stockie's imago

In the previous posting, you will notice that once you straighten the horizon, ACR will automatically removes or crops out incomplete edges.

Crop Tool

Press Z or H to view aligned image.

To further crop your image accordingly, click at the Crop Tool or Press Z.

If you press long enuff at the Crop Tool button, a list of menu appears as options to choose from.

• Normal – you are free select part of your image without constraint.
• 1 to 1, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, 4 to 5, 5 to 7, 9 to 16 – with these options your selection is constrained according to ratio selected.
• Custom – with this option you can choose to crop using ratio, inches, pixel or cm.
  i.e. I chose to crop exactly at 8RW size of  12 inch x 8 inch
• Constraint to image – err err.. God knows!
• Show Overlay – this is a cool thing where it displays a grid of 3 x 3. Super cool when you still struggling about Rule of Third, like me!
• Clear crop – self explanatory ain’t it?

To me on of the most common touch up required is straightening the horizon. Some people don’t mind photos slanting here and there. Some even use it as part of creative expression. However all those depends on individual on the message that they wanted to bring forth. I rather not start on why horizon must straight in landscape. It may works with creative angle on portrait, still life, conceptual, street, urban etc but in landscape? Hmmm…. I better shut up!

Anyway, to straighten the horizon in ACR is such a breeze. Sometime I even purposely open files in ACR just because wanna straighten the horizon here is much easier than in Photoshop which requires few steps. I admit that I’m such a lazy fart!

Straighten Tools

Well, I think from the image, it has been so clear on what need to be done.

1. Click at the Straighten Tool or Press A.
2. Drag along a line that represent horizontally or vertically aligned.

Done!

Take note the ACR automatically crop those unwanted edges.

ACR is not a twisted word game for car. Neither it’s a car plate no for Perak!

It is Adobe Camera RAW. Read more about it here please and please download the latest version for your CSx or Lightroom! For windows users, download page here and don’t forget to read on how to install too. If you are a MAC, you must be a friend of mixer and do search yourself! (Ha ha ha .. sorry, personal joke!)

ACR is launch whenever you open a RAW file thru Bridge, Photoshop, Lightroom or Element. I mainly using Bridge. So either I right click at the file and open with Camera RAW or I just press Ctrl + R. R for RAW. For MAC – I donno. Please refer to mixer. (Sorry, just can’t help it)

Sample of how it looks like,

After ACR

Hey, up to me la if I wanna re-use the previous image!

So let’s familiarize with few simple things first on how you going to navigate this window.

Zooming and Hand Tool

1. First thing press F and press it again. Got it? F is to toggle between full-screen and window mode.
2. Now press Z and then H. Observe how your mouse pointer changes. Z is for zoom and H for Hand.
3. At the lower-left you can find zoom selection area.
4. Now press “Ctrl + 0″. 0 is the number zero. This is to make the photo fit the window/screen.
5. Now press “Alt + Ctrl + 0″. This is to zoom in 100%

Good enuff for now?

Press Z to bring you into Zoom Tool mode and you can see mouse pointer changed to a magnifying glass with “+”. When you click you will keep on zooming in. You can also draw /highlight an area to zoom in. If you wanna navigate to another area while zoom in, press spacebar and notice that the mouse pointer change to hand.

To zoom out, use “Alt + click”. When you press Alt the magnifying glass changes to” -”. Now when you click, you are zooming out.

Press H now. Usually you wanna use H when you are zooming in, say like 100%. It will be easier for you to navigate.

So while in H mode, press “Ctrl” for zoom in and press “Alt” for zoom out.

I painfully explain this first because it’s painful to me to see users keep clicking at scroll bar on the right and bottom of window!

NEXT : We will be looking at Crop, Straighten and Rotate.

The NEXT NEXT : Then only we start control the basic settings!