Before and After: How This Photo was Processed in Lightroom

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A Post By: Andrew S. Gibson

Andrew’s ebook Mastering Lightroom: Book Four – The Photos is available now at a special price of 40% off for a limited time from Snapndeals. It’s an advanced guide to processing photos in Lightroom’s Develop module, explaining how to use Lightroom’s powerful processing engine plus Develop Presets and plug-ins to create beautiful images.

The Story

A few years ago I passed through Bolivia, South America’s poorest and, in some ways, least developed country. I spent a few days in Potosí, a small, largely forgotten city whose history had a central role in shaping the modern world. Built at the foot of the Cerro Rico (Rich Hill), the silver mined in Potosí flowed across the continent, through the cities of Cartagena and Havana, and across the ocean to Sevilla and Madrid in Spain, where it powered the rise of European nations as the wealthiest and most developed of the era.

The silver no longer flows from Potosí, although the mines are still open. The city seems to exist on a mixture of mining output and tourism. It’s one of the world’s highest cities, sitting a little over 4,000 metres above sea level in the Bolivian Andes. It’s a cold place, even in the summer. Sleet or snow can strike at any time of the year.

I liked wandering the streets as dusk fell, watching the local people as they went about their daily activities. It was a busy time, with kids out of school, shops closing and people leaving work. Potosí is a city of contrasts: the poverty of some of the local inhabitants against the relative affluence of foreign travellers; the fading grandeur of the magnificent old colonial architecture against the newer mud brick houses at the edges of the city; the tragedy and scope of the city’s history against the snippets of modern daily life. The feeling that, even after hundreds of years, this is still a place where the traditions of the people who lived here before the Spanish came intersect with the ways of modern, European descended South Americans.

As I wandered around the streets, dusk falling, a Bolivian lady walked around the corner. She had tied her hair in two long plaits, and wore a Bolivian style sun hat on her head. There was a blanket slung around her shoulders, inside which sat a baby, hair styled in a topknot, looking behind it as his mother walked onwards. I had time to raise the camera and take a single photo before a second child walked around the corner and blocked my view.

This photo isn’t perfect. The baby’s face is slightly out of focus. The photo was underexposed (the moment happened so fast I didn’t have time to dial in exposure compensation). The rear light of a car and the out of focus man in the background are distractions (see the original version below). Yet that’s not important. Photography is about evoking emotion, and sometimes things happen too fast for technical perfection.

What matters is the moment. In this photo it’s the juxtaposition between the mother walking one way and her baby looking another. The atmosphere created by the fading light of another cold night in Potosí. The age of the building she is walking past. The intersection of ancient ways with the present day.

This is a photo I come back to again and again, reprocessing as my skills improve. Each time my approach is driven by my memory of that moment and how it felt. Ask yourself the same question when processing images. How did the moment feel? And how can you express that feeling with colour, light and shadow?

First steps

There are plenty of things wrong with the original photo (below). It’s underexposed, and needs brightening (although not too much as I want to retain the atmosphere created by the fading light). The background is distracting. The colours are muddy.

Step 1 Basic corrections

The baby is the natural focal point of the photo, and I wanted to emphasize it. I also wanted a lot of blue, the natural colour of light during dusk, in the photo. To start, I setProfile in the Camera Calibration panel to Camera Landscape. This setting is intended for use with landscape photos, but you can use it whenever you want to emphasize the colours blue or green. I also went to the Lens Corrections panel and enabled bothProfile Corrections (with Vignetting set to zero) and Chromatic Aberration removal.

I went to the Basic panel and kept Exposure where it was, even though the photo was underexposed, because I liked the gloomy atmosphere. I set White Balance to auto,which gave a neutral colour, then reduced it (to 3639 Kelvin) to create a blue colour cast. This gave me a good starting point.

Two versions of the photo after the completion of step one. One has the Camera Landscape profile and the other the Camera Portrait profile. Even though it may seem logical to use the Camera Portrait profile on a photo containing people, Camera Landscape is the better option given my intention, as it gives the most appropriate colours.

Isolating the subject

My aim now is to continue the processing in a way that minimises distractions and places the emphasis on the baby.

Step 2 Crop

I used the Crop tool to cut the right-hand side of the photo, eliminating the distracting background. This makes a big difference as the eye is no longer being pulled away from the people by the blurred light.

Step 3 Local adjustments

I added a Radial Filter and moved the Exposure slider left to make the background darker. The Radial Filter is new to Lightroom 5, but if you have an earlier version of Lightroom, you can do something similar with the Adjustment Brush (by painting in the area you want to darken).

Step 4 Add some punch

The photo was quite flat so I returned to the Basic panel and increased Contrast. Then I used the Adjustment Brush to make a selection over the woman’s back and the child, and increased Clarity and Exposure. The aim was to make the baby sharper, and a little brighter, than the rest of the image, encouraging the eye to go to that part of the photo.

This screen shot shows the mask created by the Adjustment Brush.

Step 5 Make color work

Next I used the Adjustment Brush again to select a smaller area and moved the Tempslider right, making that area warmer. The idea here is to work on the natural colour contrast between the colours of orange and blue.

This image below shows the result of these adjustments. The key was to make them subtle so the image looked natural and not over-processed.

Throughout the processing I imagined that I had taken the photo on slide film and that the scene really did look like that. The fact that the scene would have come out differently than my version is incidental. The idea was just a guide to the approach I should take.

Step 6 Darken edges of the image

Next I created two Graduated Filters, one on either side of the frame. I reduced theContrast in each one. A side effect of reducing Contrast is that the area affected also becomes lighter, so I adjusted Exposure to make them darker again.

These are subtle adjustments that reduce contrast at the edges to emphasise the area around the baby in the centre of the image, where I increased Clarity earlier.

Finally I decided the image was too dark and increased Exposure to compensate. Here’s the original and final versions together so you can compare them.

What do you think of these processing techniques and the style in which the photo was processed? Do you have any suggestions for an alternative interpretation of the original Raw file?  Please let us know in the comments.

Andrew’s ebook Mastering Lightroom: Book Four – The Photos is available now at a special price of 40% off for a limited time from Snapndeals. It’s an advanced guide to processing photos in Lightroom’s Develop module, explaining how to use Lightroom’s powerful processing engine plus Develop Presets and plug-ins to create beautiful images.

Step by Step Portrait Processing in Lightroom

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A Post By: Andrew S. Gibson

Andrew’s ebook Mastering Lightroom: Book Four – The Photos is available now at a special price of 40% off for a limited time from Snapndeals. It’s an advanced guide to processing photos in Lightroom’s Develop module, explaining how to use Lightroom’s powerful processing engine plus Develop Presets and plug-ins to create beautiful images. This photo is one of ten case studies from the book.

The story

When you are photographing someone who enjoys being in front of the camera, take advantage of it. This was a simple portrait to take and its strength comes from the model’s spirit, not fancy technique. I’ve worked with her before and know that she is good at creating different facial expressions. I asked her to give me a series and every time she changed her expression I took another photo. Experienced models will pose, pause until you take the photo, and then move onto the next one, making your job as a portrait photographer much easier.

You can’t see it in this photo but the model was holding a silver reflector slightly beneath her shoulders. The reflected daylight created a wonderful clean lighting effect that made processing the portrait much easier.

First steps

Here’s the original portrait as it appeared straight out of the camera. It was taken with an 85mm lens set to f/1.8, throwing the background out of focus.

I knew from the start that I wanted the model’s expression to be the focal point of the portrait. The use of a short telephoto lens and a wide aperture has partly achieved that, but the photo required more work. The first task was to tackle the background. Although out of focus, its brightness was a big distraction. My main job here was to make the background darker so the viewer’s eye goes straight to the model.

My hope today is that by following this tutorial and applying the techniques I used to your own photos, you will learn how to create better portraits in Lightroom.

Step 1: Basic adjustments

I prepared the photo by going to the Camera Calibration panel and setting Profile toCamera Portrait. Next I went to the Lens Corrections panel and enabled Chromatic Aberration removal and Profile Corrections, setting Vignetting to zero.

I wanted clean, neutral skin tones, so I went to the Basic panel and moved the Tempslider slightly (from 4850 to 4520) to remove the warm tint.

Step 2: Add a vignette using the Radial Filter

Next I used the Radial Filter tool to make the background darker. I placed the filter so that the top half surrounded the model’s face and shoulders. In this position theRadial Filter can be used to make the area either side and above the model darker, without affecting the bottom part of the portrait. I set Exposure to -4.0 to see the area affected by the adjustment.

When I was happy with the position of the Radial Filter I reset Exposure to zero, then reduced it until the background went quite dark. I also set Saturation to -70 to remove colour from the background. How much you push the Exposure slider in this situation is always subjective. Some of you will want to retain a fair amount of detail in the background, others will be content to make it go completely black.

Note: Radial filters are new to Lightroom 5. In earlier versions the best way to achieve a similar effect would be to place a Graduated Filter on either side of the model, and useAdjustment Brush adjustments to fill in the gaps. An alternative technique is to use thePost-Crop Vignetting tool, and lighten any areas that are too dark (such as the model’s shoulders in this example) with the Adjustment Brush tool.

Step 3: Refine the vignette with the Adjustment Brush

While the Radial Filter is an excellent tool for making backgrounds darker, it’s not perfect. The feathering required for a gradual transition may leave some areas of the background close to the subject too light. In this case there were still areas around the hood that were a little bright.

So I used the Adjustment Brush tool to select those areas and reduced Exposure (to-0.65) to make them darker. I didn’t have to be precise with the placement of theAdjustment Brush as the background was already quite dark and out of focus.

Tip: If you find that the use of the Adjustment Brush is obvious, try setting Feather to100 and Flow to 50%. This lets you build up the effect little by little instead of doing it all in one brush stroke.

Step 4: Retouching with the Adjustment Brush

This portrait didn’t need much retouching, but there were still a couple of things I wanted to do. The first was to minimize the lines under the model’s eyes. Note that I didn’t want to get rid of them completely, as they are a natural part of her expression. The lines were created by her smile and winking action, and removing them would look unnatural.

I used the Adjustment Brush tool (zoomed in), and carefully painted over the lines under her eyes. I kept the brush size small so as not to affect the neighbouring areas.

Then I selected the Soften Skin preset from the Effect menu. Lightroom applied the skin smoothing effect at full strength by setting Clarity to -100 and Sharpness to +25. This was too strong. To reduce it, I clicked on the pin that marked the Adjustment Brush, held the left mouse button down and dragged the mouse left. Lightroom reduced the intensity of the effect by moving the Clarity and Sharpness sliders in proportion (this technique works with any setting from the Effect menu). I stopped when it looked right (Clarity -45, Sharpness +11).

I created a new Adjustment Brush to cover the model’s eyes, mouth and eyebrows. I pushed the Clarity slider to +40 to bring a bit of extra sharpness and contrast to those areas. The screen shot shows the areas covered by the Adjustment Brush.

Step 5: Framing the portrait

The model’s hood creates a natural frame for her face and is an essential part of the composition. I decided to emphasize it by using Clarity to bring out the texture of the fur.

I created another selection using the Adjustment Brush tool and increased Clarity (to56), Contrast (to 22) and Exposure (to 0.26). The hood is a frame that draw the viewer’s eye to the centre of the frame, and these adjustments help to emphasize it. I needed to find the balance between emphasis and distraction; highlighting the beautiful texture of the fur lined hood without pulling too much attention away from the model’s expression. This screen shot shows the area covered by the Adjustment Brush.

Next I went to the Basic panel and reduced Vibrance to -14 to de-emphasize the colours a little more. Finally, I used a small Adjustment Brush to lighten the edge of the model’s right shoulder, which had been darkened by the Radial Filter adjustment earlier. The area covered by the Adjustment Brush is shown in the screen shot.

Comparing before and after results

Here are the original and final versions together so you can compare them.

What do you think of these processing techniques? There’s more than one way to process most photos – do you have any suggestions for an alternative interpretation of the original Raw file? Please let me know in the comments.

Andrew’s ebook Mastering Lightroom: Book Four – The Photos is available now at a special price of 40% off for a limited time from Snapndeals. It’s an advanced guide to processing photos in Lightroom’s Develop module, explaining how to use Lightroom’s powerful processing engine plus Develop Presets and plug-ins to create beautiful images. This photo is one of ten case studies from the book.

How to do Noise Reduction in Lightroom

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A Post By: Helen Bradley

When you capture images using a high ISO setting you will invariably end up with some noise in your photos. If the noise is distracting and if you want to remove it, then Lightroom can help.

How to do Noise Reduction in Lightroom

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A Post By: Helen Bradley

When you capture images using a high ISO setting you will invariably end up with some noise in your photos. If the noise is distracting and if you want to remove it, then Lightroom can help.

A word of warning

Before start using any noise removal tool it will pay to understand that noise removal is generally achieved at the expense of losing some detail in the photo. This is because the noise removal process involves smoothing the image pixels, and this in turn compromises fine detail. In addition, the main Lightroom noise removal tool applies the fix to the entire image not just the areas where it is most visible, meaning that you can’t mask the result and limit it to only those areas you want to apply it.

Because of this, if you are a purist and noise reduction is an ongoing and significant need, then you may consider a dedicated and specialist noise reduction program such as Topaz DeNoise, Neat Image or Photo Ninja a worthwhile investment. However, for most photographers, the tools in Lightroom judiciously applied will suffice.

Identifying noise

Noise in photos comes in two types; color noise and luminance noise. Color noise is evidenced by multicolored pixels in an area of the photo that should show as a flat color. In the image below you can see that there are multicolor pixels in an area which should be solid blue.

Luminance noise is monochromic so it will be less colorful and more like grain. Here is luminance noise in the sky of a photo captured at an ISO of 6400 in early morning light:

Process versions

Whenever you import an image into Lightroom some noise removal will be performed automatically by the process version which is the camera raw technology Lightroom uses to adjust and render your photos. In each process version the technology has improved over that of the earlier versions. So each will render your photos differently and, in particular, Process Version 2010 included better noise reduction technology than the earlier 2003 version. This was carried forward to the 2012 version.

The current process version for Lightroom 4 and 5 users is 2012 so, if you have images in your catalog that you imported using an earlier version of Lightroom (versions 1, 2 or 3) which are still set to process version 2003 then you can achieve some immediate benefits in noise reduction by simply updating those images to the new process version. To do this select the images and in the Develop module from the Camera Calibration panel select 2012 (Current) as the process version (use the Sync option to copy the setting to all selected images).

Removing noise

To remove noise from a photo, open the Detail Panel in the Develop module to display the noise reduction sliders. There you will find sliders for Luminance noise and for Color noise.

For raw images Lightroom automatically applies color noise reduction in the import process. So the Color Noise Reduction slider will be set, by default, to 25 with Detail and Smoothness set at 50 for all raw images. The Luminance noise slider will be set at 0, with Detail at 50 (see screenshot on the right)

Adjust the slider for the type of noise you are seeing in the image, either color or luminance. If you are unsure what type of noise you have, adjust each slider in turn to the maximum value to see which removes the noise. In some cases you may have both types of noise, in other cases one type may predominate.

Once you know what type of noise you are trying to remove, adjust the slider for that type of noise by dragging it to the right. Aim to reduce the noise to an acceptable level, but avoid going beyond that point because, in doing so, you will lose some detail in the image.

Once you have adjusted the Luminance Noise slider you can then adjust its Detail and Contrast sliders. The Detail slider controls the luminance noise threshold – the higher the value the more detail in the image but, as a result, you may experience some residual noise. If you use a lower value you will get a smoother result but with less detail.

The Contrast slider controls luminance contrast so high values will retain more contrast but you may also see more noise and mottling in the image. Lower values will give you a smoother result but again at the expense of reducing contrast.

For Color Noise there are two additional sliders: Detail and Smoothness (the latter was added in Lightroom 5.2). The Detail slider controls the color noise threshold, so adjusting this to a higher value will protect detail in thin colored edges but often at the expense of removing speckled color. Lower values will give you some added smoothing of the color noise but, as a result, you may notice that colors bleed into each other. Adjust the Smoothness slider to help reduce low-frequency color mottling artifacts.

In this image, removing Color noise leaves some Luminance noise apparent:

Once the color noise is removed, the Luminance slider will remove the remaining Luminance noise:

When you are removing noise from an image it helps to be viewing the image at a 1:1 size ratio so you see clearly what is happening. Periodically zoom out to check the result.

Local Noise Reduction

If your image has luminance noise you can remove this from selected areas of the image using any of the three local adjustment tools: the Adjustment Brush, the Radial Filter or the Graduated Filter. These tools let you limit noise reduction to only those areas you want to affect, leaving other areas of the image unchanged. The downside to this feature is that there is no additional Detail or Contrast slider to fine tune the result, and it only works to remove luminance noise (not color noise).

Using any of these tools select the area from which to remove noise, and then adjust the Noise adjustment slider. Drag to the right to remove luminance noise from the image. If you drag to the left then you will add noise to the image.

When you go to sharpen an image that you have removed noise from, pay attention to the Masking slider in the Detail panel. Using this you can apply sharpening to only the edges in the image and avoid sharpening areas of flat color where the noise was most apparent.

Here is a video tutorial showing how to reduce noise in photos in Lightroom:

If you have questions or comments please leave them in the space below. Hope this helps you with removing some of the noise in your images.