Fundamentals: Wildlife photos Discover how Lightroom or Camera Raw can help you boost detail

A new feature from Adobe will help tease out more detail from low-sized captures

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of being connected with nature – out away from people, but still surrounded by life. This photo location didn’t even have roads! It was shot on the Saltee Islands off the coast of Wexford. This shot is from my first trip there with a Canon 20D. It’s a mere 8MP camera – but with new technology, we can easily overcome the low size for larger prints. This is done with Adobe’s Super Resolution technology, which can double the resolution on each axis. This gives a file four times larger. It looks great and works on TIFF and JPEG, as well as raw. For raw files, you get a full DNG with Kelvin white balance, so it acts like you shot a much larger original raw.

With any shot, you sometimes have to make compromises. It was a really overcast morning, so this was photo was taken at ISO 800. Because the lens was at 500mm, a 1/125 sec shutter speed was used to reduce camera shake, despite the underexposure. So let’s fix the exposure, then make it larger.

1 Update the Process

While the exposure is the most obvious issue, the most important issues to deal with first are the Process Version and the Profile.

The Process Version is how Lightroom (or Camera Raw) interprets the data from your sensor. Hover over the lightning bolt to see the current version. Version 1 had a different set of sliders to process with, so updating is necessary. Click the bolt to get the Update dialog. New files imported into Lightroom automatically have the latest Process Version applied.

2 Add a Profile

On top of the Process Version, you have the Profile. The Profile takes the information from the Process Version and gives it a particular look. This file is old, so it has one of the original ways of rendering a file, called ACR 4.4, before Profiles even began to exist as we know them.

Without using the Profile Browser itself, you can make a quick selection of Adobe Vivid from the menu to greatly improve the colour and contrast in the photo.

3 Fix the exposure

With the foundation in place, you can now correct for the underexposure.

Bring Exposure up to 1.15.

Bring Highlights down to -36 to bring back detail in the white feathers. Increase Texture to 21 to help with feather detail in general.One downside to the increase in Texture is the additional noise in the photo. Switch to the Detail Panel…

4 Enhance the detail

Set Luminance to 25. Doing this removes the crunchiness in the out-of-focus areas. Set Detail to 100 to keep the edges. To improve larger areas of colour, set Smoothness to 76. An Amount of 25 in the Color section looks good as the default setting.

The change in Luminance has blurred the photo. To sharpen the edges, but not the out-of-focus areas, set Masking to 70. You want detail, so increase Sharpening Detail to 50. Finally, bump your Sharpening Amount from the default 40 to 50.