Editing Images with Adobe Camera Raw

Let's talk about editing RAW images from your digital camera. Now, even if you think I can't shoot as RAW format or I don't want to,  so maybe I don't have to listen to this video, I'm just going to skip it,  there are actually some important concepts here because you can also apply this RAW editing workflow using Adobe Camera RAW to regular images. There's actually a filter that you can use, so there's actually some pretty cool features that Adobe Camera RAW offers as a workflow and you can apply them to actual RAW images from your camera, but you can also apply them as a filter.

So in the next video, we'll come back and we'll talk about applying this as a filter to any layer or any image, but right now we're going to see how does this editing process work and what is this Adobe Camera RAW. So often on digital cameras, especially the better quality digital cameras,  we can shoot as what's called a RAW file. Now, as opposed to a JPEG or an HEIC file, there are different file formats which are going to bake in the settings.

So a RAW file is just all the RAW data just dumped from your sensor into a RAW file. In this case, I have CR2 files. CR is for Canon RAW.

They go through different versions of it. Other manufacturers will have a different file extension. It's not just.RAW, which would be kind of nice,  but every camera manufacturer takes their RAW data,  dumps it into a file with whatever file extension they want.

It is not actually an image yet. It is just RAW data that needs to be processed into an image. Now, what are the benefits? Why would we do this? So the downside is that the RAW file is unprocessed and needs to be turned into an image.

So there's extra work and those files are generally bigger than equivalent JPEGs. So why would we want to have those downsides? Because of better quality. Because it does not make decisions of how much sharpening to apply,  permanently changing the white balance and applying that,  applying some sort of compression like the JPEG algorithm applies some compression.

When we shoot as a RAW file and it just dumps all the RAW data in there,  it takes note of what it would do for white balance. But we can choose when we open it up if we need to correct the white balance,  we go back to the original RAW data and we are kind of one generation closer to the original. Instead of having the wrong white balance applied and then trying to correct it,  we just go back to the original color and we fix it right from the source.

Also, because of the lack of compression, these are bigger file sizes,  it has not compressed out some of the quality. It is not permanently applied sharpening. We can get better quality, especially with low light images where there can be noise,  we can recover more data, we can recover more highlights.

These typically store more information in general. So how do we access this? So I'm going to cancel this. And in Photoshop, we just open the file and we go to the image that we want to open,  such as this one.

And I'm going to open this up. And because it's a RAW file, it opens up in Adobe Camera RAW or ACR for short. Now, looking at this image, if you looked at this on your camera,  you might think, oh, this is so dark.

This possibly can't be a good image. I can't salvage this thing. But we can recover a lot more data than you might think.

I shot this on my Canon 60. So I want to recover a lot of the shadow details. And when we expose our digital images, we always want to expose for the highlights because highlight detail is difficult to recover.

So I expose for the highlights and I left the shadows fall into darkness. But we can recover a lot more detail out of our shadows than we could highlights. So always expose for your highlights and then pull out the shadow detail.

It's amazing what you can pull out of your shadow detail for this. So let's say I go to, I could do overall exposure,  but I actually don't want to really change that. I think in this case, I want to, let's say, bring up the shadows.

So I can make the shadows darker or lighter. And there's actually quite a lot that I can bring back in this. Now, I think I do probably want to bump up the exposure a bit,  but then my highlights are getting blown out.

So I'm going to pull them back. So I can do a little bit of a balance here of exposure,  pulling back my highlights,  bumping up my shadows,  and look at all the detail that was brought back from this. You might have thought that this was unsalvageable,  but look at there.

There is a lot of detail that's in there. Yes, there is some noise. And depending on your camera in those shadow details,  it's going to tend to have more noise,  but there's actually a lot of places here where there isn't bad noise.

And we can always compensate for some of that noise with some noise reduction as well. Now, before I get too far in this,  as far as the workflow goes here,  these changes we're making are non-destructive. If I hit done,  what it does is it can't actually overwrite the original file.

It cannot add to that file. So here, this file,  I actually took this picture back in 2015. It has not modified that.

This is the XMP file. This is the metadata. This is where it's storing like the notes of what it would do.

When I hit done,  it created this XMP file. And this XMP file,  this metadata file has to have the same name. And so it's really important that if you were to change this name,  let's say to two,  you would have to rename this one as well.

Both have to have the same name. So just be careful of that. And so if I ever open this back up again in Photoshop,  so let's say I open it back up and go back down here and I open up,  it's going to look at that XMP file,  look at the settings,  which are these settings,  and it restores that.

If, however, I deleted that file,  all the settings would go away and it would go back to the original. So everything you do in Camera Raw is non-destructive. So that's a really nice workflow that we have,  non-destructive editing.

When we're eventually all done with this,  we will open this image up. Now we can open it just to open it,  which would create a Photoshop file. And this is not a smart object.

It's just a copy of that. No, make no mistake. It is a copy.

When I go to save this,  it's going to force me to save a Photoshop file for this. Okay. Or if I want to retain editing capabilities in here,  what I might want to do instead is when I open this up,  open this up as a smart object.

This will put a embedded smart object version. This is the actual raw file sitting inside the Photoshop document,  which means at any point,  I can double click on that to open it back up in Camera Raw and continue making edits. Now this is a copy of the one that's on my computer.

So what happens in this Photoshop file would stay in this Photoshop file. It would not change the one that's on my computer. But when you're eventually done,  you might want to do that if you want to retain editing capabilities within Camera Raw.

So let me close that back up and let's go back into seeing what we can do here in the Camera Raw dialog. We can do our exposure. We can change the white balance.

If I want to make this more warm or more cool,  I can change that. And this is going back to the original raw data as it was shot on that day. So instead of it applying the wrong white balance as it would with a JPEG potentially if it didn't get the white balance correct.

And then we try to correct it from that. This is going back to the original data. We're having one less kind of generation away from the original.

It's kind of like instead of going from like in film days when we had a negative and we made a print,  we're going back to the original negative. So Camera Raw is kind of like a better quality original. We can change the vibrance.

We also have color saturation,  but vibrance is a bit more natural in what we do. We also have some things that are kind of unique here to Camera Raw. For example, we have dehaze.

Now in here, I don't really have a good example,  but I'm going to open up another one that dehaze. I could show you on that. Clarity would be kind of for a localized kind of contrast.

When we do clarity,  look at the kind of the detail that kind of comes out. So it kind of makes your details pop a little bit more,  not full like kind of sharp little details like sharpness would be,  but clarity is kind of one step up. It's not contrast.

I mean, it's kind of contrast,  but contrast is like a very overall contrast. Clarity is kind of localized contrast around certain areas where it kind of it's between contrast and sharpening. And so we can see, yes, it is cranking up contrast around certain edges,  but not quite as fine tune of a sharpness as an actual sharpening would be.

Texture is a little bit more fine-tuned where it actually increases the texture,  like especially in the trees. So kind of in the most general contrast adjustment,  you have contrast, then you have clarity,  then you have texture and then you have sharpness kind of in going from general to very specific fine-tuned sharpening. Now, we also have, as we scroll down here,  we also have the ability to remove noise as well.

So here I'm going to go into manual noise reduction. You can use AI noise reduction if you want. You can also do manual noise reduction here.

And if we look at this here and I zoom in,  there is some noise. There is some luminance noise,  which is kind of light and dark spec noise. But there's also some color noise.

Look at that, there's kind of some reds in here,  RGB, right? Red, green, and blue. There's some of those colors in here. And see, if I pull this off,  it actually had already done some color noise reduction.

See how I remove that color? See, there it is. There I move it. Now, you don't want to go all the way.

You're like, oh, I could just go all the way here, right? That can remove some color saturation if you're not careful. So you can also see that here. We zoom in closer here.

So there's the color noise. There it isn't. Oh, here you can really see the luminance noise as well.

Now, anytime you're removing noise,  you have to be careful about removing detail because it can get confused. Is it real detail or is it noise? If you go too heavy on the noise reduction, you lose detail. So my goal is to go as low as I can go with this and just have enough that it removes the noise that I want to.

But going back here to the color noise,  do keep an eye, look at different things because sometimes if you go too heavy handed on removing color noise,  some colors can kind of blend into each other and you can sometimes lose some color saturation. It's actually not being too bad here. But see like there, for example,  I'm losing some color saturation on that.

So you want to be careful to not go too heavy on these things. Just to go enough. I think maybe somewhere around there is not too bad.

This is a waterfall. So there's actually some texture that's supposed to be there because this is a waterfall here at the 9-11,  the site of 9-11. Okay, so we've got that.

Now under optics here,  another thing that we can also do is we can use profile corrections. So this was shot on my Canon 6D and it knows that it knows the lens that it was shot on. That's all in the metadata of this raw file.

If we look in here, it knows that. It knows that it was shot with this lens and it can automatically remove the distortion. And look at how much straighter those lines get.

So that's nice. Also, there is some natural vignetting of this particular lens where vignetting is a darkening of the edge where the light kind of falls off and it doesn't get exposed properly at the edges. So it helps to compensate for that vignetting.

So it removes the distortion. It removes the vignette as well. So that's looking good, I think.

But the defringe, let's talk about defringe. So sometimes in certain lighting environments and certain cameras and certain lenses,  you might see some what is called a color fringing and that is where you get typically this kind of purple or magenta color on one side and then on another side,  see here is this kind of purple magenta color and then the other side is like a greenish color. Let's go over here.

Oh, there, look at how green that is. So the idea here is that you can say,  well, let's reduce the green that's here. Now, it might not quite get the exact green.

So you might have to shift over here and this is a little bit more towards the bluish side. And oh, look at that. That's getting better.

Okay. So how much do you want to reduce? We can reduce that. That's looking good.

Now here, I definitely see some of that kind of purple fringing. So let's try to reduce that. Oh yeah, look at that.

Now, if we need to shift one way or the other to try to get our particular color because it can vary depending on the lens and your camera,  but that really was able to remove that color fringing. So I'm not seeing it as much on all the windows. You really see it on the contrasty edges.

Oh yeah, look at this. No longer have it on that edge there. That is much better there.

So look for contrasty edges and look for color fringing and you can remove that with Defringe. So lots of cool things that you can do here to make this image look good. When we're all done,  when we're ready to kind of continue here,  I can click on this link down here at the bottom that tells me what resolution this is going to be opening up as.

So you can set your resolution. You can also be setting your color space as well. When we take our picture on the digital camera,  it can actually capture a lot of color,  more than some color spaces.

So for example, sRGB is a smaller RGB color space and the Canon camera can actually capture more than that. Now, you don't want to be working with so much color that when you end up converting to your final destination,  that you're going to lose a lot of that color and it's going to have major color shifts. So as far as working in a color space,  this does get kind of complex,  but to simplify things,  if let's say you're going to always just go online,  you're going to put this on the web,  the web basically wants sRGB.

So you could say convert this into sRGB. If you were going to be doing print work,  Adobe RGB is bigger than sRGB. It's closer to be more about what print is.

So print is CMYK. So it's bigger than sRGB,  but not so much bigger than print that you're working with a lot of colors that you can't print. If you're doing print work,  I would say go with Adobe RGB at 300 pixels per inch.

If you're doing web stuff or digital or online,  go with sRGB and technically resolution doesn't matter,  but a lot of people would just put in 72,  but it really doesn't matter because it's just, that's a print concept. We don't really have to care about that. It's more about the color space that you're working in.

So let's say I'm going to do this for print and web,  then I would go with the bigger space. I would go with Adobe RGB. Why not work with more colors? And I can always convert down to CMYK and convert down to sRGB when we do an export as it automatically converts down to sRGB for the web anyway.

So that could be a good use. And because this doesn't matter,  and I might do print,  I'll put this at 300 pixels per inch. And then that way, when I open this up and I open it as a smart object,  I get a new Photoshop file with a copy of this in there that if I ever want to make changes,  I can double click on it.

I can make any changes I want. It remembers all my settings. Don't need to make any changes there.

And look at how much of a difference I've made in this image. So you will get the best noise reduction. You'll get the best quality out of RAW files.

If you can shoot as RAW files on your digital camera,  do that for the best quality,  open them up in Camera Raw to process,  and you can do a lot of things. I've tried to do some of these things on JPEGs. For example, the noise reduction,  the bringing back the details in the shadows.

It is not as good a quality as RAW files. I thought, how bad can it be, right? It was amazing. There was a night photo that I shot as both RAW and JPEG,  and I could not recover as much detail from the JPEG as I could with the RAW file.

Now, if you say, well, but I can't shoot as RAW. I don't have control over this. You can still use these same techniques,  but as a filter, which I'll show you in the next exercise.

But let me show you one really cool feature of Camera Raw that's really not in anything else. So this is great. You can apply this as a filter on any image.

So I'm going to open up this image here of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. And notice in the distance here,  you know, this is kind of off. And as it gets farther away, it gets more hazy.

There's a really cool feature called Dehaze. So haze is just stuff in the atmosphere. You know, it could be pollution.

It could be moisture, smoke, whatever it is. And the farther away it gets,  the more hazy or light or lack of contrast it gets. So basically, we need kind of a contrast adjustment that's a variable amount of contrast that the farther away it gets, the more haze there is,  it'll apply more contrast the farther away it goes.

That's what Dehaze is. And so as I Dehaze something,  notice that the part that's closest to me doesn't really change. But the part that's farther away that has more haze,  it just removes the haze.

Look at that. That is so much better. And if I hit P for preview,  just look at the difference.

Amazing. You could not repeat this or replicate the same settings with just adding contrast because that would change this. It's a variable amount of contrast that's based on the amount of haze in the image.

Just amazing. That one feature alone is just,  there's nothing else outside of Camera Raw that's exactly like that. Also, the clarity that can be done as well.

This really shows, I think,  some of that clarity where it's kind of like contrast,  but it's very localized. If we want to do more texture at a fine level,  we can increase the texture there. These kind of things,  there's just no exact equivalent to those in regular Photoshop.

This is only in Camera Raw. Look at the difference there with just a little bit of Dehaze and a little bit of clarity. That is just an amazing difference.

And it's all non-destructive. If I just hit done where it saves the changes,  I can come back to it later. Ultimately, you do have to open it up and then turn it into some file that's usable.

That's not just a raw file. I can take this final image and we can do like we did before. We can export it for web.

We can save it as a Photoshop document to bring into InDesign or Illustrator. But these hopefully are showing you why Camera Raw as a workflow is useful and also some of the cool things you can do. So this is Exercise 5D.

And then we're going to come back in the next video and we're going to see how we can do these things to any layer in any Photoshop file. We do it as a filter.