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Provides: Manipulation of RAW, JPEG, and TIFF images from a wide variety of cameras
Developer: Adobe
Requirements: Mac OS X v10.4.9
Retail Price: Free; comes with Photoshop
Note: The following is a preview of beta software. That means this software was still in development and was not formally "completed" at the time this preview was written. Thus, there may be changes in design, functionality, and performance from what will be shipped to the consumer.
ACR, or Photoshop Camera Raw v4 opens yet new grounds for enhancing RAW images. What used to be good control has now blossomed into spectacular control. Some of the features in ACR 4 have drifted from Lightroom, but regardless from where they came, their presence in ACR is very welcome. The primary power of Photoshop Camera RAW is its ability to batch process many, many images. That is, let's say you have 400 photos that require a minor color correction, a lightness enhancement, and a saturation boost. In ACR, you do this to one image and then apply the changes to the rest of the images. Boom, you're done.
[For some reason, Adobe recently renamed Adobe Camera Raw into Photoshop Camera Raw but kept the ACR initialization. I suppose this is in the same vein in which Lightroom was renamed Photoshop Lightroom. Either way, in the annals of silly renaming, this is high up there.]
Before I start the ACR review, I want to spend a few moments on the subject of RAW images and the DNG format. This is for information sake, the review continues below.
ACR Converter
For those who don't know, a RAW image is the information straight from the camera that hasn't been "interpreted" into an image yet. It has had no digital processing, and is therefore often referred to as a digital negative. This is the data that has not officially been white balanced, converted into the proper RGB channels, or adjusted for light or dark. The value of the RAW file is that nothing has been removed. By the time an image in a camera is converted into a JPEG or even a TIFF, some information within the file has been removed...permanently.
Another issue about RAW files is that each camera manufacturer has its own proprietary code for a RAW image and its own software to manage and manipulate that image. For example, Nikon has the NEF format and Canon has their CR2 format. I'm not fully sure why so many manufacturers maintain such a painfully tight fist on their format, but there are a bunch of reasons why this is not good. A classic example would be the Kodak Photo CDs. Once a big force for preservation of images, the format was owned and pushed only by Kodak. That was until Kodak stopped supporting its own format, and now if you have one of those CDs of images, you should go out of your way to recover the images before it's too late. They are equivalent to the 5-1/4" floppy.
Adobe has two different approaches to maintaining RAW images. One is that they have reversed engineered many camera manufacturers RAW format so that Adobe's Camera RAW software can work on them (if you want to see if your camera's RAW images can be used in ACR, check here. By reverse engineering, they avoid issues of proprietary software. The second approach is the release of open software (e.g., the code is non-proprietary, any company has access to the code) for a DNG image, or the Digital NeGative format. The icon image you see above to the right is the icon for Adobe's DNG Converter. When you open this small application, you get the window seen below.
Operation is very straightforward. You select the folder you want to convert from the camera's format to the DNG format. You select where you want the converted images saved to. You alter the name by appending dates (with various formats) and various numbers and/or letters. Lastly you can set any overall preferences that control the size of the built-in preview, if there will be lossless compression, and even if you want the original RAW image embedded into the DNG image.
The overall concept of the DNG format is to provide something that is not proprietary, that everyone has access to, and by its nature is not going to stop if one company ceases to be. We have already observed some digital camera manufacturers go the way of Pan American Airlines. If you owned one of those cameras and saw your proprietary format close up on you, it's time to start converting all of your images to DNG format now before you can't access those images any more.
I'm not saying that Nikon or Canon are likely to go belly up any time soon, but Stanley Kubrick thought that Pan American was going to be around in 2001, and that was in 1968.
As a thought, you can always double your bet: save both image formats. Save your photos in both the camera's format and the DNG format. After all, if these images are important, even if only to your family, you might as well provide as many chances to your great-grandkids as you can to see what you looked like.
For more information on the issue of RAW images and the issue of closed proprietary formats, go to OpenRAW, a website devoted to this issue.
One extra benefit of the DNG format is that the files are a bit smaller than a camera's proprietary format. My Canon's images tend to be around 7-9MB in size. After conversion, they are around 6-7MB in size. This means I can backup more images on a CD or DVD. A small issue, but a consideration nonetheless.
Assuming you are looking at your images in Bridge, you can set in Bridge's preferences whether you open a RAW image hosted from either Bridge or Photoshop. This may seem a bit confusing, but ACR is a plug-in that can either be hosted by either Bridge or Photoshop. With my testing in the beta version, I found some discrepancies between when I opened the image from Bridge and from Photoshop. Since there is no functional difference between the two, I set my preferences for Photoshop to host my ACR RAW work.
One of the aspects of RAW images (whether saved as DNG or not) is that you must open a RAW image first in ACR before you can open that image in Photoshop. It's sort of as if the image must first be "assembled" before it can be dealt with in Photoshop. All other image formats can be opened directly into Photoshop, but RAW/DNG images must first pass through ACR. [By the way, new with ACR 4, you can work on JPEG and TIFF images in ACR. More on that at the end of the review.]
When you open a RAW image you get the RAW workflow window, as seen below. As you glance around the work area, there are considerably more options available to the user and a larger working area for the image. To accommodate the larger image, some of the working area was removed. Relocated are the options to set wether the image will be saved as an 8 bit or 16 bit image, the size, the color space, and the resolution.
Now, there is a "web-link" like button on the bottom of the window, seen above as a line of blue text. Click on this, and the Option Window pops up to let you control the aforementioned aspects of the image. The only advantage of this type of button is that it presents the current condition of the image. Thus, as I have it set right now, any RAW image is set to be an Adobe RGB (1998), 8 bit, at 3504 by 2336 (8.2 MP), 240 ppi—and as I change the parameters of the images, the button changes accordingly. It's a strange way to show you what you have, but it does work.
Close observers to Photoshop Camera RAW will note several new buttons in the tool palette. Just to the left of the CCW Rotate icon is the Photoshop Camera RAW Preferences. Nothing deep there, simply another mechanism to get to the preferences, nothing more. New, and much more significant, is the Retouch Tool, just to the left of the also new Red-eye Correction tool.
The Red eye tool simply requires you to marquee a rectangle larger than the size of the pupil you wish to correct.
After you let go of the mouse button, the rectangle will contract down to a size where ACR sensed the majority of the red in the eye. At that point, you can drag the "Pupil Size" slider left or right to expand or narrow down the range of red correction (too large, and you can effect the red in the skin around the eye). You also have limited amount of Darkening available to you. I would not call this robust control, but it certainly works.
While a bit different to use from just about every other tool related to retouching, the Retouch Tool in ACR is mostly for removing errant dust particles smudges that have attached to the sensor in an SLR camera. By setting up the Retouch Tool on a position, when you perform a "Synchronize" operation on a collection of images, all of the images will get the Retouch in the exact same spot. At a minimum, you may need to fix the location of the transplant patch.
Since I do not happen to have any dust on my CCD, I did find an image with a lens flair I can use demonstrate how the Retouch Tool works. As seen below, the reddish flair is something I can remove at the RAW level. It's small and sort of round. When you click on the Retouch Tool, an extra control strip drops down from below the tools. There is a Radius slider that lets you control the size of the Retouch Tool, and you have the choice of either "Heal" or "Clone."
If you do a single click on the image, a healing circle is created at the size set in the Radius slider. Then, moments later, a second source circle shows up on the screen. By sliding the Radius slider at this point, you can increase/decrease the size of the repair/source circle to fit as needed. Alternatively, you can drag out a circle over the errant region to the appropriate size. That is, you place the cursor exactly in the center of the errant spot and drag outward until you've encompassed the part of the image you want to remove within a red and white circle. After you release the mouse, a green and white circle will appear to one side of the red and white circle. Now, drag the green and white circle around to provide the best source for repairing the region inside the red and white circle and/or slide the Radius slider to increase/decrease the size of both circles to obtain the best fit and the best repair.
As seen below, this can do a great job of repairing small spot regions, but, if you have a long or irregular region that needs repair, you are substantially better off performing the repair within Photoshop itself. However, if you have a spot that is showing up in an entire photo shoot, this is a fantastic way of dealing with an otherwise minor disaster. Just as in ACR 3, you can make all your main repairs on one image and Synchronize that image with all of the others in any given shoot. Synchronization operations can include the Retouch Tool.
If you look at the image above, you can see a number of red flecks near the green leaves. This is a visual cue for parts of the image that are "blown out." That is (in 8 bit terms), these parts of the image are whiter than white. Since full white is 255, 255, 255 (RGB), than these are all 255, 255, 255. When a part of an image is like this, you cannot get any level of shading because there is nothing left to shade.
The controls on the right side of the ACR window have been enhanced to provide an incredible level of control over the full image. A full size screen shot of the controls is shown below. As before, the top two are Temperature and Tint. However, now added are "color cues." That is, when you drag the Temperature to the left for a lower number, and cooling the image, you will be bringing the image "bluer." Likewise, when you drag the Tint to the right, you will be making the image more magenta.
Below the Temperature and Tint controls are the new depth and power to ACR. The top, Exposure, is not new and still makes the image lighter or darker. Like before, it makes the entire image lighter or darker. If there are regions where the image is already too light, it will make a bad situation worse. As seen below, when I took this shot, I had to aim the camera toward the sunset. It was the only option I had. Here I had to crank the exposure up some to lighten up the side of the main building, but that was blowing out the sky.
The slider just below Exposure is "Recovery," which darkens the lightest parts of the image. There were parts of the image that were damaged from the get go, but I wanted to recover the parts of the image that were otherwise being blown out by actions that I had taken with the Exposure control. Just below Recovery is the "Fill" slider, which provides control on the darkest regions of the image: the shadows. "Blacks" controls the entire region of the dark side of the image, while "Brightness" controls the entire region of the light side of the image. Lastly, "Contrast" is like pushing an "S" curve in the curves dialog box (lighten the light regions and darken the dark regions).
But, as they say, there's more. One of the common problems when you're trying to bring up the shadows and flatten the bright regions is that the image tends to not be very lively. The colors tend to flatten out and just "lie there." You can always crank up Saturation, but this cranks up all saturation. If you look at the bottom two sliders, you can see "Vibrance" and "Saturation." Saturation, like I said earlier, can be dangerous and/or tricky because it wants to bring all colors up. Thus, any regions that are okay to begin with, soon become neon. This is not a good thing. Vibrance, on the other hand, is like controlling just the Fill or Recovery sliders; it just works on the small region of colors that are not fully saturated, as opposed to on all colors.
Below is the image used above before any correction was done.
Below is the same image after getting as much out of it as I can with a few moments of work. All of the corrections were done in ACR, nothing in Photoshop.
It bears repeating at this point that all of the corrections performed on this image were non-destructive. That is, ACR is telling the computer what corrections to display this image with. I've not changed a single pixel in the image itself, and if I do not like the results, I can easily start over again from the very beginning. No damage, no harm, no foul.
Besides the significant updates to the basic panel of ACR, the other tabs have had some level of updating as well.
The Curve palette is one of the two other palettes that have received the most updates. Below you see the ACR 3 Curve palette on the left and ACR 4 Tone Curve Palette on the right. Now there are two tabs, the Point tab is exactly the same as ACR 3. The Parametric Palette is quite different. The sliders of each range "tweak" only a portion of the curve. The "Highlights" slider only tweaks the lightest third of the curve line, while the "Lights" slider tweaks the right-most 3/4 of the curve. The "Darks" and "Shadows" sliders operate the mirror image aspects of "Lights" and "Highlights." Curiously, the Point curve is independent of the Parametric curve.
New to ACR is the HSL/Grayscale Palette and Split Toning Palette. Here, you can tease the colors of your image to enhance and/or embellish your image. In addition, you can check "Convert to Grayscale. Unfortunately, unlike the Black and White Adjustment in Photoshop, you cannot move your cursor over to the image and drag across the image to move the sliders. This is a disappointment because once you've had the chance to adjust images via that technique, it's hard to go back to this less sophisticated approach. Nonetheless, this is a very effective approach to adjusting individual color enhancements. Anyhow, once you've converted your image to Grayscale, you can then go into the Split Toning Palette to create single or two-tone images.
The obvious advantage of the HSL/Grayscale - Split Toning Palettes is that when you work on a RAW image, the changes will be non-destructive. However, Since Photoshop's Black and White Adjustment can be an Adjustment Layer (and therefore non-destructive), this is not as important, and, without the scrubbing function, it's not as easy to use. I'm glad this is here, but my first choice will be a Black and White Adjustment Layer.
There was a minor change in presentation for Camera Calibration as seen below, where on the left is ACR 3 version and on the right is the ACR 4. The big change is that there is color coding for your tweaking.
Lastly, the final tag is also new, and is called Presets. In each tab, you can pull down the submenu (the three short lines to the far right of each tab's name (e.g., in the image above, to the right of "Camera Calibration"). Amongst the options are to save the various settings for each and/or all of the various options in ACR. Once saved, they can be also placed in Presets where they can be called again as needed. Thus, if you have a particular light arrangement/setting that you use occasionally, for example, you can save all of your settings as a preset. Then, the next time you take a series of photos under those lights, you can select all of the new photos, select the presets, and poom, you're done.
But wait, there's more. As mentioned in the beginning, if you like the ACR workflow, you can also adjust your JPEG and TIFF images in ACR as well. The catch is that you have to properly prepare Bridge and/or Photoshop to pass these image types to ACR for processing; it's not like you can say "this JPEG I'll do in ACR and that one I'll do in Photoshop." The trick is to either go into your Photoshop Preferences and, in File Handling, check "Prefer Photoshop Camera Raw for JPEG Files" or, in Bridge's Preferences, to go to Thumbnails and check "Prefer Photoshop Camera Raw for JPEG and TIFF files."
If both are checked and you click on a file in Bridge, in the Finder, or from Photoshop's Open dialog, you will have your JPEG files open first in ACR. However, keep in mind that confusions await on this route. If you chose to go on this journey, take a folder of images, make a copy of this folder, and work with this copy. The workflow with JPEG and TIFF images in ACR is complicated, not necessarily obvious, and very screwy.
If you set things up as I stated, you can select a JPEG image and, from the File menu, select "Open in Camera RAW..." (Command-r). There you will see your JPEG in ACR. If you make any change to the image and click the "Done" button, that commits the changes, and you will always have to run that JPEG image through ACR before getting to Photoshop. The metadata changes are burnt into the JPEG image. Since they are metadata changes and are not changing the pixels themselves, you will not be getting the normal option to save the JPEG as a JPEG image. The saving of the metadata is done when you click "Done."
If you do a "Save as..." and then click Done, you will save the changes in the newly created document AND the JPEG you originally had. If you do not want the changes in the original document, after selecting Save As..., click the Cancel button. The good and/or bad news is that if you open the JPEG directly into Photoshop, any changes made in ACR will be ignored—you have to go through ACR on your way to Photoshop to have any alterations made in ACR seen in Photoshop.
[Speaking of doing a Save as..., one of the options available to you is the DNG format mentioned in the very beginning of this review. I'm of a very mixed opinion on this, mostly negative. John Nack has an interesting read on this subject in his blog. I would like to think of any RAW file to be unique, and one should not be able to save into that format. This would, at a minimum, help to make some photo types tamper proof. If I take a RAW photo from my Canon, I cannot alter that image and save into the same file type. Right now, one can take a RAW image type, open it in ACR, and then into Photoshop, do some Photoshop magic, save the image as a JPEG or TIFF, reopen the image in ACR, save it as a DNG file—and you have a RAW image that had been permanently altered in Photoshop. I'm not happy about that.]
Anyhow, if you have the preference in Bridge set to "Prefer Photoshop Camera RAW for JPEG files," and you open a folder of images, then later decide you do not want that setting and turn the preference off, subsequent trips to that folder in Bridge will still initiate the files opening in ACR. That is because the cache for that folder was set to On for that function, and you need to delete the cache for that folder (Tools -> Cache -> Purge Cache for Folder "(name of folder)"). Similarly, if you already have a folder that has been cached and now you want to be able to run the images through ACR, you need to toss the cache for the folder just as you did before. Also, if you take a JPEG image that you've altered in ACR and move it to a new folder who's cache is not set to "Prefer Photoshop Camera Raw for JPEG and TIFF Images," any changes you had made in the JPEG would not show up if you looked at those images in Bridge. But if you open that image from Bridge, it will open in ACR and all of your ACR changes will show up. Confused? Get in line.
I think it's safe to say that unless you know what you are doing, have a specific reason and need to open JPEGs into ACR, and know the consequences of what you are getting yourself into, you are probably safest to avoid this particular feature. I have a hunch that there will be seminars devoted to this one issue at places like Photoshop World.
In short, the new Photoshop Camera RAW is such a pleasure to work with that going back to version 3 (in CS2) is frustrating. The new "Recover" and "Fill" sliders bring the features of Photoshop's Shadow/Highlight adjustment into ACR. Between these two, in combination with the other lighting adjustment sliders, you can fine-tune most any image to a beautiful state. However, regardless of the fact that you can do JPEG and TIFF images in ACR, I again state you probably shouldn't. The good news is that you can't destructively do anything in ACR to any image. No matter what you do, they are all nondestructive edits. However, the process of using JPEG or TIFF images is currently confusing. There are way too many conditional situations, and I'm not all that certain that the benefits outweigh the amount of frustration that may ensue—at least not for the average user. However, for use on RAW or DNG images, ACR 4 is a wonderful pleasure to use.
___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.
Tags: Reviews ď Graphics/Design ď
