Hello and welcome back to another video, my name is Mike Davies,
and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you how to emulate the Clarity slider found in
premium software such as Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Lightroom, etc. I'll be
using GIMP version 2.10.28 which is the latest version of GIMP at the time of this tutorial.
Before I get into that don't forget to check out my website at DaviesMediaDesign.com. As always I
have tons of video tutorials on here as well as free software help articles so definitely
check that out. You can enroll in my GIMP 2.10 Masterclass: From Beginner to Pro Photo Editing
on Udemy. And you can get access to more content with a premium membership, and I'll include a link
to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video.
I'll be using a couple of free plugins for this tutorial - one is from G'MIC, you guys have
probably heard of it by now. You can get it at GMIC.eu. Just click the "download" button there.
And the second plugin is one that was created for this channel by Kevin Thornton. You can get
it exclusively from my website, and I will include a link to this in the description. Alright, so if
you've ever edited a photo in premium software you've probably come across the Clarity slider.
So here I am inside of Affinity Photo. What this slider does is it just adds clarity or
it adds detail to certain areas of the photo. And what I've done here is I've created a layer
and just sort of circled the areas that are being affected most by this slider or by the setting.
So it's a lot of the mountain details here, some over here at the very top,
none of the highlights are affected over here, but over here some parts of the road,
and there are some minor effects to these portions of the image. Basically what the Clarity slider
does in a nutshell is it adds local contrast to the mid-tones of the image. There are probably
some other factors that go into the Clarity slider for the premium software versions of this,
however that's basically what's happening. So what we need to do in GIMP is we need to isolate
the mid-tones and we need to add local contrast to those mid-tones. So let's get started with
creating this effect in GIMP here. I am in GIMP 2.10.28. What I'll do first is open up my image.
So I'll go to File, in my case "Open Recent," and I'm going to open the JPEG version of this photo,
which I'll make available exclusively on my website. So this is the same photo I was using
in Affinity Photo. So there are basically two main steps to this - the first is going to be
to apply local contrast using G'MIC. So with this layer selected I'm going to go to Filters>GMIC-QT.
It should show up here if you have it installed correctly. And if I type in the search bar
"local contrast" you're going to see under the "Detail" section we have an effect here called
"Simple Local Contrast." And as you can see it's just adding a ton of contrast throughout
the image. So I really like this setting and I like it with all the default settings here.
The main thing is just make sure the "Channels" is set to "Luminance only," that way it only
affects the luminance of the image and not the color. So that'll really just keep a lot of color
noise out of the image. And also under "Output mode" make sure this is set to "New Layer,"
that way it's going to put the final result on a new layer over here in the layers panel.
So I'm going to click OK to apply this effect. So now up top here you can see we have the new
layer and it's got that local contrast filter applied to it. So really it's just creating a very
contrast-y image. However, the issue right now is that the contrast is being applied throughout
the entire image and not just localized to the midtones. So that brings us to the next step,
which is going to be using that luminosity plug-in. And you can do luminosity masks manually
in GIMP - I actually have an entire tutorial dedicated to showing you how to do that. However,
with this simple plug-in which does work with the latest version of GIMP you can basically just
click a button and you can get luminosity masks for all levels of the image. So to use this we're
going to come up top here to the top layer, and let's just rename this "Local contrast,"
hit the enter key. So on our local contrast layer next we're going to go to Filters>Generic and
here you'll see it says "Luminosity mask setup." That article I pointed out towards the beginning
of the tutorial does show you how to download and install this in your GIMP. So I'll click
on this option and what's going to happen now is it's going to set up the luminosity masks...
Alright, once that plug-in is done doing its thing we're going to end up with a bunch of new layers
here, and they're going to be separated into different groups or organized into different
groups. So what you have here is you have luminosity masks for the various luminosity
parts of the image. So here you have your lights, and it's going to be a wider range of lighter
pixels in your image - so like the sky and some of the light coming off from the sky. And then as
you go up you've got the "LL," which is basically just a narrower version of the lights or just the
lighter parts of the image. And then the "LLL" is going to be the very lightest parts of your image.
So we don't need to use lights for this, so you can actually just delete that layer group.
And what we're just going to be focusing on is the mid tones here. So the same thing
applies - you've got a wider range of mid-tones at the bottom and then you've got a more narrow
range of mid-tones at the top. And so we're just going to delete the "Darks" layer group.
And actually we're also going to delete the "Mids" layer group. So we're deleting all of the layer
groups that were created by that plug-in, and we're back to basically where we were before the
plug-in ran. The only difference is if I come over to "Channels," now you'll see we have all of the
luminosity masks here saved to our channels. So we're going to be putting those to use. So all you
need to do here is come over to the local contrast layer, right click, and go to "Add layer mask,"
and under "Initialize layer mask to:" we're going to choose "Channel." And I found that the
"MMM" layer worked the best for emulating the Clarity effect, but you can click on the drop
down here and you can go with any of the mid-tone options really depending on what you're going for.
You can even try out the other luminosity levels there if you want, but I'll go with
the MMM option and click add. So you'll see that's going to limit the local contrast effect
just to the mid tones of the image, so if I come over here and hide this there's a before
there's an after. So the main difference here with this effect is that you are going to get
probably a bit more contrast going on in this part of the image. Whereas inside of a program
like Affinity Photo - let me just hide this - you really had a more subtle effect over here.
But this method does come with a level of flexibility that you won't find in premium
software with that simple slider because basically what you can do here is you can duplicate this
layer, and right now we have the MMM luminosity mask on here - let's right click and go to "Delete
layer mask," right click, "Add layer mask," and we're going to change this using the mouse wheel
to MM and click "Add" - and so now what you're doing is you're compounding the layer. So if
you see here this is just with the MMM layer. So let's rename that "MMM" so we know, and then
when we unhide the MM layer it's bringing in a bit more contrast into different areas of the image.
So we'll just change that to MM. So basically you can introduce more contrast to more mid-tones of
the image if you want to. So let's duplicate this and do this one more time. So delete layer mask,
and you can just click the layer mask icon here and go with "M,"
so now we have it in all of the mid-tones. Let me change this to "M." So basically we're just
layering the local contrast to this until we're happy with it. And then one last thing we can
do to customize this further is we can add a layer group - so let's rename this
"Midtones," hit the enter key, and we're going to click and drag all of these into the layer group.
And the reason I want to do this is now I can click on the layer group itself and I can add a
layer mask to this - and let's just go with "White (full opacity)," and click "Add." So now what I
can do is with my paintbrush tool selected - and I have this set to a softer brush, so it's around
32 right now, and I'll reset my colors to black and white - so what I can do with this is with
the color black I can paint on the layer mask and just paint out any areas that I don't want to have
that contrast added to it. So I can paint out all this if I wanted to, maybe paint out some of this
stuff here, and that just allows us to have more control. So here's a before, here's an after. So
now it looks very similar to what you would see in a premium program like Affinity Photo,
plus you have a bit more flexibility. Alright so that's it for this tutorial - hopefully you
liked it. If you did, don't forget to like this video subscribe to my channel and click the bell
icon to be notified each time I have a brand new tutorial. You can check out any of the links to
my resources in the description of the video, but thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.