Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [89]
Blacks
The Blacks slider is used to clip the shadow point and here again I find it useful to hold down the key to obtain a Threshold mode preview to help determine the point where the shadows just start to clip. The main thing is to set the Black slider so that the shadows just begin to clip, though try not to set lower than 2 or 3 if you can help it.
Fill Light
The Fill Light kind of matches the behavior of the Shadow amount slider in the Shadow/Highlight image adjustment. If you drag the Fill Light slider to the right this adds more lightness to the dark tone areas and lightens the darkest shadow areas. However, if you overdo this adjustment it may knock back the contrast too much and you'll end up with an artificial looking result such as the Figure 3.29 example.
Figure 3.29 Be careful when setting the Fill Light. Shown here is an extreme example of a solarization type effect that can occur if you apply too much Fill Light. If you upgrade to Process Version 2010, you will notice how Recovery and Fill Light have been much improved to prevent this kind of thing happening. As a result of this, you may need to revisit the Recovery and Fill Light settings after upgrading.
Suggested order for the basic adjustments
The first step should be to set the Exposure to get the overall image brightness looking right, taking care not to introduce too much highlight clipping. If necessary, use the Recovery slider to restore any important detail that may be clipped in the highlight areas (see page 181). Next, use the Blacks slider to set the shadow clipping, followed by the Fill Light slider should you need to reveal more detail in the shadow areas. The Brightness and Contrast sliders should be used last to fine-tune the image after you have adjusted these four sliders first.
Basic image adjustment procedure
1.
This shows a raw image as viewed in the Camera Raw dialog, using the default settings in the Basic panel. One way to quickly optimize an image is to click on the Auto button. If you then want to reset all the settings you can do so by double-clicking on the individual sliders, or by clicking on the Default button.
2.
In this example I adjusted the Exposure to make the photograph look lighter, to achieve what looked like the best visual brightness. You don't have to worry about blowing out the highlight detail because you can always use the Recovery slider to restore any highlight detail that may be clipped (but without destroying the exposure effect).
3.
The next step was to optimize the shadows. I used the Blacks slider to set the clipping point for the shadow detail and after that I used the Fill Light slider to lighten the darker areas of the photograph. Note that as you adjust the Recovery and Blacks sliders, you can hold down the key as you drag to see a threshold view of the image, which can help you determine how far to drag to set the correct amount of clipping.
4.
Lastly, I used the Brightness and Contrast sliders to fine-tune the tonal balance of the photograph.
Preserving the highlight detail
As you apply basic adjustments in Camera Raw, you want to make the brightest parts of the photo go to white so the highlights are not too dull. At the same time though, you will want to ensure that important highlight detail is always preserved. This means taking care not to clip the highlights too much, since this might otherwise result in important highlight detail being lost when you come to make a print. You therefore need to bear in mind the following guidelines when deciding how the highlights should be clipped.
White backgrounds
When creating studio shots with a white background, you usually do want the white to reproduce as a pure white. If you try to achieve this with the lighting then you need to make sure you balance the lighting ratios perfectly so that the background values are clipped as pure white and the important highlight detail in the subject matter