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😢 Lightroom Luminance Down Causes Color Disruption

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
November 28, 2018
3 replies
1672 views

Hello everyone,

I have the following question:

When I drop luminance in Lightroom Classic CC (JPEG pictures), the color tones change dramatically; the change causes some sort of weird pixel shift... I don't even know how to describe it. It doesn't deepen the color as it is supposed to, but rather makes an object super ugly and unnatural.

Please help! I have tried multiple images and different colors (bringing down the luminance).

Attaching examples here. On the first image - orange luminance down -100; second image - orange luminance down -78.

Thanks in advance!

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Correct answer Jao vdL

Also, watched the video to the point he is doing the red and orange luminance. It only works in his image (crazy how obviously the girls are photoshopped in looking at the area in the middle between them) because it is low resolution (so very little variation in the skin tones because of local structure) and they are smaller in the image - again meaning much less detail so you don't get the splotchiness. Also their skin tone is much more saturated to begin with.

Nothing wrong with your Lightroom, your images just need some different way of dealing with them

J

Jao vdL

Correct answer

Community Expert

Also, watched the video to the point he is doing the red and orange luminance. It only works in his image (crazy how obviously the girls are photoshopped in looking at the area in the middle between them) because it is low resolution (so very little variation in the skin tones because of local structure) and they are smaller in the image - again meaning much less detail so you don't get the splotchiness. Also their skin tone is much more saturated to begin with.

Nothing wrong with your Lightroom, your images just need some different way of dealing with them

P

polinarawAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thank you! I think it makes sense now And that's interesting that you say one of the reasons might be low resolution (the person who filmed the video told me that I might have a "bad camera" which won't allow my JPEGs to be edited in then right way).

Really appreciate your help! Have been trying to deal with the issue for quite some time.. Now I just won't mess much with luminance sliders when it comes to hight quality JPEGs

J

Jao vdL

Community Expert

(the person who filmed the video told me that I might have a "bad camera" which won't allow my JPEGs to be edited in then right way).

Yeah that is nonsense. If anything your image is actually too good for this treatment. Most well shot images with good skin detail (yours is a really nice portrait in my opinion) will not lend themselves well to this specific treatment. Notice that in the instagram picture the women have basically no discernible skin structure owing to their size in the image. They also have a very bronzed look to start with.

J

Jao vdL

Community Expert

The selective color trick will only work this way if there is no similar color in the skin tone here. In the upper image, the skin tone of the girls is very different from the grass. In your image they are not as separated and you will leak into the skin. In this case, I would use Photoshop with a mask instead of Lightroom's HSL sliders. You can also do the following on your image since the skin tones here are really quite different than in the example. Keep all the luminance sliders at 0 but drop the yellow saturation to -100. That gives you this:

I would probably do a global + saturation or brush + saturation in this case to get some color back in her face as it paled a bit too much. Doing the Photoshop thing similarly gives this using a quick brush to give color back to her face, hair and arm as you can see in the mask:

P

polinarawAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thank you for the tips and taking your time to try adjusting it. Maybe there's something wrong with my Lightroom?? (I don't think so since I update it regularly and even set it to the original settings recently). Look at what I get when I drop Yellow luminance to -100 just like you did

Her teeth are now greenish and there's so much noise in the skin tones...

J

Jao vdL

Community Expert

I dropped yellow saturation! Not luminance

J

Jao vdL

Community Expert

I am not sure what you expected to happen. This looks exactly like what I would expect to happen if you drop orange luminance especially if you do it that extreme. Luminance is the brightness of a color, not it's saturation. If the HSL sliders are implemented correctly, you will not see a "deepening" of the color, you should just see a darkening as you see here.

P

polinarawAuthor

Participating Frequently

I am asking that because another photographer did the same adjustment on one of his YouTube videos, and the "darkening" was consistent, with no pixelation and interruption as you see above. His images did not like these ones at all... I will attach the results he got here(left is the"after") : (Jpeg; dropping the orange luminosity to -40) I followed every step and got this (the second picture)