What use is Adobe Photoshop - for a photographer?

Adobe Photoshop CS4 is probably the most powerful image editing tool on the planet right now. It can do a vast number of things and integrates well with other programs like InDesign (for publishers) or Dreamweaver (for web designers).

Some basic functions that apply for photographers is described in the following.

The program Adobe Bridge, which comes with Photoshop, contains tools to display and organise photos of a wide range of formats, including RAW files from a large number of manufacturers. With Bridge one can also initiate actions in Photoshop like stitching a number of pictures together.

From Bridge, one can open RAW pictures in the program Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) which also comes with Photoshop. In ACR one can adjust RAW files, remove noise, change brightness, convert to black-and-white, fix vignetting and chromatic aberration and a ton of other things - much like one can in Aperture, Lightroom, Capture NX or DPP.

Once the image looks good, one can save it in one of several formats or open it in Photoshop. In Photoshop, one can cut and paste pieces of the different photos and mix them. One can add patterns, text and a lot of other things. The final picture may be resized and saved for use on the internet.

With smartobjects, one even mix layers of different colour spaces and file formats.

If one fully masters Photoshop, there is a good chance that one does not need any other image editing or RAW conversion software at all.

To explore Photoshop further, one can often download a trial version from Adobe.

Adobe Camera Raw "Batch conversion" of White Balance

... or other settings.

I took a number of pictures today with my Nikon D5000 with the White Balance set to "incandescent", which was silly, because all of them were taken outside on a sunny day. As I had taken only NEF pictures, I was not too concerned. I know that one easily can adjust white balance in RAW files. The only question was how.

My first attempt was using View NX. I highlighted all the pictures in the browser, clicked on "Quick Adjustments" and chose the white balance "Calculate Automatically". I then sat back with a good book and waited while View NX updated all the files. There was a progress indicator in the lower right corner, so I could see approximately how thick a book I could read. Somewhere along the line I also clicked on the Save button, when View NX prompted me to do so.

The "problem" was that View NX did not update the original setting in the NEF files, and Adobe products only read the original setting. In other words, even though they looked fine in View NX, they still looked wrong in Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw.

So the solution had to be within the Adobe products themselves:

1. Double click on the first image in Adobe Bridge, to open Adobe Camera Raw.
2. Select the White Balance you want (for example Auto or Daylight).
3. Click on Done, to close ACR.
4. In Adobe Bridge, right click on the image and select Develop Settings > Copy Settings in the pop-up menu.
5. Select all the other images.
6. Right click on them and select Develop Settings > Paste Settings.
7. In the dialogue you get, choose which settings you want to paste. To get just White Balance, you can select the Subset White Balance.
8. Click on OK.

Once ACR has finished processing the files, they will look fine in Adobe products.

Doing the Impossible with Smart Objects

Before CS3, there were plenty of things you simply could not do in Photoshop. With CS3 and the introduction of Smart Objects, a lot has become possible.

One (almost) obvious thing is that you can apply lossless filters. Just create a layer to a Smart Object and apply the filter. You can add loads of filters and remove or activate them, and of course edit them with Layer Masks.

Smart Object layer in Adobe Photoshop CS4

But not only that - you can now mix layers of different kinds. You can have one layer as a 16 bit image in LAB colour space, while you have another in 8 bit grey scale, and blend the two layers. You can even add RAW files using File > Place, so you have a RAW file layer, which will open for adjustments in Camera RAW every time you double click on it. This means that you can have an almost endless number of different image formats - all stored in the same file.

And if that is not enough, you can have one Smart Object contain another Smart Object that contains a third one and so on.

To have several instances of the same Smart Object, highlight the layer and press command-J. You can have as many instances of the same Smart Object as you like in a file. You can apply different kinds of layer styles and rotations and transformations of them. If you then update the Smart Object, for example by changing its colour, the modification will apply to all instances of that Smart Object in the file.

To replace the content of a Smart Object: Go to Layer > Smart Objects > Replace Contents....

You cannot edit the individual pixels in a Smart Object (unless you open it). However, you can make a copy of the Smart Object, for example with merging all visible layers to a new layer above the currently selected layer with Shift-option-command-E (or alt+ Layer > Merge Visible).

Editing your NEF in Photoshop and Camera Raw

If you want to edit your nef in Photoshop, you will have to pass through Camera Raw - directly or indirectly. You double-click on the nef in Finder, Explorer or Bridge, and Camera Raw will open. You make the adjustments you want and can then edit the file in Photoshop. When you save the file, you will have to choose a standard format, like psd, tiff or jpeg.

If you do not want to see the Camera Raw dialogue, you can shift-doubleclick on the file in Bridge, and it will go straight to Photoshop, applying the Camera Raw conversion in the background.

You can also save directly from Camera Raw, but you cannot save to the original raw file. You will have to choose a new name and the raw extension dng or another file format. From each file, you can always go back to the "original" by choosing "Camera Raw Defaults" as Setting. Talking about an "original" is a little awkward, as the original just is a dump of camera data. You have to display it in some way, and that way is through the Settings.

If your nef files are not supported directly by Photoshop and Camera Raw and Bridge, you may be able to convert them to dng, which is Adobe's attempt at a unified raw file format. Version 4.4.1 of the free Adobe DNG Converter handles both D60's and D300's nef files.

In case you wonder, the raw conversion in Adobe Lightroom uses the same engine as Adobe Bridge, so there is no advantage trying to edit a file in both tools.