There are several advantages to working this way. First and foremost, it means you can change your mind about any edits made in Camera Raw, such as a crop or sharpening settings. But it also opens up more creative possibilities.

By duplicating a Photoshop Smart Object layer, you can combine different treatments made in Camera Raw using Blend Modes. Don’t worry if this sounds complicated, in practice it’s very easy.

Our before image

Within minutes you can transform a flat scene into a punchy, detailed landscape. Here’s how it’s done.

01 Open start image
Open your start image into Camera Raw then set Temperature to 5000, Tint -7, Vibrance +50.

02 Remove chromatic aberration
Go to the Lens Correction option in the menu and then check ‘Remove Chromatic Aberration’.

03 Graduated filter
Click on Graduated Filter tool. Hold Shift then drag a line from sky to land. Set Exposure to -1.35. Hold Shift and click ‘Open Object’.

04 New Smart Object
In the Layers Panel, right-click the layer and choose New Smart Object via copy. Double-click copy’s thumbnail to go back to Camera Raw.

05 Tonal tweaks
Set Exposure -0.40, Contrast +60, Highlights -100, Shadows +80, Whites -50, Blacks +50, Clarity +100, Saturation -100.

06 Make tone curve panel adjustment
Go to the Tone Curve Panel. Under Parametric, set Highlights +10, Lights +25, Darks -25. Click OK.

07 Luminosity blend mode
In the Layers Panel, click on the Blend Mode drop-down and then choose Luminosity.

08 Removing edge halos
To fix unwanted halos, press Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E to merge a copy of the layers, then grab the Burn tool. Set Range: Highlights, Exposure 10%, and brush carefully over the edge halos.

But if you’re content with ‘one-size-fits-all’ settings, you might as well have let your camera do the conversion instead.

The real benefit of using Camera Raw is that you can use its tools to process the image exactly as you want. As a general rule, you’ll work through the tabs one by one, using the sliders more or less in sequence.

The Basic tab contains the key tonal and exposure adjustment tools, but Camera Raw also offers a wide array of options for adjusting colour and correcting image flaws such as noise or dust spots.

Using Camera Raw’s tonal adjustment sliders

Exposure
This can be used to darken or lighten your shots. It functions just like your camera’s exposure controls: its readout is even in exposure values. The slider affects mostly highlights and light midtones, and since most of the captured data should be in this range, quite dramatic changes to your images are possible.

Recovery
The Recovery slider affects the lightest tones in your image, pulling back seemingly clipped highlights without reducing exposure globally. It can flatten contrast in the highlights, though, so you may need to boost the Exposure or Brightness setting in order to compensate for this.

Fill Light
This slider lightens shadows without affecting highlights and light midtones that are correctly exposed. The darkest tones in your image won’t be affected, but high values can soften contrast and introduce noise, so use the slider with care. That said, you can get impressive results, even with JPEGs.

Blacks
Use this to set an image’s ‘black point’ – the brightness of the darkest tones – in a similar way to the Black Point input slider in the Levels dialog. It’s useful for restoring contrast after heavy Fill Light adjustments, but the slider should be used sparingly – the default value of 5 for raw files will often need reducing.

Brightness
The Brightness slider primarily works on an image’s midtones – the effects fall off towards the shadows and highlights. This slider is best used to fine-tune exposure without introducing clipping – particularly where contrast is high and highlights or shadows are already close to being clipped.

Contrast
Increasing the Contrast setting has an effect similar to creating an ‘S-shaped’ curve with Curves or Adjust Color Curves – lighter midtones are lightened and darker midtones darkened, increasing the contrast between them, but the lightest and darkest tones are affected less, minimising clipping.

Clarity slider
Increasing the Clarity setting will enhance the contrast in your image only within the midtones. The Clarity slider is therefore an ideal method for adding punch to your shots when a lot of fine detail has been captured within that part of the tonal range.

Saturation
This slider intensifies or weakens colours in the same way as its counterpart in the Hue/Saturation dialog in Photoshop. The Vibrance slider works a little differently: increasing the setting boosts less-saturated colours more than already-saturated ones, enabling you to make more subtle adjustments.

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But if you’re serious about photography you should set your camera to shoot Raw. And perhaps the biggest reason why should do this is, in addition to getting the best possible quality, shooting raw files gives you an invaluable safety net when the scene in front of you presents exposure problems.

Our start image

In our landscape photo above, the foreground is slightly overexposed, and consequently the sky looks washed out and lacking in detail. Luckily there’s a lot more tonal information hidden in Raw files than you might think; the trick is knowing how to tease it out, and if you have

Photoshop CS, then you’ve got one of the most powerful Raw converters available: Adobe Camera Raw.

As well as sliders for adjusting exposure, contrast and colour, ACR under CS4 and newer models includes additional tools, including the Graduated Filter and Spot Removal tools.

The way Camera Raw is set up, with easily accessible panels and tools, makes it easy to quickly apply multiple edits.

And while you may not get the full range of creative tools that are available in Photoshop, you do get all the tools a photographer needs to optimise exposure and colour.

Our final image

Adobe Camera Raw is the ideal place to begin your photo editing – and you may even find you don’t need to open an image in the main Photoshop interface at all.

How to rescue highlight detail in your raw files

01 Fix the white balance
Open your start image in Adobe Camera Raw. Start by clicking the White Balance menu at the top of the Basic tab and choose the Daylight preset – this removes the slight red cast, and creates more natural-looking colours.

02 Recover the highlights
There are a few blown highlights in the sky and the yellow flowers. To pull these back, move the Recovery slider right while holding down Alt to see a preview of clipped pixels; pixels clipped in one or two channels are shown in colour, while pixels clipped in all three channels are white. At around 23 all the specks of colour vanish, meaning the highlights are recovered.

03 Boost the tones
Set Contrast +10 to improve overall contrast, and Blacks +10 to give the darkest shadows an extra boost. To enhance the blue sky set Vibrance to +22; this slider boosts less-saturated colours more than stronger ones, so we can use it to boost the pale blues without affecting the more-saturated yellow flowers.

04 Add a grad
Click the Graduated Filter tool in the toolbar at the top of the interface. In the settings panel on the right, set Exposure to -1.00 and make sure all the other sliders are at 0 – you can reset a slider to 0 by double-clicking it. Next hold down Shift and drag a line from halfway down the sky to just below the horizon.

05 Enhance the sky
Reduce Exposure at little more, to -1.35, then set Saturation to +30 to boost the colours. If you need to, you can fine-tune the position of the graduated filter effect by dragging the points (hold down Shift as you drag to keep the lines perfectly horizontal.)

06 Remove sensor marks
There are a few sensor marks in the sky, so click the Spot Removal tool in the toolbar and set Type to Heal and Opacity to 100%. Zoom in on the top-right of the image, then click-and-drag over a mark to draw a circle. Release the mouse button and the tool will clone out the mark using adjacent pixels.

07 Add a vignette
Next we’ll add a vignette to darken the corners of the shot slightly, which will help to draw the eye into the frame. Double-click the Hand icon to return to the main interface, then click the Lens Correction tab, and click the Manual tab if you’re using CS5. Set Vignette Amount to -15 and Midpoint to 40.

08 Sharpen and save
Finally we’ll apply some sharpening. Click the Detail tab, then double-click the Zoom tool to zoom in to 100%. Set Sharpening Amount to 50, Radius to 1.2, Detail to 25 and Masking to 25. To reduce the noise in the sky set Luminance Noise Reduction to 18. When you’re happy, click Save Image or Open Image to open the image in Photoshop.

Final Tip
The clipping preview we use here with the Recovery slider is also available for the Exposure and Blacks sliders, and it’s particularly useful as it shows pixels that are clipped in one or more colour channels, as well as to pure black or white; in this case, the yellow channel is clipped in some of the flowers.

FIRST PAGE: Overview
NEXT PAGE: How to apply graduated filter settings

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The first is to combine two different conversions, adjusting the exposure of the second to deal with high-contrast lighting – see our image, below.

Our final version

The effect is similar to using 
a graduated Neutral Density (ND grad) lens filter to darken the top half of your image, but you have much more control over the transition between the two exposures.

Our original shot

You can also combine two raw conversions saved with different white balance settings, which allows you to warm up or cool down different areas, rather than the image as a whole.

Combine raw files for a perfect exposure

01 Duplicate your image
To save time when making your adjustments it’s best to create a duplicate of your raw file. This way you can make individual adjustments to each file, rather than opening and adjusting the same image twice.

02 Open in Adobe Camera Raw
Select both raw files by holding the Ctrl button and clicking on both, and then open them in ACR. This should be the default action, but you can also right-click and choose the Open in Camera Raw option.

03 Adjust your images
Now you can make the different adjustments for each image. For our shot we chose a cooler white balance for the first image, which we used for the sky, and a warmer one 
for the foreground in the second image.

04 Adjust the exposure

For the second image, where we wanted 
to bring out detail in the rocks, we used the Exposure slider to lighten the image a little, 
then used the Fill Light adjustment to lighten 
the rocks and sea.

05 Layer your shots
Now select both images and open them in the Edit window. Select the light image (Ctrl+A) and copy (Ctrl+C) and paste it (Ctrl+V) onto the dark one. Make sure the top layer is selected by clicking on it, then click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers palette.

06 Mask out the sky
Using a soft round brush, make sure that the foreground colour is set to black and the Opacity is set to around 25%. Paint over the sky to mask out the lighter image and reveal the darker sky below, and any other areas you want to darken. Remember, don’t get carried away…

Read the rest of our Raw Tuesday series

Getting any photo in perfect focus can be a challenge, and particularly when you’re shooting a moving subject like our high jumper above, you’ll need to use a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the action at a key moment. We used a speed of 1/800 sec to capture our athlete clearing the bar with the minimum of motion blur.

However, as the shutter speed was very fast we had to open up the aperture to f/5.6 to get a decent exposure, which meant that our depth of field was very shallow.

Fortunately, the focal point was on the athlete’s face and upper body, and the shallow depth of field produces an attractive bokeh that throws the distracting background details out of focus and directs attention to the subject.

Our original image

Although the key features of our athlete are fairly sharp in our original image directly above, we can create a print with maximum punch by sharpening them a bit more in Adobe Camera Raw.

The way to sharpen photos is by increasing contrast between pixels on either side of edges; however, the process can exaggerate noise, and create artefacts such as light or dark halos clinging to edges.

Below we’ll show you how to sharpen a Raw shot to tease out delicate details in key areas without adding artefacts, to produce action shots with real impact.

01 Improve composition
Open the image you would like to sharpen. Using Photoshop Elements, the Raw file will open in Adobe Camera Raw by default. We’ll start by cropping the shot to make the athlete more prominent in the frame; it’s worth cropping first, so that you don’t waste time editing areas that won’t be in the final shot. Click and hold on the Crop tool and choose Constrain to Image, then draw a crop as shown and hit Return.

02 Adjust the exposure
Before sharpening it’s worth making sure a shot is correctly exposed; if an area is overexposed it will be missing detail, so you won’t be able to sharpen that area effectively. Set Recovery to 30 to pull back missing highlight detail. Set Clarity to +45 to increase the local contrast and bring out detail, and to boost the colours set Vibrance to +20 and Saturation to +10.

03 Check the sharpness
Click the zoom menu at the bottom-left of the interface and choose 100% – you can only tell how sharp a shot really is by looking at its actual pixels. Now click the Detail tab. By default, the Raw editor sets the Sharpening Amount to 25 – this setting controls the strength of the contrast adjustment. Drop Amount to 0 to view the shot with no sharpening applied – you’ll notice that the facial detail becomes quite soft.

04 Adjust the sharpness
Set Amount to 50 to increase the contrast along edges, and to increase the width of the edges over which sharpening is applied set Radius to 2.0. Leave Detail at the default 25; if you push it higher you run the risk of sharpening and exaggerating the picture noise caused by the fast ISO setting of 400. To pull back the sharpening and minimise noise in the smooth background tones, drag the Masking slider to 80; this limits the sharpening to more detailed areas.

Final Tip
To see which areas are being sharpened, hold down Alt as you move the Masking slider. At low values the entire shot will be white, indicating that all areas will be sharpened. As you drag the slider right the background will turn black; only the remaining white areas will be sharpened.

A high-key portrait tends to be lit from the front, creating a relatively shadow-free image. The over-exposed highlights help to smooth out skin tones and dial down distracting details so that key features such as the eyes and lips stand out more dramatically.

The challenge with high-key portrait photography comes when deliberately over-exposing a shot to produce bright flat skin tones while preserving shadows and midtones on the eyes and lips.

It’s all too easy to go too far and lose valuable detail throughout the entire tonal range, especially if you shoot in compressed JPEG format, rather than raw.

So here, we’ll show you how to unleash the power of the Photoshop Elements Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) editor to increase the brightness of a correctly exposed portrait and create the flat wash of bright highlights associated with high-key photography.

Our original image

Because raw files have more tonal information than a JPEG, you can reveal as much highlight detail as you like post-shoot, while giving the tones of key features such as the eyes and lips an independent tweak to produce a portrait that has far more punch.

Because our subject is blonde, we’ll demonstrate how to use Adobe Camera Raw’s Exposure slider to blow out the highlights in her hair so that it merges with the white studio background, creating a clean and delicate high-key look that flatters her feminine features.

We’ll also show you how to tone down the image’s colour intensity to create a delicate palette that complements the overall effect.

Click here to see step-by-step how to make a high-key portrait with your raw files.

For more on editing raw files, check out the ongoing Raw Tuesday series over on our sister site, Digital Camera World.

There are lots of good reasons for setting your Canon to RAW quality mode. However, one of most persuasive is the degree to which you can tweak tonal range and exposure of your pictures after they have been shot.

But just how far can you go with your exposure correction? The advantage of using a digital SLR is that your exposures are likely to be pretty close to perfect in at least 95% of your pictures.

But for that odd disaster when shooting in to the sun, or when you have accidentally taken an important shot with the wrong settings, what degree of correction can you make?

In this tutorial we’ve got a sequence of shots taken at different exposures, ranging from severely over-exposed to drastically dark. Although we can improve all of them in Photoshop Elements’ Camera Raw processor, we can’t perform miracles.

Shots that are more than one stop over-exposed (that had twice as much light as they needed) are impossible to save successfully. Under-exposure, however, is much easier to correct for; shots that are two stops too dark (receiving only a quarter of the light needed) can be rescued convincingly, but even here the treatment has its side effects, increasing grain noticeably in the shadow area of the picture.

Step 1: Batch basic corrections
Go to File>Open from the Full Edit area of Elements. Ctrl-click all the rescue_start.CR2 files so they open in the Camera Raw interface. They were shot at different exposures, but we can correct some things in all the shots simultaneously. Click on Select All (top left) and crop to lose the dark patch on the right. Set Temperature slider to 5400, to warm up the shots.

Step 2: Two stops too bright
Here we used an image shot at f/5. This shot is severely over-exposed.

By moving the Exposure slider to -1.95, the Recovery slider to 100, Contrast down to +9, and reducing Brightness to +29 we can make this shot vaguely presentable. But in most circumstances this is only fit for the Recycle Bin – as colours have become distorted, and the model’s cheek is still far too bright.

Step 3: One stop over
Next we used an image taken at f/7.1. Again, the shot is very over-exposed, but this time we can make a much better rescue effort.

Move the Exposure slider to -1.30, set Recovery to 67 to get a reasonably presentable result. The forehead is still too bright – but trying to set Recovery levels higher begins to create more problems than are actually being solved.

Step 4: Correct exposure
Our next shot was taken at f/11. This looks good, but we can still tweak the settings to get the best out of the shot.

Move the Exposure slider right slightly, to +0.15. Set Recovery to 29 to reduce facial shine, and nudge Fill Light to 5 to squeeze a bit more detail from the shadows.

Step 5: One stop too dark
This image was taken at f/18. This shot is at least one stop under-exposed. However, the shot is easily fixed with the top three tonal control sliders…

Move Exposure to +1.00, nudge Recovery up to 10 and shift the Fill Light slider to 20. This shot now looks as good as the ‘correct’ exposure in Step 4.

Step 6: Over two stops under-exposed
Our last image was taken at f/29. This is severely under-exposed, with tones that are as black as treacle, but we can affect a miraculous rescue.

Move the Exposure slider to +2.45, and push the Fill Light to 50 – this is enough to give you a remarkably presentable end result. Zoom in, however, and you can see that the image is much noisier than the more correctly exposed versions, particularly in dark areas.

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First among the three DNG enhancements is what Hogarty calls Fast-load date, which is a miniature raw preview image embedded in the file that makes it faster to switch among images.

Next is ’tiled’ DNG files divided into parts so multi-core processors can read and write them faster. Finally, there will be an option for ‘lossy’ compression to dramatically reduce file size.

Adobe has been working in recent years to standardise its DNG raw format and hopes these improvements will help motivate photographers to make the switch.