Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 Camera RAW, Part 2

Hi, everybody--Mike Brown back with you; welcome back to Educator.com's Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 Beginning and Intermediate course!0000

We've been looking at Camera Raw in the last lesson; I introduced you to Camera Raw, what it was, why you would use it...0008

We have the Quick Edit and the Guided Edit that we have gone over; in both cases, they have very easy-to-use exposure, color, and sharpening adjustments.0017

The Guided Edit, with all of the instructions, is to modify your images; but in both cases, everything you do to the image is directly affecting the pixels.0027

If you want to come back at a later time and re-correct it, because you really don't like it after a while, you're going to further torque the pixels.0039

But, it's there for quick editing, to get things ready and go out.0047

There is another way to do this--non-destructively, as I have pointed out, which is Camera Raw.0052

In this lesson, we're going to look at the workspace and basic editing in Camera Raw; we'll take a look at the tools, the panels, a workflow philosophy (which you really already know), exposure, color, sharpening, and noise reduction.0059

In this case, it's exposure, color, noise reduction, and then sharpening; you want to do the sharpening last, because you don't want to sharpen and then make it unsharp by noise reducing.0076

We'll talk more about that as we move along.0090

As we move along, I'll show you an example or two of exactly how Camera Raw works.0092

Let's go ahead and get started.0097

I'm going to first work with an example (if I remember, this is the one, right here); note what I'm using here; remember, I told you in the workspace, File, Open, or File, Open Recently Edited--I have obviously been setting up this lesson, and here is a list of the previously-opened files, and here is the particular one that I want to open up.0099

It's a .nef, which is Nikon's designation for a raw file.0123

Up it comes...and here we go; the default sizing of Camera Raw--this is the way it normally opens up; you can toggle to full screen or back with this little button with the double arrows, right there.0129

This is your preview button; any changes you make in Camera Raw--you click it, and you will see the before and the afters.0146

Let's go back to full screen so we can concentrate on it right here.0154

Let's start right along the Toolbar--pretty simple stuff; we have the Zoom tool (which you really don't need, because you remember my shortcuts--Command+, Command-, Command0); or you can click it, Option/Alt, and go down.0158

I prefer the shortcuts.0177

The Hand tool is the thing that if it's zoomed way in and you want to move it--but you can also get the Hand tool with the spacebar, just like in the Editor, and move it this way; or, if you want, you can use it there.0179

This is a white balance eyedropper to try to help you find the correct white balance in an image.0191

I'm not going to bother you with this one, very simply because sometimes it doesn't work, more times than not, and it's difficult.0201

There is a much easier methodology that is built in, and that is why we're using Camera Raw.0208

The Crop tool--pretty cool; the Straightening tool--you've seen that before; the thing with the Crop tool (I'll show you that one back in a minute)...red eye reduction; these are your preferences, which we don't really need to...0214

We want to save as sidecard.xmp files; we click OK.0229

I'm going to go and cancel for a moment, because I want to show you something: I'll go to the Open menu, and I want to go to this folder right here, and there are all of the raw files in the folder, and grayed-out, you see (I can't magnify it any more) a .xmp, another .xmp, a whole series of them; those are the saved changes that you make inside of Camera Raw.0233

Remember, I told you it was non-destructive; the image remains the same, and it saves the changes as this .xmp file, automatically, back in the same folder.0265

That is where the changes are.0276

I want to go back and open that file again, right there.0279

There is Camera Raw again; so, we went over the tools (and of course, you have Rotates Right and Left), and that is it--very simple tools--you don't really need the tools too much--maybe the Crop tool or the Straightener; Preview; OK.0287

Across the bottom of the document workspace, there is the camera that it was shot with, from the information inside the image, and there is the name of the file, magnification in the corner; that pretty much sums it up.0300

I want to go to a third panel, right off the Start (let's go back to the smaller one); I want to switch a page here.0315

First, these are the features that are inside; we looked at the Toolbar; now, we're going to look at the panels, and there are only three: Basic, Sharpening, and Camera Calibration.0327

We're going to start with that one.0339

Let's go ahead and open that back up again in Camera Raw; go full frame; and go to the one that has the little icon for the camera.0342

This is all you really have in here: the camera profile--you can do some different basic settings; you can try to change this thing a little bit; but basically, leave it at Adobe Standard and work the sliders.0354

The process is the only thing that counts; if you open up a raw file that was worked in an earlier version of Elements, before Elements 11, you will see, over where my cursor is, there will be a little box with an exclamation point in it, which is an indication that it recognizes that you shot it with an earlier version, and the sliders in this panel will be the earlier version.0370

If you highlight 2012, if it comes in with 10 or 3, it will convert to the current Camera Raw 7.1, which is far better and far more precise than the earlier ones.0399

It's an absolute--there is no reason not to; that is what the exclamation point is; that is what this panel is.0415

Back to the basic panel: we have some information in a histogram, up at the top--information about the camera, the particular picture that we have right here...0422

This is white balance: you have several choices; it has read the data out of this image, and knows it was a Nikon, and these were the white balance choices for the Nikon; just leave it as shot.0436

Just change your color temperature until the image looks right.0451

There it is: throw in a little magenta to counter the green, and we have countered it!0455

We went from there to there; that was a white balance correction; really tough--done!0460

Then, we have, below that, several exposure controls: exposure--overall, the sliders work pretty well: more and less in each case.0467

Exposure goes with everything; I usually don't use it unless it's a very dark image; let's open up another image to demonstrate everything here for you; we're going to open up 9921.0476

Now, this image is going to open with a whole series of changes that have already been made to it; if you want to reset changes to 0 and start over again, rather than just--I could change them, but if you want to reset to 0, right where it says basic, go over to the right, to the little list menu, Camera Raw defaults; that is it.0489

There they are; that is the original image, and notice, all of the sliders are now zeroed out; that is how it was shot.0514

Now, here is how simply it works: in this case, for white balance; this is green felt on this pool table; this was a big tournament that I photographed.0520

It's a little bit cyan, so all I have to do is go to the right and make a little...and move this down just a hair, and check the skin tones.0529

We want green, not yellow, felt--right about there; looks like that ought to do it; now, there were television lights above the table; that is why there is such a high color temperature here.0541

Now, it looks pretty natural; notice, his skin tone looks good; the table looks good; the red, the orange, the yellow, the purple, and the blue are absolutely accurate.0557

So, we have already done the white balance.0567

Now, as far as exposure goes: we're not going to move the overall; contrast--not yet; highlights--we can increase or decrease just the highlights.0569

The table is a little hot, so we come down, and there you go!--the table looks fine; I want it a little bright; now it's deep shadow.0580

Remember, I told you that raw files have much more range of exposure than a jpeg; watch this: you see how dark it is in the back?--we could open it up that far, if I wanted to, but that is interfering with the action going on here, so I'll pull it down just a little bit--enough that we get delineation of him; it looks just fine.0587

I think I'll up the white point a little bit, just to open it up just a hair--there we go.0616

That is it--we have finished our exposure changes.0624

I might hit the--no, I don't want to hit the contrast, because I'll get that back.0627

Maybe take the table down just a little bit...I can always come back later and change it later--no problem.0630

Now, clarity is not necessarily sharp sharpening; what it does is takes the very narrow range of mid-tones and alters the contrast on those.0638

I have to tell you that this works phenomenally well; we're going to bring it up, and you can begin to see some of the detail in his shirt.0652

But, I want to show you what happens with the clarity: I don't want to put it all in--I usually go a little bit.0663

Watch: automatically, it will pop.0669

Look at that!--now, it's beginning to blow things out, so we're going to come back down--there is 0--there is maybe 30 (I don't want to blow out the contrast too much), and that is amazing the difference: we went from there to there--it just sharpened things up, or the appearance thereof, a lot.0672

That is all it is; now, I would like to bring up the color in the table a little bit; I don't want to hit the hue saturation, because it makes the background go, too, so I'll hit Vibrance, which is non-dominant colors--and notice how the table came up?0694

Backgrounds stay the same; and there you have it; we went from there to there in no time.0710

Now, we can take the Crop tool--watch this: I'm going to crop it, and I'm going to mess with it--I'm just going to go all the way to here and click OK.0716

You say, "Wow, what did he do?!"; go back and hit the Crop tool again; notice, it did not destroy any of the underlying pixels; it just saved the crop area, so I can re-crop it and change that at any time, as well--completely non-destructive.0728

Cropping, as well--pull it right up to about there--that looks pretty good--now, we'll hit OK, and I like it!0748

Now, the only other thing that we need to do is to go to the second panel that we haven't talked about yet, and that one is the Sharpening and Noise Reduction panel, which is kind of cool.0758

In this case, we have sharpening and noise reduction; I want to do the noise reduction first; I want to get the noise out and then bring the sharpening in, because if we sharpen, it will over-sharpen the noise.0774

So, let's get rid of that first; we'll zoom it up; now this is a very noisy image, and I know it's grainy; if you look in the background here (let me zoom it way up), see, there is a huge amount of grain.0787

This was at an ISO of 4000; basically, those people are in the dark.0802

It's kind of noisy, and I want that effect, anyway--that kind of grittiness of a pool room--but I do want to take some of it out of this young fellow's face, and not lose detail in his shirt.0807

So, we're going to deal with either luminance noise or color noise; color noise is jpeg artifacts, and there is not really much in here; if I hit this, you notice we don't see any change; I can go all the way over, and you won't see any change in noise reduction, because there is no color noise; that is only in jpegs.0821

Luminance noise is the electronic noise, and that is what you are seeing in all of this noise in here; it's electronic from the fact that I set it at 4000 and it was able to pull the detail.0841

All right, so we're going to take the Luminance slider, and I'll show you: I'll go about a quarter of the way, which is what I usually do--watch what happens.0852

Notice, immediately (back to 0; watch; look at all the noise; look at his face--watch his face) and there it is; it's not noise-free, but significant difference.0862

But the other side of the coin is that, we go back down here--the noise is part of everything; notice the detail and the highlights and the glass tones that we get: as we begin to do noise reduction, and go too far, we lose that--we get a very smooth effect; we lose detail.0878

So, when you're doing noise reduction, you want to balance off the detail (it comes back up a little bit) with the noise reduction; in this case, and usually, around one-quarter of the way is about right.0900

You can change the detail, and you can change the contrast, as well, which affects your details.0916

But, I usually leave that alone and take it as it is right there.0923

Now, if I want to sharpen it back up just a little bit, I usually leave the radius at 1--the radius is how wide the sharpening is; I want a narrow band.0927

I'm going to put it up just a little bit; I go down to 0; it's soft; if I go way up, we have noise back again.0939

So we come down somewhere in the mid-range; and we'll go from start to the finish, and we have a considerable reduction, and I'm concerned with the eyes, and we still have it, and the detail noise is very fine detail; in this case, we have a lot of noise; and that is that.0950

All we have to do now--you have two choices: you could accept this image as it is; you could save it in a new location in the folder, and you could change the filename, and you could change the format--whatever you want to change it as--and that is going to be it.0974

Or, click Done, and if you click the Done button, it will go back (I don't have that up right now)--that .xmp file that I showed you--it will create the .xmp file in the folder with the original, which was this image right (where is my original? it should be there--why isn't it showing me the original?) there it is--the original image.0995

It saves the .xmp file, which are all of these settings right here now, and closes the window; if you reopen it, it will reopen in Photoshop with all of these settings intact.1030

We can also cancel the complete thing, or we can go ahead and open it up into the Editor.1043

In this case, I'm just going to click...I'm going to cancel, because I have some other settings on there--and there we go.1049

So, we talked about the Sharpening and Noise Reduction--the basics; it's very simple--just use the sliders: exposure, color, a little clarity, I usually don't mess with the sharpening, some noise reduction--out of there, and off we go.1057

That is what it's for--for those of you who might just want to be using Quick and Guided Edits to do simple stuff, this is an even better way--if that will get you to there in the Camera Raw, you can open the file; then you can go ahead and save it as a Photoshop file and move on with opening it up and resizing it; post it on the Web; do what you want with it.1072

But, it's another way to do this, simpler than the Quick and the Guided, to get you started; that is the whole idea.1101

One other thing I want to show you is--in Elements, raw files open automatically; jpegs and tiffs will open directly into Photoshop, but you can make them open into Camera Raw and get slightly less control, but work on them non-destructively by doing this.1106

In the PC, if you're on a Windows, go to Edit, Open as, highlight the image that you want to open, and change the format to Camera Raw.1128

In a Mac, we'll go to File, Open; get your dialogue box up; in this case, it's on the Desktop--there is the tiff, right there--and I'm going to change my format to Camera Raw, click Open, and instead of opening up into Elements, it opens up into here, and we can very quickly go and do a horizon correction, just like that; click OK.1141

You have that corrected; let's crop this thing down a little bit, click OK, and crop it down a little smaller: take the Crop tool (oh, we're going to change it that way--that is what it wants me to do); OK, OK; bring this down; bring this up just a hair; click OK, and there it is.1168

And of course, it's always going to go back to the original point.1193

Now we're ready to edit this thing; the color temperature looks a little warm--there, that is more natural--now a little cold--we're going to adjust the contrast on this a little bit, hit the Vibrance, do a little clarity (wow, that pulled it up really nicely!); there we have that.1196

There is no noise in this, as far as I can tell--let's go ahead and take a look; no, that is pretty smooth.1217

That is it!--it was that quick--we didn't need to do anything else on the image--and now, we can go ahead and open it.1224

It's that fast with a tiff and a jpeg.1231

So, back to the beginning: we've talked about the tools, the panels, the workflow, and a couple of examples of what it can do with the primary functions--primarily, exposure, color, and a little bit of sharpening, and especially the most powerful thing is color correction for white balance.1235

All of this is using Camera Raw inside of Photoshop Elements.1257