There are many digital cameras that can save image files in the camera raw format. You need to know that camera raw image files are digital negatives and contain the actual picture data from the digital camera’s image sensor without any in camera processing applied. However, the professional photographers often prefer editing in camera raw to maintain more control since they can interpret the image data rather than let the camera make the adjustments and conversions automatically.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 will not only make you able to make color and sharpness enhancements to a variety of raw formats as well as JPEG and TIFF, but also crop and straighten those images in camera raw before opening them in Photoshop for further editing process. After crop and straighten image files in camera raw dialog box, you can save them in camera raw and reprocess the file at any time with maximum control. In the future, you can edit and refine them in Photoshop and save them in a standard file format. Using camera raw to crop and straighten gives you more options for editing and saving images. Here are how to crop and straighten in camera raw.

1.       Launch the bridge and click JPEG, TIFF, or raw format image.

2.       Click file. Open in camera raw. The photo will open in the camera raw dialog box. If the file is already in a raw format, Photoshop CS3 will automatically opens it in the camera raw dialog box.

3.       Click the straighten tool.

4.       Click and drag on a horizontal or vertical line in the preview image. The crop tool is automatically selected.

5.       Click and drag the corner anchors if you want to adjust the composition of the photo.

6.       Click and drag inside the bounding box if you want to move the entire selection in the image. After that, the bounding box will move to the area of the photograph that you want.

7.       Press and hold option (Alt). The open image button changes to open copy.

8.       Click open copy to open the image in Photoshop without altering the original one. You can hold option (Alt) key down to change the cancel button to reset so that you can start over.

Then you will find the cropped and straightened image opens in Photoshop. Now you are ready to move your image to a further level of editing that you may want to do.

M.A.H.

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