From the course: Photoshop 2022 Essential Training

A tour of the Camera Raw interface - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2022 Essential Training

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A tour of the Camera Raw interface

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- [Instructor] Camera Raw is an ideal tool for making color and contrast and tonal edits to our photographs before we open them in Photoshop. And fortunately, not only does Camera Raw support raw file formats, but also JPEG files. Now, before we begin this chapter, if you're using Lightroom Classic or Lightroom to make corrections and enhancements to your raw files, then you will open your files directly from Lightroom or Lightroom Classic into Photoshop. If this is the case, then you can skip this chapter on Camera Raw. So the first thing we should do is familiarize ourselves with the Camera Raw interface. I'm going to select these two images in Bridge, and then to open them in Camera Raw, I'm going to click on the Open in Camera Raw icon. This is very important that you use this icon if you're working with JPEG files, otherwise, Bridge would just open the JPEG file directly to Photoshop. Then in the upper right, I'm going to click on this icon to go to Full Screen mode. And across the top, we can see this is the name of the file and some information about the camera that was used to capture it. Below that, we've got the preview area. And then on the left are our different thumbnails for the two images that we opened. If I want to select more than one image, I can hold down the Command key on Mac or Control key on Windows and select them. Just know that if you have multiple images selected and you make a change, that change will be made to all of the selected images. All right, for now, I'll just select the top image. At the bottom left, there are a number of different options for zooming into your image. You can click either of these buttons to zoom in or zoom out, or you can use this dropdown menu to select a specific zoom level. You can also use Command Plus on Mac or Control Plus on Windows to zoom in and use the Minus in order to zoom out. To the right is the filmstrip icon. If you click and hold, you can change the filmstrip orientation as well as show file names and ratings and color labels. If you're working with a large volume of images and you've brought in, say, 20 or so images to Camera Raw, then it might also be useful to use either the Sort or the Filter icon. To the right of that, you can rate your images using these star icons, as well as mark any images for deletion in Bridge. Below that is a hyperlink to the workflow settings. We'll talk more about these later in the chapter. Then, there are a number of different settings to preview your image split screen. I'm going to go ahead and make a quick change. I'll just click on the Auto button because that will then enable us to access this next icon, which is a before and after full screen. Now at the top, we have a save icon which gives us access to all sorts of options for quickly saving our files to other formats, especially if we don't need to continue editing them in Photoshop. Next to that, we have our settings icon. That's going to show us all of our Camera Raw preferences. And underneath that is the histogram. So the histogram is just a visual representation of the tonal values in the image. It starts with the blacks on the left, goes through your shadows, your mid-tones, your highlights, and your whites. Now, there's no such thing as a right or wrong histogram. Each image is going to have their own unique histogram. And as we move through the next few videos and we make adjustments to our images, we'll want to reference the histogram to make sure that we maintain the information in the file that we want to work with. As soon as I position my cursor over the image area, we can see the RGB values appear over the histogram, and below the histogram is just a little bit of information about the file that Camera Raw is gathering from the EXIF data in the image. Now currently, I have the edit stack icon selected. So we see a number of different options including that Auto button, a conversion to black and white button. We can choose our different profiles here, and then we have a number of different panels with additional options. So the Basic panel, this is where we're going to start adjusting white balance and making adjustments to color and contrast and tone. We can also use the Curves panel for fine-tuning exposure and for making creative color adjustments or for correcting color CAS. We have the Detail panel where we can sharpen and remove noise. We have a color mixer for making changes to hue, saturation, and luminance across specific color ranges in images. We have color grading where we can add color in our shadows, mid-tones, and highlights to create special effects like sepia tones or cross process effects. In the Optics panel, we can correct distortions caused by the camera and lens. In Geometry, we can correct perspective. And under Effects, we can add grain and vignetting. And finally, under Calibration, we can make additional color adjustments. Now, there are some additional tools as well. We have a crop tool for cropping and straightening the image. We have a healing brush where we can remove distracting elements by either healing them or cloning them. Below that is the masking option where we can make changes to only a portion of our image using a variety of different tools. We can remove red eye, we can create snapshots, we can apply different presets. And under the More icon, we have access to additional options for resetting files or copying any of our edit settings and then pasting them across multiple images. I'll tap E to return to the edit stack. And then at the bottom here, we do have a zoom tool as well as a hand tool. We've got an eyedropper tool for sampling color, and we have a grid overlay. When we're finished making changes to our images, we could choose to cancel, but then all of the changes are going to be discarded. We can select Done to apply the changes and return to Bridge, or we can click Open or use the dropdown menu here to open as a smart object into Photoshop or open as a copy. We'll talk more about the open options later in this chapter. For now, I'll select Done. And when we return to Bridge, we can see that the edits have been made and the thumbnail has been updated and we have a settings icon letting us know that our image has been changed. So there you go, a quick tour of the Camera Raw interface.

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