LEARNING
Understanding Photography
been discussed so far along with
their current development settings.
In this photograph, a model car was
placed on a textured paper. Light
was from a window. First look at the
unmodified image. This shows that
overall exposure to be fine (as the
mid-tones are proper) but the left side
is bit overexposed and right hand side
a little underexposed. Such an image
can easily be developed using the Basic
tool. First, you can use the Highlights
and Whites sliders to tone down the
bright areas. Next use Shadows and
Blacks sliders to open up the shadows
on the right and under the car. This
gives more balanced tones overall, as
you can see. Since the original exposure
was good enough, the Exposure slider
was untouched and so was the Contrast
slider. The whole operation took less
than three minutes!You are now ready to go to the next
part of the Basic tool, the Presence
group. This is where a lot of magic
happens. This group controls three
parameters which are described below:Clarity (Picture 6-1↓11): This is an
interesting tool that alters contrast
but in an intelligent way. It primarily
learns about the edges, and enhances
them. This is somewhat similar to
sharpening but weaker. While the
description is a little confusing, this
is really a wonder tool that works like
magic. Portraits are an exception. This
is exactly the problem too since many
over use just like they over sharpen
images leading to halos (white edges
at the high contrast boundaries). So,
Adobe recommends that you apply
the tool after keeping the display at
100% to detect any halos. Start with
increasing the Clarity till halos appear
and then back down a bit. Believe it
or not this control makes the images
simply pop!Vibrance (Picture 6-1↓12): Call this
‘smart saturation’. It operates on
colours that are not saturated already
leaving aside saturated colours. It also
recognizes skin tones and avoids over
saturation. This is another wonder
tool!Saturation (Picture 6-1↓13):
Saturation means purity of the colour
and one of the three parameters that
define a colour. The other two are
luminance and hue. These will be
covered shortly. This is a fairly straight
forward tool but is not as smart as
Vibrance. Dragging the Saturation
slider it to the extreme left, to minus
100 level makes the image back and
white (monochrome). If this is a
kitchen knife, then Vibrance is like a
scalpel. My recommendation – stick to
Vibrance.Example 2: The effect of Clarity and
Vibrance sliders is very evident as
you can see (Picture 6-4). Here only
Clarity and Vibrance sliders were used
for development. No other slider was
touched. See how Clarity increased the
punch, and provided the depth whereas
Vibrance subtly saturated the colours
without making them look garish, the
way Saturation slider would do.Auto (Picture 6-1↓14): Clicking on this
button will allow Lightroom to analyze
the scene and apply all the parameters
by itself. I generally don’t recommend
using it but you can try it out since thePicture 6-3: The image at the top in the Preview area shows before and the one at the bottom shows after adjust-
ments were done using some of the sliders in the Basic tool. The right panel shows the current development settings.
These are Highlights (-) 88, Shadows, (+) 65, Whites (-) 43 and Blacks (+) 25.88 http://www.smartphotography.in
Smart Photography January 2016