Photoshop has become so big and powerful over the years that what started out initially as a program for editing photos is now used not only in the world of photography but also in practically every creative field imaginable, including graphic and multimedia design, video editing, 3D rendering, even medical research! You could almost ( almost) argue that Photoshop is now overkill for editing images, not because it can't do everything you need but because, as a photographer, it can also do a whole lot more than you'll ever need. So what makes Camera Raw so special? Streamlined For Image Editing
Of course, it's also possible to do global edits in Photoshop using features like Levels and Curves. As we'll see in other tutorials, it's certainly possible to do some local edits using the tools in Camera Raw, but in general, Camera Raw is all about making the initial overall image look good. Once we have the overall image looking the way we want, we can then move on to Photoshop for more specific local edits which is where Photoshop excels. That is, edits that affect the entire image as a whole. In general, you can think of our work in Camera Raw as global edits.
In a Camera Raw/Photoshop workflow, Camera Raw is where we do all of our initial processing work - setting the overall white balance, exposure, contrast, and color saturation, adding some initial sharpening, reducing noise, and more. Then, once we've processed the image and it's looking good, we can open it in Photoshop for further editing and refinement. First, we open the image in Camera Raw for initial developing, much like we'd process a film negative in a darkroom. So which should you use for editing your images, Camera Raw or Photoshop? The simple answer is - both! Think of Camera Raw as an image developer, while Photoshop is an image editor. Camera Raw Or Photoshop? Which Is Better?Ĭamera Raw was initially built for raw image processing, but over time, it has evolved to include the ability to process JPEG and TIFF images as well. Like Adobe Lightroom, Camera Raw gives you everything you need for processing raw images. However, both Lightroom and Camera Raw use the exact same image processing engine, which means both are equally capable of giving you fantastic results. Camera Raw is strictly an image editing application. Lightroom is a standalone application (it needs to be purchased separately) that includes additional features to help with your overall workflow, like the ability to catalog your photos.
The other is a free plug-in for Photoshop itself - Adobe Camera Raw - that ships and installs with Photoshop. One is a completely separate, standalone application known as Adobe Lightroom.
To work with these files, we need to use special software that knows what to do with the raw data. If you remember from a previous tutorial, raw files contain nothing more than the raw image data captured by your camera's sensor, with no processing of any kind (which is where the name raw comes from). There's no question that Photoshop has become the world's most popular and powerful image editor, but one thing Photoshop can't do on its own is process raw files. Yet Camera Raw can also be used to edit JPEG and TIFF images, leaving many people wondering, "Which should I use for editing my photos - Photoshop or Camera Raw?" In this tutorial, we'll answer that question by taking a quick look at where Camera Raw fits within a standard image editing workflow, as well as some of the advantages Camera Raw has over Photoshop for developing and processing your images.ĭownload this tutorial as a print-ready PDF! What Is Camera Raw? We also learned that in order to process raw files, we need to use a program like Adobe Camera Raw. Not only do we gain complete creative freedom over the process, but the abundance of image information means we can often rescue and restore detail in the highlights and shadows that, as a JPEG, would most likely have been lost. What we end up with is an already developed image, with permanent changes already made to its pixels, and with a lot of (what would have been) useful image detail missing and gone forever.Ī raw file, on the other hand, contains every bit of image detail straight from the camera's sensor with no processing of any kind so we can develop the image ourselves from scratch according to how we, not the camera, think it should look. We learned that our camera's JPEG conversion process acts like a mini photo lab, developing our images according to how it thinks they should look, with no input from us, while at the same time discarding much of the original image information that was captured by our camera's sensor.
In a previous tutorial, we looked at the benefits that the raw file format has over JPEG when capturing images with our camera.