Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS5

Chapter Three: Raw System Overview

Camera Raw, Bridge, Photoshop, and DNG

This chapter provides a 30,000-foot overview of the whole digital raw system. We’ll discuss the individual components in much more detail in subsequent chapters, but before delving into the minutiae (and there are a lot of details), it’s helpful to have some idea of what the components do and how they interrelate. Camera Raw is the raw processing backbone of the Photoshop and Bridge system—although it can also process JPEGs and TIFFs, which causes a degree of confusion (we’ll clear that up in Chapter 5, Hands-On Camera Raw).

With the constant advances in Camera Raw processing functionality, some may wonder if Camera Raw would ever replace Photoshop for basic and even advanced ...