Post-processing the photos is an important step towards creating a solid documentation. The two most important steps here are colour-correction and lens distortion. Every situation is different and with various possibilities for lighting conditions, the correct colouring of your objects gets distorted. A colour-correction can fix that, as long as you have provided a colour chart or grey card with your photos. Also, we want to compensate for lens distortions, as each setup can produce lightly distorted photos.

In order to prepare the images, we need to read out the EXIF data of the RAW image files. The software Camera Raw is quite suitable for that. We can open our RAW data in the software Adobe Bridge. Navigate to the folder with the images and select them all by using your mouse and the SHIFT-Button. By right-clicking on the selected files, we can choose Open in Camera Raw/In Camera Raw öffnen.

In the Camera Raw dialog, you should see your selected photos on the left. Choose one photo, where you are able to see the gray card or color checker, we want to do a color correction with the help of that. The correction however, should be applied to all the pictures, not only the selected one. For this purpose, on the upper left, select the button Select All/Alles Auswählen. You are still able to see your selected image in the center, but all the changes you do, will affect all the images in the left view. In order to do a color correction, you should select the White-Balance Tool/Weißabgleichstool from the toolbar at the top, indicated by a grey pipette. Search for the 50% grey area on your color checker or the grey card and simply click on it. You should see a slight change in color of all the images on the left.

Screenshot of Camera RAWThe second step should be a correction of the camera lens distortion. For this, we can use the Lens correction/Objektivkorrektur from the right icons. Here, we should check the activate/aktivieren checkbox and if it is not read out from the EXIF data, choose the lens with which we have taken our photos. Try to be exact as possible.

After that, we can save our corrected images. We want to save them as JPEGs. For that, hit the Save images/Bilder speichern-Button on the lower left. A new dialog appears, where you can choose the file format (choose JPG) and the saving destination. It should be another folder inside of your projects folder. I always call mine “jpeg-exports”. After hitting save, the software needs a bit to process the RAW images into JPEGs. You can watch the progress on the lower right, where the software counts through the remaining images. When the software is finished, you can close the Camera Raw and Adobe Bridge windows.