Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
Adobe introduced another slider control in Lightroom 1.1, called clarity. This popular
tool, also included in CS4’s Camera Raw, can be used to make objects stand out from
their backgrounds. Moving the slider increases contrast on either side of any edges in
the image. It is much more subtle in its effect than you can get by tweaking the image’s
overall contrast.
The interactive histogram allows you to address four subdivisions of the tonal range
independently, with control over highlights, lights, darks, and shadows. You will soon
notice that the slider controls refer to them, respectively, as “recovery,” “exposure,” “fill,”
and “blacks.” Recovery lets you restore clipped highlights with little visible darkening
of other parts of the image. If you are happy with your general exposure—the “lights”
which account for most of the tones in the picture—you can adjust the “darks” at the
lower end of the scale. If the image lacks deep blacks, you can move the black point with
the blacks slider.
The Curves sub-panel comes not only with adjustable points but with four slider controls
as well, to reshape lights and darks while recovering highlights and increasing blacks.
Split Toning allows you to change hue and saturation in highlights and shadows.
Slide Show Module
The Slide Show module now includes several sorely needed improvements. Although
it’s still not likely to challenge professional slide show software such as ProShow Producer
(see Chapter 27, “Slide Show Creation”), Lightroom now offers a more complete set of
controls for creating effects such as cast shadows, text overlays, color washes, background
images, and 0-20 second timings for both slide changes and fades. The Cast Shadow
controls are particularly well conceived, with Opacity, Offset, Radius, and Angle sliders,
the last of which also comes with a dial for setting the drop shadow to one/two clock
positions. Selecting a soundtrack, however, is still limited to “choose a music folder.”
Print Module
More extensive is the Print module, with facilities to format the images into different
grids for contact printing or to output whole images to an attached printer. The Print
Job sub-panel offers a choice of draft mode or selectable resolution printing. Draft mode
in conjunction with the operating system’s PDF driver uses data from the preview cache
to print perfect contacts that are indistinguishable from those generated with rerendered
data. This is a speedy way to print contacts.
Web Module
Finally, the Web module lets you put together pages of photographs for publication on
the Web in Flash or HTML format. It offers layout presets together with tools to create
your own custom layouts.