Lightroom Brightening Tool #2: “Adding” Fill Light

We’ve got a decent image here. Nice posing and facial expressions. I love the two guys clasping hands on the right-hand side.

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
• 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.]