Improving your images with the Basic controls

Let's take a look at how we can start to use Adobe Camera Raw in order to improve one of our photographs. We'll be working with this picture here, and this is a picture straight out of the camera. And this image, it needs a little bit of help. So let's go ahead and select that photograph, and then let's navigate to our File pull down menu, and here we're going to choose open in Camera Raw. Now, whenever you launch Camera Raw, you almost always want to work in Camera Raw in full screen mode. To access full screen mode press the F key or click on this icon, here. In this way, we can really focus in on our photograph and we can make better improvements because we have a larger preview of the image. Next, let's take a look at some of our panels.

Now, if we click on these icons here, we can access different controls. We're going to start off by taking a look at the Basic panel. Because this is where the magic happens. And this is where we're going to spend the majority of our time in Adobe Camera Raw. Let's start off at the top. At the top we have some controls which allow us to dial in white balance and color temperature and tint. Now, I'm going to be talking more about these controls in the next movie. So for now, I just want to highlight that we can use these sliders in order to change the overall color. Here, it's more cool.

Or in this case, we can make it more warm. If ever you want to reset one of these sliders, we'll just double-click the little icon. And that works with any of the sliders that we have here in Camera Raw. Alright. Well, next let's take a look at some of our controls. Which allow us to modify the brightness or exposure, the contrast, the shadows, and so on. The first slider that we have is Exposure. This one allows us to make really dramatic adjustments. And let me show you how. If we click and drag this to the left, we can darken the image so that it's almost completely black.

Click an drag to the right. An here you can see we can brighten this dramatically. So in this case you can see how you can use this slider in order to brighten or darken your photograph. Let's click an drag to the right, in order to brighten it up just a bit. Next we have the Contrast slider. Drag to the left and you can decrease the constrast. Drag to the right and you can increase. This image already has quite a bit of contrast. So I'm going to drag this to the right just a bit. Then we have our Highlight slider. Now our highlight slider allows us to deal with the brightest areas of our image.

In this case the sky and also the ocean. If we drag this to the right, we can brighten that area up. If we drag this to the left, well we can darken that. In this way, we have nice detail in the brighter areas of our photograph. This highlights slider can help you to correct those issues where you have over exposure. And you just need to darken up certain areas, as I needed to do here with this photograph. Next we have a few sliders which I like to think of as a bit more subtle. Our shadows and our whites and let me show you why.

Remember when I talked about exposure and how I said exposure is really dramatic. It allows us to brighten and darken in really strong ways. Well whites too allows us to brighten or darken, but it's more subtle. Here if I drag this to the right, sure it brightens the image but not as dramatically. As I drag this to the left, sure it darkens the photograph but again, not as dramatically. This allows us to work with these tones in our images in a bit more subtle ways. So here I'll just drag this to the right just to touch. Then we have our shadows. Again, this is a bit more of a subtle control.

It allows us to either brighten or darken our shadow areas. Drag to the left, and we can darken the shadows, drag to the right, and I can brighten those up. In this case, this adjustment really helps out this photograph. Then we have our control which allows us to work with the darkest tones in our image. Whereas highlights worked with the brightest tones, well blacks it works with the darkest tones. Here as I click and drag to the left, I can create deep and rich blacks. Or if I want to brighten those up a little bit I can drag this to the right. In this way you can see that you can use these controls in order to make some significant improvements to your photographs.

Here lets take a look at the before and after. To do so press the P key or click on this icon right here. When I click on this icon I can see here is the before and then click again and now here is the after. Alright, well as you can see we have significantly improved this image. Last but not least I want to modify the color temperature just a bit. So here I'll click and drag this to the right in order to warm this image up, just a bit. You know, sometimes you'll use these controls just to make subtle adjustments to your photographs. In other situations you'll use these controls, in order to make really dramatic improvements, or to create interesting and creative effects. Well either way, we're starting to see how we can use Camera Raw to modify our photographs in really fascinating ways.

Well after you've dialed in the settings that you want for your photograph. Next what you want to do is move down to the base of the camera Raw interface, and here's where we have a few different options. We can either choose to save this image, and if we click on this option, it will open up a dialog. And here we can save the file out as a different file format by choosing an option here. We can also define a location where we want to save this particular file. Now my place I don't want to save this out as a different file format rather I want to keep in this RAW format. In order to do that and in order to apply the settings which we have created. All that we need to do is to simply click done and it'll then save those settings. On the other hand, another option might be to click on the Open image button. if we click on open image, it will then open this file with these Camera Raw setting applied, and it will open that file inside of Photoshop. So, depending on your work flow, in regards to where you want to go next. You want to choose the appropriate option.

Again to reiterate, we can either choose Save Image, if we want to save this out in a different file format. Or we can choose Done in order to save and apply these settings. Or, we can choose Open Image to save and apply these settings, and to open an image with these settings applied inside of PhotoShop. Alright, well here I simply want to save and apply the settings, so I'll click Done. That will then exit out of Camera Raw. An now here in Bridge we'll see an updated version of our image with those Camera Raw settings applied.