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Main Control Panel
I think the Photoshop RAW conversion screen now looks very dated. Although there are now lots more tabs, the basic design hasn’t changed in a very long time now and it shows.
Adobe Camera Raw 6 is the best there is at the moment, but with Photoshop CS5 you do have to learn how to use it, and like much of Photoshop it’s not what you’d call user friendly.
The main control panel to the right is on the Basic tab, where you adjust exposure and color balance. Other tabs are for:
Tone Curve - Apart from a normal curve to drag, this has adjustments for highlights / lights / darks / shadows, adjusting which will make the curve for you.
Detail : Sharpness and Noise Reduction. As with Lightroom 3 the NR is the best there is, but luminance NR is turned off by default. Use it at anything over 400 ISO.
HSL: Awesome color adjustments to Hue Saturation and Lightness over 8 colors.
Split Toning : Control Balance and Hue / Saturation for Highlights and Shadows
Lens Corrections : This now has the really useful addition of profiles for specific lenses. If your lens isn’t listed there’s a tab at the top for a huge range of manual corrections for distortion or perspective.
Effects - fx : Add grain or control post crop vignetting.
Camera Profile: Create or load camera profiles.
Presets : Once you’re finished correcting the first in a series of images, you can store a preset. When you load your next image, open this panel, click on the preset, and there you go, all your corrections have been applied.
Snapshots: Use this take “snapshots” of an image as you adjust it. If you try several times at adjusting an image and store each result as a snapshot, it allows you to store and quickly compare each version.
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