Improve exposure

Jason Parnell-Brookes shows you how to use the Light panel effectively in the all-new Lightroom CC

Enhance your images using new-look Lightroom CC’s Light panel

It’s best to get the photo right when taking it, rather than using Lightroom as a fix

When importing photos into Lightroom CC, the first thing you’ll want to do is begin processing the images. On the right side, under the Edit panel, the first set of edit controls available reside in the Light panel – aptly named, for it allows you to control the light levels of the photograph. From here it’s possible to adjust overall Exposure (brightness) of your image, alter Contrast, control Highlights, lift or reduce Shadows, and adjust the Whites and Blacks sliders.

If you have an underexposed image, it’s possible to increase the exposure and save an image that otherwise would be lost. However, the controls should be used sparingly, for if you’ve underexposed an image, even if you can retrieve that data through, say, increasing the exposure by a stop or two, the image quality will begin to suffer. And it’s only useful when using Raw files, JPEGs are a lot harder to manipulate due to their ‘lossy’ format (they are compressed to reduce file size – meaning there’s less information in the photo).

Overall, it’s best to get the photo as right as possible when taking it, rather than using Lightroom as a fix. It’s a better discipline to treat the software as a boost to an already well-exposed image. So with that, let’s take a look at the Light panel’s sliders…

1 Exposure

This adjusts overall image brightness. In this photo the landscape is darkish, so we increase exposure to +0.24. Exposure can be boosted or reduced by 5 stops either way, but if your original image is under/overexposed by more than 1 stop, you’ll lose quality.

2 Contrast

Increasing contrast will help to define the edges in the scene. Here we’ve added +36 contrast to increase the difference between light and shade. Adding a negative value here will decrease this difference and create a greyer and flatter image.

3 Highlights

Highlights are the bright areas of an image, but not quite the brightest – that is reserved for the Whites slider. To increase detail in the lighter areas increase this value. We’ve opted to boost the Highlights by +45 to bring out the grass on the peak in the distance.

4 Shadows

Similar to Highlights, the Shadows slider covers the darker parts, but not the darkest. The darker areas are in the lower half of the frame, with less mist and deeper shade. We lifted them by +64 to reveal detail lost by adding positive Contrast.

5 Whites

The Whites slider controls the very brightest parts of your image. In this photo that means it covers the top of the frame, where the line of fog just grazes the tops of the peaks. Using the Whites slider we pushed this up to +20 to make the fog even brighter.

6 Blacks

The Blacks slider reacts in a similar way to the Whites slider, but it controls all the darkest areas of your shot. After lifting the Shadows in the image to regain detail, the very darkest shadows were unnaturally bright, so we reduced the Blacks slider to -10.