Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [66]
Photoshop can now install what are known as Extensions panels (such as the Configurator panel described on page 27). If the ‘Load Extensions Panels’ option is checked this will load all the installed panels on startup. Furthermore, if the ‘Allow Extensions to Connect to the Internet’ option is checked, this allows such panels to connect over the Internet, allowing them to access new content plus any important panel updates. This is particularly relevant with things like the Access CS Live panel that needs to be connected to the Internet in order for it to work.
Type preferences
Lastly, we come to the Type preferences (Figure 2.33), which are mainly of importance to graphics users rather than photographers. We could all do with smart quotes I guess, but the smart quotes referred to here is a preference for whether the text tool uses vertical quotation marks or rounded ones that are inverted at the beginning and end of a sentence. The ‘Show Asian Text Options’ is there for Asian users, to enable the Chinese, Japanese and Korean text options in the Character panel. The ‘Show Font Names in English’ option will be of more significance to non-English language users, as it allows them the option to display the font names in English, as an alternative to their own native language. The ‘Enable Missing Glyph Protection’ option will switch on automatic font substitution for any missing glyph fonts (those swirly graphic font characters).
Figure 2.33 The Type preferences.
Type tool initialization
When you select the type tool for the first time during a Photoshop session, there will be a brief pause in which Photoshop initializes the type tool engine. If the type tool was selected when you last closed Photoshop, the initialization process will happen during the startup cycle.
The Type tool Options panel also provides a WYSIWYG menu listing of all the available fonts when you mouse down on the Font Family menu (see Figure 2.32). The Font Preview Size menu determines the font sizes used when displaying this list and shouldn't be confused with the UI Font Size preference that is in the General preferences section.
Figure 2.32 Photoshop presents the font lists using a WYSIWYG menu listing.
Chapter 3. Camera Raw Image Processing
Camera Raw advantages
Although Camera Raw started out as an image processor exclusively for raw files, since version 4.0 it has also been capable of processing any RGB image that is in a JPEG or TIFF file format. This means that you can use Camera Raw to process any image that has been captured by a digital camera, or any photograph that has been scanned by a film scanner and saved as an RGB TIFF or JPEG. Camera Raw allows you to work non-destructively-anything you do to process an image in Camera Raw is saved as an instruction edit and the pixels in the original file are never altered. In this respect, Camera Raw treats your master files as if they were your negatives and you can use Camera Raw to process an image in any way that you like without ever altering the original.
From light to digital
The CCD or CMOS chip in your camera converts the light hitting the sensor into a digital image. In order to digitize the information, the signal must be processed through an analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The ADC measures the amount of light hitting the sensor at each photosite and converts the analog signal into a binary form. At this point, the raw data simply consists of image brightness information coming from the camera sensor. The raw data must then be converted somehow and the raw conversion method used can make