Smart_Photography_-_January_2016_

LEARNING

Understanding Photography

the shadows. First pick up the TAT as

before, choose a point in the shadow

area that represents the tone you want

to boost (Picture 6-5↓7) and click on it.

This will appear as a circle on the curve

(Picture 6-5↓8). Now drag the cursor up

to boost the shadows. The developed

image is shown on the right side in

the Preview area. You can see how the

details which were hidden before have

come out.

If you look at the curve now, it looks

somewhat similar to a ‘mirrored’ S

curve. The standard S curve which

you might be familiar with boosts

the contrast while this one does the

opposite.

Next is to use the TAT for adjusting the

colour. Before you do that, you need to

Picture 6-5: The image on the left shows before and the

one on right after doing the targeted tonal adjustments

using TAT.

6-5↓1 Tone Curve tool

6-5↓2 Point Curve Selection

6-5↓3 Curve center point

6-5↓4 TAT home position

6-5↓5 A point in the highlight area

6-5↓6 Highlight point on tone curve

6-1↓7 A point in the shadow area

6-1↓8 Shadow point on tone curve

understand how any colour is defined.

This is done with three components

called hue, saturation and luminance

and are abbreviated as HSL. Here is a

brief description of these.

Hue: This is basically what everyone

commonly calls as colour. So, blue,

orange, yellow are all hues. The Hues

slider allows you to change a colour

within a certain range.

Saturation: This is a measure of

purity of colour. It is also called

vividness. What it means is that a

fully saturated colour is pure and less

saturated one has neutral grey mixed

in it. As the grey content goes up, the

saturation comes down. Thus, you can

change using this slider, a greyish blue

sky to blue one.

Luminance: This changes the

brightness of the colour.

In Lightroom, all the Hue sliders are

arranged as one group first, followed

by Saturation and Luminance sliders

(Picture 6-6). Lightroom gives you

eight colours and hence there are

eight Hue sliders followed by similar

number of Saturation and Luminance

sliders, giving you 24 sliders in total.

Also, identification of a colour in an

image is not always possible. This is

because the colour you want to control

through HLS sliders may not be just

one colour but a mix of two or more.

Under these conditions you will not

be able decide the specific slider(s)

that you need to use. However, don’t

panic as TAT will help you. The next

example shows you how.

Example 4: Identify on the right panel

HSL / colour / B&W tool and click

on HSL (Picture 6-6↓1) and if needed

expand the tool. In the expanded tool

choose All (Picture 6-6↓2). This will

show all the 24 sliders.

If you want to increase the saturation

of a particular colour in the image,

first pick up the TAT (Picture 6-6↓3)

from its home position by clicking

on it. Now move the cursor to the

point which represents the colour of

your interest (marked by a red spot,

Picture 6-6↓4) and click again. This

will select the needed slider or sliders.

In this case, though the water looks

bluish, it has an aqua component. So,

90 http://www.smartphotography.in

Smart Photography January 2016