How about a small paragraph on how you do that MJ? I've always wondered.
On the hardware side of things, you need to get your camera to shoot raw images. Most of the time, you can fiddle around in the menu to get it to do that. I have mine store both raw and jpeg, as the latter are a lot easier to browse when I'm home to find the best shots. You'll need a big memory card, as raw files are considerably larger than jpeg. That's the easy part.
On the software side of things, you need need something that can read raw data files, and hopefully that software interfaces with your favorite image editor. You can do this with Photoshop, but I've never used it. I use GIMP (
http://www.gimp.org/) as my image editor, with the UFRAW plugin (
http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/index.html) for reading the raw files. Both pieces of software are free, and very powerful.
The UFRAW page has a tutorial in the user guide; I recommend just flipping through the different tabs and playing around with things and seeing what they do.
What I normally do is alter the base curve and/or the exposure in order to end up with a nicely exposed image. This is what the software uses to convert the raw image data (in my case, 14 bits per color) to something the computer can display (8 bits per color). I do this both by eye and by watching the histogram. For a lot of shots (like people, landscapes, etc), that means the histogram will look more or less like a bell-shaped curve that fills the whole range, with an average value that's about 50% brightness. For flower shots, you tend to end up with a curve with a couple peaks, one due to the inevitably blurry background, and one due to the large color patches of the flower. Same idea, though, but be careful not to blow out your flowers by forcing the average brightness to 50%; the background is frequently darker than that. Tweaking the shape of the base curve a little can really change the amount of contrast between the subject and the background and that's how these pictures really pop. The camera does the same thing when it writes a jpeg file, but it uses automatic algorithms based on various menu settings (like brightness, contrast, etc).
If you start with a really underexposed (dark) image and brighten it, you will end up with more noise (though far less than if you tried to do the same with a jpeg). UFRAW has a denoising option, and it works much better removing noise during raw conversion than trying to do it after the fact. A setting of 20 or 30 is normally plenty for me for an image that you've had to punch up a stop or two to get proper brightness. I'm fortunate to have a full frame DSLR with an enormous (and consequently low-noise) image sensor; you might need a little more denoising for cameras with smaller sensors, but be careful not to eat your fine details.
There's an option for increasing color saturation during raw conversion, and it seems to have different effects on colors than increasing saturation after the fact in the image editor. If I've increased the brightness quite a bit, the image ends up a little grey, and bumping the saturation to 1.1 or 1.2 brings the life back into the picture.
You can also adjust white balance during raw image conversion (again, the camera does this automatically when it writes a jpeg), but it's something I haven't really played around with since the 5DmkII seems to auto white balance very well.
At this point, I import the image from UFRAW into the GIMP.
The last thing I do is to apply a little sharpening (this is done in the GIMP, everything previous was done with the UFRAW plugin) with the unsharp mask to restore the sharpness that's lost due to the camera's antialiasing filter. For my 21 MP images, I normally use a radius of 15-20 and strength of 0.15-0.25. Even on a fast computer, this takes a little while. As before, the camera does this automatically when writing jpegs, but you have to do it by hand when using the raw images.
I also use the image editor to resize pictures; I scale mine to exactly 20% of full size so I don't have any interpolation artifacts; that's why they're that odd 1123 x 748 size, but it's a good size to put on my web site.
I just realized I didn't set up a signature for posts yet; I'm Mike.
