Adjusting Highlights and Shadows in Adobe Lightroom

Hey there everyone, am Professional Nature Photographer, Ian Plant and in this video I'm gonna show you two tools in Adobe Lightroom that will give you much more control over your image editing process. And these tools are the Highlight slider and the Shadow slider. Now these two sliders actually work in opposite ways. The highlight slider allows you to control the way the brightest parts of the image Look. While the Shadow slider allows you to control the way the darkest parts of the image look.

Now, if you're not using Adobe Lightroom, don't worry your image editing program probably has something very similar. The highlights slider is particularly useful for taming the brighter parts of your image files such as brilliant sunrise or sunset skies. With Raw files, sometimes the brighter parts of the photo look too bright and washed out. By sliding the highlight slider to the left, you can darken the brightest parts of the image and add more detail. If you're looking at your histogram you'll notice that when you slide the highlight slider effect is mostly concentrated in the tones to the right side of the histogram.

Although the highlight slider is especially useful at recovering lost detail in the brightest parts of your image. If your highlights are blown out in the Raw file there's not much you can do to recover that detail. So just make sure that you avoid overexposure when you're in the field. The shadow slider works on the opposite under the histogram and it allows you to control the exposure levels of the darker parts of the image. Shadows allows you to boost underexposed areas of your image or too dark in the shadows for images that don't have a lot of contrast or that appear to be washed out.

As with the highlights slider the shadow slider won't have any effect on tones that are under-exposed to the point of clipping in the Raw file. But any shadows that aren't completely bunched up to the left of the Histogram can be brightened using the Shadow slider. These two easy to use tools will give you much more flexibility when you're editing your raw files. And if used properly they will allow you to reveal much more detail and make your images look better overall. Am Ian Plant and thanks for watching.