Adobe Camera RAW Overview Video Tutorial

General overview of the interface
Instructions on how to open JPEGs with Adobe Camera RAW

Introduction to Adobe Camera RAW – ACR Toolbar Video Tutorial

Basic intro to the Toolbar in Adobe Camera RAW

 

Introduction to Adobe Camera RAW – Adjustment Interface

Quick overview of the Tabs in the Adjustment Interface
There is no video accompanying this Tutorial

Adobe Camera RAW Video Tutorial – Basic Adjustment Tab

Extensive overview of the Basic Adjustment tab, which is the tab that shows first by default

Adobe Camera RAW Video Tutorial – Tone Curve Tab

Tone Curves are mostly used to add contrast and to pop colors in a photo—There are two Curves Tabs, this video covers both of them extensively

Adobe Camera RAW Adjustment Tutorial – Detail Tab

Sharpening Photos and Reducing Noise in Adobe Camera Raw—comes with reccomendations on why, how, where and when to sharpen your work

Adobe Camera RAW Adjustment Tutorial – HSL (Hue-Saturation-Luminance) Tab

If you only view ONE video in this series, this is the MUST SEE. The HSL tab carries with it amazing abilities to adjust color, saturate color and in general make colors just the way you want them on a color-by-color basis. This is one thing you simply can’t do in Photoshop, or at least not with tons of layers, masks and time investment. If you don’t know about this adjustment tab, it will transform the way you think about post processing, a true paradgm shift in how you treat and adust color..

Adobe Camera RAW Adjustment Video Tutorial – Split Toning

Split toning is for reintroducing color into a black and white photo, you can pick two colors and split those tones along dark and light areas of the photo. Also can be used for creative color photography.

Adobe Camera RAW Video Tutorial – Lens Correction Tab

Correct Chromatic Abberation (usually purple fringing) and Vignetting.

Adobe Camera RAW Adjustment Video Tutorial – Camera Calibration and Presets

Calibrate different cameras you own for a consistant look for each.
Save Preset adjustments you can apply to any new photo in Adobe Camera Raw
The presets can save you a lot of time if you shoot in consistant conditions.

Camera Calibration

This adjustment dialog’s primary use is to calibrate various cameras you own so the colors come into Adobe Camera Raw consistently.

This dialog gives you the ability to adjust Shadow tint (same tint slider as on the Basic Adjustment Tab but affects only the shadow portion of the photo) and shift the hue and saturation of the three primary colors.

To adjust for a particular camera, you want to work on a photo that has no adjustments made to it, and has not been adjusted before. The premise is to go each of the three primary colors, adjusting them to taste—it’s suggested that you work with the color first, before you adjust saturation.

Once you’re satisfied with the adjustments, you can save them by left clicking on the icon circled in red and click "Save New Camera Raw Defaults" These settings will now be applied by camera serial number which is contained in the EXIF information for each individual shot. Note that EXIF info can be stripped from JPEGs given certain editing software used, and if you pull a JPEG with that serial number in which has been previously worked on another computer or pulled in from a different source file than the original (in other words, ACR will not have a sidecar file associated with the file) it will apply the camera settings again, so you would have to reset those settings manually by zeroing the values out on this tab.

While I don’t use this function as of yet, as I only have one camera that shoots outright color photos (I have a D70 converted for IR), Adobe claims that these settings will be applied each time to each photo (JPEG or RAW) with the given serial number contained in the EXIF data.

Adobe Camera RAW Presets

Though most don’t use this powerful tab, careful thought and use can save you a lot of time used judiciously.

Let’s go through a scenario:

You have a photo you’ve fully worked and know that this is the type of photo you will often work with like settings. Once all the adjustments you feel the photo needs have been made, you can do one of two things; left click the dropdown menu icon to the right of the word "Presets" at the top right of this image, or click the "New" Icon, which just in the rest of Photoshop and across the Adobe Suite is represented by what sort of looks like a sheet of paper and is always located in the lower right of any pallet you use, and is always one left of the rightmost "Delete" icon, which is an icon of a trash can.

If you just the upper menu dropdown, you will need to select "New Preset" from the menu, conversely, by clicking the "New" icon in the lower right, you will be presented with a presets dialog box which gives you the opportunity to choose to include or not include any of the individual settings available. Whether you’ve adjusted a particular setting or not, it is checked by default. The three settings that are not checked by unless you’ve converted the photo to grayscale.

You can save as many different presets as you want on this screen, but practically speaking, it would be hard to keep up with too many presets (for me at least), but given the obvious workflow enhancements possible with the saving of presets, I suggest you play around with it as much as you feel necessary until this methodology is actually doing what’s intended, which is saving you time. Note that presets can be overwritten, so you don’t have to name a new one and delete an old one. That offers real benefit as you begin using a preset, if you find yourself making the same adjustments over and over again with a given preset, the logical thing to do would be to overwrite it with the settings you keep on making.

The dialog box to the right is what you see when you save a preset.

Each checkbox represents a different adjustment available in Adobe Camera RAW. You can uncheck boxes as you feel necessary, however, if you only make the adjustments you want to use as a preset adjustment, you don’t need to worry about unchecking anything.

The thing you need to understand though is by applying a preset, you overwrite any changes you’ve made to a particular photo thus far, so it’s a good idea to apply presets first before you make any adjustments other than crop, red eye or healing. Those should not be overwritten, because they cannot be saved as a part of a preset.

The Lens Corrections tab allows you to do two things, remove fringing and/or add or remove
Lens Vignetting.

The Chromatic Aberration part of the dialog box is what removes fringing. Although absent from film photography, digital sensors combined with certain lenses and lighting conditions can introduce fringing (most commonly as purple fringe) in photos, photos taken backlit with certain conditions in the subject matter, and especially with "cheaper" lenses, though some very specific very expensive lenses have the problem to under certain conditions.

The Chromatic Aberration tool is actually pretty simple to use. The Defringe dropdown offers 3 settings; Off, Highlight Edges and All Edges. For the typical shot, highlight edges will be the flavor of choice, because highlight edges is where fringing most commonly occurs. I suggest as you use this tool you zoom in to 100% pixel view of an area where fringing is prevalent—the keyboard shortcut to do that is Alt+Ctrl+0 (zero) [Command+Options+0 on the Mac]—this shortcut works in both Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop. Playing with different settings from the dropdown and the sliders, you’ll soon find a setting that works with a particular photo. As you use the tool more, you’ll find yourself making mental notes of which lens you were using, as fringing tends to be pretty predictable for a given lens on a given camera, especially in backlit photos (where fringing tends to occur).

The Lens Vignetting sliders will become apparent on how they work with just a couple minutes of experimentation. Vignetting occurs mostly with wide angle lenses, especially on full frame sensors. and is characterized by dark corners. Moving the slider to the right will lighten the corners, in most cases effectively reducing and most of the time eliminating the vignetting. The Midpoint slider allows you to move the Vingetting correction closer to the center of the photograph as you move it to the right, so that you can correct more severe Vignetting.

Conversely this is a way to INTRODUCE vignetting into a photo that has none for artistic purposes.

The Split Toning tab is likely going to be your least used adjustment in Adobe Camera RAW even if you’re an expert at it, which I am admittedly not. The Split Toning tab deals with your photo by essentially splitting the tone range in half, right down the middle of the histogram as it were, allowing you to tone and saturate each half separately.

As you can see by the image of the split toning adjustment tab to the right, split toning offers the ability to adjust hue on the highlights and the shadows separately. In a color photo that you want to keep within the realm of "normal" these sliders would need to be used with great caution, as you would quickly find out as you work with this adjustment tab. Saturation would probably be the main thing you do with this, and could be useful in a photo where you have a dark color for example that was too saturate. Removing some of the saturation in the shadows might help that. The Hue slider radically changes the appearance of the colors just as it does with the Hue/Saturation adjustment in Photoshop.

Of note, as I said earlier, the "split" in split toning is right down the middle of the tone distribution of your photo, but that can be adjusted by the Balance slider in between shadow and highlights. So for example, if you wanted to change saturation or shift hue on just the darkest shadows, you would move the slider to the left a fair amount then make your adjustments on just that portion and on the Shadows only.

The basic way this works is, you use the saturation slider on either the shadows or highlights or both to introduce a hue shift into the photo. The higher you set the saturation, the stronger the hue change is introduced into the photograph. The Balance slider shifts the degree to which either the shadow or highlight hue shift affect the photograph.

As described by Adobe, the main application for this dialog box is reintroducing some color back into a shot that you’ve converted to grayscale using the HSL Grayscale conversion. Once the photo is converted to black and white on those tabs, you can reintroduce color here differently according to whether it’s in the highlight or shadow range. Therefore you can introduce one color for the shadows and one for the highlights, and dictate each color by the hue sliders. In printing, this would be called a duotone or tritone photo. There is a more effective method for doing duotones in photoshop for example, because you can actually use a Pantone color as the second color in the duotone, thus allowing the prepress workflow to pick up on that PMS/Black split and those colors would come out on 2 color plates correctly. Split toning done here would have to be run in 4 color on the press as there is no Pantone declairation.

This tab can be also used for creative/artistic changes in your photo that are more artistic or extreme as it were, that would require experimentation on your part, you will get no guidelines on artistic interpretation from me, I would say just go ahead and play with the idea if/when you get time.

This tab is the most amazing part of Adobe Camera RAW (and one of the strongest parts of Lightroom as well). This set of 3 sub tabs offer the ability to tweak color and saturation like never before. Especially because Adobe saw fit to add arbitrary colors in between the primary ones, this interface gives you an amazing amount of choices, control and options in tweaking your photo to brighten it up (as in the case of adding darkness and saturation to a blue sky) or tone it down (as the case may be for very strong tungsten lighting for example).

Hue: I find myself using this tab the least. It’s primary purpose as I see it is for either color correction or shifting colors on purpose. Just as a note, it is probably better to do most of your true color correction in Photoshop, because once you start shifting colors here, keep in mind that this is just a first step. While you can pull in any JPEG or RAW file back into ACR and start right from the settings you’ve already done,, doing so negates all the subsequent work you’ve done in photoshop. That is something to always keep in mind when you’re tweaking in ARC because you can’t bring a photo you’ve worked in photoshop without saving THAT as a JPEG, thus loosing all the layers etc. you’ve already done. I consider ACR as a "get it close" not "get it perfect" step in the post processing workflow.

The way the Hue sliders work is they take every color you see in the sliders and shift that color towards the color above (sliding to the left) or the color directly below it (sliding to the right).

This is one spot where it’s always a good idea to check "before and after" by using the preview checkbox in ACR.

It’s certainly worth your time to explore the Hue sliders, especially on a photo with difficult colors, and I do use it for very scuttle color shifts in certain photos, but as I said, I do the bulk of my color correction in Photoshop; 1. because it’s better suited for doing color corrections and has a lot of different ways to accomplish it and 2. because those color corrections can be done in nondestructive adjustment layers and can always be revisited and readjusted later on, and those adjustments are made to the final working copy as opposed to an intermediate step.

The Saturation tab is about as useful for tweaking a photograph as anything in ACR or Photoshop for that matter. Imagine being able to tweak color ranges to make them stand out more, be more vibrant and with other colors, make them subtle, even black and white if you like! That is part of the inherent power of the Saturation tab. As an example, you can heavily saturate the blues and aquas for adding a ton of punch to a blue sky, and tone down a fiery red shirt at the same time simply by pushing the blue and aqua sliders to the right—increasing saturation (in most standard sky shots you really only need to use the blue slider) and move the red slider to the left decreasing saturation in the red colors.

There are a whole host of possibilities this dialog box brings to your photography. I would challenge you as you use Adobe Camera RAW to be looking at the photograph in far more specific ways where color is concerned. With this dialog, especially coupled with the luminosity tab, there is a whole host of things you can do to add color or take color away with very specific focus.

You do want to be careful with these sliders and inspect the photo very carefully in terms of the elements of the photo you’re affecting, in particular if you get heavy with moving the sliders close to the edge. You can get unexpected results by going too far with adjustments and may find that out after lengthy editing in photoshop, so a once over at 100% pixel view of the entire photo is in order, and make sure the clipping indicators are on when you do so. Adding a lot of saturation to colors that are already nearly clipping will cause them to clip quite a bit. I always start with the "easy does it" rule by only going no more than 1/3rd of the way in either direction before I decide to take it further.

The Luminance tab is every single bit as amazing and effective as the saturation sliders, but in a different way.

While the saturation tab adds saturation, which can be considered punch, or a brightening of the colors, luminance is completely different from saturation. It takes the color of choice in the sliders and (for lack of a simpler way of explaining it) adds white or lightens color when you slide it to the right and adds black or darkens color when you slide a respective color slider to the left.

Let’s take the blue sky scenario from the saturation explanation. You’ve saturated the blue pretty heavily and the blue is brilliant. Perhaps you want to now darken that blue to take it from the surreal blue color saturation often brings to a deeply saturate darker blue by sliding the blue slider to the left, thus darkening the blue sky. This can easily be used as adding a faux polarizer effect.

It certainly doesn’t end there either, another thing you can do with these sliders is decrease or eliminate color clipping in a specific color, whether you introduced it into the photo with the saturation slider or it was inherent in the photo to begin with. Color clipping can usually be dealt with by darkening the photo overall or by darkening that specific color with the luminance tab.

All three of these tabs combined obviously give a whole new set of tools and amazing power in post processing to bring punch and bring out or subdue color aspects of your photograph in a way that could not be done before, or at least would take a significant amount of effort to replicate in Photoshop.

Convert to Gray Scale

This is the aspect of this set of tabs that I do not cover in the video. I’m certainly not about withholding information about what ACR can do, it’s just that with the new Black and White Layer Adjustment in Photoshop starting with CS3, to me, it makes more sense to convert to black and white using that tool. You still get amazing control over making given colors darker or lighter as expressed in black and white, the big difference being when you make these adjustments in Photoshop with an adjustment layer, you can come back a week or a year later and tweak those adjustments to change them to your liking.

Anything done in Adobe Camera RAW, while nondestructive are not the final step, not the final file. Any adjustments I can accomplish well in photoshop. Having said that, there is one variable that is open to those who use Bridge to batch out photographs. If all I was going to do is adjust photos in ACR and convert them to JPEG in a batch process, and some of them needed to be black and white, this method is absolutely perfect for that. One of the true bonuses of ACR is, you don’t have to open a photo in Photoshop ever to do what you need to do on a practice level. For full post processing, you can’t beat the power of Photoshop, but if you’re just doing say an initial batch-out for a client, you’ll likely bring the photos into photoshop after the final picks have been made, but for a quick batch capable process, keeping the whole thing in Adobe Camera RAW and bridge is a near perfect solution for that.

Based on that powerful capability, it makes perfect sense to convert to black and white using this interface. However, if you’re going to pull the photo into Photoshop to work it further, I strongly recommend converting the photo to black and white there, because you have a nondestructive adjustment layer that will do the exact same adjustments the above dialog box, but in a way you can revisit the photo and change settings. My mantra of nondestructive editing means nothing if you have to do work over, and that’s why I tend to coach on the differences in processes, so you can make clear choices what is better for your workflow.

The above dialog box is pretty self explanatory. The sliders work on the individual underlying colors as expressed in black and white, and the choices are to take each of the individual underlying colors and make them a darker shade of gray or a lighter shade. Because you have the big preview screen right there, it’s easy enough to tweak a photo to taste just by playing around. Even if you’re a newbie, this one is pretty easy.

Personally, I don’t make too much use of this tab in Adobe Camera RAW. I tend to sharpen my work in Photoshop using Smart Filters coupled with Smart Sharpening—that way I can always go back and tweak the adustments I’ve made at a later date. That is the ONLY way you can sharpen your work without permenantly changing the nature of the pixels in your photo. I will do a tutorial on that specific topic in the future and link it back to this article when it’s done. The same goes for noise reduction. I tend to use Noise Ninja in Photoshop becuase it gives me a lot more control.

Another reason why you may want to shy away from sharpeing in ACR is if you intend to work your photo extensively in photoshop, it’s best by far to sharpen it there, and if you’re not going to use smart filters to contain the sharpening in a changeable way, it’s best to save sharpening for last. If all you plan to do is add adjustment layers and use other nondestructive editing techniques, it doesn’t matter as much when the sharpening is done, but it’s a best practice to sharpen as one of the final steps.

The Detail tab in Adobe Camera RAW is pretty straight forward. It uses a method very much akin to the Unsharp Mask in Photoshop (or any number of photo editing programs). There are two sliders that do not directly relate to USM, but the basic principles are the same:

• Amount: Dictates the strenght of the sharpeinging—a good range for normal sharpeing can be anywhere between 70 and 200, a good starting point would be from 100 to 120 for most good digital cameras.
• Radius: Dictates the radius around or within a single pixel where the sharpeing will take place. A good starting place for hires digital cameras would be around 1.0 pixels, usually just a tad more gives better results, say a radius of 1.2.
• Detail: dictates how much detail is brought out of the edges in your photo; and edge being anything from a shoulder line to a wisker on a face.
• Masking: gives control over how strong all the above setting act on the photo.

The same above caviet about sharpeing in ACR holds true for noise reduction, but it never hurts to do at least a small amount here. This is as good as any place to talk for a moment about noise. There is much critisizm about the affects of noise on a photo. However, before you go whole hog with the noise reduction, I suggest printing out a full res patch of the photo if you have a printer at home before you apply noise reduction. The fact is, noise always looks really bad on a computer screen, but not so much when you print it. That’s an important distinction, becuase rarely do we show our work on a computer at such a resolution that the noise screams at you, so it’s not as big an issue for photos reduced quite a bit. If you’re always reducing noise to be pleased with how it looks on the screen at 100%, I suggest you try some printing experiments, you may be surprised at the fact you’re taking the noise reduction and worries too far.

Now to the details of the two sliders:

• Luminance: affects the overall noise in a given photograph.
• Color affects a specific color or range of colors and is more for treating say blue channel noise. I shot a lot at night hand held at high ISO on the streets. My color balance is always very blue, near K 3,000, and blue channel noise can be a problem, especially if I try to tweak the exposure upwards after the fact. This slider helps interceed for problems like that.

The tone curve tab is one of my most used. I tend to at least put a slight "S" curve on just about everything I do. There are times when a photo begs for contrast, and times when it needs just a little punch. Tone curves give you the most control on how contrast is added.

The "S" curve is pretty basic and can be done through the Parametric tab or the Point Curve tab. It’s basically what you’re more comfortable with. I’ve done curves for several years now using points, so that is what I go with most of the time. The Parametric curves tab is a great place for those less familiar with tone curves, because it sets the points for you, you simply adjust the 4 tone ranges separately to taste. It’s pretty easy to stay "out of trouble" with the Parametric tab because they give you a tried and true range through which you make your curve adjustments. The Point curves are great used with care, but you can also go way beyond the accepted norms to make a photo look pretty darned funky. The good news is, it’s not etched in stone—no setting on this interface is. you can always correct or clean the slate and start over.

The Parametric Tone Curve tab:

For those new to curves, this is the best place to start. As we look at the interface, what is most prominent is the histogram with a linear line going from bottom left to top right. This linear line is what you manipulate to create the classic "S" curve. When the line is linear, it means there is no adjustment taking place. The histogram itself, which is often much of a mystery to some photographers, especially new ones, is a little complicated to explain, but once you gain a basic understanding of what a histogram actually is, it will change the quality of your post processing and the quality of your shooting. Understanding and using the histogram on your camera in the field is the most important skill you can learn in terms of understanding the light you are capturing.

Just a quick overview of what an Histogram actually is: An Histogram is a representation of how many pixels are represented in each specific range of tone values. All Histograms work from left to right, the left side being solid black and the right side being solid white. Many Histograms are broken down into quarters as this one on the right is; the line in the center from left to right represents middle gray. The line to the left is half way between middle gray and black and the line to the right of the middle is half way between middle gray and white. Whenever you see the so-called "mountain peaks" in histograms it shows at the top of that peak that there are a whole lot of of pixels in the photograph represented by that specific tonal value. Where you see the valleys, there aren’t so many pixels represented by that tonal range. So an Histogram shows you how many pixels are represented by the full range of tonal values from black to white.

Using the Parametric Tone Curve interface is really quite easy. The 4 sliders are clearly spelled out as Highlights, Lights, Darks and Shadows. As you move a slider to the left, that part of tone values in the photo become darker. As you move a slider to the right, the values in the photo become lighter.

A traditional S curve using the Parametric tone curve is achieved by at minimum moving the "Lights" slider to the right and the "Darks" slider to the left. Easy does it! The "average" well exposed photo only needs a slight S curve to bring out good contrast and make the colors pop. With each photo though, feel free to play with the sliders to your hearts content.

Make sure though that you do turn on the shadow and highlight clipping indicators. It’s very hard (at least for me) to see when I’m starting to clip the shadow areas especially. A photo with a lot of clipped shadows may look ok on the screen until you zoom into the shadow areas and take a careful look, but chances are very good that a photo with a lot of clipped shadows will not print well at all. Always remember, whether it’s tone adjustments, noise reduction or any of those types of things, what you see on the screen is in a lot of cases nowhere near the results you will get on paper.

Point Tone Curve Tab:

This is a "traditional" Tone Curve interface much like the one available in Photoshop itself. This interface requires a little more caution as you can get yourself in trouble so-to-speak by laying out a curve that gives unexpected results by going too far with any particular adjustment. Anyone used to Tone Curves though would be quite comfortable in this tab.

What sets this interface apart from the Parametric tab is the ability to set pre-determined curves in the form of a drop down circled in red in the image to the right. The choices are:

1. Linier: is a "reset" of sorts, it gives you a linier curve (straight line at a 45° angle) with no points set
2. Medium Contrast: sets a moderate S curve
3. Strong Contrast: sets a strong S curve.
4. Custom: By default if you start from a blank slate and set a couple or few curve points, this turns to custom automatically. Same holds true if you manipulate one of the preset curves (which is perfectly fine to do)

This is the tab I tend to use the most in particular because of the presets. Working with Tone Curves by enlarge is not rocket science, and the presets will usually do a great job on most of your work.

The Basic Adjustment tab is where most people do all the work to adjust RAW and JPEG files, but it is really limiting the power of ARC to use just this screen. If you are in that category I want to challenge you to spread your wings a little and explore the rest of the tabs.

One reason you JPEG shooters want to watch this video is you’ll see a demostration of why RAW files are superior to JPEGS in terms of dynamic range. Once you learn Adobe Camera RAW, you’ll know how to edit not just JPEGs but RAW files as well, as there is little difference between how you work them in ACR.

In doing so, the first thing I would encourage you not to do is to take the photo as close to where you want it on the screen as far as contrast especially. I would further encourage you to explore the use of Tone Curves to create contrast rather than the contrast slider on this screen. Tone curves by enlarge to a far better job of adding pop to a photograph than any combination of the sliders you see here on this tab. The point being though, don’t take the contrast all the way on this screen. My suggestion is to go about half way and start playing with the tone curves next to see what they can do for your photo, then come back to the basic tab if need be.

Let’s go through the sliders on the Basic adjustment tab.

The White Balance dropdown gives you the opportunity to pick a basic color temp scheme; with JPEGs you only get the choices of As Shot, Auto and Custom. With RAW files, you get the full gamut of choices (daylight, fluorescent, etc.)

1. Temperature: This slider allows you to change the color temperature, as the colors indicate, sliding to the left makes a shot cooler (or adds blue, useful for correcting shots taken indoors under tungsten [incandescent] light for example). Sliding to the right makes a photograph warmer (or adds amber; useful for adjusting shots taken in open shade as an example). Watch the video to see the differences in how this slider and dropdown box are presented with RAW files as opposed to JPEGs.
2. Tint: most modern digital cameras have this adjustment as well (called hue on Nikon cameras as an example). This gives you the ability to shift the colors that color temperature does not address.
3. Exposure: For me, this is the first slider I touch in terms of manipulating tonality if the shot is either too light or too dark.
4. 
   

   Recovery: This darkens approximately the top quarter of the histogram (or the lightest portion of the shot). It is useful for getting back blown highlights. For specific manipulation of the highlight areas though, I prefer the Shadow/Highlight adjustment available in Photoshop – the menu selection |Image| |Adjustments| |Shadow/Highlight| – This adjustment is far more tweakable in terms of what part of the highlight spectrum you manipulate, and when applied to a smart object becomes a smart filter (of sorts) and is fully adjustable once you save, close and reopen a document – a huge plus.

5. Fill Light: This adjustment lightens the middle tone values of a photograph and acts much like adding gamma.
6. Blacks: This is a slider I tend to use quite often. It adds drama and punch to the shadow areas of lighter shots especially and can add punch to middle to dark range colors.
7. Brightness: While you will find the "Auto" adjustment tool on this tab makes use of brightness, I tend to shy away from it or use it infrequently. Again, I find Tone Curves far more useful.
8. Contrast: Add punch to colors and contrast between highlights and shadows. I tend to use this slider far less as I prefer to add contrast through an S curve (under the Tone Curve tab in this interface).
9. Clarity: A lot of people consider this a sharpening tool. It sort of is, but is not that. While it adds wonderful definition to a lot of otherwise drab parts of a shot, it affects mostly areas where there is gradation between light and shadow areas. As a consequence, it often adds drama to face shots, hence the mistaken identity as a sharpening tool. It does not affect the sharpness at the pixel level as other sharpening tools do. This is a tool worth experimenting with though, because you can get some wonderful results from certain shots. If you do not see this slider in your Adobe Camera Raw interface, you do not have the latest version of ARC, which is a free download – see footnote*.
10. Vibrance: this adds punch to colors in a way that saturation does not. This is often a great alternative to the saturation too. However, because you can manipulate saturation on a single color by single color basis, you owe it to yourself to learn about the HSL tab on this interface. It gives you much better control over how colors appear.
11. Saturation: Increases or decreases overall saturation of colors. Again, the Hue/Saturation/Luminance (or HSL) tab gives you far greater control over the saturation of colors.

1. 

   Histogram: Perhaps the most important measure tool for understanding light in your photo. I’ll to an extensive article on the histogram. The toggle "triangles" to the upper left and right are to toggle on and off the clipping view. Toggling both these on shows you where the shadows are the absolute maximum of 255,255,255 RGB and the highlights are pure white 0,0,0 RGB. This is a very useful tool that helps you know when you’re pushing an adjustment too far to the shadow or highlight portion of the histogram.

2. shows the exact RGB value of the precise point your mouse is on over the photograph.




3. Basic Adjustment Tab: gives you all the basic "slider" adjustments, always a good place to start, but I prefer using curves to add contrast to photos as you’ll see in subsequent videos
4. Curves: Gives you two ways to adjust the photo’s curve.
5. Sharpening: Something I don’t use in ARC, but you can explore it if you like.
6. HSL: This tab holds much of the hidden power of ARC. HSL stands for Hue, Saturation and Luminosity. These three tabs alone make it worth working any file through either ARC or Lightroom (the adjustments are the exact same for both).
7. Split Toning: Useful especially for black and white and special effects color work, not much use for normal color adjustments, although there may be occasions where subtle use of this dialog may help get the feel you’re looking for in a photo.
8. Lens Correction: Very useful for minimizing Chromatic Aberration (purple fringing) and useful for correcting vignetting (dark corners)
9. Camera Calibration: This can be very useful especially if you have two cameras that shoot consistently differently in terms of color tone and/or exposure. You can tweak default adjustments that have only to do with a specific camera and any other adjustments added on other tabs are added to these base adjustments. This is meant to be a "set it and forget it" area of ACR.
10. Presets: Once you get very familiar with ACR, this can be very useful to you in that you can save adjustment settings that you seem to be using often.

The Basic Adjustment tab is where most people do all the work to adjust RAW and JPEG files, but it is really limiting the power of ARC to use just this screen. If you are in that category I want to challenge you to spread your wings a little and explore the rest of the tabs.

One reason you JPEG shooters want to watch this video is you’ll see a demostration of why RAW files are superior to JPEGS in terms of dynamic range. Once you learn Adobe Camera RAW, you’ll know how to edit not just JPEGs but RAW files as well, as there is little difference between how you work them in ACR.

In doing so, the first thing I would encourage you not to do is to take the photo as close to where you want it on the screen as far as contrast especially. I would further encourage you to explore the use of Tone Curves to create contrast rather than the contrast slider on this screen. Tone curves by enlarge to a far better job of adding pop to a photograph than any combination of the sliders you see here on this tab. The point being though, don’t take the contrast all the way on this screen. My suggestion is to go about half way and start playing with the tone curves next to see what they can do for your photo, then come back to the basic tab if need be.

Let’s go through the sliders on the Basic adjustment tab.

The White Balance dropdown gives you the opportunity to pick a basic color temp scheme; with JPEGs you only get the choices of As Shot, Auto and Custom. With RAW files, you get the full gamut of choices (daylight, fluorescent, etc.)

1. Temperature: This slider allows you to change the color temperature, as the colors indicate, sliding to the left makes a shot cooler (or adds blue, useful for correcting shots taken indoors under tungsten [incandescent] light for example). Sliding to the right makes a photograph warmer (or adds amber; useful for adjusting shots taken in open shade as an example). Watch the video to see the differences in how this slider and dropdown box are presented with RAW files as opposed to JPEGs.
2. Tint: most modern digital cameras have this adjustment as well (called hue on Nikon cameras as an example). This gives you the ability to shift the colors that color temperature does not address.
3. Exposure: For me, this is the first slider I touch in terms of manipulating tonality if the shot is either too light or too dark.
4. 
   

   Recovery: This darkens approximately the top quarter of the histogram (or the lightest portion of the shot). It is useful for getting back blown highlights. For specific manipulation of the highlight areas though, I prefer the Shadow/Highlight adjustment available in Photoshop – the menu selection |Image| |Adjustments| |Shadow/Highlight| – This adjustment is far more tweakable in terms of what part of the highlight spectrum you manipulate, and when applied to a smart object becomes a smart filter (of sorts) and is fully adjustable once you save, close and reopen a document – a huge plus.

5. Fill Light: This adjustment lightens the middle tone values of a photograph and acts much like adding gamma.
6. Blacks: This is a slider I tend to use quite often. It adds drama and punch to the shadow areas of lighter shots especially and can add punch to middle to dark range colors.
7. Brightness: While you will find the "Auto" adjustment tool on this tab makes use of brightness, I tend to shy away from it or use it infrequently. Again, I find Tone Curves far more useful.
8. Contrast: Add punch to colors and contrast between highlights and shadows. I tend to use this slider far less as I prefer to add contrast through an S curve (under the Tone Curve tab in this interface).
9. Clarity: A lot of people consider this a sharpening tool. It sort of is, but is not that. While it adds wonderful definition to a lot of otherwise drab parts of a shot, it affects mostly areas where there is gradation between light and shadow areas. As a consequence, it often adds drama to face shots, hence the mistaken identity as a sharpening tool. It does not affect the sharpness at the pixel level as other sharpening tools do. This is a tool worth experimenting with though, because you can get some wonderful results from certain shots. If you do not see this slider in your Adobe Camera Raw interface, you do not have the latest version of ARC, which is a free download – see footnote*.
10. Vibrance: this adds punch to colors in a way that saturation does not. This is often a great alternative to the saturation too. However, because you can manipulate saturation on a single color by single color basis, you owe it to yourself to learn about the HSL tab on this interface. It gives you much better control over how colors appear.
11. Saturation: Increases or decreases overall saturation of colors. Again, the Hue/Saturation/Luminance (or HSL) tab gives you far greater control over the saturation of colors.