Summary

We've covered a lot of controls and parameters in this chapter, but hopefully you've found most of the concepts similar to those we explored earlier in the book. Overall, Camera Raw's interface is very simple:

• The Exposure slider sets the white point of your image.

• The Shadows slider sets the black point of your image.

• The Brightness slider adjusts the midpoint without moving the white or black point (usuallyit is possible for the Brightness slider to push the white point).

• The Contrast slider expands contrast by brightening the bright parts of your image while simultaneously darkening the darker parts of your image.

• The Temperature and Tint sliders let you adjust the white balance of your image, giving you dramatic color changes with no loss of image data.

These are the core editing controls in Camera Raw. In addition, the Luminance Smoothing and Color Noise Reduction sliders let you tackle noise, and Sharpness applies sharpening to your image. With Camera Raw's other controls, you can remove vignetting and chromatic aberration.

As you've seen, there's no set, "correct" order for using these tools. You should work with them interactively, using the histogram to guide you through your edits. You've also seen how working in 16-bit mode, with a larger color space, can afford you more editing latitude.

Bear in mind that the types of edits that you make with the Shadows, Brightness, Contrast, and Saturation sliders can also be performed in Photoshop using its normal tools. The same is true for the Exposure slider, but it has some additional functionality that we'll explore in Chapter 6.

Take some time to practice processing your own raw images. You want to not only understand Camera Raw's controls but also get a feeling for how much the images from your particular camera can be adjusted. You want to learn how far you can adjust color and contrast before you start to see posterization, and how much you can brighten an image before you overexaggerate the shadow noise. As you develop a sense of these boundaries, you will have an easier time recognizing and visualizing images when shooting.

We'll explore more editing features in Chapter 6. Before we move into advanced editing topics, though, we're going to explore the workflow and batch processing options provided by Camera Raw and Adobe's browsers.