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[Adobe TV Presents]
Russell Preston Brown in...]
[The Russell Brown Show]
Aloha from this addition of the Russell Brown Show.
As you can see, I've gone Hawaiian with this incredibly
good-looking Hawaiian shirt, which I expensed on the
Adobe expense program.
Hey, in this episode, I'm going to take you through a series
of images that I've completely edited
in Adobe Camera Raw.
I challenged myself to see if I could edit these entirely
with these new tools in Adobe Camera Raw CS4.
So let's get this project started right here in Adobe Bridge.
As you can see, I've got a series of images open.
Now these images, by the way, are a set of images
from a great photographer by the name of Clark Little.
I met Clark at the Maui photo festival
in Maui, of course.
A great photographer, he does his photography by lying in the surf
and having the waves crush over him.
So check this out.
Here's a series of his images.
They're like frozen glass in in time.
He lies there in the surf, captures these,
and I happened to be lucky enough
to get some of these images so that I can use
them in this project.
So let's get this started and go right back here to Bridge, right here.
Now on this project, you can see, here's the
finished result that I'm going to achieve in this project.
And, of course, here's the original.
This would be the original.
Of course, isn't this convenient how you can just turn on different ratings,
and you can simply and easily see different
images just like that?
Of course, Mr. Brown did that little mistake just so you can see that.
So here's the after, right here.
And here's the before image.
So check it out.
This is the original photograph, and I'm going to achieve the results
simply and easily in Camera Raw.
Okay, let's get started.
Target my image here in Bridge, and let's use that command
key on the Macintosh and the control key on the PC
and the letter R to open it up
directly into Camera Raw.
Now here we are.
Of course, this is unedited, but there are some great new features in
here that's really going to make this project just sing.
Of course, that's with a ukulele and a great band.
So let's get started here.
Right over here, let's start with the basic settings.
Now, you're supposed to move through these
right down through the exposure, recovery,
fill light, and go right down through the set,
but I tend to cheat a bit.
I move around a little bit, because in my technique that I'm using,
I don't usually touch the exposure if the exposure looks pretty good to start with.
I'm going to go right into recovery in this particular case.
But before I do that, I'm going to turn on
the preview for both shadow clipping and highlight clipping.
You see up here in the upper right-hand corner, this is a
great way to see what you're adjusting
with these controls, especially with recovery,
one of my first adjustments.
I'd like to recover some of the detail in the highlights.
That's represented by the red in this image.
I move this over to the right, and you see how I'm recovering that area?
I want to make this wave look more like
glass, so I'm going to recover some of
the detail in those highlights.
I'm going to turn off these two previews for right now.
I just wanted to show you that.
It's a great way to help you as you're working on this.
So I set my recovery a little bit higher to bring back detail in the highlights.
Then fill light; my next favorite adjustment.
This is like setting a strobe
if you could have a waterproof strobe here.
I can flash a little bit of light
into the shadows, so the fill light is going into the shados
and opening them up.
Now many times when I run the fill light, I have
to add a little bit of black back in.
So I'm going to slide the blacks over.
I need a little bit more of a solid black for that.
Now brightness--brightness is one of my favorites.
Brightness doesn't distort the hue of my image,
and I like to make adjustments with this.
Again, I'm not going to make much adjustment there with
brightness right now because I'm going to bring brightness back in
with some other great controls.
However, I am going to go down here and adjust the
clarity right here.
Let's bring the clarity up.
What does clarity do?
Clarity goes in and it
changes the contrast of the midtones.
There are a lot of midtones happening here
in this upper area of this wave.
So let's just see what clarity does.
Clarity set to minus 100--very, very soft,
not good.
Clarity set all the way up to 100, a little bit too sharp.
I'm going to pull it back a little.
Did you see the way it really gives that--it sort of
bumps it and makes it look a little bit more like glass--
really, really great.
Double-clicking on the hand tool always brings you back to your full view,
so I'm going to do that.
Clarity--one of my favorites.
I'm a little bit addicted to clarity.
I'm also addicted to vibrance.
Let's bring the vibrance up over the entire image.
Isn't that great the way that just pops all the colors?
Vibrance, of course, is intelligent saturation.
It's not going to over saturate any of the colors--
relatively over saturate them,
and it's going to lift the colors.
For example, it's going to lift the green values until they're saturated,
but if the red values aren't quite saturated,
it will continue to rise up and bring up those values.
Okay, so vibrance good, clarity good.
We didn't adjust the exposure because
we're going to do that in a different way.
I'm moving to my next section here, the tone curve.
The tone curve is a great way for
non-tone or
people who just don't understand this
tonal curve or working with curves very much.
You've now added highlights, lights, darks, and shadows.
You have the ability to move these adjustments and then adjust
the curve for you.
So in this case, I can go in here and start to adjust the
highlights and the lights, midtones, and the darks.
And in this case, I want to make just a few adjustments
just like this.
But wait, check this out.
I'm using the manual controls over here, but a new feature
in CS4 here in Bridge is the targeted
adjustment tool.
This is cool because with this tool
selected, I can go in, for example, and click here on the sand,
move up or down on the sand,
and then choose different areas of the image
to highlight or shade in different ways.
Fantastic capabilities.
Okay, I've done my adjustments there.
Let's move on to this one, the HSL grayscale.
This is the true control.
This where an enormous amount of power comes into play.
I just want to point you right here to luminance.
This is the best, especially when you're
trying to do the project entirely in Adobe Camera Raw,
because it's targeted luminance control
without masking.
For example, I want to adjust the luminance of the sand.
Check this out.
I'm moving it all the way to a minus 100 or all the way back up to a plus 100.
I want the sand a little bit brighter.
Let's try the yellows. Check that out.
The yellows are bringing up the shades
within the sand here in the surf.
I said earlier that I can use the targeted
control tool, the targeted adjustment tool,
with my previous adjustments.
I bet I can use it here, as well.
I can target right in on this sand. Check it out.
I can give a little snap right to that sand, and I can move up.
I can bring down the shadow, the detail here
in the water so I have greater contrast.
Let's go through here and let's adjust the blues.
I want the sky to be a little bit brighter.
Notice how I can go down or up, here.
With the sky a little bit brighter, I'm really bringing the light through
that wave as it crests over.
Okay, this looks great.
Now we can save all these settings, of course, here in Camera Raw.
Save these as the default settings,
and I can apply these settings to different photos
that I've taken in surf.
But, beyond that, I may want to take this a little
bit farther with another great tool right up here.
This is the adjustment brush.
This is what really makes this project work well.
The adjustment brush let's me go in and make adjustments,
targeted adjustments, right on specific areas
in the image.
I want to bring up the values of this sand.
The sand just doesn't have the contrast here.
So with this tool, you can see I've got adjustments
targeted to this brush I'm about to use.
I can set the size of the brush, the feathering, the flow, and the density.
I want a lot of feathering because I want it to
drift out and blend out in my image.
The flow is the speed in which the color
or the mask is laid down onto your image.
The density is the maximum value
that the flow can achieve
if you continue to press your trigger on this.
So the maximum value I can achieve is 100 percent
for the area that I'm working on.
So if I click on the flow with a fairly slow flow of twelve,
I can go in and paint this in.
Now we're not seeing anything right now,
but we do see this pin show up.
Check it out.
As I move my cursor over the pin, just like this, it highlights that area.
And then I can go in and make adjustments, targeted adjustments.
I can make it darker or lighter.
But what I'm going to do is bring up the clarity a bit more
for this area.
Remember, that's my midtone sharpening.
And down here, color.
I can bring in a color layer right here
and move this around, bring up the intensity.
Let's drop this down, and let's bring this up so you can see this.
So I'm bringing back in more of this
sand color into the sand, targeting color,
targeting clarity, targeting contrast.
Let's try a little bit of contrast on that.
It's very, very experimental, but targeted experiments.
Okay, let's add another one, a new pin.
And we want a pin up here in the top,
right up here.
We want to take out the color that we added in before.
We want to bring up our clarity,
and we want to have a little contrast and let's adjust our brightness.
Excellent. One last thing.
You can go back in to any of these other pins, click on the pin to reactivate
that pin to make new adjustments.
Wait, wait, I just have to add one more
because I can--a new adjustment.
Let's bring in a little bit more light right down
here to bring up a little bit more detail.
Let's bring up our brightness for that particular area.
See how I can just bring up the brightness?
I can target a light right here
in this reflection as it hits the water,
adjust the clarity.
Oh, let's add a little bit of sandy color to that
just like we did before, so we have
a little bit of color.
So, once again, targeted colors, global color
adjustments, working across your image.
These are great, great controls.
When I'm all done, of course, I can hold down my shift
key and export this as an object,
or without the shift key I can just export this
as an image and bring it back into photoshop
or just click done and it will save those settings
directly on this image.
So you can see the great power and capability of Camera
Raw functionality without going into Photoshop.
Let's just review this again.
We started off with that original image, ended up with this.
Let's take a look at a few others here.
Here's another original I worked with,
and then here's the finished results. Check that out.
I just have to see that again.
Before and after.
Look how I've targeted these areas to the right so I can
see the coral reef and the sand inside that
dark region.
That is a lot of control.
So there you have it, amazing set of tools, Adobe Camera Raw.
All the controls you need to make some great photos.
Until next time, see you at the surf.
[♪music♪]
[Executive Producer, Bob Donlon; Producer, Karl Miller]
[Director, Kush Amerasinghe, Post-Production, Erik Espera]
[ADOBE TV Productions, tv.adobe.com]