Tell me all about working in RAW

[jacinda]

A friend has asked me to put together a photo album of his recent trip to Alaska. He has some amazing shots of the mountains but all his photos are in RAW, which I have never worked with before. I hear you photographers talking about how great RAW is, but I know nothing about it. Where is the best place to learn? What tutorials/sites are best. Do I need lightroom to process his photos? I have PSCS5.

Would really appreciate any advice you may have, and any direction you can point me. He's a close friend of my husband, and I really want to do this for him, and show his photos off to best effect.

 

[Freckles]

You can open RAW files directly in Photoshop, they will open in Adobe Camera Raw where you can edit them. (just right click on your file and choose open in photoshop). It's a very powerful asset where you can make lots of adjustments. The ones I always make are increasing the fill light, increasing the blacks, usally increasing the brightness and contrast a little as well and sometimes add a bit more vibrance. I also often adjust the white balance. You can play around with the different sliders to see what each one of them does.
When you're done making adjustments, just click 'open in photoshop' and from there you can do anything with the photo like you normally would.

These are just basic adjustments ofcourse, there are a lot more possibilities to edit photos in camera raw, but since you said his photos are already amazing, I don't think you're going to need them. (if you do I recommend googling for video tutorials about it, there are plenty of good ones out there!)

 

[glumirk]

Also, chances are that he stayed within the same settings, etc. so you can totally batch edit using ACR or Bridge. In ACR just open multiple files at once, edit one, and then having that one highlighted first, highlight the others and choose synchronize. In Bridge you can right click to copy/paste develop settings, or Ctrl+Alt+C and Ctrl+Alt+V to copy and paste develop settings.

I would check if he already edited them, first. If so there should be some .xmp files in the folder, and you won't even have to worry about editing them. If he shoots in RAW I would expect that he has a preference for how his photos are edited.

 

[jacinda]

I have so much to learn. I don't even know what ACR means. LOL. I've been pinning some tutorial sites on pintrest, so hopefully they'll steer me in the right direction. Thanks Kim and Megan.

 

[Jen22]

I have so much to learn. I don't even know what ACR means. LOL. I've been pinning some tutorial sites on pintrest, so hopefully they'll steer me in the right direction. Thanks Kim and Megan.

I'm pretty sure it's Adobe Camera Raw. I don't use it myself, but if I remember right - that's what it stands for. It's Photoshop's RAW editing program (I think)

 

[Ginger_79]

Yep, it is. Think of it this way:
The camera takes an image and has the RAW data. Like a digital negative, the pure information. When you shoot in JPEG, the camera takes these RAW images, makes adjustments and then turns them into the compressed format. The adjustments will depend on your picture style or picture mode. For example in landscape mode, the blues and greens are usually boosted. For the vibrant picture style, saturation is increased. If you chose a white balance other than daylight, the colours will be corrected as well and so on.

When you shoot in RAW, you do all that yourself. You get the original image and make all the adjustments before turning it into a print format like JPEG. It will automatically open in ACR and the program will already make some default adjustments. Like contrast and slight sharpening. You can tweak those and then you will just open the result in PS and polish it a bit more, if needed. If you know your way around in PS, ACR will be easy for you. Just play around a bit.