There’s just one problem. The picture is a tad dark. Sure could use a little fill light. Hey, wait a minute… doesn’t Lightroom have a setting called “Fill Light”? Wonder if that would do.

Using this image as an example (download the original to play along), we’ll take a look at how the Fill Light setting operates and what makes it different from the Exposure slider and the Brightness setting.

First, let’s look at a few example settings. Then, let’s think about what general points we can derive from them about using the Fill Light tool.

First Stab: A Little Fill

In this first example, I’ve added a little bit of Fill Light (+25). The effect is subtle, but it’s a step in the right direction. The bright areas (white tee-shirts) haven’t changed much, and the faces got just a titch brighter.

The biggest areas of change that you’ll notice are the shadows. Check out the shoulders on Blue Shirt Far Left and Dark Blue Shirt Far Right. Both of these guys get a little more definition around their shoulders and some separation between them and the black curtains in the background.

Not Bad, But a Little Flat

In the second example, I pushed the Fill Light even further, maybe a titch too far (+50). The skin tones, the jeans, and the white floor are still substantially the same. But the red curtains brightened up, and now all of the shirts on the far ends of the picture have really brightened up and separated from the black background. You even start to get a little definition in the dark hair.

Problem? The picture is starting to look flat. There’s no pop. It kind of lays there…

Too Much Fill. Noise Much?

And of course, let’s take this just a titch further and see what happens when we go too far. In this case, that’s +75.

The image seemingly gets flatter. You start to get a lot of noise in those shadow areas that have been brightened – check out the back curtains, especially. Some of this noise you can dampen with Lightroom’s awesome Noise Reduction, but you won’t get the same crisp image you would with good lighting. You’ve definitely lost something by adding too much Fill Light.

Of course, there are some continuing improvements. The deep shadows in the back (the black curtains) have gained some definition. They’ve all turned kind of grayish and noisy, but you can definitely see the waves in the curtains… which were nowhere to be found in the earlier images.

So… Takeaway Lessons About Fill Light?

Notice that no matter how far we turned up the Fill Light, we didn’t blow out the image. In fact, the white tee-shirts hardly seemed to change. They probably seemed to get a little darker and duller thanks to the brightening of everything else (and the subsequent drop in contrast).

Notice also that we were able to gain some definition in the deep shadows that were initially blacked out (or close to it). When we raised the Fill Light enough to brighten the really dark areas (the curtains), we gained a lot of noise and lost a lot of contrast. Fill Light is a very powerful tool in this respect; it can bring detail out of some of the deepest shadows, albeit with significant side effects.

A little bit of fill light really helped bring out the dark shirts on the edge of the photo where the flash was starting to fall off. This is what Fill Light is good for – bringing out a little more definition in shadows that aren’t completely black.

This can help if you’ve got a portrait, and you didn’t have a fill light or your reflector didn’t bounce enough light back on the subject. Fill light will soften the shadowy area and bring out some detail – without over-brightening the lit parts of the photo. You just have to be careful not to over-do it and end up with a noisy, no-contrast image.

Ready to move on?

• Next Part: Lightroom Brightening Tool #3: Adjusting Brightness (coming soon)
• Previous Part: Lightroom Brightening Tool #1: The Exposure Slider
• Back to the Table of Contents: Three Ways to Brighten Images in Lightroom: Exposure, Fill Light, and Brightness

[Note: The working image comes from coverage of the William Paterson Fashion Show and is owned by the photography studio Olinda Gibbons Photography. You are free to download, modify, re-post, whatever-you-want with it. Just don't sell it outright; that right remains with the original artist.]

The first tool we’ll look at is the Exposure slider. You can download the original image if you’d like to play along. Also, check the table of contents of this tutorial for links to the other tools that you can use to brighten an image.

First, let’s walk through a couple example settings and see what happens. Then, we’ll think a little bit about what makes the Exposure slider a unique tool distinct from Fill Light and Brightness.

Exposure +1: Getting There

In this image, I upped the Exposure by one stop (I drug the Exposure slider to +1.00). I’d say this is a step in the right direction. The clothes are pretty well exposed, and the skin tones aren’t too bad.

I also used the clipping indicators to stop just as I was starting to blow out some of the highlights. A few small parts of the white tee-shirt under the blue hoody (center-left) are blown out, but for the most part I didn’t lose any highlights.

Exposure +1.5: Good, But Maybe a Titch Too Much

If the only adjustment I made was the Exposure slider, this is probably where I’d stop. I upped the Exposure to +1.5. The skin tones are a little brighter, and generally the picture is good… but I’m disappointed that a little more of the picture is blown out. The white tee-shirts are all just a little too bright and in your face.

It’s important to notice here that there’s a fine line between a good image and an over-exposed image. This example hovers around that line – it might be a little too far for your tastes, and just a little bit brighter will almost certainly be too much.

Exposure +2.33: Way Too Far!

So, of course, I upped the exposure a little more to see what happens. And omg! It’s bright! We’ve definitely crossed the line.

At this point, the skin tones are way too bright. They’re starting to turn an odd color that isn’t exactly human. The whites are way blown out, and the entire scene is just a little blinding. At this point, we can’t even see the line we crossed. When this happens, immediately turn the Exposure back down and return to sanity.

Notice, however, that the curtains are still black. In fact, they seem even blacker due to the increased contrast between the blown out whites and the deep black of the curtains. Hmm…

So What Do We Learn from These Examples?

The Exposure slider will brighten an image, doing the most work with the brighter part of the image. It will effect the darker parts and brighten them a little bit. If you turn on the clipping indicators, you’ll notice that the amount of clipped black areas does drop significantly from the original image to +1.5.

But, there’s much more significant change in the brighter portions of the image. And once you reach the point that the bright areas start to blow out, you start to make the image way too bright. So slowly drag it up, and pay attention to those bright areas.

In fact, that tends to be my current rule of thumb while playing with the Exposure slider. With most images, I watch the histogram or turn on the clipping indicator and I drag the Exposure slider up slowly until the highlights just start to get blown out. Then, I back it off a little bit. If I know some areas (like the background) are going to be blown out, I pay more attention to the clipping indicators to see when the subject itself (like the guy in the white tee-shirt) starts to get blown out and turned into pure white.

Ready to move on?

• Next Part: Lightroom Brightening Tool #2: “Adding” Fill Light
• Back to the Table of Contents: Three Ways to Brighten Images in Lightroom: Exposure, Fill Light, and Brightness

[Note: The working image comes from coverage of the William Paterson Fashion Show and is owned by the photography studio Olinda Gibbons Photography. You are free to download, modify, re-post, whatever-you-want with it. Just don't sell it outright; that right remains with the original artist.]

Now many people would just upload them to Facebook or Flickr anyway. That’s just the way it is… right? Nope! This is one of the simplest, but probably the most important, “retouching” that you can do with image processing software like Adobe Lightroom. There are six settings that you can adjust which together Lightroom calls “Basic Tone,” and three of these (Exposure, Fill Light, and Brightness) all go about brightening an image in slightly different ways.

When I first started using Lightroom, I didn’t know the difference to be honest. Nor did I take the time to figure it out. I should have, though. Sure, each setting will brighten an image; but each will do it differently, and each will be better in a different situation. And, unless you just need a minor adjustment, you might get the best results out of combining all three.

So, to help you better understand how these Lightroom tools work, I’m going to use a single image (the shot above of some of the guys from William Paterson’s 2010 Fashion Show) and look at the different effects. If you’d like to play along, here’s the original image as a DNG file. I’m going to post this tutorial one step at a time throughout the week, and I’ll update this post with links to each of the individual pieces.

Three Ways to Brighten an Image in Lightroom

• Lightroom Brightening Tool #1: The Exposure Slider
• Lightroom Brightening Tool #2: \”Adding\” Fill Light
• Lightroom Brightening Tool #3: Adjusting Brightness (coming soon)
• Combining the Lightroom Brightening Tools: A (Semi)Final Image (coming soon)

Note: This tutorial assumes you’re working with RAW images. The DNG file provided is a standardized RAW format developed by Adobe. You can take pretty much any proprietary RAW format (like Canon’s .CR2 images) and convert them to DNG with software like Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. These brightening tools will work different with jpeg images, and your mileage may vary.

The picture to the left shows an image in Adobe Lightroom with the clipping indicators on. All of the blue areas (mostly black curtains in the background, where very little light came back to the camera) have been clipped, and they’re simply black pixels.

Why does this happen?

The human eye is capable of perceiving a really high level of contrast. Go out on a bright sunny day, and you’ll see really bright things as well as really dark shadows. Sometimes you might have trouble making out the highlights or the shadows, but then your eyes will adjust automatically.

A camera doesn’t have that luxury, and a digital image is even more restricted. Digital images are often displayed as jpegs – a file type that gives you eight bits to describe the tone of a color (red, green, or blue). That ranges from 0 (complete absence of the color, pure black) to 255 (pure white) and a gradation of points in between. The brightest possible point is only 256 times brighter than the darkest possible point; in other words, the brightness can only double eight times, equivalent to 8 stops of exposure. Once a part of the scene is more than four stops darker than the average (the exposure you set the camera to) it’s going to come out… pure black.

One thing to note here is that your camera is capable of capturing a slightly larger tonal range. Modern digital cameras have a range of about 10 to 12 stops (1 to 2 stops on each end more than a jpeg image). If you shoot your pictures as jpegs, the camera picks an average exposure and drops the extra information at the ends (resulting in black and white clipping).

If you shoot in RAW, the camera saves this extra information and allows you to play around and pick the average exposure later in your post processing software (like Adobe Lightroom or Camera Raw). This is a good reason to shoot in RAW, especially under changing lighting conditions, because you’ll be able to tweak the exposure by about a stop or so without creating noise or digital artificats.

The simplest use of tethering is to immediately download the pictures you take onto your computer. Normally, images are stored on an SD card (or similar storage device) in your camera. You can see them on the tiny LCD screen, but if you want to preview a larger version of the image you’ll have to pop the card out, import the pictures to your computer, and then open them up. This can be time consuming. Tethering cuts out the middle man, immediately downloading the image to your computer. More to come on how to set this up, but with Lightroom 3 it is insanely simple.

A more complex use of tethering invovles some kind of software created by your camera’s manufacture, like EOS Capture. This gives you the ability to control your camera from the computer. Let’s say, for example, you’re taking a picture of a product. You set everything up on a tripod and you have all your lights set up. With tethering, you can use the computer to focus, take a picture, or alter the camera settings. You basically have complete control of the camera (other than physically moving it around). This can be a bit more complicated.

In the next few days, I’ll write up a quick tutorial on how to use Lightroom 3 to perform tethered captures with Canon cameras. You might not think you need to, but once you try it… it’s cool.

If you don’t know what the histogram is, it’s that graph looking thing in the righthand panel in Lightroom. That’s a topic for a whole nother day. But those triangles in the top left and top right corner of the histogram as clipping indicators. They help you show when “clipping” occurs – i.e. when a pixel is displayed as pure black or pure white because it lies outside the range of light that your digital camera and software could process.

Let’s look at an image and see how these things work…

An Underexposed Image with Lots of Black

Here’s an image for us to work with. It comes from the “Heat” Fashion Show at William Paterson University in March 2010. The picture was taken towards the end of the evening, when we were trying to get a few cast group shots.

The lighting wasn’t so great, because the black curtains were swallowing up any kind of bounce, so the image came out a bit underexposed. It’s a good candidate for some post processing work to brighten the image, but it’s also a good candidate for using the clipping indicators.

Click the Arrows, Turn On the Clipping Indicators

In this picture, I clicked both of the clipping indicators to turn them on. Notice the weird blue area on the curtains? What Lightroom is telling me is that the blue-ish area has no definition in it. It’s just plain old black.

The problem here is that cameras can only capture a certain range of light, and software can only process and display an even smaller range of light. Your eyes might be able to discern some detail in the shadow of those curtains if you’re there, but the camera can’t see that detail and still keep the people reasonably well exposed.

What happens is black clipping. The camera (or the software, in this case Lightroom) gives up and just displays a black pixel. It’s hard to tell whether a pixel is pure black because it’s been clipped or if it’s just really, really dark. So turning on the clipping indicators makes it easy for you to see what has been blacked out.

Turn Up the Exposure

Now let’s say I started brightening the image using the Exposure slider. For illustrative purposes, I took this way too far.

I cranked the exposure up to 11, err, 3 stops. Notice all the new red stuff? That’s Lightroom telling me that white clipping is happening. All those red areas are completely blown out – they’re pure white pixels that no longer have any definition.

In other words, I might want to tone down the exposure slider down a tad to something a little more reasonable… like + 1 stop.

So When Is This Useful?

In the final image here, I turned off the clipping indicators. You can see what the image looks like with my overzealous exposure tinkering.

So why would you want to use the clipping indicators? Because you have to make some trade-offs in photography. In most images, including one like this, there are going to be either areas of blacks or areas of whites (and sometimes both). But in the original image, nothing was blown out – there was no pure white.

Since I took the image in RAW, the camera actually stored a larger range of light data than Lightroom could process and display on my screen. I can use the Exposure slider to shift this range to the right (and make it brighter). By having the clipping indicators on, I can slowly drag the exposure slider to the right until some of the white areas are just becoming blown out and then back it off a tad. That way I brighten the image as much as I can without blowing out more detail.

Likewise, I might have an image where small bits of it fall into shadow. The black clipping indicator will bring out those spots for me to see, and I can slowly drag the exposure slider to the right to bring out the detail in those shadows.

Of course, sometimes you can’t bring out detail. Sometimes, it’s not a matter of Lightroom limiting the range of light… it’s your camera. Notice how the blue areas shrunk a little bit when I increased the exposure, but they were still there? Cause there was simply too little light. Likewise, you’ll sometimes get really bright areas of blown out highlights that are going to stay pure white – no matter what you do with the exposure slider. The clipping indicator helps you make slight adjustments when your in-camera exposure is close but not quite spot on.

Choose the Spot Removal Tool

First, zoom in on your image. Depending on the resolution, 1:1 or 2:1 is good. You want to be able to see the blemish clearly, and also have it be more than a few pixels on your screen.

Then, choose the Spot Removal Tool from the righthand toolbar. You’ll have to be in the Develop module, and you can also use the “Q” key as a shortcut. This will turn your cursor into a round circle.

Set Up the Spot Removal Tool

There are a few settings you can change with the spot removal tool. I typically leave it on “Heal” instead of “Clone,” and if I’m removing a blemish altogether I leave the opacity at 100.

As for the size, I find the best thing to do is place the cursor over the blemish and use the scroll wheel on my mouse to re-size the brush. You want it to be just a little bit larger than the blemish, but not too much larger. If you try to heal too big of a circle, you’ll notice a distinct odd looking mark in your photo. No good.

Then, click away! Lightroom will make a second circle and guess where to pull the information from to heal your blemish. If this circle doesn’t work out (i.e. if it puts the circle over another blemish) drag that second circle around ’till you find a good spot.

Before and After

And here is the (somewhat) finished product. I went through and removed a handful of little blemishes I found. The only other thing I did was apply an adjustment brush with negative clarity to Iman’s face, which softened the skin just a little bit. There’s some more work we could have done to retouch the photo, but that’s not the point here. The point is to do some very simple retouching, using the spot removal tool, and end up with a photo that still looks very natural and real – not a fully photo-shopped, magazine cover, fashion piece.

Photo by: Sziga.

I found this simple studio portrait in the “Portraits” tag on Flickr. It’s a good execution of a simple two-light scheme. If you click through to the photo page, there’s a description of the lights. But, you should have a decent idea based on the catch-lights in her eyes. The left eye tells it all – one light coming from off to camera left and one light off to camera right. They’re pretty even in terms of power output, because you don’t have a real contrast between the left and right sides of the face; there’s just a little shadow on the left cheek where the hair blocks some of the light.

There are also a lot of plug-ins that help you personalize your site without a lot of technical know-how. One of these plug-ins is the Lightbox 2 plugin for WordPress. This allows you to automatically create a “Lightbox” effect, where when a user click’s on an image they can see a full-size version of it without leaving the page. Instead, the full-size image is laid over the current page, and the background is darkened.  The roll of film to the left has nothing to do with this post, really, but I put it there so you can click on it and see what I mean.

I love this effect (or something like it). It’s a much better user experience when an image appears as an overlay over the current page instead of losing your place in the page and having to load another page (and, eventually, back up to the post and keep reading). I was just browsing another photographer’s website, and she wasn’t using any kind of Lightbox effect. When I clicked on an image to see it bigger, it loaded up a new page, and this really annoyed me… to the point where I no longer feel like browsing through her work.

Lightbox itself is a Javascript app developed to create the image effect, and there are other similar apps that you can get if you know how to work with Javascript. But, some are easier to implement into a design than others, and for photographers that don’t have a lot of web design experience, this is where the Lightbox 2 plugin really shines. Like all WordPress plug-ins, it’s a one click install and you’re done.

A note of caution: It doesn’t always work with complicated, custom made templates. The old template I made for my old website (Life of Brian) isn’t compatible, for some reason. I do use the Lightbox 2 plug-in on this site with no customization. I don’t use the plug-in itself on Olinda Gibbons Photography, but I did implement a jQuery form of the Lightbox effect that you can see on the portrait portfolio page.

Previously, I wrote about the meaning of the term “exposure” in camera talk. To briefly recap, a “stop” is a relative term describing how well-lit and well-exposed the image is. Adjusting the camera settings to increase the light by “one stop” will effectively double the amount of light in the picture (either by opening the aperture, raising the ISO, or lowering the shutter speed).

The same terminology applies in post-processing, although at this point you’re no longer changing the camera settings. In photo editing software, including Adobe Lightroom, you will usually find an “Exposure” adjustment or slider. Dragging this will digitally alter the image and brighten or darken it as if you had adjusted the camera settings.

An Example – A Test Shot of Joel

Here’s an example from a shoot I did a few weeks ago. The original image was a test shot, one of the first frames I took in the afternoon. We were outside at Branch Brook Park, and it was pretty sunny out. So I was trying to pin down the ambient lighting conditions and then I was going to bring in one or two lights to fill things out.

This first image is clearly under-exposed, although not by a ton. It’s a little dark, and everything kind of melds together into shadow. For the second image, I simply imported the photo into Lightroom and dragged the Exposure slider to the right (to +1.00 – one full stop). Now the image is much closer to being well-exposed. It could probably use a little tweaking, but it’s close enough. Some other adjustments could help the image, too, but in general it falls a bit flat because it was taken in a shady area without any additional accent lights.

In the third image, I continued to drag the Exposure slider and it now rests at +2.00 (two full stops). At this point, it’s beginning to look over-exposed. The skin is getting a little white-ish and the cloth wrap is near to getting blown out. Too far! You’ve gotta be careful when dragging the exposure slider that you don’t over-do it, because you will eventually blow out the whites in the picture. Conversely, if you drag it too far to the left, you’ll black out the shadows.

So When Do I Use It?

The exposure slider is a pretty standard go-to tool. You shouldn’t have to make huge adjustments with it, but a lot of images (especially those taken under changing lighting conditions) can use a little tweak – about a third of a stop to two thirds of a stop. If you find yourself adjusting the exposure by more than a full stop, chances are you have the camera settings wrong and you should have changed that when you had the chance.

The effectiveness of the exposure slider also depends somewhat on how you capture the pictures. If you store them in JPGs, then you’ll create a lot more noise as Lightroom artificially brightens or darkens the image. If you captured your pictures in a RAW format, then there’s already a greater range of light information stored in the file than your screen can display. You can safely move the slider up and down by one or two stops without damaging the photo. In this case (and in most), RAW gives you more flexibility in post-processing to utilize all of the information captured by your cameras sensor.