Indian Food Vendor fries up some snacks

Recently a reader sent me a message asking me to cover the basics of developing images in Adobe Lightroom and what each of the tools is for. I thought I’d take the time today to take a quick look at this, especially as I’m teaching a Lightroom workshop this weekend. These basic controls are the same as those in Adobe Photoshop (at least the CS4 version). What follows applies to Lightroom 2.x.

Firstly, the Develop module is accessed by pressing the “D” key, or clicking on Develop in the top right of the screen. Today, we’re just focusing on the controls in the Basic panel, as those are the ones that you’ll the most. When processing your images, it’s generally good practice to do things in the top-down order that they appear in.

Lightroom Basic Panel

Treatment

Treatment comes first. This gives you control over your white balance settings. There’s an eye dropper tool at the side. Press “W” or click on it to select it. Once you’ve activated it, you can click with it anywhere in the image to set the white balance. It has a magnifier that gives you very accurate control over the pixels you’re clicking, and RGB values (as percentage) are shown as you move across the image. A neutral value is when all the values are close to matching.

If you prefer to, you can set your white balance via the dropdown in the panel. Here, it gives you all the standard white balance presets, plus Auto, As Shot and Custom. The temp and tint sliders can be used to set any kind of custom white balance that you desire, from accurate, neutral settings all the way through to creative interpretations.

Tone

Underneath the Treatment section is Tone. The first option is Auto and I personally find that Auto gets things looking pretty good a fair amount of the time. It’s definitely worth trying it out first. The first of the sliders in this section is Exposure. This sets the highlight point and determines where the highlights are clipped. If you watch the histogram display while adjusting this slider (or any of the others) you will see the display values move as you move the slider. As well as being used to set the highlight clipping point, the exposure affects the overall image brightness. As exposure is to highlights, Blacks is to shadows. This sets the shadow clipping point and has a default setting as 5. You usually want to make sure you have some black in the image, so it’s unlikely that you’ll want to set this too much lower. I normally set these two controls first – once the highlights and shadows are correct, the rest of it is often just minor adjustments.

Recovery and Fill Light are located between the Exposure and Blacks sliders. Recovery allows you to pull back any unwanted highlight clipping (within reason). Think of this similar to a fine tune control for the clipping point. Fill Light affects the other end of tones, but not in quite the same way. Fill Light is used for lightening shadows in darker areas but runs the risk of drastically reducing apparent contrast and adding noise if used too much.

Clicking and dragging within the actual histogram display is also possible to adjust the various controls.

Brightness and Contrast live below these four controls. I find contrast is not all that useful, but brightness can be good for minor tweaks that the Exposure slider can’t quite get.

Presence

The final components of the Basic panel are Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation. First up is Clarity. This functions much like using Local Contrast Masking in Photoshop (unsharp mask with low amount and high radius) but restricts it to the midtones. Clarity serves to add “punch” to the image. It can often look a little too strong for portraits, but works great with most other subjects. Using some negative clarity on portraits can often give a softening effect to the skin, but too much is very noticeable. Vibrance and Saturation do similar things, basically boosting the color saturation. Saturation works in a linear fashion whereas Vibrance is non-linear. Using Vibrance, the less saturated colors will get a bigger boost than the more saturated ones, making it great for images with people in them, as it protects skin tones. You can boost the colors in a person’s clothes while preserving the tone of the skin. Saturation on the other hand, boosts everything so is most useful when you want to dramatically want to change the colors. For increasing color, I’ll almost always stick to Vibrance but for reducing color, I’ll occasionally use Saturation.

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