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David
17-08-2010, 8:57am
As a follow up to reading Ricks very helpful introduction Tutorial on processing RAW images in Adobe Camera Raw which is here

http://www.ausphotography.net.au/forum/showthread.php?t=15590

I went to Adobe and found a ‘manual’ which gives you all the detail you need to take advantage of the RAW processing tools ACR offers. This gives you all the details about all the tools and what they do and how to use them. It is long winded but very detailed so even a klutz like me can read it and understand how it works.

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/creativesuite/cs/using/WSD040CF04-C176-4ecb-8A8E-155FBA26AA77.html.

Here is a teaser to get you to go have a look see if you are new to RAW processing and have access to Adobe Camera Raw.

Sharpen photos in Camera Raw

The sharpening controls on the Detail tab adjust edge definition in the image. The Adjustment Brush tool and Graduated Filter tool use the Radius, Detail, and Masking values when local sharpening is applied.

Use the Apply Sharpening To option in the Camera Raw preferences to specify whether sharpening is applied to all images or just to previews.
To open preferences from within Camera Raw, click the Open Preferences Dialog button in the toolbar.

Zoom -- the preview image to at least 100%.

In the Detail tab, adjust any of these controls:

Amount-- Adjusts edge definition. Increase the Amount value to increase sharpening. A value of zero (0) turns off sharpening. In general, set Amount to a lower value for cleaner images. The adjustment is a variation of Unsharp Mask, which locates pixels that differ from surrounding pixels based on the threshold you specify and increases the pixels’ contrast by the amount you specify. When opening a camera raw image file, the Camera Raw plug-in calculates the threshold to use based on camera model, ISO, and exposure compensation.

Radius - Adjusts the size of the details that sharpening is applied to. Photos with very fine details may need a lower setting. Photos with larger details may be able to use a larger radius. Using too large a radius generally results in unnatural-looking results.

Detail- Adjusts how much high-frequency information is sharpened in the image and how much the sharpening process emphasizes edges. Lower settings primarily sharpen edges to remove blurring. Higher values are useful for making the textures in the image more pronounced.

Masking -- Controls an edge mask. With a setting of zero (0), everything in the image receives the same amount of sharpening. With a setting of 100, sharpening is mostly restricted to those areas near the strongest edges. Press Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac OS) while dragging this slider to see the areas to be sharpened (white) versus the areas masked out (black).

(Optional) To apply Camera Raw 6 sharpening to images that were edited in a previous version of Camera Raw, click the Update To Current Process (2010) button in the lower-right corner of the image preview.

Dan Gamble
26-08-2010, 5:28pm
Thanks David.

There's a lot to ACR and it makes such a big difference knowing how to tweak it and what's happening when you are.

Out of interest though... there's a lot of Talk about Adobe Lightroom (I know Rick uses it). Is there anywhere here that discusses the comparisons and differences between ACR and LR? I can't seem to find anything on AP and I'd like to know why Adobe would make two "apps" that do - as far as I can tell - essentially the same thing.

Can you clarify at all?

maccaroneski
26-08-2010, 6:03pm
Dan my understanding is that in essence, all of the features of ACR are contained in Lightroom (as far as "straight" raw processing goes) down to them sharing the same engine.

Photoshop then goes on to allow a very high degree of control over image manipulation, and Lightroom allows a very high degree of control over digital asset management (DAM) including keywording, tagging, sorting, etc etc.

So you can get by with one or the other, however will not have all of the features of one in the other.