Lightroom Fill Light Creating Weird Fringe

[Josh_K]

I'm trying to edit this photo for printing (the second attached). Unfortunately it's creating a fringe around some of the trees (see first attached) which I'm worried will be visible on a large print (40" width). This was caused in editing by increasing the fill light. It left the edges around the trees a little bit dark. Any ideas on an easy way to fix this?

[Ett]

Yeah. Don't use the fill light slider :P

Seriously though, I don't touch it. The amount of added noise I get when using that slider, even just a little, is horrible.

[i speak in math]

Originally Posted by Josh_K

I'm trying to edit this photo for printing (the second attached). Unfortunately it's creating a fringe around some of the trees (see first attached) which I'm worried will be visible on a large print (40" width). This was caused in editing by increasing the fill light. It left the edges around the trees a little bit dark. Any ideas on an easy way to fix this?

are you sure the fill light is doing that? It looks a lot more like what recovery would do.

[Josh_K]

Yeah, I'm sure. RAW off the camera, everything was pretty much a silhouette. I went step by step through my retouching and it's definitely the fill light.

[Josh_K]

Actually, looking back, it wasn't all underexposed to start. But playing with the fill light was the only way I could get the sky dark and the trees bright.

[Josh_K]

Here's the original photo.

[kcoppock]

My suggestion would be to leave fill light off completely, and take it into Photoshop using the Image > Adjustments > Shadow/Highlight dialog instead. This will give you more control over the tonal range and radius of the adjustment, and worst case you could always just mask out the problem areas individually.