Transcripts
1. Process an Underexposed Image in Lightroom and ACR - Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class, Process Underexposed Images in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. In addition to teaching Illustrator and Photoshop, the graphic design for lunch series of classes also includes some photo editing and photo management classes. These are taught for both Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw, as both applications share the same base code. This means that within one class, you'll simply focus on whichever application you prefer to use. Today we're looking at the problem of underexposed images where the subject in your image is very dark. You're going to learn how you can process these images successfully. The two images I'm going to work with, I'm going to work with one in Adobe Camera Raw, one in Lightroom, and I'm going to give you both those images as a download so you can follow along with the class. As you're working through the class, you will see a prompt to recommend it to others. If you are enjoying the class, please do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and then write very briefly what you're enjoying about the class. These recommendations help other students, just like you, to find my classes. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and your questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready, now let's go and dig up some underexposed images and see how we can solve the problem, firstly, in Adobe Camera Raw, and secondly, in Lightroom.
2. Process an Underexposed Image - Part 1: We're going to start here in Adobe Camera Raw with an image that was shot in Paris. We've got some really interesting buildings here, but right now we're not saying anything of them. Now the version of the image I've given you is a Danji version, that is actually a JPEG image. I've just saved this as a Danji subtle, open automatically in Adobe Camera Raw for you. Just be aware that the amount of leeway we've got in editing this image is that of a JPEG not of a Danji, or a raw image, even though it purports to be a raw image. The problem with this image is we've got some really pretty well exposed areas of the image. This is the histogram up here, these are the lights, these are the dark's. This is nearly okay exposure. It's obviously going to be this sky area, maybe a little bit in here. Over here we've got a big lump of pixels on the darker end of the sky, all these underexposed overly dark areas of the image. We've got a good sky, some interesting clouds, something that we want to cape. So using exposure is not going to help us because exposure just wipes out the sky totally. I'm actually going to bring exposure back to zero or thereabouts, and I'm going to protect the sky, in fact to even enrich the sky a little bit by bringing down the highlights. That's adding a bit more detail into the sky. We're seeing some clouds over here and some of what I remember of the Sun, are yellowing along the horizon even. So, I've got the sky pretty much where I'd like it to be. But of course the buildings are just hopeless, they're really, really dark. What we need to do is to get some detail out of these areas. These are the shadows in the image. What we're going to do is open up the shadows. We're going to start winding up the shadows. Now when we do that, we get a few things happening. We're tending to get a little bit of green color in here, which perhaps is not attractive. Let's file that away as a thought of something that we might want to get rid of. We're also flattening the image. We tend to lose contrast in the image when we adjust shadows, bring detail out of shadows, flatten the image, lose contrast. If you want some more contrast, you're going to have to need to add it. Let's add a bit more contrast in. Of course, a downside of adding contrast is that then we're throwing this building back into shadow a bit. It's a bit of a compromise at this stage. But we can solve that a little bit by adding another adjustment on top of this. So I'm going to the graduated filter. I'm going to click on it and I'm just going to drag down well, because I don't have any settings in the graduated filter here in Adobe Camera Raw, I can't actually apply it, so I need to do something at this stage. Let's just go and open up the shadows a little bit. You won't confront this if you're using Lightroom. Lightroom doesn't work quite the same way. I'm just going to put down my graduated filter and then worry about positioning everything where it should be. I want a pretty gentle fall off. This is where the filter is being applied a 100 percent. It's transitioning from a 100 percent down to nothing between these lines and there's nothing beyond here. I don't want a steep transition, I want a shallow transition. But I want it to definitely be affecting these buildings over here and some of these buildings over here. We've already adjusted the shadows, we've already bought some additional detail out of the shadows with this adjustment. We could also add some more detail back into the sky by again, having another good highlights. That's a really nice, interesting sky to me. I think I'm going to leave it as it is at this point. One thing I'm concerned about is that we are getting quite a bit of green in over here. Let's go to the Adjustment Brush and see if we can knock out some of that green. Now my mask for the adjustment rushes white right now so, it's really disconcerting to say that. I'm going to go and make it a pink color because that's probably a little bit more reassuring for the mask. I've got the mask actually turned on and I've got a reasonable size and a reasonable feather. I'm just brushing over here. I can turn my mask off then and what I want to do to remove the green is I could do one of two things. I could add a bit of magenta because magenta is the opposite of green. If you add a bit of magenta, you're actually going to kill the green in that area of the image. That's one possibility. The other possibility is you could just remove saturation. You could just go down and reduce the saturation, then you're going to get more gray than green or you can do a combination of the two. Remove the saturation of bit, and what's left in terms of saturation, just give it a magenta cast to cancel out the green. You're not probably actually going to see magenta here, but because magenta is opposite to green, they'll cancel each other out. Anytime you want to get rid of green, add magenta. Likewise, if you've got something that's too blue, then just add yellow. It's the opposite color to blue, and that will kill a color cast. Now, I'm concerned that the image is not straight. I'm going to the straighten tool, I can double-click to straighten it automatically, or I can go and do it myself. So I'm just going to press Control+Z at this stage and got and do it myself because I wasn't actually too impressed with that. Just dragging over a thing in the image which should be horizontal, the top of the bridge is a really good start here. This is showing us the crop overlay and the straightening overlay. It's really hard at this point to determine what it's going to look like, so I'll generally click away from it. I think it's gone too high on this side, so I'm going back to the crop tool and I'm just going to drag it up a little bit to even out what I think is probably a not quite straightened version of the image. I think that's a better look for the image. Now, at this point we can compare the before and after. I can press the letter P, to see that before of the image and letter P again, to see the after. We've got quite an improved image here, we've probably flattened the color out a little bit, so you may want to boost the contrast a little bit as well to bring a bit more contrast back in. Of course, we also need to pick a black and a white point because I haven't done that yet. I'm going to my white slide, I'm going to hold All to All option and drag on that. Right now, I'm just looking for my white. So I'm just going searching. The whites are up there in the top left of the screen. We're just going to bring the slider back until it's just black all over the screen. So we just under picking a white point. That's going to make sure we don't blow out any pixels here. For our black point, we're going to do the same thing, All to All option and drag on the black. So we got some blacks coming in over here. You'll see them, when I just click on that slider. We may want a bit more black, so you can bring in a reasonable amount of black into the image. Black is better than white because black is ink on paper. There's a thing, black ink, but there's nothing that's called white ink, you can't put white ink down. If you have pure white pixels, it's just not going to print it all. It's not going to be a good thing. Before we finish up trying to get a little bit more contrast back into the image, we could have a look at clarity. Clarity is a mid-tone contrast adjustment. What it's going to do, is it's going to add some contrast into the mid tones in the image. These areas that a minute ago were pretty flat. Let's just take that back. This is zero. Well, let's see where we are. This is zero on clarity and just watch these areas of the image. When I boost the clarity, they're becoming a lot crisper. We possibly don't want them in the water area of the image, so if that were the case, what we could do is we could apply clarity using the adjustment brush. So we could go to the Adjustment Brush, we could zero out all the settings for it. I'm going to just go here and choose ''Reset Local Correction'', I'm going to add some Clarity, and then I'm just going to pin this down and just brush on a little bit of enhanced clarity in the areas where I want to see it. The areas where I'm seeing a little bit of flatness in the image. Probably not in the water because I don't want you to be looking at the water so much, as I might want you to be looking at the bridge detail and the traffic and things happening in the middle of the image. When I'm done with that, I'm just going to click on a tool to move away from it. Let's again have a look at the before and after the letter P, before and after. We've saved a underexposed image, we've also saved the sky. We had a pretty well exposed sky, we've still got a pretty well exposed sky. But we've also brought some detail into some of the interesting areas of the image and created a way more pleasant result.
3. Process an Underexposed Image - Part 2: For this second image, we're going to work in Lightroom. This image was captured in the camera as a JPEG, but I'm giving it to you as a DNG image so that, again, this one will open really easily for you if you're using Adobe Camera Raw. In Lightroom, you can handle DNG and JPEG exactly the same way. In Adobe Camera Raw, DNG is always going to open in Adobe Camera Raw; JPEG, you'd have to do a little bit of work to get it open in Adobe Camera Raw, so I'm doing that work for you. Same problem as the Paris shot, only probably even more so here. You can see that we've really got some very underexposed areas of the image and a lot of really light areas. In fact, we've lost some of the highlights here. What we need to do first of all, is to try and bring back some detail in the sky. We want to protect what sky we have. Then we want to bring some detail out of the shadows. Again, we can do that using the Shadows slider. The problem we've got with this image as well is that we flatten everything as soon as we start to bring detail out of the shadows, so you want to add a bit of contrast just to compensate for that. Of course, that then throws everything into shadow just a little bit more, so just be aware of that; that when adjust contrast in a positive direction, you're going to add some crispness , so you're going to get some darker areas. In this case, that's working a little bit against us. Now, I'm also going to add a little bit of clarity, and clarity is really going to wake this image up. What it does is it's a mid-tone contrast enhancement. It's really bringing in some detail in this wall here, and we're seeing a lot more detail in this building here; probably too much. I think I probably need to back the clarity off on this a little bit. Vibrance will add a bit of color to the image, again, something that we might have lost in bringing detail out of the shadows. So we could easily add a little bit of vibrance in here. At this point, if you wanted to get a little bit of detail or blue back into the sky, you could do so. For that, I would probably suggest the adjustment brush. I'm going to click on the "Adjustment Brush." I'm just going to pin it down. I've got a pretty good brush size, got a very large feather, and I do want Auto Mask turned on. Now, I just lost my toolbar here, so let's put it back and let's see the mask overlay. I want to be able to say that I've painted this on. Because I've got Auto Mask turned on, I just have to make sure that the little crosshair in the middle of my brush is kept on sky and doesn't go anywhere near the buildings, and then I should be able to mask out the sky pretty easily. Now up here, I'm just going to click rather than paint to make sure I pick up some of that sky detail. Of course, I'm also going to need to do it here. Sometimes clicking is just more effective when you're working in tight areas. Always making sure that that crosshair is on sky and not on something else or else you're just going to paint your selection onto whatever something else was. Got a little bit in there. Now I'm going to turn Auto Mask off just to paint in this area here, because Auto Mask is going to make working over those clouds just a little bit difficult. Now I'm going to turn off my mask overlay. I can do a few things at this point. I can bring down the exposure, I could bring down the highlights that might darken the sky a little bit. I could also add a little bit of color to the sky. I can go to Color here and just go and pick up a little bit of blue. It's not very much blue, but it's just a little bit, which will help the sky a little bit. Now you could also throw a graduated filter at this if you wanted to. I'm going to the Graduated Filter here and I'm just going to bring it in along the edge of this building. I think I want it to patter out a little bit gradually. Let's just bring it over and perhaps straighten it just a little bit. Here, we could do things like increase the shadows a little bit, bring a little bit of detail out of the shadows, add a little bit more contrast, add a little bit more clarity just to help this building a little bit. But you don't want to do too much because you don't want it to be unreal. But there is a possibility that we could have some light coming in here that would light that building. I'm just going to click "Done." Before we finish up with the image, I'm a little bit concerned about this element over here. I think that it would respond pretty well to the same adjustment as we made to that Paris bridge, and that is hitting it with the adjustment brush and trying to build some clarity into it. Again, I'm going back to the adjustment brush. I want new. I'm going to click on the building to pin this down on the building. We've got a different adjustment on the building. I'm going to turn Auto Mask on as I just brush over it. Now, you don't have to be too careful with this, but you will want to get the main part of the building. You can go to the eraser if you've gone too far and just erase off the excess. The Auto Mask on this particular building will do very well against the sky, but not so well against similar town buildings behind this building itself. Let's turn off the Show Selected Mask overlay and let's add some clarity to this. This is really helping this part of the building. I think we could also bring a little bit of detail out of the shadows perhaps, so we could lighten that just a little bit. Now, if we want to see the before and after on just this area here, let's open up the history panel. Just go into the last of the brushstrokes we made when selecting this arch over here. Let me just click on that. That's the before, and this is the after. You can see that we've made a considerable improvement to the detail that we're seeing in the image here by just adding that simple adjustment to it. I'm just going to click "Done." Let's see the before and after backslash, before, after. Totally different image. When you're processing underexposed images like this, be aware that the exposure setting is probably not the one you want. You probably are going to need to protect your highlights and then bring detail out of the shadows so you end up with a much more pleasing result than you would if you just cranked up the exposure setting. Your project for this class is going to be to take an underexposed image, either one of the two that I've given you or an underexposed image from your own collection, and go ahead and process it and post your finished processed image in the class project area. As you're working through these videos, you will have seen a prompt to recommend this class to others. Please if you've enjoyed the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, just write two or three words about why you enjoy the class. Recommendations like this help other Skillshare students just like you to find my classes so that they too can learn more about Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and your questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
