Using Camera RAW in Photoshop CS
as Your Digital Darkroom

by Phyllis Davis

This barticle dives into the world of photography as it explores the truly sensational Camera Raw capabilities built into Photoshop CS. Introduced as a plug-in with Photoshop 7, the newly integrated Photoshop CS Camera Raw format lets you open and professionally “process” your digital negatives. This processing lets you set the tone, color, and brightness of your photos without losing important image data. Also, you get better resolution.

What you’ll find here is a discussion about Camera Raw, what it is and how it works in Photoshop. You’ll use the extensive Camera Raw interface built-in to Photoshop to process your own digital photos, and then save these new originals in specific file formats depending upon your needs.

What's Camera RAW All About?

It’s best to work with the Camera Raw features like you would a traditional camera print. Traditional cameras use film that must be sent to a photo lab for processing. Negatives are made from the film for each picture. The photo lab creates prints by shining light through the negatives onto light-sensitive photographic paper. The photographs may differ in color, tone, and brightness depending upon how long the photographic paper is exposed to light. But throughout the entire process the negative does not change. The prints are only affected by the amount of light passing through the negative.

Most digital cameras for consumers produce JPEG or TIF images. The JPEG format uses lossy compression. This means that the compression process that saves a JPEG photo can lose some of the data that makes up the image, especially if the image is resaved many times. Also, when an image is saved in a format such as JPEG, the picture information is interpreted by the format which automatically sets colors, tone, brightness, and other parameters for the photo. In other words, you can never get back to the naked image: the unaltered image that the camera captured.

Camera Raw format does not lose vital image information, nor does it format the digital negative by altering color, tone, or any other aspect of the photo. Instead Camera Raw format saves the image data as it is captured by the camera without further processing. This raw image is saved on your hard drive. When you open a Camera Raw photo in Photoshop, a copy of the image is opened, not the original. You use Photoshop’s built-in Camera Raw interface to “process” the copied photo by adjusting exposure, tone, color, and other settings, creating your own original. The digital negative is never touched.

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