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Author Topic: Going the OTHER way with RAW processing, the "screw-it-up adjustments"  (Read 9074 times)

Tim Lookingbill

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Quote
Posting a crummy sample photo to make a point on a forum seems a bad idea.  

I am not suggesting this is a good thing, but I think it is an issue for those of us who deign to be taken seriously.

Seriously as what? A teacher of photography? A person who's dedicated to the craft to not be worrying about what others think of them or how they appear to others?

I think at this point you're own words have done you in with regard to being taken seriously far more than what any crummy before and after demo could ever do.

Or is this about "Nobody works for free"?

« Last Edit: July 09, 2013, 02:17:46 pm by Tim Lookingbill »
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fike

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...
I think at this point you're own words have done you in with regard to being taken seriously far more than what any crummy before and after demo could ever do.
...


...I was wrong.  THAT kind of uncharitable comment is what stops people from contributing to forums and opening themselves up to criticism.
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Petrus

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I seem to get a fair number of RAW files with both over exposed highlights and crushed blacks (even with D800e), so I do bring blacks up and pull whites down quite often to keep everything inside the histogram. It is not artsy stuff, but mostly just bread and butter press photography. I also sometimes use negative clarity with LR 4.4, and guess what, only on photographs which have elderly ladies in them... well, sometimes also in futile attempts of "glamour"...
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Tim Lookingbill

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...I was wrong.  THAT kind of uncharitable comment is what stops people from contributing to forums and opening themselves up to criticism.

And I did it without posting an image to back it up. Welcome to the club, Fike.

What I said above is tame by comparison from the level of vitriol in quite a few photography forums and they don't post images there either. So I think I've proven my point of the value of talk as a way to be taken seriously, but I didn't mince words and I did get to the point, didn't I?
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fike

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And I did it without posting an image to back it up. Welcome to the club, Fike.

What I said above is tame by comparison from the level of vitriol in quite a few photography forums and they don't post images there either. So I think I've proven my point of the value of talk as a way to be taken seriously, but I didn't mince words and I did get to the point, didn't I?
wow
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Richowens

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And I did it without posting an image to back it up. Welcome to the club, Fike.

What I said above is tame by comparison from the level of vitriol in quite a few photography forums and they don't post images there either. So I think I've proven my point of the value of talk as a way to be taken seriously, but I didn't mince words and I did get to the point, didn't I?

No,you just sounded like a shit salesman with a mouth full of samples. I fail to see any point in any of your posts in this thread except that you are incompetent in using LR.

Your arrogance far exceeds your intelligence. IMHO!

With all due respect,

Rich
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fike

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I seem to get a fair number of RAW files with both over exposed highlights and crushed blacks (even with D800e), so I do bring blacks up and pull whites down quite often to keep everything inside the histogram. It is not artsy stuff, but mostly just bread and butter press photography. I also sometimes use negative clarity with LR 4.4, and guess what, only on photographs which have elderly ladies in them... well, sometimes also in futile attempts of "glamour"...

I have found that when I am dealing with deep, inky blacks and pure whites that adjusting the shadows and highlights give me better results than adjusting the black and white sliders.  That's just my experience with those controls.  As for the blacks, the quality of lifted blacks is so blocky (contrasty) that I rarely like the results of any substantial adjustment there.  The muddiness that adjusting the white slider seems to give the image is too much for me.
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Tim Lookingbill

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No,you just sounded like a shit salesman with a mouth full of samples. I fail to see any point in any of your posts in this thread except that you are incompetent in using LR.

Your arrogance far exceeds your intelligence. IMHO!

With all due respect,

Rich

I'm getting the impression you're about to provide some image samples that explain and correlate to your PV2012 slider settings that Fike first asked in his initial post which without I fail to see anyone's point in this entire thread.
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bns

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Coming back to the originator question,

.... Does anyone have any examples where you have gone the OTHER way by making these NEVER ADJUSTMENTS?  I know that processing is never about rules, but I kind of think it is pretty rare to process in these ways and make the image look better. I have started to call them the "screw-it-up adjustments"

I'd love to see some examples where decreasing clarity looked good, or where lightening blacks looked good.  


I think very appropriate examples, as well as helpful explanations, are given by George Jardin in one of his tutorials: http://mulita.com/training/hns-r/

My personal summary is:
- Negative highlights, positive shadows and positive clarity all add punch or drama to the image, not in the least because of the associated local contrast enhancement.
- Positive highlights, negative shadows and negative clarity can help in achieving a more subtle toning of (parts of) the image.

In the attached photo I wanted to enhance the serene atmosphere of the scene. Negative clarity was the way to go (for me).

Boudewijn Swanenburg
« Last Edit: July 10, 2013, 09:37:20 am by bns »
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fike

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Coming back to the originator question,

I think very appropriate examples, as well as helpful explanations, are given by George Jardin in one of his tutorials: http://mulita.com/training/hns-r/

...

Boudewijn Swanenburg

Nice little video.  Nothing earth-shattering in there, but he has some good examples in there that exercise the controls nicely. Despite an example where he brought the whites down, I remain pretty convinced that it is a rare thing to bring the whites down.  The highlights control seems much more powerful in darkening the bright areas in an appealing way.  The same can be said for the shadows and black controls.  While you might occasionally want to bring the blacks up with the black control, I think the shadows control is a far nicer way to do it.

As we all say repeatedly about these things, there are no rules, but we all tend towards some generalities and now that I have worked with the new version of ACR for a while these are starting to gel in my mind.

The examples of negative clarity look interesting and completely valid.  They aren't typical of my style, so I will need to play with it more to see if I want to incorporate it into my personal palette of frequently-used controls. Using it for skin is a nice idea, but I think it would need to be done selectively, and most of MY selective editing I do in PS with layers masks. I just have never liked the interface for selective editing in ACR.  I should probably mess with it more though because I can't imagine negative clarity to improve skin on a portrait being good for the rest of the image.  Hair and eyes would start to get that dreamy look which you don't necessarily want for a straight-forward portrait.
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Rory

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I'd love to see some examples where decreasing clarity looked good, or where lightening blacks looked good. 


Not saying this looks good, but I occasionally like to see how a "painterly" style looks.  In this example, in the adjusted image the settings were:

Contrast -38
Blacks -33
Clarity -72

Offset by:

Saturation +8
Sharpening 150
Radius 2.4
Detail 90

The extreme sharpening brings back local contrast.  Any size reduction for the web has a big impact on the look with these settings.

Unadjusted:


Adjusted:


While this looks soft, the original adjusted file has more detail. 

Adjusted 100Pct crop:


These settings are a tad extreme to demonstrate the "style" and naturally you can back them off to taste.

Rory
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markmullen

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The examples of negative clarity look interesting and completely valid.  They aren't typical of my style, so I will need to play with it more to see if I want to incorporate it into my personal palette of frequently-used controls. Using it for skin is a nice idea, but I think it would need to be done selectively, and most of MY selective editing I do in PS with layers masks. I just have never liked the interface for selective editing in ACR.  I should probably mess with it more though because I can't imagine negative clarity to improve skin on a portrait being good for the rest of the image.  Hair and eyes would start to get that dreamy look which you don't necessarily want for a straight-forward portrait.

I use Capture One, the local adjustments in v7 are far improved over previous versions.
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fike

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Not saying this looks good, but I occasionally like to see how a "painterly" style looks.  In this example, in the adjusted image the settings were:
...

Adjusted:

...
These settings are a tad extreme to demonstrate the "style" and naturally you can back them off to taste.

Rory
I think you are right.  This doesn't really look good.  The effect, in this case, doesn't reinforce any aesthetic attributes that make the image stand out in a good way.  In landscape phootgraphy, I am forming the opinion that there are very few good applications of negative clarity.  I messed with using it on fog, and it didn't do anything particularly desirable. 
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Schewe

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In landscape phootgraphy, I am forming the opinion that there are very few good applications of negative clarity.

Well, just because a control is there doesn't mean you are under any obligation to use it...as long as you DO know what it does, if it doesn't do anything you want, don't use it...
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fike

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Well, just because a control is there doesn't mean you are under any obligation to use it...as long as you DO know what it does, if it doesn't do anything you want, don't use it...

Of course.  I completely agree with you. But two comments:

1) It appears that the negative values for clarity may have been provided as a way to make the interface consistent with all the sliders being in the middle zero value and being able to go both ways (negative and positive).  I believe in previous generations some controls started with zero on the far left and only slid to positive values.  Of course, some people are saying they have good results using it for portrait work, so who am I to say it is worthless? I'm not loving it. To me, negative clarity isn't really an amazing control like say shadows, highlights, or CA adjustments, or noise reduction, or vibrance, or blah blah blah.  

...but with that said...

2) There are lots of controls in PS that I initially can't find a use for in my workflow, but eventually I am able to make useful in seemingly weird and unconventional ways.  Sometimes it takes someone showing me how they use it to spark my creativity to see how I can use it. I am not yet seeing that for negative clarity in landscape work, and that is the whole point of my query.  Can someone show me something great with negative clarity?

For each image, I can't possibly try every permutation of all the adjustments I can make.  I need to have some starting points, and ruling out negative clarity, negative whites, and positive blacks has helped me focus where I think I can make the greatest value.  Of course, there are probably some corner cases where these things are useful, but I can't figure out what they are.  

Let me think: positive blacks......hmmm.....low contrast, gray, noisy, blocky posterization.  What could I use that for.  I guess I could use it to simulate duotone printing on newsprint.  Yuck.  Not for me.

Let me see: negative whites....  hmmm...more useful because the control doesn't so severely display the limits of digital capture with noise and posterization.  This is probably useful for working on something fogy and low key.  This would possibly be interesting if I were trying to emulate some of the early (19th century) photographers work that has faded over the years.  It reminds me of some of the instagram filters that give the image a cyan or magenta cast decreases contrast and makes it look like a 1970s Instamatic image.  More legitimate than positive blacks, undoubtedly, but still kind of a "screw-it-up" adjustment. I could probably get a better effect with negative contrast.

I freely admit this is all stylistic.  I don't like adjustments that impart attributes that diminish image quality in a way that seeks to emulate inferior or nostalgic photographic performance.  Holga cameras aren't my cup of tea and neither are Holga filters.  Again this is personal, but photo effects that call too much attention to themselves are poor effects.

This is not to say I don't like moody or dramatic interpretations. I just can't see these controls (lighten blacks, darken whites in particular) being very useful.
« Last Edit: July 10, 2013, 03:33:40 pm by fike »
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fike

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Here is some negative clarity on fog.  Doesn't do it for me.
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robgo2

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OK, I'll bite.  In some B&W images. I love deep black shadows, and I often make no effort to lift them.  In fact, I will sometimes actually darken them (perish the thought).  There are many examples in the history of photography in which deep blacks are what make an image great.  I won't provide any specific examples, nor should I have to.

Rob
« Last Edit: August 03, 2013, 08:06:54 pm by robgo2 »
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