Manually adjusting images Automatic image adjustment works perfectly well in most cases and is generally the first thing to try. You might, however, prefer to adjust your images manually ­ either to have greater control over the outcome, or because sometimes the software can make mistakes when evaluating an image and not produce the best results. This is where an understanding of the individual image adjustments and the tonal histogram comes in very handy. This may seem a little daunting at first, but as you'll see, it really doesn't take much to get an image looking great. When you first open an image in Camera RAW, a set of default values is applied. These often don't require changing, but with our example image, this has caused the brighter areas to become blown out, losing a lot of their detail. You can see this effect displayed graphically in the histogram. The right-hand side of the window shows the highlights; the graph extends past the top of the chart, which means that much of the image's highlights