This section will also serve as a review of the image editing concepts and terminology that you learned earlier. In the following exercises, you’ll work with a raw image in Nikon’s NEF format as you explore the Camera Raw window.

When you open a raw image in Photoshop Elements, these settings become “live,” so you can adjust them to get more from the raw image data, working with 12 bits of data per pixel rather than the 8 bits/channel of JPEG or TIFF formats. Raw files do incorporate camera settings such as exposure, white balance, and sharpening, but this information is stored separately from the image data. In contrast, raw images retain all of the data captured for each and every pixel.Ĭapturing photos in raw format gives you more flexibility and control in editing. In creating a compressed file, data deemed superfluous is discarded in mapping the spread of captured data to a defined color space, the range of the color information can be narrowed. Many common file formats involve in-camera processing of the incoming image data that can effectively degrade the quality of the image. Though larger than compressed formats such as JPEG, raw images contain more data than TIFF files and use less space. Raw images are high-quality image files that record the maximum amount of image data possible, in a relatively small file size. To see an up-to-date list of the camera models and proprietary raw file formats currently supported by Photoshop Elements, visit the Adobe website. Although not all digital cameras can capture raw images, the newer and more advanced models do offer this option.

Open in camera raw