Adobe Lightroom Magic

I took this photo just over 5 years ago and was never very happy with it. The building and foreground were too dark and the canyon in the background was washed out.  So, I’ve just ignored it for 5 years.

Then, today, I was going through my old images and came across this one and started “playing” with it.  Photo software has improved immensely in the last few years and Adobe Lightroom wasn’t even available at that time.  Of course Adobe Photoshop had the capability to improve this image – I just never took the time to jump through all of the Photoshop hoops it would have taken to make these improvements.

One of the things Lightroom does for you, is give you an easy to use panel where you make all of the adjustments while viewing the changes as they occur.

Since part of the exposure was too bright and part too dark, I decided to leave exposure alone and make my corrections using “Recovery” and “Fill Light.  Moving the Recovery slider all the way to the right restored some of the detail to the canyon.  Then I added Fill Light which brightens the shadows.

To begin improving contrast, I moved the “Blacks” slider just slightly right and moved on to “Contrast” to finish.

I then moved “Clarity” all the way to the right for maximum effect.  What this slider does is increase the local contrast, mostly in the mid-tones, resulting in an appearance of better overall sharpness and giving more punch to the image.

“Vibrance” got bumped right a little bit – the most noticeable effect of this control (for me) is a deepening of the blues, especially in the sky, but it also sometimes can over saturate some colors.

Then, I used the individual color sliders to brighten the building a bit more (Orange Luminance), and make the greens just a bit brighter and more green.

The final color adjustment was with the Blue Luminance, just to darken that little bit of sky a tad more.

Finally, there are Sharpening and Noise Reduction sliders which I almost always use – normally with a little bit of sharpening and a lot of noise reduction.

With these tweaks, which really took just a few minutes, I was able to improve the image considerably.  Still not a contest winner, but I think it’s a much better representation of what I wanted when I took the photo back in 2004.