Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Use Camera Raw

There is one type of image that Photoshop cannot deal with. And that is an image that was captured in raw format. And that is in a digital camera where you go in the menu system, you can usually choose between capturing in JPEG or in raw. When you choose JPEG, there are a bunch of settings inside the camera's menu system that has to do with how vividly colored your image will be, how sharp it will be, how much contrast it will be worth a black and white or color in all of those settings only apply to JPEG files. And that's because JPEG files are prepared in the camera and once they're saved, they're ready to be opened in just about any program that can open a photograph, raw files. On the other hand are different raw files. Just save the raw data that the camera captured without processing the image to make it ready to be opened by normal program. Raw files don't contain the right kind of information for Photoshop. Uh You might remember in their previous lesson when we created a brand ...

new document in Photoshop, we had some options of what mode it would be in. And the mode that I said that I use the most is R GB and that stands for red, green and blue. And what that means is behind the scenes. If you were to actually look at what your image was made out of each of the little squares that makes up your picture would have a certain amount of red green and blue in those three amounts put together, define how bright that area is and what color it is. Well, the way a digital camera works is kind of weird. And that is you have this grid of sensors inside the camera, but each one of those little square sensors only senses one color of light, red, green or blue. Photoshop needs all three of those colors. And because of that Photoshop has no idea how to deal with a raw file. It just doesn't have what it needs. So it needs to go through a piece of software that is specially designed for working with raw files. And Adobe, when you get Photoshop, it automatically installs Adobe camera raw and that's its version of a raw processor, meaning it does the same thing that the camera would do if you told the camera to shoot a JPEG file, preps it for use in other programs. The difference is is you choose the settings for a JPEG file in the camera's menu system before you press the shutter. Whereas when we're in Adobe camera raw we're choosing those same settings and we can customize them after the photo was taken. And therefore we can customize it for each individual picture. Whereas most people go in the menu system for the camera. And if they ever changed anything in there, uh they changed it generically and it's used for every single picture they take when they shoot JP. So this is gonna allow us to get much higher quality from our images as long as we're shooting in raw format. Now, I should mention raw is not literally a format where it's like Tiff or JPEG or something else. And that's because each camera manufacturer uses a different method for saving the raw data that the camera captured. And because of that, the files you get, if you're on, let's say a Sony camera, the file extension at the end will be different than if you shoot with a Nikon camera and so on. So let me show you what those file extensions are just so you have an idea if you run into these files. So on the left side, you see the file extension you'd find at the end of the file name. And just to the right of that, you'll see the manufacturer that uses that particular file extension for the raw files. So when I say a raw file, it will rarely have on the end of the file name dot raw. Uh there happens to be a few, like if you look on the far right here like a, they use dot raw as their file extension, but most others do not. And so any of these file extensions are ones where Photoshop cannot directly deal with those images. So I shoot with Sony and if you look there, it says dot A RW. So you're gonna find a few of those files when you work with uh the images that you can download for this course. Uh Also I have shot in the past with Canon. So there might be some crw or cr two files in there as well. Um My wife shoots with Olympus and I've taken a few pictures on her camera. So there's a small chance you'll find a dot Orf file. But regardless all of these file extensions, I'm generically calling raw files because all of them contain or save the raw data from your camera's sensor without messing with what's there. So we can mess with it once we get into Adobe camera raw and Adobe Camera is gonna supply us with a huge number of things we could do to adjust our pictures. And because of that, they don't make it. So it only works with raw files even though that's what it was designed initially for. And it's required to use it for raw files. But you can also use it on uh JPEG files and also other file formats that do not contain any layers. You can send those also through Adobe camera and optimize them. And in at least 50% of the images I run into, I can finish them in Adobe camera raw with never the need to open that image all the way into Photoshop. And that makes everything faster. Then as an alternative to Adobe camera, you have Adobe lightroom and lightroom classic. Both of those offer the same adjustments that you're gonna see here in a few minutes in Adobe camera. And if you're in Lightroom classic, they would be in the area called the up module. And if you are in the normal version or just light room, uh if you just press the space bar to view your image big, you'd find them on the right side of your screen. So anyway, this thing, it's actually a plug in for Photoshop because you're not all the way into Photoshop yet when you use it uh is because Photoshop can't handle raw files. So we need something that preps them for Photoshop and that's what we're doing here. But some of the images you'll be able to finish them in there. So it's really powerful. What we can do. Let's dive in and get started here. I am in Adobe Bridge and this is a dot A RW file. That means it's a Sony raw file. Whereas this one over here is a dot CR two, that's a canon raw file. But the main thing is we have a raw file when we double click on it, it can't open it all the way into Photoshop. So instead, when I double click here, it brings me into this screen. This is Adobe camera raw. Let's take a look over on the right side. We'll start with this area called light and uh exposure that's gonna control the overall brightness of the picture. And I think the entirety of this picture is too dark and therefore I'm gonna bring exposure up until I don't think that the majority of the picture is too dark. But I have to decide what's more important is it, what's behind this is my wife, by the way, um What's behind her? If so I don't want to go quite that bright or is it her? And if so I could go this bright. Uh So let's say it's her and I go this bright. Uh But the whole reason I took this picture is we were really high up in Dubai and one of the tallest buildings in the world and I wanted the background. So exposure is going to adjust the brightness of the entire picture. So if the whole picture is too bright or dark, feel free to go for that. But otherwise we have here highlights and shadows highlights will work on the bright ish areas of the image. So in this case, hopefully that will be the areas outside this window. If I were to bring it to the right, it would brighten it. I'm gonna bring it to the left, which is going to darken that now, even with that all the way down, it's hard to see. And that's simply because my exposure has been moved so far that it's hard for it to uh look at that. Also in the original picture, I think that area was uh not mega bright, so I'm gonna back off a little bit on exposure so I can see what's outside the window. All right, then we have a slider here called shadows. Shadows works on the dark areas of the image. It's not literally thinking about shadows like what my wife's casting here, it's just thinking dark stuff. So I'm gonna take shadows and I'm gonna bring it up. Hm. There we go. Now we're starting to get it where I can both see what's outside the window and see what's in the dark area. Uh Then we also have another slider called contrast contrast means how big of a difference should there be between bright areas and dark areas? If you want a greater difference between the two, bring that up and if you want less of a difference, you could bring it down. And I think bringing it down a little bit on this image might not be a bad thing, then we have whites and blacks and I mainly adjust these at the end. That's kind of why they're at the bottom here. This determines how bright will the absolute brightest part of the picture be. And so if I bring it up, it's going to get brighter. And eventually, if I move it too far, we're gonna start getting large areas of solid white. Uh And if I bring it down, the brightest areas will get darker and darker, but it's thinking about the absolute brightest area and exactly what brightness level should it be. Now, there is a thing up here known as a histogram which can help us out when it comes to adjusting whites and blacks, this tells us which brightness levels are found in our image. Black is represented on the far left, white is represented on the far right. And then you'd have all the shades of gray in between. I really wish they would put a bar in here that had black on the left that had 50% gray in the middle and had white on the right and all the shades of gray in between those below here because this would be so much easier to understand. But for some reason they refused to do so, then the height of these lines tell you how much space or how common the various brightness levels would be in our picture. So just looking at this, I can tell you that these medium and bright areas take up a lot of space because this is really tall compared to the really dark stuff, we notice this is much shorter. So it takes up less space but what I'm gonna do to adjust whites and blacks is I'm gonna look right over here at the very end, white is represented right here on the end and the height of whatever is right there tells me how much space white is taking up. And I see next to nothing. Watch what happens over here when I adjust whites. If I bring it down. Do you see that stuff pushing further away from that right edge where white is represented? You know, if I bring this to the right, you see that it's getting closer and closer and if I push it too far, it becomes really tall, right on that end. That means there's a large area of solid white. So I might bring this up and tell that's close, but it is not right at the end, it's not turning into a big tall part and see if I like the image better that way or not. And I don't mind it when it's there. I just don't want to go too far where I get a mega tall thing right on the very end, then I can look on this end over here and if there's a gap here before it hits the end, then there is no black in this picture. And I might be able to show you that if I bring blacks up high enough, that means brighten, what was the darkest part of your image? So now black takes up next to no space. If I bring this down though, I'll darken the dark part of the image. And eventually we're gonna start forcing areas to black. And that's when in the histogram, you see it getting tall right here on the very end. If I bring it down a lot, you'll see you get really tall. And that means there's a large area of solid black. There's another indication to tell us if we have white or black. And that is these little triangles here and here uh when they're black, we have not forced areas to solid white or solid black. But if I grab the whites and I bring it up, watch the triangle in the upper right above the histogram. Eventually you're gonna see it change to a color when it changes to a color behind the scenes, your picture is made out of three pieces, red, green and blue. And that when it's color means that at least one of those colors started to reach its maximum and you're starting to trash some detail there. If you keep going, eventually, it's gonna turn solid white. And when you do that means there is an area in your picture that is literally solid white where there is absolutely no detail in it whatsoever. Whereas when it's color, you have detail in at least one or two of the three pieces that make up your picture. So that's another indication just know though that that is not 100% accurate. It's acting as if you scaled down your picture to a supremely small size. Imagine it looked, well, I can't get it small enough. Imagine it looked very small. Like the not quite the size of a postage stamp but small and therefore any really small areas this would not trigger and uh same is true on the other side, but you can use it as a general guide so I might bring blacks down and I'll look at that triangle, you'll see it also changes to a color when you start to lose detail. That means that one of the three colors that makes up our image has reached zero in brightness and eventually it's going to change as well and it'll change to white. That's when we have now an area of solid black somewhere in this picture. Uh So we can look for a gap on the end of the histogram. We can look for those as indicators. But in the end, nobody else sees this when you print or display your image. So in the end, it matters what your picture looks like and those are just like the speedometer in your car. You don't stare at it when you're driving, you just glance at it and it's a good indicator. Um So I could adjust those, let's adjust some other images. This image has some issues that I can see if I look here, I can see specs and her outfit. If I zoom up, you see a bunch of green specs and things that's noise and we'll learn how to deal with noise later on. But let's go for another image for now. Um In the lower bright we have three buttons. Cancel. Would mean I do not want to save these settings. I screwed up the image so bad. I want to go back to what it looked like before I started adjusting it. So I'm not gonna cancel. Done means let's save these changes with the image with that original raw file. But we don't need to open the image into Photoshop right now. So done just means save these settings with that image. So the next time I come into camera raw with that image, they're dialed in and the image looks just like this when we reopen it open. On the other hand, does what Dunn does, meaning it saves these settings. So it's related to that raw file. So that next time you open the raw file, it have these dialed in, but then it also opens it in Photoshop assuming you wanted to do work there. So for now, I don't need to work on this in Photoshop. So I'm just gonna choose done. Then I'll go back to bridge and let's work on our next image. I'm just gonna double click on it because it's a raw file and it'll bring me into camera raw. But you know, you can work on more than one image at a time with camera raw. Let me click, cancel here and go back to bridge. I'll get this image and then I'll also scroll down and let's get a bunch more. I'll hold shift and I'll click all the way down over to here. We got a whole bunch now selected and then I'll double click on one of them. And when I do these all show up as thumbnails now on the left and I can click between them over here and I could adjust each one separately by just moving the sliders on the right. And if I wanted to apply the exact same settings to more than one image, I just need to select all the images that I want to change before I start messing with the sliders because it will change all the images over here that are currently selected so I can hold shift and click up here and you see all the ones with these little uh borders on them. Those are the ones that are selected. The one with the white border is the one I'm currently viewing. But the others that have those borders on them would also change too. But I just want to work on this one image for now. So it was this image. The first thing I noticed is the brightest part of the picture seems to be way too bright. So when I come in here, it's not the image as a whole. Which is what exposure would do. It's the highlights, meaning the bright areas, I'm gonna bring that down as far as it goes because even after doing that, this is still not dark enough. Well, then I'm gonna come in here and there's a trick that is if you max out shadows or highlights either one and you wish you could move it further. A trick is to move exposure in that direction. So I'm gonna move exposure even though I'm only thinking about the brightest part of the image and I'll bring that down and see if I can get some details showing up in the sky. Now, if this was a JPEG file, by the way, I would not be able to do this because any area that looks solid white in a JPEG file does not have any extra information um lingering in there. But raw files do, even if it looks solid white, there's usually still some info in there. Now, I brought down exposure even though I didn't want it to change the entire image. I didn't want these dark areas to get darker. So to compensate for that, I'm gonna bring shadows up to get those dark areas brightened up again. All right. And sometimes that's all something needs. If you want to see before and after go to the lower right, right down in here, there's this icon, you just click on it when you do, it's gonna get a dark background on the icon and that means you're viewing the default settings and then if you want to see what you've done to it, click on it again and it'll bring you to what you've done. So that's like a little toggle before and after and you get an idea of how big of a change you made. So I'm gonna call that good for this image for now. And let's go to our next one. This image is way too bright and I think it's the entirety of the image that looks way too bright. And therefore I will adjust exposure because exposure means the whole image. But even when I do that, when I get it down there and this image just looks so dull. Uh what I wish is that this dark area in here, we get darker and the bright areas get brighter. Well, we have shadows which means dark areas and we could bring it down to control that and we have highlights which is bright areas and we could bring that up if we want to, but there's just something lacking in this image. And so I want it to pop a bit more. Well, there are other choices, we have all these other categories and there is a category right here called effects. And within there, we have a few things that can help here potentially. And one is clarity, clarity is gonna make the detail pop out in the image, but it mainly does it for the big chunky detail, not the tiny detail like textures but more objects. So if I bring that up, you see how now we're starting to get a lot more um really popping in that image and I could bring that up a considerable amount careful if you do this on pictures that have people in it. This is not kind to people's faces because any little wrinkle or crease on their face is gonna get more prominent just like this did. Then let me switch to another image. This one, this one looks really hazy. And I want to see if I can cut down on that haze. We have a couple of ways of doing that. Um The first thing is haze, what it ends up doing is it obstructs the dark part of your image. So there will be nothing black in your image. Nothing anywhere close to black. And we can see that up here in the histogram. Do you see the tall parts of the histogram? They end right over in here. Well, black is represented over here and it means we have nothing close to black in this picture. So I could grab the black slider and just kind of pull it over there and see if I can get it and I could pull it over until that little triangle in the corner starts changing color to indicate that a small area is reaching its maximum darkness and that's gonna cut through a lot of that, but I really wish I could get more of it up in here and here. But if I go further with blacks, I'm gonna start crashing detail down here. We're gonna get black, but now I'm liking it up in here. Well, there is something that works a lot like the black slider. But what it does is once it gets close to being black, it starts affecting these really dark areas less and it starts concentrating on these medium um brightness areas. And once those start getting near black, it starts concentrating on brighter shades. And what that is is not the black slider it's found instead of their effects and it's called de haze. And so I'm gonna take D Hayes and I'm gonna bring it up and as I bring it up, it's gonna make that darker area closer and closer to black, but notice what it's doing up in here. Whereas before we weren't able to really get the change to happen in there, we can go over here and pump this up and look at the histogram. I'm not forcing areas to black there. This gap that's here is not going away. So that means I could bring that way up and try to really cut through that haze. I'm not saying I want to go that far, but I think if I wanted to cut through, I could do that and then I could supplement it with clarity. Clarity will make the detail pop. And so those two put together could be kind of interesting. Now, look at how less hazy this image looks if you want to see before and after, I'll just click this icon down here. That was mega Haze and now it's cut through much more of that. And so that is the de haze slider and it can be very useful. I could potentially go back to one of these previous images. And if you ever want to reset the settings that are here, if you go to these three little dots that are here, one of the choices is reset to default and that's gonna bring you back as if you never adjusted your picture. And here this looked kind of hazy because that didn't look black. So let's try bringing up de Haze and see if that is able to cut through and it is, but I wish I could push it further. I think if I go further though, that dark area is gonna look too dark. So there's a trick and this is especially useful if you ever make a black and white picture because in a black and white picture, you have a suspended reality because you can't see black and white with your eyes in, you know, in real life. And so you, you can get away with a lot more. So I'm gonna click this little button up here. This is BMW. That'll take all the color out of my image. So it's black and white and let's see if we can bring up D Hayes and I want to be able to push it further. So here's the trick if especially with black and white. So you want high contrast black and white, come up here to the section called light and lower the contrast and then go down to effects and crank up de haze. And by doing so you can get away with much higher de haze settings before the dark area looks too dark. And I can even come back up there to light and bring up the shadows if it's getting to be a little too dark in that dark area. But by doing those things, I can end up getting in here being much more aggressive with the haze and then just popping back up to light and saying, well, how dark should that dark area be in the end? That kind of stuff? And here I haven't even gone in there with effects and tried clarity and I can make it pop even more there. Now, in this particular image, I took this image back in 2007 and at the time, I there was a lot of dust in the air you can see it's actually up here, it's, it's snowing and it's very breezy. And so when I changed lenses in my camera and such, I got a lot of sensor dust, that's what all these dots are in here and we can retouch those out with the retouch tool. But uh a more modern camera would have uh dust removal where it shakes the sensor and tries to uh kind of eliminate that. But this was before that and if you ever bring up the haze, a huge amount, especially this high, any sensor dust that are sitting out in the sky are gonna become uh overly exaggerated. So you'll need to retouch um that kind of stuff. So let's go to another image uh this image, let's see the dark area. So I wish I could see more and I think the sky looks too bright. So let's go over here to light and first let's deal with the sky, I'll bring the highlights down a bit and until the sky is about the brightness I like, uh then I'll bring the shadows up to make the dark area. So I can see more of what's in there if there's still too great of a brightness difference, that's when I could adjust contrast, maybe bring it down a little bit. I can see more detail in the shadows when I do that. But when I do, I, I feel like the the sharpness or something in here just isn't popping anymore. And that will be true. Anytime you lower contrast it, the image will find a, a little duller. And when that's the case, I usually come into effects and I'll bring up clarity a little bit. And so I'm looking at like the tree trunk that is here and seeing when I bring up clarity that it, uh that detail starts to pop a little bit more. Let's see before and after I'll click the uh icon there, there's before there's after, there's another way to see before and after, and that's the icon just to the left of the one I was just clicking on if I click there, uh This is gonna show me before and after side by side and you can actually have different views. If you look. Now, there are some extra icons down in that area. This icon here will switch between different ways you could view this. So right now we have them side by side, left and right. I click it again. And now it's split down the middle where the left side of the picture is the original, the right side is the after click it again. Now they're above each other, click it again. And now it's the single image split down the middle horizontally one more. And now we're back to uh just seeing the end result. But that's this little icon. Uh There's a little more to it um with these little arrows, but you're gonna start getting kind of fancy if you preferred the before version over the after version, this little double arrow would switch the two. So that now this is considered the before and this is considered the after. Um, but let's switch those back, just hit the double arrow or let's say I'm not certain if I want to use a particular adjustment. Well, then you could use this icon. What does that do? That means, um, make this one both the before and the after. So copy this thing, put it over there because I want to compare what I'm about to do to where I am right now. So now both of these sides are identical and maybe I come in here and say, well, what if I came in and went to light and in here, I did something different. Uh Maybe I adjusted whites to get the brightest part down. Maybe I adjusted blacks to try to brighten that up. Maybe I adjusted contrast differently, whatever it happens to be. But now I can compare that to what I had a moment ago and just know that when you're done and you turn off the before and after mode, uh you're only gonna keep the one that's on the right. So make sure the one on the right is what you like. So if I want to get out of this view, that's the icon on the far left is the one that's choosing, uh which view I have for the before and after. If you look at this, do you notice in the lower right corner of the icon? There's this tiny little triangle, if you ever see a tiny little triangle somewhere. It means that there's more to that icon that if you were to click on it and hold down your mouse, you get a menu. So if you look, for instance over here, do you see these three icons on the left? Each one of them have a tiny little triangle in the corner. And that means if I were to click and hold down on, let's say this one, it's gonna give me a menu. And so in this particular case with that controls amongst other things, it should that film strip that shows me multiple images be vertical on the left side or should it be horizontal and therefore it be down at the bottom. And all I did was go to this icon, click and hold and that's where I got that menu. But anytime you see a tiny little triangle in the lower right of an icon, it means if you click there, see there's another one over here. If you click and hold, you're gonna get a menu. And so therefore if I don't like this setup, instead of having to click on this many times to switch between them, I can just click and hold and say, what would I like to get to? And I'm just gonna go back to our single view. Now let's switch to another image. This is the image I took in Iceland and it looks way too bright. And if it's ever the entirety of the image that's too bright. Then exposure is the right thing to go for. And once I get the exposure down to where I don't think the entire image is too bright anymore. And I instead would say the bright areas are too bright. That's when I go here to highlights or shadows, I'll go to highlights, bring it down further to try to get that bright area even darker. Uh Then I might think that this dark area, I wish it was a little bit brighter. Well, shadows can let you dial in. How bright is that dark area. Uh Then I think I want this image to just pop more than it does. And one way of doing that is to take this thing and bring up clarity and now it's starting to pop a little more, but clarity thinks about big chunky detail like this arch that is here where it meets the surroundings and such, there is another slider, it's called texture in texture. You're only gonna notice if you're viewing your image uh where you are, you can see all the detail and in the lower left right here, do you see where it says fit? And right here, it says 100 I'd have to click on 100. That means zoom up until I can see all the detail. And if I come in here and I look um there's texture in, in this iceberg that is here. If I want to bring out that texture. Then this brings out the fine textures in your image. Do you see how it exaggerates the fine textures? Whereas clarity instead is the chunky details like this shape versus its surroundings. But here's clarity and sure it will emphasize some of the texture but texture goes for really fine stuff and clarity goes for chunkier details. And the two put together uh is where you can really control uh what you have in there. Now, with this image, what I really don't like is just the color feels so blah. Well, here's a section called color and in there, we have vibrance and saturation. And with both of those, if you were to bring it down, you would make this image less colorful and with saturation. If you brought it all the way down, it would be black and white. Uh If you increase these, either one of these, the image will become more colorful and that's when you start to notice the difference between vibrance and saturation, saturation treats all colors equally and certain colors end up starting to look unnatural and they get overdone like the blues that I'm getting right now and I'll bring that back vibrance. On the other hand, does not treat all colors equally. Instead it concentrates on mellow colors, areas that are not all that colorful to begin with. That's where the main change happens with vibrant and then it starts to taper off as it gets into the more and more colorful areas. So I might bring up and still that blue will eventually get overdone. And then there's another reason for that and that's because vibrance treats blue differently than other things. It assumes all blues in your picture, uh are skies and blue skies usually look better if they get darkened. So it's gonna darken and be overly aggressive with blues. So on this image might not want to crank that too high. Then above that, we have temperature and tint they're collectively known as white balance and they affect the overall look of the colors in your image. If I move the temperature slider towards the left, it's gonna make the entire image more blue is if I'm using a blue flash light and shining more light into it. If I move it way to the right, it's gonna do the same thing, but with yellow. So you can see it's way too yellow and where I can go somewhere in between. And I think I want to warm up this image a bit maybe somewhere in there. Uh I tint makes the image green or magenta and just don't move it to the extremes and you might find a good setting you like somewhere in there. And I think when I'm at something like that, the blue of that iceberg is no longer overdone so I can crank up my vibrance a little more and then maybe fine tune these sliders to see what I really want. And I'm thinking somewhere in there, but let's talk about what temperature intent was really designed for. I'm gonna click done and that's gonna save all the settings on all these pictures I've worked with and let's work on some images that I have here designed to show you what um temperature in tent is designed for. All right. Um Each light source that you might light a scene with, it could be the sun, it could be an artificial light source. It can put out different colors of light. So that Tungsten lighting, which is the old school kind of lights you would have, you know, 20 years ago in a house, they put off kind of a yellow orange light. Whereas the sun at noon puts out more white light and fluorescence is gonna put out more greenish blue light kind of thing. Well, here I have two different kinds of light bulbs next to each other. One of them I think might have a Tungsten um color and the other one, I don't know, I don't remember. Well, white balance is designed to compensate for that. So we can make it look as if whatever lighting we were using was putting out white light. So what I can do here is if I knew what kind of bulb that was, let's say, I think it's a fluorescent bulb. I could choose this choice right here and that will move the temperature and tint sliders uh to the exact settings that would be needed to compensate and make fluorescent light look as if it was white light or I could do the same for Tungsten. So let me choose Tungsten because I think that might be what this was. And if so it just tried to compensate for it, but this was a different color of light. And so it swung it way over. Let's try fluorescent. Hm. But instead, I don't know what kind those were. I don't remember. And so I can't just choose it from here or I guess I could and just do it until I find the one that looks the best. But instead there's an eyedropper right here and if I click on the eye dropper and then move on top of my image, if I can find anything that should be white or gray instead of blue or red or yellow or anything else, any shade of gray is something that should not contain any color at all because that's something you could have in a black and white photo. So I'm gonna click right here. This is a white sheet of paper and when I do it should compensate for this color of light source. And if I click over here, instead it'll compensate for that one. It's hard to tell though. When you see it change in front of your eyes, you'd have to look away from the screen for a few seconds and look back or it might be more helpful for me to actually click on the filament of the bulb itself. But this is designed to compensate for different colors of light. So here this is what happens if your camera does not measure the color of light properly, your camera has something called auto white balance and that's where it tries to figure out what color of light was the scene lit by and it tries to compensate for it. So it looks like it was white light and this is what it looks like when that fails, it doesn't properly figure out the color of light. And that's when we can come in here and grab this eyedropper. And if I can find anything that should be a shade of gray and should not contain any color at all. Like this background, I can just click on it and it will compensate. You gotta be careful though if it's something like this. This is an old like 19 what thirties or forties bus model. And this might have yellowed over time this top. And if I click on it and this wasn't truly white in the scene where the photo was taken, this paint instead had yellowed over time. When I click on it, it will try to make it perfectly gray and the opposite of yellow is blue. So when I click there, I might look bluish if I don't click on the right stuff. Um So anyway, it should be a something that should truly be gray. And so what I have here is a few uh images that were captured under different light sources where those two bulbs I showed you earlier, I just used one of the bulbs and I lit this one. Then I switched to the other bulb and I lit that one and I use that little eyedropper over there to correct for both of them. So that it looks like you cannot tell the difference between those two light sources. Even though in the room itself, I could see the difference in color. Well, here these are raw files. Let me show you what it would look like if I did it to JPEG files. JPEG files do not contain anywhere near as much information as a raw file and white balance has already been applied. So camera raw can't do as pure of a job with it. So here are the same two images shot as J pgs where the white balance was off and I'm correcting it here and the fidelity of the images and the look of the color is just nowhere near. So that's one advantage is using raw files and white balance is designed for compensating for different colors of light. But it can also be used to um make an image look warmer or cooler if you just feel like it. So if you have a sunrise or sunset image, you could warm it up or cool it down let me see if I can find. OK, here's an image. I'm gonna open this image and in this case, I want this to look dark and moody, so I want to darken it up. Well, I gotta decide, do I want to darken the whole image? I think a lot of it is dark enough. So it's the highlight. So I'm gonna darken up to make it so that table top doesn't look quite as bright, but it just feels kind of dull. I wish it looked like warm light coming in like the sun was about to go down or something and this was warmed up. So I'm gonna go over here to color and I'm gonna go to temp and I'm gonna shift it towards white. I'll just move this. Ah Yeah, that's starting to warm it up and make it feel a little more like what I envisioned. I can also adjust tint and see. Do I want it a little more greenish or magenta ish? And if it's not colorful enough, I can come over here and adjust vibrance or saturation to make it more colorful. If I want you to see less of the dark stuff that's in this image, I can go head back up here and I could bring my shadows down to say darken the shadows there. Now, your attention is going just to where that table is and that's kind of cool. The only other thing I'd want to do is probably crop. The picture there is a crop tool here in the upper right. If you click on it, all you gotta do is grab these little corners here and I'm just gonna tighten this up a little bit, maybe a little more like uh something more like that. And then up here the icon above the crop tool that gets you back to your adjustment sliders. So let's see before and after I'll click the before button. OK? After it doesn't redo the or undo the uh cropping because it's too harder to compare. It's just undoing the adjustment sliders. Let's click done on that one and head back to bridge and let's come back to this guy. I'm gonna open it up and I'm just not happy with what's going on with the colors. So I could come in here and maybe instead of bringing vibrant up, I can bring saturation a bit, but just something about the colors I'm not into. I wish I could keep the background looking kind of like almost crazy yellow, but I want the iceberg to look more like that. So what could I do? Well, we have another section in here and it's called the color mixer. And the color mixer shows all these different colors, the names over here. And then I have three things I can adjust hue, which means basic color saturation, which is how colorful it is or luminance, which is how bright or dark it is. So if I come in here, I think that looks kind of aqua because if you look at the color of the slider, it looks kind of like that. If I want to darken it, I could choose luminance and bring this down. And now look, the yellow stuff is not changing. Just stuff that is in the aqua colors. I can come in here to saturation and I could take the aquas and make it more colorful possibly. And I could go over to hue that's basic color. Take the aquas and say, do I want to shift the color? Do I want it more green, blue or do I want it more blue, blue? I think I want it more blue, blue, kinda like that. And now that I got up there, I don't like how dark it is. Let's go back to luminance. We'll bring it up a bit. OK? And maybe go over to saturation, which is how colorful and see if we can dial it in exactly the way we want. But it's not always obvious which of these sliders you should move. Uh Sure this, you might think looks like aqua but over here, is this yellow or is it orange uh might be both? Well, there's an icon up here, this little guy, if you click on it, that's known as the targeted adjustment tool, I believe. And if you move over here and you click on an area, watch what happens over where the sliders are on the right side. When I click here and then I'm gonna start dragging. You notice it's moving the sliders over there for me and it's not moving just one. It's saying this area looks yellowish orange, but notice it's moving orange more so than it is yellow. And all that means is the area I clicked on was more orange than it was yellow. Uh Not only that right now, I'm adjusting saturation and it's giving me a preview. Don't look at the sliders, look at where my mouse is on the image and you see two circles. The circle in the middle is where I currently am. Uh The one on the left looks gray and that means if I lower saturation all the way I would end up with gray and the one on the right, it looks like it's more orange. And if I move towards that, we're gonna end up looking more orange, it's gonna look more like that, then I could go over here and maybe adjust the hue. That means the basic color and I click and now it's gonna show me right on the image. If I move to the right, it's gonna get more of that yellow tone. If I move to the left, it's gonna be more of a kind of magenta ish tone. And so I can fine tune this and get kind of a preview right on the image. And if I wanted to adjust the brightness. I choose luminance. And I can also move over here and it's gonna adjust it based on color. It's gonna say OK, let's take everything, it's that color and let's brighten or darken it. And I can click now on this and it's gonna switch to the sliders that would affect this the most. I just need to remember to switch between luminance, saturation and hue. If you have this down here, you can do it right there. So I can say saturation and then you start dragging on the image. If you find this to be distracting, you just hit the little X over there and it would disappear. But this is known as a color mixer. And you can either view these hue saturation and luminance separately where you have to switch between them or over here. If you choose all, it's gonna show you all of those, that's mainly I find useful when I'm looking at an image that's already been adjusted and I'm trying to remember what I did. So I open the image here into came raw and I choose that choice right up there called all. And then I can see, oh OK, I adjusted hue and saturation and this without having to click between them separately. But most of the time I have it where I'm viewing them separately, let's click done and let's talk about a different kind of adjustment. We'll work on a few images here and uh take a look at this and ignore that these are canons that you're looking at the the ends of. Ignore those. And instead look at this part right here, this where you see the transition, I believe where I took the photo was straight, it was perfectly straight and right now it looks bent. Well, it depends on what kind of lens you shoot with as you shoot with wider and wider angle lenses, they end up distorting the image and we can try to correct for that. If we go to a different section that's in here, there's a section called optics and that's where it tries to compensate for things that distortions caused by your lens. And here is a choice that says use profile corrections. I'm gonna turn that on. When I do, it's gonna look to see what brand of camera was this image taken with and what brand and model of lens it was taken with. And if Adobe has tested that particular combination, which they most likely have, then what they will do is they'll take a picture of a grid and they'll measure how much is the grid distorted by that particular lens. And then this lens profile ends up attempting to correct for it. So I'm gonna turn that on and watch the top edge of the picture at that bowed um arched angle. When I do now look, it's much closer to being straight and it wasn't just there that it corrected for it, it corrected for it everywhere. Let me turn it back off and back on again. That's trying to correct for distortion put in by the lens. And down here you can see this was shot with a Canon camera, you can see which particular lens it was shot with and then that it, yes, it had a profile for that. Then down here, uh we can control how much it corrected for it. We have distortion. And if my lens was not, it was the same model, but maybe mine was off a little bit compared to the one Adobe tested I could go over here and increase the amount of correction it tried for or if I find it over corrected, I could reduce it. But most of the time it'll be just right by the way with any slider anywhere in camera raw. If you've moved it and you wish you would have put it back to the default setting. All you gotta do is double click on a slider, it'll snap it back to its default setting. The other thing that happens when you turn this on is lenses often do not deliver as much light to the corners of your image as it does to the middle. So the corners end up looking darker. And so when you turn this on, it brightens up the corners to compensate for the lens. But it does it based on that profile. Meaning Adobe measured it. And down here is a slider called vignette. If you bring it all the way down, it would not correct for it. So if you look at the corners of this image, when I double click on this, you'll see the correction whereas this is the original and if that did not compensate enough, then you could bring it even higher. But most of the time it'll be just right. There's another check box here of remove chromatic aberrations. I don't know if we'll see them in this image, but let me click and zoom up. Yeah, I see a little hint right here. Do you see right here? Uh It looks like almost a greenish blue line. I also see it around here, just a tiny one over here. It looks like it's a magenta line, just a hint of it. Those are chromatic aberrations and I can see it also right there, a little hint of red watch. What happens when I turn on that check box. Now I no longer see that little color halo in any of those areas. That's another artifact introduced by the lens of the camera and corrected for in this area called optics. Now, there is some ar some times when you will not want to have this correct for things. For instance, this image was shot with a fish eye lens, a fisheye lens purposely bends things. This was a straight line in real life when I was standing there but now it's all bent. And if I turn on, remove, uh or I turn on use profile, correct, it will attempt to remove that distortion and it will straighten things and that might look fine if that's what you wanted. But if you wanted the fish eye look, then maybe you want to correct for vignetting the darkening of the corners. But you could take this slider called distortion and bring it all the way down to say, do not correct for the fish eye effect or you could partially correct for it. But then I'm gonna click on this image. Let's see. I'm gonna zoom up over here and let's see if we have any chromatic aberrations I can see right here at this bottom edge, there's this kind of greenish blue hint right across there. And if I look really careful, I think I see a hint of magenta here, a hint of green there, more magenta there. And it's just right over here. I see it too. I also see it right there. A hint of green down here. I see magenta there green there will turn on remove chromatic aberrations and those things get fixed, those were caused by the lens this picture was taken with, I turn on remove chromatic aberration on pretty much every single image I work with because I can't remember when turning that on degraded the quality of a picture. Instead, it always improves it in my experience. All right. One more thing while we're still hearing camera raw. Uh, here's an image where to take it. I tilted my lens up a bit. Had I not, I might have cut off the top of this. Well, anytime you're taking pictures of buildings, if you tint, tilt your lens upward, you're gonna find that straight lines that used to be perfectly vertical, that were vertical in real life, they'll start tilting inward. You see that when you take pictures of skyscrapers, but when you do it to short buildings, it just doesn't look good. If we want to fix that, we need to go over here to the crop tool. And within the crop tool, we find this called geometry. And by the way, if you happen to use lightroom instead of uh Adobe camera raw, this is not found in the crop tool of those programs. Instead they'll just be a separate section within the normal adjustments. And I don't remember if it's called geometry or it might be a different word. I'll go look, it's down here. It's in an area called transform if you're in lightroom. So that's where it would be found instead, but the settings will be the same. So let's hide lightroom and head back to camera raw and see what it does. Well in here, we can tell it to automatically try to correct for geometry problems if I hit that, it tried to make vertical lines in the image vertical. Uh and I could have it correct for horizontals, but this image doesn't really have horizontals because it was shot at an angle. Uh Here's one for correcting only verticals. Here's one for correcting both, which won't look good in this image. Uh But the one that I use the most is the one on the far, right? Because it allows me to manually control things. What you do is when you choose that choice on the far, right, then if you move on top of your image, you should get across here. And what I want to do is find a vertical line, a line that would be perfectly vertical in real life near the right edge of the picture. And I see one right here. I'm gonna go there and click on it and then I'm gonna drag to make a line that's parallel with it. And so I'm gonna try to get that to line up right with that. Come on, get right on the edge. Sometimes it's hard to get it on the exact edge. There we go. Then I'm gonna go near the other end of the picture and I'm gonna look for another vertical. It could be a telephone pole, it could be part of the building and I'm gonna find that edge. Here's one right here and I'm gonna click on it and I'm gonna drag and make this line parallel with that in what I let go. It's gonna make both of those lines perfectly vertical and therefore correct for me tilting my camera up and it's good on architecture to end up uh getting those lines nice and straight. When you're done, you can just switch out of the crop tool by clicking on the icon that's above it. In this one. When it was zoomed up, I could see chromatic aberrations over here. Uh If I zoom up, I'll just do command plus zooms up more. I see uh red on this side, green on that side, I see all those colors on the edges of all sorts of things. So I'm gonna come back in here to optics and turn on remove chromatic aberrations and those are in general fixed. Then finally, let's talk about what happens when you hit the done button. Where are those settings that we've applied to your image saved? And how can I tell if an image here has been adjusted or not? Well, if you look at this image, uh this image has not been adjusted, I can tell just by glancing at it. Um Well, in the upper right, there would be an icon, an icon that looks like this. If that has camera raw settings applied to it, there'll be this icon that's next to it if cropping has been applied. So I know this image and this image have been adjusted in camera raw and have been cropped. Then that's because of those icons. This image has not. Then where are those settings being saved. Well, a raw file is supposed to contain the raw data, a camera captured with nothing done to it. And because of that, we can't save these changes into the raw file. Otherwise it would no longer be the raw data your camera captured, which is the definition of what a raw file is. So it needs to save them somewhere. And what happens is it creates an additional file inside the same folder as the raw file in that little file contains the settings. Let's see. So I can go to any image here in bridge, I can right click on it. And one of the choices within this menu is to come in here and reveal in finder. If you're on windows, it'll say something like reveal and explorer because I think that's what you call your operating systems version. And if I look here is the original raw file and then there's this extra file. And if you look at it, it has the exact same file name. The only difference is the file extension. This is the raw file and this X MP file is where those settings are stored. So if I take that image right there, the, the one that says X MP on it and I were to take it and I would put it somewhere else. So it's just no longer in this folder. I'm gonna put it on my desktop and then I gotta get back where you can see this picture. Uh Then I'm gonna go back to bridge and I don't know if you saw it or not, but this image changed in appearance. The sky used to be darker and these lines used to be more um straight to show you the difference. I'm gonna go back to the finder and I wanna get to where you can see uh light room at the same time. And I'm just gonna come over here and choose undue move and therefore it'll put that file back. So look in the upper right corner of that image in bridge. Notice there is no camera raw icon, no adjustment icon when I undo that move and I put that X MP file back, it only takes it a second and it says, hey, wait, now you got raw settings and you've cropped the image and now the picture looks different. So if I write, click on the image again and I choose reveal in finder. Whenever you adjust raw files using Adobe camera raw, you're gonna find in the folder where those raw files reside, there are gonna be twice as many files afterwards, you're gonna have the original raw file and you're gonna have this X MP file. But what's cool about the X MP file is let's look at the file size. Take a look over here. This is 27 kilobytes. That's about the size of a one page text document with no formatting. Um That is absolutely tiny. So the original raw file in this case was 11 megs and 27 kilobytes was added to make that adjustment. If you look at this change, it's five kilobytes. This one's 28 this one's 10, they're almost non-existent in size. They're so small to give you a comparison in case you're not used to it. I'm gonna take this image right here. I'm gonna open it all the way into Photoshop. I'll just hit open here in camera raw. Let's make one layer and let's put something on that layer. I'll just put a little dot So I can tell which image is which. And then let's save this. I'm just gonna choose save it, can't save it back into the raw file. So it has to come up here and we'll just use the default file format, which is Photoshop and I'll hit save once it's done. Let's close it. And now let's compare what it would have happened if we brought it into Photoshop and made changes there. All I did was create one layer and paint one dot Let's go back here and somewhere in this folder should now be, I hope an extra image. Take me a second to find it. It's down here at the bottom and let's bring it up here next to the others. You can see it's got that little, here we go. You can see it's got the little green dot on it. Well, let's figure out how big it is. I'm gonna say reveal and find her and look, it's 70 megabytes. If you look above that, the original raw file was 11 megabytes. Look at how many times larger that became. And so instead of getting that much larger, when we did these changes using Adobe camera raw, it only added 27 kg bytes, which is almost nothing compared to becoming six or seven times as big. But that's not all if you come in here and you find something that is not a raw file. You remember when I straightened this image, if you look at the file format there, it's a Tiff. That's not a raw file. If it wasn't a raw file, then if it's a JPEG or a Tiff or something similar, you can usually save those settings directly into uh the file itself with no need for that X MP file, but it depends on settings. And what is really in that file, sometimes you might still get X MP files. So what that means is if you after adjusting an image, go to the folder where the images are and you want to move them somewhere else, um Be sure you move any X MP files that are in that folder along with it. And if you ever rename the original raw file, be sure that the X MP file is named and that the names match because that's the only thing connecting the two together is that the file names are identical except for the file extension. If you end up changing the file name using bridge, it will automatically rename the X MP file. And if you drag that image to another folder in bridge, it'll automatically move the X MP file as well. So overall, my advice would be when you get into Adobe camera raw. What I do is I look at the image and I say what is the biggest problem with this image? What don't I like? Whatever the answer is I fix that first and then I re evaluate the image. And I say now with this new look of the image after adjustment, what is the biggest problem with the image? And I fix that? And I keep doing that until I either run out of problems. I run out of patience or I run out of time. I gotta turn it into a client. And that's how I think about adjusting images with Adobe camera raw and 50 plus percent of my images can be finished using just that never have to end up in Photoshop. And therefore the adjustments I make to the image take up a tiny amount of space in my hard drive. And I love that.