Page 92 - Enhancing CAD Drawings with Photoshop

4386.book Page 75 Monday, November 15, 2004 3:27 PM
WORKING WITH DIGITAL FILM 75

Figure 3.5
A contact sheet

Many “prosumer” and professional quality cameras offer raw formats that preserve 100% of the
original data that was captured by the camera sensor. These cameras also have many options for
tweaking images within the camera itself, but people who are serious about shooting prefer to leave
that task to Photoshop. It is better to adjust tonal range and color balance of your images at a color-
corrected workstation (see Chapter 2, “Working with Color”), and under proper room lighting, rather
than in the field with your camera. As you develop digital darkroom skills, you will want to leave
these tasks up to your trained eye, rather than entrust the “development” of your photos to some in-
camera presets.
NOTE Camera raw images have smaller file size than uncompressed TIFF images of the same pixel
dimensions.
Photoshop CS now has raw image file support built in as a standard plug-in. (It was initially avail-
able as a free download for Photoshop 7.).The Camera Raw plug-in is much improved in CS and
offers many options for working with digital film. You will be using Camera Raw to develop your
digital negatives before bringing them into Photoshop.
1. Point your browser to www.adobe.com and select Downloads from the Support group. Click
the link for Photoshop (either the Macintosh or Windows version) and then download and
install the updated Camera Raw plug-in version 2.2 or later. The new version of Camera Raw
includes bug fixes and supports many more makes and models of digital cameras.