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Editing with Shadows/Highlights Adjustment

Sometimes they're other adjustments you want, because if you're working on the extremes of brightness, meaning things that are close to black were close toe white, it's hard to be really precise with the adjustment you're doing. And there are other adjustments that specialize in working on those areas. So in this case, if you look at the waterfall, this is in Iceland and the waterfall is close toe white. And if you look at the rock that's in the lower right of the image, that's pretty darn dark. It's getting close to black, and in those cases, sometimes using curves could be frustrating because it's too easy to get all the water fall to become white or just to make a non smooth adjustment. It's when you're in the middle of the curve that it's really much easier. The extremes that the ends are more difficult to control. So when that's the case, I end up choosing image adjustments. Shadow highlight Now Shadow highlight, unfortunately, is not available as an adjustment layer, so I have to...

choose it from here. In case you're not aware, there are two types of adjustments. One would be in a direct adjustment, which is what you get from this menu image adjustments that applies directly to the layer that's currently active in When you're done, it's permanent. So if you save and closed the image, open it a month later. There's no way to undo the adjustment, whereas an adjustment layer is a layer sitting there floating above your image, and you could always open the image you know a year later and just throw the adjustment away. The image would return to the way it used to look, but there are certain adjustments that are not available. This adjustment layers and shadow highlights is one of them. When you first open it and look like this, and it'll automatically assume that you want to adjust your shadows so this slider, called shadows, will be turned up. I'll turn it all the way down. Then, if I turn preview off and on, you'll see it's not doing anything to my image at the moment. If I bring up the shadows slider, it's gonna brighten up the dark part of the picture. What's nice about it, though, is it's gonna make sure that any area that's black remains black, so it's not going to just start looking like a ghostie kind of weirdness. Then we have a highlight slider. If I bring it up, it's gonna darken the highlights so you could potentially more easily see the detail that was in that area. But right now, with just those two sliders, it's not giving me too much control. Well, there's a check box at the bottom called Show More Options. And if I were to turn that on now, I have more control. Let's see what control it gave us. Well, we still have amount, which is the amount of a change we're making. How much brighter the shadows becoming, or how much darker are the highlights becoming? But then we have a choice called tone, and if I bring tone all the way down, then what it considers to be a shadow is a very narrow brightness range that is really, really close to black. So now if I adjust my amount and move it around, you see that not much of the image changes, and it's mainly the areas that are extremely dark. If I bring tone up higher, then it means let's not just work on that narrow, narrow range, close to black. Let's expand it and get closer and closer to 50% gray. You know a medium brightness level. So as I bring this up more and more of the images affected. So what you might want to do when you're in here is start by bringing up the amount higher than you need, just so you can see that the image has changed. So here's no change in the shadows. Bring it way up. So you see the bright ning. Then move the tone. Bring it all the way down. So that's the narrowest range it could work on. Slowly bring it up until it seems like it's affecting the general range you want. So in my case, maybe about there. Then there's a choice called Radius in Radius controls the transition from that dark area that we are adjusting toe how it blends in with the rest of the image and so you could swing radius low and swinging high. It depends on the picture, as far as what's gonna look best if I get it too high. It looks too dark in that right edge. Bring it to low. It looks artificial, with somewhere in between is gonna give me the best transition. But remember, I brought the amount really high, and I didn't necessarily want that big of an adjustment. So once I've gotten the other things tweaked will probably bring him out, back down and now decide exactly how much bright and do I want. And I could do something similar for the highlights for the highlights. They might start by just bringing this up a lot, so I can easily tell where it's happening. Then we have the same slider cold tone, and it means the same general thing. But in this case, we're talking about the bright portion. So this means between white and what shade should we consider to be. Ah, highlight. The higher I bring it with wider of a range it works on. I don't want it to work too much on the sky and the water. That's not the waterfall portion, so I'll bring this down and adjust it until I noticed not much of that sky changing. Then Radius controls how it blends in with the surrounding image and all experiment low settings, high settings to see on this particular image, what looks best. It really depends on the picture. Then finally, I'm you know, just my amount. I had it cranked up just so I could see what I was working on. And now I confined. Tune it to the side exactly how much of a change I want. And if it's not making enough of a change, I need to go back and fine tune my other sliders. All right. When you have show more options turned on, you get some additional choices down below. Mid tone means what should we do with stuff that is not highlights and is not shadows. Instead, it's the in between shades. How should they look? And so now it could brighten or darken those in between shades. And then we have a choice called color, and color is a little bit interesting. If you bring it down, the colors will look more similar to each other, and as you bring it up, color separate more so in this case, there's not much of a difference in the colors, but if there was blues and greens and reds as you bring color up, you're going to see a much more much more separation between those colors. And if you bring it down the look more like the originally did, so this means we want to separate the colors a bit more, and that's the main thing that's in here. The choices at the very bottom you don't usually need to change. Black clip in white clip. What they do is ensure that the darkest Portia year of your picture becomes really close to black in Same with the bright portion. If you found that you had a foggy seen and when you win in here, it just suddenly had way too much contrast. You could set thes 20 and then it wouldn't attempt to make the dark part really close to black for the bright part, really close toe white. But anyway, shadow Highlight is a specialty tool. I use it when the issue that I have is near the extremes of brightness really close to black, really close toe white. That's when I think about going there, and it's not available as an adjustment layer. Most the time I'm not playing with all those sliders. I'm playing with either the shadows or the highlights. They don't usually need both, uh, and takes a little bit of time to find tune, but I usually like the results that I get from it.

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