Free Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Raw Workflow Step by Step
About this Tutorial
This tutorial is designed to show you what I have found to be the most effective steps to raw file processing in Adobe Photoshop. Processing your digital camera's raw files is an important step to getting your digital SLR's image to look its best. This Photoshop tutorial isn't going to cover everything you need to get the perfect image but it will give you a head start to getting there. The chosen digital photo for this tutorial is my beloved 2000 Toyota Celica GT-S. The newest car I've ever had the fortune to own. As you can tell from the before and after pictures, raw image manipulation can make a big impact on your photographic presentation. Thank you Adobe!
 Before |
 After |
Adobe Photoshop Raw Converter Overview
Adobe was smart when they setup the Adobe raw converter, everything is laid out in the most logical fashion. The vast majority of the time you will work this tool from top to bottom which makes it very easy to understand. You will find the following settings in the raw converter: White Balance - Temperature - Tint - Exposure - Shadows - Brightness - Contrast - Saturation.
Step 1: Adjust the White Balance
Setting up the white balance on your photo can be the most important step if your camera didn't capture the perfect settings when you took the shot or if you just want to add a certain look or mood to your photo. The white balance setting consists of a drop-down box and 2 sliders, one for temperature and one for tint. The drop down box contains quick settings that really do fit most situations, they are the same settings you would find in your camera [Auto, Daylight, Cloudy etc.] View the image to the right for an example of swapping settings from Tungsten to Cloudy. If you are more of a perfectionist you can take full control of the white balance by using the temperature slider and tint slider. The temperature slider is fairly simple, slide right for warmer (more reds) and left for cooler (blues) and tint is self explanatory.
Step 2: Adjust Exposure and Shadows
Exposure is important when your camera settings were just a tad off or you just want to blow out the highlights. This works best when your picture was under-exposed, there's not much you can do for an over-exposed photo so don't get your hopes up. Shadow works great for adding a natural looking contrast to the photograph. In this example I am pushing the exposure up 1/2 stop and setting shadows to 12 to bring out the shiny metallic surface.
Step 3: Brightness and Contrast
Brightness and contrast are settings that I tend to use a little less often since brightness is best controlled by exposure and adding shadows creates a great contrast, however these are still good tools to have for your artistic side. In this case I'm bringing shadows from their default value of 50 down to about 45 to cancel out some of the effect of the over-exposure earlier. In this case I'm bringing up the contrast value from the default of 25 up to 45 to help enhance the metal a bit more.
Step 4: Saturation
Saturation is one of the settings that can add significant impact to your picture. Under saturation will make your image look dull and boring. Over saturation on the other hand will blind your viewers. Try to max out the saturation as much as possible without distracting from the image. In this case the saturation was set to 35, from the default of 25. I would have pushed it up more if it weren't for the distractions in the background, of course if this was a more in depth photoshop tutorial we would just remove those distracting objects.
Conclusion
Some important parts were left out of this free photoshop tutorial that you need to use in general photo editing but they weren't in the scope of this tutorial. You always want to sharpen your photos of course and there is a lot of other editing you can do to improve your image but these aren't covered here. Check out the rest of the other free tutorials to find what you're looking for.