master raw I
f you have ever watched programmes fea- turing weatherbeaten, foulmouthed chef Gordon Ramsay or the misshapen bulging and skeletal body contrasts of fat versus thin docutainment you’ll already have seen the effects of local contrast masking on skin tones and textures.
Digital effects can just as easily be applied to video as they can to still im- ages, even though it is an intensive process demanding extreme computer power. One of the effects now being used to make people look unsympathetic, hard and dramatically unreal is what is known in Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom and some other processing applications as ‘Clarity’.
I’ve used a portrait of myself, taken at uncomfortably close range by Richard Kilpatrick using an extension tube on a Has- selblad. This is partly because the detail from the old Phase One P20+ back lends itself to the shock effect of maximum Clarity, but mainly because I would not dare show off these effects on anyone else!
This is not a single-slider operation. If you use Clarity alone, contrast will rise and colour saturation will fall as the level is increased. If you try to compensate for the saturation loss, it doesn’t look right. So what we have actually done is DROP the satura- tion further, emphasising the loss. That is exactly what the Hell’s Kitchen close-ups and Supersize vs Superskinny shock clips do on TV. They use maximum clarity, sharpness and also drop the saturation, often cooling the image white balance too. The top example here uses +100 Clarity and -33 Saturation, +7 Vibrance, Brightness 28, Contrast 44. Much less popular – perhaps for obvious reasons – is reduced Clarity which creates a glow or fog on the image. The lower example uses -100 Clarity, -8 Saturation (as lowering Clarity tends to increase this), +24 Vibrance, Brightness 51, Contrast 21. The eyes have been selectively lighted in this because the spread of black made the iris too dark. Between these two examples, a great range of hardening and softening effect is possible. It is possible to make Photoshop open JPEG or TIFF files as if they were Raw files. Simply select the file you want from the Open dialog, and with it highlighted, change the file type option below to Camera Raw; the file will then open in ACR, just as if it was a raw file. You can then use the Clarity control and other sliders which you won’t find in Photoshop itself, and apply them. There is no need change the defaults. – David Kilpatrick
Ì MASTER PHOTOGRAPHY 16
photography_
The ‘Clarity’ control in Adobe Camera Raw conversion covers a striking range of portrait treatments for pure effect.
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