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Digital Darkroom #2: Photoshop CS RAW Conversion
by Daniel Buck
www.danielbuck.net
This tutorial focuses on Photoshop CS's RAW file converter.
If your camera is not capable of shooting in RAW mode, then this tutorial will probably mean very little to you.
If you find that your camera RAW file will not open in photoshop, go to the adobe website and look for Photoshop CS RAW file updates to see support for your camera has been added.
I'll show you how I went from the dull and bland original image, to the punchy and pleasing final image.
Roll your mouse over the original image to see the final image
To start off with, drag (or open) your camera RAW file into Photoshop CS, and you'll notice a bunch of settings to the right.
This is where the magic takes place :-)
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The first and most obvious down fall with the original image is the lack of conrast. So, the first thing I did was to raise the contrast to +100. Next I raised the shadows to around 17. Boosting the shadows makes the darker areas darker and enhances the contrast. After boosting the contrast and shadow the image looked a bit dark, so I raised the exposure by +.75. I also set the white balance to auto. |
If you don't see 4 tabs (Adjust, Detail, Lens, and Calibrate) then make sure the "Advanced" option is checked at the top.This is the resulting image from just raising the contrast, shadow, and exposure.
It sure looks a heck of a lot better!
Roll your mouse over the image below to see the result of the contrast and exposure changes
The shadow tint alters the shadow color of the image. slide it to the left and the image gets a more greenish look, slide it to the right and the image gets a more reddish look. From there I played with the hue and saturation of each color channel untill I got my desired result. |
Now that have a nice contrasting image I wanted to change the colors somewhat. For that, I moved to the Calibrate tab. Roll over the image below to see the final image, the color changes made to the contrast image:
The results are stunning! Before you click "OK", you might want to click the little arrow button to the right of the "settings" drop box to save your conversion settings.
Once saved, you can pick it from the list for later use! This is quite handy when you are trying to keep the same look and feel for a few images in a series. 
Now click the "OK" button and the image will be sent to photoshop and you are back to the normal photoshop as if the image were a normal photoshop document. Edit/Save as usual! :-)
Happy shooting!
© Daniel Buck