See the end of this post for the actual RAW file used in this tutorial so you can edit it along with me in the post.

In the previous tutorial, we saw how the controls work in Adobe Camera RAW, or ACR. This time we’ll be dealing with something that only RAW can deal with-bad pictures. Adobe Photoshop is fine when the picture is good, or you want to take artistic license, but is useless when it comes to saving an image.

When would this happen? Well, it happens all the time, really. Every time I hand my camera to someone to take a picture with, the shot is inevitably bad. The problem is, I can’t sit there and teach them how to take pictures, compensate for lighting, etc., so I’m screwed, right? Wrong! I had a waiter at Giogio’s Table in Virgin Gorda, BVI take a picture of my wife & I on our 10th anniversary in April, and he took it with the ocean outside behind us. We came out as black sillouettes.

But you can extend this to paying gigs as well. You only get one chance. You “take your best shot”, and if you forgot to take in RAW, you’re screwed. I always take a small JPEG as a thumbnail, and full RAW. The JPEG with stock color temperature settings is never, ever what I really want the image to look like, and worse yet, once you’ve taken a JPEG (without a RAW coutnerpart), you can never change it. Your world isn’t a set of predetermined settings, so why use them in your images?

It’s one thing to make a good picture better, but a completely different thing to take crap and make gold out of it! I gave a course to the ship’s photographers on Celebrity Cruises using that bad picture from the restaurant as an example. I would have used it here, but I’ve long since deleted it. They, like so many, were skeptical-until they saw a really good example.

So to recreate the shot, I made a worse one. I shot my dog in the living room with a 80 true w/s monolight behind her pointing right at the camera. To show you how strong this is, I raised the camera up a little to intentionally shine it into the sensor of my Canon 40D:

OK. Now here is the image I took to work with today:

This image is at 1/250, f/16, 39mm, ISO 800. Because it is a monlight, and not a constant light source, I couldn’t meter it. This was done in manual mode to simulate what the dog’s face would look like if a constant light source were behind her. So lets load the _MG_7888.CR2 file into ACR:

We can barely see some of her facial features. Lets see what we can salvage. My policy is to move from top to bottom in this general tab (the first one that comes up), then drill down as necessary. So I shot this with a color temperature of 5500, but because it is so dark in most of the image, ACR incorrectly wants to drop the temperature to 4550 when we ask it for Auto White Balance, and it thinks the shot was taken at 5900, when it was really on the 40D’s Flash setting. Another example of why Auto seldom ever is right. Let’s keep it at “Flash“.

One place Auto can help is as a rough start for repairing an image. In this case, we’ll move to the exposure section and leave it in Auto:

This only works about 1/2 the time, so don’t get into the habit of it helping you all the time. I seldom mess with Exposure, as that will increase/decrease brightness of the entire image, the same way you’d be stuck doing if the image was a JPEG. We’ll try brightening the dark areas by adjusting Fill Light to 79:

Wow! From almost black to almost finished with just one slider!

Now is a good time to take a second and explain why the above is possible. Today’s advanced sensos capture a very high dynamic range. That is, the divisions of grey between black and white. Even though to you & I Zoosseh’s face seems hoplessly dark, there is a LOT of information stored in that tiny little sensor in your camera. Enough, in fact, to allow us to expand it’s contrast (with Fill Lights) to make it look like it was properly lit. This is a great example of just what a nice camera you have!

I point this example out to people who think that megapixels make a good image. They don’t.

I stopped at 79 because I noticed that we need some more dynamic range. That is, the spread of information on the histogram isn’t taking up the entire spectrum. I like my realistic images to take up a little of the entire spectrum. If you look at the histogram in the above (or yours if you’re editing the file locally).

I moved the Contrast adjustment to +41, but no further because we’ve lifted the dark areass too far to the right. That’s right, I’m actually going to add dark areas! So now I’ll take Blacks up to +3. Take Clarity to 13, Vibrance to +10, and Saturation to +22:

Not bad for a shot that was a loss, and about 2 minutes of editing.

SHOOT IN RAW!

Reference:
Orignial RAW file
Finished image

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