The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers part 9 docx

ptg 61Chapter 3Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step One: When you open a RAW image in Camera Raw, by default, it applies a small amount of sharpening to your photo (not the JPEGs or TIFFs, only RAW images). You can adjust this amount (or turn it off altogether, if you like) by clicking on the Detail icon, as shown here, or using the keyboard shortcut Command-Option-3 (PC: Ctrl-Alt-3). At the top of this panel is the Sharpening section, where by a quick glance you can see that sharpening has already been applied to your photo. If you don’t want any sharpening applied at this stage (it’s a personal preference), then simply click-and-drag the Amount slider all the way to the left to lower the amount of sharpening to 0 (zero), and the sharpening is removed. Step Two: If you want to turn off this automatic, by default sharpening (so capture sharpening is only applied if you go and manually add it yourself), first set the Sharpening Amount slider to 0 (zero), then go to the Camera Raw flyout menu and choose Save New Camera Raw Defaults (as shown here). Now, RAW images taken with that camera will not be automatically sharpened. If you shoot in JPEG, your digital camera applies sharpening to your photo right in the camera itself, so no sharpening is automatically applied by Camera Raw. But if you shoot in RAW, you’re telling your camera to ignore that sharpening, and that’s why, when you bring a RAW image into Camera Raw, by default, it applies some sharpening, called “capture sharpening.” In my workflow, I sharpen twice: once here in Camera Raw, and once more right before I output my final image from Photoshop (called “output sharpening”). Here’s how to apply capture sharpening in Camera Raw: Sharpening in Camera Raw SCOTT KELBY Continued Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 62 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Three: Before we charge into sharpening, there’s one more thing you’ll want to know: if you don’t actually want sharpening applied, but you’d still like to see what the sharpened image would look like, you can sharpen just the preview, and not the actual file. Just press Command-K (PC: Ctrl-K) while Camera Raw is open, and in the Camera Raw Preferences dialog, choose Preview Images Only in the Apply Sharpening To pop-up menu (as shown here), and then click OK to save this as your default. Now the sharpening only affects the preview you see here in Camera Raw, but when you choose to open the file in Photoshop, the sharpen- ing is not applied. Step Four: In previous versions of Camera Raw, you had to view the image at 100% to really see any effects of the sharpening. They’ve addressed that somewhat in CS5, so it’s not as necessary to be at a 100% size view, but it still seems to me to render the most accurate view of the sharpening. The quickest way to jump to that 100% view is to double-click directly on the Zoom tool in the toolbar (shown circled here). (Note: You’ll see a message about zooming to 100% at the bottom of the Detail panel, but it’ll disappear after you zoom in to 100%.) Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 63Chapter 3Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics Continued The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Five: Dipping into the realm of the painfully obvious, dragging the Amount slider to the right increases the amount of sharpening. Compare the image shown here, with the one in Step Four (where the Sharpening Amount was set to the default of 25), and you can see how much sharper the image now appears, where I dragged it to 120. TIP: Making Camera Raw Full Screen To have Camera Raw expand to fill your entire screen, click the Full Screen icon to the right of the Preview check- box, at the top of the window. Step Six: The next slider down is the Radius slider, which determines how far out the sharp- en ing is applied from the edges being sharpened in your photo. This pretty much works like the Radius slider in Photo shop’s Unsharp Mask filter, which is probably why the default is 1 (because that’s probably where we’ll leave it most of the time). I use less than a Radius of 1 if the photo I’m processing is only going to be used on a website, in video editing, or somewhere where it’s going to be at a very small size or resolution. I only use a Radius of more than 1 when the image is visibly blurry and needs some “emergen- cy” sharpening. If you decide to increase the Radius amount above 1 (unlike the Unsharp Mask filter, you can only go as high as 3 here), just be careful, because if you go too much above 1, your photo can start to look fake and oversharpened. You want your photo to look sharp, not sharpened, so be careful out there. Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 64 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Seven: The next slider down is the Detail slider, which determines how much of the edge areas are affected by sharpening. You’ll apply lower amounts of Detail if your photo is slightly blurred, and higher amounts if you really want to bring out texture and detail (which is why this slid- er is aptly named). So, how much Detail you apply depends on the subject you’re sharpening. With an image like this one, with lots of texture in the stone, it’s an ideal candidate for a high amount of Detail (so are most landscapes, cityscapes, motor- cycle shots—stuff with lots of edges), so I dragged the slider to the right (all the way to 78), until the detail really came out in the stone. Step Eight: I’m going to change photos to show you the Masking slider. This one’s easier to understand, and for many people, I think it will become invaluable. Here’s why: When you apply sharpening, it gets applied to the entire image evenly. But what if you have an image where there are areas you’d like sharpened, but other softer areas that you’d like left alone (like the photo here, where you want to keep her skin soft, but have her eyes, lips, etc., sharpened)? If we weren’t in Camera Raw, you could apply the Unsharp Mask filter to a duplicate layer, sharpen this layer, add a layer mask, and paint away (cover) those softer areas, right? Well, that’s kind of what the Masking slider here in Camera Raw does—as you drag it to the right, it reduces the amount of sharpening on non-edge areas. The default Masking set- ting of 0 (zero) applies sharpening to the entire image. As you drag to the right, the non-edge areas are masked (protected) from being sharpened. Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 666555CCChhhaaapppttteeerrr 333CCCaaammmeeerrraaa RRRaaawww———BBBeeeyyyooonnnddd ttthhheee BBBaaasssiiicccsss The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Nine: All four sliders in the Sharpening section of the Detail panel let you have a live preview of what the sharpening is affecting—just press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key as you drag; your screen will turn grayscale, and the areas that the slider you’re drag- ging will affect appear as edge areas in the Preview area. This is particularly helpful in understanding the Masking slider, so press-and-hold the Option key and drag the Masking slider to the left. When Mask ing is set to 0, the screen turns solid white (because sharpening is being evenly applied to everything). As you drag to the right, the preview (shown here) now shows only the parts of the photo receiv- ing sharpening. If you drag all the way to 100, you’ll see that only the most obvious edges are now receiving full sharpening. Step 10: Here’s a before/after of our building shot, first with no sharpening applied (Before), and then a nice crispvmount applied (After) using these settings—Amount: 120, Radius: 1, Detail: 78, Masking: 0. To see your own before/after, press the letter P to toggle the Preview on/off. Before After Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 66 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step One: Open the image with a lens problem in Camera Raw (from Mini Bridge, double- click on it if it’s a RAW photo, or if it’s a JPEG or TIFF, Right-click on it and choose Open in Camera Raw). Now, if you’ve been using Photoshop for a while, you already know there’s a Lens Correction filter found under Photoshop’s Filter menu, and they’ve updated that with pretty much with the same features as the Camera Raw version, but it’s better to do the correction here because: (1) it’s non-destructive, and (2) it’s faster. So I always fix lens problems here, rather than using the Photoshop filter. Step Two: Click on the Lens Corrections icon (the fifth icon from the right at the top of the Panel area) and on the Profile tab, turn on the Enable Lens Profile Corrections checkbox. Now, chances are that you’re done. Boom. It’s fixed. That’s because, as I said above, it looks at the camera data embedded in the shot to find out which camera and lens you used, then it searches its internal database for a profile of that lens, and it immediately fixes the photo (as seen here). If it can’t find a profile, it lets you know at the bottom of the panel (as seen in the next step). Previous versions of Camera Raw have had lens correction features, but in CS5, Camera Raw can now automatically apply corrections for common lens problems (like barrel or/and pin-cushion distortion, or edge vignetting). It does this by reading the embedded camera data (so it knows which camera and lens you used), and it applies a profile to fix the problem. It’s amazingly fast, and it takes just one check- box, but what if there is no profile for your camera/lens, or there’s no EXIF data for your image (maybe you scanned it), or if you don’t like the profile (it was too little or too much)? You’re about to learn all of that. SCOTT KELBY Automatically Fixing Lens Problems Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 67Chapter 3Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics Continued The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Three: So, what happens in a case like this, where you open a photo and it can’t find a pro- file automatically, or the image doesn’t have any embedded EXIF data (for exam- ple, if you’re trying to fix a scanned image, or an image you copied-and-pasted from another document)? Take a look at the photo you see here. Camera Raw couldn’t find a profile for it, so in the Lens Profile section, the Make is set to None and the Model and Profile pop-up menus are grayed out. What this really means is that you have to help it out by telling it what equipment you used to take the photo (if you know), or you’ll have to make your best guess (if you don’t). Step Four: I shoot Nikon cameras, so I pretty much knew this was taken with a Nikon, so from the Make field I chose Nikon, and as soon as I did, it did the rest—it found a lens match and fixed the photo (look at the field itself—now it’s flat, rather than bowed). Now, it’s not always 100% sure it has the right lens match, so it gives you a list of lenses it thinks might be right. You can click on the Model pop-up menu, and you’ll see a list of lenses it thinks it could be (as seen here). You can try out any of the other lenses listed there and see if it gives you a better result than the one that it chose for you (it does a sur- prisingly good job, so I usually wind up using the one it chose, but every once in a while I find a lens in that list I like bet- ter, even though sometimes I know it’s not the actual lens I used). SCOTT KELBY Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 68 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Five: Our last two images were taken with a 10.5mm fisheye lens, but now let’s look at a situation where the lens problem is so large, a built-in profile alone isn’t going to get the job done. Take at look at the image shown here, where the buildings look like they’re leaning in toward the center (look at how the tower on the left side is leaning to the right). This is a pretty common problem for photos taken with a wide-angle lens on a full-frame camera (this was taken with a 14–24mm lens, at 24mm). Step Six: Go ahead and turn on the Enable Lens Profile Corrections checkbox in the Lens Corrections panel (as shown here), and even though it immediately found a profile, you can see it didn’t do much. Actually, it did fix one thing—it removed the edge vignetting (darkening of the corners), so even though it didn’t fix the problem with the buildings, turning that checkbox on did make the image a little better. If you think it didn’t remove enough of the edge dark- ening (or, if it removed too much), you can go down to the Correction Amount sliders at the bottom of the panel, and drag the Vignetting slider to the right (to lighten the edges even more than the profile did), or drag it to the left if you think the profile overdid it. The other two sliders work the same way—they allow a subtle tweak to the settings the profile applied, so if they’re off by a little bit, you can probably adjust them enough here to keep from going to the Manual tab. SCOTT KELBY Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 69Chapter 3Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics Continued The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Seven: If you need more than a little tweak to the profile (which we definitely do here), then you need to click on the Manual tab and basically do it yourself. (Note: The changes you make in the Manual tab are added on top of what you already did in the Profile tab.) In this case, we need to fix the vertical geometric distortion, so drag the Vertical slider to the left, and as you do, keep an eye on the tower on the left. Your goal is to make it perfectly straight, so simply drag to the left until it is (in this case, I dragged over to –50, as shown here). Now, pinching the perspec- tive of the image like this will leave a gap at the bottom and sides of the image (as seen here), but we’ll deal with that in just a moment. For now, at least we’ve fixed the “leaning tower of Shanghai” problem. Step Eight: Go ahead and click the Open Image button, to open the corrected photo (complete with those gaps) in Photoshop. Now, you have two choices here: (1) The most common choice is simply to crop away those gray empty areas, so get the Crop tool (C), drag it out over as much of the photo as you can without extending into the gaps, and then press the Return (PC: Enter) key to lock in your changes. (2) Since this is CS5, we could pull a fast one, and instead try a little Content-Aware Fill to fill in the gaps. It probably won’t fix 100% of the gap, but if it does at least 80% or more of the work for us, we can finish it off with a little bit of cloning over any areas it missed, so I think it’s worth a try. Get the Magic Wand tool (press Shift-W until you have it) and click it once in the gray area to select that entire empty area (as shown here). Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 70 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Nine: Now, press the Backspace (PC: Delete) key to bring up the Fill dialog. Make sure Content-Aware is selected in the Use pop- up menu, then click OK, sit back, and let it do its thing (on a high-resolution image, it takes 30 seconds). (Note: For more on Content-Aware Fill, make sure you check out that project in Chapter 9, because there are some little tricks to using it that will save you a lot of time and trouble.) When it’s done, press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) to Deselect and check out the results (I know, it’s insane!). It didn’t do everything perfectly (look at the far left), but it did most of the work for me, and that’s fine by me. Step 10: One thing you’ll probably notice when you do a pretty major lens correction, like we did here is, if you drag the Vertical slider to the left, your image looks a little bit “squashed” (the buildings aren’t quite as tall), and if you drag to the right, your buildings look a little bit stretched (the farther you drag in either direction, the more squashed or stretched the image will look). In this case, it squashed the build- ings a little bit, so what I do to correct that is (wait for it…wait for it…), I stretch the image back out. Press Command-A (PC: Ctrl-A) to select your image, then press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) to bring up Free Transform. Now, grab the top-center point and drag straight upward a little bit to stretch it back out, so the buildings don’t look squashed (if you press Command-0 [zero; PC: Ctrl-0], the window will auto- matically resize, so you can reach all the handles). When you’re done, press Return (PC: Enter) to lock in your stretching. Download from www.wowebook.com . www.wowebook.com ptg 63Chapter 3Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics Continued The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Five: Dipping into the realm of the painfully obvious, dragging the. careful out there. Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 64 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Seven: The next slider down is the Detail. Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 62 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Three: Before we charge into sharpening, there’s one more