luminance, Crop, and Color
In addition to white balance, the Basic tab of Camera Raw gives
you efficient control over the exposure and color intensity of your
image. This is where the real power of working with raw files shines,
bringing back detail in shadow and highlight areas that would be
totally lost in a JPEG file. The luminance-related sliders are similar
to those we saw in the Levels dialog box, but the sliders in Camera
Raw are specifically designed to bringing back the immense amount
of data that our raw capture possesses within.
We’ll also take a look at some familiarly named sliders that help
fine-tune the color and contrast of an image, sliders that are pro-
genitors of the Vibrance and Saturation adjustments we saw back
in Lesson 6. And finally, we’ll use the wonderfully efficient crop
and straightening tools in Camera Raw to level the corrected photo.
- Open a new image. Let’s select a suitable photo. In
the Bridge, select the Checkers.dng file in the Raw Im-
ages folder (which is inside the Lesson 09 folder inside
Lesson Files-PsCS5 1on1), and press Ctrl+R (�-R) to open the
file in Camera Raw. The charming if overly bright photo of my
friend Megan Anderson Read is shown in Figure 9-12.
Figure 9-12.Luminance, Crop, and Color 307