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[♪♪] [Adobe Creative Suite]
[Podcast]
[Learn CS]
[with]
[your host]
[Terry White]
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast.
My name is Terry White, and in this episode we're going to take a look at
reasons why you should set Photoshop to open up your JPGs
and even perhaps your TIFs in Camera RAW
instead of opening them directly in Photoshop.
So let me explain.
When I'm working in Lightroom, for example, whether it's a RAW file,
a TIF or a JPG, I always have the luxury or the option of taking it over to the Develop module
and doing any adjustments to it, and those adjustments are nondestructive.
However, if I just double click on a JPG that's just on my desktop,
then it's going to open up in Photoshop
and it's just going to be there in Photoshop ready to edit.
And that's great, but you're missing out on all of the ease of use
of Camera RAW or the Develop module, which is basically Camera RAW in Lightroom.
So I'm going to show you an example of doing it both ways,
and I hope you understand why you'd want to set it after I show you this example.
So here we go.
I've got a folder here. Let's go to my Finder.
I've got a folder here with a couple of photos that I want to work with.
This is actually a picture of me.
If I just double click on this old picture of me,
then it does what it's supposed to.
It opens right up in Photoshop. And yes, those are my ears.
So it opens right up in Photoshop, and then at this point
I know that this photo needs color correcting, I know that it needs cropping,
I know that it needs adjustments that I would now have to figure out how to do in Photoshop.
And in some cases I'd either have to use adjustment layers
or I'd have to do all kinds of things to make it nondestructive
or at least be able to turn it on and off.
So let me close this. I'm just going to go up to File and close it.
Now instead I'm going to go to my Preferences for Photoshop,
and I'm going to go to the Camera RAW preferences.
Right now Camera RAW is set to open up a JPG or a TIF file
if it has already had settings applied to it in Camera RAW.
So if you've already opened it once in Camera RAW manually or maybe via Bridge,
you can go ahead and double click on it and it will open in Camera RAW.
But what I want it to do is automatically open all supported JPGs.
And you can do the same thing for your TIFs as well. That's up to you.
So this way, every time I double click on a JPG in the Finder
or open up a JPG, it will bring up Camera RAW first.
And then if I want to do anything, I can. I can just click Open if I don't want to do anything.
So yes, it is going to be 1 extra step, especially those times
when you don't need to do anything in Camera RAW--
maybe the file has already been adjusted and you're just ready to open it--
but it's just really 1 extra step.
It's just that 1 extra click of Open if you don't need to do anything.
Most times if I'm double clicking on a JPG, it's because I got it via email
or I got it from someone or it came off my iPhone
or it came somewhere else and I'm not really necessarily putting those photos into Lightroom
to manage forever.
So let's go ahead and say OK on that setting.
Now let's go right back to the Finder here, and now let's double click on that same photo.
This time, like I said, it opens in Camera RAW instead of opening in Photoshop first.
If I don't want to do anything in Camera RAW, I can just click Open Image
and we'll be right back in Photoshop.
But here now that I'm in Camera RAW,
I get the advantage of all of these easy-to-use sliders and all the tools up here.
So for example, the first thing that's really bugging me about this photo is the color.
I have a White Balance tool right here in Camera RAW,
same one as in the Develop module inside of Lightroom,
and I can just click on what should be white, black, or gray
and it will go ahead and make that adjustment.
Yeah, I could have done that in Curves, I could have done that in Levels,
I could have done that in certain ways inside Photoshop,
but I'd have to figure that out, where this is so much easier.
I actually wish we had a White Balance tool right in Photoshop,
and I'm shocked we don't, but we don't yet.
The next thing is if I want to crop it, I can use my Crop tool
just as I would always do.
But again, the advantage here is that crop is not permanent.
I'm not going to lose those pixels.
I can always come back in here and uncrop it.
Now, if I want to make other adjustments,
so for example, if I want to punch down or punch up the blacks,
maybe darken that photo just a little bit,
and if I want to do something with the shadows perhaps--
I think we'll leave the shadows pretty much right there--
and I can take the exposure up or down,
again it's just easier to work with.
This is a very low res photo.
As a matter of fact, it's one I got in email.
But if this were a higher res image, I would then head over to Sharpening.
I'd do my sharpening right here,
and again, all of these adjustments are nondestructive.
They're being applied to the metadata or a sidecar file for this photo.
Now, if there are more things I want to do to it, then I can go ahead--
For example, I don't like this little spot here that's kind of ghosted out
or faded out on my jacket, so I'm just going to go ahead and open it in Photoshop.
Now it's been opened in Photoshop but with those adjustments already applied.
So now I could do things like, for example, go to the Clone Stamp tool,
and let me grab a stylus--hopefully I've got one around here; oh, there it is--
and we can go in and we'll just hold down our Option or Alt key, tap,
and we'll just clone that a little bit.
These are the kinds of things that would be more difficult
or impossible to do in Camera RAW, so this is where Photoshop comes in.
While we're at it, we'll just go up to our Filter menu,
we'll come down to Liquify, and there are a couple spots here I want to take care of.
Let's go ahead and make our brush smaller.
By the way, first we'll grab our Freeze tool
and we'll just go ahead and say we want to freeze that edge.
We don't want to pull that edge in by mistake.
Now we'll switch back to the Warp tool, just push that jacket in.
That has always bugged me for years and years and years in this photo.
And that collar sticking up there, I kind of don't want to have that sticking up as much as it is.
There we go. So those are the kind of adjustments that Photoshop is great at.
I could just keep working, but you get the idea.
By opening it in Camera RAW, I got a chance to do a lot of things to it
that would have been more difficult or taken more time or more destructive
in Photoshop directly.
I love setting my preference so that I get my JPGs the option to open in Camera RAW
the minute I open them or double click on them.
That's it.
Hope you enjoyed this quick tutorial on how to set your preferences for Photoshop
so that when you double click on a JPG, a TIF,
as well as it already does this with your RAW files that open in Camera RAW first,
make all your nondestructive adjustments, then you can open it in Photoshop
and make more adjustments or do more to it
or just open it in Photoshop and print it or save it.
That's it for this episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast.
My name is Terry White. Thanks for watching.
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