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How to Work with Camera Raw Files

a c r camera, Ross, a double click and this opens inside of camera Raw. Now, I'm sure you're familiar with this camera, boy, you work in light room. The adjustments are exactly the same. They're not close. They're identical on purpose because it uses the same processing engine inside of light room is it doesn't photo shop. And in that way, I can transfer my adjustments backwards and forwards between library. So if I going like room right click openers of Roy Image, it'll come in here, and all these sliders will be moved to whatever point I left them in library. Same thing is, if you do this, you do it in a smart object you had saved. It goes back to life room. So this is this my own purpose now, something fundamentally, fundamentally big happening. Photo shop in photo shop CC. The first photo shop, CC, um, you know, was still in CC, but with C C 2017 Now. This is I don't know, 5th 6 version of Sisi, and, um, but the big thing they did is they put filter menu could go into camera raw. O...

riginally, when camera came out, it was only for working on raw files. And then they changed it where you could work on J pigs, pings and tiffs. But you used to have to go through a bridge to do it now, because we can do camera Roy inside of photo shop itself. This changes everything because a lot of the adjustment see, I used to use his adjustment layers or image adjustments inside of photo shop. I barely even use anymore because these tools of more modern and these tools of batter you know, there's a couple of tools and photos up like someone's going to say, Well, what about curves? You know that? Yes, there some tools and photo shop that a better. But trust me, this is better than you know, brightness and contrast. That's a very old adjustment inside a photo shop. This is much better by changing the color temperature. It's so easy, right? You just slide it left or right and you warming or cooling. But the other thing about this is because you can use it in layers. You don't have to apply to the whole image anymore. You can use this in a layer and trust me, it's so good so I'm not gonna go through the entire camera, because that would be a class in itself, and we definitely don't want to do that. Um, So what we want to do is we just get a look at the basics panel, which is here. We've got all these other panels, and we're not really gonna worry about. There's two minutes right now, So the first thing is white balance. You can change the white balance. You can just go to cloudy there, or we can go to, you know, daylight. You know, the two main settings that most people are going to use, and essentially when you shoot And this information is probably Odin used to you guys, but, you know, because we put the word begin around there for people that are beginners, absolute beginners. You know, this used to be a thing. You know, we used to talk about all the time, but pretty much everybody knows now, like you should enroll and the reason to shoot. And Roy two big reasons. One of them is dynamic range, which is details in the shadows and details and highlights simultaneously. Ajay pig images only in a bed image meaning it can only handle a bits of color per channel so it can handle a lot less colors. Whereas American Camera brought 16 bit, which means that there's not double that to the degree amount of colors, so it can handle a lot more dynamic range. It can handle more detail in the shadows and highlight simultaneously, meaning there's a lot more detail in your image that's really important. The other thing is, a J pick is a lossy Fuhrman, and we're gonna be talking about that a little bit more effect because we're gonna do that. I'm just gonna keep moving along and I'll explain that a little bit more and death. But the other important thing about the raw file there's with the raw file. All the settings on the camera outside of the optics are just ideas off starting places. You know you cannot change your f stop. You cannot change it shutter speed or your I s o or your lens focal length those air hardware things that you put on your camera to take that photograph. But things like white balance camera calibration, Kelly color profiles, sharpening all those little things on the knobs that you get through all those little menus. You know that in your in the cold and you take your mitt self seeking did on the back and settle that a lot of that stuff. You can change it here inside of camera raw. So if you're white, balance was wrong. You know, like last week. I just came from Cape May. I was just teaching at Mar School for a week and we went out. We shot a sunrise one morning and, you know, it was like, Well, what? White balance setting several years for the size doesn't matter. You can change it later, you know, so you can stop with cloudy, or you could start with Sonny. It doesn't matter, because later, on your change of mind, well, what doesn't look better? Well, the daylights kind of cool, but it's cool. They will get it, or it's cloudy, and it was a woman up a little bit, so you can do that. The other thing you can do is the white balance to here, and what you do is you want to give over there and you look for an area inside of the photograph. That would be white or neutral, gay gray. And in this case, it would be this pipe. You didn't even see the pipe there. Um because, you know, it was kind of, but I knew was there because I've seen the file before. Or you could click on a rock or something like that. You know, that should be great buildings. They're usually really good roads and good. So look for something that should be gray or white. Now I use the X ray color checker. You guys seen those little thing, you pull it up and it's got color chips on. It's great to put one of those. Have you got a portrait? You smile, take the picture, and then you can use it for white balance later. Wrong. Um, so moving on, let's make this color that you can also just move the color to temperature if you wanted, so you want to save your color. The next thing you do is you expose your overall brightness. There we go. We can see things I can see clearly. Now we're looking, and then we can go to the highlight pull. It'll the way the left were recovering. The highlight information. We can open up their shadows. Be careful with shadow is a slippery slope and you come full down it and toe wonderland and your photos are gonna look like Wonderland over process HDR. If you push it too far highlights. You can usually push it quite far to the left, and it's gonna look awesome. If you push those shadows too high up, it can start to look very artificial, so just be aware of that. So more gentle on that would then whites the white was the difference between whites and blacks and shadows and highlights. Hold on, hold on, hold on. And they kind of the same thing. Okay, let me break this down. There's only three things really going on here. There's three things going on here. We've got a color. Remember I told you earlier on two parts of the images color. There's luminosity, those top ones a color, that's all. They're fake. These other ones are illuminates. We're talking about brightness of there's different ways of changing brightness. This is a sliding scale. This just does over brightest contrast. Forget about it right now. Just completely forget about it. But I'll tell you what it does, though. If you get to the left, it shows dynamic range. It also looks like you haven't watched the windows for like 10,000 years. If you put a shit all the way up here snappiest, punchy, it's rock and roll, but it's you can't make out anything in the image, so you want to find, like a nice you know, happy medium. But the reason I said forget it is because if we move down brightness these two shadows and highlights these of recovery sliders, you don't use these to make your image light or dark. You use these two sliders to bring out details in your shadows and highlights, which is why we shoot raw because there's more detail in the shadows and highlights. Then we moved down to whites and blacks. These air volume sliders, these are contrast, essentially contrast, increases the whites and increases the black, so it squishes it right or it opens it up. So whites and blacks, the exactly same thing is contrast. Except you have more control cause you can do the whites and blacks separately, whereas you push contrast, you doesn't even every together. It's like a tone control versus a correct graphic equalizer. You guys know what a graphic equalizers? No. You know the thing on the I. You know, when you get on ITunes and it makes it sound it that one. All right, so moving on eso whites whites will make those whites more snappy, and what they do is they also get rid of that muddiness in the white. You know, when the white start to look a little milky and muddy and you get rid of that blacks, blacks, ed body, that foundation to the image. They make it look not washed out because if the blacks of their it looks washed out to bring the blacks down. Now there is a history of my Piercy, that thing that has to graham blacks on the lift highlights on the right. Um, here's a tip. If you hold down the old key, when I move it to the left, you'll see where it's That's the clip or force those colors. Were you losing tone sessions, said colors tones. There's a standard go to pure black right? This if we get about there, we know that's good, but not losing it in this have looking the whites or look see the skies down a blow out there. If you do that, that's not good. A little bit, you know, reds. Okay, you can get away with that. Okay, So now what you can do is if you want. If you turn the zone just by clicking, you can also see that clipping on there. So as long as it's not losing image information and you just got areas that are, you know, smooth areas of out, lot of detail, you can cook those a little bit. And in fact, even though I'm showing you this, you can click them a lot if you want. If that's your artistic, artistic vision, clarity, clarity does mid tone contrast that makes it look sharper. Um, and then you get the lift. It makes it look soft and dreamy. But honestly, don't do that. There's better ways of blurring and image than that. Um, so you can give contrast gives a little snap, But be careful because I see people do it all the time. They take the high shadows, open them all the way up. They pushed the clarity all the way up, and now you they're like, Oh, that looks good. No, it doesn't. Um, let's go back. Give it a little bit. Settle. Settle. Right. Um, and in vibrance and saturation, vibrance is basically saturation. Saturation is you go this way is carnival You go this way. It's Ansel Adams, um, with the vibrance, rather than just pushing everything it looks at, the emergence is what areas already have saturation. What parts of the image on Lohan saturation? Because I think that the user here wants to boost the saturated parts not as much as the non saturated parts, because if something is already clipping so it's a little smart, so it looks at areas that are already very colorful, and it doesn't make them adds colorful. So if you watch this even see that it doesn't, I blow it out. But it looks awesome in the sky. Look at that and see how the skies in the water suddenly a little more saturated on it. And it is my screen. But you get the general idea. So, vibrance is your friend situations fine. I mean, if you want to use it like no one's gonna like. Patrol the house arrest. Um, but I like to use vibrant I barely ever used saturation again. Unless I'm going for in effect, sometimes have you drop the saturation down, boost the vibrance and get a cool effect, and vice versa pulled a vibrant. So all the way down person saturation, you can get some interesting effects, so that's good for in effect. But here's a little tip. Give you a tip. He, when it comes to effects, get it right first like that's the problem people did. I want to apply an effect, an image. Let's give it like a sepia tone. Let's like, make it look instagram ish. And what happens is they get the picture, which is not properly corrected already and try and apply this effect, and then it looks like a mess. What you want to do is fix the pitcher first and then apply the effect, and then it will look much better. Okay, so that's the basics of camera raw. And if you want to open it in photo shop, see where it says open image. If you hold the shift key, it changes the object. See that? That's how your total between opening a smart object orbiting an image. This button here believe it or not, that's a button ugliest button in photo shop. I challenge you to find an ugly a button in that, um, you can go in here and you can also say your preferences toe open in photo shop is a smart object. That's essentially what? It does it right there. Okay, so I'm gonna hold down the shift, and I'm gonna click. An openness is an object. So why did I do that? Because if I open it as an object of a double click on here, it will take me back into camera raw. If I open it as an image, it's gonna render that out. It's no longer to be a rule file, and it's just gonna be just like a JPEG tiff or whatever. And when you're in here, you know you can do other fun things like creating you layer and like, Well, look at that sewage pipe. Let's get rid of that. It's not, uh, let's go here. We're gonna grab a healing brush tool, and we can actually do this onto a blank layer. This is something good for people to know. Um, it's very good. You want to make sure your sample all layers, and I'm just gonna have the option key to create a sample was make the brush nice and big. Good. And then we just go here and just cover that up. And bingo. Done. And this is still known destructive. Except for that little bit there. So, as you can see, that's camera raw. Wonderful tool, love it.