Photoshop Professor Notes - Adobe Camera Raw and Bridge

The Adobe Camera Raw plug-in (referred to from now on as ACR) is available from within Adobe Photoshop and from within Adobe Bridge. When you are in Photoshop you can only open raw files in ACR using Photoshop but if you happen to be in Bridge, you can choose to either have Photoshop open the raw file(s) or have Adobe Bridge open you raw file(s). There is no difference between the two, it’s just a matter of choice.

Why shoot Raw?

In order to answer that question we need to discuss the advantages of the RAW format versus the JPEG file format. For one thing, RAW images are not processed in camera like JPEGs. You have to use a RAW interpreter such as Adobe Camera Raw, ( aka ACR) which comes with Photoshop and Adobe Bridge or Adobe Lightroom which uses the same version of Adobe Camera Raw that Photoshop and Bridge uses. 

This should be one of the first tabs rather than one of the last tabs ...

In my humble opinion, the choices made here effect every other choice you make regarding adjusting your images and probably should be the first tab or maybe even in the Workflow Options dialog box.

In my humble opinion, the choices made here effect every other choice you make regarding adjusting your images and probably should be the first tab or maybe even in the Workflow Options dialog box. We will discuss those options in a later chapter. In the following pages I go through a process of showing you what the differences are between some the various choices that can be made here. 

Okay, let’s get into this White Balance stuff. By default, the very first time you open your image in Adobe Camera Raw, the White Balance option in the drop down is always set to “As Shot”. Which means whatever your camera was set to. Now ...

So now you have this Camera Raw dialog box in front of you, what next? Well, there are many things that we can adjust in ACR and more often than not you will want to play around with your exposure, brightness, contrast and white balance. These are the fundamentals that need to be addressed and that is why these options are in the Basic tab along the right hand side of the dialog box.

The Tone Curve Tab allows you to tweak tonal values in a way that the Basics Tab could not. Not every one will be visiting this tab on a regular basis but when you do, it will be nice to know how these features work. There are two curve tabs in here; one being the Point Curve and the other being the Parametric Curve.

This is Part 1 of 2 of the Sharpening section of the Details Tab

This is Part 2 of 2 of the Sharpening section of the Details Tab

The options in the HSL/Greyscale Tab allow us to select specific colours or more specifically hues and shift them around with their neighbouring hues based on where they lay in the colour wheel. All you have to do is look at the colours on any one of those many sliders, eight to be exact, to see the limitations for each. Unlike the Hue/ Saturation feature in Photoshop itself, you can’t change red to blue. Once again, Adobe Camera Raw is limiting what you can do, to save you from yourself just like in the Sharpening Tab where we can only sharpen to the Amount of 150 and the Radius can only go to 3 as opposed to 250 in Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask filter.

The Saturation tab allows you to either increase or decrease the saturation of colours in your image based on the hue sliders. Remember that these are global adjustments and not local adjustments.

The Luminance tab allows you to either lighten or darken the colours in you image based on the hue sliders in this dialog box.

The Greyscale option converts your colour image and allows you to lighten or darken specific colours.

Split Toning in the digital world allows us to alter our current highlights and shadows areas by adding colour to them. For example we could add pinks to our highlights and greens to our shadows. Now just moving the Hue sliders does absolutely nothing until you also move the saturation slider for either the Highlights, Shadows or both. Once you have played around with the Highlights’ Hue & Saturation sliders and the Shadows’ Hue & Saturation sliders, you can push or pull the balance slider to have your effect more prominent in one end or the other.

The Lens Correction Tab is a pretty important one to say the least. Most common lenses manufactured by the top brands should be listed here. Using the appropriate lens profile will remove any lens defects such as pin cushion or barrel distortion you may have. If you don’t like what the Auto feature has done you can always go in and manually make your adjustments - usually the Auto in this case works quite well.

We start out in this movie with our image in the Effects Tab with the Grain Amount, Size and Roughness set to their respective maximum values. Obviously this is too much and I have gone to the extreme to show you what this feature is about. Over the next few minutes we will see what each one of these sliders does to our image so we can decide if this is an effect that we may want to use at some point. Some photographers that used to shoot in the days of film generally add some kind of grain to their images because they feel that digital photographs are too synthetic.

Presets are saved settings that you have created by moving some sliders around in any of the Camera Raw Tabs and then have subsequently, saved. If you take a look at the very bottom of the Camera Raw window just above the “Done” button you will see two icons. One is currently greyed out and the other is the “Create New Preset” icon.

This is so cool it’s not funny. As you go through the process of deciding which effect you like for your image, rather than trying to remember what settings you have used or actually saving the file out as a pixel based image for each effect, you can just as easily create a snapshot of what the image looks like at any point in time. If you click on one of your snapshots, you can always go through the various tabs to see the slider values applied and then of all things, create a Preset. Who knew? Well, I did, but I waited until now to tell you ...