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Digital Photography Tutorials

Now that you know what RAW is, let’s see some adjustments over a .nef file.
Picasa is a free software from Google which I found useful and helpful in many photographic situations, but when it comes to RAW editing, it’s very basic. If you take a look at the first image down here, you’ll see that raw editing is split into 3 categories: Basic Fixes, Tuning and Effects. Basic Fixes solves most of the editing necessities but is not flexible as Adobe Photoshop contrast, brightness, and curves: practically you only got Auto Contrast and Auto Color. Croping is useful and nicely done and Straighten is a function I really admire Google for the idea: it saves a lot of time compared to manually straighten that usually requires a lot of steps.

Basic:


Tuning goes deeper into the lighting adjustments, conferring the possibility to darken the shadows, lighten the highlights and adding overall atmospheric light to the RAW picture. While I consider this still pretty basic fixing, choosing the neutral color and color temperature is a little bit more than that. Picasa did a fine job with the colors, and, if you still think about improvements, in the Effects menu you got Saturation, Warmify, and Glow for further color adjustments. Sharpen, Film Grain and Blur are also present but, again, in a much more inflexible and basic form than Adobe Photoshop.

Advanced:


Between B&W and Filtered B&W I prefer filtered. Sepia and Duotone (here called Tint) are also present in the menu. By the way, I like very much the preview thumbs of the menu that helps deciding what effect to chose. Graduated Tint was a pleasure surprise from Google. For this kind of picture, like the one in my example: where a good part of it is the sky, this effect really works amazing - it gives a darker tint to the sky but no dark tint over the buildings.

Results:

Tags: raw, picasa, raw adjustments, picasa raw editing, raw editing