From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

A tour of the Camera Raw interface - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 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 contrast, color 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'll open your files directly from Lightroom Classic or Lightroom into Photoshop. And if this is the case, then you can skip this chapter on Camera Raw. So the first thing that we should do is familiarize ourselves with the Camera Raw interface. And to do this, I'm going to select the rock waterfall as well as the basalt image, and then click on the open in Camera Raw icon at the top of Adobe Bridge. Then if you're not in full screen, you can use the icon here, these double arrows, and that will take you into full screen. Along the top, you can see we have the name of the file as well as the camera information. We've got the preview area in the center, and on the left are the thumbnails for the files that we had selected in the film strip. We can click on either one to select an image or hold down the Command key on Mac, Ctrl key on Windows, in order to select multiple images. With them both selected, any changes that I make will be made to all of the selected images. Now in the bottom left we have our zoom settings. I can quickly toggle between fit in view and then 100% by using the two buttons. Or we can use this closure triangle here in order to select a specific percentage that we want to zoom to. We can also use Command + + on Mac or Ctrl + + on Windows to zoom in and Ctrl or Command + - to zoom back out. For now, I'll use fit to fit on screen. We can click on the film strip icon in order to hide and show it, or we can use the small little triangle at the bottom and click and hold in order to access additional options. For example, we can switch the film strip orientation from vertical to horizontal. For now, I'll just switch that back. We also have a number of different options that we can use to sort as well as filter images if we take a number of images into Camera Raw at once. You can also rate your images as well as mark any of them for deletion. At the bottom, there's a hyperlink that we can click on, we'll talk more about this in detail later in the chapter, but it's going to access the Camera Raw preferences for our workflow settings. To the right of that, we have a number of different before and after options. If I click once, you can see before and after left, right, and as I continue to click through them, we have a bunch of different choices. At the top we have the save icon. If I click this, I could quickly save a derivative of this image. Again, we'll talk about that more later in this course. And then we have the settings icon, which will display our preferences. Under that, we have a histogram, now this is a visual representation of the tonal values in the image, so we have it from black on the left to white on the right. Now there's no right or wrong histogram, each image has their own unique histogram, but it can be very helpful as we're changing our color and tonal values to reference this, to make sure that we're not pushing anything to pure black or pure white. If I position the cursor in the preview area, we actually get a readout of the RGB values displayed over the histogram. And below the histogram, we have some extra information or information about the file itself. Currently I have the edit stack icon selected. There are several panels and they have a lot of different options. So for example, I can run an auto-correction or convert to black and white. I can even work in HDR. I can use the profile area to assign a set of instructions that determines how the information in a file is processed. There's a light panel for adjusting tonal values like exposure and contrast. There's a color panel which I can use to adjust white balance and vibrance and saturation. We have our effects panel for adding texture and clarity and dehaze, as well as vignettes and grain effects. We have a tone curve that we can adjust and fine tune our exposure, and we can also make creative color adjustments and correct color casts. Then we have our color mixer, which we can use to make changes to hue, saturation, and luminance across specific color ranges and images, as well as make changes to specific point colors. Below that, is our color grading for adding colors and shadows, midtones and highlights to create special effects like cinematic or vintage film looks. In the detail panel, we can apply sharpening as well as noise reduction. In optics, we can correct distortions caused by the camera lens and lens blur. We have an early access feature here to add selective blurs to the image. And in geometry, we can correct perspective, and in calibration, we can make additional color adjustments. But of course, that's not all. We have additional tools here on the right hand side. So I can crop images and straighten them. I can also use the healing brush or the clone stamp tool to remove distracting elements. We can use the masking panel to selectively adjust areas in the image, remove red eye, work with snapshots, as well as presets. And if I click on the three dots, then I have additional options such as copying and pasting edit settings from one image to the next. Below that, we have a zoom tool, a hand tool, a color sampler tool, and the ability to show a grid overlay. When we're finished making changes to our images, we can choose to cancel, in which case all of the changes will be discarded. We can click done to apply the changes and return to Bridge, or we can choose either open or open as object or open as a copy in order to open the files in Photoshop and continue editing. For now, I have both images selected, so I'll return to the edit stack and simply click on auto. Then I'll click done so we return to Bridge and we can see that both of the thumbnails have been updated, and we have the little icon here that tells me that the settings have been changed for that RAW file. So there you go, a quick overview of the Camera Raw interface.

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