Customer Reviews

Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS2

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Fraser's previous version of this book was excellent. This one is even better. It remains short and to the point but he has improved the illustrations and his text is clearer than ever. Plus he illuminates the powerful new features of ACR and the new "light table" called Bridge. In reading it I felt like he invited me into his mind to follow along with him, watching the decision making of a Master.

This book is for serious Photographers who want to squeeze every last drop of quality out of their image capture, in other words for anyone who is going to be using the RAW processor built into Photoshop CS2.

He does not throw in a lot of unnecessary fluff; just clear "Real World" examples that you can use in your day-to-day work.

One idea that I have picked up already and will use every day is "Highlight recovery" using the exposure slider. I had always figured that burned out highlights meant a trip to the trashcan. "Not necessarily so" he says and not something other RAW processors can do.

Highly recommended for intermediate to advanced users.
He has given me more useful advice for Photoshop than all other writers combined.
Henry Domke
www.henrydomke.com

You need to understand RAW mode to get the most out of your digital photos. The fundamental reason is that they contain more editing headroom. By shooting in RAW, you can ignore all the camera settings other than ISO, exposure and shutter. This book also explains the linearity of camera sensors versus the non-linearity of our perception, which is why you want to expose as close to clipping highlights as possible. All of the other corrections are done by the camera to the RAW image, including sharpening, contrast and brightness control, noise reduction, spectral correction, barrel/pincushion distortion correction, color correction (tint, saturation and especially white balance), etc. etc. This effectively means I can ignore 90% of the menu options on my camera and only worry about exposure.

For me, the RAW converter can grab an extra stop of highlight detail over Canon's in-camera converter (EOS 5D) and does a better job at noise reduction. That alone is worth shooting in RAW.

I came to this book after seeing it recommended in Martin Evening's "Photoshop CS2 for Photographers" (an absolute gem) and the Adobe classroom in a book (a dud). Like Evening's book, this one assumes you're serious: you have print or web customers, need to calibrate color, need to archive, and want to automate as much as possible yet still retain creative options. Most of it's about gamma (digital's Zone System for contrast and highlight/mid/shadow detail) and color correction.

I found this book to be rather repetitious and far too filled with rah-rah-RAW prose. An even bigger chunk just walks you through the menus, buttons, etc. The remaining bit is worth the price of admission -- it tells you how to understand the conversions and then set up your workflow for the best balance (for you) between automation and creative control. I also like that it's written for photographers; if you don't understand histograms and gamma, this is probably not a good starter book.

Ironically, the images in this book are horrible. They're about the size of medium format transparencies (60mm or 2 1/4 inch square). I couldn't tell the difference between most of the compare-and-contrast pairs. Nor could my wife. The other drawback is that it's another Photoshop book that's being sold by the pound -- heavy paper, huge font, and very wide margins. Please make the pictures bigger next time.

CS2 introduce a lot more functionality in camera Raw and this book I think was the 3rd book out on the subject after cs2 was released. The 2 main things this book will give you are

1. How to use the new features in Camera Raw and Adobe bridge to do some work on your images before you pass them into photoshop, this includes cropping and curves.
2. A good introduction to workflow- in fact if you have this book I don't think you need the other cs2 workflow book out there. This one is pretty through even including automation techniques.

Overall I'm pretty happy with this book, I found some the information a bit useless for me, but someone else may find it invaluable. The whole metadata section and how to edit the xml file for example.

I've been a long-time fan of this book, which is probably the definitive work on the topic. However, both my library and real-world knowledge of Raw have been greatly enhanced by the addition of a new, complimentary book -- Rob Sheppard's "Camera Raw for Digital Photographers Only," which features a "you're a photographer first," approach and takes a discussion of Raw to a whole new level. Sheppard is an actual working photographer, and his savvy perspectives from the field benefit from his cool images. Sheppard's book is different than Fraser's, and it adds great value to the overall body of knowledge on Raw.

Besides the advantages of camera RAW, the integration with Bridge and the automation possiblities are something I never considered. I thought Bridge was another glorified picture browser. Not so! I have set up several automated actions so I can let the machine do much of the default processing. This is important since getting my Canon 20D my picture backlog has been growing much faster than I can whittle it down. For image quality the RAW processing is much superior to handling 8-bit JPEGS. Several minor editing mistakes. The section on calibrating your camera using a macbeth color checker could use more work including a hue/sat color chart as a reference. Instead of a 10 min job, I still can't get my RGB values right. Yeah, he's right every adjustment throws off every other. Overall this book is a winner.

I read through this book in about 2 days - probably because the content was low and the fluff was high. The actual content was useful - Bruce Fraser does put together a useful procedure on the steps one should take in CS2 RAW: Exposure eying Histogram, Contrast, Shadows, Highlights, Noise and Sharpening. But the descriptions went from way to slow to way to fast. Also, it would be beneficial to follow along with the sample photos - not only to practice the techniques but also because it is impossible to see many of the changes in the poorly reproduced photos in the book! Third, summaries and checklists would have helped considerable when referencing in the future. I feel this book is good, but should have been made into a quick guide + sample photos = exercises.

I started with Photoshop 5 and have progressed with each new version since then. I've accumulated a fair number of books on Photoshop over the years. Although this deals with only one aspect of PS -- Camera Raw -- it is, by some margin, the most useful book on digital image processing that I've ever purchased. It explains in detail the many features of Camera Raw 3.X. And the latest version of this software that ships with PS CS2 is feature rich. Without a guide like this, you won't know how to take advantage of half the features that are there.

Some complain that there is too much detail. The book is set up in such a manner that you can take or leave as much detail as you wish. Don't want to know about XMP in detail, no problem, skip that chapter, but when you might want to learn more about it come back when you have the time and inclination. But it serves as both a reference that you can pull out when you have a specific question and can be read from cover to cover if you want to know all the nuances of this program.

Best of all Mr. Fraser's anaylysis of workflow while using Camera Raw is indispensible. He provides many useful tips on using Bridge and Camera Raw together. For me photography is an avocation. But I find that I end up with hundreds upon hundreds of photos upon returning from a vacation or even just going out for a day's shooting. It is easy to spend countless hours in front of the monitor reviewing and processing your RAW images. Fraser gives you the expert's inside view on how to cut your time down and only do what is necessary.

If you're not truly "into" digital photography and don't want to be bothered spending some time getting the absolute best out of your RAW imanges, then this book is not for you. But if you want to start the process of maximizing the potential of your images in the most time efficient manner and desire to understand Camera Raw in all its glory, do not pass this book up. I originally purchased the prior version of this book, but found the detailed information on the updated Camera Raw and Bridge programs so valuable that I'm not sorry that I also purchased this version.

This is a thorough technical book, no doubt about it. At times, however, it gets more deeply into color theory than I require, and ironically has less of a real-world aspect than would be optimal. For a true real-world supplement to this one, I recommend Rob Sheppard's excellent Adobe Camera Raw for Digital Photographers Only.

Camera Raw and Photoshop CS2 have released so much power to the digital photographer, most of us are still a bit stunned by all the new things we discover. Bruce Fraser has tackled this subject and reduced it to understandable dimensions. This is not his best writing but he is in the same boat as the rest of us, finding words for things that didn't exist a few months ago.
If you are an experienced photographer, this book will help you with new ideas like Adobe Bridge, "linear gamma" (a misnomer), 32 bit images, metadata. Nothing is completely defined, because nobody can do it yet, but this book is as complete as it needs to be to get us focussed on the core issues and how to exercize the new concepts of Camera Raw. It also brings issues like color spaces, dynamic range, sharpening, etc into better focus.
Add the well written (free) Adobe White Papers from Fraser and Schewe and you'll have about as complete an understanding of Photoshop CS and Camera RAW as you can get.

Just buy this book and get busy.

I wouldn't dare to write a review on Bruce Fraser, being as he is incredibly knowledgable and gifted with the oustanding talent to digest dificult subjects and articulate them for the reader with a clarity , accuracy and completeness that is missing on most technical books.But for the reader that doesnt know who Mr Bruce Fraser is I will speak about my impressions after reading this book.

Very commonly nowedays technical books are written by teams of writers and are therefore lacking unity of style and more often than not, coherence.Not so with "Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS2" by Bruce Fraser.It is obvious that it was written with a master plan that unifies all the chapters ,in which every new concept is introduced gently and gracefully to be later on amplified whenever relevant, for further escalations on the art of using the virgin information stored in the camera raw format.
This book aims to enable the reader to obtain the most that is possible from the binary representation of the image, in conveying his vision into a final print.
If it sounds like a lot is because it is! This is a book for those that aim at perfection. It is a tool for artists and professionals that already know all the fundamentals and are wanting to achieve mastery in digital imaging. After reading (and rereading his book)I have an after taste that is reminiscent of Ansel Adams in the sense that for both of them the real capture happens inside the brain and all that the techniques really do is to bring it out into the open for others to see.If this how you feel about about photography then Mr Fraser speaks your language and this book is for you