Editing

The first thing users of Camera Raw in Photoshop CS3 will notice is the re-design of the user interface and the inclusion of some new functions in the Image Controls menu on the right side of the workspace. Some of these have come from Lightroom’s Develop module, which allows it to synchronise with Camera Raw. Photographers can now choose to open and edit Raw, TIFF and JPEG files in either Lightroom or Camera Raw without losing settings applied in either application. This also makes all the settings provided in Camera Raw available for JPEGs and TIFF files.

If your digital camera can record raw files, you can take advantage of higher bit depths when you edit your images. Bit depth refers to the number of colours that can be displayed by a digital device. The higher the bit depth, the more colours used in the image and, consequently, the larger the file size.

In this article we’ll be looking at the most basic of editing processes: resizing. Images need to be resized when:

Cropping and resizing, brightness and contrast adjustments and some basic colour adjustments can be found in even the simplest image editing software. You will probably also find automated tools for correcting red eyes in flash shots and sharpening images. In this chapter we’ll look at how to use these tools and then move on to more sophisticated functions that can help everyday photographers to produce richer-looking prints from their digital photos.

Most digital photographers have experimented with various panorama stitching techniques using either bundled software applications like Canon’s PhotoStitch or ArcSoft Panorama Maker, or the PhotoMerge tool in Adobe’s Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. These applications work well with images that can be overlapped seamlessly; shot sequences where nothing has moved between the shots.