Shooting and Processing .raw

By today .raw became the standard of digital SLR photography due to its quality and increased mobile media capacity. Any professional photographer shoots in .RAW and even if you don’t consider yourself a professional, there is no reason why you shouldn’t use it.

Processing .raw pictures is almost as vital as shooting the originals, however you can always go the easy way and use automatic procession programs (one would be Google’s Picasa 3). This, of course, won’t give you the precise result you are looking for, so in this tutorial I am going to show and explain to you every basic feature of the Photoshop plug-in “Camera Raw”.

Camera Raw

I will be using a photo I took in Prague this summer, and here is the before-after picture for those who wonder.

Intro

When you open your .raw file using Photoshop, this is what you see.

As a Photoshop user, I tend not to work with the toolbar you see at the top, since all of the tools up there are available in Photoshop itself. Instead, we are going to focus on the right sidebar where all the tweaking and adjustments are done.

Fill Light, Brightness

Before starting your adjustments, let’s make sure you click on both the white and the black triangles at the upper-right corner of the screen. As you can see at the screenshot below, those buttons, when on, fill underexposed spots of your picture with blue pixels, whereas overexposed spots are filled with red pixels.

Now let’s start working.
Using the Fill Light scroll, I am increasing the amount of light in my picture. As I do so, the blue pixels disappear, as dark spots’ size decreases.

Eventually I got up to 85 on Fill Light bar, when all of the pixels were gone. Now I don’t want to rely on the computer only. If you fill that your picture might look pale, boring or simply too fake, you can always recover the previous result using the Recovery bar right above the Fill Light. Try to think of the feature as lowering the opacity on your adjustment layer in Photoshop.

In my case, the Recovery number is 20, and as you can see, the graph in the upper-right corner has slightly changed, as the grass started to look a bit more juicy and shadows look more real now.

Temperature, Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation, Exposure

This picture was taken in Prague in late summer of 2009. I would like to play with that and therefore  “warm” the picture’s temperature up a little.
The temperature is set at 5650 when you open the picture, and in my case I increase it up to 7250.

With the image you see after all of our tweaks, some of the minor elements like local shadows or tiny textures tend to disappear, so Clarity is exactly what we need here. It combines Contrast Filter and History Brush to a point where small things that people tend not to notice, become more realistic and add realism to the image.

Despite a pretty nice effect, I still would consider the Temperature a rather abstract adjustment and if you really want your pictures to be juicy and full of summer, you should be working with Vibrance and Saturation parameters.
The word vibrance derives from vibration and if you are aware of the way the color is built, then you should have no problem understanding this slider effect. For everyone else Vibration makes the colors more vibrant and pretty much more saturated to a point where they look really bad, so a big figure here is never recommended.

It often happens that the picture you were editing becomes quite a mess after all of your adjustments and you would rather have the imperfect original than what you have now. It is very important at that point to pick out what have you done wrong. Our picture looks a bit dark, I’d say, so let’s increase the Exposure to +0,30. Even though exposure is an extremely powerful tool, you should not overuse it, and a small number is exactly what’s needed.

Tone Curve and More Precise Editing

After all of the basic and general adjustments are made, it’s time for precise editing. As mentioned before, Camera Raw should not be used alone in post-processing, so try to avoid getting carried away.
Tone curving is the same thing as Levels adjustment layer of Photoshop. If you are not aware of the Levels concept, it is basically a graph with a curve that represents the way light is treated on the photo. It is adjusted manually with precision. The concept is quite hard to describe but one or two try-outs of the feature will make it all clear.

For my picture, I have increased the shadows, since the picture looked a little flat and also decreased the highlights for the very same reason.

Detail

Detail tab is both for Sharpening and Noise Reduction, but I never use it, since Photoshop has a better way of doing both, plus the effect is no good anyway and is rather weak. But you can always play around with the features, to see if you might like what you’re seeing. My recommendation would be using the Sharpening filter in Photoshop.

HSL/Grayscale

This is a very nice color editing tool that might become useful for you. As you can see, every color is something of one and something of another color. A red can be more purple or a green can sometimes be close to yellow. Well that’s the concept the HSL tab works with. You basically adjust every color on its own. There are 3 subtabs in this tab:

• Hue – adjusting the colors according to other colors next to them
• Saturation – increasing every color’s “strength” on its own
• Luminance – darkening or lighting up the colors

For my picture I have put the Orange color Hue to “-13” to make the top look more red as opposed to yellow

Plus, is you want, you can always convert your image to Grayscale and play around with the colors in that mode if you need it.

Split Toning

Split Toning tab is used if you need to add an extra tone or color filter to your image (say, that old magenta vintage color effect). The tones are applied to highlights and shadows separately and you can adjust the saturation for both of them as well as the balance between the shadows and the highlights.

As my picture suits me perfect in terms of toning, I haven’t edited a thing in this very tab

Lens Corrections

Lens Corrections is used to get rid of fringes the camera could’ve created, plus you can add a Vignetting effect to your picture, as it surprisingly tends to be very popular.

However, I’m not a big fan of the feature, even more consider it an amateur trademark, so I usually avoid it. This picture won’t be different.

Camera Calibration

Camera Calibration is a tool that reads the .raw file and understands what camera was used to take the picture, so it calibrates the colors and white balance of the specified camera automatically. However if you feel like a change is needed, you can always make a change using the sliders.

Extra Tools

As highlighted in the picture, Camera Raw give the user a variety of extra tools that might be pretty useful when on a run. Those include:

• Zoom and Hand tool for zooming and moving
• White Balance Tool, that makes you choose the area of your picture that suits you in terms of white balance and make the area’s balance default for the picture. So, say, if you have a nicely balanced center but there’s a dark spot on the left of your picture, you can click on the center to adjust the overall white balance
• Color Sampler, which allows you to see the RGB figures for the area selected
• Crop Tool and Straighten Tool which is basically a more intelligent Crop Tool that lets you straighten your picture up by cropping some bits of it
• Spot Removal that can be both Heal and Clone Tool from Photoshop and Red Eye Removal Tool with the name that speaks for itself
• Adjustment Brush is a nice tool when you have a small area of the picture you want to edit. You can select the required area and apply basic adjustments to it
• Graduated Filter tool is an interesting tool again which allows you to create a gradient going from 100% to 0% in terms of the changes you want to make. With this tool you can create adjustments to fade out which is very specified, but once needed will make a perfect result
• Rotate Image tools are pretty simple, aren’t they?
• The Preference Dialog which I talk about in the end

At the Preference Dialog Box (which is opened by clicking the button in the Tools menu of Camera Raw), you can choose how to save image settings (as an extra file or save it inside the .raw file), edit some of the default settings and the way those are applied. One important setting to pay your attention to is the Camera Raw Cache. If you own a hi-end computer, I suggest putting this figure up, since Camera Raw is a heavy application. If your computer is slow, be sure not to overuse your RAM, or a crash will come eventually and we don’t want that.

Presets

One nice feature of Camera Raw that saves tons of times are the presets option. As a photographer myself, I know that I never took one picture at one place. It usually is around 10-20 good pictures that rest on my SD card that were taken at the same place, same time (same conditions). With that in mind, I might manually adjust every picture I took, but it will save me time doing just one and then saving all of my tweaks as a preset.

Once done, I can load the preset from the list and apply it to all of the pictures I took. Believe me, nothing saved me as much time as this (considering, a bad picture would take around 5 minutes to edit).

Saving

Apart from choosing destination and file name, don’t forget to save your image in the format needed. CR supports exports in .dng, .jpg, .tif and .psd. If you feel like you’re done with the image, you can save it as a jpg and upload it to flickr or something, however I prefer saving it as a .psd to make sure I can change it whenever I want and for further editing. In the end it’s all up to your hard drive capacity and actual needs of editing.

Obviously, I’m not giving you any patterns of Camera Raw editing, since that won’t be needed. A great thing about photography is that every picture is unique as well as most of the editing is unique too. I hope I made it clear for some of you how to use some of the CR tools. One shouldn’t treat Camera Raw as a miraculous application, as it won’t save your 90% underexposed pictures or blurry photos. It is a well scripted tool to make the workflow of a photographer working with .raw a little easier and also faster.

See you next time!

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