Image Rescue
There’s unrealised potential in this shot – so it’s time to open up Lightroom…
Our starting raw file isn’t particularly inspiring, but with those boat textures to the fore, it has the makings of a gritty black-and-white photo. The whole image is slightly underexposed – so to start, we are going to brighten the image using the Whites slider in Lightroom’s Basic Panel, pushing it all the way to the right . In this case, that is +50.
The boat ‘junkyard’ at the back needs a lift, so we’ll run an Adjustment
Brush over the top half of the image, then lift the Shadows in this area by +45 .
With that done, we can press V to change the image to black and white. In the resulting B & W Panel, we can have a play with the eight Black & White Mix sliders to help bring out some of the detail and contrast across the image .
Finally, we want to increase the details within the whole image to really make it pop, so back in the
Basic Panel, we’ll push the Texture slider to +20 and the Clarity slider to +20 4 . We’ve gone from dull to interesting in minutes!