Camera Raw: How To Use The Fill Light & Black Sliders
https://www.shutterbuggs.com/ - In the previous video, we discussed how important the exposure and recovery sliders were with regards to preserving highlight detail. And in this video, we’re going to focus on how to control shadow detail using the fill light and black slider. So, if you’ve ever used Photoshop before, you may have come across a filter called shadow and highlights, which is comparable in some respects to the recovery and fill light sliders in Camera Raw.
Now, the fill light attempts to recover details from the shadows without affecting the black. So, you can see as I move the fill light slider across to the right hand side of the image, the darker areas of the seal’s fur coat begin to lighten. Now, with that said, there’s only so much detail that can be recovered, and if you attempt to push things too far you risk the introduction of fringing, noise, and other digital artifacts. So, as we can see here, for purposes of showing you the effects of this slider, I’m going to set it to 100. And we’re going to go and zoom in at 100% on the seal’s flipper, and what you’ll notice is along the line of the flipper is fringing, and also continues along the actual rock face there. And that becomes quite obvious the more you actually increase the amount of the fill light.
Now, you’ll also notice that this is actually extremely noisy. I did shoot this at ISO 1,000, because it was quite low lighting conditions on the morning that I actually took this photograph. But, with that said, when you do increase the fill light it does tend to actually reveal a lot of aspects of the photo that you normally wouldn’t actually see. If this were actually set to a density that was sort of where it’s actually supposed to be, you’d actually notice that those noise aspects actually wouldn’t show themselves. So, it’s just something to pay particular attention to, that if you do sort of push it beyond the realms of what is actually visually pleasing to the eye that those things tend to show up.
Now, you’ll also notice just here, that it is, like I was just saying, it’s quite noisy. You can actually see the color noise in here as well. You can see here it’s sort of a very red-y color around where my mouse is, and then it goes to sort of a green-yellow, and over here to a sort of a blue-y/black color. Now, I just recommend for you when you’re actually using this tool, just use it with caution, because, as I say, I tend not to add too much fill light to my images. In a future video, I’ll actually show you a really cool technique of combining two raw files, or two files of the same raw file I should say, where you actually adjust the exposure to two different settings, and then combine them in Photoshop using smart objects. It’s a pretty cool technique, but I’ll leave that for a future video. But, as I was saying for the fill light, just be cautious when you actually use it.
If the fill light concentrates on recovering shadow detail without affecting the blacks, then the black slider can be used to increase contrast in the shadows and blacks of your image without affecting the mid-tones. Now, this adjustment is very similar to the black point adjustment in your Photoshop levels. Now, the key to using this slider is to adjust the black point of your image until it just touches the edge of your histogram. So, if you notice at the top here in my histogram, there’s a space between the left-hand side of the histogram, and the actual information in the image. So, there’s basically empty space there. So, what you want to do is you want to make adjustments to your black slider until it sort of just reaches the edge of your histogram.
What you’ll notice I’m doing here is if you select the amount of any of these sliders, and use the up and down keys on your keyboard, you can increase the values by increments of one. Now, if you want to increase the increments in 10, just hold down shift whilst you’re actually pressing the up and down keys, and you’ll notice that they jump up in increments of 10. So, by making that slight adjustment, you can see now that the histogram is sitting right on the left-hand edge of its threshold, as it were.
Now, with all this said, keep in mind that this is just a guide. The look and feel of your image must come first. So, you really want to monitor your blacks, but you must also sort of use personal preference, and actually decide whether you want to push your blacks further than what is visible in your actual histogram.
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