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There are so many available adjustments in Develop that there is a very long control panel down the right hand side of the screen, so make sure you scroll all the way down. Many of the tool boxes are closed by default - clicking on the arrow next to the name will open the toolbox. In fact there are so many adjustments that it can be a bit daunting at first, but don’t be intimidated - Every tool you’re ever likely to need is there, but most you’ll probably never touch. Nice to have them all handy though, for the one time you really do need to, say adjust the hue of a deep purple flower.
On the other hand there are tools in Lightroom that you will use all the time. Apart from the basic: exposure / color temp / brightness etc, there are tools you should be familiar with, so let’s start with the Sharpening and Noise Reduction tools in the Detail toolbox. The Noise Reduction in Lightroom 3 is among the best you’ll find anywhere, and although Color Noise Reduction is on by default, Luminance NR isn’t. Most digital SLRs need some luminance NR at any ISO above 400 so click on the preview to view the image at 100% and adjust the slider to remove most of the gritty grain like noise, and then adjust the sharpening and detail sliders to restore some bite to the image. I’ve published suggested settings in the camera specific software tests, but this page for the Canon EOS 50D will give you some idea of the figures to set. Sharpening and NR with any application is a trade off between reducing the noise without losing so much detail that you end up with an impressionist painting. Lightroom 3 manages that trade better then any other application I’ve ever tested, but every image is different so it is something you have to practice. As with all adjustments in Lightroom, the great thing is if you get it wrong and only realise next week, or next month, you can go back and have another go at getting just that adjustment correct without having to redo anything else. That is so cool.
One other just amazing tool at your disposal in Lightroom is the “Ajustment Brush.” This is on the row of tools right at the top on the right hand side, along from the crop box. With this tool you can make very precise local adjustments to brightness / contrast / clarity / saturation / sharpness of areas of your RAW image before you process it. This tool alone makes getting past the Library section worthwhile. It’s just incredible what you can do with the Adjustment Brush, and relatively quickly. All you have to do is click on the tool and then paint over the area you want to adjust by holding down your left mouse button. Then hover your mouse pointer over the adjustment point which will appear, (If you have more than one, the active control point is the one with a black center) and a red mask will appear over the area you’ve selected to adjust. If it’s too small just do some more painting, if it’s too big, holding down the Alt key will change the + in the middle of the brush to a - and you can paint over the area of mask you want to remove. Once you’re happy with your selection you can make the adjustment you want. Need to adjust another area - just click on New in the tool box and off you go.
Using this tool may take a little practice and experimentation, but it’s worth it. If any of you ever hand printed in a darkroom and spent ages shading and burning in areas of images, this is what you need for digital images. As with all the other adjustments, if you change your mind next month, you can come back, select the one adjustment brush you want to change, by clicking on it’s control point, and there you go - adjust away. I’ve really run out of words here to describe how just plain awesome that is.
Next to the Adjustment brush is a graduated filter mask - just pick up the tool and drag it down over your image, adjust the color and strength and you’ll rarely need a grad filter again. With RAW files this is done before processing the file, so, unless you make really extreme adjustments there’s no loss in quality, because, like a negative, a RAW file holds far more information than you can include in your finished TIF or JPEG. All these tools do is let you use it all. Magic.
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