I’ve posted about RAW processing a couple of times lately.  The first article discussed why to shoot in Raw and the 2nd, how to adjust a photo’s white balance.  Now for the next installment:  how to make other Raw adjustments on the Basic Panel in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).

The illustration image here would not win any photo contests.  But that’s what made it a good example – it needed some serious work in ACR!  Here is the cropped straight out of camera shot.

And here is the shot after adjusting the white balance.  See how the white balance adjustment toned down blue a bit and red a lot?

After correcting white balance, I clicked on the Auto button just above the Exposure slider.  (My last RAW post has a picture of the Basic Panel in ACR, if you need a refresher.)

Every once in a while, the Auto button actually perfects a picture; if not, it’s often a good starting point.  If you don’t like it at all, you can always click on the default button to return to your starting point.

To fine tune this Auto setting, start with the Exposure slider to adjust overall brightness.  This will especially help with an under- or overexposed photo.  If the black arrow in the top right-hand corner of the histogram turns white, that means that you are increasing the exposure so much that you are losing details in the highlight areas.  Click once on that triangle and these areas of “blown” highlights will turn red.  If large areas of your picture are red, you’ll probably need to reduce the exposure. 

However, if only small areas are blown, move the Recovery slider to the right until the red mostly disappears.  This Recovery slider might also be useful for some overexposed pictures in general, especially if you use the Exposure slider to reduce exposure first.

Next step?  Skip down to the Blacks slider.  Moving it to the right will increase shadows in your picture.  This is not the same as decreasing the exposure on your image – the Blacks slider darkens tones that are already dark to begin with, rather than darkening all tones as the exposure slider does.

Brightness is like the middle slider in Levels – it adjusts the midtones of your image.

At this point, if the subject of your image is still too dark, jump back up to the Fill Light slider.  This is particularly useful if most of the light in your photo is coming from behind your subject and your subject’s face is dark, as a result.

I honestly don’t use the Contrast slider much, and I definitely don’t try it until after I’ve adjusted the Clarity slider (see below).  ACR usually applies a small amount of Contrast adjustment as a default, and I don’t change this.

After you’ve made these adjustments, you might need to go back and tweak each individual line.  One adjustment might cause another you’ve already made to look a bit off.

Of the three sliders in the bottom section (Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation), I usually only use the first two.  I use Vibrance first.  Vibrance works mainly on non-skin colors and is better than Saturation for boosting colors when you don’t want skin to look unnatural.  Note that as well as increasing vibrance, you can decrease it to give your pictures a faded look.

Next, I zoom in to 100% by double clicking on the magnifying glass at the top left corner of the page.  Then I play with the Clarity slider.  Now, this is supposed to be a really cool new feature in ACR and Photoshop.  And maybe it’s because I mostly take pictures of kids, but I don’t like it all that much.  It tends to make soft skin look too harsh.  Having said that, it is often a good alternative to running my Defog action on images that are hazy.  And I usually try it out on every picture, nevertheless. 

This screenshot shows the adjustments that I finished with:

And here is my picture after making all the adjustments on the basic tab.   The straight out of camera shot is before it, for comparison.

I haven’t sharpened yet (obviously) but the colors and exposure are much better!  The picture still needs some help.  I think that the more I blog, the more long-winded I get, because I can’t seem to finish a topic in 1 (or even 2) posts anymore!

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