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Highlights: This slider is usually used to decrease the highlights in photography, if your highlights are blown out, it means that some parts of the picture are too bright and detail in those areas is not visible and lost - sort of, it is lost to the eye, but it is still part of the Raw file, so by decreasing this slider, you can make the too bright parts less bright. Contrast makes the bright parts of the image brighter and the dark parts darker. Usually I go through each slider dialing it up and down to fit my taste in order to help you get an idea of what each slider does, below are some definitions:Įxposure: How bright your image is the higher the number, the brighter your image - the cool part is if you overexposed your image (too bright ) in-camera, it would be a lost cause with a JPEG but with Raw, it can still be recovered.even if the whole screen is white.Ĭontrast: How much variance there is between the highlights and shadows (light and dark). I took this picture on a somewhat overcast day and so, the picture had a kind of yellow tint to it I felt that the picture would look a bit better if it was a bit more on the blue side so I just bumped up the tint so it fit my taste.
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The way I usually start is by changing the temperature/tint if needed. Time to edit the picture(s)! This step is the most difficult to teach: everybody has different tastes and sees pictures differently so it is hard to say what you may want. **The easiest way to explain light temperature is to think about different types of lightbulbs if you have ever been to a hardware store and seen the various light bulbs, you may notice that the "white" light they output is different - some are more to a yellow side while others more to a blue side. White Balance is a corrective setting that can be done in camera that are used in order to get the coloring in the picture as accurate as possible. The reason for this strange tint is because different lights have different temperature to them - a different tint or color. *You may or may not have noticed that when examining shots after taking them, the images can come out with an orange, blue, yellow tint even though the fact that to the naked eye the scene looked quite normal. That being said, Raw files have the disadvantage of not being able to be ready straight out of camera they need to go through a processing program such as Adobe Camera Raw or Adobe Lightroom. If something was too dark in the image, the information would be lost in the JPEG, but in the Raw file, it could be recovered. With Raw, you get all the information from the camera and have complete control of the settings. Okay, so now that you know what JPEGs and Raw files are, here is why a Raw is superior to a JPEG: The problem with JPEG files is that the decisions that are made during compression sometimes affect the picture in an adverse way part of the reason why what you see in the viewfinder or screen of the camera isn't always the same as what you see afterward on your computer. What is a Raw file? A RAW image file is a file from the image sensor of a camera that contains minimally processed data in other words, what a raw file captures is exactly what the sensor on the camera sees, no compression applied which is why raw files are so much larger than JPEG files.
#Lightroom raw photo processor manual
Even if you've set up the entire shot in full manual mode and set up everything yourself, the JPEG processing still needs to make some decisions as it compresses all the information striking the sensor into one little file.
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In that time, the camera quickly collects all the light information, analyzes things such as the white balance* and the temperature of the light** and quickly compresses it into a reasonably sized file, most of the time, a JPEG. Once you frame up your shot on your camera and hit the shutter, the light floods the sensor of the camera in order to record the image onto your memory card. What is a JPEG file? A JPEG file is a digital image that has been through a lossy compression. Well, in order to understand the significance about Raw files, we have to look at some definitions:
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