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1, 2, CVS and 4
Image by Lightscapes | Ramon J. Freire
Published at www.rjfblog.Lightscapes.wordpress.com, Jan 20, 2013
Who said business travel is no compatible with keeping up with one’s blog?
I landed at Heathrow quite late on Friday night in the middle of a major snow storm and half way into Sunday I am already sitting,a I type this, on a Eurostar train to Brussels, usually a great place to catch up with the pending emails but, being Sunday and having spent 3 hours sitting on a taxiway at Heathrow on Friday waiting for a gate to dock the airplane to, I have done the all the catch up already and I thought it will probably be the last chance to blog for a few days….mind you I would had prefer to spend the whole weekend at home with wife and kids.
I promised something about Clarity, Vibrancy and Saturation so here we go.
First, I use Lightroom 3.0 for 99% of any postproduction (1% would be Photomatix). I had a try at Photoshop a long time ago and found it well beyond my needs, specially since, as self imposed editorial policy, I do not edit any picture by deleting or adding beyond cleaning some dirt spot on the sensor or the odd smear on the lens or filter.
Over the years I have developed my personal workflow in Ligthtoom, (1) cropping, (2) curves, (3) CVS (not the pharmacy for the US readers but Clarity, Vibrancy and Saturation) and (4) sharpening.
This does not mean I always apply changes at all for stages nor that I do not use WB, colour adjustements, etc. but in most of the cases I manage well with the 1, 2, 3 and 4 approach.
Autumn is lends itself to colour management, the sameway Winter is contrast season, Summer is Light and Spring is the perfect mix of all.
This scene, again at Hamsterley Forest, Co Durham, had a perfect mix of reds, greens and yellows and everything in between but once out of the sensor and into my screen it had clearly lost humf, probably because the over exposure over 2.5?.
Many times I find a genereous S at the curve tool fixes somehow the lack of intensity in colours but here some extra help was required and adding +10 Clarity (basically works mid tones’ contrast) and +16 Vibrance did the trick.
It is pretty easy to go well over the top with these sliders so I always open up the Before/After screen (key Y) to keep an eye on it. Also, I keep away from Saturation which is it “incompatible” with Vibrance and, even by itself, too harsh. When more (or less) saturation is needed I use the colour section and apply whichever adjustment for the individual colour I want, but this is rare.
Here two good articles from the fantastic site Digital Photography School about the CVS slides.
Ramon
Clarity
Vibrance vs Saturation
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