Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS2 (Paperback)

by Bruce Fraser (Author) "Fundamentally, a digital raw file is a record of the raw sensor data from the camera, accompanied by some camera-generated metadata (literally, data about data)..." (more)
Key Phrases: File Info, Bruce Fraser, Adobe Bridge (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Call it a control thing, but until recently–or, more specifically, until the availability of digital raw camera formats–you simply weren’t ready to make the move to digital photography. Raw formats, however, changed all of that by allowing you to retrieve images before any in-camera processing has been performed. Photoshop’s Adobe Camera Raw plug-in makes that process even easier by providing a standardized way of accessing and working with these uncompressed digital negatives in your favorite image-manipulation software. In the first volume devoted exclusively to the topic, best-selling author Bruce Fraser shows you how to take advantage of Adobe Camera Raw to set white balance, optimize contrast and saturation, handle noise, correct tint, and recover lost detail in images before converting them to another format. After learning about the raw formats themselves, you’ll discover hands-on techniques for exposing and shooting for digital raw, using Bridge, Adobe’s new standalone file browser, to preview images and automate tasks, and building a workflow around the digital raw process.

About the Author

Bruce Fraser is an internationally known author, consultant, and speaker on the topics of digital imaging and color reproduction. In addition to authoring Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop, he is a contributing editor for Macworld magazine and co-author of the best-selling books Real World Adobe Photoshop and Real World Color Management.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Peachpit Press (June 2, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321334094
• ISBN-13: 978-0321334091
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (54 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #297,870 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

118 of 120 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential Short Book for Serious Photographers, June 13, 2005

By	H. Domke (New Bloomfield, MO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Decent guide for pros, but needs tighter editing and better printing, January 2, 2006

By	Bob Carpenter (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

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.

47 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good primer for the new Raw features, July 29, 2005

By	Patrick Holt "txdragon" (San Antonio, TX USA) - See all my reviews

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.