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Adobe Camera Raw and Hidden Tricks

Lesson 14 from: Advanced Adobe Photoshop Techniques

Dave Cross

Adobe Camera Raw and Hidden Tricks

Lesson 14 from: Advanced Adobe Photoshop Techniques

Dave Cross

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Lesson Info

14. Adobe Camera Raw and Hidden Tricks

Make one small, but incredibly important change to your Camera Raw settings and transform your editing process.

Lesson Info

Adobe Camera Raw and Hidden Tricks

start talking about camera raw first and then compositing second since it makes better sense for me to do it since I'm going to incorporate smart office monteiro compositing so that's my story and I'm sticking to it so camera raw and raw files boy what a change that has been in the world of photography because when we first start with our cameras we had jpeg files and there was when you captured a file you really had to concentrate on getting it as perfect as you could which was all very nice but there were some situations where photographically it was just very hard for example here was a situation I face a few years ago where did have a lot of time I was thinking maybe I could set up a tripod and do like trying to hdr with multiple exposures but basically as I was standing there the a person that was running our tourist that okay time to go so I had no time to do anything so basically my only thought was well I'll try and make sure I wanna make sure there's detail in the sky because ...

you can always brighten up shadows it's really hard if you've got a pure white sky there's just nothing there so given a choice if I got one shot to do it this is what I would do it and before camera raw I would have opened this in photo shop and tried to do some masking and lighten this part which I could still do but gosh with camera it's just so much easier so I'm going launch this into raw and first of all just talked about this briefly yesterday but I want to talk about this a little bit more and that is by default when you work in camera ross it goes into photo shop and it's kind of like a one way dead end street so for example if I did decide I was going to try toe lighten up the shadows a bit and add some more vibrance and things of this nature maybe adjust the exposure slightly and I'm gonna overdo it a bit deliberately to make a point and a death the bottom image a button and just as open image so if I click on that it applies those settings and it opens in photo shop as a background layer that's just a standard photo shop layers of this planet has absolutely no relationship whatsoever to camera raw except that's where it started so if I look at now and go gosh I wish I hadn't the skies of the cloud little too bright although I could adjust it in photo shop I suppose I really want to do as much as I can in camera ross on this case really my only option would be to close this and start again now you'll notice right away in bridge that the fact that I applied some settings and click open means now the thumbnail is showing me that's what it currently looks like in one of the greatest things about camera raw is that you never it's never a permanent change so this is just telling me this is what it currently looks like but any time I could go back in and go but I want to do further tweaking so what I recommend is that you make a one small but incredibly significant change to this the wave camera operates and that's kind of an odd way this thing down at the bottom that looks to me like a hyperlink on a web page is actually a really important part of camera because it's when we click on it this is where we get all of our work flow options and I were talking about some of the other options later on but for now the main one I want to focus on is this one this is open and photo shop as smart objects and the fact that it's plural at first confused me because I thought how can I open this one image is smart objects but it's really saying this is a preference from now on every time you work with camera it will open in photo shop as a smart object so what does that mean well what it means is if I again overdo something and hit open object it still applies the settings that comes in the photo shop and now it no longer says background and this thumbnail has this little symbol on it which we know now is the indicator of it being a smart object yesterday we talked about smart objects I showed you that we always have the thing about container and contents and when it was just like a standard layer or two when I double clicked on it would open a second window that had the contents in it well in this case it's still a similar principle of container and contents the only difference is the contents are back in camera raw so if I want to do any work on this as we talked about yesterday I can't use any tool because going to show me no you can't do it I'm gonna get that similar says you can't so if I double click on it this is where I can edit the image I could go back and adjust to say well maybe I went a little too far on the exposure could do whatever I want increase clarity all those things and when I click okay it updates in photo shop now this to me is it really important principle because when we talk about things like making selections and masking and all those sort of things sometimes it's hard to do because there's not a lot of contrast between for example the wall in the sky here it's not bad but what this suggests to me is for example I could say if I want to select the sky I'm going to make sure that I've got a whole bunch of contrast between the sky and the wall I want to make sure that this is going allow me to make a selection so I might actually overdue something like this so there's so much difference here that now when I go back to photo shop and I use one of my selection tools like the quick selection tool it's got a really nice selection happening because I made photo shops life easier I made it easier for that tool to see the edge of it I don't want the photo to end up that way but this was a temporary measure so that now I could go back and say all right now that I've done that let's put this back the way I had it before opening up the shadows and like this whatever I want like that click okay and you'll see that because I had an active selection it's still active now and we'll score that in more detail but that's one of many reasons why doing as much as you can and taking advantage of camera is important now even though this is an advanced techniques class I would say for people that are still struggling with adjustments like how to use curves and things like that one of the greatest advantages of camera it's just easier it's just easier to use you know I talked to people time her knew the photo shop and they open a photo and photos on all you want to do is brightened up a bit and they look under all these commands like brightness and contrast curves levels exposure they're like where's the camera there's a slider is called exposure if the showers or two dark there's a shadow slider one thing the photos off still doesn't have is a clarity option clarity is a wonderful function for a lot of features and in photo shopped there is no simple way to just take a slider that says clarity and move it so the fact that all these things are available as sliders and they're very intuitive to me makes really good sense the other thing that I would suggest is we have to think all the time about where how we're going to take advantage of both sides of the equation camera on photo shop for example I can see here that I have some sensor dust or something on the screen then I can see that big dot that's right there and there's also some weird little reflection thing happening on the rocks so if I goingto photo shop of course I could take advantage of photo shops editing techniques we saw already if I try and use a tool like the spot healing brush of misusing the letter j to get to the right tool here I get that similar says no you can't do it so that tells me I have to add a new layer and now I khun do my spot healing wherever I want looks pretty good simple however the problem with it is it looks pretty good right now because of the settings I had in camera raw the tools like the spot healing brush our operate at that moment in time where the moment I used it so it said I will use the settings based on the current look of your photograph so now if I go back and say well you know what I think I actually still need to adjust a little bit maybe just the exposure and do something else going overdo it a bit so you can kind of see what I'm talking about here but when I click okay you can clearly see the problem is while the photo updated the spot healing idea didn't because that was just like a copy and paste in effect so the pixels are just floating there independently and that presents a bit of a challenge I mean at worst I would have to just delete them and do them over again but I don't wanna have to do that so if I see something that's just very straightforward like that I'm not talking about re touching the whole person's face or something but I noticed a couple of little specks of dust or something that I want to adjust then we might want to consider doing that in camera raw itself because it will adjust on the fly with the image so if we zoom in a bit here I'll put the exposure back down there's a very nice spot removal tool this has improved in the last couple of versions of camera because at first it was just a big circle which was fine if all your dots were like little circular dots but anytime there's some shape them now you khun paint with it just like you would a tool like the spot healing brush and it actually shows you this is the spot I'm using to heal from so if it's not quite right you can adjust it in the same down here I can just go in here it usually does a pretty good job of finding the right spot and then you'll see at first it looks like I can't do anything but everything about camera is not destructive self later on I could go back and actually see these are the two spots that I previously had edited the last I want to say a couple of versions ago of camera raw they added this nice option where if you think there might be some very small little dust specks or something but you can't quite see them this option kai's called visual eye spots will change the look of the image for you and sometimes you'll notice a lot of this is just looks actually pretty good but sometimes you'll see oh I can I didn't notice that before there's some little it just helped you find where the spots are so in this particular instance the benefit for me is now I go back to photo shop and keep working I can do whatever I want with it but once again same deal if I look at it and say now is still not happy with the exposure this time you'll notice as I'm adjusting suppose you can already see that the heels if you want to call that the healing spots already updated so I don't have to worry about oh no I just changed everything now it won't match up so again just to clarify I would not say that if I'm trying to remove ah whole bunch of blemishes on someone's face that I would do it in camera although I might consider it but for photographs where you're saying overall there's not a lot of work I need to do if I see a handful of spots all I'm doing is making sure that it here I have it set to hell instead of clone I prefer hell versus clone because the clone is just like a copy paste where the hell tends to do a little more of texturizing and making things blend in a little better so with this possibility you can see very quickly I'm able to make adjustments do those little bits of healing now the next I'm going to say is definitely a matter of opinion personally I prefer doing selective adjustments in photoshopped in other words there there are tools like this one which the adjustment brush which allows you to say I'm gonna brush just this area and make it lighter darker green or blue or whatever it is yeah it's it's not bad I personally I find that the masking ability of photo shop is better so if I needed to do significant changes like I wanted just the sky to be a different shade than something else I personally would tend to do that in photo shop so I'm going to try and do as much as I can with the main tools in here but for me it's mostly those little spots you see here in there which is where I would really take advantage of things because I've opened this in photo shop at the moment it's still not a save file the original raw file still saved away where I originally had it untouched meaning I can change it but at this point if you wanna continue I'd still need to save this file and I would say this as a psd file so that it preserved the smart ability back and forth by default it's going to prompt you to call it name of file as smart object dash one dot psd that you don't really need that but that's just how you distinguish that the psd follows the one you're working on that's still contains the smart object back to camera spot hell between photoshopped and camera raw in photoshopped visit content aware or is it cloning there is actually an option with thee thus the healing brushes in photoshopped to choose content aware which I always recommend as a general rule as I think I said yesterday anything that has the word content aware innit it's a good thing to use the biggest difference though in our case is the fact that the healing and camera is live where in photo shop it's a one shot deal and most of time that's okay but that suggests if you can do all that work in photo shop he had to make pretty darn sure you're exposure other settings are the way you want them because it's not going to update the same way and I've had people tell me that I just spent you know twenty minutes doing all sorts of healing in photo shop and then realize that the skin tone was a little off color so I went back to camera and also they had very noticeable little spots all over the place because the colors didn't match and that's the drawback to doing that in photo shop so there's always different situations of which way you want to do it but that's where part of the way you have to make the decision now here's another example one where a challenging photograph situation lucky enough to go to italy but every day we were there the skies look like this they were just like gray and boring is heck so one of the possibilities is to do and again this is not I didn't think about at the time trying to do multiple exposures hdr types up we'll talk about that a little bit but in this case I've got one photo this is it so I want to try to see if I can give myself a couple of options so I'm gonna do some adjustments that first just looking at the buildings themselves and trying to make those look kind of the way I want I would also make sure I would come in here and pick the sizing I'm going to keep it fairly small for the sake of um this demonstration's doesn't have a humongous file and just make a few little adjustments and hit open object now one of things with smart objects now I want a second copy so I can try and adjust the sky separately so it's almost like in a sense it's almost like doing multiple adjustments multiple exposures after the fact but the challenge is this if I just simply use the standard way of duplicating a layer in photoshopped commander control j I've made an exact clone of this we talked about this little bit yesterday with smart objects that if you duplicate a smart object they're both exactly the same so if you change one the other one will change so for example here if I went in and said let's make it a grey scale just for this layer you would see that the problem is both of them are gray scale because they're clones of each other so that's not gonna work what we have to do is some help somehow tell photoshopped I want to make a second smart object that's independent still based on the same raw information but it could be edited separately on the way we do that is by right clicking there's an option that's called new smart object via copy or via depending how you like to say that word we have debates about that around our household whether it's via or via anyway that's the command it still looks the same it still says copy but the difference is that what that's doing is making it rather than a clone it's a copy so they are the same raw file but can be edited independent of each other and that for us is crucially important so now I'm actually do it on the bottom one and you'll see why in second to go back here and said this point all I'm doing is looking at the sky I'm not worried about the buildings at all so I know I already have one so I'm gonna do whatever I can to make the sky look better push up the vibrance and saturation changed the color temperature I'm gonna overdo it so I can make sure I can see what's happening here and let's push the high lights up a bit remembering that all of this is edited on ongoing basis so this is my first run out and say I think this might look good but I'm not sure yet and I'm I tend to go with the concept of overdoing it a bit because I know I can always pull it back but I want to make sure I can clearly see the distinction between the two layers of the two versions of this so I click okay it's gonna update one of the huge benefits we have here of course is this is not like I took two separate photos a couple of seconds of parts they might be slightly misaligned these air perfectly align because it's the same photo I don't have to worry about aligning them I know it's going to be perfectly aligned so now if I show this layer you can see I have the top layer where the buildings look the way I want and the bottom layer where the sky looks so I want and now somehow I have to combine them now someone asked this question yesterday about using the blend of sliders to see if that was a way that they could combine images that would be the first thing I would try my expectation here is will probably look maddeningly close toe working but not quite because that's often what happens with the blend of slider so if I double click on this top layer I say I want all this white area to be see through so I can see the sky so like click on this triangle and start to move it you can see at first glance it looks not bad I'm going to split the triangle little bit tio no that's a little too far see what that looks like it's not bad but of course the problem is it's not bad if you keep the photograph this big if I start to get a little closer it's still actually not bad but there's two giveaway see the trees there they just don't look so hot and that's one of the problems is it could be very close to working but not quite and frankly as we saw yesterday with the blend of sliders if you see that they're you're going only tweak so much it's not going to suddenly work you know it says that's just the way it is but I would still try it because for some occasions that works well enough they say all it actually did work in this case looks like it's not gonna work quite the way that I want so instead in this case I would go back to one of things we talked about yesterday which was the channel based selection now theirs up the what we did yesterday was went in and tried to make this as close to a black and white as possible so just to kind of review that part wouldn't see how this all pulls together I would add a black and white adjustment layer recognizing that that's going to temporarily allow me to make adjustments I'm trying to get it so the sky is white and everything else is dark that's a little better okay and one little trick you can also do sometimes if the black and white dessler doesn't really make it that much darker you can change the blend mode to multiply its still not black and white but at least it's making everything a little darker and this a little lighter or maybe even overlay might help us well it's maybe better now I go back to my channel duplicate this and start trying to make this closer to black and white so we're gonna try darken up these areas and really all I'm trying to do is make enough of a distinction I'm not really worried about this part down here I'm just trying to make sure there's enough dissension in the sky and the trees over here so at this point I can now use my quick selection tool to make that selection now once I've done that I don't need this anymore over here now if I just click with the layer mass button it makes a mass based on my selection is the wrong way around because I really want to mask so that the buildings on the top layer show not the sky so I could click on the mass button and then hit invert but just so you know if you have a selection you realize what you really want is the mass to be the opposite of what it currently is going to do then there's a key we talked about yesterday for those who were watching that's this little modifier that makes everything act a little differently or better than make better keys some people like to call it if I hold on option our altar and click on the adam ass button it automatically makes the masks in the inversion that I want so now if we take a look you can see it's better trees still need a little help but it's better than it was and now because I have a mask I can do more tweaking the challenge with the blended sliders they're often quite good but just so everyone's aware of this more often than not like I said you're like oh that looks great oh except for that one part there and that one part there you can't leave tweak it because there's no settings you can't go into like master refine edge because there isn't one whereas here I can because I created a mass let's take a look at the mask it looks okay not bad but clearly it is a bit more detail in here so if I double click on this it opens the properties panel I click mask edge and then I can start trying to see if I can maybe make that trees just by moving that little slider there always looks better I might be ableto painted here a little bit to try and make this blend in a little better looks pretty good to me now in the a real job I would of course looked through the whole thing and make sure but I think the most of part of the sky is pretty good here and there but that looks good now remember refined mask is different than refine and this is when you already have a mask so all I'm really doing is even though it says output to layer mask I'm just updating my current one so when I click okay now I have what I was looking for I have the two together buildings on the top layer with a mask in the sky on the bottom now that I do that I think okay the sky looks a little much for this particular image so that's okay because I could just double click member I deliberately kind of went in and said let's make this a little bit too much just so I can make sure I can see what I'm doing but now I can adjust it so that looks a little more reason because frankly it was a cloudy day as wanted a bit more color popping through and the other nice thing by doing that of course is then before there was a noticeable difference between the trees and the sky because I pumped up the saturation so much now that I have lorded down it already looks a little better so the mask is pretty good and in this particular scenario what I would do is save it just like you see it as a psd file which would mean this photoshopped document contains two cameras smart object versions of the same raw file so I could edit either one of those at any time if I decided this point that I wanted to continue working on this and do something like sharpen it or something like that then I would do take it one step further select both of these layers right click and shoes convert to smart off to do that nested smart object thing so now I can do whatever filter I want let's just do it I'm gonna actually over go crazy sharpening weigh too much but I want to be able to see what happens next so don't ever sharpened using these numbers you will not be happy so don't write down this part unless you're going for the hyper unrealistic you know but I wanted you to be able to understand what's happening in the next step so at first glance here it looks like I have one layer with a filter apply because that's the way smart objects work remember though if I double click on the smart object it's going to open a separate window that shows me the contents this is where I would do my favorite thing which by the way works really nice the bigger the monitor you have change the view to two up so what that means is on this right hand side this is my quote unquote final version that has everything combined including the smart filter this one is the contents document where I have all that camera information so what this means is now I can say well I think I like that but I just want to tweak that sky a little more so if on this document that contains the original smart objects jeppe sorry objects I go in and I can tweak and all again overdo it so you can clearly see what's happening as soon as I click okay this documents goingto update on the left hand side because that's where the contents are assumes I had saved you will watch the one on the right it's going to update and reapply the smart filter so I'm not waiting for anything to say now reapply filter or now have to redo things so that's part of that ongoing discussion we've been having about the whole non destructive workflow is that at no point do I have to feel like how gosh I wish I hadn't merged or flattened or deleted that because I'm out of luck here at this point now let me be clear the downside is when I say this psd file it's going to be quite large because it has two camera aw smart obstinate and my reaction is oh well I'd rather have that I'd rather have a big file that contain lots of information than one where I found myself looking later on going I wish I hadn't done that here like save it this way I come back later gold cash that sky is just too intense I could go back and adjust it okay so storing a large file is not that big of a deal anymore almost anyone could afford it you know multi terribly backup drive printing however if you use in you know internet based printing company they've got limits on file sizes so would you recommend copying the psd file and then if letting things well and I'm glad you asked that question because for my purposes I'm goingto store this as a psd file so I can edit it so this is what I refer to as my master file but the final output is ajay pig so once I'm happy with this then I go to this one here and just choose save as and it's going to prompt me to save it as a photoshopped document because it has layers I just tell it don't make it a jpeg and I label it so I know like such and such dash final I'd like to put if I could I put quotes around final because it's never really final but that's the one that's going to be smaller because that's the one I would stand out to my lab for printing so they're getting a typical jpeg file but I know behind the scenes of that j peg is this much larger psd file that has all these levels of edit ability so if I were to show you a typical folder which I won't because they're messy but if I did you would see a bunch of raw files which are the out of camera files a folder full of ps d's which are the master files and then a folder called final and those are the j pegs that I sent to a client or out to a lab but I know I can't go back to the psd toe add it those and if I really into go right back to the raw file to edit though so I've got multiple levels of headed ability and I do that mostly because years ago you couldn't and you anytime a client or a friend start a sentence with can you just change this one thing you like because you knew in many cases it was like starting over here the jpeg seems final step because you've saved a flattened version but that's the key you're not flattening you're making a version which is flattened so that's why I was harp about don't ever flatten something and people say but one of us wanted to say no to a print well that's different saving a version that's flattened is completely different than taking this file and flattening it so this way I got like I said all these levels even though I've done I could have added another filter and added some techs and put a border and on all these wonderful things and still look at the sky and go know too much I just have to go back to that one that I created this okay I think I went a little bit overboard let me tweak this and do whatever I want click ok and it's gonna update the contents file again I have to save it and then it updates this one so especially when you're first starting out doing this editing method I highly recommend doing this tiling windows thing because otherwise you you see one image or the other and that for many people they're like they had saved they go nothing happened what it did it just weighs waiting for you to switch to the other window this way you can see side by side contents final or whichever way you happen to do it and one other little reminder if you're if you ever get a little lost looking at the two windows of that their tile trying to go which one is which the clues would be the final version will only appear tohave one layer because that's the one you've done another smart object and it will be the one that's that is a psd file typically although I haven't saved this one yet the contents file you'll see the multiple smart objects and it will say dot psb not d so psb is the file format that's used by the contents of a smart object it doesn't show up anywhere so if you go looking on your hard drive going where is that file called something copy dot psd you won't see it because it's embedded inside that container that's what makes the file size bigger but this way again we have these multiple levels of edit ability which for me that just makes such perfect sense to do it that way then always be worrying you know how my goingto make a decision one point to say that a certain way the other nice thing about working with raw files and camera rahs if you have several photos from the same shoot I only have three in this case but I'll show you to different variations of something we can do I only have three then I could just open all three and on the side it says here is your three files I prefer to right away go select all synchronized and I'm going to initially synchronize everything including the only thing I wouldn't do is spot removal and local adjustments because if there was a spot on one photo the chances are it's not on exactly the same place unless actually I shouldn't say that if it's censored dust the only good thing about sensor does is they're always exactly the same place so in theory you could actually synchronize several photos and say do a spot removal on the same place but by doing this that means now any change I make a soon as I adjusted if he watched the left hand side you'll see that there's a slight pause and they all update so I'm not having to go adjust this one and then either remember what I did or make some other adjustments so synchronizing three or mohr now there is a limit I wouldn't go much more than five or six because otherwise you'll be waiting for a while so if you have forty five hundred whatever there's another way we'll talk about the second that I would approach those but this does allow me to go in and make whatever adjustments and as you can see it's always changing on the fly you can always switch between them actually look at the other ones more closely to make sure they're looking the way you want and whichever one is the active one if you make a change there's still all synchronized so if I'm looking at this one and make a slight tweak the other two will change as well if you ever get the point of realizing it doesn't make sense to do that because this one needs something independent then you would just make sure that you were I'm not doing that only working on one specific image personally if I'm doing this it would be because I want to do what I would consider a kind of a first run at ending these photographs and once I'm finished then I was going to click done because I don't want to open all three and continue working on them in for a shop for now at least I wanted to say just do this initial camera raw adjustment when you click done it's almost like saving the file even though technically you can't save over the top of a raw file it's saying I'm done editing and because of the way camera works and bridge works you'll see the image of thumbnails update so now though that's the way I've left those so if I open any one of those now they will adjust now let's pretend for a moment here and take that off let's use your vivid imaginations here that I had seventy five of these from the same photo shoot so I don't want to open all of them at the same time so the way I would do it is I would adjust one of them whatever way I want let's make this looking way want to be exciting to go the other way and this okay so I'm just doing something there so we can see that I have I made a change to it and again I click done I don't want to open this because the whole purpose I'm doing here is just applying an adjustment a global adjustment my first run to this image like then want to intern apply to all the rest of those fictitious seventy five so I hit done go back to bridge and you'll see now this thumbnail has updated but the other two have not so I would select the other seventy four which were only doing two but we're imagining in our heads that there's a whole bunch of these then I right click and shoes develop settings previous conversion and say whatever you just did apply that to those ones without even opening them and you'll see if you had seven five would go big people the way through bridge you see each one the thumbnail would update on a little symbol on top corner would say you have made an adjustment to these so this is great for situations where you have a whole bunch of images from the same photo shooting you want to make sure they all are adjusted the same way what's nice about that in addition to that is I can still go to any one of these and say well when I did it I initially applied these settings will see it comes in with all the settings all the sliders wherever they were but I can still change mind say now I think I want on this photo I want to go complete the other direction so it's almost like a pre set where you're saying start with this but nothing is ever permanent that's one of the best biggest advantage is working with camera is that you're never should feel like oh no I've completely ruined it so I'm going to do some horribly bad things here for second just so you can see what I mean I would never do this of course but I want to show you that I was apparently had been staring at the sun for too long before I was playing around with this image because I just did cookie crazy stuff to it and I hit done now in normal things if you actually hit save unless you're using all kinds of non destructive stuff save would be a bad thing done is not a bad thing here because if I ever go back this and go yikes what was I thinking this is the best lifesaver right here camera defaults ineffective saying put it back to the way you took the photo and any whatever default settings you have and that just take perhaps out everything I've done that was horribly bad news puts it right back so imagine if you had opened a jpeg and photo shop and cropped it and done a couple things and then had saved you are out of luck because there's no magical way to go inside that jay beg and say wait wait to change my mind so that's one of the other benefits of the nature of raw and I'm saying robert I could we could also be talking about dmg because it's the same thing if you have dmg files works the same way as we'll see a little bit later you can open a jpeg or tiff into camera raw doesn't have quite the same level of edit ability that a raw file does but it still is possible and we'll see some examples where you can actually do that so you have a raw file and then you say that a psd those are two separate files when you're accessing if you move there let's say you delete the raw file or you move it you can still open up the raw data you can see it's not actually physically accessing all that yeah that's a good point because the that's what makes the file size because the raw file is embedded inside that psd file so you can still do that back and forth editing and that's I'm glad you mentioned because that's yet another little added bonus of the raw files if you did unintentionally go what happened to my original raw file it's still the information is still inside that photo shop document so the two way editing street is going back and forth the camera but it's not like ah linked smart object where you have to have that original file or else you're going to break the link this is just that's why there's no in fact there isn't an option to say linked camera rafael it's just embedded that's just the way it is okay so that again is a big big advantage and the price we pay is bigger file size but as you mentioned that it's a very good point on this one of my favorite expressions storage is cheap my time isn't so I could go and buy a big hunk and humongous hard drive and store big files and not worry about it I'd rather do that than have to go back and feel like I was re editing something I'd already edited because all I had was a j p and anyone who's watched me teacher before knows that every time I talk about work flow on ptsd is I always go like this are pfc and my final j peg because to me it's never really final because I know I still have that master file if that master file contains raw smart objects seemed better so I have all those level of ed ability I'm making at that moment in time final j peg to be sent to my client or whatever but then if they say no can you just change this one thing I have a much better chance of doing that because I know I have that editing ability back there

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Dave's Detailed Course Notes
Using Photoshop, Illustrator, & InDesign

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

I am an experienced photographer and retoucher and this Advanced Photoshop class with Dave Cross was exactly what I was hoping to find. I know how to accomplish everything I need in Photoshop, but was looking for the ways that I could update my workflow with the new features that have been added by Adobe. The complete use of Smart Objects and libraries is already changing my life and is incredibly useful and time saving. Dave gave a great explanation about the coarse at the beginning as to the fact that he just wanted to help users make their workflow better and he did just that...and in an enjoyable way. I highly recommend this class!

a Creativelive Student
 

While not highly experienced in PS I'm also not a newbie. I've done a few other online courses and am a member of other training sites but very quickly found I got information here that I hadn';t yet come across. Nesting smart objects and the non-destructive editing abilities they give me was one of those light bulb moments. Lots of other useful information in this course. Had to try the CC Library as a result. Very useful..... wish it saved the layer comps with your file though. Put some of these new learnt skills into a composite straight away.... did I say I'm loving nested smart objects!! A great course Dave.

Kirsteen
 

Brilliant, love Dave's clear presentation style which is easy to follow, simply had to buy this one. I thought i had a pretty good grasp on photoshop but I'm delighted at how some of these seemingly simple tips and tricks have improved the quality of my final images and the speed at which I can work.

Student Work

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