The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers

Chapter 4. Basic Image Editing in Camera Raw

INITIAL COLOR AND TONE ADJUSTMENTS

Many photographers have a hard time fighting the urge to jump directly into Photoshop once they find a photo or two they like. You may have that impulse now, after having identified your three- four-, and five-star images during the photo-editing process in Bridge. But stay with me here for a minute. Even though Photoshop is an amazing image editor, its place is later in the flow.

The bulk of your image editing will actually occur in another application known as Adobe Camera Raw. ACR is a plug-in that comes bundled with Photoshop CS4 and is hosted by either Photoshop or Bridge. To be perfectly candid, this is amazing software that has changed my approach to image processing. ACR lets you quickly fine-tune your photos using tools that are easy to recognize. For example, adjustments such as Exposure, Fill Light, Brightness, and Saturation are the sort of controls that you'll be working with. Even though the names of these controls sound familiar to you, that doesn't mean you get to skip this chapter. I'll show you how the Exposure slider lets you control the highlights, how you can use Brightness to control midtones, how you can recover shadow detail using Fill Light, and how Saturation affects color intensity. But you can see already that this conversation makes sense and the controls will be easy to remember.

To better understand the relationship between Photoshop and ACR, think about how you might paint a house. You'd use a sprayer or rollers for the larger surfaces, such as the walls. Then, you'd switch to a brush for the detail work and the finishing touches.

Figure 4-1. If you were to paint this wall, ACR would be your large-surface sprayer. Save Photoshop for the detail work.

Consider ACR as your large-surface sprayer and Photoshop as your detail brush. As Photoshop expert Katrin Eismann once remarked, "Adobe Camera Raw can make a lot of your pictures look great; Photoshop can make your best look perfect."

On the next few pages, I'll show you how to use some of the basic tools in ACR to quickly improve your three- and four-star images. For most pictures, these adjustments are all you'll ever need. In the next chapter, I'll show you a few of the advanced tools in ACR that you may want to use for specific images. But for now I want you to walk with me through the basic adjustments that you can apply to nearly any photograph.

COOL TOOLS: DESPITE ITS NAME, ACR IS NOT JUST FOR RAW FILES

It's true that ACR was originally designed to process raw files. But when the CS3 version hit the streets, Adobe added the capability to process JPEGs and TIFFs. At the same time, they incorporated a number of robust processing tools to enhance ACR's editing capabilities. With ACR, we now have a very powerful image processor that lives between Bridge and Photoshop in the image processing workflow. Besides its ease of use, one of the great benefits of using ACR is that it's nondestructive, even for JPEG files. That means your original files are left untouched, and your edits are stored as a separate set of instructions. Let me say that again in case you glossed over it: your original files are protected when you're working in ACR. Unlike Photoshop, if you click the Done button in ACR your original file is still protected, even though the picture you see has changes. At any time you can return the picture to its original state just by clicking a Reset button. This nondestructive feature takes on an additional dimension with JPEGs. Most photographers know that JPEG is a lossy format. But many are not always clear on how this works. Loss of information happens only when you recompress a JPEG file. You can open a JPEG as many times as you want, and then close it, and you will not lose picture detail. Only when you apply an image edit to the file do you force the file to recompress, and that's when you lose picture quality.

In ACR, the application reads the JPEG file but it doesn't recompress it. Instead, it stores the instructions as separate data. That's why ACR is nondestructive for JPEGs as well as raw files and TIFFs.

Combine this feature with the knowledge that your image edits are always reversible, and you can see why so many photographers have switched to ACR for the bulk of their work.

The Benefits of ACR

It's worth understanding a few important advantages of ACR , if for no other reason than to motivate you to use this application more often.

First, ACR is a nondestructive environment. When you open an image in this application, it saves all our edits as metadata rather than editsto the image itself, so your master is always protected. In addition, those metadata instructions take up very little hard disk space, far less than saving an entire copy of the picture or multiple adjustment layers in Photoshop. So, ACR is as efficient as it is smart.

And finally, the software's editing tools are highly advanced. So when you're working in ACR, you're using the latest generation of image editing controls.

By now, ACR is probably starting to sound pretty good to you. But it gets better. For example, when you access ACR through Bridge, none of your Photoshop resources are tapped. In other words, you can set up a batch-process job in Photoshop, let it run in the background, and work on another batch of images using the Bridge and ACR workflow—all at the same time!

ACR also provides some nice batch processing tools. So, if you have a handful of images that require the same global adjustment, such as white balance, you can quickly correct them in ACR. I'll show you some of those advanced techniques in the next chapter, after we master the basic workflow in this one.