Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Correcting Images in Camera Raw

As you learned in Chapter 3, Camera Raw 8 is a powerful plug-in that converts images shot in raw format into editable pixels. It also gives you tools that you can use to crop, straighten, and correct the color and lighting of your images (it works on JPEGs and TIFFs, too). Since most of Camera Raw’s settings are slider-based, it’s hands down the easiest place to fix your images (and that’s why this section comes before the ones about Levels and Curves, which are—truth be told—100 times more confusing).

POWER USERS’ CLINIC: Fixing Lighting with Blend Modes

If your image is still too dark or too light after you run a Shadows/Highlights adjustment on it, you can fix it with blend modes. The technique is described in step-by-step glory back on Fixing Exposure with an Adjustment Layer and its Mask, but it’s so important that it deserves a mention here, too.

To darken an image, create an empty Adjustment layer by clicking the half-black/half-white circle at the bottom of the Layers panel and choosing Brightness/Contrast (it’s the first one in the list that doesn’t actually do anything to your image). Then use the drop-down menu near the top of the Layers panel to change the new layer’s blend mode to Multiply (or press Shift-Option-M [Shift+Alt+M on a PC]). Finally, in the layer mask that automatically tags along with the Adjustment layer, paint with a black brush to hide the darkened bits from areas that don’t need darkening.

To lighten an image, add an empty ...