The Art of Photography: Rescue Techniques in Adobe Lightroom

When working with images that have been compromised by exposure issues, such as those found in high-dynamic-range (HDR) photography, it's essential to know how to rescue them. One of the most effective techniques for doing so is utilizing the develop window in Adobe Lightroom.

In this example, we're presented with an image that has been affected by overexposure, resulting in lost highlights and details in the shadows. To address this issue, one of the first steps is to turn up the exposure, which can help to recover some of the lost detail in the shadows. However, as you increase the exposure, it's crucial to be mindful of the impact on the highlights, particularly in areas such as bridges and clouds.

A useful approach to mitigate this effect is to bring down the highlights using the Highlight slider. By doing so, you can create a more subtle contrast between the bright areas and the dark areas, which can help to maintain the overall integrity of the image. Another option is to keep the exposure unchanged while lightening the shadows, which can also achieve a similar result.

It's worth noting that when working with HDR images, it's easy to overdo it and end up with an unnatural look. To avoid this, it's essential to use restraint and make subtle adjustments. This means being careful not to clip the highlights or compress the shadows too much, as this can lead to an unappealing tone mapping effect.

In addition to adjusting exposure and contrast, another effective technique for dealing with HDR images is to work with the tone curve. By using the Lightroom tone curve tool, you can gain more control over the image and make targeted adjustments to specific areas of the curve. This allows for a much more subtle approach than simply adjusting the overall exposure or contrast.

Furthermore, when working with HDR images, it's essential to consider other factors such as white balance and color grading. In this example, the image could benefit from a slight adjustment to the white balance to give the light a warmer, golden tone, which is reminiscent of c41 film. By making these adjustments, you can create a more natural and pleasing look that enhances the overall aesthetic of the image.

Finally, it's worth emphasizing the importance of working slowly and carefully when editing HDR images. It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of making quick adjustments, but taking the time to step back and reassess your work is often essential. This allows you to make more informed decisions about the overall look and feel of the image, rather than simply reacting impulsively.

By understanding these techniques and using them judiciously, you can rescue images that have been compromised by exposure issues and create stunning results in Adobe Lightroom. Whether working with HDR or conventional images, the develop window offers a wealth of tools and adjustments that can help to transform your photos into something truly exceptional.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday's episode we're going to do something a little bit different and I promised you guys uh since I left my day job to do the Art of Photography full-time that we would be adding some new things and part of that is we're going to be doing more shows and I'm bumping this up to three shows a week and I think this is going to be a little bit of a challenge but it's going to be a lot of fun and you guys have seem to ask for more stuff and I think this is a great way of doing it um part of the process in doing this is I'm introducing some new show segments and this is one of those today and our segment today I'm going to call in poost and one of the things we haven't covered a lot of on this show is post-production um and for various reasons I think when I was doing one show a week and I was doing this show in my free time um I I felt like you know covering history of photography and the whole art side of it was really for me the most important thing to do at that time and now that we're introducing new content I think doing post- production is really important and it's an important part of that and I think no matter what you do whether you shoot film or whether you shoot digital um and you know everybody does some post-production work and so I'm hoping that this series will address address some of those issues and help you guys with a little bit of training and give you guys some ideas for things that you might be able to do on your own um our subject for our inaugural episode here is I want to talk about highlights and shadows now a lot of times getting the proper exposure in camera is a difficult thing to do and it's a little bit subjective um you can control exposure to you know enhance a certain type of mood that you're looking for um you can go for very low-key photography for a very somber look you can go for very highkey photography for uh you know embracing blown out highlights uh for you know a completely different kind of look especially if you want a washed out white background on something a lot of times you see product images that are done this way uh you see uh portraiture that's done this way but in any case no matter what you're doing exposure is essential to getting the image correct and if you're just going for uh a standard type of exposure where you're looking for a well-balanced photograph what you're basically dealing with is what we call dynamic range and dynamic range is pretty simple um in concept and basically if you think of it this way um if you're in a very dark room let's say it's so dark the lights are out there's no windows and all of a sudden somebody turns on a flashlight or a light bulb and that is very bright it's a lot brighter than the room in the dark and so the distance between something that's really bright like that and something that's very dark like that is essentially what we all tie into dynamic range it's typically measured in what we call stops or f- stops you find those on the aperture of your lens and generally speaking um in all the formats that you might be shooting on whether that is film or digital the formats that are going to give you the most dynamic range inherently are going to be on the film side of things and they're going to be black and white film because you can adjust your film and your development time to capture more dynamic range and then that's followed by color negative film or c41 film which a lot of the modern films give up to like maybe 14 stops of light if you shoot on it correctly and and that's pretty amazing and you're going to basically what this means is it gives you more flexibility and post in terms of your shadows and your highlights and and so if you have more information there to work with in other words the Shadows just don't go fall off to Black and the highlights don't get blown out to White then you have more you can do in post with the with the exposure with the photograph of the image to manipulate that now with digital you have a slightly more limited dynamic range although each year when new sensors are developed and new cameras are developed this is starting to change you also have techniques you can use uh like HDR photography which does get abused but you know if you use HDR photography correctly uh you can increase the dynamic range of your image now the problem with this is dynamic or HDR photography requires taking several exposures of the same seam so this usually means you need a tripod to do this on you need to have a consistent aperture um you know your focus needs to stay consistent and that's not always possible particularly if you're taking more like street photography or some more improvised kind of off-the-cuff types of things so what I want to do is look at what's possible in post- production and so what we're going to do is use Adobe Lightroom today and I want to show show you kind of some of the things you can look at in terms of Shadows and highlights and how that all put gets put together so come on over with me and let's have a look so we've got an image here that has some pretty serious issues with dynamic range um in fact you're probably wondering what this image is supposed to be even because you can see we have such an extreme difference between shadows and highlights on here and actually what this is I'll turn the exposure up a little bit and so you can see some of the the Shadows here um I was getting off a train in Brooklyn uh this was when I was in New York recently uh going to see a friend of mine's art opening and I was up on the platform and I was just kind of doing some Run and Gun street photography and when I got off I thought it was kind of an image of the sun going down and all that and so I really wanted to capture that what's interesting was when weet this I actually was set up in manual mode believe it or not um I which is what I prefer to shoot in but I probably wouldn't choose that um just doing running gun stuff but I had been obviously in the train shooting out the window so I was already kind of set up for you know the the daylight and so when I got off um I'm going down I'm like all of a sudden kind of a neat image and I just you know lifted the the camera and just just took it and obviously this is wasn't not what I saw which you know the reason is is your human eye um has is capable of discerning a lot more stops of dynamic range than a camera is and unfortunately when you're in extreme settings this is what you get now what can we do to rescue this there's a couple things I want to talk about um first of all one thing that helps a lot and it's not it's going to be still difficult in this image but you know you kind of want to try to expose for the highlights and I was kind of lucky because that's where this exposure is you can kind of see that up here in the you can still get a little detail on the clouds and the sky and some separation up there and that's kind of important because once you lose highlights once they go off to White you're kind of done you can get more out of the Shadows than you can highlights the other thing is whenever possible you want to shoot raw and this is really important because a raw image retains more data and more information about what's going on in those highlights and shadows than a JPEG does and so if you're ever in a situation like this you know just raw is that's one of the nice things about it the other thing too is this is a digital image obviously um I could have shot film c41 film would have given me a little more dynamic range had I had a film camera with me um as would black and white um where you're going to have trouble with slide film slide film's probably going to be even worse than this um you're really going to lose a lot of your dark so anyway so what can you do to rescue an image like this well there's a couple things you can do if you're used to using Lightroom which is what we're using right here I'm in the develop window here and the first set of controls that you have offer you you know some reprieve from something like this and you're going to be messing with exposure and highlights Shadows whites and so you know the obvious thing I can do is I can turn up the exposure which is what I kind of did a minute ago and yes I start to get my detail on the Shadows down here but what you're going to see down here particularly with the bridge and the clouds is I lost everything because it moved everything brighter and so what I don't want to do is I I want to maintain those highlights but bring in my Shadows so there's a couple things you could do at this point you could try to bring down the highlights here down the Highlight window which which sort of works in fact they kind of came back there um the other thing I could do is the opposite keep the exposure the same let me reset this let's keep the exposure the same and I'm just going to lighten the shadows and that kind of works too it's kind of two ways to get to the same same ending now what you want to be careful of here is you can start to see when I do too much of this it starts to wash out my image and if I really make those Shadows bright I start to get some weird tone mapping problems here and I say they're problems because you start to see that effect that a lot of guys who shoot HDR you know where it kind of starts looking phony and that doesn't look pleasing to my eye even though your eye sees more stops a light to see it faked with tone mapping in a photo um it looks very unnatural so personally with my taste is I don't like to overdo this I like to keep the effect fairly subtle and that's not a knock on HDR I'm just saying that that's not a look I like um and the other thing you can do is if you look at the histogram up here you can see I brought all my highlights and compressed them um let's reset this once again you can see that right here in the histogram inherently I've got pretty much all shadows and all highlights with not a lot of midtones in this image so this is you know an extreme example the other thing you can do that's kind of interesting too is if you come down here you can deal with the tone curve a little bit and I like the fact that Adobe Lightroom separates highlights and lights and darks and shadows so they don't totally clip and this helps you a great deal so if I could take my darks and open them up on here my Shadows even and open them up it's a lot more subtle effect and I can bring the lights down so you know you can really dial in and get really specific and and actually see the tone curve as you're working with this and this gives you I think a little bit more control as you're working in here and in fact this is starting to you know look a little more natural to me the other thing I would do because this is a Sunset and this is really easy to do particularly with a raw image is I probably would change my white balance over a little bit and actually make it so the light is a little more golden here and I start to get a look that is more of what I would expect to see on c41 film which I think is interesting I probably bring my contrast up a little bit on there but anyway you can play with it and and kind of keep going on this until you get what you like the other thing that I would recommend um just as a general tip to people is when you're dealing with with extreme kinds of situations like this I kind of like to edit my images and then come back to them later I don't have the time to do that for you right here obviously but a lot of times because you can make extreme adjustments on here just they sometimes are a little too much and you don't notice that when you've kind of been really close to the image for a long time uh like another thing I might do on this cuz I kind of wish I had angled the camera a little more to bring out you know make that a little more severe with with the point of view here and my focus point and all that and so these are kinds of things that you might want to kind of sleep on look at but anyway that's basically how you're going to make these adjustments and deal with this in Adobe Lightroom and I want to thank you guys for watching another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you in the next video latertoday's episode we're going to do something a little bit different and I promised you guys uh since I left my day job to do the Art of Photography full-time that we would be adding some new things and part of that is we're going to be doing more shows and I'm bumping this up to three shows a week and I think this is going to be a little bit of a challenge but it's going to be a lot of fun and you guys have seem to ask for more stuff and I think this is a great way of doing it um part of the process in doing this is I'm introducing some new show segments and this is one of those today and our segment today I'm going to call in poost and one of the things we haven't covered a lot of on this show is post-production um and for various reasons I think when I was doing one show a week and I was doing this show in my free time um I I felt like you know covering history of photography and the whole art side of it was really for me the most important thing to do at that time and now that we're introducing new content I think doing post- production is really important and it's an important part of that and I think no matter what you do whether you shoot film or whether you shoot digital um and you know everybody does some post-production work and so I'm hoping that this series will address address some of those issues and help you guys with a little bit of training and give you guys some ideas for things that you might be able to do on your own um our subject for our inaugural episode here is I want to talk about highlights and shadows now a lot of times getting the proper exposure in camera is a difficult thing to do and it's a little bit subjective um you can control exposure to you know enhance a certain type of mood that you're looking for um you can go for very low-key photography for a very somber look you can go for very highkey photography for uh you know embracing blown out highlights uh for you know a completely different kind of look especially if you want a washed out white background on something a lot of times you see product images that are done this way uh you see uh portraiture that's done this way but in any case no matter what you're doing exposure is essential to getting the image correct and if you're just going for uh a standard type of exposure where you're looking for a well-balanced photograph what you're basically dealing with is what we call dynamic range and dynamic range is pretty simple um in concept and basically if you think of it this way um if you're in a very dark room let's say it's so dark the lights are out there's no windows and all of a sudden somebody turns on a flashlight or a light bulb and that is very bright it's a lot brighter than the room in the dark and so the distance between something that's really bright like that and something that's very dark like that is essentially what we all tie into dynamic range it's typically measured in what we call stops or f- stops you find those on the aperture of your lens and generally speaking um in all the formats that you might be shooting on whether that is film or digital the formats that are going to give you the most dynamic range inherently are going to be on the film side of things and they're going to be black and white film because you can adjust your film and your development time to capture more dynamic range and then that's followed by color negative film or c41 film which a lot of the modern films give up to like maybe 14 stops of light if you shoot on it correctly and and that's pretty amazing and you're going to basically what this means is it gives you more flexibility and post in terms of your shadows and your highlights and and so if you have more information there to work with in other words the Shadows just don't go fall off to Black and the highlights don't get blown out to White then you have more you can do in post with the with the exposure with the photograph of the image to manipulate that now with digital you have a slightly more limited dynamic range although each year when new sensors are developed and new cameras are developed this is starting to change you also have techniques you can use uh like HDR photography which does get abused but you know if you use HDR photography correctly uh you can increase the dynamic range of your image now the problem with this is dynamic or HDR photography requires taking several exposures of the same seam so this usually means you need a tripod to do this on you need to have a consistent aperture um you know your focus needs to stay consistent and that's not always possible particularly if you're taking more like street photography or some more improvised kind of off-the-cuff types of things so what I want to do is look at what's possible in post- production and so what we're going to do is use Adobe Lightroom today and I want to show show you kind of some of the things you can look at in terms of Shadows and highlights and how that all put gets put together so come on over with me and let's have a look so we've got an image here that has some pretty serious issues with dynamic range um in fact you're probably wondering what this image is supposed to be even because you can see we have such an extreme difference between shadows and highlights on here and actually what this is I'll turn the exposure up a little bit and so you can see some of the the Shadows here um I was getting off a train in Brooklyn uh this was when I was in New York recently uh going to see a friend of mine's art opening and I was up on the platform and I was just kind of doing some Run and Gun street photography and when I got off I thought it was kind of an image of the sun going down and all that and so I really wanted to capture that what's interesting was when weet this I actually was set up in manual mode believe it or not um I which is what I prefer to shoot in but I probably wouldn't choose that um just doing running gun stuff but I had been obviously in the train shooting out the window so I was already kind of set up for you know the the daylight and so when I got off um I'm going down I'm like all of a sudden kind of a neat image and I just you know lifted the the camera and just just took it and obviously this is wasn't not what I saw which you know the reason is is your human eye um has is capable of discerning a lot more stops of dynamic range than a camera is and unfortunately when you're in extreme settings this is what you get now what can we do to rescue this there's a couple things I want to talk about um first of all one thing that helps a lot and it's not it's going to be still difficult in this image but you know you kind of want to try to expose for the highlights and I was kind of lucky because that's where this exposure is you can kind of see that up here in the you can still get a little detail on the clouds and the sky and some separation up there and that's kind of important because once you lose highlights once they go off to White you're kind of done you can get more out of the Shadows than you can highlights the other thing is whenever possible you want to shoot raw and this is really important because a raw image retains more data and more information about what's going on in those highlights and shadows than a JPEG does and so if you're ever in a situation like this you know just raw is that's one of the nice things about it the other thing too is this is a digital image obviously um I could have shot film c41 film would have given me a little more dynamic range had I had a film camera with me um as would black and white um where you're going to have trouble with slide film slide film's probably going to be even worse than this um you're really going to lose a lot of your dark so anyway so what can you do to rescue an image like this well there's a couple things you can do if you're used to using Lightroom which is what we're using right here I'm in the develop window here and the first set of controls that you have offer you you know some reprieve from something like this and you're going to be messing with exposure and highlights Shadows whites and so you know the obvious thing I can do is I can turn up the exposure which is what I kind of did a minute ago and yes I start to get my detail on the Shadows down here but what you're going to see down here particularly with the bridge and the clouds is I lost everything because it moved everything brighter and so what I don't want to do is I I want to maintain those highlights but bring in my Shadows so there's a couple things you could do at this point you could try to bring down the highlights here down the Highlight window which which sort of works in fact they kind of came back there um the other thing I could do is the opposite keep the exposure the same let me reset this let's keep the exposure the same and I'm just going to lighten the shadows and that kind of works too it's kind of two ways to get to the same same ending now what you want to be careful of here is you can start to see when I do too much of this it starts to wash out my image and if I really make those Shadows bright I start to get some weird tone mapping problems here and I say they're problems because you start to see that effect that a lot of guys who shoot HDR you know where it kind of starts looking phony and that doesn't look pleasing to my eye even though your eye sees more stops a light to see it faked with tone mapping in a photo um it looks very unnatural so personally with my taste is I don't like to overdo this I like to keep the effect fairly subtle and that's not a knock on HDR I'm just saying that that's not a look I like um and the other thing you can do is if you look at the histogram up here you can see I brought all my highlights and compressed them um let's reset this once again you can see that right here in the histogram inherently I've got pretty much all shadows and all highlights with not a lot of midtones in this image so this is you know an extreme example the other thing you can do that's kind of interesting too is if you come down here you can deal with the tone curve a little bit and I like the fact that Adobe Lightroom separates highlights and lights and darks and shadows so they don't totally clip and this helps you a great deal so if I could take my darks and open them up on here my Shadows even and open them up it's a lot more subtle effect and I can bring the lights down so you know you can really dial in and get really specific and and actually see the tone curve as you're working with this and this gives you I think a little bit more control as you're working in here and in fact this is starting to you know look a little more natural to me the other thing I would do because this is a Sunset and this is really easy to do particularly with a raw image is I probably would change my white balance over a little bit and actually make it so the light is a little more golden here and I start to get a look that is more of what I would expect to see on c41 film which I think is interesting I probably bring my contrast up a little bit on there but anyway you can play with it and and kind of keep going on this until you get what you like the other thing that I would recommend um just as a general tip to people is when you're dealing with with extreme kinds of situations like this I kind of like to edit my images and then come back to them later I don't have the time to do that for you right here obviously but a lot of times because you can make extreme adjustments on here just they sometimes are a little too much and you don't notice that when you've kind of been really close to the image for a long time uh like another thing I might do on this cuz I kind of wish I had angled the camera a little more to bring out you know make that a little more severe with with the point of view here and my focus point and all that and so these are kinds of things that you might want to kind of sleep on look at but anyway that's basically how you're going to make these adjustments and deal with this in Adobe Lightroom and I want to thank you guys for watching another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you in the next video later\n"