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13.02.09
The anatomy of Camera Raw
Since version Photoshop 6.0, Adobe has included a plug-in called Camera Raw that opens Raw files so they can be edited like any other graphics file. Open a Raw file in Photoshop (or Photoshop Elements) and you’ll be presented with the Camera Raw interface which allows a Raw file to be tweaked and adjusted as it’s opened.
If you’ve never seen Camera Raw before, it’s a lot to be presented with all in one go. But don’t be daunted, here’s the anatomy of one of Photoshop’s most useful features.
FINE TUNING WHITE BALANCE
Rather than worrying about setting white-balance in the camera, it’s possible to fine-tune it when processing a Raw file using the Temperature and Tint sliders; they control blue-yellow colour casts and magenta-green respectively. If you’re not sure where to start, select a preset from the White Balance pop-up menu to get you in broadly the right place.
SHADOW
These five sliders affect the look of your picture, and are best used in the order they are appear, from top to bottom. The Exposure and Shadow sliders set the brightest and darkest part of the picture, while Brightness looks after the mid-tones. Use them in combination to achieve different looks.
EXPOSURE
Altering the Exposure, Shadow and Brightness sliders with only the picture to refer to is a fairly unscientific way of assessing an image. So have half an eye on the histogram as you go along. When setting the Exposure slider, make sure the right-hand of the histogram doesn’t slide off the edge. If it does you’ll get blown, featureless highlights. Likewise with the Shadow control, ensure the left end doesn’t disappear. Also useful when making these kinds of adjustments are the Shadows and Highlights warnings. Turn them on and any featureless shadows will turn blue; blown highlights will show up in red.
SETTINGS
It’s possible to save your settings to apply to other pictures by selecting Save Settings from the Settings pop-up menu. Or, when you open up the next picture in the series, select Previous Conversion.
WHITE BALANCE
Camera Raw allows some basic editing, such as cropping and rotating. Also present here is the White Balance tool. Select this and click on a part of the image you trust to be white or neutral grey and Camera Raw will set what it considers to be the best white-balance.
WORKFLOW
Workflow options allow the bit depth (8- or 16-bit, use 16-bit for critical work) and colour space to be set (stick with Adobe RGB 1998, unless you really know what you’re doing), as well as the final image size and resolution.
SAVE
Clicking OK puts Camera Raw to work converting the image according to your specification and opening it in Photoshop for further editing. If you just want to save a copy, click Save and Camera Raw will prompt you for further details. If you get into a mess with your settings and want to go back to the beginning, hold down Alt and click Cancel. This will reset everything.
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