ptg 71Chapter 3Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Before After Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 72 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step One: Open a photo that has signs of chromatic aberrations. If they’re going to appear, they’re usually right along an edge in the image that has lots of contrast (like along the edges of these rock formations). Press Z to get the Zoom tool and zoom in on an area where you think (or see) the fringe might be fairly obvious. Here, there’s red fringe running along the edges of the rocks. To remove this, start by click- ing on the Lens Corrections icon (the sixth icon from the left) at the top of the Panel area. Step Two: In the Profile tab, turn on the Enable Profile Corrections checkbox and Photo- shop tries to remove the color fringe based on your lens’ make and model (it learns this from your image’s EXIF data. See page 66 for more on this). If the image still needs correction, try the C. Aberration slider under Amount. If the automatic way doesn’t work for you, try getting rid of the fringe manually. Chromatic aberration is a fancy name for that thin line of colored fringe that sometimes appears around the edges of objects in photos. Sometimes the fringe is red, sometimes green, sometimes purple, blue, etc., but all the time it’s bad, so we might as well get rid of it. Luckily, Camera Raw has a built-in fix that does a pretty good job. Fixing Chromatic Aberrations (That Colored-Edge Fringe) SCOTT KELBY Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 73Chapter 3Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Three: At the top of the Lens Corrections panel, click on the Manual tab. Down in the Chromatic Aberration section, there are only two sliders and you just drag toward the color you want to fix (they’re labeled—the top one fixes red or cyan fringe; the bottom fixes blue or yellow fringe). But before you begin dragging sliders, you may want to click on the Detail icon (the third icon from the left at the top of the Panel area) and lower the Sharpening Amount to 0% (if you added any or are fixing a RAW image), because sharpening can also cause color fringes to appear (and you want to make sure you’re curing the right problem). Step Four: Start by moving the top Chromatic Aber ration slider all the way to the right (toward cyan), which reduces the red fringe. Here, there’s still just a little color fringe, so try choosing All Edges from the Defringe pop-up menu, which seems to do the trick. TIP: Editing TIFFs and JPEGs Although you can edit TIFFs and JPEGs in Camera Raw, there is one “gotcha!” Once you edit one of those in Camera Raw, if you click the Done button (rather than opening the image in Photoshop), you’ll need to always open that photo from within Camera Raw to see the edits you made. That’s because those edits live only inside of Camera Raw; if you bypass Camera Raw and open an edited TIFF or JPEG directly into Photoshop, the Camera Raw edits you made earlier won’t be visible. Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 74 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step One: Here, you can see the dark areas in the corners (that’s the bad vignetting). This is normally caused by the camera’s lens, so don’t blame yourself (unless you bought a really cheap lens—then feel free to give yourself as much grief as you can bear). To remove this vignetting from the corners, start by clicking on the Lens Corrections icon (the sixth icon from the left) at the top of the Panel area. In the Profile tab, turn on the Enable Profile Corrections checkbox and Photoshop tries to remove the edge vignetting based on your lens’ make and model (it learns this from your image’s EXIF data. See page 66 for more on this). If the image still needs correcting, try the Vignetting slider under Correction Amount. Step Two: If the automatic way just isn’t working, do it manually by clicking on the Manual tab. In the Lens Vignetting section, click on the Amount slider and drag it to the right until the vignetting in the corners disap- pears. Once you move the Amount slider, the Midpoint slider beneath it becomes available and it determines how wide the vignetting repair extends into your photo, so drag it to the right to expand the lightening farther toward the center of your photo. If you’re looking at a photo and the corners of the photo appear darker, that’s lens vignetting. Generally, I look at it this way: If it’s just the corners, and they’re just a little bit dark, that’s a problem and I fix it. However, sometimes I want to focus the viewer’s attention on a particular area, so I create a vignette, but I expand it significantly beyond the corners, so it looks like an intentional soft spotlight effect. Here’s how to fix (or create) vignettes: Edge Vignetting: How to Fix It and How to Add It for Effect SCOTT KELBY Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 75Chapter 3Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics Continued The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Three: Now for the opposite: adding vignetting to focus attention (by the way, in the “Special Effects for Photographers” chapter, I also show you how to get the same effect outside of Camera Raw). This time, in the Lens Vignetting section you’re going to drag the Amount slider to the left, and as you drag left, you’ll start to see vignett- ing appear in the corners of your photo. But since it’s just in the corners, it looks like the bad kind of vignetting, not the good kind, so you’ll need to go on to the next step. Step Four: To make the vignetting look more like a soft spotlight falling on your subject, drag the Midpoint slider quite a bit to the left, which increases the size of the vignetting and creates a soft, pleasing effect that is very popular in portraiture, or anywhere you want to draw attention to your subject. That’s it—how to get rid of ’em and how to add ’em. Two for the price of one! SCOTT KELBY Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 76 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Five: So far, adding the vignette has been pretty easy—you just drag a couple of sliders, right? But where you’ll run into a problem is when you crop a photo, because you’re also cropping the vignett- ing effect away, as well (after all, it’s an edge effect, and now the edges are in a different place, and Camera Raw doesn’t automatically redraw your vignette at the newly cropped size). So, start by applying a regular edge vignette (as shown here). Step Six: Now, let’s get the Crop tool (C) from the toolbar, crop that photo in pretty tight, and you can see what the problem is—the vignette effect we just added is pretty much gone (the dark edges were cropped away). Note: Adobe originally added the ability to add a vignette after you’ve cropped an image (called Post Crop Vignetting) back in Photoshop CS4, but the problem was when you added it, it didn’t look nearly as good as the regular non-cropped vignetting (even though it offered more control, as seen at the bottom of the Effects panel shown in Step Seven). It kind of looked just like adding muddy dark gray to the edges. Yeech! SCOTT KELBY Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 77Chapter 3Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Seven: Let’s go add a post-crop vignette by clicking on the Effects icon (the fourth icon from the right) and, under Post Crop Vignetting, dragging the Amount slider to the left to darken the edges, then using the Midpoint slider to choose how far into your image this vignetting will extend (as seen here). Now, here’s what they’ve added in CS5 (it makes all the difference in the world): At the top of the Post Crop Vignetting section is a pop-up menu with three different types of vignetting: Highlight Priority (which I think far and away looks the best, and the most like the original vignetting we applied back in Step Five), which tries to maintain the highlight details as the edges are darkened; Color Priority tries to maintain the color while the edges are darkened (it’s okay, but not great); and Paint Overlay is the old method from CS4 that almost everybody hated (apparently somebody liked it, because it’s still there). I would stay away from this one altogether. Step Eight: Below the Midpoint slider is the Round- ness slider that gives you control over the roundness of the vignetting (lower the Feather amount to 0, so you can get a better idea of what the Roundness slider does). The farther to the right you drag, the rounder the shape gets, and when you drag to the left, it actually becomes more like a large, rounded-corner rect- angle. The Feather slider determines how soft that oval you created with the Roundness slider becomes. I like it really soft, so it looks more like a spotlight, so I usually drag this slider quite a bit over to the right (here I dragged it over to 73, but I wouldn’t hesitate to go higher, depending on how it looks on the photo). Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 78 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step One: There are three advantages to converting your RAW files to Adobe DNG: (1) DNG files are generally about 20% smaller. (2) DNG files don’t need an XMP sidecar file to store Camera Raw edits, metadata, and keywords—the info’s embedded into the DNG file, so you only have one file to keep track of. And, (3) DNG is an open format, so you’ll be able to open them in the future (as I mentioned in the intro above). If you have a RAW image open in Camera Raw, you can save it as an Adobe DNG by clicking the Save Image button (as shown here) to bring up the Save Options dialog (seen in the next step). Note: There’s really no advantage to saving TIFF or JPEG files as DNGs, so I only convert RAW photos. Adobe created DNG (an open archival format for RAW photos) because, at this point in time, each camera manufacturer has its own proprietary RAW file format. If, one day, one or more manufacturers abandon their proprietary format for something new (like Kodak did with their Photo CD format), will we still be able to open our RAW photos? With DNG, it’s not proprietary—Adobe made it an open archival format, ensuring that your negatives can be opened in the future, but besides that, DNG brings another couple of advantages, as well. The Advantages of Adobe’s DNG Format for RAW Photos SCOTT KELBY Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 79Chapter 3Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Two: When the Save Options dialog appears, at the bottom of the dialog, from the Format pop-up menu, choose Digital Negative (shown here), click Save, and you’ve got a DNG. TIP: Setting Your DNG Preferences Once you’ve converted to DNG, Camera Raw does give you a few preferences for working with these DNG files. Press Command-K (PC: Ctrl-K) to bring up Photoshop’s Preferences dialog, then click on File Handling in the column on the left side, and click on the Camera Raw Preferences button (or press Command-K when you have Camera Raw open). When the dialog appears, go to the DNG File Handling section (shown here). You’d choose Ignore Sidecar “.xmp” Files only if you use a different RAW processing application (other than Camera Raw or Lightroom), and you want Camera Raw to ignore any XMP files created by that application. If you turn on the Update Embedded JPEG Previews checkbox (and choose your preferred preview size from the pop-up menu), then any changes you make to the DNG will be applied to the preview, as well. Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 80 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step One: Here’s the original image of a red sculpture on a washed-out, cloudy blue sky, and what I’d like to do is tweak the color of that sky so it’s a richer blue, which would add a nice contrast to the red sculpture. You tweak individual colors, or ranges of color, in the HSL/Grayscale panel, so click on its icon at the top of the Panel area (it’s the fourth one from the left—circled here in red). Now, click on the Luminance tab (as shown here) to bring up the Luminance controls (which control how bright the colors appear). Step Two: The blue in the sky is washed out, so we need to bring some richness and depth back into the color, so drag the Blues slider way over to the left toward the darker blues (those color bars behind each slider give you an idea of what will happen when you drag a slider in a particular direction). Now drag the Aquas sliders to the left quite a bit, too (as shown here). Moving the Aquas slider added a little more satu- ration to the blue in the sky. How did I know this was going to do that? I had no idea. I just dragged each slider back and forth real quick to see what it would do. I know—it sounds awfully simple, but it works. In the next chapter, you’re going to learn how to paint an adjustment over any part of your image, but sometimes you need to affect an entire area (like you need the entire sky bluer, or the sand warmer, or a piece of clothing to be an entirely different color). In those cases, where you’re adjusting large areas, it’s usually quicker to use the HSL adjustments, which not only let you change color, but also let you change the saturation and the lightness of the color. It’s more powerful, and handy, than you might think. Adjusting or Changing Ranges of Color SCOTT KELBY Download from www.wowebook.com . Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Before After Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 72 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for. from www.wowebook.com ptg 73Chapter 3Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Three: At the top of the Lens Corrections panel, click on the Manual. www.wowebook.com ptg 79Chapter 3Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Two: When the Save Options dialog appears, at the bottom of the dialog,