Double Raw
Read More
Your everyday, basic rusty old locomotive reflected in a puddle of nasty, muddy water as it looks the first time it is opened in Camera Raw. It has a blue color cast to it and it is pretty dark.
The blue cast can be helped by moving the Temperature slider toward yellow (to the right). This helps to warm things up a bit. At the same time a slight green cast is corrected by moving the Tint slider toward magenta (to the right). The color looks better, but the image is still pretty dark and the histogram shows that there is a lot of clipping in the shadows.
Using the Fill Light adjustment the darker areas are lightened up and moves the histogram away from the left edge.
A couple final tweaks before moving into Photoshop. First the Clarity adjustment is used to add contrast to the mid tones and makes them appear a little sharper. Second the Vibrance adjustment is used to add a bit of pop to the colors. Although the locomotive looks pretty good, the reflection in the puddle looks horrible. Its flat (not much contrast) and an awful muddy brown. By opening the image in Photoshop as a Smart Object a second Camera Raw conversion can be done later to get the puddle looking better. Hold down the Shift key and the Camera Raw Open Image button will change to Open Object. Clicking on Open Object opens the current image in PS as a Smart Object.
Inside the Photoshop Layers palette Smart Objects show up with a symbol in the lower right corner.
Using the Layer > Smart Objects > New Smart Object Via Copy command a second Smart Object is created. Double clicking on the new Smart Object opens Camera Raw for adjustments to just the new object.
Adjusting temperature, exposure and black level gets the puddle looking much better. The rest of the image can be ignored as once back in Photoshop a layer mask will be added to keep only the puddle visible.
Back in Photoshop a layer mask has been added to the Smart Object copy. The mask hides everything but the puddle.
Complete image after only one trip through Camera Raw (i.e. no tweaks to the puddle).
Completed image after using Smart Objects and Camera Raw to adjust the puddle.
Completed image with the opacity of the masked puddle Smart Object backed down to 80%.