How to get both has been the digital photographers’s balancing act for the last decade – especially if one didn’t want to rely on opening a file and applying pixel-based noise reduction/sharpening filter.
This quality boost would be worth the price of upgrade alone but the ACR team has also added new improved blending options for the Post-Crop Vignette feature and also the ability to add a simulated “grain” back into images to obtain a range of traditional film looks. The algorithms for this new “demosaicing” process allows Adobe Camera Raw 6 (like it’s cousin Lightroom 3) to achieve sharper, cleaner detail while also dramatically reducing noise in high ISO images. Many of her images are represented for stock by Monsoon Images and Photolibrary.Adobe has done it again – they’ve taken the foundational image processing engine of the world’s most popular raw converter and rewritten it from the ground up. Her work, which can be found on her web site,, has been published and exhibited throughout the Pacific Northwest. I assume this non-destructive lens correction will also be in the next version of Lightroom, version 3, which at least so far has used the Adobe Camera Raw conversion engine in its Develop module.ĭiane Miller is a widely exhibited freelance photographer who lives north of San Francisco in the Wine Country and specializes in fine-art nature photography. However, I miss having a grid overlay to help judge things, as I do in the equivalent filter in Photoshop CS5. With a little more time I could massage the other sliders to correct that. There is still a slight distortion in the left edge of the red painted rectangle, because I was not standing exactly centered in front of the sign.
The only change I made was to pull the Vertical slider to the left, as shown in the closeup of the Manual tab above. I was able to correct the perspective nicely. Here is a picture I made looking up at a sign on the side of a building.
The second tab is for Manual corrections, which allows full correction for perspective as well as chromatic aberration and vignetting. Very complex distortions can be corrected here that would be virtually impossible to do by hand. Checking the Enable box will read the lens, focal length and aperture from the metadata, and if it is found in the extensive lens database, a correction will be made for distortion, vignetting and chromatic aberration. The Lens Corrections tab is the 6th one over, circled in red in the figure.Ī more basic version of Lens Corrections was there before, but it is now much more powerful.
It is represented by the leftmost of the icons under the histogram. When Adobe Camera Raw opens, the General tab is displayed. For almost all of my images I would still go to Photoshop, which is unequaled for the power and flexibility of its adjustments. It has been possible to level horizons in Camera Raw for some time, but for many images, I need to go to Photoshop to do perspective corrections. (Lightroom handles things this way, with powerful export, slideshow and print options making it less necessary to go to Photoshop for straightforward images.) If you hadn’t discovered this useful feature in Adobe Camera Raw, click the Save Image button in the lower left of the Camera Raw window, to see the options. With the addition of this powerful adjustment you can more often make sufficient corrections to images so you can save (export) them directly from Camera Raw as DNG, JPEG, TIFF or PSD without ever opening them in Photoshop. You can return any time to the raw file and see the last state of the corrections you made and modify them further as desired. Lens Corrections adjustments in Adobe Camera Raw are non-destructive, as are all the other corrections (or settings) in Camera Raw.
You can get the update and have it automatically installed by going to the Help menu in Photoshop.
You can convert your files from newer cameras to the DNG format, which can be read by older Camera Raw versions.) (You can, however, get profiles for the latest cameras by using the frequently-updated DNG converter. Prior Photoshop versions are not supported by new Camera Raw updates. This new version is only for Photoshop CS5, Photoshop Elements 8, and Premiere Elements 8. In Photoshop the filter only works on 8 bit images, but in Camera Raw it is using all the bit depth contained in the camera’s raw file usually at least 12 bits, and 14 bits in newer and higher-end cameras. You now have the equivalent of the new and improved Lens Correction filter that is in Photoshop CS5, right in Adobe Camera Raw. Since then Adobe announced Camera Raw 6.1, that incorporates a feature I am really excited about. I recently wrote a review here of Adobe Photoshop CS5.