Heal, Clone or Content Aware Fill before or after Raw file exposure clean up?

[sbr]

Hi,
Regarding the order in which you develop raw files in Photoshop or Lightroomfor that matter. Should you do your heal, clone or content aware fill workbefore or after you make color and exposure adjustments? I have some landscapepics and need to remove power lines and little odds and ends. I tried to removethem after I adjusted the sky color on a clear blue sky and the heal/clonecolor was really off, it looked like to healed/cloned with the original skycolor, not the new adjusted sky color. What is the recommended order fordeveloping raw files?

 

[Brian Soto]

Always do white point and basic overall raw processing actions first before getting into PS work. Further, if you're working in Lightroom and PS, that implies a level of experience I'll assume you probably already know, but to reiterate common retoucher knowledge, I would add that when working in PS, make sure to duplicate your original layer, and leave that original alone.

Also, try to make smart objects out of your working layers so you aren't working destructively. That is to say, so if something goes wrong down the road, you aren't out all of those hours invested, or have to use history and undo everything to get back to a certain point. You can (and usually should) open your raw images as smart objects in PS.

 

[Tom Mann]

... I have some landscapepics and need to remove power lines and little odds and ends. I tried to removethem after I adjusted the sky color on a clear blue sky and the heal/clonecolor was really off, it looked like to healed/cloned with the original skycolor, not the new adjusted sky color. ...

To be honest, in ACR / LR, I normally see almost no difference whether you do the healing / cloning / filling before or after color and exposure adjustments. I think I may have seen this occur once (in processing tens of thousands of images), but I tracked it down to me doing something stupid, but I forgot what that was.

As Brian said, "Always do white point and basic overall raw processing actions first before getting into PS work.". That's obviously correct since one should make all major color and tonality corrections in ACR / LR before moving the image into PS, but that a slightly different question from what you asked.

Tom M

PS - BWT, @OP, sorry I forgot about this thread after it was first posted. I had been meaning to respond.