356 Developing the perfect sunset in Camera Raw

- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques! Today, I'm going to show you how to develop the perfect sunset, by which I mean, we're going to take this exceedingly unimpressive shot right here. Can you even see the sunset? It's actually there, but we just need to bring it forth in order to create this fully-developed photograph. Now, we're going to be doing so in Camera Raw. But this technique is 100 percent applicable to Lightroom. Here, let me show you exactly how it works.

All right; just so you have a chance to see things on screen, here's the original photograph and here's the enhanced sunset, courtesy of Camera Raw. The first step here inside of Photoshop is to go up to the File menu and choose Open As Smart Object. And then, if you're working along with me, find this file, Bluebell Road.dng, and click on the Open button. Now, because this is a raw photograph, it opens automatically inside of Camera Raw. If you want to modify that dng file on disk, then just go ahead and set in adjusting the settings, but if you don't want to affect the dng file, then click on the Okay button, and that will open the image inside of Photoshop.

It also breaks the link to that dng file on disk. So from this point on, all of your modifications happen inside Photoshop and only inside Photoshop. All right; I'm going to press shift + tab to bring back my right-side panels here. Of course I do want to adjust the image inside of Camera Raw, which is why it's so fortunate that I can return to that program just by double-clicking on this smart object thumbnail, here inside the Layers panel. Right; I'll go ahead and zoom in a little bit by pressing ctrl + plus. Now, you can modify the temperature and tint values, if you like.

But I'm going to go ahead and drop down to this Highlights value right here. The reason being that I want to bring back this very bright sky. I want to bring back those lost details. And Highlights is the best way to do that. And, at the risk of being too heavy-handed here, I'm just going to take this Highlights value all the way down to negative 100. That, as you can see, brings back the sky. So we have a lot of detail to work with. But it also overly darkens the foreground, which is why I'm going to compensate by increasing the Shadows value all the way to its maximum, which is plus 100.

Now, I want to enhance the edge detail, so I'm going to take the Clarity value up to 75. No reason for subtlety, I figure, where this image is concerned. At this point, you can see the image is pretty washed out, which is why I need to sink the blacks; that is to say, S I N K, make them darker. And I'm going to do that by dragging this slider triangle over to the left. And if you want to see exactly which pixels are clipping, then press and hold the alt key, or the option key on the Mac, as you drag.

I'm going to go ahead and take that value down to negative 50. And then, as soon as I release the mouse button, or the alt or option key, I will restore the preview. I also want to bring back some of the blown highlights, so I'm going to take this whites value down to negative 50, as well, in order to produce this effect here. If you want to see what you've done so far, then just press the p key to turn off the preview. That's the original photograph as shot. And then, if you press the p key again in order to turn the preview on, you can see the enhanced sunset.

Now, things are looking pretty darn good, but I want to enhance the detail of the image by sharpening it, so I'm going to go ahead and click on this flatiron right here in order to zoom it in to, let's say, about 200 percent, so we can get a really good view of it. And notice this horrible edge that we have at work here. It's not a function of chromatic aberrations. So if you were to switch over to the Lens Corrections panel, notice here in the Color panel that I have gone ahead and turned Remove Chromatic Aberration on in advance.

And I've also here, inside the Profile panel, I've turned on Enable Lens Profile Corrections. So Camera Raw has basically done everything it can automatically. So why in the world do we have these weird edges? Well, I'll switch back to the Basic panel and show you. That's a combined function of Clarity, ranking the Clarity value up that high -- and notice, if I take it down, I start to lose that edge -- but I'm going to go ahead and keep it up to 75, as I set it before. And the other factor at work is this Highlights value.

Notice if I were to take this value up to zero, which is where we started, then our edges start to look a heck of a lot better. So you might argue that the thing to do is to apply a graduated filter, using this tool right here, to the sky and leave the flatirons alone. But if we were to do that, then we're not going to have a lot of dynamic action inside of these rocks. So what I'm going to tell you, and this is just a subjective determination, I'm okay with these bad edges because they're ultimately going to reconcile when I output the image at 300 pixels per inch.

However, I do want things to look better than this, so I'm going to go ahead and switch over to the Detail panel, which is the third icon in, and I'm going to crank the amount value all the way up to 150, which is the maximum amount of sharpening that you can apply inside of Camera Raw. Notice that we get all these little wormy details here. That's a function of Detail, the Detail slider. And if you don't want that sort of twisted micorsharpening, then go ahead and take that Detail value down to zero, which is almost always your best bet.

All right; now I want to smooth out some of this noise. So I'm going to take the Luminance value up, and I'm going to go way up to a value of 80 right here. And the other values are just fine as is. You could crank the Luminance Detail value down. And, by the way, it's analogous. Luminance Detail is very similar to the Detail Sharpening option. It's just that it affects noise instead. And you're retaining that detail. But if you take the Detail all the way down to zero, you're smoothing things, in my opinion. If you were to take this Detail value all the way up, you're going to bring back some of those very small details inside the image.

I'm going to leave this set, however, to its default, which is 50, and I'm going to leave the other options the way they land automatically, as well. All right; now press ctrl + 0, or cmd + 0 on the Mac, in order to zoom out, so I can take in the entire image. And I'm going to switch over, finally, to HSL/Grayscale, which is going to allow me to emphasize some of these colors in the sky. And actually, I want to increase the saturation of these bright reds in the clouds. I'm going to do that by switching to the Saturation tab, which is the second one in, and then I'll go ahead and grab my Targeted Adjustment tool, up here in the horizontal toolbar, and I'll drag in these clouds to the right, like so, in order to crank up their saturation values.

Now that, to my eye, looks like a little bit too much. I'll go ahead and take that reds value up to 50, let's say, but the oranges value is really too high, so I'm going to click inside of it and press shift + down arrow three times to take it down to plus 70. So we've got a reds value of plus 50 and orange value of plus 70, for those of you working along with me. And next, I'm going to click on the Luminance tab, and still armed with my Targeted Adjustment tool, which changes to suit whichever tab is active, I'll go ahead and drag in the blue sky to the left in order to darken those blues.

I don't want to take them that far down, so I'll just go ahead and back things off to about this point right here. So you can see, now the blues value is negative 25, the aquas value is negative four, for what little that's worth, because really, if it was set to zero, it's not going to matter at all. And that's it, folks. If you want to get a sense of what you've done, you can press the p key once again to turn off the preview. So that's the before version of the image, the as-shot version, and then press the p key again to turn the preview back on.

All right; now, to save your changes, all you need to do is click on the Okay button, down there in the bottom right corner of the screen, and you will apply your changes here inside Photoshop. All right; now, this is a pretty horizontal image, so I'm going to go ahead and hide the interface by pressing the f key a couple of times, which is going to fill the screen with that photograph. And that's it, folks. Just to recap, I'll press ctrl + z, or cmd + z on a Mac, so that we can see that original as-shot version of the photograph.

And this is so important. If I hadn't captured this image as a raw photograph, this would be the way the baked jpg file would look, which would be, obviously, a tragedy. But because I did capture it as a raw file, I can develop it in Camera Raw in order to achieve this dazzling and much more accurate sunset. All right; so the image is obviously looking better. But it could look better still. Notice the vegetation, the foliage, that is. It lacks a little bit of drama.

I want to punch it up in order to create this effect right here. I'm going to do so in a movie that I'm calling The Real Green is Yellow. And it's of use to anyone -- any of you -- who are interested in developing full-color landscape shots. And you can get to it at the lynda.com online training library. And for a free week, just go to lynda.com/deke. Next week, I'm going to show you how to take care of an effect that occurs all the time. Notice this tree right here.

Go ahead and bring it closer to the camera. Notice how it's got sort of light stuff all around it. That's what I call Clarity Halos. And I'm going to show you how to get rid of them. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.