Making photos look better using Camera Raw

Did you know you can make your picture look more dramatic and awesome by using Camera Raw feature in Photoshop CS5?

First you need to open Adobe Bridge CS5.

In Adobe Bridge, go to the folder where your picture is ...

You can click here to download the picture I used in this tutorial.

... right click the picture and choose Open in Camera Raw...

I want to make sky more dramatic, and boost up color and contrast of landscape.

Let's fix the sky first.

In the toolbar above, choose Adjustment Brush (see picture).

I chose the following image settings ...

... and the settings for Adjustment Brush.

Now, just paint across the sky, to make it more dramatic.

Let's fix the rest of the picture now.

Choose the Hand Tool.

These are the settings I chose ...

... boosted up Clarity to make the image a bit sharper, a bit of Vibrance and reduce Saturation.

And at the end, set the White Balance to Auto.

It does the job in most cases.

White Balance represents the intensity of colors on a photograph, sometimes the photos can look too cold, or too warm, it depends on the white balance settings of your camera.

And this is how my photograph looks like after applying the above settings.

Let's fix the lighting a bit.

Click Tone Curve button (see picture)

And play with the tone settings to achieve a better result.

Much better now.

All you have to do is click Done to take you back to Adobe Bridge or Open Copy, which will open a copy the picture in Adobe Photoshop for further editing if that is what you wish to do.

Original picture ...

... and fixed one for comparison.