426 Developing a dark and stormy photo in Lightroom

- All right, so as you may recall in a previous movie I showed you how to develop a dark and stormy photograph using a combination of Camera Raw and Photoshop. In this movie I'll show you how to do the exact same thing in Lightroom. And the reason is that even though Camera Raw and Lightroom share the same development settings, they work quite differently, and this will give you a chance to decide which program you prefer. So here we are looking at the dark and stormy treatment, but this image began looking pretty dull as we're seeing right here.

And I captured this image as a Raw photograph and converted it to DNG, which is Adobe's Digital Negative format. Now I'm gonna switch to the Develop module here inside Lightroom, and notice that (mumbling) closed the histogram panel to save myself a little room. Now the first thing I want to do is correct for any lens distortion by clicking on Lens Corrections to expand that panel, and turning on the first two check boxes, Enable Profile Corrections, which goes ahead and corrects for the barrel distortion of the image caused by my use of a wide angle lens.

And I'll also turn on Remove Chromatic Aberration to get rid of any weird colors around the edges, especially around the outer perimeter of the image. But you'll see that it doesn't get rid of all the aberrations. There are some colors we'll need to address manually. Now one of the things about Profile Correction is it not only corrects for the barrel distortion, as I was saying a moment ago, but it also gets rid of the dark vignette around the outside of the image. I want to keep that vignette, and to do that, I'll go ahead and turn the check box back on and I'll switch over to Profile right there and I'll drop down to this Vignette option and I'll crank it all the way down to zero, and that will bring back those dark edges.

Now I'll click on Lens Corrections in order to collapse that panel and I'll click on Basic to expand it. I'm gonna leave the White Balance settings as is but I'm gonna darken up the image considerably by scrubbing on this Exposure value until I take it down to negative 1.0, like so. I also want to take the Contrast up to its absolute maximum, and incidentally, you can scrub in increments of ten by pressing the shift key as you drag on the value. And in the end I took Contrast up to plus 100.

I'm also going to take the Whites value up just ever so slightly to plus five, in order to avoid any clipping. And I'll go ahead and take the Blacks value up to plus five, as well. If you press the alt key or the option key, as you drag that slider triangle you will see the pixels that are getting clipped, and in my case I have a fair amount of clipping going on, but I actually want that in order to achieve my very dark shadows. All right, I'm also gonna take the Clarity value up to 50 by shift scrubbing on its value. And I'll take the Vibrance value up to 77 just by clicking on it and dialling the value in.

All right, now I want to darken up the sky, and I'm gonna do that by collapsing my Basic panel and then clicking on HSL, you want to click on the letters HSL in order to display these values right here. And then I'm gonna click on Luminence in order to switch to the Brightness options. And just so I can drag around inside the image window I'll go ahead and click on this icon which represents the Targetted Adjustment tool. And now I'm gonna click inside of the blue sky right there and drag down. And as I drag down, you'll notice the blue value over on the far right side of the screen, dropping.

And I want to ultimately take that value down to negative 77, is what I came up with. And that ends up creating this very dark sky. All right, now I want to make the walls of the cathedral look that much more golden, and so I'll go ahead and switch over to the Hue option right there. Notice my Targeted Adjustment tool's still active. And so now I can drag up inside these walls in order to make them more yellow. Now if I go too far, I'm gonna start making them green, that's not what I want. So I'll go ahead and take this value down to plus 20 as we're seeing here.

And I'm gonna take the Orange value up to plus ten. Now if you saw the previous movie you may recall that everything looks great from far away. But we've got some problems with the edges. And the easiest way to zoom in on those edges is to turn off the Targeted Adjustment tool, just by clicking on this icon once again, that'll return you to the Hand tool and then you can just click on a detail such as these gargoyles right there in order to see their edges. Now we can see them even more closely by zooming farther in and I'm gonna do that by clicking on this little double arrow icon right there and choosing three to one to zoom into 300%.

And notice that we have, what amounts to Chromatic Aberrations around these gargoyles heads. Now we could return to the Lens Correction options, and adjust the Purple value, for example, but we're gonna get better results if we stick right here in HSL. So notice what we have is colorful halos and they're aqua colored around the upper left portions of the gargoyles heads. And sort of purplish down and below, and that becomes even more obvious right over there. So what we can do is make the aquas and the purples more blue.

And you can make the aquas more blue by increasing this aqua value to its maximum of plus a hundred, and notice those aqua halos just go away. And now I'm gonna take the Purples value down to its minimum, which is negative 100, to make the purples more blue, and we end up making those purple highlights go away, as well. Problem is we still have these bright halos, but we can address those using the Luminence options. So go ahead and switch over to Luminence and take that Purple value all the way down to negative 100 and watch what happens to these bright halos around the bottom right edges of these heads.

As soon as I take that Purple value down, those bright edges just basically go away. And so notice that now I have a Purple value of negative 100. I'm also gonna take the Aqua value down to negative 40 to get rid of the halos around the top left edges of those heads. All right, that still leaves us with a little bit too much halo action. And so what I'm gonna do, and by the way, in case you're curious where these halos are coming from, it's a funciton of having reduced the heck out of this Blue value.

So notice we're just not seeing halos when the sky is bright, but as soon as we make that sky dark by reducing that Blue value we end up with some bad edges. And so to address those further, I'll go ahead and collapse the HSL panel and I'll expand Details so that we can see the Sharpening settings. Notice if I crank the sharpening value up, we end up with these little worms throughout the image. Those are a function of this Details slider right here. Not a big fan, and you can if you like, crank that value down to zero.

But we're gonna get even better effects if you just go ahead and crank the Amount value down to its minimum of zero, instead. And now I'm gonna take the Luminence Noise Reduction value up to 50 as we're seeing right here, in order to achieve the smoothest effects possible. Now I'll just tap the Z key to zoom out so that I can take in the entire image. Now the last thing that I want to do is rotate this image so it has a more interesting angle, and I want to crop it, as well. Those are two things that I could do in Lightroom, if I want to.

But I'm gonna work inside Photoshop instead because Photoshop gives me more freedom where this kind of stuff is concerned, and it allows me to apply Smart Filters which is exactly what we'll be doing in the very next movie. And to open this image up in Photoshop what we want to do is right click inside the Image window, choose Edit In, and then choose Open as Smart Object in Photoshop. And that way you will preserve the image as a Camera Raw Smart Object, and I'll show you what that looks like in just a moment. But here, as you can see, we are now inside Photoshop.

But also notice up here in the Title bar we're looking at a 16 bit image, so that's what meant by RGB slash 16, which is to say we're gonna have a monstrously large file with no real benefits. And so to reduce the size of the file, all you need to do is go up to the Image menu, choose Mode, and then choose eight bits per channel. That is not going to damage the image at all, it just changes the way that you preview what is now a Camera Raw Smart Object. So go ahead and choose that command and a few moments later after this Progress bar you will see that we now have an eight up here in the Title tab, which is what we want meaning that we're looking at eight bits of data per image.

All right, now I want to crop the image and I could use the Crop tool, but instead, because I know the exact dimensions I want I'm gonna go up to the Image menu and choose the Canvas Size command. Notice that my width and height values are set to pixels, Relative is turned off. I'm gonna change the Width value to 5000 pixels and I'm gonna change Height value to 3000 pixels. Then I'll click Okay. Photoshop is gonna tell me that some clipping will occur, that's a big lie, just go ahead and click on Proceed because no clipping is actually occuring. Now I want to rotate the image and I'm gonna do that by going to the Edit menu and choosing Free Transform, and then I'll just go ahead and drag outside this transformation boundary until I can see a value of exactly six degrees, that's what Im looking for, 6.0 degrees in that little heads up display above and to the right of my cursor.

And now I'm gonna drag this guy til he snaps into alignment, and I want to be able to see an awful lot of the left hand portion of the image, as well as just about all of the sky as I'm seeing here. And you could drag that down even farther, if you want to, but I think this is looking pretty good so I'll just go ahead and press the enter key or the return key on the Mac in order to apply that change. All right, now let's say I'm looking at the image and I think there's just a little bit too much contrast. I want to downplay the highlights, just ever so slightly, and I want to breathe some life in the shadows, as well.

Well, because we opened this image as a Smart Object from Lightroom, we can now modify its settings anytime we like by double clicking on the thumbnail for this Smart Object here insde the Layers panel. And as soon as you do, rather than opening the image inside Lightroom, you will open it inside Camera Raw. The great news though, is that Camera Raw maintains everything you did inside the other program. So now what I'm gonna do is take the Highlights value down, but I don't want to go quite this far down, so I'll just take it down, to let's say, negative 20, should work out pretty well.

And then I'll increase the Shadows value again, that looks pretty great, but I feel like I've gone too far so I'm gonna take that value down to plus 50 in order to open up those shadows without dramatically reducing the contrast. And now I'll go ahead and click Okay in order to update that image inside Photoshop. And now I'll just go ahead and press the F key a couple of times in order to enter Photoshop's fullscreen mode, so that we can see the final treatment of the image. And just so you have a chance to see what we've accomplished, this is that original, and I must admit, extremely drab version of that photograph.

And this is the more dramatic dark and stormy treatment achieved, in large part, using Adobe Lightroom.