Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Correcting Images in Camera Raw

As you learned in Chapter 2, Camera Raw is a powerful plug-in that converts images shot in raw format into editable pixels (before this conversion, the files are kind of like digital negatives—the image info is there, but it’s not in a form you can edit in Photoshop). Camera Raw—which works on JPEGs and TIFFs, too—also gives you tools that you can use to crop, straighten, and correct color and lighting. Since most of Camera Raw’s settings are slider-based, it’s hands down the easiest place to fix your images (and that’s why this section comes before the ones about Levels and Curves, which are—truth be told—100 times more confusing).

Note

You can also open the Camera Raw plug-in as a filter from within Photoshop, which is incredibly handy. The box on Using the Camera Raw Filter has the scoop.

The adjustments you make in Camera Raw plug-in are 100 percent nondestructive: Instead of applying them to your image, Camera Raw keeps track of them in a list it stores within the image or in a file called Sidecar XMP (could that name be more cryptic?). Simply put, you can undo anything you’ve done in Camera Raw whenever you want.

The Camera Raw plug-in is covered in several places throughout this book. Here’s a handy cheat sheet:

• Information about the raw file format: Working with Raw Files

• Opening files in Camera Raw: Opening Raw Files

• Cropping and straightening in Camera Raw: Cropping and Straightening in Camera Raw

• Going grayscale in Camera Raw: Going Grayscale in ...