Why Shadow Detail In Photographs Is Sometimes Overrated — Plus Seven Masters Who Lose It

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We’re often taught that good photographic technique means preserving detail from the brightest highlights to the deepest shadows. We expose carefully, process selectively, and use increasingly sophisticated tools to recover the information our cameras capture. But just because detail is there doesn’t mean we need to see it.

More information doesn’t necessarily produce more expression. Sometimes revealing everything can actually diminish a photograph. Shadows can conceal, simplify, suggest, intensify, and transform. What we don’t see can become as important as what we do.

Think of Ridley Scott’s Alien. Unlike its sequels, the creature in the first film is most terrifying largely because we rarely see it clearly. We catch glimpses and fragments. We don’t fully understand its form, what it’s becoming, or what it can do. What the film withholds creates a space our imaginations rush to fill. What we imagine may be more disturbing than anything we could be shown.

Shadows can work the same way. When a photograph describes everything, less is left for the viewer to discover. Suppress information and other things become more active: atmosphere, mood, ambiguity, imagination. What isn’t supplied invites the viewer to participate.

This doesn’t mean blocked shadows are inherently expressive. Losing detail indiscriminately is no more creative than preserving it indiscriminately. The question isn’t whether shadow detail is good or bad. The question is: What does the photograph need? What function do the shadows serve? Does the form fit the function?

What Can Lost Shadow Detail Do?

Create atmosphere.
Forms don't need to disappear into black to lose detail. Mist, haze, smoke, and low contrast can obscure information while making atmosphere itself palpable.

Establish depth.
Detail and tonal separation can change with distance. Controlling how much we see—and where—can organize space and intensify atmospheric perspective. The blackest black is closest.

Intensify mood.
Darkness carries emotional weight. Allowing shadows to overtake a scene can make it intimate, contemplative, brooding, ominous, or mysterious.

Create suspense.
Forms hovering on the threshold of visibility can hold our attention precisely because we can’t quite apprehend them. The eye keeps looking.

Make light more luminous.
A pool of light surrounded by darkness appears brighter than the same value surrounded by midtones. Sometimes darkness gives light its power.


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How To Choose An Optimal Setting For Photoshop’s High Pass Filter

Color - Adjustment, Technique - Color, Technique - Sharpening  Comment
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Photoshop’s filter High Pass is one every user should know. It can be either an edge sharpener or a unique luminosity contrast enhancer that produces a three-dimensional effect, unlike any other tool.

With only one slider, Radius, the differences between low and high settings can be found in the way they handle frequencies of detail: low (smooth spaces and planes), medium (broad lines and moderate texture), and high (fine lines and texture).

When you use low Radius settings, the High Pass filter adds contrast to the edges of lines. As the setting rises it brings out first coarse and then medium texture, accentuating fine texture, often confused with noise, much less.

When you use high Radius settings, the High Pass filter moves beyond sharpening and becomes tonal enhancement. The halos (light lines) and lines (dark lines) it produces become so broad and feathered that rather than only contour contrast (Think edges and thin lines.) they instead accentuate broader image contrast (Think planes chiseled by a sculptor.).  In short, images filtered with high High Pass settings look contrastier and more three-dimensional, as if all the planes in an image are dodged and burned.

Low or high, how do you choose?


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How To Make Your Photographs Appear More Three Dimensional With Photoshop’s High Pass Contrast

Technique - Color  Comment
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The unfiltered image.

A low High Pass filter setting for sharpening

A high High Pass filter setting for contrast

The filter High Pass

Photoshop’s often overlooked filter High Pass is one every user should know. It can be either an edge sharpener or a unique luminosity contrast enhancer that produces a three-dimensional effect unlike any other tool.

When you use high Radius settings with the High Pass filter, it moves beyond sharpening and becomes tonal enhancement. The halos (light lines) and lines (dark lines) it produces become so broad and feathered that rather than only contour contrast (Think edges and thin lines.) they instead accentuate broader image contrast (Think planes chiseled by a sculptor.).  In short, images filtered with high High Pass settings look contrastier and more three dimensional, as if all the planes in an image are dodged and burned.

Take these steps to apply High Pass contrast.


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How To Enhance The Illusion Of Space With Atmospheric Perspective

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As atmosphere builds up, contrast and detail are diminished, while colors grow cooler and less saturated.

Whites are an exception; they get darker and yellower.

Atmospheric perspective can be applied to neutral or black-and-white images using luminosity only.
In the foreground, increase contrast. In the background lighten blacks and darken whites.

Because compositionally, skies are quickly read as separate spaces, they can generally hold more saturation and still seem far away… but don’t overdo it if you want your photographs to be believable.

 

Used in Western art since the Renaissance, the principle of atmospheric perspective can be stated simply. Some colors rise forward, while others fall back. Lighter, warmer, saturated colors, with more contrast, appear closer, and darker, cooler, desaturated colors, with less contrast, appear farther away. You can use atmospheric perspective to control the illusion of three-dimensional depth in your two-dimensional images. When you do this, the scenes you present will become more believable, eye-catching, and compelling.

Adjust Color Selectively

The key to using atmospheric to enhance your images is to adjust color selectively.


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How To Make Day Look Like Night In Your Images

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Because both analog film and digital image sensors are not as sensitive in low light as the human eye, night scenes recorded in natural light are typically underexposed to the point where little is visible. However, night scenes can be rendered with daylight.

"Day for night" is a set of cinematic techniques used to simulate the appearance of night while filming during the day. It's often used when it's too difficult or expensive to shoot at night, but it's sometimes selected deliberately because it offers special image qualities. It's not just technique; it's also an aesthetic.

The same techniques cinematographers employ can be used for still images.

Exposure

When shooting day for night, scenes are typically underexposed in-camera or darkened during post-production, reducing saturation and adding a blue tint – though some movies, like Mad Max: Fury Road, deliberately overexpose. There's more than one way to create the impression of night, and each one offers unique qualities.

ND filters are needed only for the brightest scenes or to prolong exposures to create motion blur.

Continue to use ETTR (expose to the right) but use it more cautiously; above all, don't clip highlights. This will offer you more latitude during post-processing. Avoid dramatic underexposure, which can crush shadows, flatten midtone contrast in ways that reduce flexibility during post-processing, and accentuate noise.

Very bright skies can disrupt the effect. If the sky isn't necessary in a composition, eliminate it. If it is, plan your exposure accordingly. Consider making a second, darker exposure for the sky.

Using HDR exposure techniques, even when a normal exposure wouldn't require them, will give you a variety of exposures for shadows and highlights to choose from or allow you to render a lower contrast combination that is more likely to produce convincing effects.

Lighting

Always consider the scene's light and modify your exposure and post-processing accordingly.


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The Key To Lively Images – Midtone Contrast – And How To Get It

Technique - Color  Comment
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Contrast catches the eye. When looking at images short of an exciting subject and a dynamic composition, nothing does more to grab and hold attention. More contrast, more energy. Contrast is life.

Contrast is not as simple as one slider – thankfully. There’s real control here and so near infinite creative possibilities. Equally beneficial for both black-and-white and color images, there are many ways to enhance contrast, and every tool produces different qualities of life. Master these tools, and you’ll craft visual statements that speak with more confidence and complexity.

Let’s move through our options as we would in a classic workflow, from coarse to fine control.


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How To Intensify Photoshop’s Go To Filter High Pass With Curves

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Indispensable, Photoshop’s High Pass filtration offers contrast and sharpening effects no other tool does.

(Read Curves, Clarity, Dehaze, High Pass, Texture and Sharpening Compared.)

With only one slider, High Pass filtration slip streams between sharpening or detail enhancement (at a low setting) and luminosity contrast adjustment (at a high setting). The two are intimately tied to one another; the difference is the granularity that the contrast is applied. At a low setting, High Pass filtration accentuates contrast along contours with a thin feathered line, while the flat gray areas surrounding contours on the high pass layer tend not to accentuate texture or noise. At a high setting High Pass filtration creates stronger contrast so broadly feathered that it creates a localized vignetting effect, accentuating the illusion of volume in the process.

(Read more here on How To Apply High Pass Filtration.)

The intensity of either or both of these High Pass effects can be accentuated by adding more contrast to the High Pass layer with Curves. Unlike raising the High Pass filter slider while you apply it, which increases the width of the lines on it, increasing the contrast of the layer with Curves does not; it simply makes the lines darker and the haloes brighter.

Take these steps ...


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6 Ways To Get Better Shadow & Highlight Detail In Your Photographs

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You want your photographs to glow - right? So what’s better than one kind of glow? How about three?

You can get there by not succumbing to the classic temptations to clip shadows and/or highlights to produce a more obviously dramatic but a less lively, nuanced, and expressive tonal scale. Instead, hold the full dynamic range with a real black and white and also create gorgeous separation in the values nearest to them.

So many times we give the lion’s share of the contrast to the midtones. Midtone contrast is really important. But that doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice the light in highlights by making them too hot to look at comfortably or in shadows making them so dark they turn to murky mud. You can hold separation in these extreme ends of the tonal scale and produce beautiful qualities of light that complement not just contrast. Here’s how.


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How To Make Your Images More Expressive With Adobe’s Color Grading

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There was a time when color crosses were thought of as poor form, as so many were struggling to remove color casts consistently and accurately while managing the inaccuracies inherent in analog color photographic media. When you saw these kinds of effects, it was hard to ascertain whether the artist was not in control of their craft or insensitive to color or whether they deliberately deviated from the norm. But over time color effects like these have become celebrated both because their differences catch the eye, standing out amid a sea of images, and for their expressive capabilities. What used to require time-consuming chemical processing became quicker and easier digitally. Now there’s a new tool that makes it even easier and allows you to make these kinds of color choices more intuitively - Color Grading.

What Is It

Color Grading is the new Split Toning in Adobe Lightroom’s Develop and Photoshop’s Camera Raw processors. Color Grading offers major improvements including global, control, midtone control, blending sliders, luminance sliders, and the addition of color wheels for a more intuitive interface.

It’s Backwardly Compatible

Don’t panic. All of the Split Toning adjustments you’ve made with previous versions will be compatible with this improved tool if you choose to update files processed with older versions. The sliders will automatically be set new settings that generate the same results. All new controls (midtone, global, luminance) will be set to zero. Blending will be set to 100. You can also make the new tool behave like the old tool by setting Blending to 100 and moving only the hue and saturation of shadows and highlights.

How To Use It

Accessed by clicking the five circles to the right of word Adjust at the top of the panel, you can choose the way you view the Color Grading tool. It’s likely you’ll spend a majority of your time in the first panel (3-Way), which condenses into one panel the next three panels (Shadows, Midtones, Highlights). The larger view of these separate panels offers only one additional feature, the ability to use the Custom Colors swatches to apply preselected colors or sample colors within an image. The fifth and final panel Global adds color to all values equally, for finishing touches rather than the grand effect.

Color Wheels

The most eye-catching part of the new interface may present the biggest learning curve for those who have not used color wheels before but once you try it a few times you’ll find it’s incredibly intuitive.

Move the circle from the center of the color wheel towards the color you want to add, increasing saturation the further away from the center you go, and you’ll see the Hue and Saturation sliders move as you do. Rather than rendering them useless, they become fine control. The second circle on the edge of the wheel moves Hue only and is redundant but perhaps more intuitive to use. The Luminance slider affects brightness for the tonal range you’ve selected, but you’ve got to ask yourself why you wouldn’t use the more precise Tone sliders in the Basic panel. The Luminance slider is fine for some occasions, (It’s great for quickly lifting blacks or lowering whites so they’ll show color effects in ways that pure black and pure whites will not.) but don’t trade convenience for exceptional results.

Balance & Blending

The Balance and Blending sliders both control how the color you add fades into surrounding luminance values. What’s the difference? Balance places the middle of the transition while Blending affects how short or long it is. Blending sets whether the transition is short (Set low it affects fewer surrounding values thought the transitions it makes are still smooth.) or long (Set to 100 it’s capable of affecting all values but not equally.) Be careful setting both Balance and Blending high; you can create curious color cross-over effects.

You’ll find that the Blending setting will affect the saturation of your color choice significantly. A higher Blending setting with less saturated color allows more of the image to be affected less intensely. A lower Blending setting with a more saturated color affects less of the image more strongly.

Midtone Control

One of the game-changing features of Color Grading is the ability to add a third color into the midtones, one that is different from the color added into the shadows and different from the color added into the highlights.

Global Control

You might think it strange to add Global Control to a tool designed to affect select levels of luminosity, but once you try it you’ll find it very useful, often as your last stop in this panel. The addition of an overall color effect frequently helps unify the disparate effects added into shadows, midtones, and/or highlights.

Curves

Color Grading’s interface is much more intuitive and direct than Tone Curve’s. Nevertheless, with a little more work, you can get very similar and even identical effects to Color Grading by using Tone Curve’s Red, Green, and Blue Point Curve feature, which allows you to add color into shadows, midtones, and highlights and control the blend of these effects into one another. I tend to use the Curve for its precision and often further refine Color Grading effects with it; the two are not mutually exclusive. But, you can get even stronger effects with Tone Curve than you can with Color Grading. So if you find yourself using these kinds of Color Grading effects frequently, you owe it to yourself to also see what you can also do with the Tone Curve panel.

Use Photoshop's smart filters to apply Raw adjustments locally

Apply It Locally

Color Grading is a global effect, that is it will affect all shadows, midtones, and highlights equally – unless you apply it as a Camera Raw smart filter in Photoshop. If you do this, you can mask the Color Grading effect to apply it to any portion of an image in any percentage you choose and away from other portions.

Color Strategies

Before you apply Color Grading make your Basic adjustments first, setting black and white points, brightness, midtone contrast and white balance. How you set these things will change the subsequent settings you use in Color Grading. There are always exceptions but, usually, you’ll want to clear any color casts as a more neutral base will show Color Grading effects with fewer color influences and you can do more with less. Black and white images show Color Grading effects most quickly and even a tiny bit of color can produce significant differences.

Here are five strategies for applying Color Grading.


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The Art Of Color Adjustment

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Download your free copy now!

 

The power of color offers you extraordinary creative capabilities and you’ve never had more control than today.

 

Strategies

 

Infinite Variations
The possibilities are almost limitless. Explore your options before you commit to a solution.

Use Presets To Find Variations Quickly
Speed your workflow and visualize many possibilities for your images.

Why Achieving Neutrality In Your Images Is So Important
Make your color more believable, saturated, and three-dimensional.

4 Ways To Achieve Neutrality
How you achieve neutrality sets the foundation for future color moves.

How To Key Your Images Expressively – Go High, Medium, Or Low
Set the mood for your images with tonality.

The Key To Lively Images –  Midtone Contrast – And How To Get It

6 Ways To Get Better Shadow & Highlight Detail
Increase separation in the darkest and lightest values.

5 Tools You Can Use To Make The Most Of Shadows & Highlights Without HDR
You can extend the dynamic range of your images without bracketing exposures.

Why Shadow Detail In Photographs Is Sometimes Overrated — Plus Seven Masters Who Lose It

How To Lose Shadow Detail In Photographs — 29 Ways Counted

How To Avoid Making Viewers Squint At Your Images To See Their Highlights
Preserving detail and setting brightness are important first steps.

How To Render Lively Shadows

3 Qualities Of Light You Can Use To Make Your Images Glow

How To Use Simultaneous Contrast To Make Colors Even More Lively

9 Ways To Tell If Your Images Are Overcooked

How To Make Day Look Like Night In Your Images

How To Enhance The Illusion Of Space With Atmospheric Perspective

Deciding Where To Make Your Images Glow And How To Do It  | Coming Soon

 

Raw

 

What In The World Are Raw Files?
Dive in to the strange and wonderful world of Raw files.

Why You Should Shoot Raw
Get highest quality images from your digital camera.

Why You Should Profile Your Camera
Improve the clarity and saturation of the color your digital camera creates.

How To Get More Than The Maximum A Slider Allows
Get 150%,  200%, 500% or more out of sliders.

5 Reasons You Still Need Photoshop
1  Fine Retouching, 2  Precise Masking, 3   Advanced Color Adjustment, 4  Creative Sharpening, 5  Plug-Ins

 

Tools

 

How To Evaluate Color Adjustment Tools
Identify the go-to, exotic, and redundant tools.

Blend Modes
Make all of Photoshop’s color adjustment tools more precise.

Curves
It’s the most precise tool for adjusting luminosity and hue.

High Pass Contrast
Make your photographs appear more three-dimensional.

High Pass Contrast Or Sharpening – How To Choose An Optimal Setting
Choose between planar contrast or edge sharpening.

Curves, Clarity, Dehaze, High Pass, Texture and Sharpening Compared
How do you choose between so many ways to control luminosity contrast?

Curing Dehaze Color Artifacts
Try this quick fix to eliminate Dehaze color artifacts.

Hue/Saturation & Vibrance & HSL Compared
They’re the most powerful tools for adjusting saturation.

White Balance, Photo Filter, Color Overlays, and Curves Compared
How do you choose between so many ways to control color temperature?

Selective Color
It makes very precise changes like no other tool.

Use LAB Color Mode To Increase Hue Contrast
Use LAB mode for greater hue separation.

Blending Channels
Use the information in one channel to improve another.

Adobe Camera Raw Filter
Using ACR on layers lets you use Photoshop’s precise masking with it.

Color Lookup
Color grading can give many images a similar look or individuals a unique one.

Color Grading
Make the color in your images more expressive with this easy split toning solution.

Gradient Maps
Add new color into specific ranges of luminosity.

Match Color
Transfer color from one image to another.

Synthetic Profiles
Make big changes non-destructively by redefining color values.

Before You Mask Use The Tool’s Selectivity | Coming Soon
The results are faster and sometimes better.

What You Can Do With Raw That You Can’t With Photoshop Unless … | Coming Soon
Adjust Raw files and individual layers with the most robust color adjustment feature.

 

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