Section 4.7. Opening and Adjusting Multiple RAW Files in Photoshop CS2

4.7. Opening and Adjusting Multiple RAW Files in Photoshop CS2

When you have multiple images that have the same exposure, brightness range, contrast, and color balance, you should open them all at once in Camera Raw. Then click the Select All and Synchronize buttons so the settings applied to any one of the images will apply to all of them. This situation especially applies to product, fashion, journalism, and event photography where many photographs are taken of the same subject to ensure capturing just the right "moment." You do not want to spend time adjusting each photo individually, since it could unnecessarily add hours to your processing time.

You have to start in Bridge to get into Camera Raw. If you jumped ahead to this chapter out of a rabid curiosity about Camera Raw, jump back to the "Applying Camera Raw Settings in Adobe Bridge" section earlier in this chapter and familiarize yourself with the steps you ordinarily take in Bridge. Then, if you're following my workflow rules as religiously as I dogmatically demand, you have already eliminated all the really obvious losers. You've also used Bridge's lightbox feature (choose WindowWorkspaceLightbox) to physically place photos that should be adjusted in the same (or nearly the same) way next to one another. Once youve done that, processing efficiency demands that you open all the related files in Camera Raw at the same time.

You select a series of contiguous files by selecting the first file, pressing Shift, and then selecting the last file in the series. Figure 4-32 shows you the Bridge Light Table workspace after putting contiguous files together.

Figure 4-32. Using the lightbox workspace in Bridge, with similar images placed so that they are next to one another on the "light table."

Select a series of files that you haven't "lightboxed" into contiguous groups by selecting the first image, Cmd/Ctrl-clicking on another and then on all the files you want in that series. To simultaneously transfer those files into Camera Raw, press Enter/Return.

4.7.1. Adjust Similar Files at One Time

You can synchronize the open files so that when an adjustment is made to one, it is applied all. If you've opened 15 files, that means that you've saved 15 times as much as if you'd done each file individually. Doing this is a matter of:

1. Clicking the Select All button.

2. Clicking the Synchronize button. The Synchronize dialog appears, as seen in Figure 4-33.

   Figure 4-33. The Synchronize dialog in the Camera Raw workspace.

3. Unchecking the boxes for the properties you don't want to synchronize.

4. Making the adjustments for the image currently in the Preview window. The images for all the thumbnails will be adjusted simultaneously for the selected properties.

If you are doing this for the first time, you probably want to keep all the boxes in the Synchronize dialog checked. If you just want to change a setting or two for a group of files that you've already adjusted, uncheck all the settings except those you want to change. If you only want to change one property for all the synchronized files, choose that property from the Synchronize menu at the top of the dialog. Now when you adjust any of the settings in any of the tabs, the same adjustment will take effect for all the images that are currently open, selected, and synchronized.

4.7.2. Ranking and Deleting

You should have already done all your initial ranking and winnowing (deleting) in Bridge. However, there's a big advantage to making your final choices after you open multiple files in Camera Raw: you can magnify all the images to whatever extent it is necessary to spot fatal flaws. The most persistent of these include minor blurring due to focus, camera shake, or forgetting to stop down enough to increase depth of field to the degree necessary. No matter how good the shots are in other respects, these shots are never going to be good enough (and don't fool yourself into thinking that you can recover them by sharpening).

Click the Select All button and then double-click the Zoom Tool icon. You'll still see the whole image in the thumbnail, but when you choose an image for previewing it will be enlarged to 100 percent in the Preview window. Grab the Hand tool and pan the image to the place where focus is most critical. As long as all the other images are still selected, they will be prepanned to the same location when you select them for previewing. Now you see approximately the same portion of the image when you preview each image using the arrow keys.

When you see an image that's technically unacceptable, just press Delete/Backspace. A red X will appear in the upper-right corner of the thumbnail. If you change your mind before leaving Camera Raw, select that image and press Delete/Backspace again. The red X will be gone. Don't leave Camera Raw until you're sure you want to delete the images in the Trash, because that's exactly what will happen. Of course, you could still open the Trash and drag any images back to the folder they came from. You just have to be able to identify them by their filename since your system's file browser may not read RAW files.

4.7.3. Using the Save Button

You do not want to click Save until you've done everything in Camera Raw to make the image look as much like the final image as possible. The result of your Camera Raw adjustments will become the Background Layer of your Photoshop file. This is because you want to avoid keeping track of multiple versions of a Photoshop file, which is because you can keep all the versions on layers inside the same file in .psd format. So when you have finished adjusting but need various versions for various purposes, automatically create a version for each of those purposes. You do that by turning off the layers you don't need for that version, exporting the result to all the sizes, color spaces, quality settings (if they are JPEGs), and sizes you need for the image's various intended purposes, and then number those versions.

At the bottom right of the Camera Raw dialog is the only button that doesn't record any settings or changes made in the current Camera Raw session. That button is the Cancel button. Use it when and if you come to a point where you just know you have to take a deep breath and start over from a fresh point of view.