Product Description

Call it a control thing, but until recently–or, more specifically, until the availability of digital raw camera formats–you simply weren’t ready to make the move to digital photography. Raw formats, however, changed all of that by allowing you to retrieve images before any in-camera processing has been performed. Photoshop’s Adobe Camera Raw plug-in makes that process even easier by providing a standardized way of accessing and working with these uncompressed digital negatives in your favorite image-manipulation software. In the first volume devoted exclusively to the topic, best-selling author Bruce Fraser shows you how to take advantage of Adobe Camera Raw to set white balance, optimize contrast and saturation, handle noise, correct tint, and recover lost detail in images before converting them to another format. After learning about the raw formats themselves, you’ll discover hands-on techniques for exposing and shooting for digital raw, using Bridge, Adobe’s new standalone file browser, to preview images and automate tasks, and building a workflow around the digital raw process.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #239064 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

About the Author

Bruce Fraser is an internationally known author, consultant, and speaker on the topics of digital imaging and color reproduction. In addition to authoring Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop, he is a contributing editor for Macworld magazine and co-author of the best-selling books Real World Adobe Photoshop and Real World Color Management.

Customer Reviews

Most Effective Sharpening I've ever used!
I bought this book about 6 months ago and it has become a "bible" of sharpening for me. I shot with 6mp and 8mp (now 10mp) dSLRS and had previously used a single pass of UnSharp Mask or Smart Sharpen for sharpening. (all digital photos need sharpening -- *all* of them -- and in-camera sharpening is not desirable for many reasons)

My photos never came out as sharp as others I had seen published and I kept asking myself, "what am I doing wrong?! Is it my equipment, my photo technique, ...?". Now I know that at least part of it was my *sharpening* technique. Also, I needed to learn that photos properly sharpened for output (printing) will likely *not* look good on the screen (esp at 100%), and how to better judge output sharpness when viewing on the screen. Hints: (1) don't get freaked by apparent sharpening ugliness when viewing at 100% or greater; (2) only view at even zoom factors like 25% and 50%; and (3) 50% is often a fair zoom to use when judging sharpening for output.

The results I've seen from the sharpening techniques in this book range from "great" to "oh-my-god-this-is-*fabulous*". I'm finally producing photos that are as sharp as I had always hoped for, comparable to anything I've seen published.

Bruce Fraser starts at the beginning, explaining the need for sharpening, and proceeds to build a case for why a three-level sharpening process is so effective (Source Sharpening, Content/Creative Sharpening, and Output Sharpening). After you're convinced by his sound reasoning that this is a good idea, he details *how* to implement this 3-pass sharpening process. I codified the three passes into Photoshop Actions, which now take no more time for me to run than the single-pass sharpening I had previously done.

I keep this book in my car or on my shelf, with dozens of post-it tags sticking out where I added my own indexing to all the good parts. I'm sure that this book will become ragged with use, over the years. It is without a doubt the most useful photography book I've bought in the last 10 years.

Excellent CS2 book
This book is an excellent primer on the fundamentals of Camera Raw, covering a wide array of topics in an effective manner, while also offering many places for you to explore further on your own. Although this book is now out-of-date, with Photoshop CS3 on the market as I write this, this book would still be of value to those who could not afford the current version for some reason.

Great book
This book was a great help getting me started on processing my RAW images. It not only explaines the differences with Camera Raw and JPEG formats,, but also goes into depth on how to edit. It has many nice illustrations, and step by step instructions. Also talks about the different saving formats,,, I would highly recommend this book if you are new to RAW.