The Darkroom Toolkit

In this chapter, I've concentrated on describing each of the tools individually, with simple examples of their effects on images. But it's a mistake to fall in love with a single tool and ignore the otherswhen all you have is a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail! The way the tools interact is as important as their individual functions.

Many different combinations of Camera Raw settings can produce superficially similar results, but when you look closely, or when you start to push the converted images further in Photoshop, you'll invariably find that one combination works better than the others, so in the next chapter, I'll show you how the tools all work together to let you evaluate and optimize your images.