Sharpening and saving from Camera Raw

In the next few movies, we'll be working with this photograph, and we'll focus in on two main topics. And those topics are workflow options and output sharpening. You notice we've discovered in this course? Camera Raw's an incredibly powerful tool. And because of that, there's some digital photographic workflows which actually begin and end in Camera Raw. And that's the type of workflow that we're going to focus in on in these movies. With this photograph, let's begin by zooming in on the image to 100%.

Then next, let's take a look at how we can change some of our workflow options and also apply some output sharpening. Alright, well here, go ahead and double click the zoom tool, which will take the photograph to 100%. That will show us a 1:1 view of the native file size, and here we can see all the details that we have to work with. Yet when it comes to thinking about our workflow before we start to change our exposure or contrast, or before we start to work in the detail panel and improve the sharpness or reduce the noise, we need to define the output file size.

To do so, we can click on the Workflow Options link or button right here, and this will open up the Workflow Options dialog. Let me move this over so we can focus in on the image a little bit. In this dialog, we'll focus in on three things. First, we can choose a color space, here, I'll select Adobe RGB 1998. Then we can choose to resize the photograph. When we click on this checkbox here, we have a few options. We can click from the pulldown menu and choose different criteria, I like to work with Long Edge.

Let's make a selection here and then let's change this, say to a different size, like six inches. This gives us a 4x6 photograph. The reason why this step is so important in regards to our workflow is it, this will then change how we view and evaluate the photograph. Notice how we change its size to a smaller size. It's showing us a 100% view of this image at this size and resolution. If we change the resolution, maybe to 72 pixels per inch, it shows us a much smaller photograph.

This will obviously change the amount and the detail that we work with when we're working with our sharpening or our noise reduction. So before you even start your workflow, it's essential that you define some of these values. Where it's really helpful, I should say, to define these values. With this photograph, let's go to an image which is ten inches wide, and 240 pixels per inch. This will give us a nice large photograph, it's about 6.6 by 10, at 240 pixels per inch.

The thing that I like about these controls is that as you make changes here, you see the changes on the photograph. The next set of controls, output sharpening, doesn't show us anything. It won't show us the results until we actually output the image. You know, we've talked a little bit about the difference between input and output sharpening before, but just as a reminder, input sharpening is foundational. That's a sharpening that we apply in the beginning of our workflow. Output sharpening, that's a step which is applied at the very end.

So here, when we output this image, we want to apply a little bit of sharpening. We can define between screen or different paper types, let's say that we're going to send this to a client. We'll print this image with matte paper, we'll make that selection. We also need to define the overall amount of the sharpening. And here again, three options, low, standard, or high. What I've found that in most situations, standard works best. So let's make that selection, and then click OK.

When we click OK, it simply then applies those workflow settings to the image. Keep in mind, we won't see any of the final output sharpening until the very end of our workflow. Yet nonetheless, we've taken an important essential first step in our workflow. Next, what we need to do is to dig a little bit deeper. What that will mean is working with some of our panels. For example, here in the basic panel, maybe we want to warm this image up a little bit, or increase some contrast and brighten up the shadows.

We go through all of our basic panels that we want to use. After we've done that, we'll go to a place like the detail panel, where we can improve the sharpness or maybe reduce some noise. Now it's important that we don't get too confused here. Remember that the detail panel is all about input sharpening. The output sharpening, we'll worry about in a little bit. Right now, we just want to improve the visual quality of the image here. We want it to look better on our screen when we're viewing it at 100%.

So in this case, there's a little bit of noise, but not a lot. The photograph is in pretty good shape. So I'll just bring this up ever so slightly. So I'm just going to bring these values up just a touch here. All images can use from a little bit of color noise reduction. So again, we have lower values with our noise controls. For the sharpening, what we'll do is bring that radius up to about 1. And then bring up the sharpening amount. We could bring out a little bit of detail if we want to. Might be nice to have some, some of the texture there in the photograph sharpened.

If we want to try to protect some of the larger areas and have it focus a little bit more on the edges, we can bring up the masking there. And with these values again, we're just hoping that this has a little snap. Here is the before, and then when we see the after, it may be difficult for you to see. But what I'm seeing on my monitor, just a little subtle snap, and it's improving the way the photograph works. And when it comes to our workflow, what we're doing is we're applying all these adjustments based on those workflow settings, which we defined here.

If along the way we decide, you know what, we actually want a resolution of 72, well, we can make that change here. But we'll need to go back and change these setting so that they look good at this 100% view. So again, just keep in mind that however you define those workflow options, those will then affect the way that you work in your other panels. And in particular, the way that you work in the detail panel because you want this to look good at 100%. Alright, well, I think we've come to a pretty good stopping point, because here we've focused in on some workflow elements.

We began by talking about how we can take advantage of the Workflow Options dialog. And then next, we looked at how we can start to work on the photograph, whether that's to work in the basic panel, or to improve the details over here in the detail panel. Now that we've accomplished these steps, we have some more work to do with this photograph. So let's leave this image open, and continue the conversation in the next movie.