The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers part 9 docx

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.. Step Two: If you want to tu

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

Continued

62 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics

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%.)

Continued

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

64 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics

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

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 sharpenreceiv-ing 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

66 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics

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

Automatically

Fixing Lens Problems

Continued

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)

68 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics

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

Continued

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)

70 Chapter 3 Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics

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.