Camera Calibration Panel: How To Accurately Manage Color Within Photoshop’s Camera Raw Plugin
https://www.shutterbuggs.com/ - So now we’re up to one of the most interesting panels in Camera Raw. It’s called camera calibration. So if we go to our panel options, you’ll notice there’s a little camera icon. If we click on that, you’ll see that your Camera Calibration panel appears.
Now, the first thing that you’re going to notice when you look at your Camera Calibration panel is the process section which contains a little drop-down menu. So as you can see here, it has 2010, which is the current process. And then you have 2003. Now, if you’ve worked on images in older versions of Camera Raw, what you’ll notice is that the process in Camera Raw will automatically default to the older version. So in this example, the original file, I should say, was worked on using the 2003 process.
Now, another way to tell whether you’re using the older process of Camera Raw or whether you’re using an up-to-date version is if you look down into the bottom right-hand corner here with the images, you’ve got this little exclamation mark icon. And what this essentially is telling you that you’re working on an older process, and would you like to update to the current process?
So in order to change the actual process itself, what you need to do is either select the actual drop-down menu in Camera Calibration and choose to select the current 2010 process or you can… let’s just drop it back to 2003. Or you can go and just click on this little icon and it will automatically do it for you. And that icon displays throughout. It doesn’t matter what actual panel you’re in or what adjustments your making; that little icon will be present if you’re using the older process of Camera Raw itself.
Now, Camera Raw 6 uses improved processes to calculate detailed adjustments. So photos that were edited the first time in Camera Raw use these newer processes. So the first time that a photograph is opened in Camera Raw, it’ll use these new versions of this process. And as I said before, if you’ve actually edited a photo in an older version, it’ll use the previous version.
Now, the process version specifies which version of Camera Raw sharpening and noise reduction functions are used to adjust and render photos. So let’s take a closer look at this image, for example. Let’s zoom in on this lovely watch here. I’m going to 200%. Now, what you’ll notice is if I just hold down the Alt key on a PC or the Option key on a Mac, you’ll notice that the little Menu buttons down here have changed. And I’m going to click on reset and that’ll just set it back to the old process.
What you’ll notice is you can see quite a bit of chromatic aberration around this watch, and you can see a different way that it’s been processed in terms of sharpening and noise. Now, if I go ahead and actually update the process itself, you’ll notice that that changes. Now, to make it a bit more obvious, if I un-tick the preview and then tick the preview, you see how big a difference that actually changes in the photo, how well that improves the actually sharpening and detail of that watch. It’s quite a really big improvement. So it does really allow you to actually get more out of your photographs. And you just want to be careful, because when you actually make these upgrades sometimes according to the types of images that you’re using and the types of adjustments that you’ve done to those images, it can tend to upset or affect, say, some of the density or colors.
So you see slight changes in the actual image when you do upgrade to a newer process. But all in all the benefits are greater than having to make slight adjustments to your images you know with those affected changes. So just take that into account. So you can retain your old process version of your photograph if you want, but I think that the improvements to the sharpening and noise reduction in Camera Raw are a big benefit to your photographs and it’s well worth upgrading them if you can.
Now, underneath the actual Process drop-down menu in the actual panel itself, you’ll notice that you have a camera profile. Now, under here, you have several different presets that you can choose from to use. And what these attempt to do is to mimic in-camera process settings. So for example, if you’re shooting with a Canon, I should say, you have several different preset settings built in to your camera and you set your images to when it actually processes your photos in camera as JPEGs, for example. So you could choose to use like a Camera Faithful or Camera Landscape or the Neutral, Portrait, or Standard presets that are actually in your camera.
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