Thank you for your kind words. I could not find an appropriate smiley, so you'll have to imagine one.
Apparently I have not have not expressed myself clearly.
What I meant is this. Sometimes people want an approach in which they can go as close to possible to the raw sensor data, that is without any adjustments such as the curve that LR/ACR applies. That is what I meant by 'zeroing', not setting the sliders to zero which gives you what I'd call the default conversion.
Well, sorry if I was a bit harsh... it's just that you basically tried to write me off in passing with a single sentence, as if I was advocating some sort of ludicrous, misinformed technique. I'd expect that sort of response if I
really was recommending an odd-ball method, but I think the concept of zeroing everything is a pretty standard approach. So, yes... it rubbed me the wrong way.
Since you can apply develop presets to your files on import (as I would imagine many LR users do), what people think of as the "default settings" or "default conversion" can be virtually limitless in configuration. It seems more practical to refer to "zeroing everything" when you're talking about setting all sliders to the zero position.
All that aside, though, I gather now that we are roughly in agreement that a 'zeroed' or 'default' conversion is a perfectly legit starting point. For my own purposes, I simply find it more practical to start with everything at zero, rather than trying to reverse and "undo" any excesses introduced by auto-tone. In some instances, auto-tone makes development choices that are rather strange; working backwards from auto-tone just seems to me to be the "long way around", so to speak.
