Adobe Camera Raw

Initially a means to allow Camera Raw images to be opened in Photoshop, The Camera Raw plugin has extended Adobe Photoshop to provide non-destructive post-processing of RAW, TIFF, and JPEG images.

ACR is used in the “Image Capture” phase of RAW processing as an extension of the camera itself, allowing the photographer to make adjustments that may have been made in the camera if time and circumstances allowed. Processing is applied in a similar fashion to working with film in order to prepare the image for further work in Photoshop. In a way, it’s a sort of pre post-processing, often resulting in optical exposure and color balance which likely needs no further processing. These tools are so powerful, that they’ve been adapted for use with JPEG and TIFF images as well.

Camera Raw’s Adjustment Brush

In Photoshop, every adjustment and retouch is done as s layer. There are no overall adjustments as such, so simple moves are often more complex than necessary. ACR approaches things differently by providing a set of tools to make overall adjustments, and three tools to make selective adjustments; Spot Removal, Graduated Filter, and Adjustment Brush. Instead of creating layers for these adjustments, they place anchors in the image area itself called “pins“. Each of these pins carry the adjustment settings and a mask which can be freely edited at will. If the adjustment is no longer needed it can be deleted simply by selecting the pin and pressing the delete key.

There are also “Targeted Adjustments” which allow you to select a color or tonal region within the image area and simply drag the cursor to adjust hue, saturation, luminosity, a parametric curve, or black and white conversion.

RAW, JPEG or TIFF images edited with Camera Raw do not need to be imported into a library. The adjustments are stored as metadata either in the Camera Raw database, or as a “sidecar” .xmp file. This file can also be exported for archival purposes. In this way, you can store as many versions as you want as XMP data instead of several versions of the image file itself.

Adobe Camera Raw comes bundled with Photoshop, and integrates tightly with it. If you have this combination, you have the world at your fingertips and don’t need to purchase Adobe Lightroom.