Obtaining a "before" version of a raw edit in ACR

If you're like me, you probably like to display a before-and-after of your editing from time to time.  You've worked hard to craft a finished masterpiece from the original file that came from your camera, and you'd like to show people the results.

To do that, you need to go back and open a completely unedited version of your raw image.

The brutal way to do that is simply to clear your edits, and open the image at ACR's default settings.  Very effective.  BUT ... then you've lost your edits; and that's not a great idea - what if you need them again?

Fortunately the solution is really simple:

Open up your edited raw file.  In this example you can see I adjusted the white balance to a custom setting, lowered the exposure a bit, etc, etc:

Photoshop's "Arrange" functions

In a discussion on Facebook recently, I was a little surprised to realise that not everyone is aware of the power of the "Arrange" options in Photoshop and Elements. Adobe allows us great control if we have multiple windows open at once.

The Arrange features have been available for as long as I can remember. They've always been accessible via the "Window" menu, as shown in this CS2 screenshot:

In the modern interface (CS4 and 5, and Elements 8 and 9) they're still in the Window menu, but also much more accessible right there at the top of the screen. It's a handy little button that you might not have noticed much before.

Here it is in Photoshop:

And here it is in Elements:

Screen resolution poll results

Recently on Facebook I posted a poll to get an indication of modern screen resolutions.

Here's the result so far:

  

Admittedly, the sample size isn't very big, but it definitely confirms what I already knew to be true - that the stubbornly-held notion that "screen resolution is 72ppi" is out of date.

To be honest, I was astonished that even one person reported their screen was exactly 72ppi - I wasn't expecting that.  I was even a little surprised that one respondent's screen was less than 80ppi.  The majority of people reported values between 80 and 110ppi, which is exactly what I anticipated.

A couple of folk measured values over 130ppi - I bet they are Macbook Pro owners.  Those screens have tiny pixels!

So what does it all mean?  Not much, frankly.  It's nice to know your own screen's pixel size for an accurate "print size" view, as I discussed here, but beyond that, it's pretty irrelevant.

So, the point of my post is to remind you to chill out about the ppi value of your web images.  Almost every day I see somebody on a forum carefully explain how they change their web images to 72ppi, because "that makes them low resolution so nobody can print them".  It's utter bunkum.  Web browsers - in fact, the whole darn world wide web - competely ignore ppi values in images.  All they recognise is the dimensions of your images - 800px wide, or whatever.