MASTER RAW!

Dan Mold shows you how to transform your captures with just 10 essential edits in Adobe Camera Raw

Unless you’re a professional news or sports photographer who needs to send JPEGs to a picture desk in real time, there’s no reason for not capturing raw files at the point of shooting. Thanks to their compressed file size, JPEGs are great 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 mass of image 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 there’s a great way of getting started: set your camera to capture both JPEG+RAW formats, choosing the highest-quality raw format available, until you become comfortable with shooting solely in raw.

But it’s what you do with your raw files that matters most. So we’ve designed a workflow for Adobe Photoshop (other raw image editing software is available) that’s based around the 10 essential editing steps you’ll need to get the most from your valuable post-production time…

1 HOW TO CROP AND FIX LENS DEFECTS

Some simple tweaks to get you familiarised and started in ACR