Lessons

Lesson Info

Overview of Basic Adjustment Sliders

so I'm gonna get out of that. And let's go to some images that have yet to be adjusted. And before we really get into working on photographic images, much trying to understand some of the adjustments that are available by looking at a simple image, I'm gonna end up opening this, which is generically known as a, um, gray wedge. Now, this is not a raw file. A raw file would end with a file extension of I think CR WRC are two came from a canon camera. It would end in dot and the e f for a Nikon in there are many different file formats. Each camera manufacturer has a different version of a raw file. In what raw means is the raw data that the camera captured without being manipulated at all. It's just with sensor grabbed before anything else has been done, and each manufacturer saves that in a different way, and therefore each one is a different file extension on the end. And so this is not a raw file to tiff because I made it in photo shop, and if you have a tip for a J peg file, you can s...

till adjust them in camera, but you have to go to the file menu and choose opening camera raw to force it to go in there. All right, so this is just gonna represent the general brightness range you might have in a picture, and we'll work with the sliders that are found on the right side of my screen to see how does it adjust this particular simple image? And as I do, I think it will be easier to understand what the's sliders do. Then we'll start applying them to normal pictures and let's take a look at what we can dio. So first off, cameras divided up into various tabs. If you look on the right side of my screen, right here are all the tabs. And if you hover over a tablet, this one, you should see the name of the tab, the detail tab, black and white split toning, lens corrections and so on. We're going to start under the basic tab because just about every image I open gets adjusted with those controls, whereas the others are only used as needed. And not every picture needs what's under the other taps. So down here we have a series of sliders, and we're going to start by working with these settings right in here, which are the tonal sliders. They generally adjust the brightness of the picture, and they can't generally shift color. They're not going to make a blue sky turn red or something like that. These were only, you know, affect how bright or dark something is. Exposure is going to adjust the overall brightness of the picture. So when I move exposure, watch this image and see how much of it changes. The only portion that's not changing when I'm moving. This is black. Black is remaining black, but other than that, everything gets brighter. If I move in the opposite direction, everything is going to get darker. So I adjust exposure when the entire picture has an issue. And so the whole images to dark fine, just exposure. Then I'm gonna skip down to sliders, so we have highlights in shadows and let's see what they do. The highlight slider tries toe, isolate the bright ish shades and your picture and tries not to effect the dark ish areas. So if you look at this image, what might we consider to be bright well, these shades up in this area are definitely bright, and these maybe to a lesser extent. But once I get down into here, I wouldn't consider those to be highlights or bright areas. So let's see what happens when I just my highlight slider. I bring it up and you notice that if I just bring it out, bring it back down and bring it up. If you look at the areas that are changing, it's primarily the really bright stuff that's changing. And then a little bit of the rest of the image is changing, and that's just so it blends in with whatever is left over. Once you get into the darker shades here, I'll bring highlights down, and we can also attempt to darken it. You notice that white stays generally white. It's actually getting the tiniest bit darker, but barely perceivable e darker but is trying to isolate just the bright areas. Shadows does the opposite. It tries to work in the darkish areas of your picture and tries to leave those bright areas alone. So if I go to shadows and I bring it up, let's see what part of the image changes you notice that it's the really dark areas up until about the middle gray that's there. And then next. Nothing happens to the writers moving the other direction, and Aiken darkened things. But again, it's trying to isolate it just into the dark ish portion of the image. Then we have whites and blacks, and a lot of people get confused about what's the difference between whites and highlights because they both work on the bright part of the picture. And what's the difference between blacks and shadows? Because again, they both think about the darkest portion of the picture. Well, when you adjust both whites and blacks, it will generally affect the entire range of your picture. All it's doing is saying How bright should this brightest tone be? Um, it might be easier to see this if I have something that doesn't already have black and white in it. Let me grab this image here, which the brightest shade is nowhere near white. So if I move up, the whites watch what happens, you see that the entire picture is getting brighter. But what's happening is is it's taking whatever the brightest shade is in the picture, and it's making that brighter in taking all the other shades that are darker than that along with it. But it's doing it starting from the brightest shade that's in the picture so I could bring this up and I'm gonna bring it up until that brighter shade looks white. If I bring it further than the I lose detail with the shade next to it. So I think right about there, it turned white. Blacks, on the other hand, thinks about the darkest shade in the entire picture, and it controls how dark should it be. So if I move blacks down, watch the darkest part of the picture. I can come in here and make a darker and eventually get it to be solid Black War. I could bring it up in lighten it. But it's thinking about the extremes of brightness, the absolute brightness and the absolute darkest. Let's tweak how bright those areas are and let the rest of the picture move along with it. I imagine you had a spring in your hand if you were a kid and you had a slinky. When you're a kid, it's like grabbing the ends of the Slinky and just pull it out longer, either side longer and everything else in between moves along with it. Just like a spring. The loops on the spring would move along with it. Now you might be thinking, though, that sounds a bit like shadows and highlights, but it's not right now. If you look at this particular image, what would be considered a highlight? Meaning what is bright right now? And the answer is that not much. This might be the little list, like the absolute edge of being considered a highlight. But if I try to adjust the highlights, it's not going to change this image much right now because there's nothing in this picture that's close toe white, and therefore there's not really any highlights at all. We're just got the areas where it would blend into everything else. If I go to shadows, what in here is close to black? Nothing. So when I just shadows, not much will happen a tiny bit because it would try to blend in with the rest of the image. But there's nothing near black, and therefore shadows will be largely ineffective, but with whites and blacks, since it thinks about whatever the brightest shade is regardless, if that's white, where if it's 50% gray or it's anything else in this means just brightened. The brightest part were dark and the brightest part. Then it's going to be effective and saying, with blacks working on the darkest range, so I often think of whites and blacks is either the first step that I do for an image that looks washed out. If it looks like it's dense fog in a picture, that means you're not gonna have any white in that image. You're not gonna have any black in the You'll see that when I get to foggy looking images, and that's when these two sliders will be useful. But otherwise, on normal looking pictures, I use the whites and blacks. Sliders is what I might call a finishing technique, meaning that when I think I'm done with the image, then all tweak those just to make sure I got the full brightness range I might want, Um, but most the time it's more near the end of adjusting things. Let's go back to that more full range version of the gray wedge that's here and now let's look at what the other sliders do. So remember, exposure controls the overall brightness of the picture. It's gonna pretty much affect everything and highlights is going to isolate bright ish things. Things that are close toe white shadows will isolate darkish things. That means things that are close to black whites controls. How bright is the brightest part of the picture, Blacks is how dark is the darkest part of the picture. These will become much more useful when we start working on normal pictures. But now let's figure out what contrast does contrast is going to control how big of a difference is there between bright and dark things. If you increase contrast, there will be a greater difference between bright and dark stuff in. If you lower contrast, bright and dark things will become more similar to each other. You could in some ways do that with the shadows in the highlight sliders. If I brighten the highlights and I darken the shadows, I'm getting a greater difference between bright and dark things, and that's going to be the equivalent to increasing contrast if I do the opposite. If I take British things and darken them by lowering this and I end up taking the dark stuff and brighten it. They're going to become more similar to each other. That's similar to lowering contrast. But let me get rid of those adjustments and show you just contrast. Just, you know, in here any time you have a slider you're experimenting with, be feel free to double click on it that's going to reset it to it's default setting. So anytime I'm experimenting with a slider and inside, I don't like what it did. A double click on it. It just pops to its default. Alright, let's try contrast and let's see if it does what I said. It does. I bring it up right. Things get brighter and dark. Things get darker at the same time, I lower it, and bright and dark things start looking more similar to each other. And it contrast is something where most of the time adjusting highlights and shadows instead, because that can control the two parts individually, whereas with contrast, it's doing in both at the same time. But it's still a very useful adjustment now, below that, we have three sliders. They're called texture clarity in D. Hayes. What the heck do they do texture, clarity and D. Hayes. Well, in this case, the one I really want to talk about its d. Hayes, because texture and clarity, we need detail in our picture to really see what it does. So it's not gonna do much on here cause I don't see like, texture within my picture. But D. Hayes should end up doing something. De Hayes is going to act much like the blacks slider. Remember when I said that blacks and whites might be useful when I get an image, it looks foggy. Wouldn't that also be known as hazy? Well, let's grab an image one of these simplified ones. This would be the equivalent to a hazy scene where it just looks like dense fog. You and you can't see a lot of detail. That's because bright things and dark things will be very similar to each other. Just look like a gray fog. Let me freshly what blacks would do if I bring blacks down. The darkest part of the picture gets darker and darker, and eventually it turns black. But if I continue pushing it further, watch what happens to the bar that's right next to black do you see how eventually you lose it and it turns solid black. And if I could push this even farther, the next bar over might end up getting to solid black, although I've maxed it out, so I might do exposure instead to see if I could get it. But let's look at how D. Hayes is different. It's gonna act a lot like that black slider. But once that area gets close to being black, it's going to be concentrating them the dark part of the picture in trying to retain detail. So I'm going to bring D haze down. Let's see, I'm sorry. Bring it up, see if that dark area gets darker and darker. But as it nears black, you'll notice that the one right next to it is still very easy to see that it's different. And so D. Hayes. Anytime you have a hazy picture, the darkest part of your picture will not be near black. In to break through the haze, you want to get the darkest party image towards black. But if you did that using the black slider and you went it all too far, you can easily trash the detail on dark part of the picture, but D. Hayes is going to do it and make it so you can still see the separation between all those tones, but that will make more sense when we get Tor normal picture.