Introduction to Adobe Camera RAW – Adjustment Interface
Posted by Wilk | Filed under Adobe Camera RAW tutes
The Adjustment Interface
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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.
- shows the exact RGB value of the precise point your mouse is on over the photograph.
- 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
- Curves: Gives you two ways to adjust the photo’s curve.
- Sharpening: Something I don’t use in ARC, but you can explore it if you like.
- 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).
- 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.
- Lens Correction: Very useful for minimizing Chromatic Aberration (purple fringing) and useful for correcting vignetting (dark corners)
- 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.
- 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.
Tags: adobe camera raw, nondestructive, post processing, tutorial
