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Lightroom: Presence Panel Adjustments

Lesson 9 from: FAST CLASS: Light Painting

Tim Cooper

Lightroom: Presence Panel Adjustments

Lesson 9 from: FAST CLASS: Light Painting

Tim Cooper

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Lesson Info

9. Lightroom: Presence Panel Adjustments

Lesson Info

Lightroom: Presence Panel Adjustments

Now that we're done with our basic panel, we can turn our attention down here to the bottom part, which is the presence, and notice that it does come afterwards. There's a reason for this. The folks at Adobe A really, really smart and they put saturation completely at the bottom. This is Ah for a lot of beginners. They'll go right to the saturation slider and they'll just start pulling it up. And it's just the worst. Look, it's the only thing worse than that is an over sharpened image. On the only thing worse than that is an oversaturated and over sharpened image. So when I'm evaluating images, I look at them in three different ways. I evaluated for brightness, for contrast and for color. The overall brightness is kind of what we're dealing with with the exposure slider slightly brighter, slightly darker, kind of getting the image to where we wanted to go. So then we moved down to contrast. But with in contrast, there's three different forms of contrast. There's the overall contrast. T...

here's the mid tone contrast, and then there's something I call micro contrast. That's not a term. I just make it up to help you all understand what I'm talking about. So contrast is overall mid tone or local and then micro. And then it comes to color and within color. We have hue, saturation and brightness or luminous. So those air All of the things that I evaluate when I'm dealing with adjusting my images in light room and indeed, photo shop afterwards. But ah lot of it we've taken care of here. So exposure, that's our brightness. That's the first on our list. Then it comes to contrast, which we've broken down to overall. The overall contrast is from the deepest black to the brightest white, and we've adjusted that as well, using the blacks and whites slider that's going to set the overall tone feel like it if it has a really wide range of tonalities in it. That's the overall contrast. Typically are images, especially nighttime photography and light painting should have a deep black and bright white making a good overall contrast. All right, next comes mid tone contrast in mid tone, contrast is adjusted with your contrast slider. So what the contrast letter doing is taking that hissed a gram and squeezing it out? That's a slightly different effect than grabbing the whites and the blacks and pulling them edge to edge. So that's why we say that mid tones that contrast letter works on our mid tone contrast. All right, so that just leaves us with clarity and clarity. Is what I just what I call micro contrast. It's really just one step above sharpening. So micro contrast is going to be the difference between very near tone allergies. So we could say, um, are whites and blacks overall contrast Adjust the contrast between the top of the space needle here and the deepest black here the contrast slider might affect, you know, the mid tone contrast from, you know, like maybe this value to these brighter values up in there to the to the water the close, but a little bit further spread out both physically and tonally. But then our clarity sliders for really near tones. So we could say that you know, like this level of gray here and that adjacent tone they're pretty close together in tone ality. That's where that clarity is gonna try to separate them out. Um, the clarity slider is not going to affect the overall blacks in overall whites quite as much, and the end result is it really looks like a type of sharpening. So in this case, cranking up the clarity really gives you that pop in that look. But just remember that that's ultimately going to be a little heavy handed, and you, as a photographer, could make that art artistic decision. But do you realize what is going to happen is, as you increase that contrast, you're going to start to affect that micro contrast in there? And this is a really perfect example of that. Well, look at this area and zero out. Our clarity becomes really super smooth and add a bit of clarity, and it gets a little bit more crunchy to me. That's a really nice use of clarity without going over the top and being a ham fisted with with your sliders. So next we have, um, vibrance and saturation and vibrance and saturation are similar in that they both increase the intensity of the color. But saturation, the way that it works, is it effects all saturated colors equally. So let's just make up some numbers. Let's say we have a part of an image that's 10% saturated and another part that's 90% saturated. If I move my saturation slider 10 points, this only moves up to 20 which is like almost no change, and this rooms for 90 to 100 which is a severe change. So what would be better? And what the vibrant slider does is it will take less saturated colors and increase them mawr, while the saturated colors only increase a little bit were left alone. And the way that this works is that vibrance is really geared towards more towards blues. And, uh, yeah, there's no greens, but it leaves the Reds alone, so it's kind of designed to increase the colors without increasing skin tone saturation. But the by product is it ends up just being what I like to call smart saturation, right? So the contrast slider itself is going to increase color saturation. So let me just try to find an image that's got some color to it. Let's just say we'll take this one. Um, watch what happens as I increase the contrast slider and nothing to do with saturation here. People. I'm just gonna take my contrast slider and move that up. Notice how much saturated those colors become. So this is why Adobe is smart to put the saturation slider at the bottom. Because once you've gone through all of this and you've made your proper adjustments, chances are you're going to need a lot less saturation than you thought you did before you started.

Class Materials

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Tim's Gear Guide
Tim's Lightroom Presets

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