This is an amalgamation of the past two weeks as we were let loose on the college PCs and given instruction on some of the main editing functions in Camera Raw. The following isn’t exactly the most interesting of posts but this is my online notebook, so it was never going to be a laugh a minute. (FWIW, the cloud photos haven’t been edited one bit. They’re on here for a bit of colour and, yes, they really did look like that. Which goes to show just what you can capture if you get lucky with some crazy light).
Snapshot: Allows you to create numerous edits of the same image without changing the original or creating actual copies. Instead, with each saved edit you are creating a small file that remembers the alterations you’ve made and applies them to the original image. You need to name and save each edit individually: say B&W; colour boost; crop… whatever. You can only see one version at a time. Click Done to save changes.
Adjustment Brush: use this to give you localised control for colour; exposure; saturation; white balance; clarity etc. Simply select the areas you want to edit.
Eye-dropper: Adjusts white balance – click on a white or neutral area of your shot and it will adjust the colour range accordingly.
Crop Tool: Does what it says on the tin. SLRs shoot on a ratio of 3:2, so if you’re cropping to print always stick to those proportions or you will lose info’. It’s also much cheaper and easier to stick to the set proportions for printing, otherwise you’ll have to go for a bespoke print.
Point & Shoot cameras use a ratio of 4:3 (as do mobile cameras shooting RAW).
Freestyle is fine for the internet, though, where pretty much anything goes.
16:9 works for widescreen.
Square is ideal for Instagram.
Transform: Use this for rotating, enlarging and basically changing the perspective of your image. A bit like Tilt Shift on Instagram – at extreme, it’s all a bit House of Fun mirrors. There are various options, including fully automatic/automatic horizontal/automatic vertical and the final option where you use “spirit level” lines to draw/determine exactly which vertical or horizontal lines you want adjusted.
Vignette: There is a vignette option in the Lens Correction sub-menu that you can use to compensate for lens anomalies. However you should use the FX vignette option for editing shots. There is also a highlight option that you can use to reduce shadow vignette from highlighted areas or boost a highlighted vignette. Aside from playing around with the actual level of shadow or light used on each vignette effect, you can also add colour.
Before/After Splitscreen: 1st icon, bottom right lets you toggle between your original and edited version.
Sync Editing Settings: Camera Raw allows you to open multiple images, change one, choose select all and then sync your edits across the batch. Useful when working on very similar images shot in the same light.
Gradual Filters: Use to change exposure, colour etc across a certain range of your image. But select a working area wider than the image for a more delicate effect.
To get out of settings, click on magnifying glass or hand icon in top left menu bar.
SAVING IMAGES
For print; email; blog etc, save as JPEG. For printing, select Maximum Quality – 12 – emails and blogs can be lower quality (smaller files) for sake of ease.
When saving a work in progress – so an intermediate point – you can save RAW files as Tiffs. Tiff files don’t compress as JPEGs do, but use LZW compression to create a smaller file.
DNG – stands for Digital Negative: Adobe’s attempt at a generic RAW format.
Life Through a Lens 
Unit 1 1.1 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6
Unit 1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.6
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