Distress to impress

James Paterson gets gritty and teaches you how to distress your images, pull out hidden textures and enhance details with simple Lightroom skills

Lightroom’s Clarity slider can be seductive and troublesome. It works by adding contrast to the midtones, which has the effect of crisping up flat details and enhancing textures. As such, it’s easy to use and even easier to abuse… unless of course you want to create an intentionally rough, hyperreal treatment like this, in which case it performs miracles. We can use it here universally and selectively to achieve great textured effects.

A treatment like this will often benefit from selective saturation tweaks. We’ve desaturated the overall image and then selectively strengthened the greens and reds in the train. Lightroom offers several excellent tools for this kind of colour control. We can target and adjust the saturation of eight colour ranges using the HSL panel’s on-image tool, then further enhance by painting with the Adjustment Brush.

We’ve provided a starting image, but why not try the effect on your own photos? Images of buildings, old vehicles and street scenes will work particularly well. While the effect can be applied to JPEGS, this is the type of project that demonstrates the advantages of shooting and editing in Raw. Canon’s .CR2 Raw files hold greater detail in the shadows and highlights, while JPEGS are more prone to clipping at either extreme of the tonal range. So when teasing details out of the brightest or darkest parts of an image – as we’ve done here – you have greater headroom when working with Raw files. Areas that initially seem completely black may turn out to hold an incredible amount of detail, as long as you know how to gently tease it out. We’ll do so here using a combination of simple tonal controls and straightforward selective tools.