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Understanding Saturation Clipping

Lesson 6 from: Photoshop for Photographers

Ben Willmore

Understanding Saturation Clipping

Lesson 6 from: Photoshop for Photographers

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

6. Understanding Saturation Clipping

Lesson Info

Understanding Saturation Clipping

then I thought I would summarize a little bit about what we did earlier with camera raw before I had a little summary up here about how I think about the different sliders and raw. This summary is about saturation in what's called saturation clipping. So that's why I have the heading up there. So when you get a hist a gram, remember the white part of the Hiss cram talks about tonality, meaning that is talking about brightness is ignoring color. For the most part, the color part of the history Graham is talking about color in the main part of it I look at would be the ends of the history. Graham. Are there really tall, colorful spikes there? And if so, it means my saturation is so high that, um, the most colorful areas of my image are starting to lose detail. What happens is behind the scenes. Every little pixel that makes up your image is made out of three numbers numbers that represent how much red, green and blue light there is in there. If what you see on the ends is a spike in the ...

color of the spike, his red, green or blue you just remember RGB mode because that's mode your images. Aaron stands for red, green blue. That means that 1/3 of the information that makes up your image is being lost somewhere was behind the scenes your images made out of three parts. You're losing one of those three pieces that makes up an area. If, on the other hand, the spikes that show up on the ends of the hissed a gram are sigh in magenta yellow, then it's amore extreme case of clipping. What that means is two out of the three pieces that make up your image. Hallelujah have been lost. They've gone to solid black, solid white in that there's no detail left. There's only one part that still has the details in. So Sigh in magenta and yellow means that it's, um, or extreme case of saturation clipping. So 1/3 of the information is being clipped. If it's red, green or blue, 2/3 is being clipped if it's signed magenta and yellow. And if you were to clip all three, we have no detail in all all three pieces. You would have solid black or solid white in that area no longer talking about color. Everything has gone out of there, so that's just kind of nice to know. Just main thing is, if it's signed magenta yellow, you're pushing it pretty far. As far as losing detail, there will probably be relatively obvious in the saturated areas. If it's only red, green or blue it, you have to look for it before you can notice it. Then, if you see those colorful spikes on the very ends your history Graham and you want to see where it is in your picture, then you need to go to one of two sliders to show you where it ISS. And if it is on the left side, then you need to go to the black slider. If it's on the right side, you need to go to the white slider, and it's not that you want to move the slider. What you want to do is hold down the option key if you're on a Mac, the all clear key. If you're on windows and just click and hold it wherever the slider was already positioned, don't move it, just click it. And that was where you get that alternative view of your image, and you can see the Big Red for other colored blob. And you'll know that if this stuff that shows up the big blobs of information where your picture used to be if it's red, green or blue, their slight clipping if it's sigh in the Genser yellow, it's more extreme clipping. It's clip more information, Uh, and the clipping that shows up on the ends there. One of the things that determines how quickly that stuff shows up is in what's known as your color space. And when you're in Kamerad, the bottom of the camera window will be some text that's underlined. It looks like a link on our website. It's like think it's usually blue, and if you click on it, you could choose your color space. These are the three most popular color spaces, and I just thought I'd let you know that s RGB. You're going to see the clipping, the earliest. It's gonna be easy to see clipping. It's gonna be easy to get clipping. Adobe RGB will be able to have a wider range of colors and therefore won't clip is quickly in Pro photo RGB. It will be hard to get clipping, you'll have to really crank it. That doesn't mean the pro photos better. A lot of people will talking into thinking that's better, for it depends on your situation. If you're a Meggie Tech head, that and you're overly into analyzing things, then this might be a good thing for you. But one of these two is probably gonna be better for most average people that are just I wanna get my work done. I don't wanna to a geek out on the technology part of it. So anyway, But just so you know what you choose here will have an influence on when those spikes show up unless you're in light room. If you're in light room, that does not affect it. Instead, it's using something similar to Pro Photo RGB, but it's not pro photo, but it's similar to its. It'll be harder to get the spikes to show up in light room doesn't mean you're adjustment is better in light room. It just means if you open your picture in the photo shop and you're using S RGB when you open it, it'll probably it's probable to get those clipping in photo shop that you didn't see in light room because it wasn't previewing it properly in the history. So but ignore that stuff for now. We'll talk about that stuff later, okay? Eso That's my summary about saturation clipping any quick questions? Yes, it's not shocked related that just quick when you're talking about light room, how it's something similar. Pro photo. Can you export it to any of those color spaces? Are you kind of stuck in whatever light room? No. You can export it to whatever any of the normal color spaces. You can export it to it. It's just you can't set the history Graham to display what it would be like in one of those others. So you're not truly getting a preview of what your end result is gonna be. So it's a it's a little different. I actually like cameras set up better when it comes to the history Ram because that so there's some clarification needed regarding tiffs. Quite a few people are asking what it is, and if you could quickly explain it and then quite a few other people are asking, Ah, flatten tip is more edible than a J pay. Okay, In general, we're gonna talk about file formats, Probably tomorrow. That's in some of those sections. That's gonna be the technical crap. You don't really want to know that I should. But in general, the J Peg file format. Its main idea is to give you a small file in order to give you a small file. It's gotta throw something away. It's gonna throw away some detail, and it's gonna limit you to 256 brightness levels. I only use J. Peg as a final file format. Not what I would call working file format If you plan to open the image again and do something to it, I'm not gonna have it in Jay Peg, because each time I open it, make a change. Save it. It degrades a little bit in quality. Then if I open it again, make a change and save it, it's gonna go down and quality each time it's getting compression applied again that can't be recovered. What Aziz lossy compression. A tiff file, on the other hand, does not degrade the quality of the image whatsoever. You get exactly what you had when you save the file when you open it again, it's a not a bad working file format in that you can open and close that as many times as you want. Save it as many times as you want. Quality does not go down. Same is true. Photoshopped file format in So that's why I would use tiff. The only reason I'm using tiff instead of photo shop is, as far as I know that I could be wrong. Camera rock and adjust J peg tiff raw. And I don't know if they could do Photoshopped in photo shop and mainly reserve for images that have layers. I'll explain why later, uh, said tough. And it needs to be flattened because Cameron can't adjust images. Have layers. Cool, I think. Oh, go ahead. I was just gonna ask these color profiles. Have anything to do with the color profiles, like when you can set them in your camera? Because I know I can set my camera to raw and I can set my camera to adobe raw. Well, actually, I think you're combining two different choices from your camera. Usually there's an area where you choose what file format you shoot in, and there you'll have the choice of J. peg were raw and then in a separate setting, we'll have an area where you can set the color space and you have the choice of EFS, RGB or Adobe RGB. Two different settings and those settings on Lee affect JPEG files. If you shoot raw, it doesn't really matter. But when we talk about color spaces, which will most likely happen tomorrow, you'll get a better sense of what you might want to set that, too. I just don't want to get your brain too full of technical crap at the beginning, where your brain could kind of shut off ago. He's getting in the technical thing, you know. Instead, I want to just do stuff that you can really get something done. First, get your brain to be into what we're doing, and then we can get into that some of the tackle of junk and will most likely start that up tomorrow

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Ratings and Reviews

Jim Pater
 

I taught Photoshop (version 5) to graphic design students at the college level. I had great fun teaching. This is the perfect course to show others how they might go about teaching a Photoshop course. Congratulations Ben, on your excellent teaching style and methods. I thought I already knew quite a bit about Photoshop but this course made me aware that there's always more that you can learn.

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