Quick Summary

If you have Adobe Photoshop CS, and have a digital camera that is supported by Photoshop’s Camera RAW application, then this book is for you. Strongly recommended!

Review

Real World Camera RAW for Adobe Photoshop CS (RWCR) appears at first glance to be a book with a very narrow target audience. And to an extent, that’s true... it’s all about taking pictures in RAW format with your camera, and how to process them inside of Photoshop CS. But it does cover more than that, it tells you why the RAW format is a ‘Good Thing’, and covers some areas of workflow and automation that make the handling of large numbers of RAW files practical and realistic. If you do not already have experience with some of these automation features the results in improved knowledge of Photoshop can be a revelation.

Chapters 1 & 2 cover the basics of digital camera sensors and the Camera RAW application, and explains why shooting in the RAW format is a Good Thing. It really does become clear why the increased file sizes of RAW files is well worthwhile. For example, there are edits that can be carried out in the Camera RAW software related to colour balance that simply can not be achieved easily inside Photoshop proper. Not to mention the fact that Camera RAW has some excellent capabilities to extract details in files that (as jpegs taken from the camera) appear to have blown highlights.

Chapters 3 covers the Camera RAW module in detail; this is the core of the book in terms of its title. The style of writing is enjoyable and provides easy-to-understand descriptions of the controls and tools available inside the Camera RAW application. Camera RAW is easy-to-use from some respects, but you will not know about half of the capabilities if you base your use of it on the items that are ‘obvious’ about the user-interface, or on the Help files.

Chapter 4 covers the File Browser mini-app, and Chapter 5 discusses a complete workflow right from downloading RAW images from your camera-memory-card right through to some possible areas of automation.

Chapter 6 discusses metadata. A useful topic, and one that is worth knowing about now. However, there is currently some sense that metadata is ‘not quite there yet’ and something that in due course will be extremely useful... at the moment it is certainly useful but there is promise for more!

Automation, which is to some extent the pinnacle of the book, is covered in Chapter 7. Camera RAW is a fantastic tool that offers great controls; but would be fairly impractical if you used it on an image-by-image basis, one at a time. Using concepts covered in the previous chapters, Photoshop Actions are discussed, recorded, and used in Photoshop Batch commands. There were some frustrations here (please see the following section) but once surmounted, we could really start to see how Camera RAW, File Browser and Automation come together to make the processing of RAW file formats a real practicality.

Problems

This book filled us with such an enthusiasm for trying out some of the creation of Actions that we dived right in at an appropriate time. Unfortunately, we quickly found that there are some bugs in Photoshop that make the book inaccurate in some respects. This lowered our confidence in the book, and was a frustration overall as our expected ‘quick gains’ were instead met with problems.

Specifically, the problems lie in Photoshop’s Automation ‘Batch’ tool and an option called ‘Suppress Color Profile Warnings’ - simply put it does not work as it ought to, and results in some incorrect information in the procedures noted in the books. If you follow the information in the book, any automation you carry out does in fact risk being halted by the arrival on-screen of one of these dialogs. However, we were lucky to have a discussion on this subject with Bruce Fraser himself on the Adobe forums, and there is a work-around, which is covered below.

Working Around a Photoshop Batch Bug

This section covers the specifics of working around the bug in the Automation ‘Batch’ tool in Photoshop CS.

If you follow the instructions in the book, you will find that if you run batches to create different types of files (in different colour spaces, for different purposes such as jpegs for web output (in sRGB) or Photoshop files for editing (in ProPhotoRGB) then it is likely you will find your Actions stalling with ‘Embedded Profile Mismatch’ warning dialogs. This should be prevented by selecting the ‘Suppress Color Profile Warnings’ option in the Batch dialog, but it does not work! There are three main work-arounds to this problem, covered here, of which the third is the most preferable.

Option 1 - Disable Profile Mismatch Warnings

You could simply disable the Profile Mismatch warnings dialog. This can be achieved by:

1. Opening the Color Settings dialog (usually found under the Edit menu);
2. De-selecting the ‘Profile Mismatches’ option under the ‘Color Management Policies’ heading (i.e. so the box is empty and unchecked);
3. Click OK.

In many ways, we consider this option not to be preferable as the dialog serves a useful purpose!

Option 2 - Automate changes to the Working Colour Space

You can record Actions of you changing your working Colour Space, and then use these actions inside of your scripts. So, if your Action in Camera RAW is creating sRGB files, the first step would be to change the working space to sRGB, and the last to change it back to your normal working space (Adobe RGB for many people). The image to the right shows such an action set up with highlighting showing the actions being run. Click on the image to see a high-quality file open in a new window.

The advantage of this approach is that all other settings in the book can be kept as-is (e.g. in the Batch dialog).

The disadvantage of this approach is that this change of working space occurs for every image, slowing down the automation. Nevertheless, this is preferable if it allows you to walk away from the computer!

Option 3 - Disable the Open Step

The option suggested by Bruce Fraser is to disable or delete the open step in the Action. The images to the left and right show what needs to be done. If you had recorded an action such as the ‘Save As Jpeg’ action on p200 of the book, then the first thing is to delete or disable the ‘open’ step - note how we have disabled the step by unchecking the tick box to the left of the step (the check mark next to the action name then turns red).

If you then kept the settings in the Automate dialog as recommended in the book, you would get messages about no file being present to save, and various other problems. So, you need to keep all the settings from the book except you must disable the ‘Override Action "Open" Commands’... thus you need a dialog that is set up something like that shown right, not like Fig 7-10 on page 209 of the book. Disabling this item effectively sets Photoshop to open the files from the selected list set in the ‘Source’ option.

Clicking on either image will open a high-quality file in a new window.

This is most certainly the preferable option to work around the potential problems with Suppressing the Color profile Warnings.

Reviewed November 2004

Please note that MWORDS has closed. We aim to retain these support pages in the hope that they may benefit our past customers, but regret that we can no longer offer further comment or support in relation to the information above.