You may have noticed the Auto button above the Exposure slider.
Use Auto to have Camera Raw assign its best-guess values to the six
exposure settings. (To apply Auto from the keyboard, press Ctrl+U or
�-U.) Like Photoshop’s Auto Color command, the Auto button fails
about as often as it succeeds. You can always try the Auto settings first
and then make your adjustments.- Sharpen the image with the Clarity slider. Clarity increases
the contrast along edges. In other words, areas of rapid contrast
become more rapid still, which has the effect of sharpening the
image. For this image, a Clarity setting of +50 provides nice
edges without going overboard. - Adjust the Vibrance and Saturation settings. The final two
sliders in the Basic panel let you modify the intensity of colors
in an image. In reverse order:- The Saturation value increases or
decreases the intensity of all col-
ors across the entire image—the
flesh, the fabric, the background,
everything. Overdoing it with the
Saturation slider can result in garish
colors, especially in the skin tones. - Vibrance changes color intensity
more selectively, affecting the low-
saturation colors more than the
high-saturation ones. A heavy hand
with the Vibrance slider can give
you rough transitions because not
all the colors are boosted evenly.
For this image, set the Vibrance value
to +70 to bring out the lovely red shade
of Megan’s hair and play up the purple
in her sash. Then set the Saturation
to +10 to pump up the colors without
overplaying them. The results are dis-
Figure 9-14. played in Figure 9-14.
- The Saturation value increases or
Figure 9-15.
- Choose the straighten tool. Because a handy checkerboard grid
appears on either side of the subject of this image, it’s fairly ob-
vious that the image is slightly crooked. Camera Raw has you
covered for fixing this problem. Start by selecting the straighten
tool in the toolbar across the top of the window (highlighted
in Figure 9-15) or pressing the A key.
310 Lesson 9: Pro Photography Tools