Sometimes the colors in your image aren’t quite right and it’s not all of them but perhaps one in particular. White balance, saturation and vibrance adjustments affect the whole image, so how do you target specific colors? In Lightroom it’s easy.
LUT stands for LookUp Table. It’s a digital file that shifts colors and tones in hue, saturation, luminance – usually all three. LUTs are used widely in video editing and cinematography, but are becoming increasingly popular in regular stills photography. They are like ‘pre-processing’ for images. They give you a whole new look without involving any of the editing tools – unlike presets.
A high key image is one which consists almost entirely of bright tones. This works really well for subjects with white or near-white tones and gives a very bright, airy look. Not every image needs a full range of tones from solid black to brilliant white, and not every image needs the ‘perfect’ histogram. Histograms are there to tell you what’s happening, not what to do.
All image-editors offer color controls that let you target a specific color or color range and then change its hue, saturation or lightness. In this example, I’m using the Color Editor in Capture One, but any photo editor with HSL color controls will let you do the same.
What’s in a name? Preset effects typically have names to give you an idea of the kind of subjects they might work with, but in reality you should just choose a preset that gives you the ‘look’ you want. For this dramatic seascape I turned to the Hollywood Glamour preset in Silver Efex Pro, one of the key plug-ins in the DxO Nik Collection.
It’s easily done. You view a RAW image in Lightroom, it applies the default Adobe Color profile and you don’t even bother to question it. You can see what you don’t like, you do some editing – sometimes it takes a while – and you fix it. But often you’re fixing an issue introduced by the default Lightroom profile, and not something that actually needs fixing!
If you want the short answer, it’s yes and no. Yes, you can create digital bokeh, and no, it’s not as good as the real thing. You can, however, create a reasonably convincing bokeh ‘look’.
Lightroom and Capture One offer HDR tools with a difference. They don’t create wild and exaggerated HDR effects. Instead, they create what I would call DNG ‘super-negatives’ with extended dynamic range that you can then exploit however you like.
Analog Efex Pro’s double exposure tool is one of the features that makes this program unique. Here’s a breakdown of how its Double Exposure presets work and how they combine double exposures with other effects.
Kodak HIE infra-red film was one of my favorite films, delivering dense black skies, dreamy soft highlights and heavy grain. Can I get the same effect digitally?