Photoshop Cs2 Raw: Using Adobe Camera Raw, Bridge, and Photoshop to Get the Most Out of Your Digital Camera

by Mikkel Aaland

The RAW file format is the uncompressed data file captured by a digital camera's electronic sensor. When your camera saves an image in RAW format, settings like white balance, sharpening, contrast and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596008511
• ISBN13: 9780596008512
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 8.1" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

Photoshop Raw - M.Aaland

Minimum text balanced with excellent sidebar explanations, examples and illustrations made the book easy to read and understand, and to fully exploit the many features or RAW. Of particular interest was the coverage of colour balance, High Dynamic Range and Black and White conversion in RAW

Good for Starters

This is another entry in the Adobe Camera Raw ("ACR") sweepstakes. These are the books that tell you how to use ACR, which is the front end of Adobe Photoshop, and which is used to process digital photographs taken utilizing the RAW format. This is the format that provides more information and opportunities to control the image than the JPEG format, but also requires more manipulation to get the photograph from camera to final output. There is other software that can be used to process RAW images but Photoshop, with good reason, dominates the market. Aaland's book is clear and understandable and provides the information that people need to use ACR, particularly if they can't get a handle on Adobe's rather bare-boned and non-linear instructions contained with Photoshop. After a brief discussion of RAW as a format, Aaland starts with a discussion of Adobe Bridge, which is a picture management program provided with Photoshop, the knowledgeable use of which will contribute to effective processing in ACR. He then discusses each of the tools available in ACR and tells you how they work. Where there are similar tools available in both ACR and the main Photoshop program, such as sharpening and noise correction, the author compares them and presents arguments as to when each of the similar tools is best used. He discusses using RAW for generating black and white pictures (although he did not convince me that this was a better approach then creating them in the channel mixer facility of the main Photoshop program) and using the Adobe DNG file format. He finishes up with a brief tour of multiple picture processing and automated functions like actions, contact sheets and web gallery creation. Other than as mentioned above, there is no discussion of processing in the main Photoshop program. There are other books that deal with the ACR function. Like Aaland's book, John Canfield's "Raw 101" is aimed at the beginning ACR user. It seemed a little skimpier, and didn't cover all of the non-ACR functions that Aaland covered, but it also addressed Photoshop Elements, although not in elements' latest iteration. Rob Sheppard's "Adobe Camera Raw for Digital Photographers Only" is limited to ACR in Photoshop only, is much more detailed then either Canfield or Aaland, emphasizes the artistic use of ACR, and might prove just a little daunting for newcomers to Photoshop. My own feeling is that no one who realizes the capability of Photoshop and wants to employ that capability will feel content reading just one Photoshop book. Each additional book will show how to get more out of the software. Aaland's book will be a good start, but it shouldn't be the end of the educational process.

RAW and Beyond

I believe that the title of this book should be "Photoshop CS2 RAW and Much More" because the author not only explains the usage of Photoshop RAW in detail, but he also shows many new creative ways how to integrate it with your work in Photoshop. I in particular liked the chapter on B & W photography which challenged my entrenched ways on doing things (channel mixer, two hue/sat layers with one set on luminance...) . Everything is tested, well documented with screenshots, and easy to follow, yet the author doesn't pontify and doesn't insist that his is the only way, but he encourages the reader to try for him/herself and see. A great book and much more than just "how to" in Camera Raw.

The Best book on the subject

This full-color book offers clear and concise instruction that takes you step-by-step through the process of using the Camera RAW plug-in in Photoshop as well as the related sections of Bridge and CS2. The author not only explains how to use the settings but devotes entire chapters to some of the problems that can, and often do occur - like dealing with digital noise. I appreciate the fact that he doesn't treat the Camera Raw plug-in as the be-all, do-all tool in Photoshop but rather presents equivalent tools in CS2 that many times are a better choice for particular lighting situations. The layout and organization of the book reminds me of one of Scott Kelby's books; the two major differences being the author doesn't include rambling witticisms throughout the text and unlike the aforementioned books, I think that he thoroughly covers the topic rather than just the highlights. The book's organization allows you to quickly find the desired topic (or in my case, problem area) and read a brief description and ways to either perform the action or resolve the problem. To date I have read three books on the topic of working with Raw files using the Camera Raw plug-in filter and this book is far superior to any title I have reviewed. If you are a photographer shooting Raw images this is the only book you will need - period.

Hard to beat

This is an incredibly detailed book that should definitely be read by anyone that uses Adobe's Camera Raw plug-in for their primary source for RAW conversion. Aside from covering in detail the ins and outs of the RAW converter so you can get better quality images, the book covers a broad range of pro-level techniques for post-processing images once they're imported into Photoshop. Covering some of the key new CS2 filters like Smart Sharpen and wide angle lens correction, this is really using the latest cutting edge tech that professionals use. Fortunately, it isn't written assuming you're a professional so people who are new to Photoshop CS2 shouldn't have a hard time getting their head around the techniques and concepts involved. Great book.