More Camera Raw Editing Examples


Hopefully, you now understand that your basic strategy when using Camera Raw is to use the image data that you've collected to maximum advantage. Whenever possible, this means avoiding brightening shadow details. Here are a few more editing examples.

Goal tending

The image shown in Figure 6.31 is a fairly straightforward daylight shot. As you can see from its histogram, it's a reasonably well-exposed image. It's a little short on contrastit would ideally be nicer to have more data across the histogram rangebut there's no clipping. There's also a little too much image, so the first step will be to crop it.

Figure 6.31. Before any editing begins, this image needs to be cropped.


Because this image has no blatant exposure troubles, one of the trickiest things about editing it is figuring out what, if anything, needs to be done. The white balance looks fine, so we don't need to worry about temperature or tint. We don't need to fix any highlight or clipping problems. The histogram is weighted a little to the right, which is nice; we can push data down into the shadows if we need to, but the shadow areasthe dark areas beneath the treesare already okay. In the end, what might make this image a little more compelling is to play up the contrast between the blackness of the blacktop and the white of the basketball backboards.

We could move the Shadow slider to darken the image, but as explained before, the Shadow tool doesn't allow really fine adjustments. Instead, since we want to accentuate the difference between some strong black and white elements, we'll use a Contrast adjustment (Figure 6.32).

Figure 6.32. We want to emphasize the contrast between the black of the playground and the white of the basketball goals, so we begin with a Contrast adjustment to increase the contrast in the image.


Since we've made no other adjustments to this image, we get a very nice, even contrast change. However, as we move the slider to the right, we not only increase the contrast of the black ground and white goalposts, but we also increase all of the contrast in the image. Because this photo was shot in bright daylight, the contrast can easily become a little harsh, so we'll stop the Contrast adjustment at +60, which punches up the image nicely.

Nevertheless, we want the ground darker, so let's turn to the Curve tab. We hold down the Ctrl (Windows) or Command (Mac) key and click the blacktop in the image to place a control point on the curve and then drag that point downward to darken the blacktop. However, because we don't want to darken any more black tones than we have to, we'll reshape the curve a little bit to try to constrain the darkening to just the blacktop's tonal range (Figure 6.33).

Figure 6.33. A curve adjustment lets us darken only the blacktop tones.


Note the histogram that's displayed behind the curve. The largest concentration of pixels is the huge tower of data that sits right behind the point where we made our curves adjustments. The blacktop is the dominant visual element in the scene-a huge collection of pixelsso it makes sense that it leaves a noticeable signature in the histogram. We could easily have chosen where to make our curves adjustments simply by following this part of the histogram.

This gets us the contrast that we want, but before leaving the Curve tab, let's try darkening the sky a little bit. A simple Ctrl-click (Windows) or Command-click (Mac) on the sky gives us a relevant control point on the curve. By moving the point downward slightly, we darken the sky and create an S-shape in the upper tones of the curve. This provides a nice extra contrast boost in the midtones and highlights of the image (Figure 6.34).

Figure 6.34. Further refinement of the curve lets us darken the sky and add a tiny bit of contrast to the midtones of the buildings.


Although the image looks better this way, it's still a very busy picture. It has a lot of visual elements and a lot of contrast. With a quick return to the Adjust tab, we can dial the Saturation slider down to 30. This gives the image a much calmer, almost hand-tinted look. A quick zoom in to 200% shows no noise and a tiny bit of red fringing on the extreme left side of the image. We can easily dial this out with the Fix Red/Cyan Fringe slider (on the Lens tab). Next, click Open to open the image in Photoshop; apply an Unsharp Mask filter to sharpen, and the image is complete (Figure 6.35).

Figure 6.35. For the final image, a little desaturating in Camera Raw tones down the colors a bit.


Late-night self-portrait

Figure 6.36 is a 30-second exposure shot late at night. The bright light in the sky is the nearly full moon, and the long exposure enabled the camera to capture enough light to render quite a bit of detail in the scene (in Chapter 7 you'll learn more about shooting at night, a photographic situation that is greatly aided by the raw format). Obviously, under these conditions, exposure options are a little limited, and this extremely underexposed image was the best that I could muster. Fortunately, Camera Raw makes it possible to produce a very usable image.

Figure 6.36. This 30-second exposure was shot late at night under a nearly full moon. Camera Raw will let us pull detail out of the foreground.


The histogram indicates some clipped highlights, but a quick look at the Highlight clipping display shows that the clipped areas are simply the bright disk of the overexposed moon, as well as the streaks created by the flashlight that I used to "paint" myself with light (Figure 6.37). There's not really any meaningful information to recover from these areas so we won't worry about trying any highlight recovery. Besides, the image is dark enough already, and lowering the Exposure slider to recover highlights will only darken things more.

Figure 6.37. Camera Raw's clipping display shows that the only clipped highlights are in the fully blown disk of the moon, so the image doesn't need any highlight recovery.


However, if we make a positive adjustment to the Exposure slider, we'll clip the highlights further, which will mean losing detail in the clouds around the moon and in the glows around the flashlight. So our initial brightness adjustments will need to come from the Brightness slider (Figure 6.38).

Figure 6.38. To protect the sky, we perform initial brightening using the Brightness slider.


Unfortunately, even the Brightness slider adds some highlight clipping, so we don't want to push it too far. Instead, we'll get the rest of our brightening by using the curves tool to apply some more refined corrections. By default, Camera Raw applies a Medium Contrast Tone curve, so this will be the starting point for our curve edits.

The area that needs the most brightening is the road and vegetationbasically, everything on the ground but me. If we hold down the Ctrl (Windows) or Command (Mac) key and roll over my image, we can see that those tones are all in the lowest quarter tones of the imagethat is, they all fall within the box in the lower-left corner of the curve. Because of the default Tone curve, this area is being darkened, so we'll begin by reshaping the upper part of the lowest quarter tone to make it a little brighter.

The problem, of course, is that we're talking about the part of the image with the least data! Since we're dealing with the darkest tones in the image, that means that we're working with the area that has the least information in it. Consequently, we're not going to be able to brighten this part of the image very much.

Since we can't get it outright bright, let's try to make it more contrasty. As you've already seen, an S-curve applied to an image increases contrast, so we'll build a slight S shape into the lower quarter tone of the curve. Finally, to improve the contrast in the sky, we'll darken the midtones and brighten the highlight a tiny bit. This will cost us a tiny bit of detail around the moon, but that's okay (Figure 6.39).

Figure 6.39. Curves lets us brighten the foreground, as well as apply a little bit of localized contrast. This curve also improves contrast in the sky.


Finally, let's zoom in to check for chromatic aberration and noise. There doesn't appear to be any chromatic aberration, and the noise that does exist is nothing that we wouldn't expect from a long-exposure, low-light image. Since this image is already fairly stylized, the extra texture that the noise provides is fine, and eliminating noise from this image is only going to soften details further, so we'll leave the noise alone.




Getting Started with Camera Raw(c) How to make better pictures using Photoshop and Photoshop Elements
Getting Started with Camera Raw: How to make better pictures using Photoshop and Photoshop Elements (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0321592131
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 76
Authors: Ben Long

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