Adobe’s approach to raw

wrote:

Would it be correct to think of ACR as the Adobe Transfer Function Builder? Because what you are doing by making adjustments in ACR is designing and building a custom transfer function that is used to map the raw data to a PS image.

If this is true wouldn’t it be more intuitive for PS to display the raw image as a layer below the ‘background layer’ in the ‘Layers’ palette with the mapping functions as an associated layers mask?

Having the raw data embedded inside the Tiff or PSD would not increase the file size that much and they could even embed it in the DNG format and call it the negative layer. I can think of lots of advantages to having raw data inside PS.

That’s already possible. Read the chapter on the ‘Place’ function and ‘Smart Objects’. A RAW file can be a ‘smart object’.

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Johan W. Elzenga johan<<at>>johanfoto.nl Editor / Photographer http://www.johanfoto.nl

wrote:
[snip]

Just curious, and this is potentially a very stupid question, but do most PS images originate from sources other than digital cameras – like software, cinematography or film? Obviously I am new to PS I am wondering if dSLR photography is central to PS or more of a sideline?

I don’t know whether ot not "most" do originate that way. But one of the factors is simply history.

A little over 2 years ALL my Photoshop images originated from film – because I didn’t have a digital camera. Since buying a dSLR, I haven’t use film at all, so now all my images are either scans from years-old film, or more recent dSLR images. Other people will be at different points in the change-over.

To a LITTLE extent, it could be said that dSLR photography, especially raw photography, is a sideline, because most of Photoshop is equally applicable to any source, and raw images are handled by a plugin. But the ACR plugin is reasonably well integrated with Bridge and Photoshop, so I am able to handle 100s of them at a time. In fact, Bridge + ACR
3.x made a great leap forward (in my opinion – some take the opposite
view) in raw handling, and that was why I upgraded very early from CS.

There is little doubt that Adobe see that they need an alternative (or call it addition) to Bridge + ACR + Photoshop for digital photography, hence Lightroom. (I may well stop upgrading Photoshop, and switch to Lightroom next year to replace at least ACR and perhaps Bridge for much of my work. I’m not sure yet – but I will still keep Photoshop for a long time).

A response to the subject of this thread, "Adobe’s approach to raw", is that they are taking a multiple-source and multiple-destination approach. I believe, for example, that ACR (I think a modified version of it) can be used as a plugin to After Effects 7.x. Raw is becoming ubiquitous in Adobe’s products, and Adobe are also majoring on DNG as a future de facto standard raw file format.

—
Barry Pearson
http://www.barry.pearson.name/photography/