Simple Lightroom Image Fixing Workflow

Eredeti: Digital Photography School, Helen Bradley

Whether it’s a photograph of mom that you’re sending to her or an image that you’re preparing to print, most photos can use some fixing before they’re ready to be shared or used.

Here’s a quick and easy Lightroom workflow that I apply to most every day images before sending them to family and friends, posting them to Flickr or my blog or printing them for a paper based photography project.

If you’re new to photo editing or to Lightroom, this step by step process should get you on the way to fixing your images.

Step 1

The first step to fixing an image is typically to straighten and crop it so that you remove any areas that you don’t want to include in the final image.

To help you apply the rule of thirds to your crop, in Lightroom the crop grid, by default, shows a ‘rule of thirds’ grid over your photo.

Place an object of interest in the photograph over the intersection between the gridlines or place the horizon or another strong horizontal line along one of the horizontal lines to achieve a pleasing composition.

Here I’ve cropped and sized the image to place the waterline along the top line of the grid.

Step 2

Adjust the Exposure by dragging on the Exposure slider. This image is a little underexposed and the histogram falls well short of reaching the far right of the chart area. Increasing the Exposure fixes this.

Step 3

To test to see if you need to use the Recovery slider to recover blown highlights, hold the Alt key (Option on the Mac) as you click on the Recovery slider handle. If you see light areas on the image, drag to the right to recover them.

Here I artificially increased the Exposure before doing this to show you what the image will look like if you need to use the Recovery slider. If you see something like this on your image and if it is nicely exposed, drag the Recovery slider to the right to remove/reduce these areas.

Step 4

Hold the Alt key (Option on the Mac) and drag the Black slider to the right until you see the smallest hint of black appearing in the image. You use this slider to ensure that your image has some blacks in it.

By now the histogram should extend to the very left and right of the chart area ensuring that your image has a good tonal range.

Step 5

If you have some areas that are clipped you will see white arrows in the histogram area. You can hold your mouse over these to see the clipped areas on the image. If areas are clipped you will have blown out highlights or plugged shadows which are generally undesirable.

Here I have over adjusted the Black Clipping slider so there are some plugged shadows that you can see colored blue on the image.

Step 6

You can use the White Balance tools to adjust the white balance in the image. Drag the Temp slider to the right to add warmth to the image or to the left to make it colder. Dragging to the right warms the image by adding peach/orange tones to it and dragging to the left cools the image by adding blue tones.

If you’re shooting in RAW or DNG then there will be a range of options available from the White Balance dropdown list.

Here I’ve added a lot of warmth to the image to show what is possible.

Step 7

You can also adjust Brightness and Contrast although I prefer to skip these adjustments and add some Clarity to adjust and sharpen the midtones and some Vibrance to boost the color in the undersatuated areas in the image.

From here I would sharpen the image and it’s ready to go.

Lightroom: Embracing Brightness

Eredeti: Digital Photography School, Helen Bradley

In an earlier blog post, I discussed a typical Lightroom workflow and I advocated using the Exposure slider to lighten an image. I also said that I preferred to skip using the Lightroom Brightness slider altogether.

I’ve recently changed my mind about the Brightness slider and I’d encourage you, if you haven’t already done so, to experiment with it on your images.

However, before we begin a word of warning about Brightness/Contrast in general. Brightness adjustments in some programs aren’t as good as in others. If you’re using Photoshop CS2 or earlier, for example, use Curves or Levels to lighten an image not Brightness. In Photoshop CS3 the Brightness/Contrast tool was re-engineered and instead of adjusting all pixels equally as it used to do with the result that highlight areas were routinely destroyed in the process, it now protects the lightest pixels as it lightens the image. Before trusting your image to a program’s Brightness and Contrast tool, check your histogram before and after using it and make sure you aren’t blowing out highlights in your quest for a lighter/brighter image.

Now, back to Lightroom.

Take a look at the image shown here. If I leave Brightness at the default value – which for my camera is +50 but which may be different for yours, and if I crank up the Exposure to the maximum value, a lot of the lighter pixels in the image get blown out.

Of course I would never adjust an image to this value but it’s a useful exercise to see how Exposure works.

When I do the same thing in reverse and leave Exposure at its default value of 0 and crank Brightness up to its highest value only a small number of pixels are blown out.

Using the Brightness slider lightens the image while at the same time protecting the lightest pixels in the image from being blown out as a consequence.

So what does this knowledge mean to you in a typical Lightroom workflow? Well, my new Lightroom workflow for lightening and brightening an image involves using the Exposure slider first of all to adjust the overall exposure of the image but I stop short of where too many highlights get blown out.

Next I test the Recovery tool on the image. Hold the Alt key as you drag on the Recovery slider to check to see if there are blown out highlights (they show as varying colors on the black background). Drag to the right to see if they can be recovered . If they can’t be recovered ease off on the Exposure and check again.

If I have shadow areas in the image that are still overly dark I’ll adjust these using the Fill Light slider. This tool helps recover detail hidden in shadows, but it’s not a tool I’d use for an overall brightening effect.

Finally, I use the Brightness slider to increase the overall image brightness. Somewhere between the Exposure slider and the Brightness slider is the sweet spot for lightening an image.

From there, the rest of my workflow is pretty much as I detailed it in the earlier post.

While we’re on the topic of the Brightness slider, check out the default value on an unedited image so you know where your starting point is. For most raw images, Lightroom defaults to a Brightness of +50 and Contrast of +25 as its starting point.

Also take care when working with images you had processed in Lightroom 2 with Lightroom 2 settings. When you upgrade to Lightroom 3, you’ll have a choice of Updating your images to the new Lightroom 2010 Process. My experience is that this can result in a significant lightening of images which were processed in Lightroom 2 so I apply this update on an image by image basis so I can reverse it or adjust for it as I go if necessary.

It’s About Light

Eredeti: Digital Photography School, Lin Junjie

When I first started out in photography many years ago, I didn’t quite appreciate how important light is to photography.

In fact the young and ambitious me often fought against light.

I refused to be restricted by something as fickle as the weather and light. After all, a good photographer should be able to make anything look good—whether it’s noon, sunrise or dusk, right?

The result of my foolhardiness was that I often end up with photos with highlights that are too bright and shadows that are too dark for my camera to handle because I shot them at 12 noon. Or worse—I end up making my human subjects look like racoons because of the high overhead noon light.

Due to the poor lighting I shot the photos under, I wasn’t comfortable showing others the photos that I’ve just taken on my camera because they didn’t look good without extensive post-processing.

Truth as I learnt is that even the most mundane things on a simple handphone camera can look good in great light, and they can look really good right away without needing any or much post-processing at all.

As a photographer who understands how light can make or break a photo, I now only choose to photograph my day shots at two timings of the day known as the magic hours (or golden hours). In practical terms, they’re basically an hour or two after sunrise, and an hour or two before sunset. The exact timing will depend on where you are and which part of the year you are in.

Here in Singapore where we’re situated close to the equator, and the magic hours are almost always from 7-8.30am and 5-6.30pm. At these hours, light is most interesting because of three reasons:

1. light is directional and that provides interesting side lighting that can emphasize shape and texture, in addition to casting long, interesting shadows of your subjects,
2. light has a more warmer and more attractive colour than midday sun (thus the name ‘golden hour’), and
3. light quality is softer and produces highlights and shadows that your camera can deal with more easily than the extremely contrasty light produced by the high midday sun.

To illustrate, I was photographing the temple ruins at Ayutthaya in Thailand sometime late last year. Although I had chosen to shoot in the evening magic hours, the strong cloud cover that day would constantly block and diffuse the warm evening sun.

However I knew I would get a dramatically different—and better—shot once the sun breaks through the clouds and lit the scene in front of me.

Sure enough, patience paid off and I got myself the shot I was looking for. The shots were taken less than 2 minutes apart but made a world of a difference.

While I am not usually inspired to photograph my neighbourhood in the same way as I would photograph the world heritage site of the temple ruins in Ayutthaya, mundane everyday sights in my neighbourhood can look gorgeous in the right light.

On one occasion on my way back home, I saw how the evening light was casting beautiful shadows of the trees on the apartment blocks nearby. I quickly returned home, grabbed my camera and took two a few shots of the scenes around me.

Within a span of 18 seconds, I had two completely different photos of the same scene.

So while choosing to shoot at the magic hours dramatically increases your chances of getting a good photo, you’re still very much subjected to the weather and cloud cover. But if you choose to fight against light and photograph at the less ideal timings, chances of you getting a good photo are probably terribly slim.

In the world of photography today where people obsess themselves over expensive gear and equipment, light is probably the most understated part of photography.

I often tell my students that learning to appreciate and exploit great light is probably the single, biggest improvement you can do to your photography, even more so than spurlging their paycheque on the expensive lens they’re eyeing after.

Lin Junjie is a professional photographer and photography instructor based in Singapore. He conducts photography workshops and courses in Singapore at Phocus Academy.