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Lesson Info

Adobe Camera Raw Smart Objects and Using Adobe® Camera Raw

since I mentioned this here's a jpeg file now normally of course if I double click on a j pick follicles into photo shop but I'd liketo have access to camera raw editing ability with the j p actually before I do that let me show you one other thing so here's a typical raw file one of the advantages of it is I have a lot more room to edit raw file contains more information than a j pegs if I do decide like in this case while that exposure was way too high I have a better chance of adjusting it and not losing too much quality the other big difference with a raw or dmg file is white balance information still built into it so on your camera if you said I meant to set it on daylight but I hit flashed by mistake or something you can see all of these white balances and go through and see what is my photo look like in these different settings and sometimes you may find one that even though technically it wasn't really taken with the flash you might like the look of that better so that's anothe...

r kind of editing possibility and draws either put it to the correct white balance or just try one and congo okay that's that's not actually the white balance that I expected but I kind of like the look of it and I want to show you that just for comparison purpose so back to this story with r j peg I wantto force camera raw to be the border should say the way force this file to open in camera and the simplest way to do it even for people who have the hardest time in the world remembering keyboard shortcuts you'll never forget this one because commander control are for raw so in bridge if he does go r then it's gonna force that j peg toe open in camera and the nice part is we have access to all the same settings except for one and that's white balance so if the white balance was off on this photo unfortunately the j pick file doesn't store all that information so I can't just say go on and change it to flash it only gives me to ops is bad and worse I mean auto and custom so it's actually not that bad but it's not great either so unfortunately we don't have the same level of white balance control so hopefully with if you were taking photos and j peg it's because you had full control of the situation knew I'm in the right settings and the right white balance so on there's a limit to how much you can edit but for example in here I might decides he's got a little bit of a hot spot going on I might try to see if I could just lower a couple of these settings on make some changes there also I feel like I don't know this is a stock photo that I just happened upon last night when I was looking for something to open his ajay because I shoot everything in raw I feel like the lens choice here was bad on fits me but isn't her face kind of looks like it's a little bloated because they used a too short of lens I don't know that's just the way I look at it so this is something that allows me to do in so much more easily in camera that if I tried to the equipment that in photo shop I could do it but it's much it's a whole separate filter and different setting so I like the fact that I can just go right in here and try it or put this back here I can't even try to see I don't know how well it'll do in this case that because this is a stock photo it's not reading any information usually with a raw file it will say oh this was shot with a fifty millimeter lands or something and it will apply lens correction based on knowledge what the lands are is but in this case at the very least I can try and do that myself a little bit so here I would just make a couple of little adjustments and now this is an interesting capability because normally when you open a j peg in photo shop make changes and save it that's it and if you're saving the same j peg repeatedly one of the problems that j pegs have is that they are it is a loss e format meaning if you keep saving the same j peg over the top of itself multiple times you'll start to lose a bit of quality in this case I've taken a j peg force it open and camera raw and now I'm going to say this is a psd so I'm back to preserving it because it's a psd that has a camera smart object that happens to originally it started as a j p so he's on the relative where occasions where I'm starting with the j peg I still forced the issue to say let's make this happen as part of cham a raw and that means that when I'm saving this master file we're backto having a psd with a smart object in it now one thing that did happen and I apologize in advance that I can't remember I want to say it was I think it was photoshopped cc I don't think was photoshopped cia six uh just get rid of this I want this to go back to being a regular old j p this is one of my favorite things that happen in the recent history of photo shop because the ability to force a file to open in camera raw is great but the onus is on you to remember to do that right at step one because if you're in the middle of doing something in photo shop used to be no I'm kind of in trouble here but in this case I could for example I'll just do something uh had some texts on here second we can pretend that I've started to work on this I'm doing something it's not terribly creative but just for the purpose of demonstration and I done some things I'm adding some things also don'tthink I wish I could access camera raw editing at this point well as of again I believe it was photoshopped cc and apologized pretty sure that is correct if I convert this to a smart object now so I can run filters that used to be well all that it was my filters were smart will now one of the smart filters is camera so I can actually on a layer by layer basis access camera raw editing from within photo shop even by then start with the raw file that to me is huge because again for the same reason if someone was working on several layers and photo shop and all they want to do was try to in effect at the equivalent of clarity of how would you do that in photo shop or now you could just jump into camera from within photo shop as a filter so for me for especially for people who are have been sticking with csx because they're not one hundred percent convinced about creative cloud yet this is one of the most compelling reasons I think that in some of the most recent announcements with new aps and things they have a really interesting theory bility to you I use this all the time now because there are times where I'm working with files that I've already started or their multiple files I'm just creating things from scratch and think oh this would be easier to edit in camera so camera filter allows me do that so I can do whatever changes I normally would including the same kind of things where we went in and said let's adjust the distortion a little bit and click okay updates in photo shop but keeps all the other layers the way they are so once again I'm still back to the same point of even though this file is currently displaying as brunette dodge a pig because that was the original file name if I had saved it's anna promptly and say would like to call the psd file because it's already layers in there so it's not going to let me save it as a j peg unless I go save as I want to do it this way to save this as a psd that preserves that now camera filter so just like we talked about smart filters yesterday this is now a filter that aiken turn on and off and I could double click on to remind myself how I did it so you have the choice of either starting in camera raw by doing that force it open and raw right to begin with or if you already have multiple layers and then you realize away this would make better sense for me to edit in camera you can either do it on a per layer basis or if I had say five layers I could merge those not don't say merge convert those five layers into a smart object and then run the camera a filter on all of those so either way you do it the point being that we now have a different way to access camera than we did before and this could also be uhm you might have a logo on a layer by itself and realize maybe I could apply camera watches that graphic why not you could my work in some cases that we'll see if the easier than doing it in some other way in photo shop so the recurring theme here of cameras camera is simpler then a lot of things in photo shop and in some cases offers functionality that for a shop doesn't have like clarity so let's look at this example for one second that I have it here I'm going to turn off this transformation thing I did for a second and show you that one of things that some people like four as a kind of a skin retouching method let's get a little closer here is negative clarity so clarity is like it kind of does sharpening and pulls out more diva we see in this case it's not a very good thing because pulling out more texture in her face but if I reduce the clarity it actually does kind of a skin smoothing but still leaves a little bit of a texture I'm deliberately going overboard so it's really blurry overall it does a pretty good job but around the detailer is there still a bit of a problem so if I click okay here now it's like any other smart filter I've got a mask so if I invert the mask it's filled with black so now this is one of the things I love about working with smart filters is whatever if you set yourself up this way where you apply some filter whatever it is fill the mask with black then take your paintbrush and change it to white whatever filter you've applied that in effect this brush becomes in this case the paint with the camera raw filter with minus something clarity attached to it so wherever I paint in it's going to start adjusting those areas and as I often find this is going to still built too much at first you see it's also having a bit of effect on the coloring a little bit just because of the way that it's affecting the mid tones of the image a bit but I'd go in here and just make these little quick adjustments forever and for now we're going toe I can do it really quickly and not that well and once I've done that it looks again a little too much like the bad you know barbie doll plasticky face kind of thing so I double click and say well I want to make sure I could see it but that clarity is way too let's put it back to something like this and when I click okay it's gonna update if we turn it on and off you can see it's making just a little bit of a more subtle change now so that's kind of an added bonus now I could do that with a raw file with camera but I want to show you that happens on me starting with the j p file that I've already opened in photo shop you can still apply camera settings that way as well okay so just to further that point here I have a j peg file that's just a graphic was someone created in adobe illustrator and saved a copy of it as a j peg so once again I force it open and camera aw why because it just gives me different options I could look at it and say I want to change maybe I like the design but instead of being all those kind of reddish images I'd like it to be something else so I go into uh h s l gray scale and said I'd like to shift these colors a little bit to be uh maurine a certain way that seems hugh you start to see it's going to make some changes I could go in and just this way I mean it really is just another option that allows us to because it doesn't matter what the information is we're just applying these same settings and again remember that once I open it it's going to work exactly the same way we're still going to be a psd file that includes in this case a graphic it happens that was adjusted in camera and one last example of that kind of idea before we move on to some other concepts of of raw itself is every so often people run to situations where they're trying to restore an old photograph so in this case you can see it's a typically looking old photograph it's got some noise in it and it's got some the color is a little off it's got that old sea peotone kind of look and I want to make it look more like a regular photograph well I usedto always start off by let me open this in photo shop and start doing photo shop things to it but now often I'll go in to force it open and camera and just buy doing a couple of quick adjustments sometimes we can even just do a quick little white balance and exposure and contrast and already it's starting to look a little better just in that quick couple of steps now there are some things that still needs to have done there's all sorts of little specks of dust all over the place camera has a noise reduction option that's better than photoshopped so as an aside if you ever have anything where you want to reduce noise I would do it on camera because just tends to be better than photo shop but even in this case just by going into some of the noise reduction settings look at how it's already better I mean there's still some specks of dust that are more noticeable but it's already doing a better job so the fact that just in a couple of quick two second things I've already got a better start on my restoration because I don't have to do as much info so now if it's tourney into pieces you still need photo shop for that kind of stuff but in terms of little specks of dust or just needs a bit more work with anything that's more exposure in contrast so camera awe and the main reason I want to show this is too make sure we're all on the same page of camera happens to work really well with raw files but it can open anything that's raw that susan j peg or tiff and apply the same kind of settings with the equip exception of that pull down menu for white balance okay okay so the other thing that has happened recently that gives an interesting option with raw is in the world of h d r and I got a preface this by saying I'm not the world's biggest fan of hdr in fact very quickly found that the majority of h ere I saw was like yellow much you know it's a fact I had a theory that the hdr software that people use their all these sliders and be like look at that look at that and there should be a cynic you click okay should take every setting and pull it back twenty five percent because most things is just I felt like just a little too much it was like that whole angry sky harry potter ish look where just one didn't look realistic anymore to me the whole principle of hdr used to be when it was first introduced was to get a full range full dynamic range of your photograph and unfortunately some of the software allowed you to move sliders in a way they were like you but now I can push things into over the top cartoony kind of thing so I personally have typically straightaway from hdr or if I did use that I would try toe usa's much caution as possible with moving sliders so here's where slight change and this is the last I would say this is where it starts to get challenging because it's not eventually a feature that will be on that list of when they change things I would say this is probably a photo shop see sea change so in braids I have three different exposures that I took now this was handheld so was I tried to keep my camera still on do a multi burst thing as quickly as I could so in an ideal situation we'd have a tripod etcetera etcetera but now within bridge I select those three and I choose uh merged two hdr pro so it takes a couple of moments to go through and start to create a multilayer file and then it's going eventually open our little hdr interface window looks like this and normally you would see something that looks like this with all these sliders and here's the danger zone kid go who ej chlo what is that too and they start moving sliders and all of a sudden it just looks to me unless you're going for the over the top you know hyper realistic fantasy strange thing which I personally don't like that used to be the problem so one of the changes by the way I always tend to choose this little option called removed ghost which is wouldn't be a cz much for an indoor thing it's more like if you're outside and there's a slight breeze of the leaves might be moving slightly even between your exposures as a habit I just put it on anyway just because even if I moved slightly as juana make sure but the change that was made which I love because I this part I don't I'm not happy that I don't understand what a lot of these do so I'm always worried that a certain point all move a slider and go at that's way too much so if you change you nothing else the same different you start launch this whole thing automatically but up on the top you have this set to thirty two bit then the only thing that lets you do and it says right here complete toning and adobe camera so now you finish it in raw I don't move any sliders in here you just let the hdr software combined them into one exposure but that's got all this information down the bottom and the button that you can hardly see for some reason tone in a cr it's now going to do all this stuff and create a smart object that it opens in camera so now I have all this information but now as I start moving sliders and saying let's lighten up the blacks and add more clarity so I'm doing the typical camera things I'm comfortable with but it's based on a blended exposure that it did for me instead of me having to do like I did earlier to say make one exposure of the sky make another spoke for the building and masked um this is still hdr but is using camera raw as your final step in hd are not the the hdr software where there's that danger of pushing sliders into a place where you something lee that's not what I wanted so essentially by shooting the three different exposures you've taken the dynamic range of a single photograph and brought it out something like this so your highlights you know when we do our highlights like bring back our highlights you're able to go way further saying exactly big and because you're now you can do most cameras could do either a three bracket exposure or even five so then you're going quite a range from really under exposed for the certain areas especially in this case where like the room the light coming in for the window is still pretty bright so it want them or exposures we have you'd have at least one where that window is going to be much darker and that's going to be part of the blending that happens and then the sliders are taking advantage of all that so this is something that for me is just it's change it's actually made me want to go in when I was in a building that well we're gonna use excuse that the sign was in a different language we realized later probably said no trespassing but we didn't know that at the time normally I wouldn't have had much interest in going into a room like this because of my some people like who I could hdr that and I've never thought of hdr is a verb it was more a solution but some people go looking for a place in their mind they're like that would make a great hdr photo now I'm back on that train line of thinking that because of this option of doing the final piece of it in camera so when I click okay again same idea it's still seeing it's a smart filter with the camera ross smart filter on it so even though I access this aiken still double click and see hears that information and there the original I wouldn't want to edit this because that's just the combination before toning I would though double click to go into camera and he could at this point make another copy to still work on the window and I think we can still continue to take it up another level but for people like me that we're kind of not terribly happy with what they were seeing out of the world of hdr I like this because and I don't want to turn off anyone who's a big fan of hdr but I always felt that hdr was originally just a solution to a problem not an art form but it kind of became that and I've seen some that I think you're wonderful but there's a lot of others that I'm like a little much you know and I'm not saying we all have to do like hyper realistic everything looking the way but if you're just trying to sanders trying pull detail out of area that I couldn't otherwise get with one exposure this hdr method is just a nice way of doing it okay so let's go back here and get something open in camera ross we could talk about some other situations that you might run into and how we can make life a little simpler people who watch me teach know that I'm a big fan of presets anywhere where there's a word preset on like yes because preset to me equals timesaver so in this particular case I've got we're going to pretend I don't happen here in bridge but what is going to imagine for a moment that once again I had ah whole bunch of images that were taken under this same situation so eventually once I start finding the combination that I really like I realize that I have several other photos like this that I want apply to now as I showed you before I could if I want to write away use that command called previous conversion but if I wanted to work on this one and then tomorrow work on some other ones that previous conversion thing you wouldn't help me anymore because it's too late so the other option is to make adjustments the way you want and then come over here and make a preset and the camera when you make a preset it says what would you like to include in that and you can make it as much or as little as you want so for example in this case all settings is I want to make it look just like this but look at how all the levels of detail in here you could make a preset for example that was on ly white balance so if you took a whole bunch of photos and realized the only problem with ease is they're in the wrong white balance if I went through and saved different white balance settings and just called them you know flash cloudy whatever that man I can apply those very quickly without having to do any other work in this case I'm going toe make one that's something and click okay and now it's on my list of presets that means when I open any photograph in the camera raw I can go through and click on a preset you can see some of them don't work at all but here's an example of a pre set that I was playing around one time that apparently has some other things is kind of interesting effect actually includes a vignette to make the outer edges kind of disappear so these air hole that's a nice one obviously some of these had very specific purposes but let's go back here and do this just so we can see once you have pre sets you can not only use thumb from within camera raw itself you can also use them in bridge so if I had twenty seven copies of this photo different angles that I wantto all adjust the same way I would select all of them and right click and in this case instead of choosing previous conversion I would pick the precept that I just saved announced on apply those settings to all the selected raw files so that's another way to speed things up if your want to make a global adjustment again the key thing is here is global adjustment to at first but then each individual image I console go into double click it's okay for this one I need to tweet this result a little bit okay so let's go back and look at a couple of other things here so there's that type of preset there's some other ways we can speed things up in working in raw that aren't necessarily obvious for example up here in the top we have this history graham and a lot of people use it simply for one thing and that's as you're adjusting you want to make sure you don't either blow out the highlights completely or muck up the shadow so much there's no detail so these indicators if I turned them on you can see right away there's that little blue overlay that means there's no detail in that shadow area the more I darkened things will seem more of that and this is of course up to you you might be going for a particular look where you don't care about that but that's why these warnings wrong here as I move the exposure up you'll see in a certain point all the red there in the sky is saying that's being blown out so much there's no detail whatsoever so that's for most people that's their initial impression of what the history graham does but there is another interesting use for it which is actually pretty interesting and that is I don't know how well you can see this but can you see as I hover over the far left and saying blacks and then shadows and then exposure highlights whites that means I can actually click right on that area and as I drag it it's actually adjusting the image by me pulling on that history graham what is doing is telling me oh I need to pull the shadows up plus seventy seven to do that but you can go to any part of it and say I want teo make the highlights a little more and take this exposure up a bit so for especially for someone who's uncertain which slider should I be using to affect this if you click on the history graham and say I want to take the blacks and adjust them and as you look down you'll see oh the one moving hardly enough is called blacks in which kind of makes sense but this is a nice way to just make kind of an adjustment overall without having to worry about you and I in the right spot the other option which is really nice is you khun click right on the image itself and say this area here I want you to be brighter or darker so that's on image controls and give you another ability to adjust I don't personally use that all that often but for some situations it's just quicker than trying to figure out okay which one of these sliders is going to affect the part that I want to effect as I mentioned we also do have the adjustment brush I personally don't use it all that much but if you do it's worth noting that you can also create presets for local corrections so if you know that for a series of photographs you used the adjustment brush to make the grass a little greener than you could save a preset for the adjustment brush called greener or something so you knew we don't have to go in and click on the brush and then move all the settings you could just have that as a preset the other kind of pre set which is kind of interesting normally when I open a raw file at first it's going to be the default size which is depending on the the size of your camera capture but when I'm especially when I'm teaching I don't want to open files that are twelve megapixels and four thousand pixels wide so I tend to go in and say let's resize the long side to some number and that frankly I used to always just go in and do this and type and saying I make it two thousand pixels wide flip side two hundred ninety six two thousand and that's just for the purpose for me I don't want to have a huge file it takes forever to load I'm working on an actual photo I would not do that of course but you could because re sizing is with another element of a raw file that could be changed but the main point of this is so I'm creating something and I know that I'm doing this for a lab that says oh make sure you do it in rgb and we also want to sharpen it for glossy paper just a standard amount all whatever you want to put in here then you can come to this preset and choose a new new work blow preset so I'm going to call this s r g b two thousand pixels sharp bend or whatever I like when I click okay this little lincoln's thing down the bottom changes to that setting but if you did that and suddenly realize okay winning man I'm that's not what I want for this image does I'm going to do it for some other purpose if you control or right click down here it shows you whatever presets you've previously saved so now I can change it back to a different one and it will make sure that when find now hit open object will open with all those settings applied so camera raw itself has a lot of areas where you can create presets not just the overall setting you can create a preset again using this function that either when you hit the preset save everything or just one or two functions whatever you want you can create presets for the workflow and you concur presets for global adjustments we also can go in here camera profile is a function which one of the challenges people face when they first start shooting and raw is they take a photograph they look at the back of their camera to go looks great then they open the raw file to go why doesn't look the same that's because the camera is displaying using something inside the camera to apply some settings and apply a jpeg which often looks a little more saturated and so on whereas the raw file truly is without any adjusting to it so some people like to say well I really wanted to look closer to the back of my camera so these color these camera profiles are things like camera portrait or there's one for landscape and it automatically apply settings which will try to mimic maur what the cameras capturing some people just like these by nature to say I's a starting point I prefer this camera profile than some other one so that's a personal choice it's set to adobe standard which is fairly minimal adjustments but you can again go in and make whatever changes you want if you decide that the more you play with these settings that every time you open a photo shop you may open a raw file into camera you want this camera profile and you'd also like just because you know with your camera it often needs this little push of exposure and I say this with great caution because keep in mind what we're doing here if you go into this pop up menu you can choose save new camera defaults that means every time from now on when I open a raw file it will automatically use that camera profile and adjust the slight settings I would be somewhat hasn't attempt do anything to major because of course is goingto I mean that every photo you take there's a slight difference between you know whether you want to use setting a year setting be so but just so you're aware this is an option the other thing I would say and this is a kind of a global statement about photo shop and preferences and camera on preferences is that there's nothing wrong with changing the camera defaults for now meaning for the next two hours I'm working on some images where I know I'm gonna always make these adjustments so I'll change my camera defaults once I finished that project I will revert them back to standard so you just go back to the same menu and choose reset camera defaults so the good news is it doesn't have to be permanent some people I think when they think of things like preferences they think well once I change those I'm outta luck that's my purpose from now on and when I'm working with preferences in any of my software products if it helps me I'll change a preference for the next twenty minutes and then change it back if that eliminates me having all every time I open a photo I'm changing the setting are moving a slider I'll change my default settings for now and then once I finished that project and this is the only tough part remembering like I forgot yesterday with the script events manager turned back off again is remembering to reset it back the way that you want okay so there's lots of ways we can take advantage of that how we doing with the rev any questions so far good dave always got questions over here so one question from bo from our our questions doc and wanted just actually remind folks out there that you can vote for questions as well there's a little blue arrow right by each question as you scroll down so you can vote for your favorite questions and we we definitely like tio vote asked the ones that are most popular so this is from j h bo in camera what is the difference between the button done and save image ok good question so when we're adjusting an image done just means I'm finished adjusting for now and that just means the raw file up updates to say these are now your current settings if you felt like you are completely finished and you're like I'm ready to send this out to my lab for printing saved means you can now save a jpeg directly out of this image with its current settings I honestly can't say that I've ever done that because I always feel compelled to at least taking the photo shop and do just a quick look and check although if you one hundred percent certain that all the work you've done in camera was exactly the way you want it to be then that's what that save image does what's gonna save and say what would you like to save it as in terms of file format j picked if photoshopped personally I'm not sure why you would ever save his photo shop because I would just open in photo shop but for me the main part would be if I'm kind of percent sure that this is just ready to go you can save it as j it's important to remember though that I wish in fact it said save a copy or something because you can't save over the top of a raw foul thing some people worried if I make a mistake what if I make this permanent it's not possible raw files you can't technically save them you just leave whatever settings when you hit open or done it says for now I will keep displaying those adjustments until you tell me otherwise so the save button is really to say save a copy with the current settings in some other file format and the question from sam cocks do you you said everything in camera as non destructive do you mean the order in which you make the adjustments in camera doesn't matter correct I mean it's still cumulative so if you move exposure and then do something else but the nice part is is we saw if I do spot healing in camera raw and then decide to make a further exposure adjustment I khun do that whereas in photos ofus who saw I can't so from that respect it's less important and that is a nice aspect to it I still personally tend to try to follow a fairly specific hit the exposure first and then you know a serious but it is it's almost like having completely non linear undo because you can go I've got halfway through and now I realize I need to adjust this one setting it's not like you're goingto be painted into a corner not be able to do it