This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Summary
What you’ve seen in this chapter are the Camera Raw tools that you’ll use on almost all of your raw images. While there are more controls to explore, these are the foundation, workhorse options that you’ll soon become very familiar with. In the next chapter, we’ll explore more advanced editing features provided in both Camera Raw for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, but all of those features will assume an understanding of the basic functionality, tone, and color adjustments that we’ve performed here.
In particular, you’ll want to remember these basic concepts:
- The Exposure slider brightens or darkens your image, and serves as a very good tool for controlling the brightest parts of your image.
- If they’re not overexposed too far, you can recover overexposed highlights using both the Recovery and Exposure sliders.
- The Blacks slider sets the black point of your image, allowing you to control how dark the darkest tones in your image are. The lowest quartertones in your image are affected by this slider.
- The Brightness slider adjusts the middle tones in your image without moving the white or black point (usually—it is possible for the Brightness slider to push the white point).
- The Contrast slider expands contrast by brightening the bright parts of your image while simultaneously darkening the darker parts of your image.
- The Temperature and Tint sliders let you adjust the white balance of your image, giving you dramatic color changes with no loss of image data.
These are the core editing controls in Camera Raw. In addition, Vibrance and Saturation let you control the saturation of colors in your image, while the Clarity control can bring out fine detail.
Finally, remember that Camera Raw is a nondestructive system. At no time will your original raw file be altered, meaning you can easily process the same raw file in many different ways. Any time you open or save a raw file, or click the Done button, Camera Raw stores all of the parameters that you’ve defined.
As you’ve seen, there’s no set, “correct” order for using these tools. You should work with them interactively, using the histogram to guide you through your edits.
Reducing Contrast
While the human eye is far more sensitive to contrast than to color, and good contrast is essential to a good photo, sometimes an image can be too contrasty. The most obvious example is a person standing in front of a bright window: The extreme contrast difference between the darkness of the person’s face and the brightness of the window can make the image difficult to read. Figure 4.62 shows an image with harshly contrasting highlight and shadow areas.
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Figure 4.62 This scene had more dynamic range than the camera could capture, resulting in an image that’s too contrasty.
Though you can try to lower the contrast of this image using Camera Raw’s Contrast slider, this really isn’t the best approach to solving the problem. First, the Contrast slider can’t reduce the contrast by much, and second, it will reduce all of the contrast.
A better approach is to use the Fill Light slider. Fill Light analyzes your image and performs an intelligent brightening of only the shadow areas. The results are sometimes incredibly effective (Figure 4.63).
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Figure 4.63 Camera Raw’s Fill Light slider makes short work of the contrast problem in Figure 4.62.
Contrast reduction is not only useful for correcting outright difficult situations. It can also help when an image is properly exposed but yields just a little too much contrast, as shown in Figure 4.64.
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Figure 4.64 Though the image is well exposed, the contrast is just a tad too harsh.
While this image isn’t bad, the shadow on the underside of the seagull is too strong. In this case, lowering the contrast in Camera Raw reduces the shadow and produces an image that’s more evenly exposed (Figure 4.65).
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Figure 4.65 In this instance, adjusting the Contrast slider in Camera Raw to lower the contrast reduces the intensity of the shadow on the underside of the bird, creating a gentler tonal transition.
Take some time to practice processing your own raw images. You want to not only understand Camera Raw’s controls, but also get a feeling for how much the images from your particular camera can be adjusted. As you develop a sense of how much adjustment your images can sustain, you will have an easier time recognizing and visualizing images when shooting.
What next?
In a typical image-editing workflow, your next step would be to open your processed image in Photoshop and perform any edits that you couldn’t make in Camera Raw. These could run the gamut from additional color and tone correction to complex retouching and composites.
However, many versions of Camera Raw include additional tools beyond those that we’ve explored in this chapter. We’ll explore these in detail in Chapter 5.