From the course: Photoshop 2023 Essential Training

A tour of the Camera Raw interface - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2023 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

A tour of the Camera Raw interface

“

- [Tutor] Camera Raw is an ideal tool for making contrast, color, and tonal edits to our photographs before we open them into Photoshop. And fortunately, not only does Camera Raw support raw file formats, but also JPEG and TIFF 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'll simply open your files directly from Lightroom Classic or Lightroom into Photoshop. If this is the case, then you can skip this chapter on Camera Raw. The first thing I'd like to do is familiarize ourselves with the Camera Raw interface. I'm going to select these two images and then instead of choosing File Open, I'm going to click on the Open in Camera Raw icon. It is especially important to use the icon when you're editing JPEG and TIFF files, otherwise, they'll open directly into Photoshop. Once we're in Camera Raw, I've clicked on the icon in the upper right in order to toggle it to full screen mode, and along the top we can see the name of the file that's selected as well as the camera that Camera Raw got from the EXIF data in the file. We have the preview area in the center, and down at the bottom is the film strip. If I want to select a different image, I can simply click on it. If I want to select more than one image, I'll use the Command key on Mac or the Control key on Windows. When more than one image is selected, any changes that I make will be made to all the selected images. In the bottom left are these zoom settings. I can quickly move from fit in view to 100% by just clicking on either of these icons. I can also use Command + - to zoom out or Command + + in order to zoom in. For now, I'll fit them both to window and we can use the film strip icon to toggle between showing and hiding the film strip, or we can click and hold and change the orientation from horizontal to vertical. We can also choose to show file names, ratings, and color labels, and if we'd taken a bunch of images in here and we wanted to sort or filter them, we can use these two icons right here. You can also rate your images or you can mark your images for deletion using these icons. And below that, there's a hyperlink to the workflow settings. We'll talk more about this in detail later in the chapter. There are a number of different ways we can preview the before and after view of our images, or once we make changes, we can click the icon to the right or just tap the P key. At the top, we have the save icon where we can access all sorts of options for quickly saving our files to other formats if we don't need to continue editing them in Photoshop. To the right of that, we have the settings icon. It's the gear which we can use to show our display preferences. Under that is the histogram, which is a visual representation of all of the tonal values in the image. It starts with blacks on the left, goes through the shadows, to exposure, or the midtones, to the highlights, and then over to the whites. As we move through the next few videos making adjustments to the dynamic range of 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. If I position my cursor in the preview area, we can see the RGB values in the histogram. Below the histogram we'll find information about the file that Camera Raw gathered from the EXIF data within the file. Now, currently I have the edit stack targeted and there are several panels that offer lots of options for making edits to our images. At the top, we can apply some auto adjustments or convert to black and white, or we can assign a specific profile. A profile is basically a set of instructions that just determines how the information in a file is processed and displayed. Below that, we have the basic panel where we can make changes to white balance, as well as adjustments to color and contrast and tone. Below that, we have the curves panel. This is great for fine tuning exposure, and making creative color adjustments and correcting color casts. Below that, we have the detail panel for sharpening and reducing noise, and below that is the color mixer for making creative or corrective changes to the hue saturation and luminance across specific color ranges in our image. Then we have the color grading panel for adding color in the shadows, the midtones, and the highlights to create special effects like Sepia tone or cross processing. The optics panel will correct the distortions caused by the camera lenses and geometry will help us to correct the perspective in our images. We have an effects panel to add vignettes as well as grain, and a calibration panel for making additional color adjustments. On the right hand side, there are additional tools, including a crop tool, the healing tool to remove distracting elements, masking tool for just editing a portion of your image, red eye removal, snapshots for capturing a moment in time and saving those settings within a document, as well as presets, and a more icon for accessing additional options like working with multiple images, applying previous settings and copying and pasting edit settings from one image to another. There's also a zoom tool, a hand tool, a color sampler as well as a grid overlay. When we're finished making changes to our images, we can cancel, in which case all changes are going to be discarded. Click the done button, which would apply the changes, and then return to bridge, or we can choose to open the file in Photoshop, open as an object, or open as a copy. For now, with both images selected, I'll choose auto to apply the auto toning to the images, and then I'll choose done to return to bridge where we can see the updated previews, as well as the icons letting us know that our images have been changed. So there you go. A quick tour of the Camera Raw interface.

Contents