Tutorial 2

Fancy some experimentation? here are four easy effects to try on any image...

Alter the entire mood of Raw file images with just a few simple tweaks

01 The natural look

Fix any colour casts by clicking the White Balance tool over a neutral tone. Adjust Exposure and Contrast until the tones look punchy. To make full use of the tonal range, hold down Alt, then drag Whites and Blacks for a greyscale view that shows clipped pixels, and stop just short of where they begin to appear.

02 Cooled down

Use the Basic panel’s sliders to give portraits a cool, desaturated look. Drag Temperature to the left to cool the image, then tweak Tint. Lower Saturation to partially drain the image of colour. Finally, to give the image a stylized look, increase Shadows, decrease Highlights and pump up Clarity.

03 Go retro

Go to the Tone Curve panel, click Point and target the Blue channel. Next, drag the bottom-left point upwards and the top-right point downwards to tint the shadows blue and the highlights yellow. For a simple film-like border effect, grab the Graduated Filter tool and set Exposure to -4.0.

04 Sepia Tint

Grab the Targeted Adjustment tool from the toolbar, right-click and choose Grayscale Mix. This will let you drag up or down over a greyscale image to alter colour brightness. For a sepia tone, go to the Split Tone panel. Alt-drag the Hue sliders for a temporary view of shadow and highlight tinting at 100% Saturation.