I know I have done a little tip on RAW before but I ran over it again and I think its naff to be honest, So this one is going to show you how RAW can help you out .

 

Firstly we need to make sure our photo’s are in RAW format, There will be an option on your DLSR camera that sais Quality, then you’ll be able to select RAW…Hopefully .

 

Ones you have your RAW shots, Plug your camera/card into your PC and simply double click the icon.

Once the file loads it will/should open your Photoshop and display a dialogue box like so:

 

Now,  notice the sliders on the right, These are the beauties that our going to help you .

I mainly use this to adjust the Exposure and Clarity, You can slide the sliders up and down to adjust the settings and the great thing about it is it’s not damaging your picture! By this I mean it’s not going to create lot’s of noise/add grain etc as if you were doing this with a normal JPG File , So in a way it’s the ‘proper’ way of solving things.

Another GREAT thing about this is it will let you adjust the White Balance ‘on the fly’ after taking the photo, Which really helps out allot.

 

As you can see in this image, The bottom of the image is underexposed so I can just slide the ‘Exposure’ slider up and it will brighten it for me as so:

 

But the problem you get now is that you notice the sky has gone over exposed … If you had Adobe Light Room this would be an easier method to solve but I wont get into that just yet, The solution?….

You open the file once your happy adjusting it all:

Then re-open the same RAW file and slide the ‘Exposure’ slide down to expose for the sky and open:

Now you should have both images open in Photoshop, One exposed for the sky, and one exposed for the scenery .

This is the way I would do it to show you guys but there are other methods out there, Select one of the images and press ‘Ctrl + A’ to select it all then ‘Ctrl + C’ to copy it. Now go over to the other image and paste it on top ‘Ctrl + V’.

 

Now select the rubber tool, make it ‘soft’ and rub out the top/bottom half to make the image below show through making it exposed for both (the sky and the scenery).

Now you see, The sky is exposed and the scenery is too. Here’s a before and after:

After:

This is just one way of doing it but as said before there are easier/different methods .

If you’d prefer to see a video of this tutorial I’ve added one below .

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Onfp00_YAlk