Apply powerful Adobe Camera Raw tools—like Dehaze and selective noise reduction—even to non-RAW images directly within Photoshop. By converting a layer to a Smart Object, you can use Camera Raw as a filter and retain full editing flexibility.
Key Insights
- Camera Raw can be applied as a filter to any image layer in Photoshop, even if it wasn’t originally captured in RAW format, by first converting the layer to a Smart Object to preserve editing flexibility.
- The Dehaze feature in Camera Raw offers a unique effect that enhances image clarity by adding localized contrast and correcting color—something basic contrast adjustments can’t replicate.
- Noble Desktop demonstrates how to apply selective adjustments using Camera Raw masks, allowing for targeted edits such as applying noise reduction specifically to the sky without affecting the rest of the image.
Adobe Camera Raw offers some really unique features that are only found in Adobe Camera Raw. But how can we apply them to any image, even if it was not shot as a raw file? We can do it through a filter. Up under filters, we have Adobe Camera Raw as a filter.
This can be applied to any layer. Now, filters are destructive, unless we convert for smart filters first. So I'm gonna first convert for smart filters, and I'm just converting this regular layer on an image that was not shot as a raw file.
Convert for smart filters. Now I've got a smart object. Now I can go in and choose my Camera Raw filter, and I get all the features of Camera Raw, but as a filter.
Now, as far as recovering things like noise and exposing, kind of like brightening up the shadows, it's not gonna be maybe as good a quality as if I shot as a raw file. So there's still benefits for shooting raw when possible, but I didn't get this image as a raw file. This is how I got the image, so I still wanna use Dehaze because this image, well, it's hazy, and so I wanna use that really cool Dehaze feature here, and I can pull this up, and wow, look at that.
I can hit P for preview to turn the preview on and off, and just with that one feature, it does an amazing job, and this is not the same as just a contrast. Like if I go up here and I just increase contrast, see, it is not just a normal contrast. It is darkening certain areas the farther away it gets, adding localized contrast.
There's no exact equivalent to Dehaze in any other feature, so it's kind of darkening those lighter areas, adding contrast as necessary. It's color correcting. It is doing a lot of different things all in one shot.
It is a pretty amazing thing. Now, there's other things we can also do while we're here. For example, we can do a little bit of noise reduction because when I zoom in here, and I'm just dragging left and right here, by the way, to zoom in, I can see that there is some noise reduction that needs to be done, so I'm going to do some noise reduction.
This helps. I don't want to go too heavy-handed because I lose some of the texture there in the mountains here, so I want to do a little bit of noise reduction, but I can't really do too much here because I don't want to lose that texture, which is legitimate real texture, so I want to kind of do more noise reduction in the sky than everywhere else, so this also brings up selective adjustments that we can do, so we can change certain areas, and so over here, we can do some selective adjustments. There are the general settings, and then there are other things, so I can do some removal of things, which is kind of like a healing brush, but I want to do the selective changes over here, and this allows me to create masks where I can say, hey, I want to mask out the sky, and it'll select the sky for me and say, hey, there's the sky.
What do you want to do to the sky? Okay, I want to come down here, and I want to do some more noise reduction to the sky, and do Command plus or minus to zoom in and out, CTRL PLUS (+) or minus on Windows, and this noise reduction is only being done in this mask, so it's only being done to the sky. Also, while I'm at it, maybe I want to adjust some of the other settings of the sky. Maybe I want to darken it down a little bit.
Maybe I want to make it a little more cool or a little more warm. Maybe I want to change the highlights, the shadows, and I think I actually need a little more noise reduction now so let's go back to the noise reduction like so, and so all of those things are being done just to the sky. Look at that before and after.
I could not have done this quickly or this well using other features in Photoshop because there's just nothing quite like this dehaze. Dehaze is amazing. Now, when I hit OK, this is a filter.
I can turn the filter on and off. At any point, I can double-click on it to go back into all the settings, so it's really cool that we can apply this Camera Raw technology and the features into any layer in any Photoshop file, so try this out in Exercise 5E.
