PRO PHOTOgRAPHy TOOLS
Figure 9-1.PhOtOShOP Began ItS lIfe back when few people, even profes-
sional photographers, possessed digital cameras. Most of the folks using the applica-
tion then were like me, graphic artists who were either working with scanned film
images shot by someone else or creating pieces of our own from scratch. Usually,
the photographer was more or less out of the loop by the time the Photoshoppery
happened. As taking your own digital photos became more common, however,
the Photoshop phase of the process started much earlier. Nowadays, if you have
a digital camera, chances are you want to create and enhance your photographs
yourself. Photoshop has become a digital darkroom, where the photographer makes
early decisions about the way an image is developed, both literally and expressively.
As Photoshop has matured, we began to see tools that were tailored for photo-
graphic work. The most overarching of these tools is Adobe Camera Raw (ACR),
a plug-in that comes with Photoshop CS5 and allows you to process your own
digital negatives right from the get-go. In this lesson, we’ll look at both the global
edits you can create in ACR as well as the localized modifications you can make
to specific parts of an image.
We’ll also discuss two powerful features that are particularly appealing to pho-
tographers. Both involve combining multiple frames or exposures into one image.
Using Photoshop’s Photomerge technology, you can, among other things, stitch a
bunch of images into one large, expressive piece that captures an entire horizon,
like the one in Figure 9-1.