Camera Raw Edit Modes

Hi everyone,

I'm new to using Raw but am doing my best to learn how. I'm currently shooting a Canon Rebel XSi. My editing program is Photoshop Elements 9. As I opened a raw photo into the full edit mode, I'm given 3 editing modes. Basic, Detail, and Camera Calibration. As I did a search online, it seemed like a good number of people had more than these three modes. Is this because they use different cameras and editing software? I want to take a color photo and changed to black/white. The only way I'm able to do this is by putting the saturation at 0. Is there a greyscale mode that can do this instead? My plugin is up to date (6.3). Am I missing something? Thanks for any help!

My mistake, my saturation is set below 0.

In Elements when you first open a RAW file it opens in Adobe Camera Raw. That's where you're seeing the Basic, Detail, and Camera Calibration tabs. The reason you are seeing other tabs posted on line is that the version of ACR supplied with the "full" Photoshop has all of the tabs; the version of ACR in Elements is somewhat limited in features, but still very capable.

Anyway, once you have made your adjustments in ACR, click on the Open Image button at the bottom right and you will be taken to the Elements Editor Workspace. There you can do a lot more editing, including using layers and layer masks. Once in Elements, click on Enhance > Convert to Black and White where you can make quite a range of adjustments. When you're done with your editing you can save your image as JPG, TIFF, or PSD file.

Thanks, Rimmer. I'm aware that when I click on "open image" it sends me to the actual editing page. I watched a clip on a site that someone had multiple tabs and was capable of taking a color photo and putting it in black and white in raw mode. I'm going to assume this someone had a different editing program and had many more features than I. I'll continue to play with saturation. This answers my question, thanks again.

Glad that was helpful. Desaturating isn't a very good way to produce a black and white image, by the way. Using the conversion tool in the Editor Workspace will give you some control over how each of the colors is rendered to give better results.

tkneisl wrote in post #15270172
Thanks, Rimmer. I'm aware that when I click on "open image" it sends me to the actual editing page. I watched a clip on a site that someone had multiple tabs and was capable of taking a color photo and putting it in black and white in raw mode. I'm going to assume this someone had a different editing program and had many more features than I. I'll continue to play with saturation. This answers my question, thanks again.

Like Rimmer said earlier, the Elements version of Camera Raw only has the tabs you see. The shots you've seen online with more tabs is showing the full-featured Camera Raw found in Photoshop CSx. It's several times more expensive than Elements.

One of the tabs missing in the Elements Camera Raw is the HSL/Grayscale tab, which one would use to make a Grayscale/B&W conversion, but as you've seen it's missing in Elements. That's where following Rimmer's advice to open the image in the Elements editor will give you the proper tools.

There are other Raw processors out there with more Raw tools than Elements. In fact, the Canon Raw software Digital Photo Professional (DPP) can be a quite useful and enjoyable app, especially for someone getting started with Raw processing. If you have the disks that came with your camera, install DPP, and then you can go to the Canon Web site and install the latest upgrade. If you don't have the disk, let us know, there are workarounds that are "legit" since it is provided free for Canon shooters.

As you go, you will hear a lot about other Raw processing apps. Photoshop Lightroom is quite popular -- for one thing it was developed around the same Raw processing "engine" found in the Photoshop CSx Camera Raw, so that it has the various tools and capabilities that are missing in Elements. It's significantly less expensive than CSx, but it should be noted that Lightroom lacks a "regular" image editor such as found in Photoshop/Elements.So, many, likely most Lightroom users keep a "companion" image editing app on hand. In fact, Elements is quite common serving that role.

If you do feel the need to "upgrade" your Raw processor, just be aware that there are issues with moving to a new, complex app. These things tend to take people by surprise unless they have done thier homework, and that's what I'd seriously advise you to do: take your time and read up on the app(s) you are interested in, and "fish" this and other forums for input!

tkneisl wrote in post #15269688
As I did a search online, it seemed like a good number of people had more than these three modes. Is this because they use different cameras and editing software?

PS Elements 9 on OSX has the full ACR, if accessed through Bridge.
No such luck for the windows version…

hmm
will photoshop elements 11 be able to edit raw files on a windows machine? O_O
just ordered it
should have looked into this first

Yes, it will work, but you'll have the limited version of ACR.

The cheapest route to the full ACR functionality is to go with Lightroom. As Tony has already said it dose have a lot of image management functions, which are quite easy to learn, and as with everything Adobe seems to have multiple ways of doing things. What this means though is that you have to think about how you are going to approach things before you start. Once you have done that using LR is an absolute dodle. Don't think that you have wasted your money on Elements though, LR is brilliant at just about everything you could want to do with a RAW file, it won't do pixel level editing or layers so Elements makes a great compliment to LR.

Alan

i had downloaded a trial version of lightroom but had no idea how to use it
and now it's expired and just sitting there
-_-
i am not proficient at photoshop beyond very basic editing so hopefully elements will be enough for whatever i am trying to do in terms of post processing

XKxRome0ox wrote in post #15285095
...
-_-
i am not proficient at photoshop beyond very basic editing so hopefully elements will be enough for whatever i am trying to do in terms of post processing

You needn't be worried about PSE, it's a very powerful editing program. The version of ACR that comes with it includes the Basic panel, which is where you'll do most of your work anyway. It also has the Detail panel for sharpening and very capable noise reduction, and can also do things such as cropping and straightening and white balance, all of which are nondestructive for RAW files.

Beyond that you'll transfer your files to the Editor workspace. Providing you save your work as PSD or TIFF almost everything you do there will also be nondestructive since both those formats will preserve the adjustment layers that you will be using. For the few things that you do that are non-reversable, even those can be nondestructive providing that you do that work on a duplicate layer. Yes, that increases the file size and is perhaps not as efficient as doing everything on the RAW file as you would in Lightroom or CS6, but it's a small price to pay, I think.

I think it's good advice to suggest that you get a good book to help you learn the program. I have Scott Kelby's PSE8 book and just got his PSE 11 book. Just as PSE 11 is an improvement over the versions 5, 7, and 9 that I've used in the past, the PSE 11 book includes a lot of new material and I'm already learning new things from it.

thanks for all that

i have been using photoshop 6.0 or something from the year 2000 all this time because i never really needed to do much
i definitely have a lot to learn

Going from PS 6.0 to PSE 11 will be a huge leap forward. PS 6.0 had no Raw support at all.