Adjusting lighting - Lightroom Mobile Tutorial

- [Instructor] The lighting controls in Lightroom Mobile are among the most important controls that you'll use to adjust tonal values in an image. These controls can have a big impact. So after you apply a profile and maybe the auto button, I suggest you open the light panel and adjusted sliders. In this movie, I'm going to explain what each of the light sliders does. So you can approach them in an informed way rather than just dragging them. So let's tap this photo of the Maroon Bells Mountains in Colorado, and this looks like a pretty good exposure, but I can see that it lacks detail in the white areas like the snow and the clouds, and also in some of the dark areas in the foreground. So I do suggest that you take a look at your photo like that before you start adjusting it. And if you're not sure what's wrong with it, then you can open the histogram panel and that can help you to diagnose. So if I tap with two fingers on the photo and then two fingers again, that shows me the histogram, the histogram is a bar chart that represents the tonal values in an image. The left side of this bar chart represents the darkest possible tones and the right side, the lightest possible tones. And then those mounds in between represent the actual tones in this image, the higher a mound, the more of that tone there is in the photo. So here we can see that there are tones all across the tonal range from light to dark. And so that's a good thing in this case, if the photo was too dark, then most of these mounds would be over to the left. If it was too bright overall, the mounds would tend toward the right. So now let's see how we can improve this photo using the sliders and the light panel. If you don't see the light panel, then tap the edit control at the top right of the task bar, I'll tap the light panel to open it. I usually approach the sliders here from top to bottom, but you can jump around if you want. So we'll start with exposure. What exposure does is it influences the middle range in that histogram either brightening it or darkening it. And when it does that, it makes the whole photo look brighter or darker. In this case, I think the photo is a little bit dark. So I want to pull the exposure slider over to the right. to make it brighter. Because I just want to go a little way instead of dragging the slider, I'm going to tap on the value, the zeros to the right of the exposure slider and just one tap will take it up Point 10. I'll start with that. And I can always come back and increase or decrease exposure later. Now we'll go to contrast. Contrast is different than exposure. Contrast means the difference between the really dark parts of the photo and the really bright parts of the photo. When you take a photo under bright sunlight like this, you often get a lot of contrast and you can see there's a lot of bright white and a lot of dark dark. So I think I want to try to reduce the contrast a little. And for that, I'm going to drag the contrast slider over to the left a bit. I usually don't go too far with this slider. The next four sliders in the light panel, each adjust a particular part of the tonal range primarily. And you'll be able to see that if you drag any of these sliders and you keep your eye on the histogram. For example, the highlight slider affects things that are bright, but not the extremely bright whites. So watch what happens if I drag the highlight slider over to the left. You can see, the bright part of the histogram is the main part that's moving. Normally, you want the highlight areas to display detail. And to do that. Especially with a landscape photo like this, I'll often drag the highlight slider way over to the left. And as I do, you can see that I'm bringing back detail in the clouds and in the snow on the mountain. I'm going to zoom in a bit. And then I'll press and hold. So there's a before. And there's an after with just that one slider, we do see a lot more detailed in the snow. So use the highlight slider when you want to recover detail, particularly when you're working on a raw file where you have lots of editing latitude. The shadow slider affects things that are dark in the image, but not the extreme blacks. So you might think of the shadow slider as kind of the opposite of the highlight slider. In this case, we want to drag the shadow slider to the right, to open up the dark areas, mostly in the foreground so that we can see more detail there. So I'm going to drag the shadow slider way over to the right. Sometimes when you drag the shadows slider to the right, you get a kind of gray or silvery look on the image. To counteract that I want to make the very darkest parts, a richer, darker black, and that's controlled by the blacks slider. So I'm going to take the blacks slider and drag it slightly to the left. There's one more slider, the whites slider. This slider controls the very brightest parts of the image. You usually want those to be bright white, so you can drag the whites slider to the right, but the trick is not to drag it so far to the right that you blow out or lose the detail in the bright whites like this. So I put that back to zero by double clicking it. And I'll show you a trick to make sure that you don't take the whites slider to too far to the right, start dragging the whites slider to the right. And as you drag press on the image with your finger, I'm using a finger on my other hand and drag to the right until you start to see some small white spots. Those are the areas that you're going to push to pure white with no detail. I'm ignoring the color spots and just looking at the white spots. And then I release my finger from the slider and from the image. And were done. We've gone through all the sliders in the light panel, and now we know what each one does. I'm going to finish up by pressing on the image to see a before version, and an after version. And you can see that we've evened out the exposure in the contrast, and we have a lot more detail in the highlights and in the shadows. Now of course, there's more we could do to this image. We might add some effects or some adjustments to color, but this is a good base for this photo.