From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

781 Low vibrance and high saturation

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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781 Low vibrance and high saturation

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now have you ever wondered, "Gosh Deke "why in the world would I combine "a very low vibrance value with "a very high saturation value, "either when applying a vibrance adjustment layer "or inside Camera Raw or Lightroom?" Now some guys, they'd have an answer for you. I have two in the form of this great white shark right here and her buddy. Here let me show you exactly how and why it works. Alright, I'm going to start things off with a kind of great white slideshow. Just so you can see a few examples where I've combined a very low vibrance values, such as negative 100 in this case with a high saturation value, in this case plus 60%. And here we have another one that's a little less radical. Vibrance negative 80, saturation plus 50. I captured both of these images at about 30 feet deep just using natural night. And then we have this guy who's located quite a bit closer to the surface, as you can see, which is why I didn't take the vibrance value down nearly so far, just negative 40. Though I did pump the saturation to plus 80. And we'll actually see how I developed this image in a separate movie. We're going to see both of these guys in this movie. Alright now I'll go up to the file menu and choose, browse in Bridge, in order to view the contents of this folder inside Adobe Bridge. And notice we have a couple of raw DNG files. I'm going to go ahead and select them both. So I'll click on one, Shift-click on the other. And then I'll open them in Camera Raw hosted here inside Bridge by right-clicking on either image and choosing, open in Camera Raw. Or you have a keyboard shortcut of Control-R here on the PC or command-R on the MAC. Now these are very different images, as you can see. Or perhaps you can't because they're both pretty murky. But they do require different approaches. So I'm going to select each one individually. I have made some changes inside the other panels in advance just for the sake of expediency. So that we can focus our attention on the basic panel. Alright, now we don't need to worry about any of the stuff at the top. So I'll just go ahead and scroll all the way down. And we're going to start with the temperature and tint values, which I'll adjust automatically by grabbing my white balance tool. Now this image is so very, very blue because once again I relied on natural light at 30 feet deep. That if I click just about anywhere inside the image I am going to max out the temperature and tint values. So notice temperature is all the way up at 50,000 degrees Kelvin and tint is now plus 150. And that's just the way it is where this image is concerned. Now the image is pretty hazy thanks to the fact that there's all this water in between me and the fish. And so you might consider cranking up the dehaze value here, but notice when you go very high with this value you end up creating some very crunchy details. Especially around the shadows. Notice that we're getting this purple shadow effect right here? And so, while I'm not suggesting you don't use dehaze I am suggesting that you take it easy. And so I'm going to take this value down to plus 40, which is still pretty darn high. And then I'll Shift-Tab back to the clarity value and I'll take it up even higher to plus 60, like so. And these are ultimately subjective modifications. You could go your own way, however I think you'll agree with me that this image is way too dark. And so notice up here in the histogram that we have very little in the way of highlights and we have nothing in this whites area. So one thing you could do is just move your cursor into the center so that you're seeing the word exposure down there below the histogram and you can just drag over to the right like so. Or you could actually click in the exposure value and press the up arrow key a few times in order to, in my case, ultimately nudge that value up to plus 0.5. Alright now I'll take that contrast value and I'll just crank it up to 100%. And then I took both the highlights and the shadows values up to plus 80 is actually what I'm looking for right there. And that's going to help breath some life into those shadows and brighten the highlights as well. Which I think is pretty straightforward. Now this next step is mostly for the sake of demonstration. I'm going to take this blacks value down and I'm going to do so by pressing the Alt key or the Option key on the MAC and dragging this slider triangle down all the way to negative 50. And all of that cyan that we're seeing on screen means that we're clipping like crazy in the complementary red channel. Now normally I wouldn't go this far, however it is going to help me demonstrate vibrance and saturation down here. Now let's say I'm thinking I want the image to be in some way, shape, or form more colorful. If I were to crank up the vibrance value you can see that on one hand it doesn't really do all that much good and on the other hand it makes the image extremely blue. And frankly this image doesn't need to be any bluer than it was in the first place. Which is why I'm going to reset that value to zero. And I'm going to Tab down to the saturation value and I'm going to take it up, which is definitely making the image bluer but it's also brightening the image as we move along. And so at plus 60 I figured it looks pretty nice and bright, however it's way oversaturated which is why I'm going to take the vibrance value down. And notice as I do I'm reducing the saturation of the most oversaturated parts of the image. And as a result, just by taking it down to negative 100 I make my shark a lot more neutral than it was before. And so this is what we were seeing at a vibrance level of zero. Notice how very blue that shark is. These sharks are actually just absolutely gray, as better demonstrated by a vibrance value of negative 100, like so. And just to demonstrate the huge difference we've made I'll press the P key to essentially turn off the preview. Notice that we have a very hazy looking shark indeed. And then if I press the P key again we see the shark as it looks now. Alright now just to make sure I've made my point I'm going to switch over to this image right here and I'm going to make my adjustments a little more quickly. I'm just going to go ahead and max out that temperature value because once again the image is way too blue. And then I'll Tab to the tint value and I ended up taking it up to almost it's maximum of 146. And then I'll Tab to the exposure value, take it up to 0.25. I'll go ahead and take the whites value up to plus 20. And I'll take the blacks value down to negative 10. Alright now I'll advance to that clarity value and I'll take it up to plus 90 this time and I'll take dehaze up to plus 30. So a little less of a dramatic modification than in the previous image. Alright, once again if I crank up the vibrance value I end up with a predominance of blue inside of this image. And it starts looking kind of darkish as well. As compared with setting that back to zero and taking the saturation value up to plus 50. Which also makes the image extremely blue but it brightens it a little bit. And then I'll Shift-Tab back to the vibrance value and I'll take it down ultimately to negative 80. And we get a much more neutral looking shark. Although, I don't think you can really distract any attention away from this vertical fish right here. Just don't understand what this fish is up to. Anyway I'll press the P key once again to turn off the preview. Have a very murky shark indeed. And then if I press P once again we can see that shark looking very dapper. Now there is one thing I forgot to mention about the previous image, so I'll go ahead and switch back to it. Remember when I was Alt-dragging this black slider triangle? You know we saw so much cyan on screen which meant we were clipping like crazy inside that red channel. Well if I were to once again press and hold the Alt key or the Option key on the MAC and just click and hold on that triangle. You can see that we have far less red clipping. Once again inside that red channel. Which means that we have more neutral colors inside the sharks face in particular. And that is once again a function of combining that low vibrance value with that high saturation value. Here inside Camera Raw or Lightroom. Now if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning I have a follow-up movie that shows you how to go about sharpening an image that combines low vibrance with high saturation. If you're looking forward to next week I'll show you how to automate the creation of a full color head cut using a single action once again inside Photoshop. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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