Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Black and White in Adobe Camera Raw 5.0
A very brief background
The Adobe Camera Raw (or “ACR” for short) plug-in became available shortly
after the release of Photoshop 7.0. What is now taken for granted as a self-
loading portal into Photoshop was at inception a very new, forward-thinking,
powerful and l exible alternative to each individual camera company's
proprietary methods for raw i le conversion. From the initial version 1.0 of
the plug-in, Adobe provided a quick, consistent and intuitive interface for
photographers who preferred the high image quality and non-destructive
nature of the raw format. I don't think that anyone then knew how much ACR
would catch on; but with an easy-to-learn stepped interface, terms familiar
to photographers like “temperature”, “exposure” and “white balance” coupled
with a layout that was both familiar to legacy users and approachable by
those new to the application - it really couldn't lose.
Why use Adobe Camera Raw?
The most powerful aspect of shooting in raw, and subsequently using
ACR, is not perhaps immediately obvious - it is entirely non-destructive.
“Non-destructive” is a term that gets used a lot these days, but what does it
mean? In the case of ACR, any adjustment applied in the plug-in, from tonal
adjustments to sharpening, are all a system of settings associated with each
i le - each list of adjustments is simply a set of instructions to be applied to
the original. For those converts from a i lm-based workl ow, think of a raw i le
as your negative - pure, pristine, and unaltered.
Beyond giving the user an easy way to constantly make changes to a i le,
settings also have an incredibly powerful advantage - they can be shared!
This means that when you give i ve or ten of your precious minutes to
massaging the tonal adjustments in ACR, you can subsequently share any of
those adjustments with other i les with the mere seconds it takes to make
a mouse click or two. So, reading between the above lines, this equates to
a harmless system of adjustments that are entirely extensible - essentially,
the preservational benei ts of adjustment layers and the power of batch
conversions without any requisite knowledge of either.
Why a plug-in?
ACR was lauded as brilliant when it came out, and raw shooters the world
over welcomed it with open arms - after all, it supported nearly every major
camera capable of shooting a raw format at that time. Unfortunately, getting
ACR to work on the proprietary formats of so many cameras was only part
of the problem. Change is inevitable, and change in digital photography,
especially hardware, is constant! ACR thus needed to be l exible. Luckily,
Photoshop has always been built upon an architecture which supports the
extensibility of, literally, thousands of plug-ins.
 
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