0.1: CAMERA RAW OR LIGHTROOM?

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This is a not a book to just sit down and read. You have to be doing things while reading it. One of those things is taking photographs and making them better. If you have access to Adobe Creative Cloud applications, you have two choices for cataloging, processing, and adjusting your images.

ADOBE CAMERA RAW

Camera RAW is a component of Adobe Photoshop that handles files a bit differently than the main part of Photoshop. With it you can adjust all the parameters of an image, such as exposure and contrast, but manipulations of an image are limited. When you are done with an image, the changes are not saved to the image itself, but to a separate file or a part of the image file reserved for instructions.

Camera RAW is not a catalogue program, so it does not do anything related to keeping images organized. In this book, we use Adobe Bridge for that task.

Nor is Camera RAW able to send images to a printer, so this book uses Photoshop (the main part of the application) for that task.

CAMERA RAW ADVANTAGE

The primary advantage to using Camera RAW (along with Bridge and Photoshop) is that it is flexible. You just have to keep track of where your images are. Bridge acts as a viewer for those images, and Photoshop acts as a port to print from.

CAMERA RAW NEEDS

About all you need if you are using Camera RAW is the SD card that fits in your camera and a place to store those images after you put them on the computer. This could be a separate hard drive, a local shared drive, a flash drive, or even a cloud drive.

An alternative to this is to only use the SD card (at least 32G) and navigate Bridge to the images on the card. This is not recommended for a number of reasons, but it works.

ADOBE LIGHTROOM

Lightroom Classic has exactly the same image adjusting capabilities as Camera RAW. But it is also a cataloging application in which you can keep track of hundreds or thousands of images.

You can apply keywords to help you find certain images, and you can search for images using different criteria.

Lightroom also enables you to keep your images in different sets and keeps all of the organizing of your images visual and easy. So while not as flexible as using Adobe Bridge for these tasks, it is much more powerful.

Printing can be done right out of Lightroom, so all you need is one application.

LIGHTROOM ADVANTAGE

The primary advantage of using Lightroom Classic instead of Camera RAW is that you are building a catalogue that you can take with you. If you plan on taking a lot more photographs, or just want to use one application for everything, Lightroom is what you should be using,

LIGHTROOM NEEDS

Since you are using Lightroom to start your collection, you really need a hard drive other than your SD card. This could be a 32G or larger flash drive, but if you use a flash drive, make sure that it is USB 3 drive (not just USB 3 compatible) and it is formatted for the type of computer you are using (Mac or Windows). Otherwise, Lightroom will slow waaay down.

The instructions for Camera Raw are at the end of most chapters. The instructions for Lightroom are in the appendix, but there is also a link to the instructions at the bottom right of each page of Camera Raw instructions. Adobe keeps all adjustments in Camera Raw synchronized with Lightroom, but they are implemented differently.