Clipping in Lightroom

gwendolyn

Okay, I know you guys are going to want a sample, but I'm feeling lazy. Anyway, here is my question.

I have just started using lightroom and trying to use the histogram to adjust my photos. If the arrow on the top left of my histogram is lit (which indicates clipping) how worried should I be if I think my picture looks okay. When I put my mouse over it to see where the underexposure is, it highlights areas that are suppossed to be pretty dark and places where I don't need detail. Is this okay? When I go to fix the pictures I don't like them as much. The pictures are in a church, and I just perfer the original exposure. Thanks in advance for all your help!:scratch

DonRicklin

Hey, Photography is a sunbject art anyhow. If you like it that way and it is the way you 'saw' it, then leave it.

Don

arodney

gwendolyn wrote:

I have just started using lightroom and trying to use the histogram to adjust my photos. If the arrow on the top left of my histogram is lit (which indicates clipping) how worried should I be if I think my picture looks okay.

For blacks, not at all. For whites, as long as there's not data you hope to reproduce, not at all either. You are in control of the rendering here. Its totally subjective. If you look at the work of some really great photographers (take Greg Gorman), he has NO black detail in huge amounts of his portraits. That's his style. As for white, again, if you want to blow out highlight detail to produce a desired color appearances, by all means do so. It IS useful to see the clipping so you at least know what is going full black or white. But after that, who cares?

Hindsight

It's all been said already but I feel like spewing.

".....how worried should I be if I think my picture looks okay."

VERY. Never let your opinion or "vision" of what a photo "should be" cloud the objective reality of a shot. You underexposed.. no big deal, just fix it. Mistakes happen to all of us. We can't always get the perfect even exposure. But that's why we have these tools. To guide us down the path of perfection.

I can't go on. It hurts.

Nah, there's nothing "wrong" per say with crushed blacks or blown highlights. The indicators are tools to provide you with information, "there is clipping here." That's it.

One of the cool things about LR is you can try on many different looks without ever even making the changes, with presets. You just mouse over various effects and watch the preview pane. Sometimes extreme tonal curves are ridiculous, sometimes they're cheesy, sometimes they're amazing though.

Don't become one of the "histogram people." "The histogram looks great but the photo looks flat," etc. Letting the tools limit the vision (especially in post!!) is being just another camera consumer. If you're making a product catalog or something, see paragraph one but otherwise throw your worries away. It's indeed nice to know where the clipping begins and ends. I like to push shots both ways in post; normal shots way out of bounds or shots shot way out -back into bounds. When you start playing with desaturated and duo tones etc pushing images to odd places can turn a complete dud into something fantastic. God am I still talking??

jfriend

gwendolyn wrote:

Okay, I know you guys are going to want a sample, but I'm feeling lazy. Anyway, here is my question.

I have just started using lightroom and trying to use the histogram to adjust my photos. If the arrow on the top left of my histogram is lit (which indicates clipping) how worried should I be if I think my picture looks okay. When I put my mouse over it to see where the underexposure is, it highlights areas that are suppossed to be pretty dark and places where I don't need detail. Is this okay? When I go to fix the pictures I don't like them as much. The pictures are in a church, and I just perfer the original exposure. Thanks in advance for all your help!

As others have said, both the histogram and clipping indicators are just information about your image. Sometimes that information is helpful to make proper adjustments, sometimes not. If it's important to you in a particular photo to retain as much visible detail in a highlight area, then the histogram can really help tell you when you are losing detail. If, on the other hand, the image is really all about the mid-tones (as many are) and you get much better mid-tones if you let a few unimportant highlight areas blow, that may be the best adjustment for that photo. You may also try to achieve both by tweaking highlights separately from your mid-tones.

Here's a simple analogy. Imagine you're in a high tech car. It has a visual display that shows you how far away you are from the white lines when you are parking (the equivalent of a histogram). Most of the time, you will strive to be in between the two white lines because that's the best "normal" position for your parked car. But, sometimes you will encounter a parking situation where you want to be as close to one line as possible or even over the edge of one line because there's some unique circumstance in that particular parking (giant truck on one side, open space on the other side). You don't follow the visual information blindly to position your car. You use it as an input to make a proper decision for each particular case.

cmason

Typically, I use the clipping to provide the boundries of exposure etc editting. You want to keep the red at a minimum, and the blue at a minimum. But once within this boundry, it becomes personal/artistic preference. Of course, you can clip all you want as well, but the above is a reasonable guideline.

One word of warning though: I was doing this above, and thought that Lightroom 'auto' was favoring things a little overexposed for my tastes, putting it close to 'red' clipping. But then I 1)ordered prints and 2) got a better monitor, and found the my earlier edits were too dark and muddy. So be sure that what you are seeing on the screen is what you want to get in the print.