Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Step Three:
Another thing you can now do in Light-
room 4 is paint to open up the shadow
areas (kind of like using the Fill Light slider
back in Lightroom 3). Here's an image
where we want to open up the shadow
areas on her hat, her hair, and the back of
her dress (they're all facing away from the
light source, so we're losing a lot of detail
in there). If you used the Shadows slider
in the Basic panel, it would lighten all the
shadows in the image and affect the area
behind her and that would mess up the
nice separation we have between the light
on her and the background. So, the ability
to open shadows just where we want
them is pretty sweet. Get the Adjustment
Brush, choose
Shadows
from the Effect
pop-up menu, then drag the Shadows
slider a decent amount to the right (here,
I dragged to 49), and paint over her hat,
the back of her hair, and the back of her
dress. Those areas are now no longer solid
black—we now have detail in them.
Step Four:
Now, the downside of opening up shadow
areas like we just did pretty much comes
down to just one thing: noise. If there's
noise in a photo, it lives in the shadows,
and a lot of the time it hides there—since
it's so dark, you really can't see it. However,
when you brighten up those shadow areas,
any noise that was there starts to become
really obvious. If that happens to you (like
it's starting to do here), then just drag the
Noise slider to the right and it suppresses
the noise in those shadow areas you just
painted over. Of course, you don't have
to open the shadows up to use the Noise
slider here. It's just that, in this case, since
we created the noise problem, at least now
we can reduce it. Plus, since the shadow
areas are already painted in for us, the
noise reduction just appears in those areas.
