Editing Exposure in Lightroom
Little Blue Heron |
The following description of how I edit photographs will be based on Lightroom, but there are many software programs that do all the same things I describe here. They may have different names, but you should be able to find the the right controls in your software program to do what I've displayed below. If you click on any of the images, even the smaller "straight out of the camera" images, you can see them larger.
Little Blue Heron
When shooting a light-colored bird, like this immature Little Blue Heron (photographed above), I want to make sure that I have details in the bright parts of its feathers. Once I have the photograph in Lightroom, I then can make adjustments to make the photograph look prettier. For this particular photograph, I increased the brightness a little to give the white feathers a little more punch, but I also watched the histogram at the top to make sure that the right hand "bump" didn't move so far to the right that I would begin losing detail in the feathers. I also added some vibrance and saturation to the photograph. I did this for two reasons: 1) it makes the photograph a little more colorful and 2) it tends to darken the blues. So when I raised the brightness I lost some blues in the water, but I got it back when I raised the vibrance.
Be careful about adding vibrance and saturation. Both add color, though to my eyes, adding vibrance creates a little more natural feel. Adding too much saturation can make the photograph look a little fake. I like my images very colorful, partly because I have red-green colorblindness, which (as best as I can describe it) tends to desaturate those colors. But it's easy for me to overdo it.
Original Image Out of Camera (cropping only) |
Osprey |
Let me also mention the slider for blacks. Lightroom automatically sets this to 5 when I import RAW photographs, and usually this is a very good starting place. If the portions of the photograph that are supposed to be black look grey, I'll use this slider to make them look right again.
Original Image Out of Camera (cropping only) |
This is what I do for photographs that look basically right and need only minor adjustments. In a future post, we'll look at making larger adjustments for when lighting conditions are not favorable or when you just plain make a mistake in exposure.
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