James Stephens

My preference is to shoot in RAW mode and to use Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) for conversion of the RAW sensor data into a tone-mapped image. The ACR plugin is installed with Adobe Photoshop CS2 but in my case ACR v3.3 was needed to support the Canon EOS 5D. I downloaded the plugin from Adobe.

ACR affords a fantastic amount of control over the conversion process; so much so that in many cases I find that no work is necessary in Photoshop at all and simply invoking Image Processor from Adobe Bridge is enough to generate a required Tiff or Jpeg from the RAW file. That said, you have to know how to use ACR; some useful controls are as follows:

• Up/down arrows - adjust selected slider in small increments.
• Shift + up/down arrows - adjust selected slider in large increments.
• Ctrl + plus/minus - zoom image in/out.
• Ctrl + 0 - Fit entire image in preview window.
• Ctrl + Alt + 0 - Zoom to 100% actual pixels view.
• Ctrl+U - Toggles automatic adjustment of exposure, shadows, brightness and contrast. I prefer to leave the auto adjustment off and make adjustments by hand. Be warned that if you make adjustments and then toggle the automatic adjustment on and then off again, the sliders will return to their Camera RAW default values and not the ones you originally adjusted to.
• U - Toggles shadow clipping warning (blue).
• O - Toggles highlight clipping warning (red).
• Alt + Click on exposure slider - Displays areas with clipped channels over black background. This is very useful for making precise adjustments to exposure to control highlight clipping.

  White pixels indicate highlight clipping in all three channels. Red, green and blue indicate clipping in their single respective channels. Cyan pixels indicate clipping in green+blue, magenta in the red+blue channels and yellow in red+green.

  
  
  Marsh Reflections
  Canon 5D with 24-105 f/4L IS lens @ ISO 100
  (click image to enlarge)

• Alt + Click on shadow slider - Displays areas with clipped channels over white background. This is very useful for making precise adjustments to exposure to control shadow clipping.

  Black pixels indicate shadow clipping in all three channels. Red, green and blue indicate clipping in their single respective channels. Cyan pixels indicate clipping in green+blue, magenta in the red+blue channels and yellow in red+green.

• H - Selects the hand tool. Useful when zoomed in to move around the image.
• I - Selects the white balance tool. Locate a diffuse (but not blown) highlight in the image and click to set the white balance for the image. Note - adjust white balance after exposure.
• C - Selects the crop tool. Click and drag over the image to select an area to crop. Right click and select ‘Clear Crop’ to remove the crop. When choosing to Open a cropped RAW file in Adobe Photoshop CS2, only the cropped area is opened.
• S - Selects the straighten tool. Click and drag on the image to select a horizon line. When choosing to Open a straightened RAW file in Photoshop, the image is rotated according to the horizon line and cropped automatically to preserve maximum dimension.

Recommended Reading

This book completely changed my digital RAW workflow. Before reading it I used Adobe RAW simply as a file conversion tool to import RAW images into Adobe Photoshop CS2 where the real work could be done. Since reading it I make so much use of Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) that I often don’t have to use Photoshop at all.