The RAW Processing Step I Kept Skipping (And Why I Finally Stopped)
I’ll be honest about something: I have been editing RAW files in Lightroom for years and quietly assuming that what came out of my camera was as good as it was going to get before I touched a single slider. Denoise in Lightroom, maybe some sharpening, call it done. That was the workflow. It worked well enough that I never questioned it. Then I started getting more serious about printing my landscape edits at larger sizes, and the cracks showed up fast.