Camera Raw: Clarity, Vibrance & Saturation Sliders
https://www.shutterbuggs.com/ - The remaining three sliders in the basic panel are clarity, vibrance and saturation. Clarity is a total adjustment for the mid tones. And the way it works is by creating a mask, which isolates just the mid tones, to which contrast is then applied.
So, as you can see, as I increase the clarity slider to 100% and then we go take a look the preview before, after, before and after, what you’ll notice is that clarity adds a distinct depth to the image, and a crispness. So, it does make the image look like it is sharper and also lifts it sort of off the canvas. I highly recommend utilizing the clarity slider, especially if you intend on printing your photographs as this effect really makes your images pop and stand out off the page.
Now, if you want to add more clarity than plus 100, the other way of doing this is to go to the adjustment brush and click on that, or hit K on the keyboard. And what you’ll be able to do is actually use the adjustment brush to add clarity. So, in this example, if I wanted to add additional clarity to an already sharp and crisp image, you could actually go and create a mask. For this particular example, I’m just going to select the couple. And as you can see here, there’s just a mask around them. What I’m going to do now is just grab the clarity slider and increase that.
If we go and actually turn the preview on and off, you can see it’s also increased the saturation, which is really, really weird. But that’s primarily because I’ve got the color set here, which I don’t want to. I want the saturation to be zero. My bad.
So, as you can see, now that I’ve actually increased the clarity on the adjustment brush to 100%, not I’ve increased it from the original basic panel setting. I’ve increased it by using the adjustment brush, which is a really neat way if you ever have trouble…or I should say, if you ever would like to add more than what the basic panel allows you to add, you can always come in and use the adjustment brush, just to get that little extra amount of clarity, saturation, contrast, brightness etc. to add to your image. So, that’s quite a neat tip and technique.
Now I’m going to clear that. The other thing that the clarity slider does is it actually mimics a technique in Photoshop often referred to as “local contrast,” which utilizes the unsharp mask to create a similar effect. Now, if you’d like to have a go at creating this effect in Photoshop, set your unsharp mask amount between 10 to 25%. And set the radius to about 100 pixels. But make sure, though, to keep an eye on your highlights, because if you’re not careful, they may blow out, which is normally what tends to happen primarily because you haven’t actually created a mid-tone mask. What I usually do is create a layer mask in Photoshop to exclude the highlights when making these adjustments using the unsharp mask.
Underneath the clarity slider is vibrance and saturation. Now, these two sliders both control the amount of saturation in your image. Now, the saturation slider itself is very similar to the hue and saturation adjustment in Photoshop, except it does have some limitations. It’s primarily an overall adjustment of saturation to your image, which you may not always want. You may particularly only want to add saturation to certain areas of your image, as opposed to all of your image. One way around this is to use the saturation tab in the hue saturation and luminance panel, which is up the top here. And we click on that one.
You’ll notice this saturation tab. This tab itself is broken down into eight separate hues, so you can adjust individual colors based on your image, and what you actually want to achieve. In this example, although I’ve totally gone overboard with the saturation, if I wanted to knock back the skin tones I could grab the orange slider and just decrease the amount of saturation there until it looks quite normal again. So, that’s one way around getting that additional fine control that you sometimes want when you’re actually adjusting your images.
Now, if we jump back to the basic panel, let’s take a look at the difference between saturation and vibrance. Vibrance actually excludes the skin tones from the addition of saturation. To prove this, what I’m going to do is, we’re going to leave the saturation at 100. And I’m just going to blow out the skin tones, just to show you an obvious example of what I’m talking about. So, we can see some clipping there is entering around the facial area. We’ve got it highlighted in red, and it looks quite hideous. And there’s quite a bit of noise in the hair.
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