Photoshop CS5 also has a new, improved engine for creating High
Dynamic Range (HDR) photos that allows you to combine multiple
frames of the same subject shot at different exposures. Using HDR,
you can combine a wider range of highlight and shadow detail than
a single frame might be able to capture (which I’ve also simulated
in Figure 9-1). Both Photomerge and HDR require some planning
at the moment you click the shutter, so you have to be thinking like
a photographer way before you get to Photoshop.The Raw Power of Adobe Camera Raw
As far as processing digital photographs in Photoshop goes, Adobe
Camera Raw is the flagship tool. ACR’S primary purpose is to be
the digital darkroom for photographs captured by a midrange or
professional-level digital camera and saved in the camera’s native
format, known as its raw format. These raw files represent the un-
processed data captured by a camera’s image sensor, represented in
its unprocessed state in Figure 9-2. You have to process the files to
see the benefits of capturing raw, but you get to work with a much
wider range of luminance data. All this adds up to a lot more flex-
ibility when you’re correcting images. Figure 9-3 was created from
the same capture data (the same click of the shutter) as Figure 9-2,
but you can see all the shadow and highlight detail and color that
I was able to extract using ACR.
Inside Camera Raw (a third way people refer to this plug-in), you can
adjust white balance, fix the exposure, correct the contrast, enhance
the colors, and straighten or crop as needed. Camera Raw also al-
lows something Photoshop doesn’t: You can apply adjustments to
multiple images at a time. And although it was designed specifically
for processing raw format files, it also works with TIFFs and JPEGs.PeaRl Of WISDOm
Photoshop supports raw files from a slew of digital cameras, including
those sold by Nikon, Olympus, and Canon. The problem is, virtually
every manufacturer uses a different file format (Nikon’s NEF, Olympus’s
ORF), and some have more than one (Canon’s CRW and CR2). To rein in
the proceedings, Adobe developed the DNG (Digital Negative) format, a
royalty-free, documented standard with lossless compression and editable
metadata that Adobe promises to support well into the future. The list of
manufacturers whose cameras capture DNG files include Hasselblad, Leica,
and Samsung, and the list is likely to grow. If your camera shoots to another
format, as most do, not to worry. You can convert your images directly from
your camera’s memory card using Adobe’s DNG Converter, which you can
download for free from http://www.adobe.com/dng. We will be using DNG files
throughout this exercise.
Figure 9-2.Figure 9-3.The Raw Power of Adobe Camera Raw 295