The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers

Your First Image Edit

Now it's time to open an image and make it pretty. You'll work with some of the items on the toolbar at the top of the ACR interface, especially the White Balance eyedropper and the Crop tool. We'll also spend some time with many of the Control tabs on the right side of your picture. ACR has eight tabs, each with its own set of adjustments. For this workflow, you'll concentrate on the Basic, Tone Curve, HSL/Grayscale, and Detail tabs, in that order. Your image will improve as you move from tab to tab. Some of your pictures will require only a few minor adjustments in the Basic tab, whereas others will require a bit more finesse. That choice is yours.

Start by Cropping

Since cropping in ACR is a nondestructive process, this is a great place to start your image editing workflow. The act of refining your composition forces you to examine your picture to determine which elements are necessary and which ones can go away. If you change your mind later, fear not; just select the Crop tool again and you'll see the photo in its entirety, so you can compose it differently. (Ah, the joys of nondestructive editing!)

Figure 4-5. Select the Crop tool from the toolbar in the upper-left corner, and then drag the mouse to select the area you want to keep.

Click the Crop tool and drag your mouse across the area you want to keep. You can use the handles to adjust the framing. Or, if you want, hold the mouse pointer down on the Crop tool and choose one of the preset aspect ratios from the menu that pops up. Once you've framed the image to your liking, press the Return key to apply the crop. As you work on the image, you may change your mind about the composition. Just click the Crop tool again and readjust.

First Edits in the Basic Tab

It's time now to move to the Control tabs for tone and color adjustments. The Basic tab is our first stop. Many photographers can correct the bulk of their pictures right here and call it a day. These tone and color adjustments are easy to use and give you great control over the appearance of your images.

Tone adjustments in the exposure slider

You'll start with the Exposure slider. Even though there's an Auto link above it, I tend to avoid that link because I think it overexposes many of my pictures. You can try it if you want, and then click Default to return to your original exposure.

Figure 4-6. The Exposure slider in the Basic tab

Instead, let's take control of our tone adjustments. Start with the Exposure slider, which sets the highlight point. Hold down the Option/Alt key and drag the Exposure slider to the right and left. This activates the clipping overlay to show you what areas are overexposed. All black means no clipping, and white indicates clipping in all channels. Red, green, and blue tell you that there is clipping in only those individual channels. My approach is to move the Exposure slider back and forth until I've eliminated clipping, except for spectral highlights that will be blown out no matter what. (A bright bulb is a bright bulb, and you're not going to get detail in those areas.)

Setting	Result
Exposure	Controls basic highlights
Recovery	"Recovers" highlight detail
Fill Light	"Recovers" shadow detail
Blacks	Controls shadow areas
Brightness	Controls basic midtones
Contrast	Applies basic "S" contrast curve

Now jump down to the Brightness slider to adjust the midtones. This is a subjective correction, so have fun and make those midtones look good to your eyes. If your image is looking a little too bright in the dark areas, don't worry. Move the Blacks slider until you have the look you want. Double-check your adjustment by holding down the Option/Alt key to reveal clipping in the shadow areas. A little plugging in the darkest blacks is fine, but if you're showing a lot of shadow detail loss, you might want to back off a bit.

Once you've made your basic highlight, midtone, and shadow adjustments, you might want to play with the Contrast slider. This is similar to creating an S-curve in the Curves control. Contrast lightens the brighter areas and pulls down the darker areas without compromising (too much) the tones at the ends of the histogram. This is a visual adjustment based on personal taste.

Some images suffer from large areas of detail loss in the shadows. You can recover some of that information using the Fill Light slider. This isn't a cure for a terribly exposed image, but it does come in handy when you want to reveal just a bit more detail in the dark areas. Its counterpart for highlights is the Recovery slider. Again, this is a fine-tuning adjustment that you can use after setting the Exposure, Brightness, and Blacks sliders. But Recovery can work wonders on subtle bright areas, such as blown-out highlights in a white shirt or on a white wall.

Before moving on, review your exposure corrections. Start by clicking on the "shadow clipping warning" indicator in the upper-left corner of the histogram. Note the dark areas that are plugged up and decide whether further work is needed, then click the triangle again to turn off the warning. Next, click the "highlight clipping warning" triangle in the upper-right corner of the histogram and take a look at the bright areas where you've lost detail. Does the image look OK? Great! Click again to turn off the warning.

Figure 4-7. The area highlighted in red indicates highlight clipping. The image has no detail in that area. You can restore detail by moving the Exposure slider to the left, or the Recovery slider to the right.

I've saved the best check for last. Turn on the Preview checkbox to see the version of your picture prior to the Exposure adjustments (you also can toggle this off and on via the "P" key). I bet this brings a smile to your face because your current version (check the Preview box to see) probably looks miles better than what you started with. You're now ready to color-correct.

Color adjustments

Once you have your tones under control, it's easier to make global color adjustments. Raw shooters will have the full complement of white balance presets available to them in the White Balance pop-up menu. (For JPEG images, ACR will list only As Shot, Auto, and Custom.) You can take a peek at different presets by choosing Daylight, Cloudy, Shade, and so on. If you find a preset you like, stop there. If none of the presets are quite right, try the White Balance tool—it's the eyedropper icon that's third from the left on the toolbar at the top of the ACR interface.

Figure 4-8. Use the White Balance tool to automatically color-balance your images.

Choose the White Balance tool and click an area of the photograph that should be neutral, such as a white wall, cloud, or something similar. The tool will make that tone neutral, and the other colors in the image will fall into line. If the adjustment isn't quite what you expected, click a different neutral area to get a different result.

You can then fine-tune your adjustment (if necessary) by moving the Temperature and Tint sliders. Temperature is a blue/yellow modifier, and Tint affects all colors shifting between more green and more magenta. Keep an eye on your neutral areas when fine-tuning with these sliders. If they become too warm or too cool, you may want to reset using the White Balance tool.