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Editing A Photograph: Detail Panel

Lesson 17 from: Adobe Lightroom Classic CC Workflow for Photographers

Daniel Gregory

Editing A Photograph: Detail Panel

Lesson 17 from: Adobe Lightroom Classic CC Workflow for Photographers

Daniel Gregory

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Lesson Info

17. Editing A Photograph: Detail Panel

Inside the detail panel, add some finesse with the sharpness and noise reduction tools inside the detail panel. Daniel answers basic questions like how much sharpness is too much and what the radius slider does.

Lesson Info

Editing A Photograph: Detail Panel

we're gonna move into the detail panel, which is where sharpening and noise reduction are sharpening, is about getting edges into the photograph, and we see contrast on edges where the light side of the pixels bright in the dark side of the pixels, darker. So what sharpening doesn't goes in and accentuates those The detail panel here is really about. In the traditional role of sharpening, we sharpen three times We do what's called input sharpening. We do creative sharpening, and then we do output sharp output. Sharpen his easiest Explain, Inc It's paper spreads out and the sharp innings about offsetting the spread of the ink, creating sharpening We do with a brush or a grating, and we're like, Oh, I want to go make the eyes a little more punchy so I paint in some sharpness there. The detail panel sharpness is about the input sharpening, and it's about getting the base sharpening applied to the image cameras that don't have anti alias seen filters and some of the newer cameras that are ...

really sharp will need less of this. If you've got great lenses will be less of this other images. They need more and every image gets a little bit of finessing the sharpening. So everybody says, Well, what I what I put in? What's the sharpening value? Well, I don't know if there's a lot of small edges. You might need different sharpening. And if there's hardly any edges, do you think about a baby? You probably don't want to aggressively sharpen a baby photograph where if you shot somebody who is Ah, Harley Biker and they've got all these great wrinkles in the hair and the beard, you might aggressively sharpen that to really accentuate that. So each image kind of gets treated independently. Now, I mentioned those all option keys. One of the things that people really struggle within sharpening is I could don't know what to look for and what to see. So the health option key here, just like in the sliders above, gave us an all of you. We get a great all of you here as well, so you want to be zoomed in at 1 to for sharpening. You can't see sharpening when you're zoomed out farther than that, and the effect we can't see it on the screen to know how much is too much so we want to be zoomed into 1 to 1. This dialog box right here you can click on the little square here and target. This is showing you a 1 to 1 view. And if you're not zoomed in at 1 to and this is collapsed, will give you a warning. So if you collapse this down and you zoom out, you'll get a little warning. And to tell you moved a 1 to 1 so you couldn't see the value. The amount is the strength of Scharping is applied to. And everybody always ask because it goes up to 150. I don't know why. I always think it's, you know, in my story, I tell myself, is that used to go to 100%. And then somebody said, That's not enough. And they went spinal tap on it. So it goes to 100 50. But I don't know why. It's 150. Um, the radius is how wide can the effect go across the pixels? What's weird about pixels is we think of them is like units of one like way draw pixel. We see a pixel, it's one. Well, we can actually go inside the pixel so we can actually sharpen within the pixel because the math let's get into that So we can be. We can have a radius of less than a pixel. So even though we're sharpening pixels, it's less than a pixel. Photo shop will let you sharpen from zero to a trillion. I don't actually sharpen anything. Light room will contain you down to three, which is good. Keeps you from doing anything super egregious. The detail slider does two things. If the number is above 50 it sharpens really fine detail. So high density are, ah, high frequency image you go. About 50 will help going to grab every one of those little edges. It might help in this photograph with some of the grass down here, cause it's a bunch of really small, fine edges. If it's below 50 it helps minimize the halo that Scharping is going to create, and then masking is gonna help me target based on the edges within the photograph. Because remember, sharpening is about edges. This photograph has a lot of blue, smooth sky in it. If there's noise up there, or if there's dust, or if there's anything kind of weird up there. The Scharping is gonna grab it and accentuate it and pull my eye from So the masking is gonna let us come in and tighten that down a little bit to make sure we just stay on our edges. So that's what the three sliders do. So let's jump in and take a look at those so it zoom back into our 1 to 1. If I hold down the L key and Option King, click on the amount you now concede, Ian, the image black and white, We're not distracted by the color you can see Here is no sharpening. And if you look at the grass in the foreground, you see, it gets really soft. And as the sharpening goes up, I start to get some more clarity in their punch in there. If I grab the radius and hold it down now you can see how wide that effect is. So you can see. Remember the light side of the pixels get lighter. The dark side gets darker. So here I'm on a radius of one and you could see as I shrink the radius, the halo gets to be less you look along the horizon line, you'll see the halos getting less. If I increase, you see the halo gets whiter. We don't want to see the halo. The goal is not to see your sharpening. When you look at a photograph, you're like, Well, that's digital. Usually it's sharpening has been egregiously done. It's one of the tale tell signs between film and digital. So if I were to give you a rule of thumb, if you're the landscape person, it's 0.6 toe one. And if you're a portrait person, it's 0.91 Oda. 1213 So you're missing every little wrinkle, but you're still getting some of the peace is adjusted. The amount is really to taste. So usually, you know, if I was gonna give you a rule of thumb and be somewhere between 30 and 60 70 that's gonna change by the image gonna change by the camera. I've got an old digital camera that needs more sharpening. My new camera needs very little sharpening so sharp coming in, sharpen it even more. It starts to get a little wonky. Now, the masking I zoom out and the masking is one of the ones that I think if you're gonna do sharpening and apply it, this is the one slider to make sure you use every time because this is what's gonna allow you to target it in. If you do this, you can't see anything. But if you hold the altar option key down, it's going to show you where it's gonna ply the sharpening. Its using the same metaphor for masking. We haven't Photoshopped. White reveals the effect Black will hide the effect. So I dragged this to the right. You see, it's starting to grab edges. Anything that's black is gonna get no sharpening applied to it. Anything that's white is going to get the Scharping apply to it. The farther I go, the more and more it looks for edges. So now I've started to pull out even some of the texture and the clouds from that Scharping effect, and you can see that the horizon lines getting a much stronger effect on the top of that clouds getting a stronger effect on some of the other A. So it's kind of gray. It's getting a partial effect applied in this case, I kind of want a little that texture applied into the clouds. That's the appropriate mount there. Noise reduction. I'll walk for the tools. Uh, basically noise. Let me get a high. I eso image here. Let's get a reference view. Ah, so there's a bunch of weird kind of colors. Make it a good spot here. As I move the slider, you could see I'm actually removing some of the color that's in there that rose red dots. And there's some blue dots and green dots in there. That's color noise, so you might have no ways because it's a high I eso image. The signal wasn't quite strong enough. Color noise got generated easily. Looks like kinda like holiday lights throwing up on the screen. You'll see it in the shadow more than the highlight, but it's across the entire image. You're just going to remove the color slider until that those colors disappear once they're gone. Like right there at that point that those red dots disappear. Anything above 20 is not doing any more of the noise reduction. It's already done its job. So as soon as you see that color disappear, stop the detail and smoothness. Lighter is to do this it's got a blur that color out. So the smoothness is how aggressive is that blur happening? How much of that color could kind of lead back in? And the detail is how much detail to try to hold in that blurred so less aggressively blurt somewhere else. For the most part, unless you see something weird like something, it's really, really soft or really, really weird leaving those about them. You'll make a little adjustment of those, but often times, particularly the color slider. You don't have to do a lot with that. The Luminant slider is You've got kind of a static across the images. I'm moving out, sharpening its I move Lou Minutes, Uh, let's see if we can find a better spot to see that. Actually, let me grab a different image to so you can see the luminous noise here. OK, Mommy's zoom in a little tighter, and we believe they're easier to see. And then we'll be good. Okay. As I move the color slider, you can see there's a little bit of color in this area. I move that color slider. That color falls out thing kind of staticky gray stuff on there that's the luminous noise. So as I move the Luminant slider you see that wall starts to smooth out is that disappears? So what it's doing is blurring out that effect I would blurt to about there, where I still have a little luminous noise because noise creates sharpness, creates the illusion of sharpness. And I don't have to worry about over Scharping's all removed some nearly all the noise. But what happens if you remove too much? If I come down here to his face, you'll see this. He gets a plastic artificial nous to him, and so you want to make sure that removing it doesn't make it look fake. But I remove enough so that it's not a distraction, and that's kind of your line. That's actually my question. So then that fixed later so that you can have is like You don't want it to smooth like it looks plastic for the person specifically with people. I find that that's the case. So a couple of options you have for somebody's faces, I would leave it. Um, if it was real bad in the image, I would probably go a little far on the face so in this case I would for the Emmys. Let's see, like I wanted a pretty aggressive noise reduction, and it's starting to get a plastic he there and then in the adjustment brush I can paint. And then I can add some noise back in so I could come back and apply a little noise back in and where that reduction was and see if I could fix that if it still looks really odd that I'm into photo shop, but I'm using some of the masking tools and Photoshopped that let me deal with that in Photoshopped. But in light room that would be the way I would deal with that would be removed and then put some back in in the skin tones or reverse that and painted out of everything. That's not the skin tones, whichever was the easier at it. Wind win what I do. Noise reduction in terms of the actual workflow. I like to get the base exposure of stuff done, and I used to tell everybody, Oh, do your noise reduction and sharpening first. But lately I've decided it's easier sometimes, once the photographs got kind of the right luminosity on it to see that affect a little bit easier. So it doesn't actually matter when you do it. Um, but I usually like to do it earlier in the process than later. Before I go in any regional or local adjustment, cause if I am gonna add regional sharpening, sharpening will multiply on itself. Then if I come back and adjust that slider later, I might have to go back and do a re edit, so that would be the piece there.

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

I watched this course live. Really good!. Of course, I like all of Daniel Gregory's classes. It's a real treasure when one finds a really good teacher who thinks like oneself. I thought that I already knew Lr well so I was really surprised about how much I learned from this course. I learned so many ways to improve my workflow efficiency.

Anne Dougherty
 

I was impressed by the amount of information covered in depth, and by Mr Gregory’s teaching style. I’m somewhat new to Lightroom and found his explanations of its capabilities, and why you would use it rather than Photoshop for specific processes, enormously helpful. I especially appreciated his lessons covering printing. This is invaluable information. Great class.

Warren Gedye
 

This was a great course. Daniel certainly explains it well and in terms I can understand! Super worth it and learnt loads of new tricks! Great job!!

Student Work

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