Raw to ready – photoshop basic edit walk through
Photoshop tutorial basic image editing of raw… by artofimagery
Today sees our first tutorial on this site not my own, hopefully the first of many. The dancing aficionado James QH is the author and his photographic credentials are as follows (in order of importance)
#1 He’s a good friend of mine
#2 He’s a decent shooter, better than many that do it for a career, you can see his work here: http://www.jqh.com.au/
#3 He used to be manager of Brisbane Photography
#4 He is my most commonly used photographic assistant
#4 He made Steve Parish’s website (he’s a web guy by trade, photo guy “only” by passion)
#5 He made an old incarnation of my own folio site: benheys.com (don’t bother looking at it now to see his work – it had to be updated and I can’t afford his stuff these days!)
Anyways in this 720p HD video capture we see James start with a raw image straight out of the camera and slowly, with fantastic explanation, perform a complete image edit using some common photoshop editing functions along the way. This is a great video for beginners and intermediates alike as James takes the photo edit slowly and explains precisely what he is doing and why (much slower than I can manage, I must have ADHD, quick! someone pass me the ritalin). Have you ever been a bit confused about color space? Have you wondered how to import an image into 16bit rather than just 8? Wanted to know different ways to boost contrast of a raw file before it even gets to photoshop? Wanted to know other assorted photoshop tips and techniques? It’s all covered here. The first video is around 10mins in length and covers the ACR (Adobe camera raw) stage of the edit, it shows what can be done to an image while it is still in raw format before it even hits photoshop. The second part can be found in the premium members section here, is around 20mins in length and covers what happens once you have finished with ACR and have the image sitting in photoshop proper.
Once you have the image in photoshop (members only):
Some interesting points here and I particularly agree with the importance of shooting Raw. I am a recent convert to Lightroom, though I’m kicking myself for not having done so before because I think the workflow is much better overall than ACR and I believe it’s a far better option most of the time if you are shooting large numbers of images.