Bob,

Never heard of it. And it’s not technically possible. RAW processing is the action of taking the raw bits from a RAW file and drawing them to screen. Once they are drawn to screen, they are no longer RAW, so can’t be “re-processed”.

Feel free to link me to an article or discussion.

cheers

Bob,

I had to google it… sounded too odd. I see what it is now; it’s basically a form of HDR (correct me if I’m wrong). Users are processing their images in two different ways and combining the results in Photoshop.

You can’t do this in Aperture, I’m afraid. You could process the image in two different ways, yes, but then you’d have to export and combine in Photoshop.

Bob,

I had to try this out myself this morning. You do get a cool look in Photoshop by doing this double-raw technique (I tried it following these steps at glyndewisblog.com) but the result was remarkably close to what I already had done in Aperture with a little curves and enhance adjustments. I put the two side by side and was able to reproduce the look very very closely in Aperture; of course which is “better” is entirely subjective.

The end result is a high contrast image, high saturation image with lots of sharp details pulled through from the shadows. I don’t know that the technique actually benefits from the double-raw processing itself. The technique of layering a high-contrast B&W version of an image on top of the original and using the Luminosity blend mode isn’t new, and doing that from RAW images vs TIF or PSD originals doesn’t, in my mind, give any benefit.

If it’s the look you’re after, try an s-curve, increased definition and if necessary, adjust the midrange with either the curves or the gamma on levels. I think you’ll be pleased at what you see.

Here you go Bob.

These three screenshots show all three images; the original RAW as processed by Aperture, the double-RAW as processed by Photoshop CS4, and the RAW Aperture file with my treatments. I’ve even saved the settings as a preset, although you can’t expect this to work on all images — the settings were very dialed to this specific shot.

Zoomed out: [screenshot]
Close-up 1: [screenshot]
Close-up 2: [screenshot]

To download the preset, click here.

Of course I want to point out that while I do know Photoshop very well, I’m no expert. So there may be more that could be done with this double-raw technique in Photoshop.

Daniel,

Do you mean losing detail in mine vs. the Photoshop way, or just in general? I’m sure I could tweak it to bring back some shadow detail; I just happen to like the crunchy look for most of my photos.