Unleash the Power of Adobe Camera Raw

VIDEO #3

Unleash the Power of Adobe Camera Raw Part 2

Adobe Camera Raw

Learn Photoshop Adobe Camera Raw. Welcome to my “Photoshop for Photographers“ series on Adobe Photoshop CC. I think Adobe Camera Raw or Raw files are the best advancement in digital photography. Yes, I used the very first Kodak/Canon digital camera that cost $25,000. It served a purpose, but it was not imaged quality. I think I photographed in a .tif format Nikon D series cameras. Then Adobe Camera Raw came about and it changed everything. People complained it was time consuming, but you could apply the same setting to multiple image and speed of the process. Plus, the image quality was so much better.

In this video I will walk you through the main functions of Adobe Camera Raw. What you should use and what you are better off doing in Photoshop. Adobe updated Adobe Camera Raw since I made this video, and it has some cool new functions. Here is a link to the video explaining the new functions in ACR. Do not think of ACR is that annoying step before Photoshop. Items like white balance are key to do before you move any image into Photoshop.

“Photoshop for Photographers“ was designed as a supplemental resource for my class, “Photoshop for Photographers.” The goal is to teach you how to use Adobe Photoshop step by step. I understand this path is not for everyone and there is no reason you have to follow this process. However, if you want to really learn the program, I would suggest learning everything on the video and then move on. If you are interested in learning Advanced Photoshop techniques, I am constantly adding new and updating videos. My last word of advice is to come up with a workflow and keep organized. If you blow this off in the beginning your will regret it in the long run.

You should be photographing in RAW not .jpg, and Adobe Camera Raw will be your friend.

JOHN WHITEHEAD IMAGES

Items Covered in this Video

Photoshop Requirements and Hard Drives

Working in Adobe Photoshop and with photography is more than just installing software and saving images to your computer. Computers these days are using solid State Drives SSD, which are fast, but do not have a large storage capacity. If you start downloading a bunch of photographs to your computer, it will not take long until you get a “Scratch Disk Full” error. This means your internal hard drive is full. Just to run a computer and Adobe Photoshop you need a sufficient amount of free space. Image previews are usually stored in a computer’s cache. This a temporary storage so it can quickly retrieve previews without recreating them every time you look at them. I cover this in the my Photoshop Preferences Tutorial. Personally, I store all caches on an external hard drive. At this moment I have 4 different hard drives hooked up to my computer. Two SSD’s and two enterprise optical drives, each performing a different task. All these drives are backed up via BackBlaze.

Another important aspect of running any of Adobe’s products are them requirements. Adobe lists the minimum requirements to run each of their programs, but you never want to be using the minimums, or the speed will drive you nuts. You need to realize that that your computer and every other application you run have requirements. So if you have Photoshop’s min of RAM 4GB, that will not allow any for your computer to run or a browser like Chrome. Below I will have two lists. One is some reasonable minimum requirements to run Adobe Software and what I am running. The second is a list of issues you will run into with insufficient hard drive space, and low minimum requirements. Just about every online student that I teach run into these issues. I hope this helps.

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I have a Facebook Group called, “Learn Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, and Bridge.” I created this group because I get a lot of questions on YouTube that are hard to answer unless I can see the issue. This will allow a place you can ask questions, and more importantly post images and videos.