Warrior 1 James Abbott
Adobe Camera Raw has come an incredibly long way over the years, with a number of innovative features that have revolutionised the way we can process our images. The fundamentals have remained almost unchanged but every once in a while, a ground-breaking new feature comes about.
And it’s two relatively new features, including one released in May 2019, that will form the basis of how I process this image and work with detail: Dehaze and Texture.
1 Apply basic adjustments
The first job is to apply all the basic adjustments. So, to get started and to reduce the haze in the scene, I set Dehaze +40. I then adjust White Balance by setting Temperature to 5800 and Tint to -6, before increasing Exposure to +50 and Contrast to +30. The next thing I need to do is to recover shadow and highlight details, so I set Highlights to -40 and Shadows to +55.
To finish up, Whites are set to +12 and Blacks to -12.
2 Enhance detail
With the basic adjustments complete, I decide to use the new
Texture slider, to help achieve a kind of Orton effect in Adobe Camera Raw rather than in Photoshop itself. To do this I simply reduce Texture to -75, which makes the image look softer, with a waxy appearance. But rather than leave it like this, I then increase Clarity to +30, which increases mid-tone contrast and adds a degree of sharpness to the now much softer-looking image.
3 Convert to mono
At this stage the image is looking punchy, possibly too much for colour, but my aim was always to convert to black and white. When I click on Black & White at the top of the Basic tab, the default conversion looks pretty good. I could leave it as it is, but there are a few adjustments I want to make; so I click on the Black & White Mix tab and set Yellows to +30 to lighten the rocks, Greens to +60 to lighten foliage and Blues to -50 to darken the sky.
4Darken the sky
To complete the processing, the last thing I want to do is to darken the clouds in the sky to make it look even moodier. To do this I click on the Graduated Filter on the main menu, hold down Shift and drag the guide down so the whole sky is covered by the filter. Next, I reduce Exposure to -0.40 and Highlights to -30. The result of this is subtle, but it adds more definition to the clouds sitting next to the nearly-black blue of the sky.