Disclaimer: I have written guest articles previously for Michael Reichmann's site, The Luminous Landscape.

Guide to Camera Raw: Raw Processing in Photoshop is more than seven hours of video instruction by Michael Reichmann and Jeff Schewe.

Writing a review of these videos is a challenge. I greatly respect Michael Reichmann as a photographer. I am enthusiastic in my support for his site. I have authored essays there. I would like to stay on positive terms with Michael, and I fear that candid reviews can jeopardize that. These comments are my candid opinion, however. I've done my best not to permit my feelings towards Michael Reichmann or The Luminous Landscape intrude.

Let me start by saying that there is a good amount of technical content in these videos. If you're new to Photoshop or ot Adobe Camera Raw, you'll learn a lot. Jeff Schewe has authored a book on this very topic, using Adobe Camera Raw as a RAW processor for Adobe Photoshop.

A lot of time is wasted on the buddy interaction. Strike that. A LOT of time is talking heads stuff. Typically, Jeff says something, Michael nods and smiles, occasionally adding a comment of his own. There are times where this is helpful. Jeff is so intent on letting viewers know how well connected he is with Thomas Knoll, Mark Hamburg, and others at Adobe, that he incessantly launches off on digressions that contribute no technical knowledge. Just name dropping. Michael can bring him back to task.

Here's an example. Jeff gets ready to talk about split toning. It has it's own video. Does he move into a technical discussion about split toning and the HSL sliders? No. Instead, a few minutes go by as Jeff lets everyone know that Thomas Knoll doesn't appreciate B&W photography, he doesn't shoot B&W, he doesn't print B&W. The HSL sliders are the result of Mark hamburg's interest in B&W photography. Save that stuff for a tell-all insider book entitled, This CRAZY World of Photoshop.

This reaches a climax with the last video. It's an homage to Thomas Knoll and the ACR/Lightroom team(s). You learn that Thomas Knoll and his wife invited Jeff and Michael to their home to meet and interview Adobe engineers. Unless you like to watch malignant narcissism and ass-kissing in action, you can easily forego downloading the 28th video. (Although it is funny to watch the engineers sitting on a couch. Jeff on one side. Michael on the other. 98% of the time the dobe team is silent. Their heads, in unison, twist like spectators at a tennis match as Jeff or Michael prattles on and the other feels compelled to get some camera time, too.)

The video window is way too small. The screen dimensions are 640 x 360. Worse, there are no screen captures. Instead, video cameras point at the monitors. The video was shot at chez Schewe in Chicago, so I guess Jeff and Michael felt it really important that you see the expensive monitors, etc. Worse, this gives the videos incredibly large file sizes.

I can produce 800 x 600 Quicktime videos with minimal compression and the files will run about 1.5MB per minute. These videos with their tiny windows heft in at 10MB per minute. Given that the videos are available now only by download, you can expect to spend a half-day downloading them (and that's only if you have something like high speed DSL).

The tiny window combined with the softness from shooting a screen rather than using a video screen capture program to grab the video directly and the video compression associated with Quicktime means that the video can sometime be hard to see.

The discussion of noise reduction is a good example on this point. I could not tell the difference at ISO 100 and ISO 200 that Jeff was describing. If I maximize the video, it softens. At the small window, the noise is undetectable. And that after Jeff zoomed Photoshop to 400% to make the noise more apparent to the eye.

The audio quality is good. It would be excellent, except that the audio was normalized at about -10db. That means you better wear earphones and turn the volume way up. When I loded one of the videos in Adobe Soundbooth, the reason was obvious. There was breath puffs all over the audio. Rather than take the time and edit them, instead the volume was reduced to make them inaudible. That's a shame, because when I boosted the gain, I could hear the breath puffs distinctly, but other than that the audio was clean.

The video is now a bit dated. The copyright is 2008, but it obviously was produced before Photoshop CS4 and Adobe Camera Raw 5. So don't expect information on ACR5 features, like the Graduated Filter or Adjustment Brush tools.

If you're using an older version of Adobe Camera Raw (pre ACR5), you'll find good, solid technical content. Just expect bloated downloads and to suffer through A LOT of blather. The tiny window and the resulting inability to see fine detail makes it difficult to strongly recommend this video series. Based on the breadth and depth of coverage, however, I give it a Recommend rating instead.

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