Re: "until I bought HRH Ronald of Reznick's ebook"
harlanlampert said:
What does this mean?
Harlan
Ron Reznick is a renown photographer and teacher. He has an eBook which espouces a unique approach towards post processing. The technique relies less on judgement of colors, WB, etc. to manipulate the image and more on judgement of the Curves presentation on Nikon Capture of the RAW image. So it's really "technical" 'till you can competently intrepret the curve.
Until one has a feel for the technique and "sees" what is going on it is highly frustrating (and occasionally heated) however what you get through his technique is spot-on white balance and color-neutral shadows. With this you can apply third party or PSCS noise correction and sharpening.
Many of the members here at the Cafe are granduates of Ron's traveling shooting and postprocessing school and use his technique. Because of this they have kiddingly/affectionately nicknamed "His Royal Highness Ronald of Reznick."
I'm not sure how much of this you already know so I did a core dump. Ron's eBook is not cheap ($80.00, US, as I recall) but it contains the essentials of his processing technique with numerous examples.
I think that about covers the ground, as they say.
Rich