Touring the Camera Raw user interface

The first thing that we need to do is familiarize ourselves with the Camera Raw interface. I'll select the iceberg image, and instead of double clicking on it, I'm going to click on the Open in Camera Raw icon. Or you can use the keyboard shortcut Cmd+R on the Mac or Ctrl+R on Windows. If you're not in full screen mode, be sure to click on the preview icon, up here to toggle. Here we are out of full screen mode, and here we are in full screen mode. You'll notice that the tools are along the top and as I hover my cursor on top of each one, it shows me not only the name of the tool, but also the keyboard shortcut associated with that tool.

So for example if I wanted to select the Crop tool all I need to do is tap the C key. If I want to move back to the Zoom tool all I need to do is tap the Z key. In the center area is the preview and in the lower left I can choose to either zoom in by clicking on the icons. To zoom in, zoom out, or we can select a variety of different zoom levels from the list, or I can use my keyboard shortcut Cmd+plus in order to zoom in, or Cmd+minus to zoom out.

On Windows, that'd be the Ctrl key. I can also use the shortcut, Cmd+0, to zoom in to fit on screen or Ctrl+0 on Windows. All of the different panels are here on the right. The basic panel is the default panel, and here's where we'll make all of our default adjustments to exposure and contrast, shadow and highlights, set our black and white points, as well as increase clarity, vibrance and saturation. We can also change the color temperature, and we have an option to have Camera Raw automatically adjust the image for us. The next panel over is the tone curve, where we have both the parametric tone curve editor, as well as a point curve.

Then we have a detail panel, which allows us to modify our sharpening as well as noise reduction. In the HSL and grey scale panel, we can choose to modify just a hue, saturation or luminosity value in our image. And we can also choose to convert our image to grey scale. In the next panel is split toning where we can add a color cast to our shadows or to our highlights and we can do this either to a color image or a black and white.

The next panel is for making lens corrections. We can go in and apply profile corrections to remove distortions caused by the lens. We can remove chromatic aberration and we can do both automatic as well as manual perspective corrections. In the effects panel we can add grain as well as a post crop vignette. We also have the ability to select different camera profiles in the camera calibration panel. We can create and save presets and we can save out snapshots. In the lower left, we have options to save out images as different file formats.

We have our work flow settings in the center, and on the lower right, we can choose whether we want to open the image in Photoshop, if we prefer to cancel out, or click done in order to save those settings with the image. When I click done you'll notice that I was returned back to Bridge, and we can see the settings icon, which tells me that this image has settings applied to it through Camera Raw. Now one small detail that I want to point out just to avoid any confusion, is the reason that I had you select the image, and then click the Camera Raw icon in order to open it.

Because I wanted to show you that this is going to enable you to make changes in Camera Raw in Bridge. And what I mean by that is when you make your changes to your image, and then you click done, you're actually returned directly back to Bridge. If you were to open the file by double-clicking on it. Then you can see Photoshop in the background there for a minute and if I made another change to my image, when I click done, it doesn't return me back to Bridge, instead it takes me to Photoshop.

So, if I wanted to get back to bridge, I could either use the File menu and choose Browse in Bridge. Or use the keyboard shortcut Cmd+Option+O or Ctrl+Alt+O on Windows. So I just wanted to make sure that if you're following along with your own files whether or not your working with raw or JPEG, if you select the option to Open in Camera Raw then you'll be sure that when you're finished and you click Done, you'll return back to Bridge. Whereas otherwise if you double-click a file to get to Camera Raw, then it would take you to Photoshop when you click Done.

And that's actually a feature, because if I have a limited system maybe that's not running very quickly, what I could do is I could select my raw files in Bridge and use the Camera Raw icon in order to open them in Bridge without having to run Photoshop. If you double-click on them, then you'll have Bridge running as well as Photoshop running. So, I know it's a small detail. And, for most people it won't make a difference. But, I didn't want you to be puzzled by the different behavior if you were using your own files in order to follow along.