Today we will finish off the main panels in ACR. The first two panels are not in the Elements version of ACR even though it is the same file (nice blocking bit Adobe!). The others are in all versions of ACR in the past couple of years.
CURVE - The curves function of ACR is like an advanced version of contrast. It does not have the same functionality of Curves in Photoshop, that would be Curves on steroids. In Elements curves can be adjusted under Enhance-Adjust Color- Adjust Color Curves. This is still not the same curves as Photoshop. It is more of curves in ACR that is not enabled in Elements ACR but is in Elements. Did you get that… I’m not sure I did.
Anyhow, there are two ways to adjust curves, these are Parametric and Points. Below is what the parametric curves panel looks like. You adjust the four sliders for Highlights, Lights, Shadows, and Darks as necessary to give you the look you want.
The points curve is just that. You select a point along the curve line and slide it to the position you like. That is all fine and good but what in the world are you looking for when you make a curves adjustment. Read on!
Using the same points curve you can see below a slight “S” curve will give a nice contrast to the image making it pop. What we have in curves is this; There are four sections of tonality to the curves graph. Each for Blacks on the left, darks next, lights, and finally highlights. As you move the line up from its linear origin the specific tone gets lighter. Conversely if yo move the line down the tone will get darker giving a greater contrast to that section.
HSL - This stands for Hue, Saturation, and Luminance and is designed to work with very specific color ranges. It is not selective editing but rather a range edit.
Hue Changes a specific color. For example, you can change a blue sky from cyan to purple. The problem is that it is not selective, so if there was a blue fish tank in the image it would also change color.
Saturation Changes the color vividness or purity of the color. That same blue sky can go from gray to a highly saturated blue.
Luminance Simply turns the power up on the color range making it brighter.
NOISE REDUCTION - When you try to push a sensor with increased ISO or exposure times, digital noise can be captured in the image. To counter this, ACR provides two tools to adjust this. One for black and white noise (Luminance) and one for Color. The lastest versions of ACR do a pretty good job but earlier versions were really a joke. You would be for better off picking up Noise Ninja or one of the other Noise plug-ins.
SHARPENING - As stated in the Clarity section, a RAW image is not sharpened when it comes out of the camera. This level of of sharpening is not intended for output sharpening. It is designed to bring the image up to a minimum level of sharpness where it can further be sharpened creatively or for output. You really need to have the image at 100% zoom when you are sharpening to get an idea when you are going too far.
Amount - What can I say… It is how much you are sharpening. Pushing this too much will cause halo’s to appear.
Radius - This equates to how many pixels are being sharpened. Normally this should not be any more than 1.2 unless you want to get freaky with your image.
Detail - Decreases the haloing from pushing sharpening too far.
Masking - Forces the sharpening effect to edges.
All in all there is some really high end number crunching going on when you are processing a RAW image in ACR. Not just the fact that you are making changes, it is being done at a 16 bit level.
Tomorrow is the last day on this RAW processing extravaganza. Hopefully it will all come together in a viable workflow.
We’ll see you then… Doug
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