MASTER RAW

Transform your images with our 10 essential Raw edits in Photoshop CC's Camera Raw. Deputy editor Dan Mold shows you how...

Unless you’re a pro news or sports photographer who needs to send JPEG files to a picture desk in real time, there’s no reason for not capturing Raw files whatever you’re shooting. Due to their compressed file size, JPEGs are brilliant for sharing and storing, but if you want to take your photography to the next level, you’ll need to be able to exploit the full information contained in a Raw file.

Unlike JPEG, which actually stands for ‘Joint Photographic Experts Group’, ‘Raw’ isn’t an acronym; it literally means the raw data straight from the camera. This extra data does come at the cost of larger files and at up to four times the size, it’s true that Raw files will fill a memory card or hard drive faster. But this is a price worth paying for the additional editing possibilities they allow.

Many of us already use Raw files in our workflows, but for those who don’t, you can set your camera to capture both JPEG+Raws, with the highest-quality Raw format available, until you become comfortable with shooting solely in Raw.

We meet many PhotoPlus readers who shoot in the Raw format, but then get stuck when it comes to Raw editing, so we’ve designed a workflow for Adobe Photoshop (other Raw image editing software is available) that’s based around the 10 essential Raw image editing steps you’ll need to get the most from your valuable Raw files…

01 HOW TO CROP AND FIX LENS DEFECTS 

Some simple tweaks to get you started in Adobe Camera Raw