luminance independently for each colour range. For Czech landscape photography, three adjustments recur frequently:
- Green foliage: Camera sensors tend to render foliage either too yellow-green (Bayer-pattern sensors with strong green channel sensitivity) or too saturated. Pulling Hue for greens slightly toward teal (–5 to –10 on the hue slider) and reducing Saturation for greens by 5–10 produces more natural-looking foliage.
- Sky blue: Brightening the Luminance of Blues in the HSL panel lifts sky detail without increasing saturation. Increasing Saturation of Blues risks an artificial cyan cast on pale overcast skies.
- Autumn colour: The beech and oak forests of Moravia in October produce a range from yellow through deep orange-red. These colours are captured accurately by most modern sensors, but the Saturation for Oranges and Reds may need moderate reduction (–10 to –15) if they read as oversaturated on screen.
Colour grading in the Shadows / Midtones / Highlights panel (the "Color Grading" panel in Lightroom Classic, "Lab" adjustments in RawTherapee) allows adding a colour cast to specific tonal ranges. A slight cool blue shift in shadows paired with a warm amber in highlights is a common landscape look. Apply these adjustments with restraint — values above 15–20 on the hue wheels tend to look processed rather than photographed.
Step 5: Noise Reduction
Noise reduction is most relevant for images shot at ISO 1600 and above — handheld shots inside Czech castle interiors, dusk photography in towns, wildlife at long telephoto in low light. Modern AI-based noise reduction tools (Adobe Denoise, DxO DeepPRIME, Topaz DeNoise AI) produce substantially better results than classical luminance and colour noise sliders, particularly in preserving fine detail while reducing grain in smooth tonal areas.
For classical noise reduction, the order matters: apply colour noise reduction first (it is aggressive and has little effect on detail), then luminance noise reduction with detail preservation set to 50–70 to retain texture in foliage and stone surfaces.
The key constraint is to noise-reduce before sharpening — not after. Sharpening amplifies noise; noise reduction before sharpening gives the algorithm cleaner input to work with.
Step 6: Sharpening
Sharpening in RAW development is capture sharpening — it compensates for the slight softness introduced by the optical low-pass filter and Bayer demosaicing. It is not the same as output sharpening.
In Lightroom Classic, Amount 40–60, Radius 1.0–1.2, Detail 25, Masking 40–60 is a reasonable starting point for most landscape files. The Masking slider, held with Alt/Option, shows a black-and-white preview of where sharpening is being applied — white areas are sharpened, black areas are not. Setting masking at 40–60 restricts sharpening to edges and textured areas, leaving smooth gradients (sky, water, out-of-focus backgrounds) unsharpened.
For high-megapixel files (Sony A7R V, Nikon Z8) photographed on a tripod, more aggressive sharpening is possible — Amount 70, Radius 0.8, Detail 35, Masking 50 — because the pixel-level resolution is sufficient to support it.
Step 7: Export Settings
Export settings depend on intended use. Three standard configurations:
- Web and social: JPEG, 80–85% quality, sRGB colour space, 1600–2400px long edge, 72ppi. Output sharpening: screen, standard.
- Print (home printer): TIFF 16-bit or JPEG 95%, Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB, full resolution, 300ppi at intended print size. Output sharpening: matte or glossy paper, standard or high.
- Archive: DNG (lossless compressed) retaining all adjustments as embedded XMP data, or original RAW with sidecar XMP file. No export quality loss.
Colour space selection matters most when handing files to a third party — a print lab or publisher. sRGB is the safe default for web; Adobe RGB covers a wider gamut for print but requires colour-managed viewing to see the difference.
Consistency Across a Shoot
When processing a set of images from a single location — a morning at Průhonice park, an afternoon walk along the Dyje floodplain — synchronising base adjustments across the set before fine-tuning individual images saves time and produces a more consistent result. In Lightroom Classic, develop one image fully, then sync selected settings to the rest. Adjust white balance and exposure individually afterward where the light changed, but keep colour grading and noise reduction consistent across the set.