Shooting Raw offers maximum control over variables such as exposure, contrast, colour, noise and sharpness. Mark Galer shares a typical RAW workflow, explaining step-by-step how to get maximum impact from your Raw images.
Most digital images benefit from some simple post-production adjustments to variables such as white balance, tone and sharpness.
A few years ago most photographers used the main editing workspace of Photoshop to make these changes. These days, however, many photographers prefer to use the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) interface (it’s available with Photoshop CS, Photoshop Elements and Photoshop Lightroom) to optimise both JPEG and Raw files. Unlike Photoshop, the ACR workspace was designed specifically for photographers. It is laid out to follow a typical photographers workflow and offers some very useful editing controls. Further, any changes you make are non-destructive. That means the pixels in your original image are preserved, so you won’t lose any information in the editing process and you can undo your changes at any time. In this project I’ll demonstrate a typical ACR workflow.