Product Profile: Page (1) of 1 - 04/04/05

email article

print page

Camera RAW support in Photoshop CS2
Batch processing, Auto adjusting added By John Virata

Adobe Systems has enhanced the Camera RAW support in Photoshop CS2  to further refine your camera RAW editing capabilities. You can now open multiple images in the Camera RAW 3.0 window, edit them,  and batch process them simultaneously.

To do this, you simply select the RAW images from the Bridge (which replaces the File browser as the hub for your Adobe projects), right click and select Open with Camera Raw. One image will appear in the main Camera Raw editing window and the remaining images, including the one in the main window will appear on the left side of the Camera RAW dialog box, as seen in the image below.

This gives you easy access to the RAW images that you want to look at and potentially edit, eliminating the guess work when working with multiple similar images in the RAW file format, and having to launch Photoshop CS2. With the previous iteration of the Camera RAW dialog box, you could manipulate one RAW image at a time. The new version adds the capability to look at and manipulate multiple images at the same time. To achieve this, you select the images from the image strip and then move over to the editing tabs, of which your choices are Adjust (White Balance, Temperature, Tint, Exposure, Shadows, Brightness, Contrast, and Saturation), Detail (Sharpness, Luminance Smoothing, and Color Noise Reduction), Lens (Chromatic Aberration Fix Red/Cyan Fringe and Fix Blue/Yellow Fringe, and Vignetting Amount and midpoint), Curve (Tone Curve), and Calibrate (camera Profile, Shadow tint, Red Hue, Red Saturation, Green Hue, Green Saturation, Blue Hue, and Blue Saturation).

In addition, when you launch a raw image, Photoshop, by default, Exposure, Shadows, Brightness, Contrast, and Saturation are automatically adjusted. These boxes can also be unchecked.

By default, Exposure, Shadows, Brightness, Contrast, and Saturation are automatically adjusted when you bring an image into Camera RAW.

When you make a change to a sequence of images, the image in the main window as well as the images in the image strip will reflect the adjustment. Each of the selected images also have a round icon with two arrows pointing up. That icon is placed there to remind you that those images have been selected for manipulation. See image at left. Click on that icon and that particular image will appear in the main RAW editing window, so you can further zoom into the image to see what changes, if any, need to be made.

Once you are satisfied with the changes that you've made to the images in your selection, you can choose to save those images or open the images in Photoshop CS2 for further editing. When you choose to save the images, the Save Options window opens giving you some File Naming choices. Because digital cameras have random naming conventions (PIC00021, PIC00022, CRW_1706, CRW_1707, etc.), there are several options that can help in the naming conventions of the images, including via date (mmdd, yyyymmdd, etc), serial number (1.dng, 2.dng, etc), serial letter (a.jpg, b.jpg, etc), or document name. The naming convention is up to your image organizational structure.

Save options

After you are finished manipulating the attributes of an image, the RAW dialog box enables you to save the file out as a Digital Negative formatted file, as well as the standard JPEG, TIFF, and Photoshop formats. When saving in the .DNG file format, you can choose to save the file as a compressed (lossless) image, convert it to linear image, as well as embed the original raw image.

Page: 1

John Virata is senior editor of Digital Media Online. You can email him at jvirata@digitalmedianet.com

---