Correcting Tone and Color
CORRECTING TONE AND COLOR
Every time you pick up the camera and take a picture, you’re telling a story. It may be a simple story of your nephew’s birthday party as told through a snapshot, or it may be a soaring call for the protection of wild lands as told through a series of vivid color fine art prints.
Just as certain words add color, texture, and depth to your writing, image brightness, contrast, and color affect the message your viewer receives from your photos. In the next two chapters, we’ll look at how you can use Lightroom and Photoshop to influence your viewer by supporting the story you’ve captured when pressing the shutter.
Climber, Eldor ado Canyon State Par k, Color ado. Olymbus E-3, 12–16mm lens, 1/60 second at f4.5, ISO 200
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Before
After
This chapter focuses on making adjustments to the entire image. Chapter 15 builds upon these global adjustments and gives you tools for making selective adjustments to specific areas within your
photos. Understanding how to use these tools to enhance your photos is to truly unlock the power of the digital darkroom.
Compare these two photos (see Before). The image on the left is open, airy, and warm. The bright blue skies and vivid sandstone work to tell a story of the desert at sunset. You can almost feel the warm breeze on your skin just by looking at the picture. Contrast these emotions with your perception of the photo on the right.
The heavy shadows create an atmosphere of apprehension and uncertainty. The elderly couple walking arm-in-arm together and the appearance of a cane suggests a pair marching together toward the end of their lives, out of the light and into the darkness.
How would the couple photo look without the shadows? How evocative would the canyon photo be without the color? Both are shown here (see After) directly from the camera for comparison to underscore the importance of carrying your creative vision all the way through to your finished print or web gallery.
The first step in learning to take this kind of control over your photos is learning how to adjust the brightness
levels, or tones, in an image. The histogram is one essential tool to help gauge the distribution of tones in your image.
Histograms
The Histogram panel provides a visual representation of the tonal value for each pixel in your photo. The horizontal axis of the histogram corresponds to a gradient of increasing lightness from black to white (left to right).
The height of the histogram represents the number of pixels with a given lightness value. The higher the peak, the more pixels with that tone are in your photo.
Black and white photos are great for helping you understand how a histogram relates to a photo, because they show only the tone, unaffected by the colors in the image. The following illustration shows a black and white image demonstrating the correlation between a histogram, a grayscale ramp, and a
photograph. Specific areas within the photo are represented with their lightness values and their locations on the histogram.
Most images should show a distribution of tones across the full range of the histogram, from shadows to highlights. The locations of the peaks and troughs will vary depending on whether the image contains predominantly light tones or dark tones. This particular image has peaks on either side of middle gray.
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An image with a large number of darker shadows will show a histogram with high peaks on the shadow side.
Here , specific tones within a photogr aph are
dr awn out from the image and their location is displayed on the histogr am.
280 The snow in this image (at bottom) makes
for lots of highlights, which appear toward the right side of the histogram.
You may have noticed that the histograms for your photos are displayed differently than those shown in these examples. Typically, Lightroom displays the tonal histogram in gray, along with the histograms for the color channels in red, cyan, green, magenta, blue, and yellow. To simplify the display of the histogram for the sample images, I chose to present only the tonal histogram. As you’re working, you’ll want to pay attention to both the tonal and the color histograms, as both provide valuable feedback on your image corrections.
It is important to know how to read histograms both on the camera and in Lightroom. The on-camera histogram is the most accurate gauge of your exposure.
The first three images shown so far present “normal” histograms that vary based on the image content. While they initially appear very different, they share one important similarity: the peaks and troughs all stay within the left and right boundaries of the histogram.
Any peak or trough that appears within the left and right margins of the histogram contains detail that you can lighten or darken. If the histogram ends with a cliff on either side your photo, you’ve lost detail in either the highlights or the shadows. This information typically can’t be recovered and can cause a major problem for you later in the workflow.
A histogr am for a badly underexposed photo
A histogr am for a badly overexposed photo
With histograms this bad, these exposure errors should have been caught in camera and the exposure corrected for subsequent shots.
When in Doubt, Overexpose Slightly
Photographers have long been trained to underexpose slightly to get better highlight detail and color saturation. This is a recipe for poor image quality when using a digital camera, however. Your camera’s sensor doesn’t
“see” light the same way our eyes do. Our eyes have a natural response to the distribution of brightness in a scene that, more or less, pays equal weight to light colors and dark colors: bright tones and dark tones.
The camera’s sensor does not give equal weight to all tones. In fact, your digital sensor is heavily weighted to the brightest areas in your photo. If you took a grayscale ramp like the one shown here and applied the camera’s way of seeing it, you’d notice that instead of a smooth, gradual transition from light to dark, the camera lumps all the shadows on top of one another.
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Taken another way, the camera has a fixed number of numeric values for describing the brightness of a pixel. Fifty percent of those numeric values are devoted to the brightest
f-stop in your photo. Each successively darker f-stop receives one-half the number of the
f-stop ahead of it, until the shadows receive only a small sliver of the total possible values.
This is important information, because all detail in your photos is a result of subtle
differences in tone and color between adjacent pixels. In the shadows, where fewer values
are available to describe these differences, it becomes more difficult to retain details.
Underexposing photos drives more of the information contained within a photo deeper into the shadows, causing a loss of detail
and an increase in noise (unwanted color impurities) in the photo.
Take, for example, these two photos shot by the same camera, only seconds apart. The first is correctly exposed, while the second was underexposed significantly and then lightened
Correct exposure Underexposed
The image on the left is exposed cor rectly. The image on the r ight was underexposed by one
f-stop, and then cor rected in Adobe Camer a
Raw. Notice the difference in shadow detail and smoothness in the detail images.
using raw processing software. At a small size, the two photos look very similar, yet when you look closely at the images you can see that smooth tones are blocky in the underexposed image and the shadows have lost details that are present in the correctly exposed image.
The key message is this: If you want the highest quality pictures, you have to pay close attention to your exposures. Your light meter and your on-camera histogram are terrific tools for gauging and adjusting for the correct exposure, but they aren’t perfect. If you’re uncertain and you think you have to hedge your bets toward over- or underexposure, it’s better to err toward slight overexposure. It is important to emphasize the word slight. The image adjustment tools found in Lightroom and Photoshop’s camera raw processing software are very good at bringing back up to
½ f-stop of highlight detail on most images. Provided you don’t see a radical spike on the right end of your histogram, you will probably be able to recover any highlight detail that may be temporarily lost.
At times the range of tones in the scene exceeds what the camera can capture in a single photograph. When this occurs, you have to make the artistic decision to expose for the highlights or the shadows, and
you’ll expect to see a cliff on one end of the histogram indicating you’ve lost detail in that portion of the tonal range.
This is a result of a series of differences between the way our eyes see light and the way the camera records it. Often, these differences are minor and form the backbone of the changes you’ll make in the digital darkroom. These corrections are designed to bring the photo closer to the way you saw the original scene when you took the picture.
The first tool you’ll use to perform these corrections is Adobe Camera Raw, found in both Lightroom and Photoshop.
Optimizing Your
Photos in Lightroom
Thomas Knoll is one of the most influential people in photography today, yet you probably have never heard his name. Thomas and his brother John were the original inventors of Photoshop and led the software through its initial development and purchase by Adobe.
While this accomplishment alone warrants mention in this book, Thomas has played an active role in the continued development of Photoshop and spearheaded the growth and development of camera raw files through the creation of Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), the raw processing engine inside Adobe Lightroom.
When we wrote the first edition of this book, some photographers were taking
advantage of camera raw files using early versions of ACR and other raw processing software for development.
While functional, those tools were crude by today’s standards and didn’t offer a
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clear superiority for many photographers over shooting JPEG in camera.
Through the continued development of ACR, the vast majority of serious amateur and professional photographers now shoot exclusively in raw. More than 90 percent of all raw files today are processed through Adobe Camera Raw.
Camera raw processing is the cornerstone of an effective digital photography workflow for two primary reasons. First, the corrections you make to a raw file are nondestructive, and second, these corrections can be applied quickly to many other images in the shoot.
While it is the first benefit that initially attracts photographers to camera raw, the second benefit provides the more profound, day-to- day workflow benefits.
In this section, I will help you learn to harness the power of the corrections in ACR from within Lightroom.
If you’ve been using ACR from within Photoshop, you’ll find the controls in Lightroom very familiar. In fact, the ACR module that runs within Photoshop and Lightroom are identical. The layout is slightly different between the two applications, as Photoshop stacks the corrections horizontally in separate panels while Lightroom arranges corrections vertically, but the underlying code is the same.
When you open the Develop module in Lightroom, you activate the ACR module. When performing your corrections in ACR, you will typically follow the listed order of the tools from top to bottom in the Basic panel, beginning with White Balance (WB), then Tone, and finally Presence.
To help you better understand the use of the tools, I’ll temporarily depart from this convention to discuss the tools for adjusting tone, followed by color-specific tools. The How To at the end of the chapter will follow the recommended workflow for performing image corrections.
Since we are postponing our initial color correction, I recommend that you select
an image that has good color overall when following along with this chapter of the book.
Correcting Tone in ACR
While color may be the most visible element in a photo, the underlying tone provides the structure, support, contrast, and detail in an image. The six sliders under the Tone area of
the Basic panel in ACR give you fine control over the tonality and contrast in your pictures.
The first two sliders, Exposure and Recovery, both target the highlights in your photos. The Exposure slider is designed
to increase the lightness of the photo and brighten the highlights, while the Recovery slider is used to darken the highlights without darkening the overall picture.
Begin your tonal adjustment with the Exposure slider used to set the lightest point that contains detail in the photo. This will push the highlights in the histogram to
the right, brightening the highlights and improving overall image contrast.
While this can be set by eye, you can use a trick to make this process even easier. Hold down the option (Mac) or alt (Windows) key on your keyboard while adjusting the Exposure slider. This activates the clipping display that shows areas in the photo that will
be clipped—that is, they will lose detail—at the current setting.
Increase the exposure amount until you begin to see important detail appear in the clipping display. Then back off your correction until the clipping display returns to black. If your image has specular highlights, the bright reflections off shiny surfaces such as chrome, water, or glass, it is okay for them to appear in the clipping display since they don’t contain any important detail. Base your correction
off the lightest point in the photo that should contain detail. For this particular image, the clipping display indicates that the right side of the rider’s jersey is the lightest point in
the photo, so I’ll increase the Exposure slider amount until I see areas of the jersey appear in the clipping display; then I’ll reduce my correction just past the point at which these areas disappear from the clipping display.
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detail in the highlight areas of your photos, effectively darkening the highlights at, or outside, the right margin of the histogram. Hold down the option (Mac) or alt (Windows) key to enable the clipping display, as described, or set the Recovery slider visually.
These images demonstrate the Recovery slider’s ability to rescue detail in highlight areas.
The Fill Light slider is a photographer’s best friend, because it allows you to lighten the important shadows in your photo quickly to bring out detail in shaded faces and other essential details. It’s like adding a fill flash or reflector to your photos after the picture has been taken.
Light settings, it is natural for your image to lose contrast. Some of this contrast can be reclaimed with the Blacks slider, while
additional contrast adjustments will be made with the Contrast slider (described shortly).
Returning to our original image, which didn’t require any adjustment with either Recovery or Fill Light, we’ll turn our attention to the Blacks slider, which is used for setting the darkest point in photos.
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No clipping display is available for the Fill Light adjustment. Simply increase the Fill Light amount until you’ve lightened the shadows to your liking. With higher Fill
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the option (Mac) or alt (Windows) key to enable the clipping display. In this case, the photo initially turns white, and black areas in the photo indicate areas in the photo that will lose details in the shadows.
For this image, I wanted to pay particular attention to preventing the shadows on the rider from turning completely black, so I slowly increased the Blacks slider setting until these shadows began to appear in the clipping display, and then I reduced my correction slightly to preserve detail in these dark shadows.
Setting the lightest and darkest points in the image using the Exposure and Blacks
sliders increases the contrast in your photo by maximizing the dynamic range of the image. At this point, you will use the Brightness and Contrast sliders to adjust the midtones in your photo to dial in the overall appearance of the image.
The Brightness slider affects the midtones in the photo independently from the highlights or shadows.
Increasing the Brightness slider tends to make a photo appear more open or expansive, while decreasing Brightness makes a photo feel more moody and mysterious. You’ll have to judge what setting works best for your images. The more you experiment with different Brightness slider settings, the more intuitive your corrections will be.
For this image, I reduced the overall image brightness slightly to darken the shadows on the mountain and enforce the appearance of the late afternoon light raking across the hillsides.
Once the overall distribution of tone is established, you will often need to increase the contrast in the photo to improve the overall presence of the photo and improve the appearance of image details. The Contrast
slider adds midtone contrast by pushing middle gray tones toward either the shadow or highlights.
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In this photo, adding contrast made the rider more prominent by lightening the
rider and darkening the shadows behind him simultaneously. It also provided a subtle but important improvement to the overall feeling of depth and dimension in the photo.
Note Be careful when using the Contrast slider. If your image contains predominantly highlight (high-key) or shadow (low-key) tones, increasing the amount of contrast in your photo will decrease the actual contrast in your photo. This happens because the highlight and shadows are compressed by the Contrast slider adjustment. If you have a high-key or low-key image, you’ll be better served by performing contrast adjustments
using the Tone Curve or a Curves adjustment in Photoshop. See “Adding Contrast” later in this chapter for information on using the Tone Curve in ACR.
Once you’ve added contrast to the photo, you may need to go back and make subtle adjustments to your previous corrections, particularly Fill Light or Recovery corrections that you’ve made.
Correcting Color in ACR
Now that you know how to adjust the tones in your photo, you’re ready to graduate to the color adjustments. Like tone, color is
a powerful tool for communicating your message. However, color takes a bit more practice to get right, as our color perception is often swayed by colors in our environment and even the amount of caffeine we’ve had
today. While you can’t always control variables such as room lighting and you don’t want
to give up your double latte, you will want to ensure your monitor is calibrated before embarking on a lengthy color-correction session. Monitor calibration is discussed in Chapter 18.
Correcting color in ACR is a multi-step process that addresses overall color, color intensity, and finally specific colors within the image. I’ll address specific color adjustments later in this chapter.
Correcting White Balance
As you probably remember from Chapter 3, your camera offers a White Balance control to help match the colors in your photo to the way your eye perceives the colors in different light sources. For this reason, both your camera
and ACR offer a series of presets matched to different lighting conditions, from tungsten and fluorescent, to shade and daylight.
While these presets are helpful, you’ll find it even easier and more accurate to use the White Balance tool. Located next to the White Balance sliders in Lightroom
and along the top of the preview window in Photoshop, the White Balance tool allows you to neutralize the color cast in a photo with a single click.
In this image, the incorrect white balance setting was selected on the camera. To correct this problem, click the White Balance tool and select a portion of the image that should contain a neutral shade of white, gray, or black. When possible, select a light gray. This particular image doesn’t contain any truly neutral colors, so I’ll use the White Balance
tool to choose the best option available, which is a dark shadow on the trunk of the tree.
This improves the photo considerably. Although the correction isn’t perfect, it is a significant improvement over the original image. If you aren’t happy with the white balance correction, you can press cmd-z (Mac) or ctrl-z (Windows) to undo the correction, or select a new point with the White Balance tool. If you ever need to return to the original image, click As Shot from the White Balance preset menu.
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The White Balance tool is designed to help you quickly achieve an accurate color balance. Frequently, however, photographers prefer pleasing color over accurate color. After making a preliminary correction with the White Balance tool, you will
often want to refine the colors further using the White Balance sliders, Temp and Tint.
Adjusting the overall color balance in your photos is an underappreciated art. While we all see color in slightly different ways, we tend to have similar emotional reactions to specific colors. Warm colors such as reds and oranges are inviting and approachable. Cool colors such as cyans, greens, and blues can feel distant, cold, and intimidating,
particularly in skin tones. Movie and TV producers frequently play with the color balance to elicit an emotional effect in their audience. You can do the same with the Temp and Tint sliders in ACR.
The Temp slider controls the balance between blue (left) and yellow (right). The Tint slider controls the balance between green (left) and magenta (right).
The most common correction is to nudge both the Temp and Tint sliders slightly to the right to warm up the image. This adds a slight orange cast to your photo, similar to adding an 81A filter to your camera’s lens.
Conversely, if your goal is to commu- nicate a cold, harsh reality, move both sliders to the left. Notice how changing the white balance creates a different emotional message for each image.
The tree and meadow image is typical in that adjusting the global white balance
improves some areas of the photo, yet hinders others. For example, the correction we performed warmed up the landscape image, improving the color in the foreground, but
it diminished the intensity of the blue sky. Fortunately, ACR provides very precise controls to help us adjust specific color ranges. I’ll cover these later in this chapter. For now, select a white balance setting that provides the most pleasing overall color balance.
Next, let’s turn our attention to the Clarity, Vibrance, and Saturation sliders located in the Presence area of the Basic panel of the ACR.
Clarity
Using the Clarity slider is a bit like adding chili powder to your cooking. A little bit is often exactly what you need, and it’s easy to go too far and spoil the dish. The Clarity slider
is similar to the Contrast slider, with extra intelligence built into it. While the Contrast slider adds contrast by making all the dark midtones darker and all the light midtones lighter, the Clarity slider analyzes whether to add contrast on a region-by-region basis. This process is a bit tricky to describe with words but easy to demonstrate with images.
Whenever you use the Clarity slider, be sure you’re zoomed in to 100-percent view so you’re looking at all the pixels in your image. Zoom in by clicking on the large image preview. Zoom back out by clicking a second time. The effect of the Clarity slider is most
dangerous on portraits, where you can age someone 20 years in only ten seconds.
This is a baseline view of the image without any Clarity added.
At a moderate Clarity setting of 15, the contours in the photo are better defined, making the picture look three-dimensional. This is the most that I would want to add to a portrait like this one.
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A Clarity setting of 50 is really starting to cause problems with this image. Notice how pronounced the contrast is along the bridge of this gentleman’s right cheekbone.
To see what happens when you really go too far, I’ve included a sample image with a Clarity setting of 90. The natural contours of the subject’s face are heavily exaggerated and his skin looks blotchy and dark. As a point of reference, a Clarity setting of 90 looks pretty good in the primary preview window. It isn’t until you zoom in and look at 100 percent that you can see the mess Clarity has caused. You can be sure that you’d see it in the finished print as well.
Tip Negative Clarity Selecting a negative setting for the Clarity slider softens a photo and decreases contrast. This can be useful for softening age lines or skin blemishes in a
portrait or it can be used for creative effect in landscape or architecture shots.
While I rarely use the Clarity slider, the next two tools, Vibrance and Saturation, are essential for most image corrections. Both increase the saturation, or color purity, of a photo, but each does it in a different way.
Vibrance and Saturation
Vibrance increases desaturated colors more than saturated ones. A Vibrance correction will boost a pale blue more than a royal blue. Additionally, Vibrance is designed to protect skin tones so you can push the color further without making the people in your photo look artificial.
Saturation does a great job of making bright colors scream off the page. It needs to be used with greater care than Vibrance as it can make colors look false very quickly. The amount of Vibrance and Saturation you apply to each image will vary based on the content of the image and the effect you’re looking for. Generally speaking, however, I find I add 2/3 Vibrance and 1/3 Saturation to give colors just enough pop without making them look fake.
For comparison, I’ve pushed the Vibrance and Saturation settings to 60 to show the different effect each slider has on the image.
The final image uses a Vibrance setting of 21 and a Saturation setting of 10. The colors are vivid, but they don’t yet look artificial.
After performing global corrections to the tone and color in your raw files, you’ll often make smaller, more refined corrections using the advanced features in ACR.
Vibr ance 60
Satur ation 60
Vibr ance 21, Satur ation 10
Advanced Corrections
Many photographers never venture beyond the corrections found in the Basic panel. This is a shame, because several of my favorite tools for correcting images are found in the advanced panels of ACR. Don’t worry, however, because although the corrections are more advanced and often less obvious than those listed here, they certainly aren’t difficult to use and can result in big payoffs in your photos. In the next section, I’ll show you how to perform two of the most common types of advanced image corrections in camera raw: adding contrast and correcting specific colors.
Adding Contrast
Before we get too far into the sections on adding contrast in ACR, it’s worth considering the question, Why do I need to add contrast to my images?
The simple answer to this complex question is this: contrast equals detail. All of the detail you see in your digital photos is a result of differences in the lightness or color of the pixels in your photo. Adding contrast to your photos exaggerates these differences, enhancing the appearance of detail in your photographs. So if you want your photos to look their best, you need to become a master of intelligently adding contrast to your pictures.
I recommend the Contrast slider as a tool for adding contrast to the midtones in an image. While this is useful for a large number
of images, it can be detrimental to images with important highlight or shadow detail. Take the upcoming fishing image, for example. Adding
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contrast with the Contrast slider causes the fog rising off the river to become too bright and lose important detail. This occurs because the Contrast slider adds midtone contrast at the expense of the highlight and shadow areas.
This is an unfortunate side effect of making corrections to digital photos. Adding contrast to one portion of the tonal range robs contrast from other areas. Since contrast equals detail, it is critical that you add contrast only to the most important areas in your
photo. When you need this additional level of control, look to the Tone Curve for salvation.
The Tone Curve panel in ACR allows you to make more precise tone and contrast adjustments than you are
able to make using only the sliders in the Basic panel. To orient yourself, think of the diagonal line of the curve as a histogram tilted up on a 45-degree angle.
Shadows are at the lower-left corner of the curve and highlights are at the upper-right portion of the curve. Bending the curve up and to the left lightens the photo. Pulling it down and to the right darkens the photo.
Now this is the most critical part for our discussion. Any areas of the curve steeper than the original 45-degree angle gain contrast, while any areas on the curve with an angle of less than 45 degrees lose contrast.
Our correction with the Contrast slider would result in a Tone Curve that looks like this:
The midtones in the photo gain the most contrast, since that portion of the curve is the steepest. The highlight and shadow regions, however, suffer a loss of contrast. For many pictures, this is ideal and Adobe’s rationale for making this the standard method of adding contrast. For this specific fishing picture, a simple midtone adjustment is less than ideal since the most important visual detail resides in the highlight areas and a different approach is required.
You can adjust the Tone Curve in Lightroom in three ways. All three will achieve the same results. Typically, photographers find one of the methods more intuitive than the others and use it more frequently.
■ Use the sliders below the curve to adjust each of the tonal regions on the curve. Hovering your cursor over the curve lists the tonal
region that will be adjusted and highlights the corresponding slider.
■ Click and drag on the curve to perform tonal adjustments. Although this is the most common method of adjusting the curve, it is the most difficult to use correctly because it requires the user to be able to look at the picture and guess
correctly the corresponding location on the curve. You can use the histogram behind the curve as a guide to help you manipulate the curve correctly.
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■ Use the Targeted Adjustment tool (TAT) to make corrections on the image directly. This is the most intuitive and certainly the coolest method of performing corrections, because it allows
you to directly target a specific tonal region in your photo.
Single-click the TAT icon in the upper-right corner of the Tone Curve panel, and then click and drag on the image to make adjustments to the curve. Clicking and dragging the cursor up toward the top of the photo lightens the corresponding tonal region on the curve, while dragging toward the bottom darkens it.
For adding contrast, you’ll have the best success with the TAT, because it allows you better control over your adjustments. For example, in this image of the fly fisherman, the TAT allows you to darken the water in the river and lighten the mist to increase the visual separation between them.
You can also increase the detail in the trees by lightening the highlight areas of the trees and darkening the deeply shaded bases of the trees.
To follow up with our fly-fishing image, the top photo on the facing page is the result of adding heavy contrast using the Contrast slider. The image on the bottom-right is the result of using the TAT to add contrast to the highlights and the shadows, where contrast
is needed most in this photo. Notice the difference in shadow detail in the background and the detail in the mist above the river.
The most important thing to keep in mind while adding contrast to your photos is to think of adding the contrast through a portion of the tonal range, not a single point. If you want more contrast in the clouds, click the lightest portions
of the clouds to make them lighter and darken the darker portions
of the clouds to increase contrast throughout the clouds.
In the next chapter, we’ll spend more time adding contrast to images; for now, instead of adding contrast throughout the picture, we’ll focus on adding contrast to specific regions in a photo using a layer mask. This helps you enhance
the contrast corrections you make at this stage.
Correcting Specific Colors
Until this point, all the image corrections have been applied equally throughout the picture. For example, adding yellow with the Temperature slider increased yellow in all areas of the photos. This can be problematic.
Consider a landscape photo with a beautiful blue sky: adding yellow
will make the grasses and trees in the photo more appealing while ruining the blue sky, since adding yellow to blue makes it grayer.
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The Hue, Saturation, and Luminance (HSL) sliders allow you to adjust your blue skies separately from your green grass without the need to select or mask areas in the photos. You’ll use HSL for three primary purposes:
■ Correcting one set of color separately from another, as in the example of warming up green grasses without affecting skies.
■ Correcting the differences in color between what your eye sees and the camera captures. This effect, called camera metamerism, is quite common and requires a custom set of corrections in Adobe Camera Raw to align the color in ACR with what your eye sees.
■ Making your photos look more three- dimensional by lightening specific colors to “bring them to the front” visually and darken background colors to help them recede from view.
■ I encourage you to dedicate some time to learning how to use the HSL sliders. Many of the corrections I once had to perform in Photoshop using masks and selections I can now do completely in Lightroom.
Introduction to HSL
You’ve probably already used the Hue, Saturation, and Luminance (HSL) color scheme without necessarily knowing it. Many computer applications use HSL standard when selecting colors for type and design. On the Macintosh, HSL is the standard color model used in Apple’s Color Picker.
Even though HSL may be familiar, that doesn’t necessarily help you use it for
correcting images. For this, you need to have a basic understanding of how the HSL system is set up and why it makes difficult corrections easy and intuitive.
Several different models can be used to describe the full spectrum of colors. When working with digital cameras and digital images, we commonly use the RGB color mode, where all colors are created using varying amounts of red, green, and blue. HSL is similar in that you can describe any color using three variables; however, HSL is unique in that each of the three variables controls a different aspect of the color.
The best way to visualize the HSL color mode is to imagine a cylinder containing all the colors in the spectrum. Looking down on the cylinder’s top surface we see the color wheel, familiar from art classes, paint stores, and software color pickers.
Each of the 360 degrees around the circle corresponds to a different color hue.
For example, a hue angle of 20 degrees corresponds to a reddish-orange. The vibrancy of the hue is determined by the Saturation amount. A Saturation of 0 is a shade of gray. A Saturation of 100 is a vivid, highly saturated color.
The third axis on the cylinder, Luminance, determines the lightness of the color. A low Brightness amount results in
a dark color, and a high Brightness setting creates a light color.
Together, all three axes of HSL are combined to create all the colors in the visible spectrum. What makes this useful in ACR is the ability to adjust the axes independently. If you need to make a blue sky darker, you can decrease the lightness without making any change to the hue or saturation of the sky.
This is a powerful method of performing corrections to images. It is now time you learn how to make HSL work for you. If you want to become more familiar with the HSL
structure, open Photoshop and double-click the foreground or background colors at the bottom of the Toolbox on the left side of the screen to open the Color Picker.
The Color Picker displays all of the possible color combinations for a single hue angle. You can think of the Color Picker as a vertical slice of the HSL cylinder. See what
happens to the color when you adjust the H, S, or B (Brightness) values.
Using HSL Sliders Lightroom provides separate Hue, Saturation, and Luminance sliders for each of the primary colors: red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple, and magenta. By default, these are organized as separate modes within the HSL/Color/ Grayscale panel. If you prefer, you can reorganize the controls to be viewed as one long list by clicking All to the right of the
Luminance button or by color by clicking the
Color heading in the panel’s title. Changing
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the controls’ display will not affect their behavior.
When performing corrections, you’ll use each of the three components for different types of corrections. The best use of Hue sliders is to affect more or less of a particular color: making the green grass less yellow
or making the sky more blue, for example. The Saturation sliders increase or decrease the vibrancy of a color group. Desaturating skin tones (typically orange) helps to rein in overly saturated skin tones. The Luminance controls are commonly used for emphasizing specific areas within the photo based on the premise that your eye will always be drawn to the lightest and highest contrast area within a
photo. Using the Luminance sliders to lighten your subject slightly will make it stand out more clearly from the background.
HSL slider use is very straightforward.
However, it is not always obvious which slider is best for addressing a specific color problem. To adjust the salmon-colored panel on the hot air balloon, should you use the Red, Orange, or Magenta slider?
While you can experiment with the individual sliders, it is faster and more effective to use the TAT introduced earlier with the Tone Curve panel. Selecting the TAT allows you to click the image itself to perform your adjustments. Clicking and dragging up will move the Hue sliders to the right; dragging down will move the Hue sliders to the left.
The brilliance of using the TAT in this case is that Lightroom will adjust multiple sliders simultaneously, if necessary, to perform your HSL adjustments. For the salmon-colored
panel on the balloon, Lightroom adjusted the Red and Orange hues together.
This subtle change created greater visual separation between the red, orange, and salmon-colored parts of the balloon, with the added benefit of making the red less yellow and more distinctive. Additional corrections to the Hue sliders cleaned up the balloon’s green and purple colors, and deepened the blue in the sky at the center of the balloon. These types of corrections are perfectly suited to the HSL tools.
For a deeper understanding of HSL, let’s look at another example that allows us to use HSL to fix problems with the photo and call attention to our main subject.
After correcting this image with the corrections in the Basic panel, we still need to make four corrections in HSL:
■ Remove some yellow from the pine trees in the background.
■ Darken and desaturate the greens in the pine trees and water.
■ Lighten and saturate the blues of the fisherman’s shirt to bring them to the front.
■ Tone down the saturation from the fisherman’s face.
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Step 1 Use the TAT to push the greens from yellow toward green. This makes the color more natural, even though it is still too saturated.
Step 2 Using both the TAT and the sliders directly, pull back the saturation in the greens and yellows to make the trees’ color more accurate, increase the blues and aquas to add saturation to his shirt and fishing line, and decrease the saturation of the orange slightly to remove some color from his face.
Step 3 Decrease the lightness of the greens significantly, and increase the lightness of the aqua to make the shirt stand out.
These are the types of corrections that used to require a high degree of Photoshop skill and a lot of time to correct but that can now be done in a matter of minutes using HSL sliders.
For information on correcting common lens problems and
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adding vignettes, visit www
.perfectdigitalphotography.com/ lightroom.php.
The next chapter will spend more time demonstrating tips you can use to guide your viewer’s eyes through photos. In the meantime, I need to round out the discussion of the global image manipulation tools in Lightroom by discussing the Crop Overlay, Spot Removal, and Red Eye Correction tools.
Lightroom’s Image Manipulation Tools
Photographers of all backgrounds and abilities need effective tools for cropping images.
Although the ideal is always to crop your photos in-camera through careful composition, the reality is that most images need to be cropped either to match the dimensions of
a given print size or to remove extraneous elements from a photo.
While there isn’t enough space in this book for a thorough treatise on cropping, I will say that it is well worth your time to experiment with cropping your images in several different ways to see how much you can remove from your images while still maintaining the key stories within your photos.
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Tip To learn more about cropping, try to track down a copy of Visual Impact In Print, by Gerald Hurley and Angus McDougall. Although the book is out of print, it is still readily available through used booksellers online.
The technical aspects of cropping are far more
straightforward. Lightroom’s Crop Overlay tool is very easy
to use for free-form cropping and for cropping to a specific print size or aspect ratio.
The Crop Overlay tool is located immediately below the histogram in the Develop module on the left side of the row of icons, or you can access it by pressing r.
Once the cropping grid is activated, you can adjust the crop by dragging any of the anchor points on the corner or sides of the grid. To preserve the proportions of the
original image, hold down the shift key while dragging any of the four corner points.
When you are satisfied with your crop, press return (Mac) or enter (Windows), press r, or click Close at the bottom of the Crop & Straighten panel.
Cropping Tips
■ To reposition the cropping grid on the image, click inside the cropping grid and drag the photo into the new position. The trick here is to remember that the crop stays in the same position and you are relocating the photo within the anchored crop grid.
■ To crop and straighten your image simultaneously, move your cursor outside the cropping grid at any of the four corners until the cursor changes from a
diagonal line with two arrows to a bent, double-headed arrow. Click and drag the image at a 45-degree angle down and left to rotate the image clockwise or up and to the right for counterclockwise rotation. A finer grid will temporarily appear to aid alignment.
■
To crop to a specific proportion, choose your desired proportion from the Aspect pull-down menu in the Crop & Straighten panel. Select Custom to crop to sizes not included in the preset menu.
The crop applied in Lightroom is a soft crop—that is, you never throw away any of the pixels outside the cropped area of the photo. This allows you to return to the full image at any time. This is one of the many advantages of working in camera raw.
Spot Removal Tool
Dust is attracted to the sensors on digital SLRs, and many a photographer has lamented having to manually go through and removing dust spots from every image in a shoot. While Lightroom can’t keep your camera’s sensor clean, it does make the process of removing dust spots a little simpler with the Spot Removal tool.
The unique challenge of removing spots caused by dust on the camera’s sensor is that spots appear in the same place on every file. While this makes the spots easy to correct one by one, it is a challenge from a workflow
perspective, because the content of the picture around the dust spots will change from photo to photo. This requires an intelligent tool to remove spots from multiple photos quickly and effectively.
Located next to the Crop Overlay tool, the Spot Removal tool has two retouching modes, Clone and Heal.
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For most of your retouching work, you’ll want to work in the Heal mode, which automatically blends your correction with the surrounding tone, color, and detail to make your corrections invisible. For each spot you remove, you will have a source
and a destination point. The source point contains the “good” pixels that will serve as the well from which Lightroom can draw its corrections. The destination point is the dust spot or area you want to remove. The destination point will receive the correction. For each correction you make with the
Spot Removal tool, both points need to be specified.
To begin, find a spot in an image that needs to be removed. To make the
demonstration clearer, I’ve added some nasty looking dust spots to an image in Photoshop and imported the image into Lightroom. You’ll need to zoom in to your image to look for dust spots. Do this by clicking in the large image preview in the Loupe or Compare view.
Once you identify a dust spot you want to remove, look around for an area of the photo with similar detail and color that you can use for your source point. After you’ve found the most likely candidate, select the Spot Removal tool by pressing n or clicking the Spot Removal tool under the histogram. Next, position the brush over the dust spot and adjust the brush size by pressing the right bracket key (]) for a larger brush and the left bracket key ([) for a smaller brush. A brush
that is slightly larger than the dust spot is ideal.
Click the dust spot, and then drag your cursor over to your clean source point in the image. Lightroom will draw an arrow from your source point to the destination point (dust spot). Ideally, the Spot Removal tool will blend your correction with the surrounding area so well that the only way you can identify the dust spot is by the arrow pointing toward it.
Repeat these steps for each of the dust spots in your image. Be sure to select a new source point for each dust spot. Otherwise, you might create a pattern of clean spots that is easily identified.
The Heal mode in Lightroom works remarkably well in smooth areas without lots of detail. When removing spots near edges the Heal mode tends to smudge the edge, leaving an obvious blotch on the photo. When this occurs, you’ll need to take more control over the retouching by using the Clone mode.
Switch from Heal to Clone mode by clicking the Clone heading at the top of the Spot Edit panel.
Unlike the Heal mode, which automatically blends the tone and color of the detail from the source point onto the destination point, the Clone mode copies
pixels directly from the source point and places them over the destination point.
To demonstrate, I’ll duplicate the photographer in this picture by creating a brush large enough to fully encompass the photographer, and then I’ll move the cursor to my destination point, the blank area to the right of the photographer. Clicking and dragging from the destination point to the
source point clones the photographer onto the ridge.
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When cloning, click and drag from the destination point to the source point. This clones the pixels from the source onto the destination, and here it creates a second photographer on the ridge.
Red Eye Removal
This picture of my nephew, Finn, taken by his proud grandfather is a great snapshot; it’s
nicely composed and shows a great expression, but the red eyes make him look a bit devilish.
Red eye, caused by an on-camera flash bouncing directly off the back of your subject’s eye and returning to the camera, can be quickly fixed using Lightroom’s Red Eye Correction tool.
In the Develop module, select the Red Eye Correction tool from the middle of the row of icons below the histogram. As a
preparatory step, I recommend zooming into your picture before selecting the Red Eye Correction tool to ensure that you remove the red eye entirely.
Center your cursor over the first red eye, and then click and drag from the center of the eye to just past the edge of the red. Lightroom will draw a target over the red area of the photo while you drag and then remove the red eye.
If you need to clean up Lightroom’s correction, adjust the Pupil Size and Darken sliders to tailor your results.
Repeat for the second eye. If one of your corrections is unsuccessful, delete the red-eye correction point by single-clicking inside the point’s outline and then pressing delete.
Changing the size or shape of the initial circle will often clear up even the most stubborn red eye. When you are finished, click the Red
Eye Correction tool icon to close the Red Eye Correction panel.
Context Is King
Instead of covering all tools in the Develop module in this chapter, I’ll discuss tools for
burning and dodging, sharpening, and noise reduction in later chapters. This will help arm you with background on these tools so you will have a comprehensive view of how to use them to make your images pop.
I’ll cover the two remaining selective correction tools, Graduated Filter and Adjustment Brush, in the next chapter, where they fit within the broader context of making selective adjustments to optimize images. Additionally, the Sharpening and Noise Reduction controls are grouped with the Image Sharpening sections in Chapter 16 to teach you what image sharpening is, why it is important, and how to use a two-pass sharpening technique to tease out maximum detail in your photos.
This change allows us to focus our attention on batch processing multiple photos quickly and easily by synchronizing camera
raw corrections and building presets to significantly cut the time you spend correcting images after a shoot.
Correcting Multiple Photos
While the correction techniques demonstrated in this chapter will help you process photos
quickly, correcting the best images individually still amounts to a lot of time. Fortunately, using presets
and batch adjusting photos will trim your image correction time tremendously. For the remainder of this chapter, we’ll focus our efforts on applying the image correction
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techniques to your photos in batches, which can help to expedite your workflow by leaps and bounds.
Synchronizing Corrections
ACR, both in Lightroom and Photoshop, stores your image corrections in a separate text file on your hard drive, typically in the same location as the original image. This text file, often called a sidecar file, is written in
an XML-based language called Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) and stored with the .xmp extension. This file tells ACR how to process your camera raw images. It also makes it easy for ACR to copy corrections from one file and apply them to another photo, since the text file takes up very little space on your hard drive and can be duplicated quickly.
In Lightroom, ACR seamlessly combines the original raw file with the sidecar file to generate the preview you see in Lightroom. That’s why it sometimes takes a moment for your corrections to appear. Lightroom has to access the sidecar file to see what your photos should look like.
Copying these sidecar files and their corresponding corrections between multiple photos is easy. First, correct one image indicative of a group of images with the same white balance, exposure, saturation, and so on. Then select all the images in the group
in the Filmstrip by shift-clicking to select contiguous images or cmd-clicking (Mac) or ctrl-clicking (Windows) to select individual images. Then click the Sync button near the bottom of the rightmost panels in the Develop module.
A Synchronize Settings dialog appears, asking whether you want to copy all the attributes of the first photo in the series or only selected attributes such as White Balance or Spot Removal. For your shoot-specific corrections, you will want to leave most of these corrections checked. For scene-specific corrections, you’ll want to tailor the list to adjust only a handful of corrections.
Click Synchronize, and after a moment, Lightroom updates the preview images to reflect the new changes. As you move on to your next batch of images, you can bypass the Synchronize Settings dialog by clicking the Previous button. This will apply all corrections from the last image to the current image.
Note The Previous button is available only when a single image is selected. The Sync button is available only when multiple images are selected.
Using the Previous and Sync commands is useful when images are grouped close to one another, such as a series of formal pictures at a wedding. What happens when you need to match the settings between
the cake picture you took before the bride and groom arrived with the cake-cutting picture you took several hours later?
In addition to being able to synchronize settings, you can copy and paste camera raw
settings from one image to another. Correct a photo, and then in Lightroom click the Settings menu and click Copy Settings, or
press shift-cmd (Mac) or ctrl-c (Windows).
Navigate to another image that needs the same correction and click the Settings menu and click Paste Settings, or press shift-cmd (Mac) or ctrl-v (Windows).
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Tip You can also access the Copy and Paste Settings options by right-clicking an image in the Filmstrip and then clicking Develop Settings and then Copy Settings.
By synching and copying camera raw settings, you can quickly perform your shoot- specific and scene-specific corrections. For corrections you perform even more frequently, such as camera-specific corrections, it’s worth creating a preset that stores your changes and allows you to apply them to images with a single mouse click. A good rule of thumb
for working efficiently in Lightroom is to build a preset any time you perform the same correction twice.
You’ve already learned how to create presets for file naming and adding your metadata. Now let’s create a Develop preset that adds a baseline set of corrections for your camera.
Building Camera-Specific Presets
As you gain experience working with ACR, you’ll find that you consistently perform a base set of corrections for all your images. To make your workflow more efficient, you’ll want
to save these corrections as a Develop preset that you can quickly apply in the Develop module or as a baseline set of corrections when importing images from your memory card.
Before creating a preset, I like to review a number of my previously corrected photos. In doing so, I find that I typically add Vibrance and Saturation, boost the Contrast slightly, and pull back from the default Blacks setting.
I wrote down the common corrections so I’ll remember them when developing the preset. My new baseline set of corrections for this camera will be this:
Blacks: 0
Contrast: 37
Vibrance: 15
Saturation: 6
This isn’t a strong correction, yet it is a step in the right direction. I expect to refine this as I continue to process images with the preset. I may find that the correction is too strong in some areas and not strong enough in others, so I may need to add HSL or Tone Curve corrections to make it more useful.
Think of this first preset as a starting point for your custom camera defaults.
To create a preset, select an image that hasn’t received any corrections. To be sure, click the Reset button at the bottom of the rightmost panels in the Develop module.
Next, apply your corrections to the photo. Once you’ve completed your baseline corrections, open the Presets panel on the left side of the Develop module and click the plus (+) sign in the upper-right corner to add a new preset. Title your preset CameraModel_ Defaultsv1 to indicate that this is the first set of baseline corrections. Be sure to check only the boxes in the New Develop Preset dialog for your baseline corrections. For my preset, this includes the Black Clipping, Contrast, Saturation, and Vibrance.
For subsequent refinements to this preset, title them v2, v3, and so forth. This helps
you keep track of your changes. Versioning your corrections instead of choosing the same filename each time allows you to revert to an earlier version if you are dissatisfied with new additions to your preset and compare the same photo with different presets.
The goal of developing presets is to tailor Lightroom to match your aesthetic tastes. You can also create content-specific presets for black and white conversions, sepia
toning, saturated landscape images, or neutral portraits. You can always perform additional corrections to supplement your preset or revert back to the original file if need be.
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Applying Your Preset
You can apply a new preset to photos in several ways:
■
For a single photo, click the preset name in the Presets panel in the Develop module.
■ To apply your preset to multiple photos outside of the Develop module or in the Filmstrip, select the images you wish to correct, right-click the images to open the context menu, click Develop Settings, and then click the preset name.
■ To apply your preset to an entire shoot upon import, select your preset from the Develop Settings pop-up menu in the Import Photos dialog.
Working with presets makes your workflow more automated and efficient. It eliminates many of the tedious tasks in the digital darkroom and allows you to make your photos look the way you want them to, not the way the camera manufacturer or Adobe thinks they should look.
Adobe recently released the DNG Profile Editor for use in Lightroom 2
This chapter introduced you to the controls in the Develop module; helped you adjust the tone, color, and contrast of your photos; and helped you develop efficient routines for batch correcting multiple files. In the next chapter, we’ll go into even greater depth on optimizing a single photo in Adobe Photoshop. These corrections will build upon
the work you’ve performed here and take your
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and Photoshop CS4 that allows you
corrections even further to help your photos
to create custom looks for your digital photos. These custom camera profiles allow greater control than the presets described here.
While they are not difficult to create, Adobe recommends the DNG Profile Editor for intermediate/advanced users. To view a tutorial on using the DNG Profile Editor to create custom camera profiles, visit www
.perfectdigitalphotography.com/lightroom.php.
stand out from the crowd.
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H OW T O : M AKING THE N E W T HREE -M INUTE C ORRECTION
The techniques presented in this chapter may initially appear to be complex and time consuming. Be assured, however, that once you become accustomed to using the tools, you can correct an image using the full suite of Lightroom’s editing tools in three minutes or less. In this How To, I’ll explain the thought processes behind the corrections I used to take a photo from bland to rich, vibrant, and full of interest. This How To is focused on helping you see the big picture and learn which tools to choose and why. Specific instructions on using each of these tools is contained throughout this chapter.
Overcast, drab days can be great for highlighting subtle colors in a scene, like the streaks of lichen on rocks and the bright green of a climber’s sweater.
Unfortunately, they don’t always come out the way you’d like in-camera. Looking at this photo, I see several problems that need correcting:
background. This makes the picture feel flat and two-dimensional.
■ Climber Since the climber is a small subject in a large scene, I need to bring him to the front
by lightening and increasing the saturation in his shirt so he is the first thing you see in the photo.
With these goals in mind, let’s get started with the corrections.
Step 1
The first step is to correct the photo’s white balance using the White Balance tool, followed by a manual
correction to the WB sliders.
■ White balance It was a cloudy overcast day, but I remember the orange of the rocks, the green of the trees, and the yellow-green streaks of lichen being far more prominent than the original suggests.
■ Shadows The right side of the picture is a bit of a muddled mess. The trees in the foreground aren’t visually distinct from the trees in the
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Step 2
The overall exposure is good, but a small Recovery slider adjustment to eliminate clipping in the background, fol-
lowed by a boost to the Fill Light and Blacks sliders, both lightens and increases contrast in the shadows, making the trees more distinct. I also increase the Brightness in the
photo to make the picture appear more open.
Step 4
Next, I set out to improve the visual separation between the trees in the background and the foreground by adding contrast to the shadows using the Tone Curve. Because
the foreground and background trees are very close in tone, I modify the Split control in the shadow region to fine-tune the Darks and Shadows regions.
Step 3
After zooming in to 100 percent for a subtle Clarity cor- rection to improve the contrast on the climber, I increase the color using the Vibrance and Saturation sliders. Once again, the ratio of three-parts Vibrance to one-part Satu- ration works well. I’ll perform additional saturation adjust-
ments with the HSL slider later. This correction is intended to set the photo’s overall color.
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This adjustment allowed me to control the background trees with the Shadows slider and the foreground trees with the Darks slider. This Tone Curve adjustment is impossible to
replicate using only the sliders in the Basic panel and is a part of why mastering the Tone Curve is so valuable.
Step 5
To further increase the separation between foreground and background, I use the HSL sliders to make the background trees bluer and darker while boosting the lightness and
saturation of the yellows, oranges, and reds, making the cliff, climber, and foreground trees more prominent in the photo.
At this point, the photo feels a little too bright overall, so I
go back to the Brightness slider and darken it three points— a subtle but noticeable improvement.
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At this point, I’ve addressed my three goals and improved the appearance of the photo noticeably. There are a few minor, selective corrections I’d like to make before the photo is ready for print, but I’ll save those for the next chapter