Adobe Camera RAW 4.0
Tim Cooper

New Features

Recovery Slider in Adjust Tab
Fill Light Slider in Adjust Tab
Vibrance Slider in Adjust Tab
New Curve Option- Parametric
HSL/Grayscale
Split Toning

 

More Tabs, More Features
The latest version of Adobe Camera 4.0 will truly offer some photographers the option of one stop shopping.  For many folks a trip to Camera Raw, will complete their entire editing workflow.  For others, the time spent in Photoshop proper may be greatly decreased.

The new Camera RAW dialog box will seem very similar.  The major difference is in the addition of several new image processing tabs.  All of the functionality of previous features remains intact.  This is great for those of us who have built our initial workflow around the Adjust tab in the CS2.  The Workflow Options of Space, Size Depth and Resolution also remains unchanged. At this point the tabs are represented by letters, although it is likely that they will eventually have icons associated with them.  A less glitzy feature that has been added into these tabs is the ability to reset just the sliders within an individual box.  Double clicking on the slider itself after making an adjustment will return it to its default position!  This is a great alternative to resetting the whole image. 

Before getting into the new functions of Camera Raw, however, a review of image tonalities is in order.  The histogram can be broken up into segments to simplify the description of tonalities within an image. We call these regions the Shadows, Three-Quarter tones, Midtones, Quarter tones, and Highlights.  The shadow region of the histogram represents the darkest of the tonalities.  The Three-Quarter tones represent the values that are dark, but not as dark as the shadows.  The Midtones are just what you think they are- the middle brightness values.  The Quarter tones represent lighter tones such as pastel colors, the Highlight region covers the brightest pixels in the image.

Tonality Description

 

 

 

The B Tab

The first tab is labeled “B”.  It is our old standby, the Adjust Tab with a bit of a makeover. A couple of really nice changes have been made here.  For starters, the Auto Adjust Boxes are gone and are replaced with Auto and Default.  Thankfully the Auto Feature is no longer turned on by defualt. In the past, CS2 would automatically try to fix the exposure on all of your images by keeping the Auto feature turned on.  This would leave us guessing as to which of the images to choose for processing.  Picking the best exposure was made more difficult. Now if you want to see Adobe’s idea of Auto simply click on it.  This is very helpful for photographers wanting to see the look of bracketed images or the natural look of a photograph pre-processed.  If after making alterations within this tab, you want to revert back to Adobes Default settings you can click on Default.

The Exposure Slider remains the same.  Use this slider to adjust the luminosity of the image.  Moving the slider to the right makes the image appear as if it had been given more exposure at the time of capture.  To the right, less exposure.  Remember, if you press the Alt/Option key down while moving the slider, you get a preview indicating when clipping in the shadows or highlights will occur!

The Recovery Slider is just below the Exposure Slider.  This slider attempts to bring back detail in the highlight areas.  It is well placed after the Exposure slider.  There may be times when setting the Exposure slider to produce an overall good look will blow out the highlights in certain areas.  Enter the Recovery Slider.  Moving the slider to the right will bring detail back in the brightest areas.

Fill light.  My favorite addition to this tab.  The Fill Light Slider mostly affects the Three-Quarter tones while only subtly affecting the Shadows and Midtones.  This is important because when a photo loses its deepest tone, it starts to look washed out. By moving the slider to the right the Three Quarter tones of your image will become brighter.  Be careful with this adjustment however. A heavy hand here will produce strange edges where the dark tones meet lighter tones.  You are better to leave this a little below the desired value and work on further brightening with curves.

Blacks.  This slider is the same thing as the shadows slider in CS2. It will make the Shadows darker while having less influence on the midtones and highlight values.

The Brightness slider works mainly on the midtones of an image.  Pushing the slider to the right will brighten up the midtones without a heavy effect on the Shadows and Highlights.

The Contrast Slider increases or decreases the contrast above the Shadows and below the highlights.  A heavy hand here will allow the effect to dip into these areas, however.

The Vibrance Slider is a new addition.  This tool applies a non-linear increase in saturation so that lower saturated pixels are more affected. It also has a built in skin tone protector to prevent a face from becoming  overly red.

The Saturation Slider remains the same. Care should be taken with both the Vibrance Slider and the Saturation Slider as these are somewhat blunt instruments.  A much more surgical approach to color can be applied within the H Tab (more to come on this in a minute).

The T Tab

The second tab in line is the Curves Tab.  For those photographers that would break into a nervous sweat upon hearing the word Curves, you can thank the team at Adobe.  They have made this box much more intuitive with their introduction of the “Parametric” curve.  Upon entering this tab, we now have the choice of working with Parametric and/or Point curves.  The Parametric Curve Box opens by default but you can simply click on the Point Tab to work with the traditional curve. 

The first thing you will notice in the Parametric curve is the addition of sliders at the bottom and the middle of the box.  The middle sliders are a great way to visualize where the effect of the lower sliders will occur.  In the following illustration I have color coded the areas that will be affected by the corresponding sliders.  The Shadow Slider will affect the blue region of your image, the Darks Slider, the Green, the Lights are in Red and the Highlight Slider will affect the Yellow region.  Note:  This is not how the Parametric box appears, just my illustration for your edification.

Parametric Curves

Another feature in Parametric Curves is the ability to choke down or widen the individual regions that will be affected by the sliders.  In the next illustration, I have clicked on the region sliders and moved them out.  Now my Shadow and Highlights Region are smaller and my Lights and Darks region have expanded.  You can also move the midtone region slider to alter the division of Lights and Darks. The new Parametric Curves box is worth experimenting with even if you have always been afraid of curves in the past.

The H Tab

Hold on to your hats, the HSL/Grayscale tab hides one of the most useful photographic innovations since the introduction of the RAW file!  This tab allows us complete control over the color in our photographs. It is also an extremely effective method of creating Grayscale images from a color files.  This box breaks up the three color components of Hue, Saturation and Luminance into individual tabs.  You can then adjust the colors of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Aqua, Blue, Purple and Magenta within each tab. 

 

Here is a look at what the three components actually control:
Hue- The name of the color. Red. Blue. Orange.  This name describes where the color sits on the color wheel.  We do know however that there is a wide range of colors that we could call red.  For example you may have red that is similar to that of pepper.   By using the Hue Tab and choosing the red slider, you could make that red appear more Blue or more Orange.

Saturation- How close the color is in value to the true hue.  Is it Burgundy red, orange-red or red-red.
This slider will bring colors that are near to red on the color wheel, closer to a true red.  This Slider differs from Hue in that it pushes all near colors towards the “true color”.  Take an autumn leaf for example.  It may have a variety of colors within that leaf that could all be described as a red.  There is a variance, though.  By pushing the Red slider towards the right under the Saturation Tab, you will taking all of those near reds and pushing them towards a true red. The Hue slider by comparison would alter each of these colors by pushing them all in the same direction-more blue or more orange.

Luminance- Describes the brightness of the color.  This effect is often confused with saturation. When darkening a color it may appear to become more saturated.  Lightening the same color may appear to make it less saturated.  The truth is you are really just changing the brightness.  A moment or two of comparison between these two sliders will reveal their subtle differences in character.

Following are some examples of using the different sliders on a color chart.

In the above example I have changed the Hue of the reds within the color chart.  The first image shows the red as it was captured by the camera.  In Image two I have pushed the Red Slider to the left causing the red to move to more of a blue-red.  Image three shows the result of pushing the Red Slider to the right- a more orange-red.  Of course this effect could be achieved in Photoshop with the Hue/Saturation Dialog box, but that would require another step. The real strength behind this tool, is that surrounding colors remained unchanged! Even the neutral grays at the bottom of the chart remained unaltered.

The next set of images show how the Saturation Slider affects the same color red.

Notice how the saturation differs from the effect of hue.  Even though both commands are affecting the “color” of the red, the Saturation Slider seems to affect the intensity while the Hue makes changes to what we would consider the name of the color.  Image one is the natural color of the red.  Image two shows the red desaturated.  Image three represents the red in a very saturated state.  The power of this dialog is not to be understated.  The Saturation and Vibrance Sliders under the B Tab (Adjust) are both global adjustments affecting all colors while the Saturation Sliders in this box let you fine-tune your image to a very fine degree.

 

The Last example displays the results of increasing or decreasing the luminance of an individual color.

Again, the first image is the red unchanged.  The second image shows how the red appears after being darkened and the third shows the red lightened.  When compared to the Saturation examples above, the difference between Saturation and Luminance becomes more clear.

The HSL Tab to create Grayscale images. 

As you can see from the above examples, the HSL tab puts a lot of power into the photographers hand.  Nowhere is that more evident, however, then when changing a color image to Grayscale.  Creating great Grayscale images has never been easier.  A good Grayscale image will have a pleasing range of tones  from pure black to pure white, with good separation through the midtone gray values.  There are exceptions to this rule, of course, such as high key or low key images. In general, though, this is good formula for success.  The biggest problem facing black and white photographers has always been the separation of tones.  This problem existed in film as it does with digital images.  Our eyes have the benefit of separating tones by color.  So we note the color contrast between a red value and green value even though they may be the same exact brightness level.  When converting to black and white the brightness value has always been the main consideration.  Up until now.  The HSL/Grayscale box is revolutionary in its ability to individually alter the brightness of individual colors within an image. This translates to brighter or darker grays in the final image.  Any future Grayscale image should always begin with a visit to the B Tab, to set the Exposure, Blacks, contrast and Brightness sliders.  Very rarely will the HSL/Grayscale box itself, be enough to create great black and whites.  You will also need to set the black and white points as well as the local contrast through the B Tab to finish the job.  You can start with the HSL/Grayscale tab and then move to the B tab or vice versa.    Lets begin with the HSL/Grayscale Tab in the following examples.

 

 The image above shows the color image before any changes have been made.  Notice that there is sufficient color separation but very little brightness separation between the color values.

HSL_BW_Auto Settings

This screen shot shows how the image would look if you simply clicked in the Convert to Grayscale box.  Photoshop Automatically sets the color sliders by examining the brightness of the colors in the image and trying to replicate them in a grayscale image.  Sometimes you may find that this is just what the doctor ordered.  In other cases you may want to experiment and create your own values.  The Default button will reset all the color values to 0.  Look closely at this image and the original color  image above to note the correlation between brightness of color and the resulting gray value.

HSL_BW_LightenBlue

Once you decide to set manually set your own values, the sky is the limit!  In the original color image we can see that I have an abundance of Red and Orange metal.  The small dots of Blue/Purple add a nice counterpoint.  The goal in this image would be to separate these colors as best as possible so that they translate into different tones of gray in the final Grayscale.  In the above example, I have moved the Red, Orange and Yellow Sliders to the right, which has the effect of darkening down those colors.  Aquas, Blues, Purple and Magentas have been lightened. 

HSL_BW_LightenReds

The opposite approach has been taken with the above image.  The red family has been lightened and the blue family darkened.  This set of values is strikingly different from the previous photo. 

In the two photos above, I have increased the contrast and set the black and white points to get the final image.  This is always an important consideration in creating the finished look of a fine Black and White Print.

 

The S Tab

Following the H tab is the Split Toning Tab designated in the Beta version by an S.  Split toning is a favorite technique among many Black and White darkroom photographers.  It was a way that you could get different color tones in different areas of your image.  A typical Split toning technique was to have the shadows show a cool blue color while the midtones and highlights were pushed towards a warmer brown or yellow tone.  This combination had the advantage of adding the color contrast of Cool/Warm in addition to the Tonal contrast of Dark and Light.  Recreating this technique in Camera RAW is easier, faster, more efficient, and is much less hazardous to your health.  The really cool thing is that you can also try this technique on color images.  There is no reason that the photo has to be a traditional Black and White image to enjoy the benefits of split toning.  To begin with this technique, simply click on the S tab.

Split Tone Box

The Split tone box is broken up into three segments.  Highlights, Shadows and Balance.  The Hue Slider in the Highlights and Shadow section allows you to choose the Hue (color) that you want applied to the region.  I find it hard to choose a color without first increasing the saturation.  This will intensify the hue making it easier to visualize the final color.  Move your Saturation Slider up to Fifty and then move your Hue Slider until the desired color is produced.  Return to the Saturation Slider and reduce or increase the value until the proper intensity of color is created.  Do this for both the Shadow and Highlights regions.  When these steps are complete, you can adjust the Balance Slider to introduce more of the Highlight Color into the Shadows or vice versa.  Moving this slider to the right will begin to push the highlight color down into the darker midtones and eventually the shadows themselves.  Move the slider to the left and the shadow color will start to replace the highlight color in the lighter midtones and eventually the highlights.  Incidentally, moving the Balance Slider all the way to the left or the right is an easy way to reproduce the look of warm or cool tone Black and White printing papers.  Remember to go easy on the saturation when trying this technique.

SplitTone_neutral
SplitTone_Cool_Warm

The introduction of so many new features into Camera RAW 4.0 is truly exciting and the level and ease of control over our images has once again taken a giant leap forward.  I hope you have as much fun experimenting with the Beta Version as I have! 

 

 

TIM COOPER
Tim began his career as a commercial and assignment photographer working with clients such as The North Face, Vasque boots, 3M and The International Heart Institute. His editorial and commercial photographs have appeared in Travel & Leisure, New York Times Magazine, Outdoor Photographer, Fly Rod & Reel, Northern Lights and Private Clubs as covers, advertising, art and editorial illustration.

In addition to commercial work, Tim has also been involved with the Rocky Mountain School of Photography since 1993. He has taught workshops, classes, seminars, as well as held the positions of errand boy, electrician, carpenter, coordinator, stamp licker, consultant and Director of Education, Director of the Black and White Program and Director of Digital Imaging. Tim currently teaches various workshops, classes and seminars for the school in addition to consulting on both photographic and digital technologies.

Tim Cooper
Timcooperphotography.com
Timcoooper123@msn.com

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