Digital Workflow – Basic Global Adjustments

Most digital photographs could use some level of enhancements as a camera may render slightly different exposures, colors, contrast, or sharpness when viewed on the monitor as compared to viewing from the camera’s LCD screen. This article covers the basic global adjustments that targets the overall appearance of the photograph, not specific areas-of-detail in a photograph.

Here we have our base image.  The image is pretty balanced and neutral as it is, the basic changes we are going to apply in the article just shows how global adjustments affect a photograph and show how to use relatively standard image enhancing software to add more impact to the final photograph. Please be aware that this article is not a tutorial for any particular image editing software, the article will merely show the usual global image adjustments applied to most photographs to help you develop a more streamlined workflow.

There are many image editing software available in the market, but let’s stick to the generally accepted standard software options such as Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop. Figure 2 shows the standard Adobe Raw Converter (ACR) and Figure 3 shows the Develop module of Adobe Lightroom. Both applications share the same basic controls, so I’ll just use Lightroom’s panel for this article.

Let’s take a closer look at the various panels available for our image adjustment in Adobe Lightroom.  Figure 4 shows us the histogram of the image, in this particular application, the histogram shows both luminosity (shades from black to white) which is represented by the grey graph, and RGB (red, green, blue) plus CMY (cyan, magenta, yellow) values, represented by the colored graphs. The histogram shows how much information there is in various segments of the photograph’s tonal range.

Right underneath the histogram shows other image adjustment features that may or may not be available in all applications, with the exception of the first icon (rectangular grid), which is the crop tool. The crop tool is available in virtually all image enhancing software.

The next figure shows the usual global image adjustment sliders and the sliders are grouped into three segments: the color balance/temperature adjustment, global exposure adjustment, global color adjustments.  Whatever changes made in these panels affect the entire image, so it’s best to work with the full image being displayed on screen. Notice that most software will have similar arrangement on the panel where the software suggest you adjust the image in the sequence of crop >> color balance >> exposure >> color, it’s a good workflow sequence to follow.

While we often try our best to frame our composition perfectly before capture, the captured image may have a slight variance in framing than what we saw on the LCD or viewfinder of our camera because of viewfinder coverage. The crop tool allows us to re-compose our image or straighten crooked horizons, or crop off extraneous elements in the frame. Some cropping tools such as the one in Adobe Lightroom, offers a composition grid that helps you crop your image according to certain composition theories such as rule-of-thirds, golden mean, etc.

The next panel allows us to fix color balance of our photographs. As discussed in our white balance article, there are cases where our whites are not really white and color casts plague our photographs resulting to weird colors. In many indoor or low-light conditions, it is difficult for our cameras to automatically set the proper white balance settings and oftentimes we need to correct any color balance issues in post-processing. In Figure 7, our day-lit scene has an ugly blue cast due to the white balance set incorrectly in camera.

The color balance adjustment slider often offers three adjustment controls, the first being the temperature slider, which allows you to shift the color temperature from a cool blue tone (left of the scale) or a warm yellow tone (right of the scale). A tint slider is often used to shift green and magenta color casts  in scenes such as foliage-induced green casts. Finally, a white balance sampler tool (water dropper) can be used to quickly sample a color-neutral area in the scene and the application will use the sampled area to compute for the proper temperature and tint adjustment.

In the example above, we used the sampler tool and clicked on the grey road on the road sign as we subliminally know that the a road sign of that type often has a grey drawing. Clicking that sample area neutralized the color cast in our image and gave us the correct white balance (Figure 10).

After correcting our white balance, we can move on to adjusting our image’s exposure. There’s no substitute to getting our exposure right during image capture, however, in the real world, we may not be able to obtain perfect exposure in every shot, especially when lighting conditions are tough or when we cannot fully control our lighting. Minor global exposure adjustments can create the perfect exposure without altering our source file’s integrity too much as large exposure changes performed in post-processing can degrade image quality.

Figure 11 and Figure 12 show the different levels of adjustment you can make to the overall exposure. Increasing the exposure over 2-stops blows out the details of our sky and building, but brought out a lot of details in our shadow areas such as the area underneath the awning and the ground. Figure 12 shows the opposite, where we decreased the exposure by 2-stops and the details on the sky are building are increased while the shadow areas under the awning are reduced to dark patches.

The challenge and goal is to create a balanced exposure with the right amount of highlight and shadow details, like in Figure 13.

After making the general exposure adjustments, we can target the midtones and shadows of the image without altering the highlights using the Fill Light adjustment slider and the Shadows adjustment sliders, respectively. By dragging the Fill Light slider higher, we lift the midtones of the image revealing more areas that are in the shadows. The Shadows adjustment allow us to dictate how much pure black areas there should be in the scene. If we go too far, we’ll end up having an image like Figure 15.

Now that we’ve adjusted the overall exposure of our image, it’s time to add some contrast to the image to add some “punch”. Contrast basically describes how gradual or abrupt the transition is between light and dark tones. Increasing contrast will result to greater distinction between shadows and highlights, resulting to reduced midtones. Depending on your image and purpose, some images are best suited with high contrast, while others are better with low contrast. Figure 16 shows our image with contrast boosted.

Finally, we move on to adjusting the overall colors of our image. The main control slider is the Saturation slider, as the Vibrance slider isn’t available in all applications. The Saturation slider increases the saturation of all colors in the scene. If we take a look at Figure 17, which received a big saturation adjustment increase, the white pillars already suffers from color bleeding from neighboring color areas while the foreground orange sign already lost details as it no longer contains color variances from one orange patch to another. So go easy when adjusting color saturation, a little goes a long way.

While we’re still talking about saturation, reducing saturation completely means taking out all the color information of the scene, the result is a greyscale image with no color information.

Figure 19 shows our final image adjustment. We’ve adjusted our exposure, midtones, shadows, contrast, color temperature, crop, and color saturation to create a pleasing, neutral, and natural final image.

Practice adjusting all the global adjustment sliders slowly and see how each adjustment affects your image and histogram. Eventually, you’ll find a general look and feel that you’re comfortable with with your images and you’ll be able to balance out the various global adjustment settings with ease.

About the Author