p.1 #1 · Why the halos?? LightRoom 4 advice please.
Thanx for the help...
I shot this tulip on a sunny day against a pure blue, no clouds day. Then given my desire to properly expose on the tulip, the sky was near washed out but I was careful to not over blow it. In LR4 later, I tweaked up the tulip, then when done with that, I needed to darken the sky. So I went to HSL, upped the saturation in Blue and a bit of Aqua, then lowered the luminance in the same proportions. I did not touch Sharpening and left it at the default values of 25 etc. (I tried moving it to 0 but no effect.)
So, why the halos? Look at the out-of-focus flowers below the tulip where they are really goofy. There is something technical going on here and I suspect those halos were in the image. So, how do I get rid of them?
Canon 5D Mk II, Canon 70-200 2.8 IS II with extension tube - from RAW.
p.1 #4 · Why the halos?? LightRoom 4 advice please.
don't use HSL in ACR or LR if you can. Photoshop gives me much more control. Using Color Range Tool in Photoshop, I fixed the halo for you in less than a minute.
p.1 #5 · Why the halos?? LightRoom 4 advice please.
You can also use an adjustment brush in LR to darken and saturate the area around the flower - NOT using auto-mask, just using a soft-edged brush.
The HSL sliders have a pretty hard cut-off between colors. That is what is causing you the problem in this instance. Adding a little purple adjustment helps but you're better off with an adjustment brush or moving to PS as Mshi suggests.
p.1 #6 · Why the halos?? LightRoom 4 advice please.
MSHI: wow, did I take that picture?? Thanx for showing the power of PS (is this Creative Suite CS6 or Extended?).
I just don't know if I want to jump in and learn even more software. Then there is the cost.
Maybe you folks can help me make a decision.... most editing I do in LR seems fine for me. It appears... just appears to me that only 10% at most could make use of something other than LR. But I don't know what I don't know; maybe I would use CS6 for more if I had it. For example, I crop heavily when I shoot birds and I think the sharpening in LR is not the best for this (or is it my skills lacking).
Eyeball: Thanx for the tip... I went back into LR and just did that.... very time consuming but way better results. Thank You.
So what do you think..... is the learning curve big for CS6 if I am proficient in LR4?
p.1 #7 · Why the halos?? LightRoom 4 advice please.
When you do global color adjustment, it often leaves a halo because of the color mixing that happens where the two colors intersect, or because of chromatic aberration.
If you are getting halos and you want a quick fix, try reversing the process, rather than pulling the background down, push the subject colors up. This can result in a reverse halo but often that isn't as bad as the alternative.
When doing quick adjustments in LR4, also be mindful of the adjacent colors. Like the other posters say, use photoshop for more serious or better adjustments.
May 04, 2013 at 11:20 AM
mshi Offline • • • • [X]
p.1 #8 · Why the halos?? LightRoom 4 advice please.
Bruce n Philly wrote:
MSHI: wow, did I take that picture?? Thanx for showing the power of PS (is this Creative Suite CS6 or Extended?).
I just don't know if I want to jump in and learn even more software. Then there is the cost.
I used CS6 but honestly for that kind of fix, even CS2 can easily handle it. If you find the cost is the hurdle, you can use GIMP, which is free and even more advanced in technology than Photoshop.
p.1 #9 · Why the halos?? LightRoom 4 advice please.
The areas that you sent grey / white with the HSL controls are out of focus and therefore have a blurred boundary between the supposedly blue sky (which is not so blue because of overexposure) and the red flower. In that area there is less blue than in the rest of the sky, so your HSL sky treatment is affecting this area quite differently.
It seems that the HSL controls works on pixels that have sufficient quantity of whichever colours you select (mostly blue in this exercise) but it affects all three colour channels of those pixels. i.e. you are not just affecting blue channel. The effect on all three channels is in some way proportional to the amount of the selected colours (blue) at each pixel, and I think it subtracting white - i.e. subtracting equal amounts of R, G and B from each pixel to leave more of the differentiating colours so that for example pale blue become rich blue. So, when you boost the saturation of the blue channel in the shadows you don't get as much boost as you do in the clear sky because there is less blue to boost and when you decrease the luminance of the blue in this area it doesn't get darkened as much because there is less blue. Net result is that it stays bright and white and forms a halo.
Saturation is obviously the wrong hammer for driving this screw in.
In Lr, instead of using the HSL controls you can try a combination of reducing exposure, increasing the shadows, decreasing the highlights, and increasing the vibrance. Just watch that you don't blow the red channel. Check out a soft proof for your intended printer or screen profile, because Lr's default working space is the very wide gamut ProPhoto RGB and it's histogram will still look ok at the bright end long after the screen is incapable of showing subtle differences in the bright reds.
By the way, blue makes very little difference to the luminance because it only contributes 11% vs 30% for red and 59% for green.
p.1 #10 · Why the halos?? LightRoom 4 advice please.
The selective color HSL controls in lightroom aren't global to the whole image, they basically 'grab' all the pixels that fall within a certain color range and modify them as specified.
What makes the halos (typically) is this -- There's almost always some blurring at the pixel level, for instance if you have a red object on a blue background, there are going to be some violet pixels on the boundaries between the red and the blue ones. So if you push the reds, pull in the blues, the violet is left alone. Often this results in a halo. The violet pixels were always there, even before the adjustment, you eyes just didn't perceive them until their brightness or saturation fell out of whack with the rest of the image.
One solution is to also manipulate all the colors that fall between the two in a somewhat linear fashion, with some experimentation until the halos are minimized or go away. But this only works when the image is simple enough.
p.1 #11 · Why the halos?? LightRoom 4 advice please.
I have been suffering similar problems with a couple of images. Comparing software I find I get much better results using Capture One than LR. Since I am far from talented with Photoshop it took me a lot of effort to get the masking right in PS to beat the C1 result, though I managed in the end.
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