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Last Updated on December 13, 2020
*Updated December 2020*
I recently wrote an introduction to Camera Raw in Photoshop, briefly outlining what Camera Raw is, and what the raw file format is. In this follow-up tutorial, we’ll take a look at how to open images in Camera Raw.
We can work with Raw, JPEG and TIFF files in Camera Raw. This gives us access to very powerful and rapid tools for image editing.
You can change anything from improving exposure to making colour adjustments to converting your picture to Black and White. You can remove haze in your photos or sharpen a picture and so much more.
All of this with just a few clicks of the mouse and a drag of a slider.
The best thing about using Camera Raw is that we can edit photographs non-destructively. The edits you make are saved as a series of instructions.
The edits are not applied permanently to your photograph, so you can come back at any time to edit and re-edit your images.
Before we can do any of this cool editing though, we need to get our image files INTO Camera Raw.
You can open a raw file in Photoshop, in much the same way as you would open any other type of image file. The difference is, the raw file opens in the Camera Raw interface instead of the main Photoshop workspace.
If you need it you can Download a Photoshop Free 7 Day Trial which includes Camera Raw.
To open a raw file from your Windows File Explorer, or Mac Finder, you can do any of the following:
Or
As Camera Raw was originally made to process photos taken in raw format, if you double-click on a raw image on your computer it SHOULD automatically launch Photoshop and open the image within Camera Raw.
If the raw file doesn’t open, check that you have the latest version of Camera Raw from Adobe’s Creative Cloud if you’re using Photoshop CC. Or check the Adobe website for updates if you’re using an older version of Photoshop.
It’s simple to open Raw, JPEG and TIFF files from Adobe Bridge.
Here are three different ways to get your photo from Bridge to Camera Raw:
Or
Or
You can open JPEG or TIFF files from Bridge (as mentioned above). You can also open a JPEG or TIFF from Photoshop, directly into Camera Raw, by doing the following:
If you’d like to set up so that every time you open a JPEG or TIFF, it opens directly in Camera Raw, you can do that in the Camera Raw preferences.
Note: This might be useful for photographers, but I don’t recommend it for designers. It could get pretty annoying if all your design files automatically opened in Camera Raw.
1. Go to Photoshop > Preferences > Camera Raw (Mac) or Edit > Preferences > Camera Raw (Windows)
2. Click on the File Handling section on the left-hand side.
Under JPEG and TIFF Handling, set both JPEG and TIFF to Automatically Open All Supported JPEGs and Automatically Open all Supported TIFFs, respectively.
3. Click OK. Note that this change won’t kick in until the next time you start Photoshop.
You can open multiple files in Camera Raw from Bridge. You can then apply the same edits to multiple files simultaneously.
This can be really handy if you have a pile of images that were all taken in the same environment and require the same sort of adjustments, such as creating more contrast or removing colour casts.
1. In Bridge, open the folder holding your photos.
2. Shift + Click all of the images you want.
3. Choose File > Open In Camera Raw.
Your images open in Camera Raw.
Notice the film strip of thumbnail images along the bottom.
1. Choose any photo to edit by simply clicking on the thumbnail. Or choose more than one photo by holding down Shift and clicking on the thumbnails of the pictures you want to edit.
In the example below, I selected all of the thumbnails, then applied a Black and White preset to convert them. All four images are converted to Black and White using the same settings simultaneously.
We’ll talk about Camera Raw presets in a future tutorial.
And that’s how you can open images in Camera Raw in Photoshop. Now you can start to have fun editing your Raw, JPEG and TIFF files.
I hope you found this post helpful. Please share it. Thank you! 🙂
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