I have been reading Miras blog for almost half a year now, and once in a while she posts useful things about photography and editing. Sometimes I learn something, and sometimes she points out easier ways to do things I allready know. So I thought I’d share some tips with you today that I use when editing my images in photoshop. For those of you interested I use the CS5 version, and there can be small changes in where the tools are placed and how they work from older versions.
First of all, you need to know that I always take my pictures in raw format. As some of you allready might know, raw is the digital version of a negative. It contains more information than a .jpg file, and can be altered alot when it comes to the white balance (how much blue, yellow, magenta or green there is in an image), contrast, exposure and basically everything but altering the motive itself. Here is what it looks like when you open a raw image in photoshop:
As you can see, there is quite a few options there that you can play with before even opening the image. Once it is opened, it converts to .jpg and you can continue editing like you would if you didn’t use raw. The only difference is you might not have to, since you allready edited so much directly into the raw file. You can ofcourse manage to do all these things in a .jpg file aswell, but each time you alter a .jpg file it loses some of its quality. So if you alter the image too much, it can damage the whole file. In raw, you keep the same quality all the way, and don’t have to worry about such things.
Below you can see three examples with before and after images of when I have played around in raw. I also edited away the marks on the glasses, and made the details a bit crisper, but that has to wait until another time. For now, enjoy playing around in raw.






Hope this helps you making your editing more fun, and that you can see the quality difference in your art.