Photoshop® CS4 Bible

7.4. Save from Camera Raw

So far, we've covered saving files while editing directly in Photoshop. Saving files while editing RAW (or even JPEG or TIFF) files by using the Camera Raw plug-in is slightly different. Camera Raw is a robust enough tool that I've dedicated a whole chapter to it (wait, you mean you haven't read Chapter 4 yet?), but it's worth briefly going over the Camera Raw Save options here.

First, you should know that you cannot save a RAW file — only the camera can generate one. Because of this, whatever edits you make while working in Camera Raw are never actually saved back to the original RAW files. Instead, they're saved as metadata in the Camera Raw cache, or in a format called XMP files, alongside the original RAW files. When you've finished editing these files in Camera Raw and want to distribute them, along with the edits you just made, in another more widely compatible file format, you can use the Save Image command in Camera Raw to do so.

If you're broken-hearted to learn that you can't save back to the original RAW format, don't fret — you can always save your edits in the DNG, or Digital Negative, format, which is as close to RAW as you can get. For more coverage of the DNG format, refer to Chapter 4.

Clicking the Save Image button in Camera Raw presents you with a Save Options dialog box (see Figure 7.15) that looks nothing like Photoshop's Save As ...