Tone Adjustments
If you are a Lightroom user like me you have probably played with the basic tone adjustment sliders and discovered how powerful they are. For quite a while I was using these tools without really understanding exactly how each tool was helping my photographs look better.
In our how to get the perfect exposure article we discussed how to check the histogram of your shot on your cameras LCD can help you improve your shots. We’ll the tone adjustment sliders oin lightroom let us fine tune the histogram (the photographs tone) during post processing.
In this post i’ll explain what each tool does and how it affects your images. Here is the Tone Adjustment tool we’ll cover:
Exposure
This is the crudest of the tools available in this area of lightroom. Moving this slider shifts the whole histogram to either the left or the right. As a general rule you should aim to expose your shots to the right of the histogram. I generally only use this tool if the photograph I am taking has a small tonal range, in other words if none of the histogram goes off the edges. If this is the case i’ll slide the exposure to the right until the right hand side of the histogram is near the edge of the graph.
Recovery
Adjusting the recovery reduces the highlights, recovering the right hand side of the histogram that may have been blown out.
When using the recovery tool the left side of the histogram (the dark side or shadows) will be completely unchanged.
As with most tools it is easy top over use the recovery tool. Recover too much and you may end up sending some of your highlights or upper mid tones to a neutral grey color.
Fill Light
Just as recovery adjusted the highlights, fill light recovers the shadows or left side of the histogram. s with the recovery tool if you over do it you will start to lose contrast in the photo, leaving it looking flat and much less interesting.
Blacks
This is perhaps my most used adjustment. It can be though of as the opposite to Fill light. It makes the blacks blacker and tends to add a bit more contrast to your images.
I use this a lot, especially when post processing film shots where contrast can sometimes be lacking. In my work I tend to shoot a lot of portraits and I find upping the blacks always tends to make these photos just pop.
Brightness
This adjustment increases the overall brightness of a photograph. It does this by shifting all of the histogram either to the right (to brighten the image) or the left (to darken it).
The brightness tool is biased towards the middle of the histogram so as you’ll adjust the brightness slider the changes you see will affect the mid tones more than the highlights and shadows.
Contrast
As a general rule a picture with a wider histogram will be more interesting as it will have a wider range of tones in it.
The contrast tool will increase the tonal range of your photograph by stretching the histogram towards the edges. This is particularly useful when an image contains a lot of mid tones.
The contrast tool is opposite to the brightness tool in that the bias is towards the edges of the histogram, rather than the center.
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