Adobe Camera RAW for Beginners: Histogram & White Balance
Adobe Camera RAW (not to be confused with RAW picture format your camera takes) is a powerful tool for editing and tweaking your photography. The software gives you artistic control over your files while still maintaining the original photo. I like to call it non-destructive editing.
Adobe Camera RAW comes packaged with Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, and while it is similar to Adobe Lightroom, it is more of an editing program than a complete digital darkroom and management program like Lightroom.
If you’re wondering about which program you should use, Scott Kelby has a good article on the differences of Camera Raw, Bridge, and Lightroom. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to manipulate the histogram and white balance in your RAW images.
Typically you’ll start your work in Adobe Bridge and open your photos in Camera Raw by either right clicking on the file and choosing Open in Camera Raw, or holding down Cmd+R/Ctrl+R (Mac/PC) while clicking on the file.
View Tutorial
The Histogram
The histogram can be a little intimidating at first, and a lot of first-time users tend to skip over it. However, the histogram can be a great tool to quickly get an overall feel for the photo and diagnose any trouble areas quickly.
Here’s a quick rundown of the histogram:
- The furthest left contains your shadow information. Here you will find how much dark areas you have in your photo.
- The middle is you midtones.
- The furthest right is your highlights. Here you will find your light areas of the photo.
- If you histogram is dominating either side it means your photo is either under or overexposed.
Clipping
The spikes found on the right or left of the histogram indicate clipping is occurring. Clipping is usually bad; it signals that you have no detail in certain areas of your photo. That means that some of your blacks or whites are 100% solid color.
You can see where clipping is occurring by using the triangle buttons found on the upper right and left of the histogram. Blue areas signal trouble in your shadows. Red areas indicate blown out highlights.
As a tip, it’s better for your pictures to be underexposed rather than over.
White Balance
When you take a picture your camera’s sensor attempts to define what is white in the photograph so that it can determine the correct color balance. While the Auto White Balance (AWD) setting works really well on most digital cameras, there are times when you will need to set and tweak the white balance of a photograph after you have shot it.
If you find that the colors are off in a photo, or the picture appears too cool or warm, you will need to adjust the white balance using one of several methods.
The White Balance drop down menu allows you to choose from several lighting conditions. You will only be able to use this if you captured your photo in the RAW format.
The White Balance Tool allows you to pick a spot on your photo that is supposed to be neutral. Neutral colors found in a sidewalk, blue jeans, shirt collar, etc. are best. If you choose an area that is not neutral you can always click again and pick a better area.
The Temperature and Tint bars allow you to manually adjust your white balance making it warmer/cooler or adding more green or magenta.
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By Travis King
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Great Stuff.. I must admit that I don’t use these particular tools when I fireup Adobe Camera RAW or Aperture..
Generally hit auto and let the program do the rest..
Thank you for this tutorial. Great stuff!
Please… I notice you are serving the screencast on blip.tv – which I also use without nearly as satisfactory results. What screen capture/encoding software do you use and what settings ie width, resolution, frame rate etc did you use for this cast?
A very informative and well done cast, by the way.
Hey DJ,
We export our videos as FLV files so Blip.tv doesn’t do its own conversion on them. Generally the videos are in 720p or 1080p for high definition display. Good luck!
“If you histogram is dominating either side it means your photo is either under or overexposed.”
This is only true if the scene itself has an “average” range of light. It’s a good (very) general rule. But folks should be aware that there are plenty of fairly common scenarios (beach, snowy landscapes, night streets) where the histogram would be heavily weighted on one side or the other, and the photo is indeed correctly exposed for the scene.
Nice. This helps a lot.
“As a tip, it’s better for your pictures to be underexposed rather than over.”
I think it’s more like “It’s better that your pics be as far to the right as possible WITHOUT overexposing, as you get the most data.”
When you darken brights, you don’t create something out of nothing, which you do when you brighten darks. It’s better to cut 250 down to 125 than try to double 125 to 250.
@Steven
Yes, that is a better way to put it. How about “The closeset to right without going over”? Ala Price is Right.
@Andy
Good point! It’s funny what you forget to say once the screencapture starts rolling =)
@dj
I’m using Camtasia on the HD setting. I’m still waiting for my compression mic to arrive, so sorry about the less then perfect sound quality. If you’re interested in screencapture setups I highly recommend Jeffrey’s rundown on nettuts – http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/general/how-to-create-screencasts/
Sorry, I didn’t read the tutorial yet. Is this Adobe Camera Raw a plugin from Photoshop?
Sounds like this tutorial is a good fit for you Diego – you should try out the program
@Diego
Camera RAW is a program that comes bundled with Photoshop.
Nice introduction to ACR.
Great tutorial! thanks!
This is very helpfull. Thank you very much. You resolve many of my problems. You English is easy to undrerstand even for somebody who do not speak it well. You make it simple and right to the point, showing lots of tips I never new using this program. Thank you ones more.