Camera Calibration Settings
If you ever follow my Lightroom tutorials, you’ll see that I very regularly adjust the calibration settings. In fact, along with the white balance, I find this one of the most powerful ways to edit a photo, as it determines which colors get enhanced and really pop (you can do this to a degree with each individual color’s hue/saturation/luminance sliders, but adjusting calibration and white balance helps to single out particular colors).
I decided to show what happens to a recent photo when I play with the calibration settings so that you can hopefully see how much changes can affect the final outcome.
First, the photo as it appeared in yesterday’s post with the edits I made in Lightroom:
As you can see, there was a lot of tweaking going on with the calibration. So what did it look like before those specific edits were made? It looked like this:
Going back to the version that I originally posted, I wanted to play with each slider to see what effects they had. Camera calibration is powerful only when you consider it with each individual picture. For instance, if there’s a photo where I want my freckles to stand out, then I’ll adjust the blue channel’s hue and saturation. If I want my skin to look really smooth, then desaturating the red channel works.
So let’s start with the red channel. Changing the red hue in the opposite direction gives us this:
Pretty scary, huh? If we take the saturation in the opposite direction as well, we’ll get a completely different outcome from both the one directly above and the original:
I actually find this one very pleasing to the eyes (ha!) but it lacks the punch of the green-yellow version.
Speaking of green-yellow, let’s put the red sliders back to where they started and see what happens when we adjust the green channel. After all, the iris of the eye consists mainly of greens, so you’d almost expect there to be huge changes. First, the green hue:
Hmmm….this looks suspiciously like the one where we desaturated the red channel. There’s still a hint of color left in the iris, although now it looks more like a washed-out version of the stronger colors we had before. And if we completely desaturate the green channel as well?
We intensify those strange colors a bit, but it’s still a rather lackluster image compared to the original. And this illustrates an important point for working with calibration. If you want to have a strong effect on certain colors in your photo, you’re usually better off adjusting the other channels for real impact. And in this respect, the blue channel is almost always your most powerful ally.
When we go back to the original settings for the green channel and change only the blue hue, we get this:
As you can see, a dramatic difference! And that’s with the blue channel completely desaturated. If we bump that saturation level up to +100, we get this:
Had I been going for an incredibly vibrant photo, I would have used these settings in the calibration field and then used the brush tool to slightly desaturate the orangey skin tones and the green cast around the iris. And that would have made for a pretty eye-catching photo indeed.