Question: I constantly work on photos with my clipping indicators turned on in Adobe Camera Raw. Oftentimes, I see the red and blue blotches all over my photos and I have to make massive changes just to get rid of them. This is especially true with light and dark photographs. I don’t like changing things too much because those changes usually make my image look less than optimal. I want my edits to look a certain way, but I also don’t want to have any overexposure and underexposure in them, especially when it comes to printing. Is there anything I can do about this? Is there any easier and faster way to make those clipping areas disappear, other than drastically editing the photo to get rid of them?
Answer: I use the clipping indicators when I’m editing my photos in Camera Raw as well and the way I remove any overexposed or underexposed areas is easy. If you think about it, you’re just adding content back to any areas where it was removed, so that’s easy enough to do.
Here’s what I can tell you; when you’re finished making all your edits in the Basic panel and you see the red and blue areas (spots – blotches) on your photo, go to the next panel over, which is the Tone Curve panel. Inside of that one, make sure the sub-panel that’s active is the Point one and then make sure the Channel drop-down is set to RGB. From there, all you need to do is lower the white corner (right upper corner) of the line to reduce the overexposure or raise the black corner (left lower corner) to reduce the underexposure. To do this, you’ll need to click and drag the point at the end of the line in the appropriate direction. As you’re doing this, you’ll see the red and blue spots disappear.
When you’re finished and you roll your mouse pointer over the areas where the red and blue spots used to be and you look at the RGB values under the histogram up top, you’ll see that no area of the image is completely white or completely black.
Please let me know if you have questions.
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