Quote:
Originally Posted by djotaku
I'm going to play with this a bit more when I get home today, but I thought I'd get some answers from the DPS crowd in the meanwhile. I'm currently going through the AWESOME "The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book" by Martin Evening and I'm reading the section on the develop module. He mentions upping (or lowering) the exposure slider until the highlights are just about to be clipped. Then do the same for blacks. I've seen this advice many, many times in Photoshop RAW books (of which I own a few).
My question stems from the fact that I often have photos that look just fine even though the histogram doesn't go ALL the way to the right (I think...I have to check for sure when I get home) - at least that's the way I remember it. If I move it over to the right, the image would look overexposed. So most of the time, if the picture doesn't look dark, I just leave exposure alone. What am I missing out by not pushing exposure until the histogram hits the right. Do you do push the histogram to the right on EVERY image? (I understand these types of things can get tricked on photos with lots of black, night shots, etc - I mean "regular" photos)
Thanks!
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I think what they are talking about are the slider's on the levels tool. The left slider is for the black's and the right slider is for the white's. There is also a slider in the middle for the midrange tones. The two sliders on the ends should be slid up close to the edge of the histogram on both sides, without clipping. You can do the same thing with the curves tool, just move the end dot of the line close to the edge of the histogram on both ends. If you change the graph to logorhythem, you can see the ends better.
What that does is resets your histogram and spreads it back out across the 5 full stops of range.