Adobe Camera RAW Adjustment Tutorial – Detail Tab
Posted by Wilk | Filed under Adobe Camera RAW tutes
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.
Tags: adobe camera raw, nondestructive, post processing, sharpening, video tutorial
