Ok, so far in the Digital Photography for Moms series on shooting in Raw, we’ve covered the following topics concerning Photoshop Element’s Adobe Camera Raw:

• Why shoot in Raw?
• White balance
• Expsosure and color intensity
• Sharpening

And now, the conclusion.  How exactly do you make the “Raw Conversion” and what do you do with your photos once you’ve made the ACR adjustments?

First, a background note about Raw images.  Raw file formats vary from camera to camera.  I shoot with an Olympus, and the Raw shots from my computer are named with the suffix ORF.  Nikon’s end in NEF and Canon’s in CRW or CR2.  Photoshop’s Adobe Camera Raw can open most of these types of files, depending on the version of ACR you have. 

To open a Raw file that you have transferred to your computer, you start in Photoshop  Elements (or Photoshop).  Go to File/Open, and open the Raw file like you would any other picture.  Doing this will automatically start Adobe Camera Raw.

ACR is a bit persnickety.  If you want to edit multiple photos in ACR at the same time, you have to select them all at the same time in the Open File dialgoue of PSE.  Do this by control clicking on all the files you want to work on.  This is good to do when you have lots of pictures taken in the same shooting conditions that you want to apply similar Raw settings to.  Unfortunately, you can’t pop back over to PSE to open additional files without closing ACR.

So, once you have your pictures opened in ACR, control click on the thumbnail for each picture that you want to edit.  Your edits will be applied to all activated images.  Then, if you need to fine tune pictures individually, click on each by itself.

When you have completed you edits, you have several options:

• Save Image – Use only if you want to save your image in the DNG file format.  I never do. 
• Done – Used when you want to make no further changes, but don’t need to change the file format
• Cancel – Use this only if you want to cancel your changes
• Open Image – Opens the picture in PSE so that you can make further edits and save it in any file format.  If you want to save your picture as a PSD or JPEG, go here.

A note about saving Raw files.  None of the changes you make in ACR ever touch your original Raw file (the ORF, NEF, CRW, etc.).  Your changes are stored in a separate XML file that is created when you first open the picture.  This is good for two reasons.  First, you can always get back to your original, untouched image, if you want.  Second, you can process this same image in many ways, all based off the original.  This is good is you have a picture with a wide range of exposure.  You can adjust the Raw settings for the low exposure areas and open it in PSE.  Then, reopen the Raw in ACR, adjust is for the high exposure settings and open this version in PSE.  Then, use a layer mask to combine the two, masking in only the appropriately exposed section of each picture. 

Much of this info came from my pouring over the Adobe Photoshop Elements Techniques newsletter and the following books:

I think that does it for my Raw series.  Did I leave anything out?

Coming up soon – info on a cool tool and learning opportunity that I’ve recently learned about.  Subscribe to Digital Photography For Moms via email or RSS so that you don’t miss out!