Lightroom sliders go to 200% and beyond!

When 100% won’t do, did you know that Adobe Lightroom has a hidden way to turn those dials to 200%?

Hi, my name is Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and this is Coffee Break Photography.

Have you ever started editing a photograph in Adobe Lightroom and moved one of the sliders all the way to 100%, but you’d still like to recover more shadows or reduce the highlights further? Well, I bet you didn’t know that there is an easy way to turn those dials all the way to 200%. Let’s head into Lightroom, and I’ll show you in a couple of easy steps how to draw out even more than the sliders do today.

We’re going to start with this image I took recently from Calton Hill in Edinburgh, looking all the way down Princes Street and including the famous clock tower of the Balmoral Hotel and the iconic Castle. It was taken toward the end of the blue hour, and pushes the dynamic range of the camera. We have strong lights throughout the shot, including the clock-face and the light-trails of the buses. However, we also have deep shadows in the rooftop areas and the trees. When I hover over the clipping indicators, you can see a small area of shadow clipping at the bottom of the photograph and a little more highlight clipping in some of the light trails. I’m pretty relaxed with the highlights, as most are in areas where we expect to see pure white anyway.

We’ll start editing by pressing the Auto button to see what Lightroom thinks are good changes. It’s not done a bad job, but I would probably like to see more from the shadows, particularly in the cliff face under the castle. Let’s move the shadows slider to 100%, and it improves it a bit more, but it still isn’t as much as I’d like. I could increase the exposure slider,  but as I do, it increases the intensity of the white clipping more than I would like.

Without this simple tip, I will show you, we would be stuck. However, there is at least another 100% we could apply to those shadow areas, and here’s how.

Let’s select the mask button, and we will select the Sky using this button. It usually does a good job of identifying which parts of the picture are sky, and I am reasonably happy with this selection. However, I don’t want to edit the sky, I want to change things which aren’t sky. The ellipses or three dots appear as we hover over the mask icon. Click on them, and take the option Invert Mask. This changes the selection from the sky to everything that isn’t the sky.

Anything we now do to the sliders in this section will only apply to the areas covered by the mask. We can add another 100% to the shadows slider if we really want to. I will leave it somewhere in the mid-80s, which looks good. I can also bring out a little more in the black areas too. I shot the image using a white balance setting of fluorescent as it helps to accentuate the blue colours in the sky. The problem is that it’s also made the foreground areas too blue. Increasing the Temperature slider to around 60 helps to balance the city areas and gives a more natural feeling. Finally, I will add a little more texture to the selected areas, which will help to provide a more natural-looking contrast without losing any of the shadow areas we have just recovered.

I’m quite happy with that as an edit now, so I could just hit the close button, and we are ready to export the photo to use however we like. Theoretically, we could even apply a 300% sliders by selecting an area within the original mask and apply another 100% to that area. Let’s add another mask by clicking the Create New Mask button and selecting the brush. Now, we can paint in the areas where we’d like to pull out more of the shadows. Once the selection is completed, we can whizz that slider all the way to around 90% and maybe add another bit of texture to this area.

This use of masks is a great way to target specific areas and apply a double dose of whichever slider you think might benefit from it. Remember, this will only work if you have captured the original image without clipping it in the areas where you want to pull information. A clipped image is a clipped image; no amount of sliders, regardless of the software you use, will pull back that lost data.

If you’ve enjoyed this video, it would be great if you could like it and share it by clicking on the thumbs-up button below the video. That way, a few more people will get to see it. You can also subscribe to the channel by clicking on this button here. I send out a monthly newsletter to my subscribers with news about photography, as well as exclusive offers. Scan this QR code to sign up. My name is Rich Dyson, from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and this has been Coffee Break Photography. See you next time.