Design Center Tutorial

Camera Calibration is another useful color adjustment part of the Develop module in Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom™ (and even Camera Raw), but with the addition of the HSL group, I find I use Camera Calibration less. While it supposedly is for tweaking how a camera sees colors (hence the name), most photographers use it for other purposes, so the name seems misleading at first.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to use the Camera Calibration feature in Lightroom.

Requirements

To follow along with this article, you will need the following software:

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

• Try
• Buy

Prerequisite knowledge:

None

Using the Camera Calibration feature

The camera sensor itself and the camera's A/D converter affect how that camera responds to color. Even camera models from the same manufacturer can have different responses to colors because the sensors are different. Camera Calibration was developed to enable you to affect this color response at a different level from simply changing white balance or saturation. You can adjust the hue and saturation of the primary computer colors of red, green, and blue to, in a sense, "calibrate" a camera for a better color response, as shown in Figure 1. However, this is much more a computer thing than how photographers normally see pictures.

Figure 1: Adjust the hue and saturation of the primary computer colors.

So, most photographers don't use this control for that purpose. They use it to tweak and affect colors based on a specific subject and scene. And indeed, this gives the photographer another way of working color in an image. Very often if a photograph needs more color saturation, this is a better place to do it than using Saturation in Basic. You can adjust red, green, and blue separately, which frequently gives better colors because you can respond to individual color needs rather than making an overall color adjustment that may help some colors, but might hurt others. However, I think that HSL is more intuitive for the photographer (plus it has that really great click-and drag- on-the-image color adjustment).

This potential was strongly illustrated when I recently helped judge the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, a prestigious international competition that attracts some of the top nature photographers in the world. Nature photographers have long liked lively colors like those that came from Velvia. This was evident in the competition from a reoccurring problem—photographers increased the overall saturation to boost the color intensity, but this overall change often over adjusted one color, making it look out of place and unnatural, even though the other colors looked okay.

That could have been solved using the Saturation control in Camera Calibration. There is no one set of steps to use this, so I can't give you a step-by-step on its use. However, if you understand how it works and what to look for as you work with it, you can quickly benefit from this Lightroom feature. Here's what you need to know:

• Shadows. You probably won't use this much. It basically affects the tint of dark tones of your image toward green (left) or magenta (right). If you really want to affect shadows, Split Toning, which I describe earlier in the chapter, offers more control.
• Primary color hue. You can fine-tune the hue of each of the primary colors: red, green, and blue (these are primary colors of light, which is what your camera is working with). This can be extremely valuable for cleaning up a color that just won't record right in the camera. You can't make any of these primary colors into another primary color, but you can adjust the range of each one's color characteristics. Hue for red alters red from a magenta red to a yellowish red. Greens go from yellow-green to blue-green. Blues go from blue-green to a magenta.
• Work more than one hue. As you adjust a hue, you may find that it affects another color that you do not want changed. Try a different color and adjust it. In fact, often you can use these hue adjustments to fix colors that have become contaminated from other colors from any number of sources.
• Primary color saturation. In this case, you can fine-tune color saturation by primary color. This is extremely useful, and frequently, a better way to adjust the color saturation of the image. In the case of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, photographers could have largely solved the problems we found from too much overall saturation by using these sliders. You may even find that while you need to increase one primary's saturation, you need to decrease another.
• Use the Before and After displays. When making color changes like these, you really need to see what is happening to the colors. Sure, you can see the change as it occurs in the center work image, but if you don't have something for comparison, it is easy to over-adjust colors because your eyes compensate for some of the change as you look at the monitor.

Tip: Intense color has become very popular in everything from ads to snapshots. If you are doing purely documentary work, then obviously you need to be careful about making colors accurate and not overdone in saturation. Otherwise, increasing saturation is not a problem in and of itself—only when it is done blindly, just to "boost colors" without also watching to see how these colors really look in the image. It is, unfortunately, only a short step from vivid to garish.

Where to go from here

For more information about Photoshop Lightroom, see the following:

• Photoshop Lightroom Design Center
• Photoshop Lightroom Getting Started Guide (PDF, 6.8M)

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