Lesson Info
3. Adobe Camera Raw
Lessons
Lesson Info
Adobe Camera Raw
Let's take a look at what has changed recently in Adobe Camera Raw. There's actually quite a huge change when it comes to raw, and that has to do with the new masking capabilities. I'm only gonna give you a brief look at them though, because I have a full class dedicated just to that topic, but there are a couple other things to take a look at. So let's dive in and see what's changed. Here I am in Adobe Camera Raw. And the first thing you could do in Camera Raw, is over here on the right side, where you have all your various sections for development, well if you were to right click on any one of these, there's a choice called "edit panels to show." And that's so that if you never use one of these sections, let's say you absolutely never use calibration. You've never touched it. Well now you can turn it off with this little check box. And when I click, okay, that is gonna disappear, but there's something that's not all that discover in here. And that is, you can change the order of thes...
e. Let's say that in here, maybe you don't use curves that much. And so you wanna put it down near the bottom of the list. Well, if you're gonna click on its name and drag, you cannot change the order that way. But if you click on it, you can use the arrow keys, use the down arrow key, and now I could move curves way down there if I don't use it all that often. Click okay, and now you can see over here, the order has changed, where curves is near the bottom, and calibration is not even found. Then if we head over to the right side where we have this column of icons, this icon that has two circles overlapping, is how you get to your presets. And I have a bunch of presets that I've created myself, but if I scroll down, there's a section in here that Adobe has created, and they've added a bunch of extra presets in here, that they didn't have before, that they call premium presets. And they've been expanding this list over time. So you can go to any one of these, and these are much more like commercial presets that you might purchase. Just hover over each one, and if you like it's look, then click on it, and you'll apply it to your image. But we have 70 new of those added to the ones that were already there, but I'm gonna click done for now. And let's go find another picture, and let's explore masking in Adobe Camera Raw. Because that's the largest new feature that they've added in recent time. On the right side of my screen, you see that column of icons. And you used to have an icon that looked like a brush, and another icon that looked like a gradient and other things, those have all been replaced with a single icon. And now we have some new choices. If you look in here after clicking on this, you need to tell it what kind of mask you want. In the past, you could do a brush, a linear, or a radial, but now we can also do select subject, and select sky. So let's see how that works. I'll choose select subject. And when I do, we get this little panel that shows up, and it gives me a red overlay over the area it's isolated. Then, if I go to the sliders that are over here on the side, I could do something like bring my whites down, maybe add contrast or lower contrast, whatever I think would be best for my sky. And it's only affecting that area. Well if we look up here in this new panel, if I hover over this, this little thumbnail, that's when you see that overlay, or I could turn on this check box to make the overlay show up as well. You can control the color of the overlay by clicking this little circle where you get a color picker, you can change it to any color you want. Then you can also click on these three little dots. In there, you can choose what kind of overlay you get if you had that check box turned on. Right now we have a color overlay. We could have color on top of a black and white picture though. Sometimes that makes it easier to tell if it's extending into the rest of the image. Then I can choose image, on black and white. And therefore, the area that's masked is in full color. The rest of the image is black and white, or we have image on black, and image on white, and also white on black. That looks like layer mask. Also, this choice here, called, Automatically Toggle Overlay, is something that I think is turned on by default, but what it does, is makes it so that red overlay will be there to start with, but the moment you move one of the adjustment sliders, it should go away. And if you wanna see it again, either hover over the mask thumbnail, or turn on that check box. Once you've worked on one area, if you'd like to switch to another, click on the plus sign up here, and tell it what kind of mask you want. And this time, let's see if it can select the subject of this photograph. We don't really have any input on that. Sometimes it picks the subject, and sometimes it doesn't. In this case, I think it did a pretty amazing job choosing my wife. And that's my wife, Karen right there. And so what I'm gonna do with her selected, is I think I might take the contrast slider and lower it a little bit, and I might wanna see a little bit more detail in the shadows, so I'll bring up the shadows so you can see that she's wearing, I think, is that a pair of jeans? I can't tell. And also I might do what's called "negative clarity." Negative clarity can clear, can clean up skin a little bit. We have all sorts of other kinds of masks we can create. For instance, I could choose color range. And with that, I can move my mouse on top of the picture. And here I have a green car, I'll click and drag across it like this, to give it a general idea of the range of colors that are found within it. I see the red overlay. Looks like it did an okay job of changing that, or selecting it. Then down here, I have a choice called, "hue." And I'm gonna turn off the checkbox called "hues fine adjustment," 'cause I wanna make radical ones. And let's see. Now I can change the color of that card anything that I'd like. And so that I'm not stuck with the original color at all, and I might also make it a little bit less colorful. Now when you're using these masks, you're not stuck just choosing one choice. Let's say that I told it to work on one area, and that it selected too much. Well, what I could do is go back to one of my other masks. Let's say for instance, I would like to do something maybe just to my wife's hair. Well, what I could do, is tell it up here, to say, "select subject." 'Cause it did a pretty good job of that. Then I can tell it right here to either add to or subtract from it. So I'm gonna tell it to subtract using a brush. And I'll use this brush, I just might get it to be a bit smaller, and I'm gonna paint over this bottom area, so I get this to be limited to only where my wife's hair is. And maybe for her hair, I wanna see the detail. So I'm gonna bring the shadow slider up, so you can really see what's in there. And maybe even I change the color temperature a little bit to make a little bit warmer or cooler, but you can combine as many of these options together as you'd like, by choosing add or subtract, and then using any one of these choices. You also have one other choice that's not shown here, and that is, intersect. To do that, go to the main mask icon, go to the right, and you're gonna find three dots. If you click on 'em, there's a choice called intersect with. And that means, let's crop the current mask so it only appears where I brush, or where the sky is, or anything like that. So that's one option that you just don't find down below. Anyway, the new masking can do so much, and we should really spend multiple hours talking about it. And we have a whole separate session about just that, in a separate Creative Live course. So for now, I'm gonna call that quits, so we can get on to the rest of Photoshop. There's one important new detail about that new masking. And that is, when you work on a raw file that is not in DNG format, instead, it's in the format that came from your camera, those masks can't be saved in the normal way that it would save the adjustments. If you're used to working with raw files, you're probably used to getting what's known as sidecar files. They have the same name as your raw file, but they end with the letters .XMP. Well, now there's a new sidecar file that ends with .ACR. In that file, if you ever see it, contains the masks that you created. And what that means, is if you're ever moving a raw file from one folder to another, and you notice an XMP file, notice that has your camera raw adjustments built into it. Then if you see another one with .ACR, that has the masks. So move all those files together so you don't lose anything.
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Ratings and Reviews
Jennifer Basford
Holy cow! I hope you already know everything about these programs before you start this class, and are ready to be off to the races! I watched the first part twice and still didn't quite catch everything. Ben slowed down a bit afterward and was fairly easy to follow throughout the rest. I appreciated the updates, but would like to be able to take a few notes next time.