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Details, Details

The Detail tab in the Camera Raw dialog box provides some controls that can be very important to the quality of your images. The first is Sharpness, and I strongly recommend that you always leave this control set to the minimum value of zero. I have found that the sharpening applied tends to be too aggressive, and the single-value slider simply doesn’t provide the control available to you with the Unsharp Mask filter in Photoshop.

The Camera Raw Detail tab.

The Luminance Smoothing and Color Noise Reduction perform similar noise-reduction corrections to your image. The Luminance Smoothing control fixes noise exhibited by tonal variations within the image, and the Color Noise Reduction control fixes noise exhibited by color variations. Both are most prominent in images captured at high ISO settings and/or with relatively long exposures.

With both of these controls, zoom in on an area of the image that exhibits the most noise (using the navigation controls available in the top-left corner of the dialog box, which behave exactly the same as their counterparts in Photoshop). This will typically be the dark shadow areas. Then adjust the controls to correct the type of noise present. Once you’ve minimized the noise, closely examine other areas of the image to ensure you haven’t caused any softening or loss of detail in other areas of the image.

Output Settings

With the image optimized, you’re ready to configure your final output settings. In the lower left portion of the dialog, set the Space dropdown to the same color space profile you use as your working space in Photoshop (I recommend using Adobe RGB 1998).

The Depth dropdown controls bit-depth for the image. To take full advantage of the high-bit data captured by your camera, I strongly recommend setting this to 16 Bits/Channel. With Photoshop CS you can even use adjustment layers with these high-bit images, helping to ensure maximum quality while maintaining maximum control and flexibility (though resulting in some very large file sizes!).

The Camera Raw output settings are found in the lower left part of the dialong, below the image preview.

The Size dropdown allows you to select from preset resampling options. While Camera Raw can theoretically interpolate the image with higher quality (since it is working with RAW data), actual practice shows this isn’t always the case. If you want to resample with this option, do some testing to confirm it provides optimal quality. However, if you are using a camera that uses non-square pixels (such as many Nikon models), you may want to use the Camera Raw interpolation to maximize quality in the conversion to square pixels.

The Resolution option is provided only as a convenience. It allows you to set the resolution of the converted image, but won’t change the pixel dimensions. This simply allows you to save a step when preparing an image for print, since you can set it to the output resolution setting you intend to use (be sure to see Real World Digital Photography, 2nd Edition, for details on recommended output resolution settings).

Checklist Complete

The image before (inset) and after adjustments in Camera Raw.

With all of the Camera Raw settings optimized for your image, you’re ready to apply the settings by clicking OK. This will cause your image to be processed (quite quickly!) and opened in Photoshop. Now you’re ready to finalize the optimization process, using techniques such as those presented in Chapters 10 and 11 of Real World Digital Photography (2nd Edition).

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