Improving multiple images at one time

One of the main advantages of using Camera Raw is that is allows you to make non destructive adjustments to your photographs. Yet another important advantage which is often overlooked is speed. Not only can you work quickly in Adobe Camera Raw, but you can also process multiple images at one time. Lets take a look at how we can do that here with these three photographs. These are images that I captured with my iPhone. And I like the images, but they are all a bit dull. What I want to do is increase the overall exposure, the contrast, and the color saturation.

In order to work on all four photos at once, click into one. Then hold down the Shift key and click into the last image. In order to select all of those files. Next, navigate to the File pull down menu, and here we'll choose Open in Camera Raw. This will then open these four images up in Camera Raw. Now, so far as we've worked with multiple files, we've talked about how we can click through these different images. Yet, one of the things that we haven't talked about is that we can choose one image. Then we can click on this button: select all.

This will then select all the files. Now as we make adjustments to this image those will be applied to the other photographs as well. So here I'll go ahead and make an adjustment. In this case I'm going to modify the overall temperature. As I make that adjustment, you can see how that's applied to the other images as well. Well, this isn't the look I'm going for. So I double click that slider, to take it back to default setting. What I do want to do here though is increase the contrast significantly. I also want to brighten up the overall exposure.

In addition, I want to add a little bit of clarity, some vibrance and also some color saturation. Again, some pretty simple adjustment. Well, now that I've made those adjustments, let's take a look at our preview before and after. Here's before, and then now here's after. And by making adjustments, with all of these files selected allows us to work quickly on multiple images. Another way that we can do this is to click into a single image. Then, we can make an adjustment. For example, I want my blacks to be darker, so here I'll go ahead and decrease the amount on my black slider. That looks much better.

I'm also going to increase the whites and also the highlights. I'm looking to create a real graphic look. Now, if I want to apply these settings, to the other images. Now what you can do Is click on the button for Select all and then click on the option to synchronize. When you click on this button, it will open up the Synchronize dialogue. And here we have the ability to synchronize specific controls or settings. If you click on your pull down menu, you can select White balance. Here it would just synchronize the white balance settings for all of these images or on the other hand you can choose Everything.

What I want to do is synchronize everything that I've done across all four of these images. So here in order to do that simply click OK. And it will then began to update and synchronize all of those files. So as you can see here, you can really easily work with multiple files. And as you can imagine when you have images which were captured in similar settings. Well, this can really speed up your workflow by leaps and bounds. All right, well in order to apply all of these settings, all that we need to do is to simply click Done in order to exit Camera Raw.

Then back in Adobe Bridge we'll see the updated versions of these photographs.