Clarity in ACR (and lightroom I guess)

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Dan1502

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Dan
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I've managed to find information and guides on what most settings in ACR do and more importantly, guidance as to what they do and how to go about adjusting them (though I might post a step by step description of what I do for advice and criticism). Anyway, the clarity setting is one where I just play around with and guess and I would like to know exactly what it does and how and guidance as how to judge where to set it, typical acceptable ranges etc.

Noise reduction is another but I'll leave that for now.

Thanks

Dan
 
Clarity is a contrast slider, I only use it in a negative way for some portraits skin smoothing and only as blend with the original so I can retain the skin detail so I don't end up with a barbie doll like skin.
 
Thanks, I've tended to adjust it in a positive way up to about +20 but wasn't sure if I should be or not and probably in part to the 'it's there so I'd better adjust it' mentality.

I don't think having used it this way has had enough of an effect to merit revisiting those photos where I've used it but will be more careful with it going forward. When yo say a blend do you mean the same technique as exposure blending of two images edited in RAW , one with and one without?
 
Yeah but I then create a hide all mask and only paint on the skin to bring out the 'clarity blend layer', it is not perfect but it is quick and not as harsh as some of the 'blur' tutorials for skin softening.
 
I think I understand how to do that but haven't done any painting on adjustments yet. I have bought a second hand tablet but have yet to really try it. That said, I have been doing landscape and general travel photography so no portrait work as yet. Looking at things again I think a bit of positive clarity does seem to help sometimes but I now have a better idea of what it does and different ways of using it.

The problem is I have loads of photos from my recent holiday and the more I do, the more I learn and by the time I've done five or six more I feel I've improved and look back at the earlier ones and think I could do better. I guess I should really save the workflow files so I can readjust them but I think I'll just do that on the special ones to stop myself going back to too many.
 
the clarity slider increases or decreases micro contrast mainly in the mid tones and can be usefull for giving a image a little "pop" if not overused or as tyler said reducing contrast in skin tones to give a smoothing effect.
 
But you say you are adding clarity and this seems to help, I suggest that it is sharpening the final image that will help and not the clarity slider (I too was once fooled by the clarity slider)
 
I use ACR, and remember a pop up that I dont see now? It said something to the affect, "on the more subtle adjustments especially sharpening, zoom in to, at least! 100%". I'm no expert by a long chalk :thinking: but it does work, I find a 'sharpen' level of 70-80 seems about right, does that sound OK? I suspect the 'clarity' slider may also be a candidate too? An adjustment I have never quite understood . . . I do now, thank you.

CJS
 
It's a local contrast enhancement - in the positive direction it produces a similar effect to doing an Unsharp Mask in PS with a fairly wide radius of something in the region of 50 pixels. Push it the other way (negative) and it applies a blur with a similar radius.

If you push it much beyond 20% then you tend to start to see noticeable halos round tone boundaries, much like you see on poorly done HDR images.

I've found Clarity useful as a way of reducing the tonal flattening effect of shooting through dirty glass or perspex when I've had to do that.

The Sharpen slider adjusts micro-contrast within a much tighter radius (0.5 to 3.0 pixels with 1 pixel as the default in Lightroom) which is what sharpening does.
 
Thanks, I understand sharpening and now better understand clarity including adverse effects to be wary of. The only main part of ACR I now have little or no understanding of is noise reduction and the colour and luminance sliders. So far I have left them at their default settings.
 
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