Understanding how to utilise and adjust lighting in the scene
can greatly impact the final outcome of your images,
truly differentiating your photography from anybody else's.
So, let's take a few minutes and talk about how we can enhance any scene
by making simple lighting adjustments in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
In photography, exposure is the amount of light that reaches
your camera's sensor, creating visual data over a period of time.
Too little exposure and the photo will be too dark.
Too much exposure, and the image will be too light.
Now an exposure can take a fraction of a second,
which enables us to freeze motion of a moving object, for example.
Or it can be several minutes, enabling us to photograph in low light,
or create intentional blurs in our images.
You can control exposure by using your camera's ISO, shutter
speed and aperture. If you need any guidance in any of these topics,
you can find links in the description below.
Dynamic Range describes the difference between the brightest
and the darkest value in your scene - from pure black to brightest white.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult for cameras to capture
the entire dynamic range of a scene in a single exposure.
This is one of the reasons
that photographers like to take photos close to sunrise and sunset,
or on overcast days, or in shade, or even in a studio where the difference
between the brightest and darkest values in the scene is much smaller.
Fortunately, in most scenarios, we can expose for the highlights.
And while the shadows may be too dark in the original capture,
we can use Lightroom to lighten them.
When editing photos, we can use the histogram as a reference.
The histogram is a visual representation of the dynamic range of your image,
plotted from black on the left to white on the right.
The height of the column shows how many pixels in the image have that value.
Monitoring the histogram is an excellent way
to prevent important details in either the highlights or the shadows
from being pushed to either pure black or pure white.
In Lightroom,
we'll select the more icon in order to display the histogram.
This image was photographed a little after sunrise.
The exposure captured the entire dynamic range of the scene.
However, we can still enhance
this photograph, by increasing the shadow slider to brighten the darker areas
and decreasing the highlights to reveal more detail in the sky.
When I use the black and white sliders, I want to make sure that I'm not pushing
the darkest values to pure black, nor the brightest values to pure white.
So, I'll enable the clipping warnings.
Now, if I move the white slider too far, Lightroom will display a red
overlay over any areas that are clipped to pure white without detail.
So I'll back off on that slider.
When setting my blacks, Lightroom will display a blue area
for areas that are clipped to pure black without detail.
We can also change the tonal values in a select area of the image using masking.
I'll add a linear gradient mask,
and then decrease the exposure and increase the shadows.
Another way to make tonal changes in Lightroom is to use the point curve.
Here, I'll use the end points to set the black
and the white points in the image. And then I'll add
a point to lower the curve and darken down the shadow areas,
and then add another point to raise and lighten the highlights.
One advantage of using the tone curves is that, if you only want to affect
the luminosity values and not the colour in the image,
you can use the refine saturation slider to prevent any changes in saturation.
To adjust only a portion of the image using the point curve,
I'll select the mask and then choose brush.
I'll select a large brush with a high feather value,
and paint over the area that I want to darken.
We can then decrease the white point, as well as lower the highlight,
and then add another point on the curve
and raise it to keep the shadows from getting too dark.
Excellent.
Those are some of the most important tools to know when it comes
to making adjustments to the dynamic range and exposure in your images.
I hope you learned something new and are excited to explore
more of your own image editing in Lightroom on desktop or mobile.