lightroom CC
George Cairns demonstrates how to reveal more texture and detail by selectively increasing midtone contrast using Lightroom’s Clarity slider
tutorial 3 How to reveal midtone detail using the Clarity slider
Tackling over- and underexposed areas in photos is relatively straightforward with Lightroom – you can use the Develop module’s Basic panel to adjust the shadows and the highlights to reveal detail where it’s needed. How, though, do you improve an image that’s mostly midtones?
The starting image on this page has some bright areas in the background windows, but the majority of the image consists of dull shadows and murky midtones. The very flat-lit printing press has lots of interesting textures and details, but in the unprocessed picture these areas of interest are lost in a muddy wash of dull browns.
To reveal more detail in this scene we could have captured a series of bracketed exposures and combined them, but Lightroom lacks Photoshop CC’S ability to merge multiple photos as an HDR composite that features detail in the shadows, midtones and highlights. We could also have zapped the scene with a burst of flash, but we chose to use the available mix of artificial tungsten and natural daylight instead, because introducing a third light source would have made it tricky to get the white balance correct.
Fortunately, our start image is a Raw file, so it contains more tonal information than we can see when looking at the unprocessed photo. We’ll show you how to lighten the midtones and bump up their contrast to make finer features and textures stand out more. We’ll also show you how to reveal the scene’s true colours by cooling down a warm cast and removing a magenta tint caused by an incorrect white balance setting. Midtone madness