Lessons

Lesson Info

Correcting in Adobe® Camera Raw

What I want to do next is talk to you about correcting your images in camera raw Plug in. So this is you can open other file types of images in the camera. Raw plug in It is easiest to open them in to open actual raw images. That's where you going to get the most kind of benefit out of correcting in programs like camera raw or light room. So what I've given you in the exercise files are too raw. Files have not yet been converted into a J peg, and we're just going to finish out the day with correcting in camera. Rocket is great to do a side by side comparison with what we just had to trot through to correct and elements, which is those levels adjustments rather than how you could do it in camera raw someone to go ahead and open at this image. I'm gonna drag it into the elements workspace. When I do elements is gonna open it. Its version of the camera raw plug in which, as we already talked about at the top of the day, lacks some of the tools that you'll find in the develop module of whi...

te room or in the camera raw plug in that you get when you install Photoshopped CC. So this is our beautiful little kitty, Miss Bootsy. She has since gone on two key heaven. She's a sweet girl, so you can zoom in and out and the camera roll window, just like you can in elements. So command minus zooms out command or control plus zooms in. You've got a nice preview button that Pierce. When we begin making changes, we can toggle that off and on to see a nice before and after. So let's go ahead and take a look. We've got a hist a gram here, just like we saw over and elements except for Kamerad doesn't really great job of showing us the individual history arms, even though there's kind of a composite, you see how each channel differs by looking at its different colors. So how do you start out with this? Well, if your images really in raw format and you do that in camera, you might want to start out with trotting through the different white balance settings. Now this particular poppet menu cannot be changed on a J peg. If you I'm not even sure how you would open a J peg in Elements version of camera raw, but perhaps it can be done. You can open other file formats in photo shops version of camera raw, but nevertheless, with raw images, you can reset the white balance, which is just you telling the camera what color the light should be or what color the light is. You can reset that in post here in camera, raw or in light room, so if you get it wrong in camera, you can fix it here. I'm really good about doing that. I get so excited. I'm shooting, shooting, shooting outside and I run in somewhere and I shoot. And then I important the image and it's like blue. But since I'm shooting in raw, I can always fix that here. So watch how the color of this image I'll zoom in a little bit. Watch how the color of this image changes as I'm changing the color of the light source so one of these will look better to you. Definitely not that one. One of those will look better in the other one to your eye. I actually think the one with flash looks a little bit better than someone. Let's say we're happy with that. You can further fine tune the color of light by using the temperature slider. We can go more towards yellow to warm it up or more towards blue to cool it off depending upon what you like the look of. And then you can further refined that More towards magenta are more towards green with those sliders. So, so far easy peasy, right? We've got a pop up menu and we've got sliders. Yeehaw! So now we've got a little scroll bar over on the right so we can cruise down and see all the other kinds of adjustments we can make. And this is the basic panel of light room. Now, before you start making exposer changes, which is really gonna lighten or darken your image, I want to do two things. I want you to tap the U key on your keyboard for under exposed. That's going to turn on your shadow clipping warning. Not sure if you can see this on screen, but as I tapped that Yuki, see how you get a white outline around that little triangle when you have that outline. That means that that clipping morning is turned on what is clipping Well, if you make an exposure change that pushes your shadow pixels to pure black, then that's clipping. Do pure black pixels have any detail in them? New. So you really don't want to push your shadows to be full on black? Ah, far more, more troublesome Problem is pushing your highlights to pure. Why? Because there's typically more detail in the highlights, and there is in the shadows of your image, so pressing. The U key turns on the under exposed warning. Right, your shadow warning pressing the Okeafor overexposed turns on your highlight clipping. Morning. We're turning on those warnings so that as we start making exposer changes down here that areas that are being clipped will show up in either a bright red or bright blue. So turning on those warnings before you start messing with these controls is very important, especially if you're selling the image or submitting it for stock. So with those warnings, turn on. If I drag my exposure sliders to the right toe lighten, see how the areas that are being clipped or now showing up in red so wherever that red overlays appearing. I'm pushing those pixels to pure white, so I'm completely screwing up all the detail that was there. So that's why it's important. Turn these warnings on so you can see that happening now if I drag my exposure slider to the left. Eventually I will start clipping shadows in those areas. We'll start showing up in blue. You can see a few of them there, so just keep an eye on him. I always worry more about the highlights than the shadows, but turning those clipping warnings on really can a save you from going too far with these changes down here. But even if you do go too far, let's say that I, for whatever reason, just for the sake of demonstration purposes, I really like the way that looks right there. Can you recover any of that loss detail that you're losing due to clipping? Absolutely. If the if you're getting clipping in the highlights and you want to come down here to the white slider and you're gonna drag it to the lift and then I'll bring back recover detail in those highlights if you have pushed the exposure to such a point that you're getting clipping in the shadows. You're gonna trot down here to the black slider, and you're going to drag it to the right toe, lighten them up just a little bit. Now, how do I know which direction to drag? What slider will look at? The gray scale bar that's underneath each slider gives you an indication of what's gonna happen to your image, depending on which direction you drag. So the exposure slider. See how the slider itself gets darker to the left than it does to the right. Well, if you want a dark and drive to left, you want to lighten drag to the right. The contrast. Slider. Look how there's far more difference between areas of high contrast in the slider toward the right. Then there is towards the left. Well, if you want to increase contrast, you're gonna drag that to the right. You want to decrease contrast, you're gonna drag that to the left. So list. Let's give some Miss Bootsy some more contrast here. Now, if I've still got highlights in my image that are too light or too dark, we can fix that with a highlight slider. So if I drag the slider to the lift, look how that slider itself begins to turn gray. If I drag it to the left, my highlights burger and darken. And on Lee, my highlights not my shadows, not my mid tones on Lee. My highlights. You've got the same kind of control with shadows. Here, the shadows slider gets darker toward the left side, lighter to the right side. If you're shadows are a little too dark, drag the slider to the right toe, lighten them up wherever they appear in your image. If your shadows are a little too light, drag the slider to the left, darken them up wherever they appear in your image, all the while watching out for any areas of bright red or bright blue. That air resulting from clipping. Now, once you get those sliders, all set. If you still have a little bit of clipping going on the highlights. That's when you're gonna drag that white slider, which direction it gets darker to the left lighter. The right clipping is highlights that have been pushed to pure quiet, so you obviously wanted dark in them so you can drag that to the left until you get rid of those clipping mornings. Same thing with the shadows. So now let's take a peek at the before and after ever image before. After now we're gonna come down here to the Clarity slider, which really just increases contrast in the mid tones. So we're going to click and drag that to the right to really bump up the contrast. If we want to make our colors pop a little bit, we can drive the vibrant slider to the right. We really don't need to do that in this image, but if we did, things would get really intense. Ah, vibrant cider is fabulous because it tends to leave areas, uh, better already pretty highly saturated in color alone. So it will pump up the intensity of colors that aren't already saturated. And it leaves skin tones alone, which is great, whereas a saturation cider that I hardly ever use just saturates everything. So that is how easy it iss to correct your images in camera raw in light. And that's why everybody is falling in love head over heels with light room because, I mean that is so easy. And look at the control that we had, you know, in Onley, affecting our shadows versus our highlights. Or on Lee, you know, affecting contrast in the midterms with clarity and being able to change the color of the light source with our white balance slider. So now let me zoom back out and take a look at the preview. You can also toggle this preview box on and off by pressing the peaky p for preview. So here's our before and here's our after my opinion, a lot, lot better image. So that's just a little ditty on using camera. Wrong. I do have a full day on using photo shops version of camera, raw as a deep dive, but over here in elements were lacking a few controls. But my gosh, I can't think of a better commercial for using camera or light room. Yeah, I think we were talking about it just in the break about trying to add some link extra classes to this one. And I think the adobe camera raw came up as well as the blend modes Deep dive that you were thinking that would be a nice addendum. Additions. Yeah, because we've got the same blend modes except for two that you'll never use anyway. In elements as you do in Photoshop, you've also got this nearly the same set of filter so that filters Deep Die would also be a great companion class, along with the selections Deep dive because you've got the same selection, tools and elements as you doing photo shop.