Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [42]
Opening files from Bridge
There are a lot of things you can do in Bridge by way of managing and filtering images and other files on your computer. You will find a more detailed analysis of Bridge in Chapter 11. For now, all that you really need to familiarize yourself with are the Favorites and Folders panels and how you can use these to navigate the folder hierarchy. The Content panel is then used to inspect the folder contents and you can use the Preview panel to see an enlarged preview of the image (or images) you are about to open. Once photos have been selected, just double-click the images within the Content panel (not the Preview panel) to open them directly into Photoshop.
Saving from raw files
If you save an image that's been opened up from a raw file original, Photoshop will by default suggest you save it using the native Photoshop (PSD) file format. You are always forced to save it as something else and never to overwrite the original raw image. Most raw formats have unique extensions anyway like .crw or .nef. However, Canon did once decide to use a .tif extension for some of their raw file formats (so that the thumbnails would show up in their proprietary browser program). The danger here was that if you overrode the Photoshop default behavior and tried saving an opened Canon raw image as a TIFF, you risked overwriting the original raw file.
Opening photos from Bridge via Camera Raw
If you are opening a raw or DNG image, these will automatically open via the Camera Raw dialog shown in Figure 1.100 and if you are opening multiple raw images you will see a filmstrip of thumbnails appear down the left-hand side of the Camera Raw dialog. There is also a preference setting in Bridge CS5 that allows you to open up JPEG and TIFF images via Camera Raw too.
Auto logic in Camera Raw
The Auto setting in Camera Raw has been improved so that, most of the time, selecting ‘Auto’ gives you better and more consistent results than could be achieved with previous versions of Camera Raw.
The whole of Chapter 3 is devoted to looking at the Camera Raw controls and I would say that the main benefits of using Camera Raw are that any edits you apply in Camera Raw are non-permanent and this latest version in Photoshop CS5 offers yet further major advances in raw image processing. If you are still a little intimidated by the Camera Raw dialog interface, you can for now just click on the Auto button (circled in Figure 1.100). When the default settings in Camera Raw are set to ‘Auto’, Camera Raw usually does a pretty good job of optimizing the image settings for you. You can then click on the Open Image button without concerning yourself too much just yet with what all the Camera Raw controls do. This should give you a good image to start working with in Photoshop; the beauty of working with Camera Raw is that you never risk overwriting the original master raw file (but do heed the warning in the sidebar about saving raw TIFF files). If you don't like the auto settings Camera Raw gives you, then it is relatively easy to adjust the tone and color sliders and make your own improvements upon the auto adjustment settings.
Figure 1.100 When you select a single raw image in Bridge, and double-click to open, you will see the Camera Raw dialog shown here. The Basic panel controls are a good place to get started, but as was mentioned in the text, the Auto button can often apply an adjustment that is ideally suited for most types of images. Once you are happy, click on the Open Image button at the bottom to open it in Photoshop.
What's new in Camera Raw 6.0
The big news in Camera Raw 6.0 is the improved demosaicing along with improvements made to the sharpening and noise reduction. The new demosaicing provides a noticeable improvement in the quality of the raw processing for most supported raw formats, while the capture sharpening provides more accurate halo generation at lower Radius settings. The noise reduction in Camera Raw