If you’re a fairly serious digital photographer, you’ll be delighted to know that Adobe hasn’t just loaded Elements with easy-to-use features. The program also includes a collection of pretty advanced tools pulled straight from the full-featured Photoshop.
Number one on the list is the Adobe Camera Raw Converter, which takes Raw files—a format some cameras use to give you maximum editing control—and lets you convert and edit them in Elements. In this chapter, you’ll learn lots more about the Raw format and why you may (or may not) want to use it for your photos. Don’t skip to the next chapter if your camera shoots only JPEGs, though: You can use the Raw Converter to edit JPEG and TIFF images as well as Raw files, which can come in really handy, as you’ll see shortly.
Note
Whereas JPEG and TIFF are acronyms for technical photographic terms, the word Raw—which you may occasionally see in all caps (RAW)—actually refers to the pristine, unprocessed quality of these files.
And you’ll learn about Exposure Merge, which lets you combine different versions of a photo to create a single image with a higher dynamic range (a wider range of correctly exposed areas) than you can get from a single shot.
You’ll also get to know the Photo Filter command, which helps adjust colors by replicating the old-school effect of placing filters over camera lenses. And Elements has some truly useful batch-processing tools that let you do things like rename groups of files, convert them to different formats, and even apply basic retouching to multiple photos. Read on to learn about all these features.
Probably the most useful thing Adobe has done for photography buffs is to include the Adobe Camera Raw Converter in Elements. For many people, this feature alone is well worth the price of the program, since you just can’t beat the convenience of being able to perform conversions in the same program you use for editing.
If you don’t know what Raw is, it’s just a file format (a group of formats, really, since every camera maker has its own Raw format with its own file extension). But it’s a very special one. Your digital camera actually contains a little computer that does a certain amount of processing to your photos right inside the camera itself. If you shoot in JPEG format, for instance, your camera makes some decisions about things like sharpness, color saturation, and contrast before it saves the JPEG files to its memory card.
But if your camera lets you shoot Raw files, then you get the unprocessed data straight from the camera. Shooting in Raw lets you make your own decisions about how your photos should look, to a much greater degree than with any other format. It’s something like getting a negative from your digital camera—what you do to it in your digital darkroom is up to you.
That’s Raw’s big advantage—total control. The downside is that every camera manufacturer has its own proprietary Raw format, and the format varies even among models from the same manufacturer. No regular graphics program can edit these files, and very few programs can even view them. Instead, you need special software to convert Raw files to a format you can work with. In the past, that usually meant you needed software from the manufacturer before you could move your photo into an editing program like Elements.
Enter Adobe Camera Raw, which lets you convert your files right in Elements. Not only that, but the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in that comes with Elements lets you make sophisticated corrections to your photos before you even open them. Many times, you can do everything you need right in the Converter, so that you’re done as soon as you open the converted file. (You can, of course, still use any of Elements’ regular tools once you’ve opened a Raw file.) Using Adobe Camera Raw saves you a ton of time, and it’s compatible with most cameras’ Raw files.
Note
Adobe regularly updates the Raw Converter to work with new proprietary Raw formats produced by different cameras and to include updated profiles for existing cameras. So if your camera’s Raw files don’t open, check for a newer version of the Converter by going to Help→Updates in the Editor. If you aren’t sure which version of the Raw Converter you have, go to Help→About Plug-In→Camera Raw/Photoshop Elements→About Plug-In→Camera Raw to check. (Normally, when you install Elements, it’s set to periodically check for updates automatically, but you can also check manually.) If you have the Mac App Store version, updates appear in the App Store instead.
For all the options it gives you, the Raw Converter is really easy to use. Adobe designed it to automatically calculate and apply what it thinks are the correct settings for exposure, shadows, brightness, and contrast. You can accept the Converter’s decisions or override them and do everything yourself—it’s your call.
While you may find all the Converter’s various settings, tools, and tabs a little overwhelming at first, it’s really laid out quite logically. Here’s a quick overview of how to use it (you’ll get details in a moment):
Open your file in the Raw Converter.
You can call up the Raw Converter from either the Organizer or Full Edit just by opening a Raw file.
Adjust your view and do any necessary rotating, straightening, or cropping.
The Raw Converter has its own tools for all these tasks, so you don’t need to go into the Editor for any of them.
Adjust the image’s settings.
This is the best part of shooting Raw format images: You can tweak settings for things like lighting and color. The Converter also lets you apply final touchups like noise reduction, sharpening, and so on.
Leave the Converter, go to the Editor.
The Raw Converter is a powerhouse for improving your photo’s fundamental appearance, but to perform all the other adjustments Elements lets you make—applying filters, adding effects, and so on—you need to move your image to the Editor, which is also where you save the file in the standard graphics format of your choice (like TIFF, PSD, or JPEG).
If you’d like some practice with the Converter, you can find a sample image (Raw_practice.mrw) on this book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com/cds, but be warned: It’s a big file (7.2 MB).
Note
If you run Elements on a screen that’s less than 800 pixels high (like on a netbook, say, or if you’ve reduced your monitor’s resolution to less than that), the Raw Converter window won’t appear. Elements just automatically converts your file and opens it straight into the Editor without giving you a chance to tweak anything.
To start converting a Raw file, in the Organizer, highlight the file, and then click Fix→Full Photo Edit (or press Ctrl+I/⌘-I) to bring up the Converter window. (If you select multiple files in the Organizer and the Converter doesn’t open automatically, then find your files in the Project bin by choosing “Show Files selected in Organizer.” Select them all, and then double-click one thumbnail to display them in the Converter.) If you’re starting from the Editor, just go to File→Open. Figure 8-1 explains how to work with multiple files in the Raw Converter.
Figure 8-1. When you open several files in the Raw Converter at once, you get this handy filmstrip view down the left side of the window. You can select a single image from the group by clicking it, and then your changes apply only to that file. Shift-click or Ctrl-click to select multiple images (or use the Select All button at the top of the list), and all the selected files get changed along with the one in the main preview area. When you finish your tweaks and click Open, all the selected files appear in the Project bin. If you want to save a group of them in another format, then use the Process Multiple Files command (page 298).
Note
In Windows, you may not be able to open Raw files by double-clicking them outside Elements (from the Windows desktop, for instance). If you try that, you’ll probably see a message to the effect that your computer has no idea what program to use to open that file. To make sure that your computer always uses Elements to open Raw files, follow the steps on Working with PDF Files. (Windows may also offer to take you to a website where you can download the files necessary to let Windows display your Raw photos.) On a Mac, you can usually open Raw files in Preview using the built-in Raw support in OS X, unless you have a very new camera or one of the few models that Apple doesn’t support.
One important point to remember about Raw files: Elements never overwrites your original file. As a matter of fact, Elements can’t modify the original Raw file in any way. So your original is always there if you want to try converting it again later using different settings. It’s something like having a negative from which you can always get more prints. This also applies to any image you edit in the Raw Converter, not just Raw files. You can crop a JPEG file here, for instance, and your original JPEG doesn’t get cropped—only the copy you open from the Converter. (There’s more on working with non-Raw files in the Converter on Choosing bit depth: 8 or 16?.)
Tip
If you shoot Raw+JPEG (where your camera takes one photo and saves it as both a Raw file and a JPEG file), you may find that the Photo Downloader (Photo Downloader) gets very confused by this scenario. If you have problems importing these files to the Organizer, try using one of the other methods discussed on Opening Stored Images to get your photos onto your computer, then use File→Get Photos→“From Files and Folders” to bring them into the Organizer.
When the Raw Converter opens, you see something like Figure 8-2. Before you decide whether to accept the automatic settings that Elements offers or to do your own tweaking, you need to get a good close look at the image. The Converter makes it easy to do this by giving you a large preview of the image, and a handful of tools to help adjust what you see:
Zoom and Hand tools. These are in the toolbox in the top left of the Converter window. You use them here exactly the same way as elsewhere in Elements. (You’ll find more about the Zoom tool on The Zoom Tool; the Hand tool is described on The Hand Tool. The keyboard shortcuts for adjusting the view and scrolling also work in the Raw Converter.)
View percentage. Below the lower-left corner of the preview window is a pop-up menu with preset sizes. Just choose the size you want, or click the + or – buttons to zoom in or out.
Full Screen. Just to the right of the Preview checkbox above the image area is an icon that looks like a page with a double-headed arrow on it. Click it to put the Raw Converter window into full-screen mode. Click it again to toggle back to the normal view.
Histogram. In the upper-right corner of the Converter is a histogram that helps you keep track of how your changes affect the colors in the photo. (Flip back to Understanding the Histogram for more on the fine art of reading histograms.)
Figure 8-2. Elements’ Raw Converter packs a number of powerful tools into one window. Besides the large preview, you get a small toolbox (in the upper-left corner) containing some old friends, a specialized tool for adjusting the white balance (explained on page 276), and the panel on the right where you tweak various settings. Below your photo, the Converter gives you a few view-adjusting tools, including a drop-down menu (lower-left) where you can choose zoom settings. If you need to rotate the image, use the curled arrows in the toolbox.
Tip
Another handy feature in the Raw Converter is the panel just below the Histogram, where you can see important shooting information about your photo, like the aperture and ISO speed (ISO is a digital camera’s version of film speed). If you hover your cursor over a pixel in the image, the RGB values (Using Levels) for that pixel appear here as well.
Once you’ve gotten a good close look at the photo, you have a decision to make: Did Elements do a good enough job of choosing the settings for you? If so, you’re done. Just click the Open Image button in the Converter’s lower right corner and Elements opens your photo in the Editor, ready for any artistic changes or cropping. If you prefer to make adjustments to the photo in the Converter, read on. (If you’re happy with Elements’ conversion, but you want to sharpen the picture, then skip ahead to Adjusting Sharpness and Reducing Noise.)
Note
Everyone gets confused by the Save Image button. That button is actually the DNG Converter (see Converting to DNG), and all you can do when you click it is create a DNG file. To save your edited Raw file, click Done if you want to save your changes without actually opening the file, or click Open Image and then save it in the format of your choice in the Editor.
Before tweaking your settings, you can make the following basic adjustments to your photo right in the Raw Converter:
Rotate it. Click one of the rotation arrows above the image preview.
Straighten it. The Raw Converter has its own Straighten tool (Straightening the Contents of an Image), which you use just like the one in the Editor’s Tools panel, although it has a different icon and cursor. (It’s just to the right of the Crop tool in the Raw Converter’s toolbox.) However, you don’t see your photo actually straighten out in the Converter—Elements just shows you the outline of where the edges of your straightened photo will be. Open the photo in the Editor to make Elements apply the straightening.
Crop it. The Raw Converter has the same Crop tool as the Editor (The Crop Tool). You can crop to a particular aspect ratio here if you want. Just click the Crop tool’s icon for a pop-out menu of presets to choose from, or right-click the image itself when the Crop tool is active. If you want to crop to a particular size, choose Custom from the pop-out menu, and then, in the dialog box that appears, enter your numbers. (You also need to select inches, centimeters, or pixels, or enter a custom aspect ratio.) Your cropping info gets saved along with the Raw file, so the next time you open the file in the Converter, you see the cropped version.
As with straightening, Elements just draws a mask over the cropped area in the Converter; you can still see the outline of the whole photo. To adjust your crop, in the Raw Converter’s toolbox, click the Crop tool again, and then drag one of the handles that appear around the cropped area. To revert to the uncropped original later, click the Raw Converter’s Crop tool, then right-click/Control-click inside the crop boundaries in the preview area, and then choose Clear Crop.
Tip
You can also fix red eye in the Raw Converter. The Red Eye Removal tool is in the toolbox just to the right of the Straighten tool, and it works the same way it does everywhere else in Elements (see Fixing Red Eye).
The long strip down the right side of the Raw Converter gives you lots of ways to tweak and correct your photo’s color, exposure, sharpness, brightness, and noise level. The strip is divided into three tabs. Start with the one labeled “Basic,” which contains, well, the basic settings for the major adjustments.
First, check your White Balance setting, which is at the top of the Basic tab. Adjusting white balance is often the most important change when it comes to making your photos look their best.
The White Balance control adjusts all the colors in your photo by creating a neutral white tone. If that sounds a little strange, stop and think about it for a minute: The color you think of as white actually changes depending on the lighting conditions. At noon there’s no warmth (no orange/yellow) to the light because the sun is high in the sky. Later in the day when the sun’s rays are lower, whites are warmer. Indoors, tungsten lighting is much warmer than fluorescent lighting, which makes whites rather bluish or greenish. Your eyes and brain easily compensate for these changes, but sometimes your camera may not, or may overcompensate, giving your photos a color cast. The Raw Converter’s White Balance setting lets you create more accurate color by neutralizing the white tones.
Most digital cameras have their own collections of white-balance settings. Typical choices include Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, and Custom. When you shoot JPEGs, picking the correct setting really matters, because it’s tough to readjust white balance, even in a program like Elements. (Unless you tweak the JPEG with the Raw Converter as explained in the box on Non-Raw Files in the Raw Converter, and even then the results may not be what you want.) With Raw photos, you can afford to be a little sloppier about setting your camera’s white balance, because you can easily fix things in the Raw Converter.
Getting the white balance right can make a huge difference in how your photo looks, as you can see in Figure 8-3.
Figure 8-3. Left: The lighting in this shot has a bluish cast that makes the scene look chilly. Right: A single click on the swan with the White Balance tool makes the whole photo appear warmer. (It could stand a little additional tweaking, but the better white balance makes the photo more vivid and improves its contrast.)
The Raw Converter gives you several ways to adjust your image’s white balance:
Pull-down menu. The White Balance menu just below the Histogram starts out set to As Shot, which means Elements is showing your camera’s settings. You can use this menu to choosing from Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, and other options. It’s worth giving Auto a try because it picks the correct settings surprisingly often.
Temperature. Use this slider to make your photo warmer (more orange) or cooler (more blue). Moving the slider to the left cools your photo; moving it to the right warms it. You can also type a temperature in the box in degrees Kelvin (the official measurement for color temperature), if you’re experienced in doing this by the numbers. Use the Temperature slider and the Tint slider (described next) together for a perfect white balance.
Tint. This slider controls the green/magenta balance of your photo, pretty much the way it does in Quick Fix. Move it to the left to increase the green in your photo, and to the right for more magenta.
White Balance tool. The Raw window has its own special Eyedropper tool up in the toolbox: the White Balance tool. Activate it and then click any white or light-gray spot in your photo, and Elements calculates the white balance based on those pixels. This is the most accurate method in this list, but you may have a hard time finding neutral pixels on which to use it.
If you’re a good photographer, then much of the time a good white balance and a little sharpening may be all your photo needs before it’s ready to go out into the world.
The next group of six sliders—from Exposure down through Contrast—helps you improve your image’s exposure and lighting (also known as “tone”). If you like Elements to make decisions for you, click the word “Auto” above these sliders, and the program selects what it thinks are the best positions for each of the six sliders. If you don’t click anything, then Elements starts you off with the Default settings. Here’s the difference between Auto and Default:
Auto. Elements automatically adjusts your photo, using the same software-powered guesswork behind the other Auto buttons throughout the program, as explained in Figure 8-4.
Figure 8-4. If you want the Raw Converter to always open your photos with the Auto settings applied, you can tell it to by opening the Raw Converter Preferences dialog box (in the Raw Converter’s toolbox, click the three-line icon or press Ctrl+K/⌘-K). In the dialog box, turn on the “Apply auto tone adjustments” checkbox, as shown here, and from now on, the Raw Converter is in Auto mode—at least for the tone settings.
Default. The Raw Converter has a database of basic tone settings for each camera model. If you choose Default, then you see the baseline settings for your camera, and it’s up to you to make further adjustments to the photo. If you want, you can set your own camera defaults (where the sliders are when your photo opens), too, as explained on Saving your settings. If you don’t like what you got with Auto, then just click Default to send your photo back to how it was when you opened it.
After you’ve clicked Auto or Default, you can override any setting by moving its slider yourself. If you go to the trouble of shooting Raw, then you may well prefer to do so, as Figure 8-5 demonstrates.
Figure 8-5. Left: The Raw Converter’s default settings make this photo look like a lost cause. Right: With a little bit of manual adjustment, the photo reveals that the camera actually captured plenty of details. (Note that the one properly exposed bit of foreground in the left image is now quite blown out. This image is a great candidate for the Exposure Merge feature, discussed on page 290.)
Here’s a blow-by-blow of each of the six settings:
Exposure. A properly exposed photo shows the largest possible range of detail—shadows contain enough light to reveal details, and highlights aren’t so bright that all you see is white. Move this slider to the left to decrease exposure and to the right to increase it. (Note to photo veterans: The values on the scale are equivalent to f-stops.) Too high a choice here will clip some of your highlights (meaning they’ll be so bright that you won’t see any detail in them). Figure 8-6 explains more about clipping.
Figure 8-6. To help you get the tone settings right, Elements includes two triangles above the ends of the Histogram. Click them to turn on “clipping warnings” that reveal where your highlights (in red) or your shadows (in blue) lose detail at your current settings. If the photo isn’t clipped, then the triangle for that end of the Histogram is dark. If the triangle is white or colored, then you have a problem; click the triangle to turn the mask on to see the clipping. As you adjust the tone settings, the mask changes accordingly. In this photo, you can see that the red and blue speckled areas will be clipped when you open the photo unless you adjust your settings.
Recovery. This clever slider brings down overexposed highlights, recovering the details that were lost, without underexposing the rest of the photo. Be careful when using it, though—a little goes a long way.
Fill Light. If your subject appears backlit, move this slider to the right to lighten up the shadowed areas, just the way a photographer’s fill light does. Elements’ Fill Light is clever enough to bring up the shadowed areas in your photos without clipping the highlights.
Blacks. This slider increases the shadow values in your photo and determines which pixels become black. Increasing this setting may help improve the contrast in the image. Move the slider to the right to increase shadows or to the left to decrease them. A small change here has a big impact: Move this slider too far to the right, and you’ll clip your image’s shadows (meaning they turn pure black, with no details, and your colors may become funky, too).
Brightness. This is similar to Exposure in that moving the slider to the right lightens your image, and moving it to the left darkens it. But this setting doesn’t clip your photo the way the Exposure setting may. Use this slider to set the overall brightness of the image after you’ve used the Exposure, Recovery, and Blacks sliders to set the photo’s brightness value limits.
Contrast. This slider adjusts your image’s midtones; move it to the right for greater contrast in those tones, and to the left for less. People usually use this slider last, because things can shift pretty dramatically if you use other sliders after you’ve increased the contrast.
Most of the time, you’ll use several of these sliders to get a perfectly exposed photo. Once you have things adjusted the way you want, you can go on to the lower group of settings and adjust your photo’s clarity, vibrance, and saturation. You can also save your current settings for use with other photos, or undo all the changes you’ve made, as explained on Saving your settings.
The final group of settings on the right side of the Raw Converter controls the vividness of your image’s colors. Most Raw files have lower saturation to start with than you’d see in the same photo shot as a JPEG, so people often want to boost the saturation of their Raw images a bit. Move the sliders to the right for more intense color, and to the left for more muted color. If you know you’ll always want to change the intensity of the color, then you can change the standard setting by moving the slider until you have the intensity you want, and then creating a new camera default setting, as described on Saving your settings.
Here’s what each of the three sliders does:
Clarity. This slider is a bit different from the next two. Clarity isn’t strictly a color tool, although it’s an absolutely amazing feature. If you’re an experienced Elements sharpener, you may have heard of the technique called local contrast enhancement, where you use the Unsharp Mask with a low Amount setting and a high Radius setting to eliminate haze and bring out details. That’s sort of what this slider does: Through some incredibly sophisticated computing, it creates an edge mask for your photo that it uses to increase detail. It can do wonderful things for many—maybe even most—of your photos by improving contrast and adding punch. Give it a try, but be sure you’re viewing your photo at 100 percent magnification (or more) so you can see how you’re changing things. With some cameras, you may find that the details in the converted photos look rather blocky when viewed at that size. If that happens, open the file in the Raw Converter again and choose a lower Clarity setting.
Vibrance. While Saturation (explained next) adjusts all colors equally, the Vibrance slider is much smarter: It increases the intensity of the duller colors, while holding back on colors that are already so vivid they may over-saturate. If you want to adjust saturation to make your photo pop, then try this slider first; it’s one of the handiest features in the Raw Converter.
Saturation. This slider controls how vivid your colors are by changing the intensity of all the colors in the photo by the same amount.
Most of the time, you’ll only want to use the current Raw Converter settings on the specific photo(s) you’re editing right now. But Elements gives you a bunch of ways to save time by saving your settings for future use. Just below the Histogram, to the right of the word “Basic,” are three tiny lines with a minute arrow at their bottom right. Click that icon to see a drop-down menu. Whatever you choose in this menu determines how Elements converts your photo. Here’s what the choices mean:
Image Settings. This is the “undo all my changes” option. In other words, if you’ve made some changes to your photo in the Converter but you want to revert to the settings Elements originally presented you with, then choose this option.
Camera Raw Defaults. The Raw Converter contains a profile of normal Raw settings for your camera model that it uses as its baseline for the adjustments it makes. That’s what you get when you pick this option. You may have several profiles to choose from here (see the box on Working with Profiles).
Previous Conversion. If you’ve already processed a photo and want to apply the same settings to the photo you’re currently working on, then choosing this setting applies the settings from the last Raw image you opened (but only if it’s from the same camera).
Custom Settings. Once you start changing the Raw Converter’s settings, this becomes the active choice. You don’t need to select it—Elements turns it on automatically as soon as you start making adjustments.
Since individual cameras—even if they’re the same model—may vary a bit (as a result of the manufacturing process), the Camera Raw Defaults settings may not be the best ones for your camera. You can override the default settings and create your own set of defaults for any camera. Here’s how:
To change your camera’s settings: If you know that you always want a different setting for one of the sliders—like maybe your Shadows setting should be at 13 instead of the factory setting of 9—move any or all of the sliders to where you want them, and then choose Save New Camera Raw Defaults from the menu discussed above. From now on, Elements opens your photos with these settings as your starting point.
To revert to the original Elements settings for your camera: If you want to go back to the way things were originally, then click the Settings button (the one with the three lines on it), and choose Reset Camera Raw Defaults.
Tip
You can apply the same changes to multiple photos at once. Using the Raw Converter explains how.
The Raw Converter’s preferences include a couple of special settings that may interest you. To bring up the Camera Raw Preferences dialog box, in the Raw Converter’s toolbox, click the icon with three lines. These preferences can be really useful, especially if you have more than one camera:
Make defaults specific to camera serial number. Turn this on if you have more than one of a particular camera model; for instance, if you carry two bodies of the same model with different lenses when you shoot, or if both you and your spouse have the same camera model. This setting lets you have a different default for each camera body.
Make defaults specific to camera ISO setting. Since you may shoot very differently at different ISO settings (ISO is the digital equivalent of film speed), you can use this setting to create a default that Elements applies only to photos shot at ISO 100, or at ISO 1600, and so on.
Tip
If you regularly share photos with people using other programs, you’ll be pleased to know that the Raw Converter’s preferences let you choose whether your settings get saved in the Camera Raw database or in a sidecar XMP file that goes along with the image. If you choose the XMP option, then your settings become portable along with your photo—so if you send the file to someone else, the settings travel along with the photo, as long as you send the XMP file, too.
You don’t have to create default settings to save the changes you make to a particular photo. If you just want to save the settings for the photo or group of photos you’re working on right now without having to open them all in the Editor and save them in another format, make your changes, and then click the Raw Converter’s Done button to update the settings for the image file(s).
Tip
You can also choose a different profile for your camera for the Raw Converter to use as a basis for adjusting your photos. Converting to DNG explains how.
Once you’ve got your exposure and white balance right, you may be almost done with your photo. But in most cases, you’ll want to click over to the Raw Converter’s Detail tab to do a little sharpening (on the right side of the Raw Converter, above the word “Basic,” click the icon that looks like two triangles).
This tab also includes two other important adjustments: Luminance and Color (both described in a moment), which help reduce noise in your photos. None of the adjustments on this tab have Auto settings, although you can change the standard settings by moving their sliders where you want them and then creating a new camera default (Saving your settings).
Sharpening increases the edge contrast in your photo, which makes it appear more crisply focused. The sharpening tools in the Raw Converter are a bit different from those in the Editor, but some of the sliders should look familiar if you’ve sharpened before, since they’re similar to the settings for Unsharp Mask and Adjust Sharpness:
Amount controls how much you want Elements to sharpen. The scale here goes from zero (no sharpening) to 150 (way too much sharpening).
Radius governs how wide an area Elements considers an edge. Its scale goes from .5 pixels to 3 pixels.
Detail controls how Elements applies the sharpening to your image. At 100—the right end of the scale—the effect is most similar to Unsharp Mask (in other words, you can overdo it if you aren’t careful). At zero, you shouldn’t see any sharpening halos at all.
Masking is a very cool feature that reduces the area where sharpening takes place so that only edges get sharpened. If you find that you’re sharpening more details than you like, then use this slider to create an Edge Mask that keeps Elements from sharpening areas inside the edges. The farther you move this slider to the right, the more area you protect from sharpening. While you adjust this slider, Elements does some amazing behind-the-scenes calculations, so don’t be surprised if there’s a little lag in the preview when you move this slider.
Masking and Detail work together to perform really accurate sharpening, which is why the sliders go so high—you won’t like the effect from just one of them set all the way up, but by experimenting with using both sliders, you can create excellent sharpening in your photo.
You can get an extremely helpful view of your image if you hold the Alt/Option key as you move the sliders, as explained in Figure 8-7 (but only if the view is set to at least 100%).
If you’re not planning on making any further edits to your photo when you leave the Raw Converter, then go ahead and sharpen your image here. On the other hand, some people prefer to wait and sharpen only after they finish all their other adjustments in Full Edit mode, so they skip these sliders. But you can usually sharpen here and then sharpen again later (outside the Converter) without any problems.
The final two settings on this tab (under Noise Reduction) work together to reduce noise (graininess) in your photos. Noise is a big problem in digital photos, especially with 5-plus megapixel cameras that don’t have the large sensors found in single-lens reflex cameras, and with cellphone cameras. Here’s how these two adjustments can help:
Luminance. This setting reduces grayscale noise, which gives your photo an overall grainy appearance—something like what you see in old newspaper photos. The slider always starts at zero, since you don’t want to use more than you need—moving it to the right reduces noise but also softens the image’s details.
Color. If areas of your photo that should be evenly colored contain obvious clumps of different-colored pixels, this setting can help smooth things out. Drag this slider to the right to reduce the amount of color noise.
Figure 8-7. If you’ve tried high-pass sharpening (page 265), then you won’t have any trouble understanding this helpful view of your image. Set the view to 100% or higher, and then Alt-drag/Option-drag any of the sharpening sliders to see this black-and-white view of your image. The lack of color makes it easy to focus on what you’re doing to the edge sharpness in your photo, so you get a highly accurate view of the effect each slider is having.
In most cases, it may take a fair amount of fiddling with these sliders to come up with the best compromise between sharpness and smoothness. It helps if you zoom in to 100% or more when using these sliders.
Once you’ve got your photo looking good, you have one more important choice to make: Do you want to open it as an 8-bit file or a 16-bit file? Bit depth refers to how many pieces of color data, or bits, each pixel in your image can hold. A single pixel of an 8-bit image can have 24 pieces of information in it—8 for each of the three color channels (red, green, and blue). A 16-bit image holds far more color info than an 8-bit photo. How much more? An 8-bit image can hold up to 16 million colors, which may sound like a lot, but a 16-bit image can hold up to 281 trillion colors.
Tip
You can adjust 16-bit images with microscopic precision, but your home printer only prints in 8-bit color anyway. If you want to do all your editing (or at least 90 percent of it) in 16-bit color, then consider upgrading to Photoshop.
Most digital cameras produce Raw files with 10 or 12 bits per channel, although a few can shoot 16-bit files. You’d think it would be a good idea to save your digital files at the largest possible bit depth. But you’ll find quite a few restrictions on how much you can do with 16-bit files in Elements. You can open them, make some corrections, and save them, but that’s about all. You can’t work with layers or apply the more artistic filters to 16-bit files, but you can use many of Elements’ Auto commands. If you want to work with layers on 16-bit files, then you need to upgrade to Photoshop.
Note
Your scanner may say it handles 24-bit color, but this is actually the same as what Elements calls 8-bit. Elements goes by the number of bits per color channel, whereas some scanner manufacturers try to impress you by giving you the total for all three channels (8 x 3 = 24). So when you see really high bit numbers on scanners—assuming they’re not machines from commercial print shops—you can usually get the Elements equivalent by dividing by three.
Once you’ve decided between 8- and 16-bit color, just make your selection in the Depth drop-down menu at the bottom of the Raw Converter window. This setting is “sticky,” so if you change it, all your images open in that color depth until you change it. If you ever forget what bit depth you’ve chosen, your image’s title bar or tab tells you, as shown in Figure 8-8.
Figure 8-8. You can always tell an image’s bit depth by looking at the top bar or tab of its image window in the Editor. The 8 at the end of this title tells you that this is an 8-bit image.
Tip
If you decide to create a 16-bit image and later become frustrated by your lack of editing choices, then you can convert your image to 8-bit by choosing Image→Mode→8 Bits/Channel in the Editor. (You can’t convert an 8-bit image to 16 bits, however.)
If you want to take advantage of any 16-bit files you have, you may want to use either Save As or the Organizer’s version set option for the copy you plan to convert to 8-bit. That way, you’ll still have the 16-bit file for future reference. Incidentally, your Save options are different for the two bit depths: JPEG, for instance, is available only for 8-bit files, because JPEGs are always 8-bit.
A popular choice when you’re thinking about your order of operations (workflow, in photo industry–speak) is to first convert your Raw file as a 16-bit image to take advantage of the increased color information and make basic corrections, and then convert to 8-bit for the fancy stuff like adding artistic filters or layers.
Now that you’ve got your photo all tweaked, sleeked, and groomed to look exactly the way you want, it’s time to get it out of the Raw Converter. To do that, click the Open Image button in the Converter’s lower-right corner, which sends the image to Full Edit, where you can save it in the format of your choice, like TIFF or JPEG. (Why not click the Raw Converter’s Save Image button? Adobe should probably rename this button, which confuses everyone. The Save Image button is actually a link to the DNG Converter, discussed in the next section.)
If you just want to save your changes without opening the file, then you don’t need to do anything: The next time you open the Raw file, the Raw Converter will remember where you left off. Just click Done to close the Converter.
A few years ago, there was a lot of buzz about Adobe’s DNG (digital negative) format, and if you shoot Raw, you should know what it is. As you learned at the beginning of this chapter, every camera manufacturer uses a different format for Raw files. Even the formats for different cameras from the same manufacturer differ. It’s a recipe for an industry-wide headache.
Adobe’s solution is the DNG format, which the company envisions as a more standardized alternative to Raw files. Here’s how it works: If you convert your Raw file to a DNG file, then it still behaves like a Raw file—you can still tweak its settings in the Raw Converter, and you still have to save it in standard image formats like TIFF or JPEG to use it in a project. But the idea behind DNG is that if you keep your Raw files in this format, then you don’t have to worry about whether Elements version 35 can open them. Adobe clearly hopes that all camera manufacturers will adopt this standard, putting an end to the mishmash of different formats that make Raw files such a nuisance to deal with. If all cameras used DNG, then when you bought a new camera you wouldn’t have to worry whether your programs could view the camera’s images.
You can create DNG files from your Raw files right in the Raw Converter. At the bottom left of the window, just click the Save Image button, and up pops the DNG Converter shown in Figure 8-9. Choose a destination (where you want to save the file), and then select how you want to name the DNG file. You get the same naming options as with Process Multiple Files (Renaming Files), but since you convert only one file at a time here, you may as well keep the photo’s current name and just add the .dng extension to the end of it.
Figure 8-9. Elements’ DNG Converter. The bottom section of this window lets you choose whether to compress the file, how to handle the image preview, and whether to embed your original Raw file in the new one. Generally, you’re best off leaving the settings in this section the way they are here.
The jury is still out on whether DNG is going to become the industry standard. But people have had other good ideas over the years like the JPEG 2000 format (see About JPEGs) that never really took off, and DNG hasn’t proved to be quite as universal as Adobe had hoped, so a fair number of people are becoming a bit skeptical about the ultimate fate of DNG, and it’s not nearly as popular now as it was a few years ago. Whether you create DNG files from your Raw files is up to you, but for now, it’s probably prudent to hang onto the original Raw files as well, even if you decide in favor of DNG.
Tip
If you want to convert a group of Raw files to DNG in one batch, the easiest way is to go to Adobe’s website (www.adobe.com/downloads), search for “DNG”, and then download the stand-alone DNG Converter, which you can leave on your desktop. Then just drop a folder of Raw images onto its icon, and the DNG Converter processes the whole folder at once. You can also batch-save images in the Raw Converter by highlighting them in the list on the left side of the window, and then clicking Save Images.