16. THE POWERFUL FOUR—EXPLORING THE BASIC PANEL

THE FIRST FOUR sliders in the Tone section of the Basic panel can take care of an extremely large amount of processing in your pictures. If I look back at the last 50 shoots I’ve done, I can saypretty confidently that I’ve been able to edit my pictures completely with these four sliders about 80 percent of the time. And the even better news is that they’re pretty straightforward to understand and easy to use.

Exposure and Contrast—The Bottle of Water

When you make a picture, you are, in essence, making a recording of the scene in front of you. Your camera registers your scene in a file that contains a range of pixels from extremely dark all the way to extremely bright. When you bring the image into Lightroom, the program tries to give you an accurate readout of what you captured. To do this, it creates a histogram.

In extremely simplified terms, a histogram is a glorified bar chart. The chart records information from the darkest of tones to the brightest of tones. The only problem here is that there are so many tones (about 255 of them) in such a small space that the bars are literally rubbing up against one another. The histogram shows the entire tonal range of your picture.

I like to picture the histogram like a half-full bottle of water. For the most part, you want to try to make sure some water is touching the entire bottom of the bottle. One of the ways you can do that is by tipping the bottle one way or another—that’s exposure.

The Exposure slider in Lightroom controls how bright an image is (Figures 16.2 and 16.3). Dragging it to the right makes the image brighter, and dragging it to the left makes it darker. Tilt the bottle to one side, and the water slides in one direction. Tilt it to the other side, and the water goes in the other direction. Adjusting the exposure is your first option.

Contrast, by contrast (I know, very punny), works by increasing the distance between the shadow and highlight areas in a picture. So by making the shadows darker and the highlights brighter, you increase the contrast of the image (Figures 16.4 and 16.5). It’s the equivalent of going into the center of the bottle of water and parting it a little. It’s a split.

Figure 16.1 An imaginary Excel file showing the tonal data of a picture. It would be completely accurate if cameras had Microsoft Excel installed, which they don’t.

Figures 16.2–16.3 Exposure makes things brighter and darker, but that is just part of the picture. #PunsRule

Figures 16.4–16.5 Before and after, with contrast parting the water. I’ll forgo the abundantly plain religious reference I could have made here and just go with “split the water, just like Moana.” #SpoilerAlert

Rather than overburdening myself on the technical side of things, I like looking at the pictures I want to work with in this manner—tip or split (Figure 16.6). When I first start making a change to a picture, I’m just trying to get enough of the tonal data in the correct range and make sure that no parts of the water bottle are completely empty. Simplifying this process helps because sometimes you stare at a picture and you’re not quite sure what’s wrong with it. You know that it doesn’t look good, but you don’t really know where to begin. Now you have a basic question you can ask yourself when you look at the histogram: tip or split?

Shadows and Highlights

There are times when the picture you’re working on has a problem in just one specific region. For example, you’ve taken a picture of a sunset and you notice that some ground elements are too dark to see. Or you’ll attempt to take a picture and some of the elements in the picture are too bright, showing up as flashing highlights in your DSLR.

These kinds of problems are usually caused by the limitations of your DSLR’s sensor compared to what you can see. The human eye is capable of seeing both the sunset and the ground in perfect exposure; it has a higher dynamic range of sensitivity. Camera sensors have not been able to reproduce this to date, but they are slowly catching up.

Thankfully, the Shadows and Highlights sliders in Lightroom can help us get some of this detail back. If an image is too dark in the shadow area, drag the Shadows slider to the right to make the image brighter (Figures 16.7 and 16.8). If the image suffers from a blown out highlight, drag the Highlights slider over to the left to make the highlight area darker.

The question here is, just how far do you drag the sliders? At the very top of the Histogram you’ll see two arrows. The arrow on the left side is for the shadow clipping. If you click on this to turn it on (or hover over it for a temporary look), the areas of the image that are too dark to show information will have a blue overlay (Figure 16.9). If you click on (or hover over) the arrow on the right, you’ll see the highlight clipped areas with a red overlay (Figure 16.10). In these areas that are too dark and too bright, there is no data to show any visual information. This is a bad thing. Your goal is to adjust the Highlights and Shadows sliders so that these warnings go away. Once they do, you can play around with them to taste.

There are two things to keep in mind here:

• If you drag the sliders to their extreme limits, you’ll produce a very unnatural effect. Be sparing with how you use them.
• If regions of your picture have been extremely underexposed, brightening the shadow areas will introduce a bit of noise to the picture. You may need to dial in more noise reduction later on.

Figure 16.6 If you were staring at this picture and its histogram, would you choose to tip or split?

Figures 16.7–16.8 The most powerful part about the Shadows slider isn’t what it does to the shadows; it’s how it leaves the rest of the image alone.

Figure 16.9 The shadow clipping overlay in Lightroom is blue.

Figure 16.10 The highlight clipping overlay is red. You definitely want to avoid seeing the shadow or highlight clipping overlays.