Chapter 2. Processing Your Images Using Camera Raw
Raw Justice
processing your images using camera raw
Photo by Scott Kelby Exposure: 1/50 sec | Focal Length: 130mm | Aperture Value: ƒ/2.8
When I searched The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) for movies or TV shows containing the word “Raw,” I was pleasantly surprised to find out just how many choices I actually had. However, I went with the 1994 movie Raw Justice, but I don’t want you to think for one minute that I was influenced in any way by the fact that the star of the movie was Pamela Anderson. That would be incredibly shallow of me. Like any serious movie buff, I was drawn to this movie by what drew most of the audience to this movie: actor Robert Hays (who could forget his role in 2007’s Nicky’s Birthday Camera or the Michael Tuchner–directed film Trenchcoat?). Of course, the fact that Stacy Keach was in the movie was just the icing on the cake, but everybody knows the real draw of this flick clearly was Hays. However, what I found most puzzling was this: in the movie poster, Pamela Anderson totally dominates the poster with a large, full-color, ¾-length pose of her wearing a skimpy black dress, thigh-high boots, and holding a pistol at her side, but yet the other actors appear only as tiny black-and-white, backscreened headshots. I have to admit, this really puzzles me, because while Pamela Anderson is a fine actress—one of the best, in fact—I feel, on some level, they were trying to fool you into watching a movie thinking it was about Pamela Anderson’s acting, when in fact it was really about the acting eye candy that is Hays. This is called “bait and switch” (though you probably are more familiar with the terms “tuck and roll” or perhaps “Bartles & Jaymes”). Anyway, I think, while “Raw Justice” makes a great title for a chapter on processing your images in Camera Raw, there is no real justice in that this finely crafted classic of modern cinematography wound up going straight to DVD.
Opening Your Photos into Camera Raw
Although Adobe Camera Raw was created to process photos taken in your camera’s RAW format, it’s not just for RAW photos, because you can process your JPEG, TIFF, and PSD photos in Camera Raw, as well. So even though your JPEG, TIFF, and PSD photos won’t have all of the advantages of RAW photos, at least you’ll have all of the intuitive controls Camera Raw brings to the table.
Step One:
We’ll start with the simplest thing first: opening a RAW photo from the Organizer. If you click on a RAW photo to select it in the Organizer, then click on the down-facing arrow to the right of the Editor icon (on the taskbar at the bottom of the window) and choose Photo Editor from the pop-up menu, it automatically takes the photo over to the Elements Editor and opens it in Camera Raw.
Step Two:
To open more than one RAW photo at a time, go to the Organizer, Ctrl-click (Mac: Command-click) on all the photos you want to open, then choose an option from the Editor icon’s pop-up menu (as shown here, or just press Ctrl-I [Mac: Command-I]). It follows the same scheme—it takes them over to the Editor and opens them in Camera Raw. On the left side of the Camera Raw dialog, you can see a filmstrip with all of the photos you selected.
Okay, so opening RAW photos is pretty much a no-brainer, but what if you want to open a JPEG, TIFF, or PSD in Camera Raw? Go under the Editor’s File menu and choose Open in Camera Raw. In the Open dialog, navigate to the photo you want to open, click on it, and click Open.
Step Four:
When you click the Open button, that JPEG, TIFF, or PSD is opened in the Camera Raw interface, as shown here (notice how JPEG appears up in the title bar, just to the right of Camera Raw 9.2?). Note: When you make adjustments to a JPEG, TIFF, or PSD in Camera Raw and you click either the Open Image button (to open the adjusted photo in Elements) or the Done button (to save the edits you made in Camera Raw), unlike when editing RAW photos, you are now actually affecting the pixels of the original photo. Of course, there is a Cancel button in Camera Raw and even if you open the photo in Elements, if you don’t save your changes, the original photo remains untouched. Also, if you have a layered PSD file open in Camera Raw and you click the Open Image button, Elements will flatten your layers as it opens the photo.
Miss the JPEG Look? Try Applying a Camera Profile
If you’ve ever looked at a JPEG photo on the LCD screen on the back of your digital camera, and then wondered why your RAW image doesn’t look as good, it’s because your camera adds color correction, sharpening, contrast, etc., to your JPEG images while they’re still in the camera. But when you choose to shoot in RAW, you’re telling the camera, “Don’t do all that processing—just leave it raw and untouched, and I’ll process it myself.” But, if you’d like that JPEG-processed look as a starting place for your RAW photo editing, you can use Camera Raw’s Camera Profile feature to get you close.
Step One:
As I mentioned above, when you shoot in RAW, you’re telling the camera to pretty much leave the photo alone, and you’ll do all the processing yourself using Camera Raw. Each camera has its own brand of RAW, so Adobe Camera Raw applies a Camera Profile based on the camera that took the shot (it reads the embedded EXIF data, so it knows which camera you used). Anyway, if you click on the Camera Calibration icon (the icon on the right above the right-side Panel area), you’ll see the built-in default Camera Profile (Adobe Standard) used to interpret your RAW photo.
Step Two:
If you click-and-hold on the Name pop-up menu at the top of the panel, a menu pops up with a list of profiles for the camera you took the shot with (as seen here, for images taken with a Canon digital camera). Adobe recommends that you start by choosing Camera Standard (as shown here) to see how that looks to you.
Depending on the individual photo you’re editing, Camera Standard might not be the right choice, but as the photographer, this is a call you have to make (in other words, it’s up to you to choose which one looks best to you). I usually wind up using either Camera Standard or Camera Landscape for images taken with a Canon camera, because I think Landscape looks the most like the JPEGs I see on the back of my camera. But again, if you’re not shooting Canon, Landscape may not be one of the available choices (Nikons have eight picture styles and Canons have five). If you don’t shoot Canon or Nikon, then you’ll only have Adobe Standard, and possibly Camera Standard or one other, to choose from, but you can create your own custom profiles using Adobe’s free DNG Profile Editor utility, available from Adobe at http://kel.by/1trwAbm.
Step Four:
Here’s a before/after with only one thing done to this photo: I chose Camera Landscape (as shown in the pop-up menu in Step Three). Again, this is designed to replicate color looks you could have chosen in the camera, so if you want to have Camera Raw give you a similar look as a starting point, this is how it’s done. Also, since Camera Raw allows you to open more than one image at a time (in fact, you can open hundreds at a time), you could open a few hundred images, then click the Select All button that will appear at the top-left corner of the window, change the camera profile for the first-selected image, and then all the other images will have that same profile automatically applied. Now, you can just click the Done button.
The Essential Adjustments: White Balance
If you’ve ever taken a photo indoors, chances are the photo came out with kind of a yellowish tint. Unless, of course, you took the shot in an office, and then it probably had a green tint. Even if you just took a shot of somebody in a shadow, the whole photo probably looked like it had a blue tint. Those are white balance problems. If you’ve properly set your white balance in the camera, you won’t see these distracting tints (the photos will just look normal), but most people shoot with their cameras set to Auto White Balance, and well…don’t worry, we can fix it really easily in Camera Raw.
Step One:
On the right side of the Camera Raw window, there’s a section for adjusting the white balance. Think of this as “the place we go to get rid of yellow, blue, red, or green tints that appear on photos.” There are three ways to correct this, and we’ll start with choosing a new white balance from the White Balance pop-up menu. By default, Camera Raw displays your photo using your camera’s white balance setting, called As Shot. Here, I had been shooting indoors under regular lighting, so my white balance had been set to Tungsten, but then I went into a room with natural light and didn’t change my white balance, so the first few shots came out with a bluish tint (as seen here—yeech!).
Step Two:
To change the white balance, click on the White Balance pop-up menu and choose a preset. Just choose the preset that most closely matches what the lighting situation was when you originally took the photo. Here, I tried each preset and Daylight seemed to look best—it removed the bluish tint. Note: You will only get this complete list of white balance presets (Cloudy, Shade, etc.) when working with RAW images. If you open a JPEG, TIFF, or PSD in Camera Raw, your only preset choice (besides As Shot and creating a custom white balance) is Auto.
Although the Daylight setting is the best of the built-in presets here, if you don’t think it’s right on the money, then you can simply use it as a starting point (hey, at least it gets you in the ballpark, right?). So, I would choose Daylight first, and if I thought this still made her a bit too blue, I would then drag the Temperature slider to the right (toward the yellow side of the slider) to warm the photo up just a little bit more. In this example, the Daylight preset was close, but she was still a little too blue, so I dragged the Temperature slider a little bit toward yellow. She also looked a little red, so I moved the Tint slider a tiny bit toward green (as shown here).
Step Four:
The second method of setting your white balance is to use just the Temperature and Tint sliders (although most of the time you’ll only use the Temperature slider, as most of your problems will be too much [or too little] yellow or blue). The sliders themselves give you a clue on which way to drag (on the Temperature slider, blue is on the left and it slowly transitions over to yellow). This makes getting the color you want so much easier—just drag in the direction of the color you want. By the way, when you adjust either of these sliders, your White Balance pop-up menu changes to Custom (as shown).
The third method, using the White Balance tool, is perhaps the most accurate because it takes a white balance reading from the photo itself. You just click on the White Balance tool (I) in the toolbar at the top left (it’s circled in red here), and then click it on something in your photo that’s supposed to be a light gray (that’s right—you properly set the white balance by clicking on something that’s light gray). So, take the tool and click it once on, in this case, the strap on her dress (as shown here) and it sets the white balance for you. If you don’t like how it looks (maybe it’s still too blue), then just click on a different light gray area until it looks good to you.
Step Six:
Now, here’s the thing: although this can give you a perfectly accurate white balance, it doesn’t mean that it will look good (for example, people usually look better with a slightly warm white balance). White balance is a creative decision, and the most important thing is that your photo looks good to you. So don’t get caught up in that “I don’t like the way the white balance looks, but I know it’s accurate” thing that sucks some people in—set your white balance so it looks right to you. You are the bottom line. You’re the photographer. It’s your photo, so make it look its best. Accurate is not another word for good. Okay, I’m off the soapbox, and it’s time for a tip: Want to quickly reset your white balance to the As Shot setting? Just double-click on the White Balance tool up in the toolbar (as shown here).
One last thing: once you have the White Balance tool, if you Right-click within your photo, a White Balance preset pop-up menu appears under your cursor (as shown here), so you can quickly choose a preset.
Step Eight:
Here’s a before/after so you can see what a difference setting a proper white balance makes (by the way, you can see a quick before/after of your white balance edit by pressing P on your keyboard to toggle the Preview on/off).
TIP: Using a Gray Card
To help you find that neutral light gray color in your images, we’ve included an 18% gray card for you in the back of this book (it’s perforated so you can tear it out). Just put this card into your scene (or have your subject hold it), take the shot, and when you open the image in Camera Raw, click the White Balance tool on the card to instantly set your white balance.
The Essential Adjustments: Exposure
The next thing I fix (after adjusting the white balance) is the photo’s exposure. Now, some might argue that this is the most essential adjustment of them all, but if your photo looks way too blue, nobody will notice if the photo’s underexposed by a third of a stop, so I fix the white balance first, then I worry about exposure. However, exposure in Camera Raw isn’t just the Exposure slider. It’s actually five sliders: Exposure (midtones), Blacks (deep shadows), Shadows (regular shadows), Highlights (well-named), and Whites (extreme highlights).
Step One:
I recommend (and so does Adobe) starting with the top tonal slider in the Basic panel (Exposure) and working your way down through the other sliders in order, which is a different workflow than in earlier versions of Camera Raw, where it didn’t matter too much which slider you moved when. However, in Elements 14, it works best if you start by getting the Exposure (midtones) set first, and then if things look kind of washed out, adding some Contrast (the Contrast slider in Elements 14 is way, way better than the one in older versions, which I generally avoided). This photo, well, it’s a mess. Taken in harsh, unflattering light, it needs some serious Camera Raw help.
Step Two:
Start by adjusting the Exposure slider. This photo is way overexposed, so drag it to the left to darken the midtones and the overall exposure. Here, I dragged it over to –2.30 (it looks a lot better already), but the image is still kind of flat looking, and that’s why your next step should be to adjust the contrast (by the way, although you can drag the Contrast slider to the left to make things less contrasty, I can’t remember an occasion where I wanted my image to look more flat, so I don’t drag to the left. Ever. But, hey, that’s just me).
Increase the contrast using the Contrast slider, which makes the bright areas brighter and the dark areas darker (here, I dragged it to the right to +38, which helped deal with the flat, low-contrast look). These two steps—adjusting the Exposure and then the Contrast slider (if necessary)—should be your starting points every time. This top-down approach helps, because the other sliders build off this exposure foundation, and it will keep you from having to constantly keep tweaking slider after slider. So, think of these two as the foundation of your exposure, and the rest are kind of optional based on the image you’re working on.
Step Four:
Before we go any further, increasing our contrast to where we wanted it created a highlight clipping problem (part of our photo got so bright that it won’t have any detail in that area at all. It’s blown out. If all that sounds bad, well, that’s ’cause it is). Luckily, Camera Raw gives you a warning if you’re clipping, in the upper-right corner of the histogram. See that triangle? That’s the highlight clipping warning (although I just call it “the white triangle of death”; the one in the upper-left corner is the shadow clipping warning). Now, if you do see a white triangle, don’t freak out. First, go up and click directly on that white triangle and the areas that are clipping will appear in red (look in the wave here). We do this to find out if what’s clipping is an area of important detail, or if it’s like a tiny highlight on a chrome bumper or something meaningless in the background of your image.
If that red highlight shows over an area you feel has important detail (we can try to get a little back in that wave), go to the Highlights slider and drag it to the left until the red areas disappear (here, I dragged the Highlights slider to the left to –8). So, I look to the Highlights slider to recover clipped highlights first, and then if that doesn’t do the trick, I try lowering the Exposure amount, but I rarely have to do that.
TIP: The Color Warning Triangles
If you see a red, yellow, blue, etc., highlight or shadow clipping warning triangle (rather than white), it’s not great, but it’s not nearly as bad as white. It means you’re clipping just that one color channel (and there’s still detail in the other channels).
Step Six:
The next slider down, Shadows, is another one you only use if there’s a problem (just like the Highlights slider), but in this case, the problem is we can’t see much detail in the rocks in the middle. That’s when you reach for the Shadows slider—drag it to the right to brighten the shadows (like I did here, where I dragged it over to +25) and look how you can now see the rocks in the middle better. This caused the highlights to clip again, so I dragged the Highlights slider to –18.
Before we leave the Shadows slider, we need to switch to another image for just a moment (we’ll come back to the other image shortly), because I want to point out that one of the most common times you’ll use the Shadows slider is when your subject is backlit like this one, where the sky is pretty well exposed, but the foreground is really dark. When I was standing there, of course, my eye compensated perfectly for the two vastly different exposures, but our cameras still aren’t as sophisticated as the human eye, so we get shots that look like this. Start by bumping up the Exposure and then the Contrast, if necessary (the Shadows slider will work much better when you tweak these first).
Step Eight:
Now, drag the Shadows slider way over to the right to open up that canoe and the foreground, so the whole image looks more balanced (here, I dragged over to +58). Now we can jump back to our original image.
The last two essential exposure sliders are the Whites and Blacks. If you’re used to working with Levels in Photoshop, you’ll totally get these, because they’re like setting your highlight and shadow points (or your white and black points). Most of the time, if I use the Whites slider (which controls the brightest highlights), I find myself dragging it to the right to make sure the whites are nice and bright white (and not light gray), but in this instance, I was using the Whites slider to pull the whites back a bit (to help hide the fact that it was shot in harsh, direct daylight), so I dragged it to the left (to darken the whites) to around –33. I also increased the deepest shadows by dragging the Blacks slider to the left just a little bit (here, I dragged over to –8). I still use this slider if, near the end of the editing process, I think the color needs more oomph, as this helps the colors look saturated and less washed out. Here’s a before/after, but I did add two last finishing touches, which were to increase the Clarity a little (more on this coming up on page 62) and I increased the Vibrance amount a bit. Again, I recommend doing all of this in a top-to-bottom order, but just understand that not every image will need an adjustment to the Highlights and Shadows—only mess with those if you have a problem in those areas. Otherwise, skip ’em.
Letting Camera Raw Auto Correct Your Photos
If you’re not quite comfortable with manually adjusting each image, Camera Raw does come with a one-click Auto function, which takes a stab at correcting the overall exposure of your image (including contrast, shadows, highlights, etc.), and at this point in Camera Raw’s evolution, it’s really not that bad. If you like the results, you can set up Camera Raw’s preferences so every photo, upon opening in Camera Raw, will be auto adjusted using that same feature. You also now have the option to add individual Auto corrections, and we’ll take a look at how to do that, too.
Step One:
Once you have an image open in Camera Raw, you can have Camera Raw take a stab at setting the overall exposure (using the controls in the Basic panel) for you by clicking on the Auto button (shown circled in red here). In older versions of Camera Raw, this Auto correction feature was…well…let’s just say it was less than stellar, but it has gotten much better since then, and now it does a somewhat decent job (especially if you’re stuck and not sure what to do), so click on it and see how it looks. If it doesn’t look good, no sweat—just press Ctrl-Z (Mac: Command-Z) to Undo.
Step Two:
You can set up Camera Raw so it automatically performs an Auto Tone adjustment each time you open a photo—just click on the Preferences icon up in Camera Raw’s toolbar (it’s the third icon from the right), and when the dialog appears, turn on the checkbox for Apply Auto Tone Adjustments (shown circled here), then click OK. Now, Camera Raw will evaluate each image and try to correct it. If you don’t like its tonal corrections, then you can just click on the Default button, which appears to the right of the Auto button (the Auto button will be grayed out because it has already been applied).
While the Auto button can do a pretty good job at making a proper exposure, sometimes it’s absolutely dreadful. Say you have an image that’s intentionally kinda dark, like a low-key image or when you shot someone on a black background. When you click on the Auto button, it tries to make it a daylight shot and it’s just a disaster. Here, though, it made it a little darker, but it’s not too bad.
Step Four:
Now, here’s the problem: when you hit Auto, it’s applying Auto Shadows, Auto Highlights, Auto everything. But, what Adobe added here in Camera Raw (well, hid here; this one’s buried) is the option to add individual Auto corrections, like Auto Temperature and Auto Tint, and a way for you to set the white point and black point automatically. So, it’s kinda like an Auto White Balance and an Auto Levels, but they’re all separate. For example, you can add a separate Auto correction for Tint and a separate one for Temperature. You don’t have to do them both; you can do one or the other. Same thing with Whites and Blacks. I’ve set this back to the default, here, so we can try this out.
So, let’s start with the Whites and Blacks. All you have to do is press-and-hold the Shift key, double-click on the Whites slider knob, and it sets the white point for you. Done. Set. Do the same with the Blacks slider. Boom—it sets the blacks. Look at the difference with just those two; it does a nice job.
Step Six:
If you want Auto White Balance, just go up, press-and-hold the Shift key, and double-click on the Temperature slider knob. If you need to adjust the Tint, do the same there. If it does something you don’t like, release the Shift key, double-click on the knob, and it will return to the default. So, you can’t ever mess things up. I think this is a very hidden, but very powerful little tool here.
Adding Punch to Your Images with Clarity
This is one of my favorite features in Camera Raw, and whenever I show it in a class, it never fails to get “Ooohhs” and “Ahhhhs.” I think it’s because it’s just one simple slider, yet it does so much to add “snap” to your image. The Clarity slider (which is well-named) basically increases the midtone contrast in a way that gives your photo more punch and impact, without actually sharpening the image. I add lots of Clarity anytime I want to enhance the texture in an image, and it works great on everything from landscapes to cityscapes, from travel photos to portraits of men—anything where emphasizing texture would look good.
Step One:
The Clarity slider is found in the bottom section of the Basic panel in Camera Raw, right above the Vibrance and Saturation sliders. (Although its official name is Clarity, I heard that at one point Adobe engineers considered naming it “Punch” instead, as they felt using it added punch to the image.) To clearly see the effects of Clarity, first zoom in to a 100% view by double-clicking on the Zoom tool up in the toolbar (it looks like a magnifying glass). In the example shown here, I only zoomed to 25% so you could see more of the image.
Step Two:
Using the Clarity control couldn’t be easier—drag the slider to the right to increase the amount of punch (midtone contrast) in your image (compare the top and bottom images shown here). Here, I dragged it over to +100, which is something you really couldn’t get away with in earlier versions of Camera Raw (you’d get horrible halos around everything), but now you can crank that puppy up and it looks awesome! Any image I edit where I want to emphasize the texture (landscapes, cityscapes, sports photos, etc.) gets between +25 and +50 Clarity, but now you can crank it up even higher in most cases (as seen here).
Of course, there are subjects where you don’t want to emphasize texture (like women and children), and in those cases, I don’t apply any positive Clarity. However, you can also use the Clarity control in reverse—to soften skin. This is called adding negative Clarity, meaning you can apply less than 0 (zero) to reduce the midtone contrast, which gives you a softening effect. Here’s an original image without any negative Clarity applied.
Step Four:
Now drag the Clarity slider to the left (which gives you a negative amount of Clarity), and take a look at how much softer our subject’s skin looks. Everything else in the image looks softer too, so it’s an overall softening, but in the bonus chapter on retouching (which you can find on the book’s companion webpage, mentioned in the book’s introduction), you’ll learn how to apply softening just to your subject’s skin, while leaving the rest of the image sharp.
Making Your Colors More Vibrant
Besides the White Balance control, there’s only one other adjustment for color that you want to use to make your colors more vibrant, and that’s the Vibrance slider. Rather than making all your colors more saturated (which is what the Saturation slider does), the Vibrance slider is smarter—it affects the least saturated colors the most, it affects the already saturated colors the least, and it does its darndest to avoid flesh tones as much as possible. It’s one very savvy slider, and since it came around, I avoid the Saturation slider at all costs.
Step One:
Here’s an image where the colors are kind of flat and dull. If I used the Saturation slider, every color in the image would get the same amount of saturation, so I do my best to stay away from it (in fact, the only time I use the Saturation slider anymore is when I’m removing color to create a color tint effect or a black-and-white conversion).
Step Two:
Drag the Vibrance slider to the right, and you’ll notice the colors become more vibrant (it’s a well-named slider), but without the color becoming cartoonish, which is typical of what the Saturation slider would do. You’ll notice in the image here that the color isn’t “over the top” but rather subtle, and maybe that’s what I like best about it.
Cropping and Straightening
There are some distinct advantages to cropping your photo in Camera Raw, rather than in Elements itself, and perhaps the #1 benefit is that you can return to Camera Raw later and return to the uncropped image. (Here’s one difference in how Camera Raw handles RAW photos vs. JPEG, TIFF, and PSD photos: this “return to Camera Raw later and return to the uncropped image” holds true even for them, as long as you haven’t overwritten the original JPEG, TIFF, or PSD file. To avoid overwriting, when you save the JPEG, TIFF, or PSD, in Elements, change the filename.)
Step One:
The fourth tool in Camera Raw’s toolbar is the Crop tool. By default, it pretty much works like the Crop tool in Elements (you click-and-drag it out around the area you want to keep), but it does offer some features that Elements doesn’t—like access to a list of preset cropping ratios. To get them, click-and-hold on the Crop tool and a pop-up menu will appear (as shown here). The Normal setting gives you the standard drag-it-where-you-want-it cropping. However, if you choose one of the cropping presets, then your cropping is constrained to a specific ratio. For example, choose the 2-to-3 ratio, click-and-drag it out, and you’ll see that it keeps the same aspect ratio as your original uncropped photo.
Step Two:
Here’s the 2-to-3-ratio cropping border dragged out over my image. The area that will be cropped away appears dimmed, and the clear area inside the cropping border is how your final cropped photo will appear. If it’s a RAW photo, and you reopen it later and click on the Crop tool, the cropping border will still be visible onscreen, so you can move it, resize it, or remove it altogether by simply pressing the Esc key or the Backspace (Mac: Delete) key on your keyboard (or by choosing Clear Crop from the Crop tool’s pop-up menu).
If you want your photo cropped to an aspect ratio that isn’t in the presets, like 3 to 5, for example, choose Custom from the Crop tool’s pop-up menu to bring up the dialog you see here. Just type in your custom size, click OK, and it will now appear in the pop-up menu.
Step Four:
Here, we’re going to create a custom crop so our photo winds up having a 3 to 5 aspect ratio, so type in your custom size, click OK, click-and-drag out the cropping border, and the area inside it will be a 3-to-5 ratio. Click on any other tool in the toolbar or press Enter (Mac: Return), and you’ll see the final cropped image. Once you click on the Open Image button in Camera Raw, the image is cropped to your specs and opened in the Editor. If, instead, you click on the Done button, Camera Raw closes and your photo is untouched, but it keeps your cropping border in position for the future.
If you save a cropped JPEG, TIFF, or PSD photo out of Camera Raw (by clicking on the Save Image button on the bottom left of the Camera Raw window), the only option is to save it as a DNG (Digital Negative) file. DNG files open in Camera Raw, so by doing this, you can bring back those cropped areas if you decide to change the crop. Your original JPEG, TIFF, or PSD will also keep the cropping border if you simply click the Done button, or once you open the cropped photo in the Editor, save it from there with a new filename. Just open the original photo in Camera Raw again, and click on the Crop tool to see the border.
Step Six:
If you have a number of similar photos you need to crop the same way, you’re going to love this: First, select all the photos you want to crop (either in the Organizer or in the Open dialog), then open them all in Camera Raw. When you open multiple photos, they appear in a vertical filmstrip along the left side of Camera Raw (as shown here). Click on the Select All button (it’s above the filmstrip) and then crop the currently selected photo as you’d like. As you apply your cropping, look at the filmstrip and you’ll see all the thumbnails update with their new cropping instructions. A tiny Crop icon will also appear in the bottom-left corner of each thumbnail, letting you know that these photos have been cropped in Camera Raw.
Another form of cropping is actually straightening your photos using the Straighten tool. It’s a close cousin of the Crop tool because what it does is essentially rotates your cropping border, so when you open the photo, it’s straight. In the Camera Raw toolbar, choose the Straighten tool (it’s immediately to the right of the Crop tool, and shown circled here in red). Now, click-and-drag it along the horizon line in your photo (as shown here). When you release the mouse button, a cropping border appears and that border is automatically rotated to the exact amount needed to straighten the photo.
Step Eight:
You won’t actually see the rotated photo until you click on another tool (which I’ve done here) or open it in Elements (which means, if you click Save Image or Done, Camera Raw closes, and the straightening information is saved along with the file. So, if you open this file again in Camera Raw, that straightening crop border will still be in place). If you click Open Image, the photo opens in Elements, but only the area inside the cropping border is visible, and the rest is cropped off. Again, if this is a RAW photo (or you haven’t overwritten your JPEG, TIFF, or PSD file), you can always return to Camera Raw and remove this cropping border to get the original uncropped photo back.
TIP: Canceling Your Straightening
If you want to cancel your straightening, just press the Esc key on your keyboard, and the straightening border will go away.
Editing Multiple Photos at Once
One of the coolest things about Camera Raw is the ability to apply changes to one photo, and then have those same changes applied to as many other similar images as you’d like. It’s a form of built-in automation, and it can save an incredible amount of time in editing your shoots.
Step One:
Start off in the Organizer by selecting a group of RAW photos that were shot in the same, or very similar, lighting conditions (click on one photo, press-and-hold the Ctrl [Mac: Command] key, and click on the other photos), then open these images in Camera Raw.
Step Two:
The selected photos will appear along the left side of the Camera Raw window. First, click on the photo you want to edit (this will be your target photo—the one all the adjustments will be based upon), then click the Select All button at the top left of the window to select all the other images (as shown here).
Go ahead and adjust the photo the way you’d like. You can see the settings I used here, for this photo. You’ll notice that the changes you make to the photo you selected first are being applied to all the photos in the Camera Raw filmstrip on the left (you can see their thumbnails update as you’re making adjustments).
Step Four:
When you’re done making adjustments, you have a choice to make: (a) if you click the Open Images button, all of your selected images will open in the Elements Editor (so if you’re adjusting 120 images, you might want to give that some thought before clicking the Open Images button), or (b) you can just click the Done button, which applies all your changes to the images without opening them in Elements. So, your changes are applied to all the images, but you won’t see those changes until you open the images later (you will, though, see the changes reflected in the Organizer. I usually choose [b] when editing lots of images at once). That’s it—how to make changes to one image and have them applied to a bunch of images at the same time.
The Advantages of Adobe’s DNG Format for RAW Photos
Adobe created DNG (an open archival format for RAW photos) because, at this point in time, each camera manufacturer has its own proprietary RAW file format. If, one day, one or more manufacturers abandon their proprietary format for something new (like Kodak did with their Photo CD format), will we still be able to open our RAW photos? With DNG, it’s not proprietary—Adobe made it an open archival format, ensuring that your negatives can be opened in the future, but besides that, DNG brings another couple of advantages, as well.
Step One:
There are three advantages to converting your RAW files to Adobe DNG: (1) DNG files are generally about 20% smaller. (2) DNG files don’t need an XMP sidecar file to store Camera Raw edits, metadata, and keywords—the info’s embedded into the DNG file, so you only have one file to keep track of. And, (3) DNG is an open format, so you’ll be able to open them in the future (as I mentioned in the intro above). If you have a RAW image open in Camera Raw, you can save it as an Adobe DNG by clicking the Save Image button (as shown here) to bring up the Save Options dialog (seen in the next step). Note: There’s really no advantage to saving TIFF, JPEG, or PSD files as DNGs, so I only convert RAW photos.
Step Two:
When the Save Options dialog appears, in the middle of the dialog, you’ll see the File Extension pop-up menu is set to DNG (shown here). Below that, under Format: Digital Negative, is a set of options for saving your DNGs.
In the Format section is the Embed Fast Load Data checkbox, which uses a smaller embedded RAW preview that makes switching between images faster (I turn this feature on). Below that is a somewhat controversial option, but if used in the right way, I think it’s okay. It uses a JPEG-like lossy compression (meaning there is a loss in quality), but the trade-off (just like in JPEG) is that your file sizes are dramatically smaller (about 25% of the size of a full, uncompressed RAW file). So, if there’s a loss of quality, why would you use this? Well, I wouldn’t use it for my Picks (the best images from a shoot—ones I might print, or a client might see), but what about the hundreds the client rejected or you don’t like? Those might (it’s your call) be candidates to be compressed to save drive space. It’s something to consider. If you do want to do it, turn on that checkbox, then choose (from its pop-up menu) which option is most important to you: saving the same physical dimensions (pixel size) or file size (megapixels). Once you’ve made your choices, click Save, and you’ve got a DNG.
TIP: Setting Your DNG Preferences
With Camera Raw open, press Ctrl-K (Mac: Command-K) to bring up Camera Raw’s Preferences dialog. There are two preferences in the DNG File Handling section: Choose Ignore Sidecar “.xmp” Files only if you use a different RAW processing application (other than Camera Raw or Lightroom), and you want Camera Raw to ignore any XMP files created by that application. If you turn on the Update Embedded JPEG Previews checkbox (and choose your preferred preview size from the pop-up menu), then any changes you make to the DNG will be applied to the preview, as well.
Sharpening in Camera Raw
In Elements, we have pro-level sharpening within Camera Raw. So when do you sharpen here, and when in Elements? I generally sharpen my photos twice—once here in Camera Raw (called “capture sharpening”), and then once in Elements at the very end of my editing process, right before I save the final image for print or for the web (called “output sharpening”). Here’s how to do the capture sharpening part in Camera Raw:
Step One:
When you open a RAW image in Camera Raw, by default it applies a small amount of sharpening to your photo (not the JPEGs, TIFFs, or PSDs—only RAW images). You can adjust this amount (or turn if off altogether, if you like) by clicking on the Detail icon (circled here in red), or using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Alt-2 (Mac: Command-Option-2). At the top of this panel is the Sharpening section, where by a quick glance you can see that sharpening has already been applied to your RAW photo. If you don’t want any sharpening applied at this stage (it’s a personal preference), then simply click-and-drag the Amount slider all the way to the left, to lower the amount of sharpening to 0 (zero), and the sharpening is removed. Note: Before I started, I used the Straighten tool to straighten the image.
Step Two:
If you want to turn off this “automatic-by-default” sharpening (so image sharpening is only applied if you go and manually add it yourself), first set the Sharpening Amount slider to 0 (zero), then go to the Camera Raw flyout menu and choose Save New Camera Raw Defaults (as shown here). Now, RAW images taken with that camera will not be automatically sharpened.
Before we charge into sharpening, there’s one more thing you’ll want to know: if you don’t actually want sharpening applied, but you’d still like to see what the sharpened image would look like, you can sharpen just the preview, and not the actual file. Just press Ctrl-K (Mac: Command-K) while Camera Raw is open, and in the Camera Raw Preferences dialog, choose Preview Images Only from the Apply Sharpening To pop-up menu (as shown here), and then click OK to save this as your default. Now the sharpening only affects the preview you see here in Camera Raw, but when you choose to open the file in Elements, the sharpening is not applied.
Step Four:
This may seem kind of obvious (since it tells you this right at the bottom of the Detail panel, as seen in Step One), but so many people miss this that I feel it’s worth repeating: before you do any sharpening, you should view your image at a 100% size view, so you can see the sharpening being applied. A quick way to get to a 100% size view is simply to double-click directly on the Zoom tool (the one that looks like a magnifying glass) up in Camera Raw’s toolbar. This zooms you right to 100% (you can double-click on the Hand tool later to return to the normal Fit in Window view).
Now that you’re at a 100% view, just for kicks, drag the Amount slider way to the right so you can see the sharpening at work. Again, dipping into the realm of the painfully obvious, dragging the Amount slider to the right increases the amount of sharpening. Compare the image shown here with the one in Step Four (where the Sharpening Amount was set to 0), and you can see how much sharper the image now appears, since I dragged it to 100.
TIP: Switch to Full Screen
To have Camera Raw expand to fill your entire screen, click the Full Screen icon at the top right of the preview area.
Step Six:
The next slider down is the Radius slider, which determines how far out the sharpening is applied from the edges being sharpened in your photo. This works pretty much like the Unsharp Mask filter in the Editor. I leave my Radius set at 1 most of the time. I use a Radius of less than 1 if the photo I’m processing is only going to be used on a website, in video editing, or something where it’s going to be at a very small size or resolution. I only use a Radius of more than 1 when the image is visibly blurry and needs some “emergency” sharpening, or if it has lots of detail (like this photo, where I pushed the Radius to 1.2). If you decide to increase the Radius amount above 1 (unlike the Unsharp Mask filter, you can only go as high as 3 here), just be careful, because your photo can start to look fake, oversharpened, or even noisy, so be careful out there.
The next slider down is the Detail slider, which is kind of the “halo avoidance” slider (halos occur when you oversharpen an image and it looks like there’s a little halo, or line, traced around your subject or objects in your image, and they look pretty bad). The default setting of 25 is good, but you’d raise the Detail amount (dragging it to the right) when you have shots with lots of tiny important detail, like in landscapes, cityscapes, or the photo here, where I dragged it to 60. Otherwise, I leave it as is. By the way, if you want to see the effect of the Detail slider, make sure you’re at a 100% view, then press-and-hold the Alt (Mac: Option) key, and you’ll see your preview window turn gray. As you drag the Detail slider to the right, you’ll see the edges start to become more pronounced, because the farther you drag to the right, the less protection from halos you get (those edges are those halos starting to appear).
Step Eight:
I’m going to change photos to show you the Masking slider. This one’s easier to understand, and for many people, I think it will become invaluable. Here’s why: When you apply sharpening, it gets applied to the entire image evenly. But what if you have an image where there are areas you’d like sharpened, but other softer areas that you’d like left alone (like the photo here, where you want to keep her skin soft, but have her eyes, lips, etc., sharpened)? If we weren’t in Camera Raw, you could apply the Unsharp Mask filter to a duplicate layer, add a layer mask, and paint away (cover) those softer areas, right? That’s kind of what the Masking slider here in Camera Raw does—as you drag it to the right, it reduces the amount of sharpening on non-edge areas. The default Masking setting of 0 (zero) applies sharpening to the entire image. As you drag to the right, the non-edge areas are masked (protected) from being sharpened.
All four sliders in the Sharpening section of the Detail panel let you have a live preview of what the sharpening is affecting—just press-and-hold the Alt (Mac: Option) key as you drag; your screen will turn grayscale, and the areas that the slider you’re dragging will affect appear as edge areas in the Preview area. This is particularly helpful in understanding the Masking slider, so press-and-hold the Alt key and drag the Masking slider to the right. When Masking is set to 0, the screen turns solid white (because sharpening is being evenly applied to everything). As you drag to the right, in the preview (shown here), the parts that are no longer being sharpened turn black (those areas are masked). Any areas you see in white are the only parts of the photo receiving sharpening (perfect for sharpening women, because it avoids sharpening their skin, but sharpens the things you want sharp, like the eyes, hair, eyebrows, lips, edges of her face, and so on). Below is a before/after of our door shot, with these settings—Amount: 110, Radius: 1, Detail: 60, Masking: 0.
Reducing Noise in Noisy Photos
This is, hands down, not only one of the most-requested features by photographers, but one of the best since the last Camera Raw upgrade. Now, if you’re thinking, “But Scott, didn’t Elements and Camera Raw both have built-in noise reduction before?” Yes, yes they did. And did it stink? Yes, yes it did. But, does the current noise reduction rock? Oh yeah! What makes it so amazing is that it removes the noise without greatly reducing the sharpness, detail, and color saturation. Plus, it applies the noise reduction to the RAW image itself (unlike most noise plug-ins).
Step One:
Open your noisy image in Camera Raw (the Noise Reduction feature works best on RAW images, but you can also use it on JPEGs, TIFFs, or PSDs, as well). The image shown here was shot at a high ISO using a Nikon D800, which didn’t do a very good job in this low-light situation, so you can see a lot of color noise (those red, green, and blue spots) and luminance noise (the grainy looking gray spots).
Step Two:
Sometimes it’s hard to see the noise until you really zoom in tight, so zoom in to at least 100%, and there it is, lurking in the shadows (that’s where noise hangs out the most). Click on the Detail icon (it’s the middle icon at the top of the Panel area) to access the Noise Reduction controls. I usually get rid of the color noise first, because that makes it easier to see the luminance noise (which comes next). Here’s a good rule of thumb to go by when removing color noise: start with the Color slider over at 0 (as shown here) and then slowly drag it to the right until the moment the color noise is gone. Note: A bit of color noise reduction is automatically applied to RAW images—the Color slider is set to 25—but, for JPEGs, TIFFs, or PSDs, the Color slider is set to 0.
So, click-and-drag the Color slider to the right, but remember, you’ll still see some noise (that’s the luminance noise, which we’ll deal with next), so what you’re looking for here is just for the red, green, and blue color spots to go away. Chances are that you won’t have to drag very far at all—just until that color noise all turns gray. If you have to push the Color slider pretty far to the right, you might start to lose some detail, and in that case, you can drag the Color Detail slider to the right a bit, though honestly, I rarely have to do this for color noise.
Step Four:
Now that the color noise is gone, all that’s left is the luminance noise, and you’ll want to use a similar process: just drag the Luminance slider to the right, and keep dragging until the visible noise disappears (as seen here). You’ll generally have to drag this one farther to the right than you did with the Color slider, but that’s normal. There are two things that tend to happen when you have to push this slider really far to the right: you lose sharpness (detail) and contrast. Just increase the Luminance Detail slider if things start to get too soft (but I tend not to drag this one too far), and if things start looking flat, add the missing contrast back in using the Luminance Contrast slider (I don’t mind cranking this one up a bit, except when I’m working on a portrait, because the flesh tones start to look icky). You probably won’t have to touch either one all that often, but it’s nice to know they’re there if you need them.
Rather than increasing the Luminance Detail a bunch, I generally bump up the Sharpening Amount at the top of the Detail panel (as shown here), which really helps to bring some of the original sharpness and detail back. Here’s the final image, zoomed back out, and you can see the noise has been pretty much eliminated, but even with the default settings (if you’re fixing a RAW image), you’re usually able to keep a lot of the original sharpness and detail. A zoomed-in before/after of the noise reduction we applied is shown below.
Removing Red Eye in Camera Raw
Camera Raw has its own built-in Red Eye Removal tool, and there’s a pretty good chance it might actually work. Although, if it were me, I might be more inclined to use the regular Red Eye tool in Elements itself, which actually works fairly well, but if you’re charging by the hour, this might be a fun place to start. Here’s how to use this tool, which periodically works for some people, somewhere. On occasion. Perhaps.
Step One:
Open a photo in Camera Raw that has the dreaded red eye (like the one shown here). To get the Red Eye Removal tool, you can press the letter E or just click on its icon up in Camera Raw’s toolbar (as shown here).
KIM DOTY
Step Two:
You’ll want to zoom in close enough so you can see the red-eye area pretty easily (as I have here, where I just simply zoomed to 100%, using the zoom level pop-up menu in the bottom-left corner of the Camera Raw window). The way this tool works is pretty simple—you click-and-drag the tool around one eye (as shown here) and as you drag, it makes a box around the eye. That tells Camera Raw where the red eye is located.
When you release the mouse button, theoretically it should snap down right around the pupil, making a perfect selection around the area affected by red eye (as seen here). You’ll notice the key word here is “theoretically.” If it doesn’t work for you, then press Ctrl-Z (Mac: Command-Z) to undo that attempt, and try again. Before you do, try to help the tool along by increasing the Pupil Size setting (in the Red Eye Removal panel on the right) to around 100 (as I did here).
Step Four:
Once that eye looks good, go over to the other eye, drag out that selection again (as shown here), and it does the same thing (the before and after are shown below). One last thing: if the pupil looks too gray after being fixed, then drag the Darken amount to the right. Give it a try on a photo of your own. It’s possible it might work.
The Trick for Expanding the Range of Your Photos
As good as today’s digital cameras are, there are still some scenes they can’t accurately expose for (like backlit situations, for example). Even though the human eye automatically adjusts for these situations, your camera is either going to give you a perfectly exposed sky with a foreground that’s too dark, or vice versa. Well, there’s a very cool trick (called double processing) that lets you create two versions of the same photo (one exposed for the foreground, one exposed for the sky), and then you combine the two to create an image beyond what your camera can capture!
Step One:
Open an image with an exposure problem in Camera Raw. In our example here, the camera properly exposed for the sky in the background, so the buildings and river in the foreground are dark. Of course, or goal is to create something our camera can’t—a photo where the buildings, river, and sky are all exposed properly. Plus, by double-processing (editing the same RAW photo twice), we can choose one set of edits for the sky and another for the foreground to create just what we want.
Step Two:
Let’s start by making the foreground more visible. Drag the Shadows slider to the right (I dragged it to +37), and then bump up the Exposure slider, as well (here, I dragged it over to +0.65). The buildings and river look kind of “flat” contrast-wise, so bump up the Contrast a bit, too (let’s go to +45). Lastly, since the buildings are brick, and we want to accentuate their texture, let’s crank the Clarity up to around +32, and then make the little bit of color that’s there more vibrant by increasing the Vibrance to around +28. Now, click the Open Image button to create the first version of your photo.
In the Elements Editor, go under the File menu, choose Save As, and rename and save this adjusted image. Then go back under the File menu, and under Open Recently Edited File, choose the same photo you just opened. It will reopen in Camera Raw. The next step is to create a second version of this image that exposes for the sky, even though it will make the foreground very dark.
Step Four:
So, first click the Default link to reset the sliders to 0, then drag the Exposure slider to the left (I went to –0.30), and drag the Contrast slider to +31 to help define the clouds. I also dragged the Temperature slider a little to the left to make the sky bluer, and lastly, I increased both the Clarity and Vibrance a bit. Once the sky looks good, click Open Image.
Now you should have both versions of the image open in the Editor: one exposed for the foreground and one exposed for the sky. (Note: This is easier if your windows are floating. So, in Elements’ General Preferences, turn on the Allow Floating Documents in Expert Mode checkbox, then under the Window menu, under Images, choose Float All in Windows.) Arrange the image windows so you can see both onscreen (with the lighter photo in front). Press V to get the Move tool, press-and-hold the Shift key, click on the lighter image, and drag-and-drop it on top of the good sky version. The key to this part is holding down the Shift key while you drag between documents, which perfectly aligns the lighter image (that now appears on its own layer in the Layers palette) with the darker version on the Background layer. (This exact alignment of one identical photo over another is referred to as being “pin-registered.”) You can now close the lighter document without saving, as both versions of the image are contained within one document.
Step Six:
You now have two versions of your photo, each on a different layer—the darker sky version on the bottom layer and the brighter one exposed for the bridge on the layer directly on top—and they’re perfectly aligned, one on top of the other. This is why we call it “double-processing,” because you have two versions of the same image, each processed differently. Now we need to combine these two layers into one image that combines the best of both. We’ll combine the images with a layer mask (more on layer masks in Chapter 5), but rather than painstakingly painting it, we can cheat and use the Quick Selection tool (A). So, get it from the Toolbox and paint over the sky, and it selects it for you in just a few seconds (as shown here).
Press Ctrl-Shift-I (Mac: Command-Shift-I) to Inverse your selection, so the foreground is selected. Then, go to the Layers palette and click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the top of the palette (shown circled here in red). This converts your selection into a layer mask, which hides the light sky and reveals the darker sky layer in its place (as seen here). It still needs some tweaking (for sure), but at least now you can see what we’re aiming for—the brighter foreground bridge from one layer blended with the darker sky from the other layer.
Step Eight:
Now, you’re going to lower the Opacity of this top layer (the brighter bridge layer), so it blends in a little better with the darker sky layer. Here, I’ve lowered it to 80%, and the colors match much better.
Now, we have a pretty common problem to deal with here: when we lightened the foreground, we ended up with a bit of noise (I zoomed in here to 100%, so you can see it better). Luckily, that’s fairly easy to fix in Camera Raw. First, we’ll have to go to the Layers palette and, from the flyout menu at the top right, choose Flatten Image to flatten the image down to one layer, and then save it.
Step 10:
Open the image in Camera Raw and zoom in on the buildings. Now, go to the Detail panel (the middle icon at the top of the panels on the right side of the window) and, under Noise Reduction, drag the Luminance slider to the right until the noise goes away (I dragged it to 20).
Getting rid of the noise made the edges a little soft, so go up to Sharpening and drag the Amount slider to the right a bit (here, I dragged it to 34). Then, to keep the sharpening only on the edges, press-and-hold the Alt (Mac: Option) key and drag the Masking slider to the right. Finally, click Open Image. A before/after of our double-processing is shown below.
Black & White Conversions in Camera Raw
One of the easiest ways to make great black-and-white photos (from your color images) is to do your conversion completely within Camera Raw. You’re basically just a few sliders away from a stunning black-and-white photo and then all you have left to do is finish off the image by opening it in Photoshop Elements and adding some sharpening. Here’s how it’s done:
Step One:
Start by opening a photo you want to convert to black and white. We’re going to work from the bottom of the Basic panel up. The next step in converting to black and white is to remove the color from the photo. Go to the Saturation slider and drag it all the way to the left.
TIP: Try the Auto Adjustment
This is one of the rare times I start by clicking the Auto button (you know, the button beneath the Tint slider that looks like a web link), because it usually pumps up the exposure about as high as it can go without too much clipping (if any).
Step Two:
Although this removes all the color, it usually makes for a pretty flat-looking (read as: lame) black-and-white photo. So, go up two sliders to the Clarity slider and drag it over quite a bit to the right to really make the midtones snap (I dragged over to +93).
Now you’re going to add extra contrast by (you guessed it) dragging the Contrast slider to the right until the photo gets real contrasty (as shown here). It’s important that you set this slider first—before you set the Blacks slider—or you’ll wind up setting the blacks, then adjusting the contrast, and then lowering the Blacks slider back down. That’s because what the Contrast slider essentially does is makes the darkest parts of the photo darker, and the brightest parts brighter. If the blacks are already very dark, then you add contrast, it makes them too dark, and you wind up backing them off again. So, save yourself the extra step and set the contrast first. After setting the Contrast to +100, I still wanted more contrast, so I dragged the Blacks slider to –63, as well.
Step Four:
The image is pretty dark, so drag the Highlights slider to the right to lighten those areas (I dragged to +100). To enhance the dramatic look, I also upped the Whites to +56. That’s it—the quickest way to convert to black and white (and get a nice high-contrast look) right within Camera Raw.
TIP: Change the White Balance
Another thing you might try for RAW images is going through each of the White Balance presets (in the White Balance pop-up menu) to see how they affect your black-and-white photo. You’ll be amazed at how this little change can pay off (make sure you try Fluorescent and Tungsten—they often look great in black and white).
