TipSquirrel » ACR

A Real World Camera Raw and Photoshop Workflow

Richard Harrington — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:26:28 +0000

In this exclusive to TipSquirrel.com video, Rich Harrington takes us through a real world scenario using Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop.

Download the original file here if you’d like to follow along.

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Shadow and Highlights with Adobe Camera Raw

Richard Harrington — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 06:00:00 +0000

In this follow-up to last week’s video, Rich Harrington teaches us how to fix clipped shadows, overblown highlights, and soft detail when working with photos shot under low lift conditions.

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Mastering Adobe Camera Raw

Richard Harrington — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 06:00:00 +0000

In this made for TipSquirrel.com video, Rich Harrington explores the power of Adobe Camera Raw. Here Rich has a real world example to work though with amazing outcomes.

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Vintage Effect in Adobe Camera RAW

Gavin Hoey — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:50:50 +0000

Vintage photo effects are all the rage in photography at the moment. Often they created in mobile apps or in Photoshop, but in this tutorial I’m going to show you a simple vintage effect that can be applied to images inside Adobe Camera RAW.
Aged and vintage effects tend to have a few things in common. First the image tends to lose some of its contrast and then there’s the trademark colour shift which happens in both the shadows and the highlights. All of that can be created with just a few clicks of the mouse in Adobe Camera RAW, but as show in the video, after the basic effect has been created you’ll need to fine tune the effect for your personal taste.

Towards the end of the video I’ll show you a couple of great effects to further enhance the image by adding some film style grain and a simple rounded corner border.

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Accessing ACR from Photoshop

TipSquirrel — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:03:25 +0000

Sometimes I come across something that changes the way I use Photoshop and today I share one such thing.

I’m a fan of Adobe Camera Raw and it’s where I like to start my editing but what if you’re working with a PSD file?No worries, there’s a way to access Adobe Camera Raw right from inside Photoshop.

Can’t See The Video? Click Here

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A Quick Look at Vignettes in Adobe Camera Raw

TipSquirrel — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 05:00:00 +0000

In this video I take a look at the old and new vignette settings in Adobe Camera Raw.
Previously designed to remove unwanted vignettes from images they have become part of the artistic toolbox of the photographer.

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Using Parametric Curves in ACR 6 to Improve Contrast

Dan Moughamian — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 05:00:00 +0000

When you need to improve the contrast in your raw photos, Parametric Curves are a great way to simplify the thought process and task of making a Curves adjustment. Instead of guessing or arbitrarily placing your points along an abstract line, you use special Histogram widgets to define which tones constitute “highlights”, “middle tones”, and “shadows”. From there making your correction is just a matter of moving a few sliders!

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Adobe Digital Imaging How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques for Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3, and Camera Raw 6

Adobe Digital Imaging How-Tos: Essential Techniques for Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3, and Camera Raw 6 is a concise, economical, current, and informed full-color guide to the key techniques for working with digital images. Readers choose the How-Tos guide when they want immediate access to just what they need to know to get results

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Blurring the Background with Adobe Camera Raw

Dan Moughamian — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 06:10:39 +0000

For this tutorial we’ll take a look at how we can add a soft glow to the background of our raw images, using ACR’s local adjustment and masking tools, without softening the subject area. This technique can also be used in Lightroom.

Blurring the Background with ACR6 from Colortrails on Vimeo.

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Black and White Film Grain in Photoshop and Lightroom

Dan Moughamian — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 05:12:42 +0000

For this new Colortrails tutorial, you’ll see how easy it is to create a classic BW film grain look in ACR 6. This technique also works in Lightroom 3.

Remember to join us again on Monday for the start of our Lightroom 3 series!

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Exposure Blending with Smart Objects

Michael Hoffman — Tue, 25 May 2010 04:45:00 +0000

Last week, we looked at creating copies of Smart Objects in Photoshop, and we saw that regular copies are linked together in a special way such that when you update one Smart Object, you update ALL the copies of Smart Objects. We put this principle to work in creating a Picture Package template that was completely reusable.

This week, we’ll ask the question once again: When is a copy not a copy? When it is a copy of a Smart Object! We are going to create Smart Object copies in a such a way that they are completely unlinked, independent and separate, and each of these copies will be able to be changed without impacting the other.

Let’s start with this image of a Royal Tern fishing. In this case, we want to have our subject be as sharp and well-defined as possible, while we try to completely avoid sharpening the sky – as that will emphasize the noise inherent in the blue channel:

Please note that these images are resized to fit within this page’s width – but you can and should click to enlarge to see the details we are discussing.

We’ll go ahead and open this from Bridge CS5 by highlighting the file and pressing Ctrl-R/Cmd-R to open the image in Adobe Camera Raw. In the ACR dialog box, I’m faced with a dilemma: I want the bird to be sharp, but sharpening creates very visible noise in the sky:

The new luminance noise reduction features in CS5 work wonders on the sky, but even with detail protection active, the bird’s body is turned into a blotchy mess when we crank up the noise reduction:

Within ACR is a great feature, the Adjustment Brush, that provides great control over many parameters and lets you paint in the effect where you please. However, the Adjustment Brush (at least in the latest version) can’t control the noise reduction setting. We need a way to develop this RAW image twice – once for the sky, and once for the detail – and Smart Objects will provide the means.

Let’s leave the noise reduction up, and open this as a Smart Object in Photoshop by holding the Shift Key, and clicking “Open Object” in the ACR dialog window. The Smart Object is prepared and appears in the Layers panel, identified with the Smart Object “package” icon. I’ve renamed this layer “Smooth Sky:”

Now, we need to make a copy of this Smart Object and change the develop settings to sharpen for the subject, the bird. However, as we saw last week, copying a Smart Object creates a “live link” between the two layers, so any changes made to one are seen in the other. Unless…

The answer is to copy using a different command. Select the following command:

Layer > Smart Objects > New Smart Object via Copy

This will create a brand new, unlinked, completely independent Smart Object. I changed the name of this one to “Sharp Bird:”

Now, we choose the Sharp Bird layer, double click the icon to re-open the image in ACR, and change the settings to sharpen the detail of the subject, ignoring the sky:

Now, add a black layer mask to hide this entire layer, by holding Alt and clicking the “Add Layer Mask” icon, or by choosing Layer > Layer Mask > Hide All. Then, using a white brush, paint back in the sharp areas of the bird, focusing especially on the eyes, beak and feather detail:

You can, of course, get as ambitious as you want in creating the mask for the sharpened layer, even going as far as to create an edge mask to reveal sharpening only in the areas where there are well-defined edges (but that’s a topic for another Tip). Be careful to avoid letting any of the sharpened area of the sly show, you may need to go back in and touch up any areas that spill over. Here are the final results:

Smooth sky, blurry subject:

Sharp subject, noisy sky:

Combination using two Smart Objects and a layer mask:

Now you’ve seen two ways to create Smart Object copies – one, maintaining the link between the copies, and today, this technique, which severs the link and allows complete independence. Give it a try and see what you can do!

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