From the course: Photoshop 2020 One-on-One: Fundamentals

Introducing Camera Raw - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2020 One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Introducing Camera Raw

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- As I mentioned a few times now, Photoshop includes a plugin called Camera Raw. One day, it should probably just be fully integrated into Photoshop. Don't ask me how, it should just be part of the program. But for now, Photoshop and Camera Raw are separate and distinct. Imagine that the act of editing an image is somehow like being a passenger on an airplane, in which case, Photoshop is the pilot and Camera Raw is, well not exactly the co-pilot but a really great flight attendant. Camera Raw's primary purpose is to take a raw photograph and develop it. Now you may be thinking, what's a raw photograph? It's all the pixels that your digital camera captures without doing anything to them, not processed or purified, just raw pixels. The idea is this. You can let your camera capture a plain old JPEG file, in which case your camera will do the image editing for you. The photograph will be cooked, it will be baked and if that's what you want, there's no reason to learn cooking or baking or for that matter, Photoshop. Did that sound like I was scolding you? I think I was. Whereas, if you capture a raw photograph, not R-A-W in all caps by the way. I don't know why people do that, just regular old lowercase raw. Oh man, I'm getting really scoldy now but then see, then you can develop that raw photograph exactly the way you want, with the help of Photoshop's amazing flight attendant, Camera Raw. Okay, so I've really been slingin' the analogies here but I have one more. A raw image is like a film negative, it hasn't been developed. In the analog world, you would take your film negatives to Walgreens. In a digital world, you take your negatives to Camera Raw, which shows you the results immediately and doesn't print the results as gift cards or coffee mugs. Okay, so back to the airplane. A pilot does things a flight attendant can't, sure but a flight attendant likewise does things that a pilot can't. Camera Raw does things that Photoshop can't. For example, edit multiple raw photographs at the same time as I'm about to show you.

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