This image was slightly underexposed and shot with an incorrect white-balance setting. We're going to fix it up.

 

Digital cameras are smarter and more capable than film cameras, but underneath, they still work the same: light hits an image sensor, and the camera’s interpretation of that light is the image you see. Sometimes the camera (or the photographer) gets it wrong, and the picture suffers. But once you’ve mastered a few tools found in Adobe Creative Suite 3, you can make adjustments to exposure and contrast. You can also do it nondestructively, making things easier to fix in the future if you change your mind.

 

This workflow depends on Adobe Bridge CS3, which comes with Photoshop, and Adobe Camera Raw 4.2, which you can use even if you didn’t shoot your image in RAW format. You can optionally use Photoshop CS3 later to tweak parts of the image.

 

WHAT YOU NEED

> Adobe Photoshop CS3 ($649 à la carte, or as part of one of the Creative Suite 3 bundles)

> A photo in JPEG format (download the image we used here)

 

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1 - Set Up Adobe Bridge. Open Adobe Bridge and select Bridge CS3 > Preferences. Under the Behavior tab, check the “When a camera is connected, launch Adobe Photo Downloader” checkbox. Also check “Double-click edits Camera Raw settings in Bridge” if you prefer to automatically launch the Camera Raw plug-in when you double-click any RAW file in Bridge. If you don’t want Adobe Photo Downloader to launch automatically, you can still get it to launch from within Bridge. Select File > Get Photos From Camera to bring up the dialog. You can change the import settings to help you organize your photos, perhaps with more human-readable folder names. The “Convert to DNG” checkbox won’t do anything to JPEG files.

 

Using Bridge means that newly imported photos won’t be added to your iPhoto library. And if you already have a lot of photos in iPhoto ’08, you’ll need to make them available to Bridge in order to use them. To do so, find your iPhoto library (which is usually in your /Pictures folder), right-click it, and select Show Package Contents. Then make an alias of the Originals folder and put the alias somewhere outside the package. (Don’t make an alias of the Modified folder unless you want to open files that were modified by iPhoto.)

 

Bridge can see into folders, but it can’t see into the iPhoto library, since that’s a package. Luckily, it can follow an alias into the library.

 

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2 - Bridge to Camera Raw. In Bridge, locate and double-click the photo (JPEG or RAW) that you want to work on using Camera Raw. (If you didn’t set double-click behavior in Bridge in the previous step, you can right-click the image and select Open In Camera Raw.) You can work on the image any way you want, but it might help to think, “top to bottom, left to right.” In most every tab, start at the top and work your way down, then proceed to the next tab to the right.

 

At the top right is the histogram, which shows how much of the picture is dark and how much is light. On the left are shadows, in the middle are midtones, and on the right are highlights. The example image of the cat is pretty dark, so the histogram shows a high mountain on the left side (since the cat’s fur is mostly black). There’s also no white in the image, because the histogram doesn’t go all the way to the right. The histogram changes as you make changes to the image; watching what it does can give you an understanding of how various tools work.

 

Above the histogram are Shadow and Highlight Clipping Warning checkboxes. Clipping happens when you make a change that would discard information, because that information becomes lighter than the white, or darker than the black, in the intended color space. With the warnings on, Camera Raw will draw blue pixels for the shadows that clip and red pixels for the highlights that clip. Keep clipping to a minimum for most of your work.

 

Along the top are various tools that can adjust the image. New Camera Raw tools include the Retouch tool, which works as a Cloning Stamp or Healing Brush tool, and a Red-Eye Removal tool. On the bottom is some underlined information about your workflow: the color space, bit depth per color channel, and the dimensions and resolution of the resulting image. Click on this information to make changes in the Workflow Options dialog. If you’re editing a JPEG, you may want to switch to 16 bits per channel to give Photoshop more latitude for adjustments you may make outside of Camera Raw. Just remember that whatever you set here has no effect on what’s going on in Camera Raw.

 

The histogram in the top right of the window indicates that most of the image is dark. There’s also too much blue in this image, since the white point is way off.

 

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3 - The Basic Tab. First up in the Basic tab is White Balance. You can set this by dragging the Temperature and Tint sliders until you’re happy with the white point. Alternatively, you can use the White Balance tool to click somewhere that you think should be white or gray.

 

After that, you can tone the image. The Exposure slider adjusts brightness, with most of its effects seen on the brighter parts of the image. The numeric value of the exposure adjustment corresponds roughly to an f-stop on a camera, so increasing exposure to +1.00 is almost like letting about twice as much light into the camera. Usually, you’ll want to adjust exposure so that the histogram stretches to both the left and right sides, giving the image some white and some black. You can make sure you’re not discarding any information by watching for clipping warnings. Not every image should have white in it, so use your judgment with this slider.

 

The Recovery slider helps resurrect details from the highlights, or bright areas, of the image. Play with it a bit and watch what it does to the histogram. It keeps the highlights bright, but pushes the detail back from the darker highlights. Skip over Fill Light for a second. The Blacks slider pushes the darker parts of the image into black. Use this one carefully, too, because not every image needs black. The Fill Light slider gets some details back from the lighter shadows, without brightening the blacks.

 

The Brightness slider makes the image brighter or darker, but doesn’t usually cause the image to clip. Rather, it compresses one end and stretches the other end of the histogram, depending on which way you slide it. This behavior is why it’s located so far down in the Basic tab - it works best after you’ve already set exposure, recovery, and blacks. Contrast pushes dark midtones darker and light midtones lighter. It works best after you use the Brightness slider.

 

The last three controls affect color saturation. The Clarity slider is a bit like sharpening the image, but we don’t use it because we’ll sharpen with a different tool in the next step. The Vibrance slider adjusts saturation to reduce clipping, and can help with skin tones. Saturation affects each color’s saturation equally. Drag it to the left to get closer to monochrome, or to the right to add some saturation.

 

Now that the histogram goes further toward the right, the blues aren’t much brighter than the rest of the image like they used to be, and the Recovery slider brought back some of the highlights that would’ve been clipped.

 

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4 - Detail Tab. For all work in the Detail tab, use a 100 percent view or larger. Start with the Noise Reduction tools, which can help eliminate the grainy appearance of photos taken at a high ISO setting by blurring some of the detail. Careful use of these tools makes the difference between enhancement and obliteration of detail. The Luminance slider smooths the details, and the Color slider reduces color splotches.

 

If you plan to do more work in Photoshop, skip ahead to step 5, because ideally, sharpening should be done last, and shouldn’t be done to an image that is already sharpened. (If your camera auto-sharpens, you may want to turn that feature off so you can sharpen in Camera Raw or Photoshop.)

 

The Sharpening controls in Camera Raw are a bit like the Unsharp Mask filter in Photoshop. The Amount slider determines how sharply edges get defined. Oversharpened images tend to get noisy, so play with the slider until you find the right setting for the image. Keep the Radius setting lower for images with fine detail, but feel free to experiment with higher settings for other images. The Detail slider adjusts how much information gets sharpened. Lower settings can sharpen edges, while higher settings can make some textures pop out, which is great for some images, but not always the best for your human subject’s skin.

 

Masking determines how much of the image gets sharpened. Higher settings keep sharpening away from more of the image, and you can hold down the Option key while dragging the slider to see the areas where sharpening will be applied. Sharpened areas will appear in white, while masked out areas will appear in black.

 

Working in 100 percent view lets us determine how sharpening affects the cat’s whiskers. Luminance noise reduction made the eyes a bit more natural looking, and Color noise reduction got rid of some of the weird splotches.

 

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5 - When You're Done. The Done button at the bottom of the window saves all of your changes without creating a new image file. Your changes will be reflected in Bridge. The Save Image button creates a new image. If you don’t change the image’s name, Camera Raw will change it for you to prevent overwriting your original image. You can choose to save the image as a Digital Negative, a TIFF, a JPEG, or a Photoshop file. After you click the Save button, you’ll return to Bridge.

 

The Open Image button sends the image to Photoshop. You can also hold down the Shift key and watch the Open Image button become the Open Object button, which sends the adjusted image to Photoshop as a Smart Object.

 

This image of the cat was salvaged from the other file, after fixing exposure and the white point.