Tool School: Take control of detail
Get to grips with one of the best tools for boosting details and enhancing portraits
Get to grips with one of the best tools for boosting details and enhancing portraits
The Texture control is one of the best tools in Camera Raw and Lightroom for controlling details in your images. On the face of it, the slider is very simple – drag one way to increase detail, drag the other way to decrease it. But used in combination with other excellent Camera Raw or Lightroom tools like the Adjustment Brush and Range Masking, the Texture command becomes even more powerful.
While the name may imply that this tool is best at enhancing textures, in fact it’s often at its best when doing precisely the opposite. A negative texture value can result in a wonderful softening effect – useful for de-emphasising overly busy parts of your frame, or for speedy skin softening in portraits.
In this project we’ll look at how to get the most out of the setting by applying it locally. This can be done in either Camera Raw or Lightroom, which have almost identical controls. We’ve used the Texture command here to soften the skin over the face and enhance the details in the fur hood, but you’ll find it useful for all kinds of editing tasks, no matter what your subject or scene…
1 The Texture slider
The Texture slider is available in Camera Raw and Lightroom, as well as within the Camera Raw Filter in Photoshop. You’ll find the slider both in the Basic Panel and also within the settings for the three local adjustment tools (the Adjustment Brush, Radial Filter and Graduated Filter). It works by targeting the high-frequency details in your scene.
2 Adjustment Brush
The Texture effect rarely works when applied universally over an image. It’s much more effective applied locally, using the Adjustment Brush. This way, we can paint the texture into areas that need it and leave everything else untouched. Simply grab the brush, load it with positive or negative texture, then start painting. Hold Alt and paint to subtract areas.
3 Brush overlay
When we paint texture with the Adjustment Brush we can toggle on a mask overlay that shows where we’ve painted. Press Y to turn it on or off, and use the colour box in the settings on the right to choose an overlay colour. (Green is good for portraits, because it contrasts with skin tones.) The mask overlay is very useful when adjusting the Range Mask controls, as it shows exactly which areas are targeted.
4 Negative texture on faces
A negative texture setting can be fantastic for skin tones. In fact, using negative texture is often more useful than positive texture. Not only is it good for applying a swift skin-softening effect, it’s also handy for softening overly sharp details or rough, patchy tones. Simply paint over the area with the Adjustment Brush then lower the Texture slider to a negative value to soften the details.
5 Clarity vs Texture
Clarity is similar to Texture in that it can also be used to enhance or soften details. But Clarity has more of an effect on smooth details, whereas Texture leaves smooth areas alone and works more on the fine details. As such, Clarity is often a better choice for selectively boosting surfaces like rocks or trees. Texture, on the other hand, is better for pulling detail out of finer surfaces, like the fur hood.
6 Range Masking for skin
Range Masking is one of Adobe’s best selective editing tools. It works by targeting areas based on colour or luminosity. Here it means we can paint loosely and quickly over the skin with the Adjustment Brush, then turn on the Range Masking colour setting and sample the colours in the skin. Everything apart from the sampled colours will be excluded, giving us a precise local adjustment.