In his latest video, Greg Benz shares some surprising raw editing results. The seemingly same setting can have drastically different effects, depending on how you apply it in Camera Raw or Lightroom.
Camera Raw and Lightroom have become powerful editing companions in recent years. The flexibility they provide through their masking features has led me to move much of my editing from Photoshop into Lightroom. But as Benz shows in his video, you must be careful with these edits. Several sliders of basic settings behave differently when applied globally versus selectively inside a masking layer.
A drastic example is the "Blacks" slider. If you apply it globally, the results look natural, and the image retains much of its contrast. However, if you create a local adjustment and use the "Blacks" slider with the same values, you get a much brighter, washed-out image. Another setting that can ruin your photos when applied in a local adjustment is the "Saturation" slider. When used within a masking layer, saturation is affected much more intensely than when applied globally.
That's why Benz suggests relying on masking in Photoshop for such settings. You can either load your raw file into Photoshop as a Smart Object and then create multiple copies, to which you apply different raw adjustments. You can also create virtual copies inside Lightroom or Camera Raw, apply different settings globally, and load those into different layers in Photoshop.
In Photoshop, you can then use masks to compose the different layers to your liking. With Luminosity Masks, you have a powerful feature that allows you to target your adjustments to specific tonal ranges. These masks are much more precise than the Luminance Range Masks in Lightroom. Benz has a free luminosity masking panel that makes the creation of such masks a breeze.
In his video, he also shows why raw adjustments are superior to using the "Camera Raw Filter" in Photoshop. The latter's name might suggest that you are editing your images' raw data, but this is not the case. Filters in Photoshop operate on the rendered pixels, not the raw data. It's why virtual copies or multiple instances of a Smart Object created from the raw file are so powerful.
