How to use the clarity slider in Lightroom

At the beginning of my journey as a photographer, I watched a lot of tutorials and read plenty of articles saying DO NOT TOUCH THE CLARITY SLIDER. Instead, most publications recommended using the Sharpening slider.

Hmmm…

Personally, I now use both. At the same time. With success.

Love it or hate it, but at least give it a try!

That being said, the clarity slider won’t work with all your images.

DO use the clarity slider for…

• natural textures already present in your image (grass, foliage, clothes, clouds, leaves, sand, wood, etc.)
• environmental portrait (small face in your big picture)
• semi-silhouette or silhouette pictures

DON’T use the clarity slider with…

• pretty bokeh (but sometime it can surprise you and work).
• Close up portraits of faces.

DO (with caution)…

• Human subject in a landscape

Okay, so let’s do this.

Here is an image that I know will work with a lot of clarity. When I say a lot, I don’t mean 15, I mean between 30 and 60 and sometimes 100! And I promise, my faces always end up looking good.

So, in this picture, my son and his friend are relatively small in the frame and their faces are tiny. There are textures everywhere: the sky, the bay, the sand and on their clothes.

The first thing I do is analyze the histogram. I’ll want my histogram to reach both ends of the spectrum. Here, I’ll probably need to darken my blacks and watch for my highlights near the sun. I am happy with my exposure overall.

Then I start editing. I begin by pushing my highlights and my shadows to the extremes. Why? Because the clarity slider works really well with these settings.

• Highlights : -100
• Shadows : +100

I push the vibrance to 20 to begin and the clarity slider to 100. I then make my way down with the clarity slider. My goal is to reach the maximum clarity I can without compromising my son’s skin and the overall natural look of my picture.

As clarity often turns the image grey, it’s important to play with vibrance and saturation simultaneously. This is an important aspect of editing using the clarity slider. If you only do things in sequence, you will often end up with a clarity setting that is not all it could be. Try to keep the image appealing as you are trying different clarity values.

Clarity also increases contrast so you have to monitor your histogram for any loss of details. If needed, just modify the appropriate slider or use a brush to get them back if the problem is localized.

In my image, I need more blacks to get my histogram correctly balanced again but I will do it with the dehaze slider later. I also need to decrease the whites because they were clipped.

When my clarity slider is finally set, I do a last pass on the highlight and shadow sliders to really optimize contrast.

As you can see here, I ended up at clarity 100.

This is with clarity at 0 with the previous histogram with a clarity at 100.

This is with clarity at 0 with a corrected histogram.

Now that the Basic Panel is done, I go on and tweak the other panels… all of them! One of my favorite is the Camera Calibration one, but that is another story for another day.

The Detail Panel:

The one you should be interested in is the Detail Panel. I mentioned previously that I use both clarity and sharpening sliders and I promised that my faces still look great.

Here is a before and after of my son and you can see my values for yourselves.

I know, skin-tones are ugly, but it will be corrected later.

First, I have a look at my ISO setting (400) and check for grain on his face.

• Noise Reduction: around 20 is my starting point. I rarely go over 30 but it happens occasionally.
• Sharpening: I will stay around 40 (lots of grain) or 50-60.
• Radius: between 1,1 and 3! If I used a lot of clarity, as in this picture, I will stay low. The key is to play with the “masking” by sharpening only the contour of what I want to have sharp (my son). I don’t want to sharpen his skin tough. To see what you are sharpening, click “alt-click” and move your slider. I only want the contour of his face to be outlined.

And that’s it… or almost. I go into Photoshop to do my cloning because I don’t like to do it in LR, it slows me down. I also correct my skin-tones there and tweak white balance!

Here is the before and after image in Lightroom, before pulling it into Photoshop.

Here is the final image:

Don’t forget! If your subject is bigger in the frame and starts looking unnatural when using the clarity slider, you can put a radial filter over him and decrease the clarity. Some images just don’t like it. I always try, but some images will stay at a small clarity level, between 0-15.

Here are other examples where I went crazy with the clarity slider.

Clarity at 100

Clarity at 56