Camera Raw: One Workflow Suggestion

The Adobe Camera Raw plug-in for Photoshop (known as ACR) is a tremendously powerful tool, but can be a little overwhelming at first. Here's one suggestion for taming Camera Raw. It's not the only way to work in Camera Raw, merely a workflow that makes sense in many circumstances.

NOTE: Remember that the most important tool you have when working with Camera Raw is your vision – does the image meet your needs and artistic intent? The appearance of the image is the key to your adjustments.

STEP 1:

Open a Raw image through the File Browser or Photoshop's File> open command. The image automatically opens in Camera Raw. (If Raw images from your camera don't open in Photoshop, you may need an updated version of Camera Raw from the Adobe Web site.) Select the White Balance tool (which looks like Photoshop's Eyedropper tool) and click in the image preview on some area that should be light gray. (Don't click on something that's bright white, such as a reflection, but rather on something that should be almost white.) This establishes the Temperature and Tint settings.

STEP 2:

Set all the rest of your sliders to zero. The Exposure, Shadows, Brightness, Contrast, and Saturation sliders in the Adjust tab; as well as the Sharpness, Luminance Smoothing, and Color Noise Reduction sliders in the Detail tab. This gives you a clean slate from which to work.

STEP 3:

In Camera Raw's Adjust tab, keep an eye on the Histogram and drag the Exposure slider to the left or right until the bulk of the histogram data is spread as far as it will go without stacking up along the left or right edges of the histogram. (If the image has a large number of pure white or pure black pixels, you may already have a stack at one end or the other of your histogram. Ignore it.)

STEP 4:

Drag the Shadows slider to the right until the left edge of the histogram data reaches the left edge of the histogram. Again, you'll want to avoid creating a stack of data at the far left edge of the histogram. The value may be as low as 2 or 3 or as high as 40, depending on the image content.

STEP 5:

Drag the Brightness slider to the right until the histogram data reaches (but doesn't climb up) the right edge of the histogram. Typically you'll use a setting between 50 and 65, but again, that depends on the image content.

STEP 6:

Drag the Contrast slider to the right (or, in some cases, to the left) to spread out the histogram somewhat. A setting between 20 and 45 is typical.

STEP 7:

Drag the Saturation slider to the right (or left) to optimize the appearance of colors in your image.

STEP 8:

Click on the Detail tab in Camera Raw and zoom in to 400% on an area of shadow in the image. You can zoom with the Zoom tool or with the pop-up menu in the lower-left corner of the camera raw window.

STEP 9:

Drag the Color Noise Reduction slider slowly to the right until all the random specks of red, green, and blue (if any) are completely gone from the shadow area.

STEP 10:

Drag the Luminance Smoothing slider to the right until any light-colored speckling disappears. (Completely skip Camera Raw's Sharpness slider – do your sharpening in Photoshop where you have more control over the process.)

Compare the before and after images using this simple technique.

Remember that your eye determines what the correct adjustment should be – and keep in mind that you never make changes to the actual Raw image, so you can always go back and create a different version of the image.

If you took a series of images under the same conditions, you can now use the Set Camera Default or Save Settings command from the menu to the right of the Settings pop-up. That makes it easy to apply the same adjustment to all of the images in the series.