Wednesday, I made this photo of Strasburg Rail Road 2-6-0 No. 89 at the East Strasburg, Pa., station.
I imported the Nikon NEF RAW file into Adobe Lightroom, where I implemented a variety of adjustments aimed at producing a better balanced photo with greater highlight and shadow detail, superior color rendition, and more even overall contrast.
I manually implemented corrections similar to the results created by composite algortihms employed by many contemporary smart phones used as cameras.
So that you can see how I implemented some of the changes, I’ve included screenshots of my Adobe work screen.
This is a JPG made from the NEF RAW file without adjustment. Note the lack of detail in shadow and highlight areas and high contrast.First round of adjustments in Lightroom. Note the postion of the Highlight and Shadow sliders. Also watch the histogram at the top of the page to see how it changes from window to window.Second round of adjustments: in this window I’ve manually lowered overall contrast, placed the black in the shadow and whites in the highlights, while increasing saturation and warming the color temperature. Notice how the histogram shows how I’ve moved the pixel distribution toward the center of the graph, which reflects the lower overall constrast.In this window, I’ve chosen the ‘select sky’ control. All the corrections here were made to the sky to improve the detail in the clouds and the overall contrast of the sky relative to the scene. The intent was to replicate how the sky appeared and not to make an unworldly dramatic sky out of ordinary thermal clouds.Final adjustment: I used the ‘clarity’ slider to globally improve the contrast by giving the image a little ‘snap’ that doesn’t significantly change the shadow or highlight detail. It might seem counter intuitive to lower the overall contrast and the increase it with the ‘clarity’ control, but this can really work to make for a more natural scene out of a high contrast RAW file.This was my end result. It’s not perfect, but its looks a lot more realistic and pleasant than the unadjusted high-contrast NEF file.
