Building better

James Paterson shows you how to take architectural shots to the next level by building up local adjustments in Adobe Camera Raw

- James Paterson

Whether you’re a seasoned retoucher or a Photoshop newbie, one of the biggest challenges with image-editing is in settling on the right strength for a tonal change. This can be a bit of a juggling act, as after making another edit you may want to go back and fine-tune the one before, so that they work together in harmony. This is why the editing tools in Camera Raw in Photoshop and Lightroom are so useful. Every edit is non-destructive, so you have the freedom to go back and alter a setting, or tweak a tonal change whenever. Not only does this give you a safety net to backtrack edits, it also allows for the creative freedom to try out different treatments and effects.

This sort of control is especially useful when making a series of local edits, as you’ll often need to balance the strength of one edited area after seeing the effects on another. With the tools in Camera Raw, we can edit different areas simultaneously until they come together into a pleasing whole. In this project we’ll look at how this works in practice with an architectural scene. Images like this tend to have several distinct areas that all require their own tailored tweaks. As such, we’ll make several local adjustments using the Adjustment Brush while employing the excellent Range Mask and Auto Mask controls, which let us break our image down into different editable areas with minimum fuss. This way, we can alter areas by boosting contrast and shifting colours – or changing them completely.

THE MISSION

Boost architectural shots with a series of adjustments of your Raw images in Adobe Camera Raw

Time needed 30 minutes