From the course: Enhancing Night and Low-Light Photos with Photoshop

Working with Camera Raw from Bridge - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Enhancing Night and Low-Light Photos with Photoshop

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Working with Camera Raw from Bridge

- [Instructor] In this chapter, we'll be taking a look at some simple but essential adjustments for improving your night or low-light images in Adobe Camera Raw. An important concept about Camera Raw is that it can be hosted by either Adobe Bridge or Adobe Photoshop. Let's take a moment to check out a few of the subtle differences in Camera Raw behavior depending on which program is the host. Here in Adobe Bridge, I have an image thumbnail selected. It happens to be a DNG file, a Raw file. If you have an image selected, whether it is a Raw file as I have here, or a JPEG, or a TIFF, or a PSD file, and you want to open it directly into Camera Raw to process it there, just come up to the File menu and choose Open in Camera Raw. The shortcut for that is Command+R on Mac or Ctrl+R on Windows. So I'll do that with this image of San Francisco. You can see if you look up at the main application menu at the top of my screen that Camera Raw is being hosted by Adobe Bridge. Whether Camera Raw is being hosted by Adobe Bridge or Adobe Photoshop will affect the default behavior of the Open Image and Done buttons in the lower-right corner of the interface. When Camera Raw is hosted by Bridge as is the case here, the Done button is the active button. By active, I mean if you just press Enter or Return on the keyboard, it is going to activate the Done button. Let me just make a quick change to this image so we can see what's going on. I'll click to make it black and white, I will lower the exposure a bit to darken it, and I'll increase the contrast. Then I'll click Done. So with Camera Raw hosted by Bridge, when you make a change and click Done, it returns you back to Adobe Bridge where you can see it has applied those Camera Raw changes to both the thumbnail and the preview of the image. But those changes are always non-destructive and can be modified or removed at any time. If I come over here to the thumbnail, I can right-click on it and come down to Develop Settings and just choose Camera Raw Defaults, and it will reset it to the original version of that image. If you want to have Camera Raw hosted by Photoshop, all you have to do is just choose the basic open command, Command+O or Ctrl+O, or you can also just double-click on a thumbnail. Let me clarify that if the thumbnail is for a Raw image, double-clicking on it will open it directly into Adobe Camera Raw hosted by Photoshop. However, if it's a JPEG file or a TIFF or a Photoshop file, it will open directly into Photoshop. If you have a non-Raw file that you want to open into Photoshop, you'll have to use the File, Open in Camera Raw command. Let me just come down here and I will double-click on this image to bring it into Camera Raw. If you look at the application menu up at the top of the screen, you can see that this is now hosted by Photoshop. When Camera Raw is hosted by Photoshop, the active button down in the lower right is going to be Open Image. What that means is that after you've made your Camera Raw changes, when you press Enter or Return on the keyboard or click the Open Image button, it will bring the file into Photoshop. So again, let me make those same changes that I did previously. I'll just click Open Image. You can see that now I'm in Adobe Photoshop where I can make further changes. This is a copy of the file. It's not the original Raw file. The file name showing in the name tab does seem to indicate that it's the original Raw file because it does say it's DNG, but it's just inheriting the file name that the original file had. This is actually a copy of the file. If you go to close it, it's going to ask you to save it, and then you'll have the option to choose what format you want to save it in. In this case, I'm just going to click Cancel and I'm going to close this file and I'm not going to save it. Go back to Adobe Bridge. One final point; if I open this file back up into Camera Raw ... If you made changes and you wanted to save out a copy of the file without going into Photoshop, you can then click on the Save Image button in the lower-left and it'll open up a dialog giving you options for how to save the file. Whether you choose to apply Camera Raw edits and then click Done to return to Bridge and work on another file or click Open Image to bring a copy of the file into Photoshop, the Camera Raw changes to your original file are non-destructive and can always be modified or removed from the image.

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