Accessing the Camera Raw preferences

Before we start to work with Camera RAW, I want to take a look at, here, how we can access the Camera Raw Preferences by way of Adobe Bridge or Adobe Photoshop. So let's start off in Bridge. Here, you can navigate to the Adobe Bridge pulldown menu and then choose Camera Raw Preferences. Here, you can see you have different preferences for Camera Raw, and we can customize those here. Yet before we actually do that, let's also take a look at how we can access these in Photoshop. So to go to Photoshop--we'll click on the Boomerang icon--and in Photoshop, if you go to your pulldown menu and choose Preferences and then File Handling, you'll notice in this area of the Preferences, about halfway down the page, there is a button for Camera Raw Preferences.

Click on this, and it will open up that same exact dialog. So again, it's just two different ways to access the same settings. Let's take a look at our Preferences. Now for the most part these Default Preferences are good to go, straight out of the box. So there's not a lot that we're going to change here, if really anything. Yet I do want to walk through these different preferences so that you have a working understanding of some of the more important preferences. One of the first ones is this: Save image settings in Sidecar XMP files. This is critical.

In this way, as you modify an image with Camera Raw, all those XMP settings will be saved right next door to that image. So that if you were to copy it to another hard drive, those settings would go with it. The other option is to Save these settings in the Camera Raw database. Well, this isn't a good idea because if you were to copy the file to another hard drive, well, you would lose all of those Camera Raw Settings. So again, I recommend you leave that default setting turned on. The next thing I want to highlight are some Default Image Settings.

The one that you want to leave checked on, again, is the default setting of auto apply the grayscale mix. This will give you a good starting point when converting your images to black and white. Finally, I want to jump down to JPEG and TIFF Handling. You know that you can process all sorts of different file types with Adobe Camera Raw. Two file types are JPEG and TIFF. Here, you can define how you want Photoshop to open up these files. Do you want it to Automatically open these files in Camera Raw, if they have already been modified by Camera Raw? Or on the other hand, you could disable this JPEG support so that if you have JPEGs, they will just go straight to Photoshop, regardless of whether they have been modified with Camera Raw or not.

Or on the other side of the spectrum, you could choose to Automatically open all supported JPEGs. Therefore, if you simply open up a JPEG, it will first go to Camera Raw before Photoshop. In My Opinion, the best preference, again, is the default option to automatically open these with settings. That is, to open the files which you have already previously worked on inside of Adobe Camera Raw. The same thing goes for TIFFs. I just want to highlight these different options so that you can choose the appropriate preference here which matches your workflow in the way that you want to work with Adobe Camera Raw.

Now that we've taken a look at these preferences, let's go ahead and dig into how we can work with Camera Raw. And let's do that in the next movie.