White balance refers to the color of light in a photo.
Exposure is determined by how much light your camera’s sensor captures and is measured in f-stops (indicating how much light your camera’s lens lets in). In fact, the slider simulates stops on a camera: a setting of +1.00 is like exposing one stop over the metered exposure in-camera. In Lightroom, the Exposure slider affects midtone brightness (in portraits, that’s skin tones). Drag to
Contrast adjusts the difference in brightness between the darkest and lightest tones in your picture. When you drag this slider to the right (increasing contrast), you “stretch out” the histogram’s data, creating darker blacks and brighter whites. It’s like parting (or joining) the middle of the histogram.
As a general rule, you want both your shadows and highlights to have as much detail as possible without affecting the rest of the image.
The Highlights and Shadows sliders let you recover details in areas that may be clipped. Clipping occurs when areas in the picture are too dark or too light. If an area is too dark (sometimes referred to as blocked), there is not enough data in the shadows to show detail—it’s too black, too muddy, and no good. If there is an area that is clipped in the highlights (sometimes referred to as blown out), it is so bright that there is no detail
If we understand that a histogram is a representation of pixel data across the range of tones in a picture, then it’s a good idea for us to establish what those limits are within that range. The whites and blacks are the brightest and the darkest parts of the picture. Setting their values sets the “limits” of your tonal range.
This is extremely oversimplified, but think of a histogram as kind of a chart. On the left side of the histogram are pixels of 0% luminance. On the right are pixels of 100% luminance. The white area is showing you color values from 0 to 255, each of them from darkest to lightest.
Saturation doesn’t take into account whether a color is overrepresented. It’s an easy way to make a photo look too colorful and unrealistic.
Setting the picture’s contrast affects the shadows and highlights, and the whites and blacks. The one part that doesn’t get a lot of attention is the midtones, and sometimes, adding a little punch in the midtones is very helpful.
The Clarity slider controls midtone contrast. It’s great for adding a bit of a gritty element to your pictures—things like metals, textures, brick walls, and hair all can do with a little bit of a clarity boost. For the young girl’s hair, it worked well.
Think of it this way: Images are composed of high, medium, and low frequencies. When you add adjustments like sharpening to a picture, you are invariably affecting the edges of things in that picture. These are the high frequency areas of a picture. Adjust it too much, and you’ll see those enhancements creep into midtone and shadow areas of an image.
The Texture slider allows you to add this detail into the medium frequencies of the picture but does not affect the lower frequencies. While clarity does a good job of enhancing the midtone contrast, it tends to affect more regions of the picture. Texture looks a little like clarity when added to an image, but you’ll notice that you get all of the benefit of the details but none of the negative effects of excessive clarity.
Saturation doesn’t take into account whether a color is overrepresented. It’s an easy way to make a photo look too colorful and unrealistic. Vibrance should really be called “Smart Saturation.” Drag the Vibrance slider to the right, and any underrepresented colors are intensified more.
Keep in mind, though, when you’re using the Clarity slider, that out-of-focus areas in a picture generally don’t look good with clarity applied to them. Use it sparingly, or use the effect attached to a mask.
The Amount slider is pretty straightforward: it dictates how much sharpening you want to apply to the picture.
Hold down the Option/Alt key as you drag the slider. Drag it to the left, and your image turns gray; drag it to the right, and you start seeing more edge information. The visible edge information is the area that is sharpened. Anything that’s gray won’t be sharpened.
The Detail slider brings out more texture or detail in a picture as you drag it to the right.
you want to limit how the sharpening is applied, use the Masking slider. It creates a black-and-white mask, where the black areas won’t be sharpened and the white areas will be sharpened, confining your sharpening to only the edges.
The Radius slider lets you change how far from the center of the pixel you want to apply that sharpening.
Noise reduction brings back some smoothness to a file with a high ISO, but it’s also something you have to do if you excessively sharpen a picture. The more you sharpen a picture, the more noise that gets introduced, especially if you use the Detail slider. So every time you go into the Detail panel’s sharpening section and create a lot of sharpening, add a little bit of noise reduction to counterbalance the effect.
All lenses exhibit some trademark problem: distortion, dark edges (vignetting), or the appearance of chromatic aberrations (colored pixels that appear along the edges of objects). To correct these problems, we have the Lens Corrections and Transform panels.
Post-crop vignetting is a great feature when you want to add a focus to the center of the picture, but it requires a lot of care or you risk your image looking kitschy.
Grain is a little more straightforward. You can control the amount of grain added to your image, how big the individual grains are, and how jagged they are. The grain looks pretty realistic and can add extra punch to images, especially if you’re working in black and white.
Very few images exploit the full range of possible brightness tones, from the lightest lights to the darkest darks. Often, you’ll have more info on one end of the histogram than the other, meaning that either the highlights or the shadows are well exposed and full of detail, but not both. That’s because digital cameras have a limited dynamic range; they can collect only so much data in a single shot. If you have a scene with both light and dark areas, you have to choose which area to expose correctly. In other words, you can’t expose for both areas in the same photo.
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