So in a recent video, I explained how sharpening works in Lightroom and how you can most effectively apply it to your photos. During that video, I also mentioned that there are three additional sliders that can also affect detail called clarity, dehaze, and texture. And I asked if you'd like to learn more about them. And I guess it's gotta be the case because a bunch of you left a lot of comments expressing interest in that. So here we are. Now, the easiest way to understand how these three sliders works is to know what they do to your image because for the most part, they do the same thing. They adjust contrast and color of the details in your photo. The key is knowing how they differ and where it makes the most sense to apply them within your photo. But don't worry, I've got some great examples here to illustrate how these three sliders work, so let's get started. All right, so before we begin, it first would help for you to understand where the sliders are located in case you're new to Lightroom. So in Lightroom, you'll see that under the effects panel here, you've got your three sliders, texture, clarity, and dehaze. And in terms of the order in which Adobe released them, clarity is actually the oldest slider, even though it's in the middle. It was followed by dehaze, and then texture is the newest of the three sliders. If you are a Lightroom Classic user though, you'll see under the basic panel here, so if this happens to be collapsed, you'll wanna expand it. And under presence, you'll see those same three sliders, texture, clarity, and dehaze. And what's cool is that even if you're using a Lightroom Classic or a Lightroom, or even a Lightroom Mobile, say you're using it on an iPhone or an iPad or an Android device. Or even Lightroom Web in your web browser. These three sliders work exactly the same, so everything you learn here, even though I'm gonna show it to you in Lightroom, will work the same in all other versions of Lightroom, which is awesome. But before we dive in, there are two terms that I think are important for you to really understand, because I'm gonna use them throughout this video. And in the context of photography, they are contrast and frequency. So contrast is pretty straightforward. In the context of a photo, contrast kind of determines the range between the darkest parts of your photos and the brightest parts of your photos. So something that has high contrast that has a lot of range or a lot of space between the darkest and brightest parts of your photo and you generally can tell a high contrast photo because it looks very punchy because the darks are super dark and the brights are very bright. Whereas a low contrast photo looks a little flatter or a little grayer because the darkest and the brightest parts of the photo are kind of pushed together towards the mid-tone. So contrast is important. And the other one is frequency. So oftentimes when you talk about a photo or even a video and you hear the word frequency, you're either gonna hear one of three different types. Either there's gonna be a low frequency, mid frequency, or high frequency. The easiest way to understand it is the frequency determines how much a detail there is. So a low frequency area of a photo, the best way to think about that is like the blue sky in a landscape photo. The sky has almost no detail, right? Even with clouds, that's still low frequency because it's mostly flat. Something like mid frequency would be things like the general pattern on a shirt, if you have a person in your photo. So it's kind of like the mid detail areas of the photo, that's mid frequency. And then high frequency, that's stuff like Like if you look at a stone wall, for example, and all of the little details, all of those little intricate details, or even the fine details, say, of fur, that can be considered high frequency. It really depends on how much of a high contrast edge there is. But again, contrast, the difference between bright and dark, and frequency is how much detail there is. So now that you kind of understand that, we can really dive in. All right, so I mentioned we're gonna start with clarity. So what is clarity? clarity affects the mid-tone areas within the tonal range of your photo without affecting the darkest shadows or the brightest highlights. And when you use it, it generally makes your image pop and appear sharper, but it kind of comes at the expense of making colors look grungier. So what do I mean by that? You can see here I have this photo of a taxi in Cuba and watch what happens when I take the clarity slider and I bring it to the right. You see how all of the details start to pop? I'll even zoom in a little bit here so you can see it better. Let's bring this back to zero. As I bring clarity out, what it's doing is it's affecting the edges within the mid-tone area of the image. And it's also making the colors look a little bit muddier, a little grungier. And so this kind of gives the impression of more detail. So how can you visualize this? Well, I mentioned how, again, clarity affects the mid-tone. So here is this histogram. The left portion of this histogram, these are kind of like your blacks. This is the darkest parts of your photo. Then there is this section here, which are your shadows. Then by far the largest area of the photo, those are your mid-tones, followed by your highlights and then your whites. So watch, when I move the clarity slider, watch how only really the middle part of this area here, this section here will be pushed to the right, this section here will be pushed to the left because we are adding contrast to the midtones. So watch, I'm gonna bring the clarity to the right and you see how they're kind of being pushed to the right and to the left. It's not very aggressive because it's only working with this area here. So as you do that, again, if we look over here, you can look at the raindrops on the taxi. You see how they pop because those are generally in the midtone area of the photo. Notice how the dark parts, the really dark parts of the image don't get crispier. They don't get more detail. See like under here. Watch when I adjust the Clarity slider. You see how those dark areas aren't really getting more detail? That's because Clarity's only working on the midtones. Now, to illustrate how that differs from, say, a regular contrast slider, because I mentioned how Clarity is just adding contrast to the midtones, let's go to the contrast slider over here. So here you can see we have the contrast slider set to zero. Now, watch how the entire histogram gets affected. You see how, as I drag it, everything, the entire tonal range is being pushed to the left and to the right. The blacks over here and the shadows really got bunched to the left, and same thing with the highlights and the whites. They really got bunched to the right. And you can see also that there is this kind of color boost that's being introduced as well. So to visualize that even easier, I created a few versions here to help us kind of visualize. So here, this is our baseline version. So this is the edited photo without any clarity Clarity or contrast applied. So if I apply 100% contrast, you can see how it looks a little grungier, there definitely is more detail, but it's not really, the darkest and the brightest parts of the photo aren't being affected. Now watch what happens with contrast. You see how with contrast, we're not really getting a lot of that added detail, but we are getting a lot more, kind of the brighter areas are getting brighter, the darker areas are getting darker, and there is this weird kind of color boost. So again, clarity, contrast. And again, notice that clarity does give you the appearance of more detail, but you do have that kind of grungy look. And that kind of leads me to, with all three of these sliders, the importance of identifying where it would be most effective to apply it. So what I showed you here, where I adjusted the Clarity slider or the Contrast slider, we are making global adjustments, which means that the effect of that slider is being applied to the entire photo. But you might not want that. Like in this photo here, I just want the clarity maybe on the background. So what I would do is use one of the masking tools and pair that with the effect sliders, which you can do. So what I mean by that is let's go to the masking tools here and let's just say that I'm gonna use a brush. I'm gonna make a really big brush, and just, you know, I'm gonna make a quick and dirty selection here, so you can see what I'm doing. I'm just kind of making a really quick and dirty selection. So you can see that I only want clarity to apply to. The wall here, nothing else. I'm not even gonna get through the windows here because that'll make the rain stand out. But here you can see there is the wall selected. And now what I can do is I can go to Effects over here and we have those same three sliders, except when I use Clarity, it's only being applied to the wall. Basically, it's only being applied to the selection that I made using the masking tool. Now, an important thing to know is that all three of these sliders don't just start at an absolute zero and go up to 100, there's a negative value as well. And so what people used to do a lot, especially photographers back in the day when this slider first came out, is especially also with portrait photos, is they would bring the clarity slider to the left because what that would do is it would make skin look soft, almost give it this ethereal glow. There are better tools now to get that effect in Lightroom specifically with the texture slider, but I wanna make a point that with the sliders here, there is a negative value. So when you bring the clarity slider to negative 100, it almost reduces the contrast of the mid-tone area and it gives the impression of kind of a softer, I would say glow or a lack of detail. So just something to keep aware. And that's basically how clarity works. Now let's move on to my next photo here because this will allow me to illustrate what dehaze does. And again, if we scroll down, you'll see that dehaze is right over here. And so what dehaze does is it actually works on low frequency areas. Remember I said that low frequency areas are areas that are flat. So in this case here, this kind of foggy sky, and it also works in areas that don't have a lot of detail or have low contrast. What it does is it actually adds contrast and it adds a color boost. So watch what happens here when I add dehaze. I'll bring it out. You see how it almost gets rid of that fog and you start to get definition in the clouds. You'll also see here that the colors throughout the image look a little punchier. That's because it's doing a little bit of a color boost here. And so dehaze is just one of those things, generally it's like a landscape photographer's best friend, especially if you're out photographing and there is some fog or some mist that you wanna cut through. It generally does a great job. It works especially well in skies. And again, this also is a great opportunity to talk about the difference between global editing and localized editing. So here, maybe I don't want the dehaze effect to apply to the entire foreground, to the dock here. I just want it to apply to the sky. Well, what we can do is go to the masking tools and we can use an adaptive sky mask. This will make an automatic selection of the sky. you can see here, the sky is selected, and now I can go down to effects, apply dehaze, and it's only applying to the sky, so it's not really affecting the foreground. Now I also mentioned that this slider has a negative value, and I have a cool photo here that illustrates it. I'm gonna go here. Why would you want to use a negative dehaze value? Well, here you can see I have this image, and there's already a bit of a glow from the sun. The sun was kind of high in the sky. And let's say I want to accentuate that. I want to add a little bit more. I want that glow to kind of go further down the frame of the image. And I want it to be a little bit warmer. Well, here's where a negative dehaze would be perfect. And we're going to pair it with one of the masking tools. So I'm going to go here to the masking tools. I already have a mask here for the water. I made an adjustment. And I'm going to actually zoom out to like 33%. And then I'm going to create a new mask. and I'm gonna use a radial mask over here, a radial gradient, and I'm just gonna make a gigantic selection like this. And when I hover over it, you can see where it's being applied. I'm actually gonna zoom out even more because I wanna make it larger and I wanna kind of see where it is. I'm also gonna make the feather really large so you can see the transition from the hard edge to the soft edge is huge. And there, you can see kind of that is the mask now. And we can refine this as we make our edits. Let's go ahead and click on fit so we can see the image larger. And now with that radial mask applied, I'm gonna take dehaze and I'm gonna bring it to the negative. And you see how we're getting this kind of glow? So we get this really nice effect here. And then I'm gonna pair it with temperature. I'm gonna take the temperature and I'm gonna warm that. And so we get this really nice warm glow. I can even boost the saturation a tiny bit. And here's what's cool is now I can go ahead, let me zoom back out to 33% and I can position it. Let's say I want it more on the structure here and bring it further down. I can do that. and you can see that that is how a negative dehaze can be used with landscape photography to simulate a glow. So again, positive dehaze, if we take the dehaze slider and bring it to the right, it will actually remove that haze. But if you bring it to the left, it'll simulate that kind of soft glow, which is really nice. And finally, there is texture. Now texture pretty much affects the mid frequency areas, but it doesn't affect color. So this is really good for portraits, this is good for wildlife, because what it'll do is, generally the mid-frequency areas of a wildlife photo, for example, would be the fur here and the feathers. And for a portrait, it would be the skin. You can adjust the skin without really affecting the pores, which would be more of a high-frequency thing. And this is also pretty straightforward. You can see if I zoom in here, I'm gonna take the texture slider, I'm gonna bring it to the right. You see how it kind of adds this really nice detail to the bird. It brings out those details without making it look over sharpened. Another important point to make is that the colors are not being affected. So if we zoom out and I go to the right, see how none of the colors here are being affected. Also, if I zoom in here, notice how the eye, the yellow of the eye, which is low frequency, notice how it's not really being affected by the texture because texture slider is primarily affecting the mid-frequency and of course if you bring it to the left it kind of softens negative texture is what a lot of portrait photographers will use because it makes the skin look really soft but it doesn't remove detail it doesn't make it look plastic it still retains pores because again it's not adjusting high-frequency. And just like before, I don't necessarily want texture to apply to the entire image because watch, if we kind of look here, it's already noisy, but as we increase texture, it does increase the presence of noise. So if you have noise here, you'll have more of that noise visible. So the easiest way to kind of go around that is to go to masking tools. I'm gonna select subject. Lightroom does a fantastic job of selecting the bird. and just like before, I can go to texture and add texture and it's only being applied to the bird. All right, so now that you see how each of these three sliders work, I hope you kind of understand how they are similar, how they operate similarly but differently. It depends on, again, what you want to do, what area of your photo you want to affect, and whether you want both the contrast, the color, and the detail to be impacted. So with that, if you do want to learn even more about Lightroom, if you want to learn absolutely everything there is to know about Lightroom, I really hope you check out my course called Lightroom Everywhere. There is no course on the internet that goes as deep into Lightroom, specifically Lightroom Desktop, Lightroom Mobile, and Lightroom Web. And it's got over nine hours of easy-paced lessons. You don't even have to take my word for it. Check out all of the wonderful testimonials on the product page. I'll leave a link in the description below. And if you want to learn more about sharpening, I mentioned the sharpening video, I've got it right here. So be sure to check that out. If you found this video helpful, as always a thumbs up is appreciated and be sure to click on the subscribe button and the bell icon to get notified of all future videos. See you on the next one.
