Adobe Camera Raw Tips, Tutorials & Techniques

The Spot Removal tool in Adobe Camera Raw is rather awesome. It has flexible power that allows you to work, in a non-destructive manner, to fix blemishes and modify photographs like no other tool will. I’ve been using Photoshop for this type of thing for years, but I’m switching over. I’d much rather accomplish these types of tasks with Camera Raw and throughout the post below, you’ll see exactly why.

In this post, I’m going to cover what the Spot Removal tool in Camera Raw can do. I’ll also talk about the tool’s two modes – Heal and Clone. They seem similar on the surface, but are very different in application. Finally, I’ll touch on a few of the controls and features of the tools in question.

The Spot Removal Tool

Let’s first take a quick look at how to locate the Spot Removal tool and the panel that controls it. Inside the toolbar that runs along the top of Camera Raw, you’ll see a button that has a paintbrush with a few specks. This is the Spot Removal tool.

If you click the button, you’ll notice a panel appear in the right column. This is the Spot Removal tool panel.

What is the Spot Removal Tool?

In Camera Raw, the spot Removal tool is a tool that allows you to select an area of a photo. After an area is selected, you can either heal it with the essence of another area in the photo or outright replace it with another area. The two modes, heal and clone, are what control each of these outcomes. I’ll show examples of both the heal and clone modes below, but for now, just know that heal replaces the selected area with another area, but modifies the replacement with colors and tones that are similar to the initially selected area. When you clone an area, you make a selection and choose another area of the photo to replace it with. There’s no modification. If you select a white area and choose to replace it with black, that’s what will happen. It’s all very interesting. Continue reading below for some graphics that will help explain.

Heal & Clone Controls

For both of these modes, there are three tools that help control what happens. These controls are Size, Feather and Opacity and are sliders located in the Spot Removal panel. Although these controls are most likely self-explanatory, I’ll quickly go over what they do.

The size control adjusts the size of the area selected. The initial size of the selected area is tethered to the heal or clone area. If you adjust the size of one, you adjust the size of the other. Again, it’ll all become very clear down below.

The feather control manages how the edge of the replacement area overlays the original selected area. If you choose a hard edge, you’ll most likely see a line around the area in question. If you choose to soften, or feather, the edge, the outline will become less noticeable.

The opacity control manages the opacity of the replacement area. You can choose to only lightly heal or clone something or you can alter the original area so you no longer see it at all.

Using Heal Mode

Heal mode is extremely fun to use. Again, this mode takes the original selected area and replaces it with a color and tone modified version of another area. Let’s take a look at how this works.

First, I’ll head up to the top toolbar and select the Spot Removal tool. Next, I’ll make sure that heal mode is selected in the Spot Removal panel and that my size, feather and opacity are set the way I’d like them to be. After that, I’ll click on an area in the photo. For this example, I’m going to remove one of the residential lights that’s on the shoreline of the lake. For demonstration purposes, I’ll set the opacity to zero so you can see the light that I’m going to heal.

Now, I’ll increase the opacity to 100% by moving the slider all the way to the right.

The light is gone. The originally selected area in red has been replaced with the area in green.

Now, in order to replace the area in red with another area, all I need to do is click inside of the green circle and drag it to another area of the photo. To demonstrate a few things, I’ll click and drag it so it covers half sky and half mountain.

Do you see what happened there? Even though the area that is supposed to be overlaying the originally selected area is cloud white and mountain green, the replaced colors are light and dark green. This is what heal mode does. It’ll correct as much as it can so it matches the original area.

Using Clone Mode

This is going to be a fast section because all I’m going to change is one thing. The drop-down box in the Spot Removal panel has two choices; heal and clone. I’ve been working in heal. Now, I’ll choose clone. By doing this, my selected areas and circles will remain as-is on the photo, but the replaced area will look different.

As I mentioned above, the Spot Removal clone made made a direct, unaltered copy, of one area of the photo and replaced the originally selected area with it. It’s that simple.

So far, I’ve covered the differences between heal and clone, how to move the selected areas and have given some examples of what different results look like. Now, I’ll cover how to resize the chosen areas.

Adjusting the Size of the Spot Removal Tool

To adjust the size of either circle for both the heal and clone modes of the Spot Removal tool, all that needs to be done is for you to roll your mouse pointer over an edge of either circle on the screen, wait for the pointer to turn to a double arrowed pointer and then drag in, towards the center of the circle or out, away from the center. Below is the result of me dragging out and away.

Selecting a Longer Area

The area that’s selected doesn’t need to be a perfect circle. Let’s say I wanted to replace a wider area of the shoreline with an area next to it. To accomplish this, I’d do the same as above, but instead of clicking once and letting go of the mouse, I’d click and drag. Take a look at the photo below.

Of course, I could go in any direction and all the previous rules apply. I can move either area and choose a different mode. It’s up to me.

Clearing My Changes

During this post, I’ve been making a whole bunch of selections and healing and cloning like crazy. To reset everything and bring my photo back to its original state, all I need to do is click on the Clear button that’s located at the bottom of the Spot Removal panel. This will clear all selections and erase any changes I made with the Spot Removal tool.

Also, to undo any of my spot removals, all I need to do is click inside either circle and hit Delete on my keyboard. That will remove any change for that one instance.

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When changing portraits from color to black and white in Adobe Camera Raw, there are a few areas you need to concern yourself with. If you make an adjustment the wrong way, you can shed an, how shall we say, unfavorable light on the person in the photo. If you make an adjustment the right way, you can actually make someone look a lot better than they naturally would. It’s all about adjustments and choosing the correct colors to work with.

In this post, I’ll review some of the information I went over in my previous post that talked about black and white photos. After that, I’ll hone in on one area in particular. I think this is worth discussing because it’s such a small area that can have a dramatic effect.

Original Photo

This is the photo I’ll be working with today. As you can see, there hasn’t been much done to it yet.

Make Adjustments in the Basic Panel

Before I change the photo to black and white, I want to make it look as good as possible when it’s color. Any sort of brightness and contrast I can add now will benefit the photo later by adding depth. After the photo has been altered to black and white, this task becomes more difficult.

There – that’s better. I added contrast and brought out some color. While editing, I was careful not to add or remove too much skin tone. That’s what I’m going to be working on after I turn this portrait black and white. While editing, also pushed the Dehaze slider to the right, to remove any sort of fogginess in the photo. This feature has a clarifying effect and an increase in contrast all in one.

Converting to Grayscale

Now that the photo looks good in color, I can head into the HSL/Grayscale panel and click on the Convert to Grayscale check box. Once I do this, all color in the photo is stripped out and I’m left with the ability to adjust the sliders that control the original colors in the photo. Those colors still exist. They’re just hidden by Camera Raw. This is what gives us the ability to edit them now.

Editing the Black & White Photo

This is just a reminder – if I click the P key on my keyboard, I can jump back and forth from the original photo to my edited photo. This can help tremendously when editing black and white photos, because it’s nearly impossible to remember the colors that were once available.

In this photo, I know I want to edit skin tone. To do this, I’ll need to focus primarily on the orange slider in the HSL/Grayscale panel. Before I edit though, I’m going to do a short experiment to show you how much better and how much worse this one slider can make someone look. First, I’ll push the orange slider to the left by 30 points. This will darken the orange in the photo. The original value for this slider is -13. I’ll push it to -43.

As you can see, by darkening the orange in the model’s face, we bought out some unflattering features. That wasn’t our goal. Now, let’s brighten the orange and move the slider up 30 points so it sits at +17.

Now, I know there is some red on the person’s lips I’d like to edit as well as some blues in the background. Let me push those sliders a bit to see what happens.

I’d say that looks good. I moved the orange slider up a bit more as well. This was on top of increasing the brightness of the reds and reducing the brightness of the blues.

Really, the moral of this story is that when editing skin tones for black and white portraits in Camera Raw, you should focus on the red, orange and yellow sliders in the HSL/Grayscale panel. This, of course, comes after making your edits in the Basic panel.

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There are a few tools in Camera Raw that I rely on for virtually all of my photo editing. In the Basic panel, they are White Balance, Exposure, Highlights, Whites, Blacks, Clarity and Vibrance. In the Effects panel, I use Dehaze. While you may be familiar with many of the sliders I just mentioned from the Basic panel, you might not be familiar with Dehaze from Effects. That’s because it’s fairly new. I believe it was launched with Camera Raw 9.1 in mid 2015.

Dehaze reduces the amount of “soft white” from a photo. In general, this soft white washes out many of the colors in the image. The Dehaze feature removes some of this detriment by analyzing how it thinks light should be absorbed into the colors of the photo and compensates for it. Whatever it is, the method Camera Raw uses really isn’t important. What’s more important is the effect it has on an image.

I will tell you this – Dehaze is just one of many tools that should be in your basket when you head into Camera Raw for some editing. By itself, it won’t have all that much of effect. But when it’s combined with others, the effects can be dramatic.

In this post, I’ll explain how to use Dehaze and then I’ll go about showing you how it can impact a photo. I’ll combine it with my regular editing workflow to show you how it can assist with making photos really pop.

Original Photo

To start off, I’ll show you what I’m working with. I haven’t done anything to this photo yet.

As you can see, there’s sort of a mist over the entire area. I’m not sure what would help here – an adjustment of contrast, vibrance, clarity?

Using Dehaze

Now, I’ll go through the extremely simple process of removing some of the haze from this photo. To do so, I’ll head to the Effects panel in Camera Raw. The Dehaze slider lives inside this panel.

Now, if I move the slider all the way to the left, I can actually add haze to the photo. Perhaps this would be desirable in some situations.

For this situation, I want to remove as much haze as I can. I’d like the image to be sharp. So, I’ll push the slider all the way to the right.

As you can see, there isn’t a tremendous difference from the original photo, but there’s enough to get the ball rolling.

Adjusting in the Basic Panel

I’ll continue my editing in the Basic panel. First, I’ll make some changes in the center section that starts with Exposure and ends with Blacks.

To make these edits, I moved the Exposure, Highlights, Whites and Blacks sliders. The problem is, by adding this much contrast to the photo via these sliders, I ended up with too much yellow in the image. While this may look good if I was going for that, I’d like to make things a bit cooler. To accomplish this, I’ll move the White Balance Temperature slider to the left.

That’s better. The greens appear to be brighter now and the warm temperature is more isolated to the top of the image where it should be.

Finally, I’ll adjust a bit more by moving the Clarity and Vibrance sliders.

Now, I do want to let you know that I usually adjust the Dehaze slider after I make all my other adjustments. I went in reverse today to more clearly show you its effect. While there wasn’t a huge difference in this photo, it can have more of an impact with other photos. It all depends on what Camera Raw picks up on. It’s definitely worth it to move the slider back and forth for each photo you edit. It can have both a clarifying and saturating effect in one move.

Here are the before and after shots from above. You can see the greatest haze removal in the upper right corner area. What was once misty is now clear.

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It’s funny – when you ask yourself what a black and white photo is, you most likely answer that it’s a photo with no color. In some respects, you’d be correct. The thing is, in many black and white photos, there was color. It’s just that you removed it with one tool or another. Believe it or not, the method in which you removed it plays a huge role in how dramatic the black and white photograph will be.

In this post, I’m going to show you some differences between methods for creating a black and white photo in Adobe Camera Raw. The first method, which comes to mind for most people, isn’t necessarily the best. The second method is the best. I’ll cover the nuances between the two.

My Example Photo

Let’s take a look at my example photo. While it’s not the best one in the world, it’ll work fine for our purposes.

In this photo, there’s a decent range of color and tone. Let’s see what we can do with it.

Removing Saturation

Remember when I mentioned that there was a method of removing color that wasn’t necessarily the best? Well, this is it. If we stay in the Basic panel in Camera Raw, we can head down to the bottom Saturation slider and move it all the way to the left. This will desaturate the photograph.

In all honesty, with this photo, the result isn’t bad. But, there’s an even better method to remove colors in Camera Raw. One that allows us to alter the tone of each individual color found within a photo. This is what will truly make the image stand out.

Convert to Grayscale

I’ll set the Saturation slider back to its original state so the colors are visible again and I’ll head over to the HSL/Grayscale panel. Inside that panel, there’s a check box that’s labelled Convert to Grayscale. I’ll check that box and see what happens.

Hmmm…that looks just like the previous screenshot. Wait, there’s one difference. If I simply remove the photo’s saturation by moving the slider in the Basic panel all the way to the left, I lose control of the HSL/Grayscale color sliders. I can move them back and forth, but they have no effect. If I leave the Basic panel Saturation slider alone and check off the Convert to Grayscale box, I retain control of the individual color tones.

Adjusting Color Tones in Grayscale

I’m going to move the color sliders around a bit in an effort to make the image pop a bit more. I simply want to enhance the contrast some.

There. As you can see, the image is already looking better.

Now, the problem we face as we adjust the grayscale mix in this way is that we forget the colors we want to adjust. I knew that I wanted to make the reds of the flower and the insect darker and the greens of the insect lighter. That was pretty straightforward. But what if there were many colors that needed adjusting? It’s certainly not possible to remember all of them while we’re editing in grayscale mode.

Here’s a solution – click “P” on your keyboard to flip back and forth from the modified version of the photo to the original. The original still has the color in it. You can jump back, check out the colors and then jump forward to your working version. It’s that simple.

Also, if you click the Toggle between current settings and defaults for the visible panel only button down below the photo, you can go back and forth as well. I circled it in the screenshot below. It’s the button with the little sliders in it.

Grayscale Mix Targeted Adjustment Tool

If you review the Adjusting Color in the HSL Panel section of my How To Make A Photo “Pop” With Adobe Camera Raw post, you’ll see that I used a tool called the Targeted Adjustment Tool. This is a tool that takes the guesswork out of making individual adjustments in the HSL/Grayscale panel. Basically, all you need to do it to select the tool, click on the area you want to lighten or darken and drag your mouse to the left or the right. It’s that easy.

Finish Editing in the Basic Panel

Now that I made some edits in the HSL/Grayscale panel, I can move to the Basic panel and finish up. This is where the major enhancements can be made that will really make this photo stand out. I’ll make my usual edits, plus a few that will differential the shades.

This may look good or it may look bad. It really depends on your usage and what you’re after.

I’m sure you can see the possibilities of having the ability to edit each color tone in grayscale mode. Go ahead a practice on a few photos and let me know what you think.

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This is one of those posts you’re going to want to print out and keep in your back pocket for frequent use. If you’re a busy photo editor, you definitely want to know how to edit more than one photo at a time in Camera Raw. This is otherwise known as batch processing. This technique allows you to open multiple photographs (in today’s example, I’ll be opening JPEG files) from Adobe Photoshop directly into Camera Raw. Then, once the files are open, you’ll have the ability to edit one, all, some or none. If you’ve never seen something like this before, you’re going to think it’s too good to be true.

Now, just so you’re aware, I already touched on this topic in another post I wrote. You can view that one here:

Adjusting White Balance of Multiple Photos In Adobe Camera Raw

In that post, I opened the files via Adobe Bridge. Since not everyone has, or likes, Bridge, I’ll be opening the files via Photoshop directly. Now, there is one thing to note here. In order to open JPEG files from Photoshop, you’ll need to tweak one small preference. Visit this post:

How To Open Files & Photos Into Adobe Camera Raw

When you get to that page, scroll down a bit and read through the Opening JPEG and TIFF Files Into Camera Raw section. That’s where I talk about how to change the preference that allows you to view, select and open the files you’re interested in working on, right in Camera Raw. When you’re finished, come back to this post. As I continue on below, I’ll assume you have made that change.

Selecting & Opening Photos From Photoshop

In this section, I’m going to open up my install of Photoshop. Once inside, I’ll head up to the File > Open menu. From there, I’ll select a few photos and then click Open.

Since I already have my preferences set to open JPEG files directly into Camera Raw, Camera Raw appears on my screen with each of the files I selected in the left column.

Editing Multiple Photos in Camera Raw

There are a few ways to go about this. Inside Camera Raw, you can either click the top photo in the left column, hold down your shift key and then click the bottom photo in the column. This will select all images in the column. If you do this and then go about your editing, you’ll most likely accomplish whatever task it is you’re after. The thing is, if you’ve got tons of photos and edit them all simultaneously, Camera Raw can become sluggish. After all, it’s got to apply every single tweak you make to each and every photo, every single time you make one. If you plan on making the same edits to all the photos, it’s better and more efficient to edit only the first photo and then simply apply those edits to the remaining photos when you’re finished. This will decrease the processing time substantially. Think of the image you select to edit as the representative of the others. Whatever you do to that one, you’ll eventually apply to all the others.

Editing the First Photo

I’ll go ahead and select and edit the first photo in the left column now.

If you take a look at the thumbnail photos, you can see that I made some changes to the first one. I didn’t do anything drastic, just moved some sliders around in the Basic panel to brighten things up some.

Applying the Changes to the Remaining Photos

To apply the edits I made to the first photo to the remaining ones, I need to select all the photos. I’ll do that the same way I described earlier. Click the first thumbnail, hold down Shift and then click the last thumbnail.

From there, I want to make my edits filter through the rest of the photos. To do that, I need to click on the small icon that’s located at the top right of the Filmstrip column. Once the selection box appears, I can click Sync Settings.

As soon as I click Sync Settings, a dialog box with many choices will appear. This is where using this method really shines.

If you look closely at this dialog box, you’ll see that there are a whole bunch of check boxes. Whichever box is checked will be what is applied to the remaining photos. Let’s say that you have 100 photos open in the Filmstrip column in Camera Raw. We’ll pretend that you make a lot of edits in multiple panels to the first photo, but only want to apply some of them to the remaining photos. By unchecking and checking boxes in this dialog box, you can easily control which edits get applied and which edits don’t.

What’s even cooler is that there’s a fast way to go about this. If I want to apply only the edits I made in the Basic panel, I can click on the drop-down box located in the Synchronize dialog box and click Basic. This will uncheck all boxes except for the ones related to the Basic panel.

Since this is an example, I’ll keep Everything selected and click on Okay. This will apply every edit I made to every photo I have selected.

If you look in the left Filmstrip column now, you’ll see that all the photos are bright, just like the first one.

Editing Individual Photographs

I do want to mention one thing here. Just because I edited one photo and then applied my edits to all the remaining photos doesn’t mean I can’t select each photo individually and continue editing. Oftentimes, a photo shoot will occur under controlled lighting. Every single photo taken may need the same exact white balance correction. You can easily apply that edit and then continue on making random edits on all the other images. You can even click through the other photos and tweak the batch processing you made earlier. What I’m trying to say here is that batch processing is a helpful tool. In no way does it limit you from further editing in any of the images.

Saving the Photos

Since I’m all finished with editing the photos, I’ll go ahead and click the Done button that’s located at the bottom right of the application. This will apply the changes permanently and save over the JPEG files that were opened. This is important to recognize. Since the photos I worked on today weren’t RAW, my edits weren’t non-destructive. If you want to edit in a non-destructive manner, you’ll need to work with RAW images.

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Every time I open a photo in Adobe Camera Raw for editing, I’m sure to follow a certain sequence of events to end up with the result I’m after. First, I want to make sure the contrasts are good. I work in the Basic panel for a while, adjusting the exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, etc…to make the photo crisp to the eye. After that, for a regular photo that was originally taken well, I’ll begin to work on the color. I’ll adjust the vibrance, saturation and then head into the HSL panel to adjust specific colors. It’s remarkable how much better a photograph can look after only a bit of editing.

I oftentimes here of beginning editors having difficulty with which sliders to adjust and when to adjust them. The most basic task is the one I just described above. So, with that in mind, I’ll use today’s post to cover what you’ll need to know to transform a photo into something that’s worth putting online and sharing with the public.

Original Photo

Let’s take a look at the photo I’ll be editing today. This was taken at Washington Oaks State Park in Palm Coast, Florida in 2013. It’s a good photo, but just a bit dull for my liking. I’ll be adding some life to it.

And this is the photo right after I opened it in Camera Raw. I haven’t done any editing to it yet.

Adjusting Highlights & Shadows

The first areas I like to edit are the Highlights and Shadows. I usually push the Highlights slider to the left to reduce them. The reason for this is simple – if a highlight, in this case, a sunburst or sun glare, is too overwhelming, it steals detail from whatever is directly around it. I want to reduce that theft. Conversely, oftentimes shadows are far too dark and create large seemingly black masses that the human eye can’t discern. Even though the actual photograph has the detail stored inside of it, it’s hidden from view. So I’ll go ahead and push the Shadows slider to the right to make those dark areas more visible.

Now, just as a word of warning, when I begin pushing sliders around, the photo may actually look worse for a little while. This is because I’m in the correcting stage. I need to fix what’s wrong with the photo before I begin bringing out its beauty.

If you look at the screenshot above, you’ll notice that there is much more detail showing where there used to be shadows. Also, the highlights aren’t washing out what’s around them as much (look at the leaves in the trees). The thing is, now the entire photo looks as if there’s a reduction in contrast. That’s because there is. We need to now fix that.

Adjusting Whites & Blacks

In this step, my goal is to add some white to what’s actually white in the photo and to add some black to what’s actually black. These two sliders are different than the two above. I’ll go ahead and move the Whites slider to the right and the Blacks slider to the left. Watch for an increase in contrast with this step.

I’d say that’s a fairly large difference. Look at all the color that’s been released from the photo. And I haven’t even moved any sliders that adjust color yet. What you see above is simply what was being hidden by poor lighting.

Adjusting Clarity

The Clarity slider is very helpful in cases like what I’m facing in this photo. This slider is what’s called a bias slider. It looks for details in an image and makes one side of them lighter and the other darker. When you move this slider back and forth, you won’t see a huge difference, but you can definitely see one. And usually when you add clarity, the photo looks better. I’ll go ahead and push this slider to the right now to add a bit more detail and interest to the image.

This slider really does add contrast and clarity to a photo. It makes things appear more crisp.

Adjusting Vibrance

The Vibrance slider is sort of like the Saturation slider. The difference between the two is that by adjusting vibrance, you aren’t adjusting all the colors in your photo. It’s meant to add vibrance to only some of them. When adjusting saturation, you’re saturating all the colors in the photo. Typically, I don’t move the Saturation slider. I find it too powerful. I usually only push the Vibrance slider to the right just a bit, depending on the photo. And sometimes, I don’t even do that. In this case, I’ll push it to the right just a tad to bring out some of the blues in the leaves of the trees.

Saturation vs. Vibrance

I’ve heard it said that editors generally don’t use the Saturation slider to add colors at all, but only to take them away. I tend to agree with this notion. Have you ever looked at a photo and noticed that one or two colors were totally blown out. It’s usually the reds and greens. And if they are, it becomes painfully obvious that the photo was edited and that whoever did it, added saturation. You can get away with adding saturation if everything in the photo is dull. But if only some of the colors are dull, stay away. By adding saturation via the Saturation slider, you’re increasing the saturation of all the colors, no matter if they already are fully saturated. Camera Raw makes no distinction for this. It doesn’t think in this respect.

Now, vibrance is another story. By using the Vibrance slider, you’re essentially telling Camera Raw to add saturation to only the colors that need it. See the difference here? Instead of saturating everything, you can saturate only what’s under-saturated. Camera Raw can tell the difference. I’d say that’s a fairly intelligent algorithm. It’s one that thinks. Also, Adobe created this feature with skin tones in mind. If you play around with this slider a bit with a photo that has humans in it, you’ll notice that by increasing the vibrance, you aren’t making people’s skin look oddly orange or pink. This is because the Vibrance slider doesn’t add saturation to those colors. Obviously, if you’re attempting to edit a photo that has those colors applied to something else, you’ll need to work around this limitation, but in general, it’s a valuable tool to have and I use it often.

Adjusting Color in the HSL Panel

If you’ve ever attempted to adjust independent colors by using the HSL panel, you may have found difficulty doing so. Much of the issue lies with the fact that you never really know what slider to use to increase or decrease certain colors in your image. When I first used this panel, I instantly saw the value of it, but since I couldn’t figure out how things worked and I couldn’t add value to my photos, I put it on the back shelf. Well, today I’m going to show you a tool to bring this panel back to the front. It’s really cool.

For this example, I’m going to work inside the Saturation tab of the HSL panel. I think, beyond the issue I just talked about above, there’s another one. When adjusting the saturation of an area of a photo, oftentimes, it takes the movement of multiple sliders to accomplish your task. By eyeballing your photo, it’s nearly impossible to figure out which sliders it is that requires movement.

If you head up to the top menu, click and pull down the Targeted Adjustment Tool, you’ll see some choices.

Typically, whichever panel you’re currently in will already be selected. Since this is the case (and it is for me right now), this doesn’t generally need to be touched.

The Targeted Adjustment Tool allows us to select any area of our image and by doing so, Camera Raw will decipher what color we clicked on. After that, if we hold down the mouse pointer and slide to the left or to the right, Camera Raw will either desaturate or saturate that particular color by moving independent sliders. If you practice this a few times, you’ll see that for most cases, multiple sliders will move at different rates. This is why I say accomplishing this task by eye is nearly impossible.

For my photo above, I wanted to bring out some of the oranges in the leaves in the foreground as well as some of the purples of the plants. To do this, I zoomed into the image and selected those specific colors with the Targeted Adjustment Tool. After that, I moved my mouse to the right to increase saturation and after I was happy with the results, I let go and moved on to the next area. It’s actually quite simple.

Final Edited Photo

As you can see, I didn’t go nuts editing this photo. I merely moved a few sliders and used a tool to enhance contrast and color. In my case, that’s all it took to bring the photo to life. Now, if you wanted to go further and edit this photo with different effects and all that, I’d use many more tools and eventually bring it into Photoshop for further enhancement. For today, this is good. I think the photo looks crisp, clean and bright.

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Have you ever seen a printed photograph, or one online for that matter, that had jagged edges throughout some of its gradients? Usually, this will occur is the color space is very small, but it’ll also occur if the dynamic range inside a photo has been clipped. You can usually tell if it’s been clipped, dynamic range-wise, by using a tool called a histogram. I talk about histograms on this website quite a bit. For reference, if you’d like to look through some of the posts where I discuss the topic, you can do so here:

Editing a Photo Using the Basic Panel in Adobe Camera Raw

How To View Before & After Comparisons in Adobe Camera Raw

Fixing Under & Overexposure With Adobe Camera Raw

How To Use Your Camera Histogram For Awesome Photos

Now, even though I’ve already covered a lot that’s got to do with histograms, I’m going to tackle this topic once more. I’m going to do this because I want to bring your attention to a really handy tool that can help out when attempting to discern whether or not you’ve got clipping in your photos. And don’t worry, I’ll explain exactly what clipping is next.

Basically, when referring to dynamic range clipping when it comes to photography, people are talking about areas of the photos that have no data. For example, let’s say you take a photograph that’s half lighted hallway and half dark bedroom. Just think about walking down a lighted path and taking a photo while looking into a dark room.

After you take the photo, your camera will return exactly what it captured. It’ll probably look pretty good to you. The thing is, since cameras sometimes have difficulty adjusting their exposure for situations like this, some (or many) of the details in the area you took the photo will be lost. Again, to learn more on this topic, please refer to the posts I linked to above.

While previewing photos like this on your camera, they’ll look fine. It isn’t until you enlarge it on a computer screen or print it out that you’ll notice the lines I talked about above that separate the either pure black or pure white areas from the almost black areas or almost white areas. And when you look closely at these areas, they’ll become readily apparent.

So, how do we go about finding where the areas of no data (or details) are? Well, I’m going to walk you through an example in this post to show you just that. But first, let me open up the photo I’m going to use.

My Photo

Please take a look at the photo below.

Now, I’ve done some testing and I can tell you that none of the image above that’s opened up in Camera Raw is being clipped. You can see this if you look at the histogram in the upper right corner.

While you might not be all too familiar with histograms, you can see that the one that identifies the dynamic range for my example photo completely fits within the left and right edges.

Adjusting Highlights & Shadows

If I increase the highlights in the photo by pushing the Highlight slider all the way to the right, we can see that the lines in the right side of the histogram move all the way to the right as well. And if I decrease the shadows in the photo by pushing the Shadow slider all the way to the left, we can see that the lines in the left side of the histogram move all the way to the left as well. When lines are hitting either side of the histogram, that’s called clipping. When something clips in a histogram, it means that data is lost in the photograph and what displays instead is either pure white or pure black. By pushing these sliders too far, I erased some data in the photo. That’s not good. Well, if I mean to do this, it’s okay, but in general, if unknowingly done, it’s not.

I’m sure you can see the difference in the photo as well.

FYI – I could have moved the Whites or Blacks sliders instead. I would have seen the same (or worse) effect.

Introducing Clipping Warnings

I’ll admit, when I edit photos, I generally don’t look at the histogram too much. I know I’m supposed to, but I forget. What I primarily keep my eye on during editing is the photo itself. I’ve been doing this for such a long time, I know what to look for. But, I also don’t do any print work anymore. If I did, I would surely need to keep a close eye on the histogram to see if I was clipping any data as I changed values. Even though, I probably should remember to watch the histogram – especially while editing the values in the Basic panel.

What if there was an easier way? What if there was some tool in Camera Raw that would sound alarms the moment I began clipping some data? Wouldn’t that be neat? Well, we’re in luck because there is. The tool may not sound alarms, but it sure does show up in the photo itself. It’s actually pretty difficult to miss. Let me show you.

As you can see, the clipping warning is going crazy. To get this effect, I clicked the two upward facing triangles at either end of the top of the histogram. That turned on the warnings. After I did that, Camera Raw knew to alert me by showing blue inside the photo for any area that was pure black. It also alerted me by showing red for any area that was pure white. Now, to make this dramatic, I adjusted the White and Blacks sliders in addition to the ones I previously adjusted. I needed to make the photo really pop for my example.

Since this is so overwhelming, let me move all four sliders to their half way positions. We’ll have a better look at thing then. Remember, keep your eye on the lines in the histogram to get a feel of what’s happening.

And to make things even more clear, I’ll move each of the four sliders to either +20 or -20 points. Again, watch the histogram. See that the lines have moved?

Now, all we see is just a bit of blue and a bit of red. While some data is lost, at least we know about it and can make the decision of whether or not we’d like to keep the image this way.

In Conclusion

Clipping data from a photo is common practice. To do it correctly while editing a photo in an editing program though, we need to know about it. As editors, the last thing we want after tons of money is spent on a big print job is a nasty surprise. That’s why it’s extremely important to use the histogram and the clipping warnings as everyday tools.

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I’d like to begin this post by telling you that the techniques I use for batch-adjusting white balance in Camera Raw can be used for any type of editing. For example, if you wanted to edit the saturation or contrast of multiple photos simultaneously, you can follow the instructions I’m about to give you below. I’ve merely chosen to focus on white balance because it’s a popular topic and extremely helpful to those who take many photos under the same light conditions, such as wedding, portrait and food photographers.

In this post, I’m going to use a few sample photos I just took a few minutes ago. I regularly shoot food photography under two distinct light conditions – one, where the light is too warm and two, where the light is too cool. I’m constantly adjusting white balance for these photos. It’s rare that I ever let a single image go through my editing process without evaluating this setting.

If you would like to follow along, you’ll need a gray card.

The test photos I shot for this project were taken in RAW mode. When using RAW mode, there is more information for Camera Raw to use while editing. It can also edit non-destructively, so it’s of value to take photographs this way. And since cameras don’t apply any sort of auto-white balance adjusting while in RAW mode, it’s perfect for our uses today.

My Sample Photos

Like I said, I just took these random shots a few moments ago. I ran around my kitchen looking for items that were somewhat vibrant in color so any differences in white balance were apparent. This is what I came up with:

If you look at the above thumbnails in Adobe Bridge closely, you’ll see that there are two batches of photos, each leading with photos of my gray cards. The first group consists of photos 1-6 and the second group consists of photos 7-13. I even named the files appropriately.

Now, if you look at the thumbnails again, more specifically, photos 1 and 7, you’ll see that the gray cards look strikingly different. This is because they are under two different sources of light – the warm and the cool.

Batch Editing White Balance

Since there are only two sources of light, I’m able to edit each group of photos all at once. This is the real benefit to using a gray card. There’s no guessing involved. It is what it is. The trick is to take a single photo of the gray cards under that particular light source before beginning any photography. This way, you’ll have a sure-fire neutral color captured under the light source you’d like to edit from.

To edit the first group, I need to select (click and highlight) each photo in that group and then open them all in Camera Raw by clicking the round Open in Camera Raw button in the top toolbar (circled in red).

After editing this first group, I’ll be repeating this exact step for the second group.

As you can see, the gray card in the above screenshot doesn’t look very gray. It looks more like it’s brown. So it only follows that each object photographed under this light conditions has a degree of inaccurate warmth added to it as well.

By the way, if you’re following along and don’t see the column of thumbnails to the left of the center photo, you need to either double-click on the left panel or click and drag it out to the right. The entire divider is clickable.

Selecting the Images

The begin my editing, I want to select all the photos in the left column. So to do that, I’ll select the first image, which happens to by the one that’s currently displaying in the center panel, hold down Shift on my keyboard and then select the last image in the column.

If you look in the left column now, you’ll see that all the images are selected. What this means is that whichever edit I make to the image that’s currently displayed in the center panel will be applied across all selected images. In this post, I’ll be editing white balance, but like I mentioned earlier, if I went ahead and made any other edit to this photo, such as saturation, lens distortion correction or exposure, each of those would affect every photo that’s highlighted in the left column.

Choosing the White Balance Tool

The next step is to select the White Balance Tool from the top toolbar.

It looks like a dropper.

Applying the White Balance Tool

To adjust white balance by using the White Balance Tool, I need to take a color sample of something that’s neutral gray. If I wasn’t using a gray card, I could guess which area of a photo is gray, but since I’m using the card (which is the reason for using it), I can simply go ahead and click anywhere on it. By doing so, the white balance will automatically be corrected in this first photo and every other selected photo. Take a look at the difference.

And if you look closely, all the thumbnail photos have been corrected as well. It’s that easy.

What Next?

From here, I can either save these photos outright or open them in Photoshop for further editing. It’s really up to me. I can even continue on with my editing in Camera Raw.

Batch Editing the Second Group

This group isn’t as much fun. The white balance wasn’t terribly off, so we’re not going to be able to see much of a change. I’ll still go ahead and edit the photos. Let’s take a look at this next group after I launch them in Camera Raw from Bridge.

Now, if I go ahead and select all the photos in the left column and use the White Balance Tool again, we can see the corrected images.

Like I said, there isn’t much of a difference. If we look at the values in of the Temperature and Tint sliders over to the right though, we can see that the temperature has changed from 4900 to 4750 and the tint has changed from +17 to +27. Just because we don’t see much of a difference on the computer screen doesn’t mean there won’t be much of a difference in print or another output medium. It’s better to accurate correct white balance than eyeballing it with the risk of being off.

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Fixing white balance is usually the first area I work on after I open a photo in Adobe Camera Raw. There’s a reason these particular sliders appear at the top of the list of those included in the Basic panel. There’s little you can do to a photo if the actual color temperature isn’t accurate. Once it’s the way it should be, we can continue on to edit our photos.

I do a lot of indoor photography where I use JPEG mode. I use this mode because my camera takes care of the more nuanced settings for me automatically. Since I use most of my photos for online purposes, many of these settings are, how do I say, less important, than they would be if I were to use the photos for print. Computer monitors and smart phones are more forgiving than billboards along highways. Nevertheless, when I use my camera to capture JPEG files, oftentimes it gets the color balance wrong. The reason for this is primarily due to confusion on the camera’s part. Indoor lighting is notoriously known as a tough customer. Oftentimes, the types and temperatures of lighting are mixed and the camera’s auto white balance feature simply doesn’t understand the photographer’s intent. Because of this, we need to adjust white balance ourselves in an application such as Camera Raw.

I want to take a moment to offer a bit of understanding regarding JPEG and RAW camera modes. While shooting in JPEG mode, camera’s tend to attempt to figure out what’s going on. In RAW mode, they leave that up to the photographer. Because of this, while working in something like Camera Raw, we’ll have fewer options available to us and will end up with lower quality photos when editing JPEG files. While working on RAW files, the sky’s the limit. So, if you can, take your photos in RAW mode and learn all that Camera Raw can truly accomplish. That said, in today’s post, I’ll be editing a JPEG file simply to show you the concept of and how to become familiar with white balance.

Also, in today’s post, much of what I want to convey has to do with color accuracy. After I’m finished with that though, I’m going to touch on color look. While editing my photos, I tend to lean toward warmth as opposed to coolness. For my type of photography, warmth is better received.

My Photo

In today’s post, I’ll be using a stock photo that’s got a nice variety of color. While I take my fair share of food related photographs, I quickly gravitated toward the one I’ll show you in a moment because of its wide range of acceptable temperature and color dynamics. Also, it’s enhances well when the color temperature is adjusted which, in turn, will show you how that setting can significantly affect a photograph.

White Balance Drop-Down Box

As I mentioned above, the first task photographers need to tackle is to actually correct any error in white balance. There are a number of tools to accomplish this. What we’ll look at in this section is the White Balance Drop-Down.

In the drop-down box above, there are only two options available. This is because I’m editing a JPEG file that has already had a white balance adjustment applied to it by the camera it was taken with. As I mentioned earlier, if this was a RAW file, there would be many further options.

Currently, we’ve got:

As Shot
Auto
Custom

If this were a RAW file, we’d have:

As Shot
Auto
Daylight
Cloudy
Shade
Tungsten
Fluorescent
Flash
Custom

Almost all of these options assumes the camera didn’t accurately capture the correct white balance. If we focus on the RAW file options for a moment, we can see that if the photo were taken on a cloudy day, for example, and the camera didn’t recognize that fact, it can be corrected by clicking on the Cloudy selection. This will either cool or warm the colors in the photograph. Each of the remaining options are similar to the one I used in my example, where they would somehow alter the white balance and/or tint.

White Balance Tool

For a more accurate white balance correction, we can use the White Balance Tool. This is located in the top toolbar.

The trick with this tool is to use it alongside an area in the photo that’s determined to be of a neutral shade. Oftentimes, this is challenging to determine, especially when the colors are dramatically skewed one way or the other. For this reason, many photographers use gray cards in their photography. Gray cards offer the photographer a point of reference that they are assured is neutral. If you aren’t familiar with this concept, please take a look at this resource:

Get your White Balance Right in Seconds Using Grey Card

I’ve even written a section on this site that talks about gray cards:

Using a White Balance Grey Card

If a gray card isn’t available, you could always try to find a neutral area in the photograph to click on. The issue with this is that some areas are more neutral than others, if that’s even possible. What I’m trying to say is that the more you click around inside a photo with the White Balance Tool, the more you’ll see variations in color.

I’ll show you a few examples. First, I’ll click an area inside of the spoon at the left side of the photo that looks neutral. Here is the result.

As you can see, the value in the Temperature slider stayed at 0, while the value in the Tint slider fell to -24. There’s also a blueish hue to the entire photo.

If I choose a different area to click on – say an area inside the other spoon that sits on the other side of the photo, perhaps the result will be more accurate.

Well that’s not very good. It’s for this reason, I don’t just randomly use the White Balance Tool. I always like to end up with an accurate reading. Gray cards only cost a few dollars.

Next, I’ll simply click into the white of the bowl. I know this is supposed to be white and perhaps we’ll get a better result.

Ah, that’s better. As you can see, the photo looks more appropriate and the value in the Temperature slider has risen to +11 and the value in the Tint slider has risen to +19. This is a good starting point for the next section.

Adjusting the Sliders

For most of my editing, I manually use the sliders to adjust white balance and tint. I know the way I’d like to see the photo and I can easily give it the look I want. And as I mentioned above, for most of my photos, I like them to feel warm.

Since I think the white balance is currently fairly accurate, I can go ahead and move the Temperature and Tint sliders back and forth, until I achieve the feel I’m after. Many photographers take this step after they’ve used their gray card to first correct any out of whack color cast. In this example, I just happened to get lucky by using the White Balance Tool and clicking on the white bowl.

It’s pretty obvious that I warmed this photograph quite a bit by adjusting the sliders. Right now, it looks good, but I would probably go back and adjust things further after I played with a few other sliders and panels. Editing is always a work in progress and one adjustment can easily affect another.

These are the most basic methods of adjusting a photograph’s white balance using Camera Raw. Of course, you’d probably want your camera to handle much of this task, but if, for some reason, you ended up with an inaccurate color cast in some photos or simply wanted to alter their feel, the White Balance and Tint sliders are perfectly acceptable tools to use.

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In today’s post, I’m going to be adjusting some of the sliders in the HSL/Grayscale panel to see what kind of effect they will have on a few example photos. If you aren’t aware, “HSL” stands for Hue, Saturation and Luminance. Let me give you some definitions of exactly what these are below.

Hue – A color or shade.

Saturation – The intensity of a color.

Luminance – The brightness or darkness of a color.

I’m sure there are some more involved definitions out there, but I’m really trying to keep things simple here. And as we go through this post, you’ll see exactly how each of the sliders in the tabs inside of the HSL panel can affect a photograph. First though, let’s take a look at the HSL panel itself.

Saturation Tab

I’d like to kick things off inside the Saturation tab, so if you’re following along, please click into that. If you’ll notice, inside this tab, we’ve got eight sliders. They range from red to green to magenta. The idea behind each slider is to adjust the amount of saturation, or intensity, for that specific color. For example, in our demonstration photo, we’ve got some flower petals that are primarily colored red and orange. I’ll go ahead and lessen (slide to the left) both of those colors.

As you can see, I’ve desaturated the flower petals.

If I reset those two sliders and increase the yellow and green colors by moving their sliders all the way to the right, we can see that the flower stems will become much more saturated.

Inside the Saturation tab, there’s a fairly wide spectrum of colors to adjust, so you can potentially have a far reaching impact if you make the proper adjustments.

Luminance Tab

Let’s mix things up a bit and change flowers. Let’s also head into the Luminance tab to see if we can brighten and darken some colors. Take a look at the screenshot below to view our original flower.

As you can see, we’ve got the same variety of colors to adjust back and forth. If you click between the Saturation and Luminance tabs, you’ll notice a small change. Where the Saturation slider alter the intensity of color, the Luminance sliders alter the brightness of color. To view this clearly, look at each end of the color sliders. Let’s see if we can adjust something.

Besides white, I’d say this flower photo is primarily made up of reds, greens and yellows. Let’s move those particular sliders all the way to the left to darken the colors.

I’d say that actually looks pretty neat. We significantly transformed the visual effect of this photo.

Let’s do the opposite and brighten these three colors by moving the sliders all the way to the right.

Now, instead of darkening those three colors, we’ve essentially “whitened” them. Again, this gives the photo an entirely different look.

Hue Tab

The Hue tab is a strange one in that it gives us the ability to actually change a color. If we have pure red roses, we can change the red color to orange, magenta or somewhere in between. The same is true if we have a flower with yellow petals. Within the Hue tab, we can change the yellow so it’s more orange or green. I’ve used this tab quite a bit and let me tell you that you can come up with some interesting combinations by moving the sliders contained inside.

I found the perfect photo to exemplify what I’m referring to. It’s sort of a purple flower. Take a look.

For this example, I’m only going to adjust one slider – the purple one. This slider gives me the opportunity to change any purple inside the image to either blue or magenta. Let’s turn the purple to blue first by moving the slider all the way to the left.

Wow, I’d say that’s a change. Now, let’s move the slider to the right so our purple flower turns magenta.

I’m not sure which one looks better. I like them both. I think you get the idea here that this is a very powerful tab inside the HSA panel. I also hope I’ve given you some sufficient background into the workings and possibilities of it as well.

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