Open in Camera Raw

I owe this little trick to Scott Kelby and his 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3, not because it was an integral part of his system but because it was one of those "blinding flash of the obvious" moments for me. I found, as I am sure many people did, that the upgrade path to Photoshop CS3 was more out of necessity to get Photoshop running at reasonable speeds on my Intel Mac. I more or less overlooked any new features and hadn't really considered looking into seeing what was changed, new or otherwise. I just installed, opened it and continued where I left off more or less. Granted at higher speeds now that Photoshop was running natively.


As time went on I started hearing about, and learning about new tricks and features and what not and before I new it I was madly in love with all that was new in CS3. Then I started reading Scott Kelby's book and the first thing that Scott has you do in any lesson is open your images in Camera Raw... all images... all formats... Raw files, jpeg files, tiff files, png files... all of them! What? You can do that? In CS3 you can. Who knew?

Since I was never a big Raw shooter I had never had to open in Camera Raw before in CS2 so haw this was achieved I had no idea. I saw no options for it. So I went online to find out how. Apparently, if Bridge is up to date (which mine wasn't), you can just press command+r (or control+r on Windows), or right-click > Open in Camera Raw, or go to File > Open in Camera Raw.

To do this in Photoshop, it's a bit different. Go to your open dialogue window (File > Open) and from the "Format" drop down menu select "Camera Raw".
open Camera Raw

Why is working in Camera Raw important? It is a non-destructive way to fine tune your images exposure, contrast, warmth and tint, etc, without losing the original settings. It's that simple.