What Is Adobe Camera Raw Used For?

What Is Adobe Camera Raw And Why Should I Use It?

Have you ever wondered what Adobe Camera Raw is good for? In this video, I’m gonna show you how to start up Adobe Camera Raw and some easy ways to use it, coming up. Hey everybody, this is Charles Cabrera helping you get started with Photoshop, Lightroom and photography.

Why Should I Use Camera Raw To Edit Photos?

So let’s start off by launching Adobe Camera Raw. You get a raw file from your camera, that’s a file that your camera has not processed. All the information about your photo is there in this raw file. And if you right-click, and in this case, I’m on a Mac, say, get info. What I want you to make sure is that the extension here, whatever it is of your file. It could be for CR2, it could be like a Canon camera or KRW’s a Sony camera, but make sure it says, open with Adobe Photoshop default. You can change that here. That way, when you double-click on it, it’ll open in Camera Raw in Photoshop. Camera Raw is a plug-in piece of software in Adobe Photoshop. Camera Raw allows us to edit enhanced files from our digital cameras. You can also open up JPEG and TIFF files in Adobe Camera Raw. But this is what the Camera Raw interface looks like, very similar to Lightroom, it has all these different sliders. So most digital cameras will allow you to pick your photos in raw and/or JPEG file formats. So the raw file contains unprocessed picture data for your digital image. Camera Raw can also open JPEG and TIFF files. The thing about TIFF files and JPEGs, all the things like brightness and color are kinda baked into the file, whereas a raw file contains unprocessed picture data. One of the main advantages of editing your photo in Camera Raw is that the file is not changed, as opposed to if you edited it in Photoshop. It is a non-destructive way of editing your photo. So I have this photo open here in Camera Raw. If I make a change to any of these sliders here in Camera Raw, if I say, done, down here and go that file, in the file system, she has created another file right here. That file has all the information with the changes that I made. So if I go back into Camera Raw, these changes are still there. All the changes are stored in another file, as metadata. But if you delete this file and go back in, you’ve lost all the changes. But what you can also do, is if you wanna reset, you can hit, alt/option, and the cancel turns into a reset button and that resets your file back to the way it was. So again, the original file is left untouched.

How to use Adobe Camera Raw

So let’s see some of the things that you can use Adobe Camera Raw for. You can use this, auto, here and if you wanna actually get a start with some adjustments, you can see that Adobe Camera Raw is made a guess at what this photo should look like. Like I say, it’s a starting point. And you can come in and readjust things to your liking. And another tool that you can use is the adjustment brush. Now, this allows you to make adjustments in certain places. Like for instance, if I wanna brush here and make the sky a little bit darker, I could do that. And if say, new, I have a new point that I’m gonna make. And I can come down here and I can use any of these sliders here and change them. Maybe I wanna make the exposure a little bit higher or darken right here. Or if I wanna lighten it up, I can lighten it up like that. When you hover over these points, it shows you where the adjustment’s made. If I wanna create a new point down here, I say, new, back in brush down here. Even after I brush, I can lighten it up and you could see it’s lightening up the foreground. But that’s the adjustment brush which allows you to target certain areas of the photo. Now, if you don’t wanna use Lightroom to do this and you don’t wanna manage your photos at all in Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw is good to use because you can open up your raw photo from anywhere, and make your adjustments and say, done, and you get out of Adobe Camera Raw. If you say, open object, it will open it in Photoshop and it will be a copy. If I say, open object, it opens it up in Photoshop with all the changes that I made from Adobe Camera Raw, and I can change this photo in Photoshop but the original photo is left untouched. This is now operating on a copy from your file system. In fact, now, if you try and close this, it’s gonna want you to save it, so you’re gonna save another copy right here. In Camera Raw, we will work with JPEG files. If I’m in Lightroom and I open up a file, now if come up here to filter, it’s says, Camera Raw filter. So I can open up Camera Raw from here, and work on it and use any of these adjustments that I used from the raw file, but now I’m operating on a JPEG. Though you can still use Camera Raw, and JPEGs or TIFFs, and you can bring it in Photoshop and still work on it. And if you say, okay, it’s made those changes here. And so, you may be wondering, “Well why not do these changes in Lightroom?” Well, not everybody uses Lightroom, and if you just wanna get in and edit a raw photo and all you need is similar adjustments that are in Lightroom, well, this is a quick way to do it. In here, you have lens correction. You could remove chromatic aberration, enable profile corrections. In here, this is a Sony camera, so you can see that it’s applied the lens profile to this photo. So in this photo, another quick-win for Adobe Camera Raw, you can use the white balance tool. In this case, this photo, it was set to white balance fluorescent, just for demonstration purposes, but you can use this eyedropper here. And if you do have a card like this to help you with white balance, it is ideal for taking a photo. If you do this first or if there’s some other point in the photo where it is almost white or 50% gray, something like that, that’ll do. With the eyedropper, just click, and there we go, the white balance is corrected in Adobe Camera Raw. Another use for Adobe Camera Raw, is the spot removal tool. So you could just click and it’s getting rid of these spots here. Of course, you can move these around and get different angles, but this is something that’s a very helpful tool, especially if you need to get in somewhere fast and you just get out a couple of spots. You can use it for blemishes, but here, we’re getting all this stuff off the sidewalk in front of this beautiful art.

How to create a Panorama with Adobe Camera Raw

And something else kinda fun that you can do in Adobe Camera Raw, is a panorama. So if I double-click on these images that I have highlighted, it’s gonna open them all in Adobe Camera Raw at the same time. Now of course, you can do this in Lightroom too, but we’re just showing you quick-wins here in Camera Raw. I select all of them and go up to the top here. This is a filmstrip, so there’s a menu here, and its says, merged panorama. Click on that and Adobe Camera Raw is merging all these photos into a panoramic view. I’m going to click this here, where it says, fill edges, and all those edges down there are filled in. And when I say merge, it is going to come up with a dialogue that I can save that merged photo. So now it’s on my file system and there is my panorama. And I could adjust it here, any way I want. If I want to change highlights, shadows, exposure, whatever I wanna do to it. I can also say, done, and there we have it.

How to create HDR with Adobe Camera Raw

And so, another use of Adobe Camera Raw is creating HDR. So I am clicking on these three exposures, right here, and here they are in the filmstrip. And the top one seems to be in the middle somewhere as far as exposure. The middle one seems to be darkest and then we have a real bright exposure. So if I highlight them all, come up here to the menu and say, merge to HDR, merging HDR preview. Here is our preview right here, and we say, merge. Again, as in the demo for the panorama, you could save a new raw file, and there is our HDR and we’ve got the full dynamic range. And we can open it up in Photoshop, if we want, or we can make any adjustments we want, right here. And when we’re done, we have a new raw file. So now to the question of the day. What do you think of Adobe Camera Raw? Are you gonna start using it more? Let me know in the comments below.