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RECOVERING DETAIL FROM SHADOWS AND HIGHLIGHTS
[with Adobe Camera Raw]
This tutorial was prepared by Roy Killen and is copyright. It is part of the supplementary training materials for members of the Belmont 16 Ft Photographic Club and is not intended as a complete, stand-alone instruction package.
Comments and suggestions on this tutorial are welcome - they should be emailed to Roy Killen.
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SHADOW/HIGHLIGHT ADJUSTMENT or CAMERA RAW?
The tutorial on Shadow/Highlight adjustment explained how to recover detail from shadows or highlights in Photoshop (version CS or later). That method provides a very simple way to bring out detail in dark areas of an image (shadows) or in very light areas of an image (highlights). However, if you have RAW image files you may find that you get better results by attempting to recover the detail in Adobe Camera Raw (or whatever other RAW conversion program you use).
One of the advantages of making these adjustments to the RAW files is that they are totally reversible. For many images the adjustments will also take less time and give better results.
When you progress to the stage of using "smart objects" in Photoshop you will find that you have enormous flexibility in the way you can recover detail from shadows or highlights using Adobe Camera Raw. Smart objects will be dealt with in a later tutorial.
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THE BASIC RECOVERY PROCESS IN CAMERA RAW
To illustrate the process I will use the following image.
When this image is opened in Adobe Camera Raw the histogram indicates that it is under-exposed. Moving the Exposure slider to the right by 0.75 improves the overall exposure but it does not reveal all the detail in the shadow areas.
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By adjusting the "Fill Light" (to bring out the detail in the shadows) and the "Blacks" to restore an appropriate black point we get the following image. |
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To provide a comparison, I opened the second image (the one with just the exposure corrected) in Photoshop and then applied a Shadow/Highlight adjustment. The result was the following image.
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The results of the two processes are very similar. On my monitor the colours in the Camera Raw adjusted image are a little richer.
Making the "recovery" adjustments in Camera Raw had the following advantages for this image:
- All the adjustments are totally reversible. I can simply open the raw image again and remove/alter the adjustments.
- The process was faster. Only two sliders had to be moved in Camera Raw (Fill Light and Blacks). This would have been three if any adjustments had been made to the highlights (with the Recovery slider). By comparison, when the unadjusted image was transferred to Photoshop I had to duplicate the layer, select the Shadow/Highlight adjustment and then adjust three sliders (Amount, Tonal Width and Radius). There would have been six sliders to adjust if I had wanted to recover any highlight detail.
- The results from the faster Camera Raw adjustments were as good, or better than, the results from the Shadow/Highlight adjustment.
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All images on this site and all documents and tutorials linked to this site are copyright.
This page last updated 21st June 2008 (RK) |
