Lightroom's New Texture Feature Deep Dive

well hello again everybody map closed Kowski here and in this video we are gonna take a look at the nitty-gritty of the new slider that you'll find inside of the latest version of later and when I say latest version may this is May twenty nineteen they've just added this texture slider and I'm getting a lot of questions on how is it like sharpening how is it like clarity how does it compare to these different things when do I use it why do I use all that stuff so we're gonna get techie here okay this is technical stuff I would encourage you it's okay to watch this stuff don't be one of those people that reads and watches videos more than you practice okay it's gonna get techie and you can try to understand it all you want but really the best thing that you can do is practice it open up photos try the different settings and see what you like better there is no right answer to all this we can give you guidelines on how it works but at the end of the day there isn't a right answer you use what looks good okay now before we get started I have two things to tell you number one there is an article from the Adobe Camera Raw team which is also cameras inside of Lightroom that talks about this texture control and there's it's got a lot of really good information and I'm guessing it's from somebody that was behind the actual creation of this max went and he's got some amazing information some great examples in here so I would advise you to read this I'll make sure I put it into the description and then number two as we get into this folks if you are not on the latest version of Lightroom and you are not on the subscription plan and all that stuff please don't leave a comment saying how horrible it is the rest of us are it's it's fine I understand if you don't want to be on it but there's no reason you should watch this video stop now there are millions of other videos on YouTube you can go watch the rest of us don't need to hear your rant in the comments okay so please just go somewhere else be happy there's no reason to continue watching this and ruin your day okay alright let's get into this so texture let's compare texture and clarity first let's talk about this texture is a is what they're they're calling a mid frequency type of an adjustment all right so what does frequency mean and I don't want to get into the weeds here because frequency can you trust me I was reading articles on this stuff this is this goes way techie er than I ever care to get but in a nutshell sommelier s which images here in a nutshell if I were to zoom in to this part of the photo this would be considered a high frequency area of the photo lots of contrast and texture lots of difference between these areas and between the trees and the sky behind it that would be considered a high frequency area if you were to look at the sky back here okay just this area right over here this would be considered a low frequency area if I were to switch photos back to the 1:1 we'll see more of here again the sky in this photo this is a low frequency area this is kind of a middle frequency area and as we get into some of the little nooks and crannies down here this would be more of a high frequency area so it's when we talk about frequency that's generally what we're talking about okay now what does clarity do clarity works on mid-tones okay so when we talk about mid-tones we're talking about we're not just talking about contrast right clarity adds contrast to mid-tones we have a contrast slider that would add contrast to the brights in the darks which is essentially what contrast does boost the whites boost the blacks it's essentially boosting your whites and blacks slider it's essentially going into your curve boosting the whites pulling down on the blacks you know the they all you you ever wonder why somebody does one thing one way and another person does another thing another way they all basically do the same thing adding contrast contrast this contrast it's it's however you like it the best and that's really the most important part again you'll hear me say this over and over again don't be one of those people that reads and watches videos more than you practice try this stuff out see which ones you like but clarity is gonna work on mid-tones so when I were if I were to look at a photo like this and I were to go down here to my tone curve I can click that little target adjustment tool and I can start to hover over areas if you look on the tone curve you'll see a little dot bouncing around all right that's letting me know where falls in the tonal range you could see it's in the it's in the middle area that's a mid-tone so if I were to adjust clarity here that would be the the biggest area that that this photo would affect would be those mid-tones okay and in there this I don't really consider a high frequency area or a low frequency area so texture would also start to come into play inside of that area as well as well as on the trees and whatnot okay because of textures a middle frequency frequency and tone don't necessarily have to be the same thing so they're not always doing the same thing the interesting thing see a lot of people talking about texture and calling it clarity on steroids that could be further from the truth clarity is actually a much stronger slider than texture is okay you can get you can go you can take the photo to weigh different places with clarity where texture is only gonna get you so far okay again they each have their place but it is not clarity on steroids in any way so let's let's take all this stuff and and let's let's take a photo here what I did is I cranked up texture and I'm gonna go to the extremes okay that's the video take way too long if I started to do ten twenty thirty percent whatever so I'm just gonna do extremes and of course you should do these tests on your own where I cranked texture up to a hundred percent pull it back crank clarity up to 100% pull it back and I also cranked up my sharpening in my detail panel here I also crank that up and I pulled it back and what I did is I opened that photo into Photoshop I had us also remove this the spots in the sky before but we don't really care about that right now because we're working on these detailed areas and I've got some layers here inside of Photoshop and they're all named so let's zoom in and let's zoom in on some of the actions some of the the stuff that we have over here so this is our before photo in fact I'm gonna zoom in a little bit further this is our before photo let's turn on texture at a hundred percent okay off it has the appearance that it's sharpening has the appearance that it's adding contrast sharpening really is adding contrast to edges that's all it is but I don't care what it's called if it's got the appearance of sharpening then I don't care I'll use it for sharpening again I'd get over the names of things so texture is definitely adding texture to these areas what you're gonna notice is that it adds a nice amount of contrast than everything to these areas if I were to go start to look at some of this over here again you can see it definitely gives some definition to things I wouldn't say it's taking it from you know this is a semi sharp photo and I deliberately picked something that wasn't tacked sharp because that's the kind of photo we would use this stuff on if it's tacked sharpie you know you don't even really need to do much other than a little bit of sharpening but I deliberately picked this so it's not making it tack sharp but it is adding some depth to it alright remember we talked about mid frequency okay this is a low frequency area up here notice it's not doing anything to the sky you don't see any noise I'll even let you pick Sylvania you don't see anything you don't see any noise getting introduced into this low frequency area over here now let's compare this with sharpening look at that alright so now sharpening again we have masking sliders that can pull it back from some of these some of these low frequency areas these smoother areas but look at the difference in sharpening now all things being equal when we get down to here that's the texture that's the sharpening sharpening actually makes it look sharper all right we're texture it's still kind of blurry it's just a little bit more gotten with some more depth and contrast to where sharpening actually makes it look sharper now all you tech nerds out there you're sitting there and you're the know I call you guys the noise police cuz you're sitting there saying well look at the noise that was introduced in here okay you're full of crap because if I were to share this online at this size you don't see any of this noise and then the problem with the tech nerds is that you're not printing so if you were to print this photo you would never ever see all that noise all that noise would smooth out that's why we over sharpen our photos when we're gonna print all right the photos should look over sharpened because it'll smooth out in the printing process especially if you're gonna print it on more of a textured paper or canvas it's it's this stuff is gone but that is again to me this would be perfectly acceptable sharpening okay yes it did get noisy but it will smooth out in the print and I know that because I print a lot now I might go in here to the sky and I might do some masking and whatnot in the sharpening but hopefully you can see the difference between texture and sharpening where sharpening is going after everything now we got clarity let's turn clarity on let's see what clarity is doing clarity would not be a good adjustment for this photo okay cuz clarity is gonna boost those mid-tones and add contrast but clarity also messes with the luminance and the saturation of the photo so if you look over here number one look at how hot some of these hotspots got look at that difference right there's a lot of hotspots in there and it's D saturated I lost a lot of saturation there if you want to compare it to texture again that's texture this is clarity texture clarity so they are very very different in what they do okay it's not saying clarity is useless anymore there's lots of places where I would use clarity and I'll go over some examples but I did want to show you on this one where I think texture definitely works better and different than clarity but I do think that sharpening would be the way to go in this and maybe you can experiment here's the thing it could be a combination of all of them it doesn't have to be one or the other and that's why it's important you start to use this yourself so let's still go take a look at a couple of photos here this this is a very very high frequency photo okay I think texture is still going to help it it's a I would say mid to high frequency there's not a lot of smooth areas in this other than maybe the waterfall but texture and this photo will definitely give the appearance of sharpening all right that's zero that's a hundred percent so it definitely will give the appearance of sharpening in this photo this photo to me I might use a little bit of texture because I think texture would do a really nice job on these trees again this is zero that's about 50-60 percent I think it does a nice job on these trees but I also think clarity would help on this photo I think clarity gives me a lot of mid-tone contrast and there's a lot of mid-tones middle tones in this photo so I think clarity would give a lot of nice depth to this photo too okay a photo like this I think for me a photo like this would be almost all clarity I think clarity would be the number one choice in this because I love what it does to the rocks and the trees and all these middle tones areas I can I can yeah clarity will desaturate it a little bit but I can always boost the saturation back and maybe warm it if I needed to but this would be a clarity photos and same thing as this one you know texture yep texture will help it too but I think clarity does a nice job too and you'll notice the clarity is really gonna affect back here a little bit more you may or may not want that you know if you want that that depth of field and you want that background blur then maybe you pull back on that clarity and you just use texture because it does definitely help the trees and the bark I won't go over this too much because it's it's hopefully fairly self-explanatory believe it or not if you read that article I showed you believe it or not texture was originally called smoothing okay and it was really meant to be a skin smoothing slider because you'll also find texture in the brush the radio filter and the graduated filter so you don't have to do it to the whole photo you can do it selectively but it was originally called smoothing and it was created to be a skin smoothing technique or skin smoothing setting because to try to keep most people from having to go over to Photoshop to do your skin smoothing okay I had said this before high-end retouchers it's not for you go go do yours frequency separation stuff in Photoshop go do whatever you're gonna do you're not going to use this this is for people that really aren't getting paid to do retouching you go shoot an event it's expected you're gonna do some minor retouching to the photos now you can do it all on the raw photo non-destructively the nice thing is is again you wouldn't you wouldn't crank the texture up in this case you would go the opposite way you'd take it to the left and it would smooth things out but you also wouldn't use the slider you go to go over here and take the brush bring that texture slider down and you could go in here and paint it's actually works really well that again keep in mind this is what it was created for it was created for skin smoothing it was originally called a smoothing slider it was created for this purpose and it does a nice fast job again for people that aren't getting paid you know who you are you're shooting an event you don't get to charge for your retouching but it's expected that you're gonna do some level retouching this is where this type of a slider comes in really handy and you can you know get really finessed in how you pull it back or add to it to add that softness to the skin okay so make sure you check out that article there's a lot of good information in the article and hope you enjoyed this guy's it's it is a very techy thing if you wanted to learn more than nitty gritty about it great um as always my my main thing is is get out there and practice you know stop it's great to read it's great to watch some videos but if you're reading and watching videos more than you're out there practicing this stuff and out there shooting there's a problem so get out there use it on your photos and you'll start to develop I think a style and a feeling for how you like it and what works best for your photos alright thanks so much for watching talk to you again soon

Channel: Matt Kloskowski

Views: 58,071

Keywords: lightroom, lightroom tips, lightroom texture, mattk

Id: Hlsy2VsCWrE

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2019