Okay, suppose you’ve just downloaded and organized a slew of raw images — either in the native format from your digital camera or converted to the DNG format. You’ve beaten back the chaos with your image-management work-flow, all right, but chaos never sleeps. So the next step is to transform the process of raw conversion into a workflow. Details of using Camera Raw appear in Chapters 8 and 9; here, however, is the raw-conversion workflow:
1. Open a raw image using Bridge.
Start Bridge by choosing File➪Browse or by clicking the Go to Bridge button on the Photoshop Option bar. Choose a raw image you want to process by double-clicking the thumbnail of the image (or you can right-click the image and choose Open with Camera Raw from the flyout menu). Figure 4-6 shows the image loaded in the Camera Raw window.
Figure 4-6: The Camera Raw window.
The red indicates highlight clipping.
2. Click the Shadows and Highlights check boxes (next to the Preview check box) to turn on the clipping warnings.
Keeping these two check boxes checked is a good habit to develop:
They call your attention to the parts of your image where shadow and highlight areas of the image are being clipped — that is, losing usable image data due to under- or overadjustment to exposure, shadows, or brightness. Such warnings help you adjust the image in Camera Raw.
When the Shadows and Highlights check boxes are checked, clipped shadow areas of the image show up in blue; highlight clipping is indi-cated in red, as shown in the portion of the sky in Figure 4-6.
3. Turn on Auto Adjustments.
CS2 brings us a new feature, Auto Adjustments in Camera Raw. If you use it, Camera Raw automatically adjusts color and tone to what it considers optimum for the image. Honestly, Auto Adjustments works pretty well.
You just press Ctrl+U on a Windows computer or Ô+U on a Mac, and you’ve got a good start in making adjustments. I use it when I first open raw images in Camera Raw.
4. Make overall tonal and color adjustments in the Adjust tab (see Figure 4-7).
When you open an image in Camera Raw, the Adjust tab is automatically selected. The Adjust tab contains all the con-trols you’ll use to adjust White Balance, Temperature, Tint, Exposure, Shadows, Brightness, Contrast, and Saturation. Using Auto Adjustments in Step 3 will automatically assign values to Exposure, Shadows, Brightness, and Contrast — but you don’t have to settle for the automatic settings. You can tweak till you get the result you want. (You’ll have to set White Balance, Tint, and Saturation on your own;
Camera Raw leaves those adjust-ments to the photographer.)
Figure 4-7: The Adjust tab contains controls for overall adjustments.
5. Apply sharpness and luminance/color noise adjustments (see Figure 4-8).
The Camera Raw Detail tab (shown in Figure 4-8) offers three controls for applying sharpness and noise reduction to both the luminance and the color of the image. Okay, what does that techno-babble really mean? Simply that you can sharpen the outlines of the image, and reduce those tiny messy bits in the grayscale areas, and get rid of the color-speckle thingies that show up in the color areas of the image.
Both are referred to as noise.
The Luminance Smoothing slider is sheer death to
grayscale noise, while the Color Noise Reduction slider is a hefty weapon against the color noise that can plague images shot in high-ISO settings or long expo-sures.
Reducing luminance and color noise during the raw conversion work-flow should be your preferred method for handling noise. Though Photoshop CS2 offers the new Reduce Noise filter, the goal is to be able to make as many adjustments as possible before you open images in Photoshop.
Save the sharpening of any image for the very last steps in your image-processing workflow. Use the Sharpness adjustment onlyfor previewing images in Camera Raw. (There’s more about sharpening images in Chapter 12; you might want to review it when preparing images for output.)
You can set Camera Raw Preferences to limit the application of sharpen-ing to Preview Only. (I show you how to set Camera Raw Preferences in Chapter 9.)
Figure 4-8: The Detail tab contains controls for sharpness and noise reduction.
6. Fine-tune the tonality and con-trast, using the Curve tab.
The Curve tab (shown in Figure 4-9) lets you fine-tune an image’s color characteristics (tonality).
Unlike the Curves adjustment in Photoshop, the Camera Raw Curves adjustment works on top of the adjustments made in the Adjust tab; it works like an adjustment’s own “fine-tuning.” I find that making careful changes in the Adjust tab reduces any need to make changes in the Curve tab.
Though most of your tonal adjustments should be made using the Adjust tab, try using the Curve tab’s Tone Curve selection box to view your image using the Medium Contrast and Strong Contrast preset adjustment. If you don’t
like the results of either, you can always leave the Curve adjustment set to its default (Linear).
7. Click Open to open the image in Photoshop CS2.
You can also click Done, but that will just save the Camera Raw settings for that image you’ve just made, and then take you back to Bridge.
Clicking the Save button will allow you to save the raw file (and its side-car file with your adjustments) to a folder of your choosing. You can also specify another format for the file — raw, DNG, TIFF, JPEG, or PSD — but for the most part, you’ll be opening the image in Photoshop for overall correction and image editing.
You may have noticed I didn’t include the Lens or Calibrate tabs in the Camera Raw workflow described here. That’s because normally these con-trols are used sparingly; you won’t need them for most of your images. (Even so, I cover those tabs and their controls in Chapter 9.)