Add effects and improve detail

In this tutorial we'll take a look at some controls in the Effects panel and in the Details panel that you can use to take your photos to the next level. If you downloaded the sample files from the Adobe webpage for this tutorial add those photos to Lightroom. If you need more help with how to do that you can always go back and re-watch the first tutorial in this Get Started series. Select this photo and click the Edit icon over here or press E on the keyboard. Open the Effects panel. Here you'll find the Clarity slider. You can use clarity to enhance mid-tone contrast and sharpness. Let's see how it works by dragging the Clarity slider over to the right on this photo. That's really increased the contrast in the mid-tones in the photo and you can see that the scratches and other marks on the desktop look much more pronounced and sharp than they did a moment ago Now if you're someone who likes a natural look in your photos I'd caution you against dragging Clarity too far to the right because you can tend to get an over crisp look in your photos if you do that. So, in this photo I'm going to take the Clarity slider back towards the left. Now just to make sure you can see this effect let's go down and do a before and after. I'll click this icon, or you could press the Backslash key on your keyboard to see how the photo looked originally without that boost to clarity. I'll click that icon again and that's how the photo looks with the increase to clarity. Again, before no clarity, after clarity. Now you also can try decreasing clarity. So, let's put the Clarity slider back to 0 by double-clicking the circle on the slider. And now let's drag the Clarity slider way over to the left. Notice that that is decreasing contrast and really softening the detail in the photo. This is a technique that's sometimes employed in portrait photography to soften the look of the photo. I'm going to put Clarity back the other way just to give this photo a slight boost. So, I hope that gives you some ideas about how you can enhance your own photos with either positive clarity or negative clarity depending on the look that you are going for.
 

Dehaze is an effect unique to Lightroom that you can use to control the haze or the mist in a photo. To take a look at Dehaze let's select this photo from the sample files. Notice that I have a couple of similar photos here. I'm using the one in which the model is turned back to face the camera. I'll press E on the keyboard or I'll come over to the Edit icon and click. In the Effects panel I'll go to the Dehaze slider. I'll drag Dehaze to the left and notice that that increases the amount of mist in the scene. Now if I drag Dehaze the other way I get a completely different effect. Increasing Dehaze cuts through the mist or the fog in the scene to reveal more detail and color. Dehaze is not only a global control it's also a local control. So, we can apply Dehaze to just part of a photo too. So, let's say that I'd like to cut through more of the mist in the sea and along the horizon here. I'll go to one of the selective editing tools. I'm going to use the Brush tool. I'll find the Dehaze slider in the Brush tool controls and I'm going to drag that to the right. And then I'll move into the image and I'm just going to brush along the sea and the edge of the horizon. And that brings back more detail and color there in addition to what we did in the global controls. Sometimes a side effect of increasing Dehaze is that it adds more color intensity than you might like to a photo. You can fix that by decreasing Saturation or Vibrance. Let's go back to the global controls. I'll press E on the keyboard or click the Edit icon here. In the global controls I'll go to the Color panel and then I'll go down to the Saturation slider and drag it to the left to get just the look I want using Saturation and Dehaze in this photo.
 

You can darken or even lighten the edges of a photo using the Vignette slider in the Effects panel in Lightroom. Let's see how that works by selecting this photo and then clicking E on the keyboard or clicking the Edit icon. In this column of editing controls, I'll open the Effects panel and I'll come down to the Vignette slider. Dragging the Vignette slider to the right would lighten the edges of this photo which really doesn't make sense on this particular photograph. But if I drag the Vignette slider over to the left you can see that I'm darkening the edges, and this helps draw your attention to the center of the photo where the subject is. So, I'm going to take that way to the left to make sure you can see it because I want to show you that there are some other controls here that you can use to fine-tune a Vignette. If you click this small left facing triangle just to the right of the Vignette slider you'll see some more options for the Vignette effect. For example, you can Feather the edge of the Vignette or you can reduce the Feather. If you take that all the way you get an oval like this. You can also change the Midpoint of the effect drawing it in or pushing it out and you can change the Roundness too. I'd like a less obvious vignette on this photo so I'm going to put the Roundness slider back to 0 by double clicking the circle on that slider. And I'll do the same with Midpoint which takes that slider to its starting value of 50 and the same with Feather which takes that back to 52. And then I might reduce the strength of this vignette by dragging the Vignette slider back over towards the right. So that's how to use the Vignette control along with its hidden options to darken the edges of a photo so you can draw your viewers' attention to the subject of the photo.
 

A photo shot in dark lighting conditions and/or with a high ISO setting on your camera can display more digital noise than you might like. You can reduce digital noise in the Detail panel in Lightroom. With this photo selected press E on your keyboard or click the Edit icon at the top right. Open the Detail panel and there you'll find a Noise Reduction slider and a Color Noise Reduction slider. Now before you use these I recommend that you zoom in to one-to-one view, so you can really see the digital noise as you're working. You can do that by either clicking on the photo or coming down here and clicking 1:1. You can see tiny grains of digital noise particularly in the dark areas of a photo. If that noise looks like small specs of color, then the first thing to do is to drag the Color Noise Reduction slider over to the right. But in this case we don't have much color noise. We have grayscale or luminance noise which you can reduce using this slider, the Noise Reduction slider. So, I'll just drag that over to the right and that reduces but it doesn't completely eliminate the grains of noise. If you take that too far to try to get rid of all the noise you're going to end up with an unnatural overly smooth look in most photos. So, I'll take that back over to the left to just remove some of that noise and this will give me a more natural look. Let's zoom back out. You can either click on the photo or click Fit. So that's how simple it is to reduce noise in your digital photos using the Noise Reduction sliders in the Detail panel.
 

A photo can almost always benefit from some sharpening in Lightroom. So, let's see how to do that in this lesson. I've selected this photo the one in which the model's face is turned away from the camera and I'll press E on the keyboard or click the Edit icon. If your Detail panel isn't open then click it to open it. Here you'll see a single Sharpening slider which is the sharpen amount slider. Now before you drag this slider it's a good idea to work with the Noise Reduction sliders first to reduce any noise in the photo as we did in the last lesson in this tutorial. Also make sure you're viewing the photo at 1:1 view because that's the most accurate view to evaluate sharpness in a photo. Now sometimes all you'll do to sharpen your photos is to drag the Sharpening amount slider here over to the right until you like the look of the photo. if you do that I caution you not to take this too far because you may get an obvious over sharpened look. If you want to take your sharpening to the next level there are more sharpening options here that can help you to fine-tune your sharpening. And those are located under this left facing triangle here. Now we not only have the Sharpening amount slider, the first slider but also the Radius, Detail and Masking sliders. To work with these sliders, you may find it helpful to know a little bit more about how sharpening works. So, I made another view of this photo that's magnified a lot more than you can zoom in in Lightroom hoping that you'll be able to better see this in this video. Take a look over here at the edge of the model's sweater. Notice that there's a white line on this side of the sweater edge and a dark line on this side of the sweater edge and those lines will create the appearance of a sharper edge. So, when you increase sharpening what you're really doing is brightening and darkening those high contrast edges of items in the photo. And by the way those edges are called halos. Now remember the additional Sharpening sliders that we looked at a second ago. The first one, the Sharpening slider, affects the amount of sharpening, in other words the brightness or darkness of the lines at these edges and the Radius slider controls the width of these halos, how far out from the edge they go. So, keep that much in mind as I go back to the image to work with the Sharpening sliders. To adjust the sliders for this image I'll start with the Sharpening slider. I'm going to drag it pretty far over to the right and I can fine-tune that in a moment. Then I'll take the Radius slider. Dragging this to the right will make those sharpening halos wider and dragging it to the left will make the sharpening halos narrower which is a good approach when you have a photo like this in which you want to sharpen fine details like those in the rock in that boulder in the foreground. Now I'll go back to the Sharpening slider and I'll drag it until the sharpening looks good to me. Next we have the Detail and Masking sliders and these both affect what content in the photo will get those sharpening effects. Dragging the Detail slider to the left would keep fine details from being sharpened which would be a good thing for some details but not for others in this photo. For example, there's probably some digital noise and artifacts in the sky and those are fine details that I don't want to sharpen. But then I do want the details in the rock and in the model's clothes to be sharpened. So, I'm going to drag the Detail slider just about here which looks like a good compromise in this photo. Now with these settings I may still be sharpening some things that I don't want to particularly in large flat areas like the sky. Fortunately, I can see what will be sharpened and what I can protect from sharpening by holding the Option key on a Mac or the Alt key on Windows. As I drag the Masking slider to the right the image turns to a grayscale map. With white lines that represent edges that will be sharpened and black areas that represent what won't be sharpened. As I drag to the right more and more of the sky turns black which means I'm protecting it from sharpening. And that means I won't be sharpening grain and artifacts in the sky. So those are the sharpening settings I'll use for this image. Now there is no one recipe but knowing how to use the Sharpening sliders will help you to set them on any photos of your own.