Original Image
Fill Flash added in Camera Raw
I was trying things out with Adobe Bridge and discoverd a cool new way to edit jpegs with Photoshop’s Raw image editor. I love non-destuctive editing of Camera Raw, but I was not aware you could do so much with a jpeg too! You can even reopen a jpeg, that has been edited in Camera Raw, and restore the original image before the edits were added.
1. Open Adobe Bridge
2. Locate a jpeg to edit, and hit Cmd R (for Raw). This will open the image in Camera Raw, as if it was a Raw image.
3. Edit as desired with many quick, little sliders. In the image above, I loved the sky color I achieved by metering on the sunset, but I wanted to restore some of the dark areas in the foreground. In Camera Raw, I added some Fill Light to lighten the dark areas, and then I added some Recovery Light to keep the light areas vivid.
If you save the image as a jpeg, it will save the changes, but it will keep the original information too, just as if it were a Raw image. Later you can double-click the jpeg again, and it will automatically open it in Camera Raw and you can restore the original image, by clicking Default in the screen on the right. You may also make new adjustments and save the image with the same file name again. This is non-destructive editing, and you don’t have to keep saving multiple copies of the same jpeg with varied edits.
Furthermore, you can open the image as a smart object in Photoshop, for more editing, and then when you click the Smart Object icon in the layers palette, it will take you back to the opened image in Camera Raw for more adjustments there. This is so easy and flexible to switch back and forth between the two Photoshop windows: Regular Photoshop and Camera Raw Photoshop.
Follow these steps to transfer the jpeg from Camera Raw to Photoshop as a Smart Object:
1. Click the text in the bottom middle of the Camera Raw window, that says “Adobe RGB…”
2. Then check the box that says “Open in Photoshop as Smart Object,” and Click OK
3. Choose “Open Object.”
Switch Back Option: Once you have added edits in Photoshop, you may click the box icon on the image layer, and it will open the image once again in Camera Raw.
Thank you so much for posting this! I've been wondering if there was a way to do this.
Hi Stacy, It is great to hear from you, and I am glad you liked the post. Sometimes if you just try things, it is surprising what you'll figure out. I just can't believe how it lets you open the jpeg again and restore the original settings. That just goes against everything about jpeg compression. I still want to experiment to see if the pixels are degraded after multiple saves. I think Camera Raw may prevent the normal lossy compression of a jpeg. Even though the file extension is .jpg, it tells me it is a Photoshop file, so that may be how it gets around the problem. I also noticed that it does save the normal .xmp info file alongside the Raw jpeg image, like it does with an edited Raw file. It seems to just store the editing data inside the special Photoshop jpeg. Very cool!