From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

782 Vibrance, saturation, and sharpness

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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782 Vibrance, saturation, and sharpness

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- [Instructor] In this movie, we'll see the effects of combining low vibrance along with high saturation and sharpening. And that's because when you're playing with colors like this, you're playing with fire. And you can bring out some color artifacts that get enhanced during the sharpening process. And I'll show you how to avoid that problem. And along the way, we'll take this photograph right here, which I captured probably at about six to 10 feet deep, looking up, of course, at the shark, and we'll turn it into this nicely balanced tactile photograph right here. Alright, so the first thing I'm going to do is go up to the File menu and choose Browse In Bridge in order to switch to Adobe Bridge, which is running in the background. And I'll go ahead and select this raw DNG file right here. And I'll right-click on it and choose Open in Camera Raw, or you could just press Control-R here on the PC, or Command-R on the Mac. Now, as before, the first step is to white balance this image. And so I'll go up to the white-balance tool here in the horizontal toolbar at the top of the screen and I'll click on it. And then, I'll just drag across these colors here, which should be neutral gray. And you're going to get very different temperature and tint values depending where you drag. And so I ended up setting the temperature value to 10,500 degrees Kelvin, and then I went ahead and took that tint value up to plus 120, like so. Alright, I'm going to scroll down this list here so that we can see all the options down here at the bottom. And I'm going to click in the dehaze value, and I'll press Shift-Up Arrow a total of four times in order to take that value up to +40, and then I'll Shift-Tab back to the Clarity value, and I'll take it up to +80 so that we have a lot more edge contrast. Now, I'll just mention in passing that I happen to be working in Camera Raw 11.0, in which the dehaze option has been improved where negative values are concerned. Personally, I'm still not a fan of negative dehaze, it ends up creating very washed out shadows, but I have to acknowledge, it is better. Alright, so, I'll go ahead and reset that guy to 40, like I had it before. Now, this image is a bit overexposed, so I'm going to click in the exposure value and press Shift-Down Arrow to take it down to -0.5, and I'll also Alt-drag or Option-drag this black slider triangle so that I can keep track of which pixels I'm clipping, and you can see I'm taking it down to -10, at which point everything that appears cyan is actually clipping in the complementary red channel. That's just how it works when you're Alt or Option dragging the blacks value. Alright, now, as you can see, we have a decent looking image but the colors are a little bit drab. If I were to crank them up using the vibrance value, then once again we're going to end up with a preponderance of blue. And this is in part because I'm shooting underwater, without any strobes. But this can happen on dry land as well, when you end up getting a preponderance of atmosphere, which can also turn an image quite blue. Alright, so I'm going to take that vibrance value back down to zero, and instead, I will take up the saturation value, and I'm taking it up like crazy to +80, which is really doing a number on all the colors including the blues, the orange of these jacks, that's what they're called, these jacks tails, and then we have a little bit of red showing up near the animal's dorsal fin and in this reflective portion of the water's surface. To make things look a little bit more natural, I'm going to take the vibrance value down to -40, and we get this much more natural-looking effect here. And just to see how far we've come, I'll press the P key to turn off the preview, and then I'll press the P key to turn it back on. Alright, now I'm going to Control or Command-click on the shark's face in order to zoom in a little bit here. And if you look closely, you can see that I didn't really end up focusing on the animal's eye. Instead, I caught its gills and this line right here that's going down to this piece of tuna in its mouth. Don't worry, no hooks are involved, it's just tied on, and of course the shark ripped it right off. And so in this case, there's not really a way to shift the focus to the creature's eye, but I can try to sharpen things a little bit. By switching to the Detail tab, represented by these two cones right here, and I'm going to take the amount value up to 100. I'll leave the radius set to one, and I'll take that detail value down to zero, so I don't end up with any what I call micro-sharpening. And then I'll go ahead and zoom in a little bit more so that you can see that we're bringing out an awful lot of noise in this image. Which is a little bit noisy. I've got an ISO up here in the top-right corner of the screen of 320. And so I'll compensate for that by taking this noise reduction luminance value up to 50, like so, and that does a pretty good job of eliminating that noise. I'm also going to take the luminance detail value down to 25. Alright, that's about all the sharpening we're going to be able to do here inside Camera Raw, but we can do more in Photoshop by clicking on the Open Image button. Now, that's going to open the image as a static file, so in other words, we're not left with an editable smart object, however the fact that we're working this way is going to save us about 20 megs in file size. And the sharpening method that I'm about to show you does not actually work with smart objects. And so what I'm going to do is create an independent layer of sharpening by pressing Control-Alt-J, or Command-Option-J on the Mac, to force the display of the New Layer dialog box, and I'll just go ahead and call this guy high pass, and I'll click OK. And the reason it's called high pass is because we are going to sharpen by going up to the Filter menu, choosing Other, and then choosing the High Pass filter which is going to do the best job avoiding clipping inside the halos. And by halos, I mean the edges that are created by sharpening filters. Alright, so I'll go ahead and choose High Pass. I set the radius to four pixels, which is pretty high, but it's going to work out nicely. And then I'll just go ahead and zoom in on the animal's face, and I want you to see, in addition to all these gray non-edges that we're going to be dropping out in just a moment, we have some relatively colorful edge details here. And you can see those colors better if I were to go to the Image menu, choose Adjustments, and then choose Vibrance. And I'm just going to go ahead and crank the saturation value all the way up to +100 and click OK, so that you can see these yellow edges around the rope. We have this blue edge along the shark's snout, and we have all these other colors going on inside the animal. And that's in part a function of those radical modifications that we made to the vibrance and saturation values inside Camera Raw. Now, obviously, I don't want to make the situation worse, so I'll press Control-Z, or Command-Z on a Mac, to undo that recent change, and I'm going to change the blend mode to one of the contrast modes, starting with overlay. And a great thing about working inside the latest version of Photoshop CC is I can actually preview that blend mode on the fly. So I know screen's not what I want. Overlay does a great job, because it's dropping out all those grays and it's just keeping those edges. If I want to back things off, I go with soft light. If I want to make things sharper still, I go with hard light. And if I want to make things sharpest, then I would skip down to linear light, at which point we have some very gritty edges. Problem is, we have all these foreign colors going on as well, and probably the best details, this guy right here. Notice how many different colors are at work at this location. I'm going to click outside that selection to deselect it so that I can effect the entire layer by going up to the Image menu, choosing Adjustments, and then choosing Desaturate. And that will get rid of all of the colors on the High Pass layer, and it will leave us with sharpness that's affecting the luminance details only. And so this is before, with this bit of color going on, and all these colors across the animal's head, and this is after, at which points all those aberrant colors disappear. Alright, now, I don't really want to go that over-the-top with the sharpening, so as opposed to working with linear light I'll go ahead and switch this guy down to overlay. And so this is before, and this is after. It's a more modest sharpening effect, but you can see it makes a big difference. I'll go ahead and zoom out just a little bit here, and then I'll turn that layer off. So you can see that it's much more tactile when I turn the layer back on. At which point, I'll press Shift-F to switch to the full screen mode, and press Control-0, or Command-0 on a Mac to fit the image on on-screen. And that is how you combine the effects of low vibrance, high saturation, and high pass sharpening using a combination of Camera Raw and Photoshop.

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