One of the jewels of Pacific Northwest in US is our spring Tulip Festival. Farms spanning many acres literally display millions of tulips for everyone to see. Trip report for that will come later. For now, a quick photography lesson.
One of the challenges there is to avoid the "postcard picture." You know, the image of a single flower that one would expect to see of a tulip. My wife however, loves for me to take such pictures since she turns them into abstracts to design quilts, redraw as watercolor, etc. So when I remember, I usually shoot a few images that way. Since they are not going to be used as is, I am not at all careful about how good they look. Just the fact that a single flower is in the image. This is one such example:
This picture shows everything NOT to do in aiming to take a good paragraph. Lighting is super harsh afternoon sun when I first arrived there creating the ugly contrast in the petals. The background is busy and detracts from the flower. And while I tried to avoid the dead center look, it is the wrong composition. There is nothing of interest to draw you to the right of the image which is just ugly background.
Now compare that to this version which just took 30 seconds to process in Adobe Lightroom:
I hope you agree it is a remarkable transformation for just so little work. And especially so for an image that didn't start with the intention of looking good. Two changes have been made one of which is obvious and the other, not and motivation for this thread:
1. Cropping. A flower is a tall and narrow item. As such, vertical framing is 90% of the time the right one. Same is true of portraits of people and tall animals. The vertical framing ditched the extra bad looking background and focused the eye on the flower.
2. Reducing "clarity." This is the star of the show. Notice the soft and ethereal aspect of the image now. Yet, the overall sharpness is maintained. Gone is the ugly contrast and replaced with a look that seems to have avoided the ugly mid-day sun. Yet that is precisely the time I took the picture and violated one of the key aspects of good nature photography (best times are sunrise and sunset or cloudy days if the sky is not going to be in the picture).
I have tried many techniques such as selective softening of the transition edges, general blurring, messing with contrast and exposure, but nothing has ever remotely produced such pleasing effect much less this fast and easy. So what is the secret? It is the "clarity" slider in Lightroom:
The slider is shrouded in secrecy. Adobe does not say what it does. Online bloggers though have figured it out and it is making sharpness adjustments to the mid-tones. In other words, only the parts of the image that don't have high-resolution, high contrast are selected and the sharpness transformation applied to them. Now, the "normal" use is to increase clarity to make the image sharper without it screaming that it has been sharpened, with the telltale haloes around the edges and artificial looking image. My use is the opposite and as indicated in the above UI snapshot, a negative value of -100 (extreme left). This softens the image but in a very subtle way since the high resolution edges are maintained. What is softened is the harsh mid-day sun contrast and a bit of the background distractions.
This is a revelation. Many images have been ruined by improper lighting which harsh edges. All can be salvaged this way in just a few seconds. It is worth it enough to get a copy of Lightroom if you don't already have it. More and more Lightroom is adopting Photoshop features but in a much easier to use interface. While I was not a fan in early days, it is my cataloging and processing tool except for very difficult images. Get a trial version of Lightroom and try this feature on some of your images and see if you like it.
One of the challenges there is to avoid the "postcard picture." You know, the image of a single flower that one would expect to see of a tulip. My wife however, loves for me to take such pictures since she turns them into abstracts to design quilts, redraw as watercolor, etc. So when I remember, I usually shoot a few images that way. Since they are not going to be used as is, I am not at all careful about how good they look. Just the fact that a single flower is in the image. This is one such example:
This picture shows everything NOT to do in aiming to take a good paragraph. Lighting is super harsh afternoon sun when I first arrived there creating the ugly contrast in the petals. The background is busy and detracts from the flower. And while I tried to avoid the dead center look, it is the wrong composition. There is nothing of interest to draw you to the right of the image which is just ugly background.
Now compare that to this version which just took 30 seconds to process in Adobe Lightroom:
I hope you agree it is a remarkable transformation for just so little work. And especially so for an image that didn't start with the intention of looking good. Two changes have been made one of which is obvious and the other, not and motivation for this thread:
1. Cropping. A flower is a tall and narrow item. As such, vertical framing is 90% of the time the right one. Same is true of portraits of people and tall animals. The vertical framing ditched the extra bad looking background and focused the eye on the flower.
2. Reducing "clarity." This is the star of the show. Notice the soft and ethereal aspect of the image now. Yet, the overall sharpness is maintained. Gone is the ugly contrast and replaced with a look that seems to have avoided the ugly mid-day sun. Yet that is precisely the time I took the picture and violated one of the key aspects of good nature photography (best times are sunrise and sunset or cloudy days if the sky is not going to be in the picture).
I have tried many techniques such as selective softening of the transition edges, general blurring, messing with contrast and exposure, but nothing has ever remotely produced such pleasing effect much less this fast and easy. So what is the secret? It is the "clarity" slider in Lightroom:
The slider is shrouded in secrecy. Adobe does not say what it does. Online bloggers though have figured it out and it is making sharpness adjustments to the mid-tones. In other words, only the parts of the image that don't have high-resolution, high contrast are selected and the sharpness transformation applied to them. Now, the "normal" use is to increase clarity to make the image sharper without it screaming that it has been sharpened, with the telltale haloes around the edges and artificial looking image. My use is the opposite and as indicated in the above UI snapshot, a negative value of -100 (extreme left). This softens the image but in a very subtle way since the high resolution edges are maintained. What is softened is the harsh mid-day sun contrast and a bit of the background distractions.
This is a revelation. Many images have been ruined by improper lighting which harsh edges. All can be salvaged this way in just a few seconds. It is worth it enough to get a copy of Lightroom if you don't already have it. More and more Lightroom is adopting Photoshop features but in a much easier to use interface. While I was not a fan in early days, it is my cataloging and processing tool except for very difficult images. Get a trial version of Lightroom and try this feature on some of your images and see if you like it.
