Camera Raw Basics

Exposure

Back in Camera Raw, and starting off from the Default image, we've adjusted the Exposure by increasing it slightly to +0.10. Then for this image, we decided we wanted more detail in the shadows below the hut, so we dragged the Exposure slider even farther to +0.30.

RGB

Taking a look at the RGB readings in the upper right hand corner will show us the value of the darks in our image. So from this step, we drag to a point over the image, shown in the next step...

RGB readout over image

...here. Our curser is right above the rocks under the hut now, and you can see that our darks are not solid black, because they have an RGB readout of 21,25,31 as shown right below the histogram. Solid or pure black would have a readout of 0,0,0.
Remember while looking at the RGB readout from the histogram, all 0's = Black. All 255's = white.

Solid White

Taking a look again at this image and it's histogram, we can see that there is a white spike on the very right. We've located this over the image (shown with our curser), and we know it to be true white because of our RGB readout of 255,255,255. You can also see that there is no spike in the black, so we know there is no solid black in this image.

Hightlight detail

So in this step, we decided to recover some of those highlights by using the Recovery slider and increasing it to 19. This brings back some of the details lost in those highlights. You'll notice that our histogram is still doing it's job and updates each time we make a change such as this.

Fill Light

The Fill Light is kinda like a fill flash on your camera. It will bring back detail in the darks and the mid-tones. We've set this image's Fill Light to 12.

Blacks

We've adjusted our Blacks to bring them back by setting them to 8.
As a note, if you click the little red triangle (noted with the #1 shown here) you can see where those blacks are on the image shown in blue. Click the triangle again to hide them. The Brightness is usually taken care of by adjusting the Fill Light, and the Contrast can be taken care of while in Photoshop, so we usually leave both of these at their defaults.

*End Tutorial*