Camera Raw Processing

In this digital photography tutorial we take a look at the raw camera processing.

Camera Raw Processing Okay, so here we are in Adobe Camera Raw. I’m just going to just go quickly go through some of the settings I use for this image. I kept the color temperature as it is straight from camera and sometimes I’ll adjust that but we’ve got quite a mixture of light in here. We got also the cool blues of the ambient light and mixed him with that, we’ve got also the daylight balance flash from the flash Canon inside the pumpkin head. We do make a lot of monsters mostly because the pumpkins skins are orange, it’s come out slightly warm, we don’t mind that. And we also got the warmth from the flash light. It’s really quite a mixture and so you know I could adjust this but I’m leaving it as it is for now. We can go and put reduction and do some more fine-tuning if you want to and the exposures are increased slightly here. If we hold on the alt key and drag this slider along, you can see where the highlights are clipping out. Now the actual head of the pumpkin is quite hard, it’s quite tempered out there. I don’t just like it as it is but I am asking to just go like that. We’ve got some bridged images that we shot some of the frames and I’m going to partly put a slightly darker pumpkin head onto this frame so nowhere as I would covered our self with that. I did use a recovery slider to just recover a little bit of highlight detail from there and like so. And what else we’ve got? The black, so I increase to 4, set to 4, we want it kind of keep low in mode in this picture. I don’t want a nice kind of well exposed open shadow to image. I bet I just want to soothe the scene at all. I think you got to consider that when we do some of the images, there is no such thing as a perfect exposure. It depends on what you want to convey on the picture, that’s how I preach the funny way. And, so yes, we can increase the contrast to 51, clarity was +90, vibrance +48, saturation + 32, so we’re keeping a lot of color in this picture, keeping it nice and punchy. And detail here we increase the luminance, noise reduction, the auto sheet is on 400 so I’ve increased that just to smooth out some of the drain or the noise, what you want to call it, slightly and also I tend to keep the color noise reduction up around 25. And the next one is the color adjustments in here and on the hue, I would adjust the hue of the yellows and also the blues and slightly we’ve made the yellows go a little bit more orangey and I’ve made the blues go a little bit more blue, rather than cyan. If I just slide this across, that goes like almost cyan. This one has got a little bit more blue. We don’t want get too far because it goes a bit just almost purple so just keep in across as far as we need to. I remember we kind of find too as much as we can if we take the first shot. We can almost adjust that a little bit further and I will get over there. The orange, I’ll just shift it a little bit as well just to adjust the pumpkin head and also I adjust the color of the grass here as well. The saturation, I’ve adjusted the saturation, the oranges, and the yellows slightly just to get them quite nice and desaturated. Luminance, what luminance does, what I’ve done with luminance in this set of images, I like to darken the blues so if I just drag this luminance slider across my blues, you can see that’s going quite dark. I was going a little bit flat there too far so I just drop this down so I just keep the sky now some dark and quite brooding. And so that’s that for those settings and the next one we’ve got on views is the lens correction and what I’ve done this one, you don’t need to touch this so we don’t want to but I find that the chromatic operation do tend to get a little bit of that and so the images from the one Ds Mark II so I tend to switch is onto all edges and that just takes care of that all pretty much anyway. I’m going to start, we’ve got lens vignetting now. I sometimes, well nearly always where I’m rechecking images, retouching images, it’s darken the edges of the picture. You can actually do this in a Adobe Camera Raw and if you noticed here, I’m just sliding this dark and you’ll see edges now sliding this down towards the darker end of the scale. You can also adjust the mid-point and that just allows the viewers just to go naturally, just center the image and it just darkens the edges. I want it too far because I’m always partly going to darken it a little bit in here in Photoshop in Post-Production but you can add that at that stage and I believe that was pretty much it for the Camera Raw settings so from here we can open this image up in Photoshop and let’s start doing some of the retouching.