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Lesson Info

Camera Raw to Photoshop: Highlight and Shadow Recovery

then we're gonna want to go in, and we're going to want to do some color adjusting and working with your photos Gonna jump back to bridge here because these photos were all shot and this was an older camera. So they all came up in J Peg format. But we also have the ability to go in and adjust in camera raw. So if you have raw files, raw files will open up in camera raw before they open up in photo shop. And with that, you'll have to go into the camera raw interface in order to work on the image before you actually bring it in, cause a camera raw file isn't a pixel based image yet. So if you've ever opened this and you click on an image here and you open a file up, it opens up in camera raw. And we have all of this content that we can do in camera raw, which allows us to adjust it before we actually get into photo shop. This is confusing to some people, but I want to show you some of the advantages that we have with camera raw and how we can get back to this rather than just jumping rig...

ht into photo shop and doing some very basic adjustments here. So simple things with going in and using camera raw images or images that you can adjust in camera raw. I want to show you some of the really great things that weaken dio in the camera raw that we can't do very easily in a photo shop. And one of them is this. I've got this picture of all these antiques sitting out, and I could simply open this up in Photoshop and do my levels, my curves, my contrast, my vibrance and do color adjustment there. But I'm gonna open this up in camera raw because this is going to give me a couple advantages with adjusting. So I'm gonna open this up in camera raw and one of the things that I noticed right off the bat, other than my finger being slightly over the lens right there, okay, is that I've got this is a white vehicle. So I've got a lot of highlights which went ahead and really saturated the dark areas. So in camera raw, there's a couple things in here that I love. Camera raw for specifically for this highlight and shadow recovery. And there's the shadows or too dark. So going into photo shop, it's a little bit difficult for me to lighten the shadows and still keep the content in there. So when I opened us up in camera raw, I can go into my shadows and I can actually open up my shadows here to do detail recovery in the shadows, which is great. So this actually allows me to open up the shadows in here. And I can knock down the highlights, too, so that it's not There's going to be is blown out so I could do highlight and shadow recovery here in camera raw, Great thing to Dio. I can also go and work with the exposure I can also adjust. The contrast is, well, I've got clarity and vibrance in here which can really bring my image together very nicely before even get into Photoshopped. A lot of people say, Well, why would I need photo shop? Well, we can take this to the next level and photo shop, but just adjusting something in camera raw is fantastic. Since your light room users, when I do this, I have the done button, and I also have open image, and it's like, Why would I have both of these? Well, here's what happens your light room user and you're very used to going in and doing adjustments and seeing it on screen and just going back and visiting them. Well, if I choose open image, this will then bring it into Photoshopped for me that I could further manipulate and clean up and do whatever I say. I want to. If I click done, it's just going to go back into bridge here and it's going to show me my newly adjusted image. How do I know an image has actually been adjusted in camera raw? Well, in light room. You know, you can see all of your adjustments in their and your images, and you can tell and you can compare well when you go into bridge, The one telltale sign that something has been adjusted in camera raw is this little icon right here. This little circle with these two sliders that tells you that that image has been adjusted in camera raw. It's like, Oh, okay, so what I'm seeing here may not be the original image So if I right click and I opened, this happened camera raw. I see that those were my adjustments and I see that adjustments have been made. Well, this is really handy because I can always go back at any time in the stage. Even when I open this up in photo shop and make adjustments, I can always go back in here and adjust in camera raw. Always. But how do I actually know Bridge actually shows me that little icon. So I know this has been adjusted in camera raw. So if I open this up and I do my adjustments here and I open the image now, what's going to take my processed image in camera raw and allow me to work with this file in Photoshop? Those camera raw settings still apply to this image, and then I can go further from here. So I was able to do some shadow and highlight recovery in here, something I can't do very easily. And Photoshopped. So there was a distinct advantage right there of using this. And then if I'd like to go in and I would like to adjust this further in photo shop, not a problem now because light room is going to do everything non destructively. I want to make sure that all of my edits that I do to this from my color correction standpoint are going to keep it nondestructive. So all of my adjustments are going to be done on a separate layer, something that I can always go back to and adjust something that I can simply at it. Light room. We don't really have layers per se, but we've got our ability to turn on and turn off and see our adjustments. This is the equivalent in photo shop layer adjustments, smart filters, things like that. So if I'd like to go in and adjust this image further, non destructively, I could go under my image menu, and I have all of my adjustments here. This is going to adjust it directly on the image, and once I save enclosed the file, I will have no recourse to change any of these. So while this is fine to go ahead and do, it's also destructive, and I like the non destructive capabilities that light room has, and I'd like to continue those in photo shop. So if I go to my layers panel when I click on the little Half Moon, which is my color adjustment. These are all my color adjustment layers. These are the things that I can go in and edit in any time dial it up, dial it back and have access to these, no matter what. So I'm gonna do just a very basic levels adjustment on my image. So when you click on the half moon, click on Levels and it's going to bring up my properties panel here. And here's my adjustment layer. I can go in and based on my hissed a gram that I see here I'm gonna slide my shadow slider in to where the hissed a gram begins the highlight slider here to get a bit more contrast. See how that looks. If I'd like to adjust the specific color range, I can go on a just my reds, my greens, my blues in the image here so that I could go ahead and make more green or I could go ahead and take some of the green out. And so what now? This is one adjustment, just like we would see in light room if I would like to turn this on or turn this off. I'm going to my layers panel, poke in the eye and I can see the adjustment that I just did Turn it on, Turn it off If I would like to go in and dialled the adjustment back just a little bit, this is a layer which I can adjust the opacity of so that I can cut back the amount of adjustment that I did. I don't want to go in and change the adjustment. I would just like to basically dial it in. And by the way, a really cool feature and photo shop, if you didn't know is you don't have to click on the drop down and slide this back and forth. Just click on the word and you get a little finger scrubby. Okay, Little finger scrubby allows you to drag back and forth on the word on. It's going to adjust what you're doing. So if I've gone in and I've done a color adjustment and they would like to just dial it back a little bit, just don't want it as intense. I can adjust back. The intensity of that color adjustment works great pretty simple. Not a problem at all. Now this file, I've done a little bit of color adjusting to it. I'd like to take it just a little bit further in here so I could get just some of this area not so dark. I mean, the original image had a completely dark, so I couldn't see anything. But I'd like to go in and just grab this area and just lighten it up just a little bit more. So one of the things I'm gonna do is I'm gonna isolate this area so that I have the ability to go in and just do that area. So I just want to put a quick selection around this so that I'm not doing the overall image, simple selection tools that we have our basic selection tools, the different lasso tools that allows us to go in and just simply isolated area really quick. And I just want to isolate this green grass area. I'm gonna use my lasso tool, and I'm just gonna do a really quick kind of a sloppy selection right around here. Not gonna be super picky about it, because I'm gonna show you what we're gonna dio once I have my area selected, I just want to see how this is going to look because I just want to kind of target this area just so nothing else gets affected to see how this is actually going to work, I put a selection around my object or the area that I want to have, and I'm gonna make sure I click back on my image here. So this selection is based on my image going to go into the select and mask feature, which is going to allow me to see how this selection is actually going to look. And I'm gonna set my opacity right here so we can see just the area that it's being affected. And look at this is painting if you're gonna paint your room, You know, if you have nice, sharp edges, that's what you want. But I don't want sharp edges for my adjustment. I wanna have is just kind of a soft so that blends in very nicely. So there's my selection, and it's like, Wow, that's gonna look really horrible. I'm gonna feather this out to get a very soft edge around my area so that it's not going to give me a really hard edge, so I'm feathering it, and I use the selected mask mode so I can see exactly what this soft selection is going to give me. I was kind of hard to see. Let me cut back capacity a little bit here. I can actually show this with an overlay as well. So you can see that right there when I do my color adjustment, it's not gonna be super hard edge which wouldn't look very good. So I can kind of give a general area and there is my selection right there. And now I could go in and I could do an adjustment just on this area. Nice and simple, Very basic stuff here. I just want to lighten that up a little bit. So with my selection active, I'm going to go back in here and do just a very basic levels here to open this up a little bit. I can go in and I can make this a little bit lighter just by taking my highlight slider and lightning that up a little bit and it on Lee effects that area. Very simple concept. Whatever's inside this election is what we can affect. What's outside this election gets left behind. So very simply, I was able to go in and he was able to take my original image, work with it in camera raw a little bit and then come back in and give a bit of contrast. Isolate that area a little bit there. And if you're familiar with masks, this is what was created here. When I have a selection and I do a layer adjustment, it will automatically a mask out the area and we'll keep it nice and simple. Okay, if you want to know about masks, we got lots of videos. But just a quick overview black conceals light reveals what's ever inside this election is what's going to be affected whatsoever. Outside this election gets left behind. Now all of these adjustments air done separately. So, just like in light room, I can go back and dialling every single adjustment mawr or less, instead of just doing everything overall completely non destructive. None of this stuff has affected the original image. I can turn off any of my adjustments in here and see exactly what I'm left with right there so that works out really nicely for me. But what do I do with this file? How do we end up saving this file? So I have all this content and everything. Well, in light room, you take everything that you're done with and you just see a preview of it. When you're ready to use that file, you're then going to export it to a file, and it's going to bake in everything that you've done. So with this, I would like the ability to go back and edit this file later. So I do have my original camera raw image. But my camera raw image doesn't take anything into account that I've done here in Photoshop. So everything I've done here, I want to get back to maybe tomorrow or a week from now. So in order to save this pretty simple file, Mexican Dua say that as here and any time that I have layers in a file, it will automatically default to save it as a layered Photoshopped file. PSD is Photoshopped document. I want to save this for future use so I can edit, change, do whatever I want to do. I have full editing capabilities so layered Photoshopped file is what I'm going to get is going to save. It is layers, and then I click save if it any point I want to go back into this file. I can open up next week and I can go in. And if I would like to make further adjustments in here just like I wouldn't the develop module, I can go back to any one of my sections of the development. And I could just go back into whatever section I'm using levels Kurt Hue, saturation, brightness, whatever, and then be able to go in, change them in photo shop. If I want to get back into here going to go to my Layers panel, double click on any one of my adjustment icons, it's gonna call up, and I'm going to see the exact adjustments that I've had, just like we have in light room, and I can adjust it one way or another without any issues whatsoever. If I would like to take this file and I would like to have some other file other than a photo shop file, namely, save it is a J peg so we can use it on the Web or something like that. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go into the file menu and choose Save as and Aiken send, Then save this as a J peg file. This won't let me save it over the original file simply because this is a PSD file. If I save it as a J. Paige here, J pigs can't have these layers. So this is the reason why I can't just go in and save the file and expect to come back to it later. When I say va Jay Peg, it's always going to save it as a copy with no layers, which means all of these editing capabilities go away when I say it is a J. Peg. I have to have my original file as a layered Photoshopped file in order to be able to get back to any of my edits. So I have to files my original edit herbal file and then my final product. Just like we have a light room. We have all of our adjustments. We save that as whatever we want. We can always go back to our original adjustments. So when I save this file, I'm able to say This is a J peg as a copy. No layers, I click save and I'm going Teoh don't want to save over my original original J peg. I'm going to save it. This and then I want to save it with the best quality possible here. I can always say about his worst quality later that I can save my file and I have my J peg. So my J pigs There on my hard drive there is my original Photoshopped file. A couple things that I've seen people do they need to save. This is a J peg, and they know that J pegs can't have layers, so they'll go into their layers panel and they'll flatten their image. Okay, Don't do this, folks. Okay? They say, Oh, but a J peg needs to be flattened. When you save it as a J peg, it will automatically flatten the file. The reason why I recommend against going in and flattening this file is because people like, Well, no, I need to save it is a J peg. It's got to be flat first. The problem is, is that you forget and you do this and then you go someplace and you come back and you close out your file and you're click. Safe, safe, safe, safe, safe. This is still a Photoshopped file, but because you flattened it, you've lost all of your adjustments. Okay? So just out of safety, don't ever flatten your file because I have people so many times people say, Oh, no, I'll remember until of course, you don't save it is a Photoshopped file. Do a save as if you want to save it Is any other type of file. It'll automatically flatten it on. That way, Don't do it manually unless you really are that lucky.