Camera Raw 5.0 - PSCS4 Sneak Peek

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Hi, I am Richard Harrington and welcome to this edition of Photoshop CS4 sneak peak. Today, we are going to take a look at camera raw 5 with chips with Creative Suite Floor. This important module is used when you develop your raw files from a digital camera. Now starting with camera raw 5 you can actually use this on TIFF or JPEG files and the adjustments would be nondestructively applied. But to get the best results, you really should be shooting camera raw. So if your camera offers that option, be sure to take advantage of it.

Let us go ahead and open it up and take a look at some of the camera raw features in CS4. I have launched bridge which allows me to browse and quickly see several images and I am just going to go ahead and command click here on a couple of images to open them. I have got four selected and I can press return. Now when Photoshop detects a raw file, it is going to use raw to open them up. You will notice some very important changes here within the image. One of those options is to actually limit an adjustment using a gradient. So I can use a graduated filter and click on it and say that I want to do an exposure adjustment over distance. I will set that to negative six. Now when I click and drag, I am defining the range of the adjustment. You can do at an angle if you need to or drag straight down and it does a nice graduated falloff.

We can go ahead and grab the starting point if we need to and what you are seeing here is that it is doing a graduated adjustment over the distance from here to here. And this is nice if we need to, we can actually edit this and just pull that down a bit and it is doing essentially a pull down in the exposure area up at the top of the frame and then a gradual falloff as it gets to the bottom of the frame. Click the hand tool there to exit that, now that is nice. The ability to make a gradual adjustment while you develop the file ensures that you can take advantage of changes for example from a skyline or maybe a lighting source that you need to accommodate for. But there is a lot more that we can do.

With inside camera raw here, we also have that vibrance adjustment we talked before. Vibrance is a useful way to pop colors while preserving some of the more subtle details. It works great for skin tones or colors like red where doing too much of a saturation adjustment would actually lose detail in the image. So that vibrance adjustment comes in handy there and really makes the colors pop without losing the details inside of our image.

Let us go ahead and switch to another image to see some other important changes inside a camera raw 5. I can click on an image here and actually apply a bit of vignette adjustment. Let us go ahead and switch over to the lens correction tab and actually put a little bit of vignette controls. Now normally we have lens vignette and you can darken the edges or open it up and that was a useful way if you are trying to accommodate for maybe the hood being on the lens, got a little darker at the edges. Or maybe just a vignette for stylistic purposes.

The challenge though is when you start to add a crop. So you put the vignette on and you grab the crop tool and you crop the image and you notice that it did the darkening up here but down here not so much. That is because the vignette controls were only being used for the actual camera lens. So that is fine if you want to use those controls to remove a little bit of a vignette that is in the image itself but what you want to take advantage of is the post crop vignette which is a very useful way to stylize the image, darkening the edges to draw the viewers eye towards the center.

This way we can go ahead and darken it and you will see that it gets darker at the edges respecting the actual crop. And here we pushed it pretty far, we will tweak midpoint there and that is a very stylized way to push the viewer’s eye towards the center of the screen. So that post crop vignette is useful if you want to harness a vignette for a stylization to the image. Let us see a couple more things.

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