WORKING WITH RAW FILES
Get perfect exposures in Camera Raw
Boost the shadows, midtones and highlights of a photo
to reveal more detail and improve the contrast
O
n the previous pages we demonstrated how to
remove a warm colour cast from our raw
starting image (ty_elements29.dng) to create
more natural-looking skin tones. It’s worth
working through that lesson first because it feeds directly
into this one. When you adjust the colour balance of an
image using tools such as the White Balance tool, you
can alter its exposure, which is why it makes sense to
remove colour casts before overcoming any exposure-
related problems that the shot already suffers from.
It can be a challenge to capture a shot with detail in
the shadows, midtones and highlights, especially when
shooting a high-contrast scene. You may end up with
over-exposed (or clipped) areas that feature no texture
or detail (such as the sun-lit leaves in this image). We’ll
show you how to activate the raw editor’s clipping
warnings, so you can see problematic areas such as over-
exposed highlights. After tweaking the overall exposure
of an image, you’ll then discover how to use sliders to
target and tweak specific tones to reveal more highlight
detail, without altering more correctly exposed tones in
the rest of the image.
The great thing about shooting in the raw format is
that you have much more tonal information to work with
than you’d get from a compressed JPEG. For example,
a white sky in a raw file may look totally bland and
overcast, but by adjusting the Highlights slider you
should be able to reveal hidden cloud texture and detail.
You can also lighten under-exposed shadows without
clipping highlights, and even give midtones a contrast
boost to give subtle details more impact.BEFORE
GET THE START FILES HERE: http://bit.ly/type-files