801 Combining a radial filter with a range mask

Welcome to Deke's Techniques. So as many of you may know, I have a passion for underwater photography, especially macro, tiny things, like this guy. He's a harlequin crab, maybe like that big. It's a decent composition, but the lighting is a little boring. So I could have used a snoot, not a snobby kind of snoot, so that we're seeing the crab without all this clutter like this. Doesn't have to be a crab, right? Can be anything, dog, cat, insect, praying mantis. The tool, Camera Raw, could be Lightroom. Okay, forget the crab. Radial filter tool, range mask let's you spread the darkness into the natural details of the photograph. It's a recent innovation so you'll need the newest software, but ah, it's so good. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, here's that tiny harlequin crab, nice and big on screen so that we can see its filth and everything. And here's what I consider to be the better development, which allows us to focus in on the subject of the photograph as opposed to its background, thanks to a kind of ham-handed application of vignetting along with a more nuanced application of the radial filter tool along with a range mask. So here I am working inside Bridge. I'm going to go ahead and right click on this guy right here. The one without the vignette, and then I'll chose Open in Camera Raw, or you can press control r or command r on the Mac in order to open Camera Raw version 11 or later. I want to stress that because before that we didn't have range masks. All right now, as you can see here, I've already applied some development settings. I've also cropped the image, I should admit that. And now what I want to do is switch over to the FX icon up here in the top right region of the screen, and then I'm going to drop down to this post crop vignetting option and I'm going to crank it down to its absolute minimum so that we're darkening the corners around the crab. Now I could darken even more of that background if I were to reduce the midpoint value, but then I'm going to start to lose the crab's legs, which is not what I want. So I'll go ahead and take that value back up to 50, which is the default. Next what you want to do, assuming you're working along with me, is select the radial filter up here in this horizontal toolbar at the top of the screen. And now I'll just drag from this kind of mustard color face of the crab right there. And notice that I'm creating this elliptical boundary and capturing the image in portrait mode. And I believe even then that only works on a Mac. For this image, however, we have Color and Luminance. I'll start with Color 'cause it is the first option listed right there. And then notice that we have this eyedropper that says Sample color. Now what I really want to do is move this radial filter boundary to a slightly different location here. So I'm going to turn off the eyedropper, and that will give me access to this guy so that I can show you how we can take some of these colors out of the darkness, and you do that once again by selecting the eyedropper. So go ahead and click on it. And then you can either click on a color, like so, in order to lift that color specifically, or you can drag around an area to determine a range of colors. You can also, by the way, shift click or shift drag, in order to add more colors to the equation. I'm going to start things over, however, just by clicking on this bit of red right here. And then I want you to notice this color range option. You can crank it up in order to increase the number of colors considered, or you can take it down if you like. And notice, by the way, if you press the alt key or the option key on the Mac you can actually see that mask applied on the fly. And then if you want to see your image once again you just release the alt key or the option key on a Mac. All right, this isn't really what I want, however. So I'm going to turn off this little eyedropper and I'm going to drag this guy back over so that the crab is more or less from 67 to 100 in my case. Your results might be different. If you press and hold the alt key or the option key on the Mac while dragging, for example, this black slider triangle right here, then you will see the mask applied on the fly. All right, so I'm going to take this guy up to 70 so we're just bringing out the brightest colors. Now I want you to see this guy's smoothness. He's very easy to miss. Notice if I take it down to 0 we have some very crunchy details indeed. Even at a default value of 50 we've got all kinds of posterization going on in these rocks right here. They're actually tiny bits of ash, but compared to him they're rocks. What I'm going to do for the smoothest results is go ahead and take this guy up to 100 and that way we have some very nice, smooth transitions. and who isn't, I'll show you a technique that I discovered, and this is true, I swear to it, in a dream. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.