Digital Home Thoughts: Real World Camera Raw with Photoshop CS

Working with Multiple Images
While knowing how to process one image is fine, the reality is that even on a small photo shoot I'll come back with anywhere from 50 to 100 images that need to be sorted through. Powering through those images quickly is what chapters 4 and 5 of the book cover.

Chapter 4 is all about Photoshop's File Browser feature. While not strictly related to converting raw images, it is a necessary tool for doing bulk image processing. Fraser gives the File Browser, as expected, a thorough explanation including three separate methods for ranking images from a shoot. This chapter is actually pretty good, and the explanations and images do a good job of covering what the File Browser is capable of.

Chapter 5 is what the rest of the book was leading up to, and it's unfortunate that it takes over 130 pages to get to this point. In Chapter 5 Fraser gives a complete workflow for dealing with raw images in Photoshop. Sadly it suffers from the same problem as chapter 3: the workflow sprawls across 37 pages and lacks a concise, step-by-step, explanation. For example, when it comes to the "Selecting and Editing" stage, three approaches to selecting the images are discussed in detail even though the previous File Browser chapter already covered the material. After getting this far with the book I felt no closer to applying Photoshop's tools efficiently.

Advanced Techniques
The final two chapters cover some advanced Photoshop techniques. Chapter 6 looks at metadata all the way down to the inner workings of the .xmp file format (used to store metadata in Photoshop). Chapter 7 covers batch processing for tasks such as saving images to JPEG, or saving TIFF files with pre-applied filters so they're ready for editing.

Conclusion
Unfortunately Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS fell short of my expectations. While there's a wealth of technical and workflow information in the book, it is hampered by poor supporting graphics and a lack of concise explanations. With better pictures and a more step-by-step approach to the basic techniques it could be a winner.