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ONE OF MY FAVORITE FEATURES in Photoshop CC is the fact that the Camera
Raw dialog now appears as a filter in its own right. But why is that such a big deal?
Is Camera Raw really that useful? The simple answer is yes, it is – but before I
explain why, let me tell you what the RAW image format is all about.
JPEG files, the sort that are captured by most smart phones and low-end digital
cameras, are composed of what’s known as ‘8-bit’ data. That is, there are 2 to the
power of 8 shades of each of the channels that make up the image. That’s 2
8
= 2
x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 256 separate shades of red, green and blue. Multiply
them together and you get just over 16 million different color combinations.
Which sounds like an awful lot. And it is – except when you’re trying to rescue
image data that’s very bright or very dark. And then, suddenly, there isn’t enough
color variation there to allow fine detail to be captured. And so the better class
of digital cameras (mainly DSLRs, but a few compacts as well) are capable of
capturing not 8-bit images, but 12-bit or 14-bit images. Now, 12-bit may sound like
just one and a half times 8-bit, but that’s 2
12
= 4096 shades of each color – which
is just over 68 billion colors in total. And that’s a whole lot more data.
The Camera Raw dialog allows you to work with all that data, expanding color
ranges where necessary to rescue detail that would have been lost in a JPEG file.
For the true photographer, nothing less than shooting RAW is good enough.
The trouble is, RAW images are much bigger than the equivalent JPEG files –
which means you need a lot of extra storage space. The other problem is that RAW
isn’t just a single file format, but the catch-all term for all the different proprietary
formats used by different manufacturers. Each one has their own standard: so Nikon
cameras will save .NEF files, Canon will save .CR2 and .CRW, Fuji use .RAF, and so
on. Adobe refers to all these formats collectively as digital negatives, and each time a
camera manufacturer brings out a new model we generally have to wait for Adobe
to catch up and issue a patch so that Photoshop can read it.
All of which sounds like rather a hassle, but there is a serious upside: when
working with digital negatives, you’re working with image metadata that’s written
I N T E R L U D E
What’s so great about
Camera Raw?
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into the image itself. Every tweak, every adjustment, every slider change, every
masking brushstroke is stored within the file. Why does this matter? Because it
means that, unlike just about every other type of image adjustment in Photoshop,
adjustments made to RAW files are completely non-destructive. You can go back
to a RAW file the next day, or the next year, and find the original image intact, just
as if you’d never closed the dialog.
One of the other big advantages of the Camera Raw dialog is that it means
you can make multiple adjustments all in one go, without committing to any one.
Unlike Photoshop’s linear workflow, where you might use the Curves adjustment,
followed by the Reduce Noise filter, followed by a bit of Unsharp Mask, in Camera
Raw you can jump back and forth between all these adjustments (and many more),
tweaking each one as you see how a different adjustment affects its appearance.
When you bring the power of Camera Raw to standard JPEG images,
of course, it may look as if you’re getting all that RAW goodness, but in fact
Photoshop is just working with the 8-bit data the image contains. You can’t bring
out information that isn’t there in the first place.
And yet the Camera Raw dialog gives us the power to make multiple image
adjustments all together, to apply such effects as Clarity and vignettes, all within a
single dialog. If you need to make subtle adjustments to an image, there’s no better
way of doing it; and now, for the first time, you don’t need to close an image and
reopen it as if it were a RAW file (the previous workaround), and in fact you don’t
even need to work on a whole image – you can apply the Camera Raw filter to just
a single layer or a selection, just as you can selectively apply any Photoshop filter.
If you have a digital camera capable of shooting RAW images, then you should
certainly be using that capability. If you don’t, then you should definitely consider
upgrading to one that offers this extra power.
But now, even if you’re working exclusively with legacy images, with images
found on the web and from online photo libraries, you’ll have the ability to at least
taste the power of Camera Raw in your everyday working life.
How to Cheat in Photoshop CC
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