MasterClass! - Adobe Camera Raw Course

Welcome to the Series of Tutorials on Adobe Camera Raw. I'm Ellen Anon, and I'll be taking you step by step through all you need to know to get the best results from Adobe Camera Raw. The Camera Raw interface is so powerful that you're likely to find that you'll do most of your image optimization right here in the Raw Converter. It's fast, and it offers an amazing Array of tools, between those available up here, and all the settings on the various tabs and sliders. All are designed to help you make your image the best it can be. As you go through the movies, take time to try out the steps and information for yourself using your own images. That way you'll learn it better and it will make more sense. Let's begin by talking about what Camera Raw is. As the name implies, Camera Raw is a program designed to convert the raw information that's captured on your sensor into visible information that you can see. When light hits the camera sensor's photo sights, it generates voltage that is recorded as values. For example, in an 8-bit file, those values are from 0 to 255, meaning black to white. Because there are photo sights for the red, green, and blue values, the numbers correspond to actual colors. I'm not going to go further into the scientific detail of how that process works, but what's important for you to understand is that we need to have a way to make the electrical information that's recorded converted into visible information that forms what we recognize as a picture file. That's the job of the Raw Converter. Raw files also have tags that correspond to the camera settings, such as White Balance, Sharpening, Contrast, Saturation, et cetera. Those tags are used to help determine the initial algorithms to make the information visible, but they really don't alter the raw file itself in terms of what information was captured, just what information is visible and how it appears. The settings you choose in the Raw Converter, the adjustments you make to these Sliders, tweak those initial algorithms so that you have the best possible image. In a JPEG file, those values are already baked into the file, and they do change the information that's available; but, in a raw file we have considerably more flexibility. Beginning with CS3, Adobe made it possible to use this Interface not only with raw files, but also with JPEGs and TIFF files. Many people found the Camera Raw Interface was so powerful and convenient they wanted to use it on all their images, not just the raw files. Of course, when Camera Raw is used on a TIFF or JPEG file, the adjustments will alter the pixels themselves, not just the algorithms used to make the raw information visible. A JPEG file has far less information to begin with, so you can't expect to be able to recover blown out highlights or blocked up shadows to the same extent as with a raw file. How do you get started with Camera Raw? Well, let's go back to Bridge for just a minute. To access Camera Raw for a raw file all you need to do is double-click the thumbnail in Bridge. If you've checked the option in Bridge Preferences so that Double-Click Edits Camera Raw Settings in Bridge, Camera Raw will open without having to also open Photoshop. Otherwise, if you don't check this option, Camera Raw will open, but it will also launch Photoshop. In that case, Camera Raw is being hosted by Photoshop rather than Bridge. Normally it's a bit more efficient to have Camera Raw hosted by Bridge, so I suggest leaving this option checked. If you want to open a TIFF or a JPEG image there are several choices. If you only want to open the occasional JPEG file, then probably the easiest approach is to right-click, Control click on the Mac, and choose Open in Camera Raw, that way the JPEG image itself will open up in Camera Raw. You can see that that's the JPEG image. Alternatively, in the Camera Raw Preferences within Bridge, you can opt to have your JPEGs automatically open with Camera Raw, in this case only those that have previously been opened with Camera Raw, meaning those with settings, will automatically open all supported JPEGs and you can choose the same thing for TIFFs. That can be a little annoying, though, because every time you open your TIFF or JPEG file it's going to open in Camera Raw first, so most people choose to leave this on Automatically open JPEGs with settings, and then right-click on the thumbnail when they want to open them in Camera Raw.