You can adjust the tone and color of an image in Camera Raw using a variety of powerful tools found across several panels, including the Basic, HSL, and Color Grading sections.
Camera Raw provides granular control over your image's appearance, allowing you to make both broad adjustments to overall brightness and contrast, as well as precise tweaks to specific colors or tonal ranges.
Mastering Image Tone
Adjusting the tone involves controlling the brightness and contrast throughout your image. The primary tools for this are in the Basic panel:
- Exposure: Controls the overall brightness.
- Contrast: Adjusts the difference between the brightest and darkest parts.
- Highlights: Targets bright areas.
- Shadows: Targets dark areas.
- Whites: Controls the brightest points in the image.
- Blacks: Controls the darkest points in the image.
Beyond these, the Basic panel also includes controls for Presence, which impact local contrast and detail:
- Clarity: Adds punch to midtone contrast.
- Dehaze: Reduces or increases atmospheric haze.
- Texture: Enhances or smooths fine details.
Using these sliders, you can expand or compress the tonal range, recover lost details in highlights or shadows, and give your image more depth.
Fine-Tuning Image Color
Adjusting color in Camera Raw starts with the overall color balance and then moves to specific hues and tonal ranges.
- White Balance: Found in the Basic panel, this is often the first step in color correction. It corrects the color cast caused by different lighting conditions, ensuring whites appear white. You can use presets (like Daylight, Cloudy) or the Eyedropper tool to click on a neutral area in your image.
- Vibrance & Saturation: Also in the Basic panel:
- Vibrance: Intensifies colors subtly, primarily impacting less saturated colors and leaving skin tones relatively untouched.
- Saturation: Uniformly increases the intensity of all colors.
- HSL (Hue, Saturation, Luminance): This panel allows you to adjust specific color ranges independently.
- Hue: Changes the pure color (e.g., shifting blues towards cyan or purple).
- Saturation: Controls the intensity of specific color ranges (e.g., making reds more or less vibrant).
- Luminance: Adjusts the brightness of specific color ranges (e.g., darkening blues to make a sky moodier).
Advanced Color Control: Color Grading
For sophisticated color adjustments based on tonal ranges, the Color Grading tab is essential. This panel replaces the older Split Toning panel and offers more precise control.
Under the Color Grading tab, you'll find sliders for Highlights, Midtones, and Shadows. These sliders allow you to precisely adjust the color of each tonal range in your image.
Here's how it works:
- Highlight Color Wheel/Slider: Adjusts the color cast specifically in the brightest parts of your image.
- Midtone Color Wheel/Slider: Adjusts the color cast in the mid-range tones.
- Shadow Color Wheel/Slider: Adjusts the color cast in the darkest parts of your image.
To use them, you Click and drag the center of a slider to choose the desired hue for your highlights, midtones, or shadows. The distance you drag from the center controls the saturation of that color in the respective tonal range.
Additionally, the Color Grading panel includes:
- Global Wheel: Applies a color tint across the entire image.
- Blending: Adjusts the balance between the Highlight, Midtone, and Shadow adjustments.
- Balance: Controls which tones are considered highlights, midtones, and shadows.
By combining these various tools, you gain comprehensive control over both the light and color in your image within Camera Raw.
| Adjustment Area | Primary Panels Involved | Key Controls | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tone | Basic | Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, Clarity, Dehaze, Texture | Control brightness, contrast, and presence |
| Color | Basic, HSL, Color Grading | White Balance, Vibrance, Saturation, HSL sliders, Color Wheels (Highlights, Midtones, Shadows, Global) | Correct cast, enhance color, tint tones |
