The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers

Fine-Tuning Your Image

Your picture is probably looking pretty good at this point, but ACR has many more tricks up its sleeve for fine-tuning your adjustments.

Fine-Tuning in the Basic Tab

We still have a few more tools in the Basic tab to cover. If you'd like to add a little midtone contrast to your image, try moving the Clarity slider to the right. This provides a little "snap" to your image, but it doesn't affect the very bright or dark areas.

Vibrance is another intelligent control that boosts color in areas of lower saturation. What's nice about this control is that it does a decent job of protecting skin tones while adding saturation to other elements in the composition.

And if you want to increase or decrease the saturation of all the colors in the image, use the Saturation slider.

Setting	Result
Clarity	Provides a midtone contrast boost with mild sharpening
Vibrance	Boosts low-saturated colors; protects skin tones
Saturation	Applies an across-the-board saturation boost

Fine-Tuning Tonal Adjustments in the Tone Curve Tab

Some images may require more precise tonal adjustments that go beyond the work you did in the Basic tab. Fortunately, the Tone Curve tab is designed for that. You can use the traditional "point curve" approach, but I prefer the newer parametric controls that let you adjust your curve using four properties sliders: Highlights, Lights, Darks, and Shadows. Let's start there.

Figure 4-9. The Tone Curve tab displaying the sliders in the Parametric sub-tab

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