Developing RAW photos in Paint by Zaweba
The RAW Developer in Paint by Zaweba opens DNG, CR3, NEF, ARW and more, with tone, colour, detail and local adjustments saved in a .ptraw sidecar.
Shooting RAW gives you everything your camera's sensor recorded, before any in-camera processing. That leaves more room to recover highlights, open shadows and set colour exactly, but it also means the file has to be developed before it looks like a finished photograph. Paint by Zaweba has a RAW Developer built in, so you don't need a separate program for that first step.
It opens automatically when you open a RAW file, and it supports DNG, CR2 and CR3, NEF, ARW, ORF, RAF, RW2, PEF and more. You can also open it on a layer with Filter > RAW Developer (Ctrl+Shift+A).
The basic panel
White balance sets the colour of the light, so whites look white. Exposure sets the overall brightness. Contrast spreads or compresses the tones.
Highlights and shadows recover detail at the bright and dark ends, which is where RAW files have the most to give: a bright sky that looks blown out in a JPEG can often be brought back. Whites and blacks set the very ends of the range.
Texture, clarity and dehaze add local contrast at different scales. Vibrance and saturation set colour intensity, with vibrance gentler on colours that are already strong and on skin.
Colour and detail
The tone curve shapes contrast precisely. The colour mixer adjusts individual colours, for example darkening a blue sky or softening a too-bright orange. Colour grading tints shadows, midtones and highlights separately for a mood.
Detail covers sharpening and noise reduction. Raise noise reduction for high ISO shots, and sharpen a little to bring back the crispness RAW files need.
Optics corrects lens faults, and geometry handles Upright perspective correction and cropping. Effects adds finishing touches, and calibration adjusts how colours are rendered at the most basic level.
Local adjustments
Local adjustments apply changes to part of the picture only, with three kinds of mask: a brush you paint, a linear mask that fades across the frame like a graduated filter, and a radial mask that affects a circle or ellipse. Darken a bright sky with a linear mask, lift a face with a radial mask, or brush extra clarity onto the subject's eyes.
Because these work on the RAW data, they have more range than the same changes made later on a finished image.
Settings that travel with the file
Your settings go in a .ptraw sidecar file next to the RAW file. The RAW file itself is never changed. Open it again and your adjustments are still there, and you can change any of them. Delete the sidecar and you are back to the original.
That also makes backing up straightforward: keep the RAW and its sidecar together.
A good order of work
Set white balance and exposure first, then highlights and shadows. Adjust the tone curve and colour. Correct lens and geometry. Add local adjustments last. Finally, sharpen and reduce noise, checking at full size.
After developing, the picture opens in Paint by Zaweba as a normal image, where you have the whole editor: layers, retouching, Sky Replacement, Frequency separation, Layer Art and the rest. For panoramas, HDR and stacks, develop every frame the same way first.
Mistakes to avoid
Don't push every slider. The RAW Developer has a lot of range, and it is easy to produce flat, over-processed pictures with too much shadow recovery and clarity. Aim for something that looks like the scene did. And keep noise reduction modest on detailed subjects, since too much can smear fine texture.
Everything happens on your own computer. Your RAW files, which can be large and private, stay there.
