Texture Slider

[GregJ]

Speaking of training.... Does anyone use the texture slider much? I have played with it a lot and just don't see any real benefit on my high-res files. Maybe I am missing something. It seems like it just adds a bit of mid-range pop and contrast, kind of like the clarity slider but can make the file look a bit overcooked. I need to google around and see what other photographers are saying about the Texture slider.
It seems to be much like the clarity slider, but more subtle. I don't shoot people so haven't played with it on skin. I have noticed on my B&W files that it has a nice effect on many of the various edits I do with B&W, but that is like adding a lot of contrast, which often works well with B&W editing.
I would like to know exactly what it does...

I don't like an HDR look on my images, even though I shoot a lot of scenics with a wide DR. If you push the Texture slider too far, it starts looking like HDR on the landscapes and buildings. I think I prefer the clarity slider and that I don't really understands Adobe's intent on the texture slider.

 

[Jan Roelof]

Speaking of training.... Does anyone use the texture slider much?

An interesting topic, but it seems to me you should open a separate thread for this?

 

[GregJ]

Maybe. Just depends on how you look at it, but you are probably right. I saw this and it had to do with learning, and I was playing around with the texture slider this morning and viewing edits of high-res files at 1:1 to see the effects of the slider and just posted it. Not sure it deserves its own thread. But if a guru wants to move it that's cool. I've decided I don't like that slider but I used it on some rock wall churches and some old Roman brick and it was pretty nice. Sort of....

One thing I notice on a lot of Google searches about various LR sliders, there tend to be a lot of lessons from people who know LR and computers, but they are not good photographers, and I can usually tell when they are not or are giving advice without thought to the photography work or angle.

That is not a problem on this fantastic forum or on Julieanne's, but it is on about 20 of them I see that are guys trying to earn a buck from various angles....

 

[Jan Roelof]

Speaking of training.... Does anyone use the texture slider much?

I am a total amateur with a modest 16MP camera, but I really enjoy using LrC.
About the texture slider: I find that since it was introduced I hardly ever use the Clarity slider any more. It seems more subtle in what it does. For me, it especially shines by bringing out the fur of my Leonberger dogs. Combined with the new masking tools, it has become so much easier to add that extra little punch.

 

[GregJ]

Yes, I find that the clarity tool is often best applied to sections of the image vs the whole image, but sometimes I get a little lazy and pop the whop scene with a little clarity. I've been playing around with the texture slider all day because I am re-editing 2000 image files I took a decade ago all over Andalucia, Spain and I can't believe how bad I was in LR compared to now. I'm like .... what was I thinking? But then again, my monitor is calibrated now and a heck of a lot better (and 4K), plus LR is a lot better now than a decade ago, so it was not all my fault. LOL.
The biggest mistake I made was lifting shadows on almost all of my city and countryside scenics. I know better than that now. You gotta use your shadows and contrast leave the dark shadows alone sometimes (actually most of the time). And oh Man I had that WB color temp all wrong. But you need a calibrated monitor to really get that right, and some of it is a matter of taste. Another big mistake I made back then was over-sharpening everything and popping the skies too blue. One really big advance in LR over the past decade is the auto upright tool. Hitting that nails it 60% of the time.
But I'm a lot better these days keeping my sensor level and not keystoning everything with my wide-angle lenses that I love.
But I'm a Hell of a lot better photographer now than I was a decade ago. Plus, my gear is a lot better so that helps too.
I guess we can all get better at our edits and workflow. I'm still learning as much as I can about LR here on this forum and just shooting and editing as lot.

 

[Paul_DS256]

Does anyone use the texture slider much?

Like a lot of LrC controls, it depends. I found it brought out more definition in the brick walls of an old mill I photographed. At times I find it also will accentuate water. I'm a big fan of dehaze for winter scenes.

 

[GregJ]

Paul, I read your response and went to some waterfall shots (I have shot hundreds if not thousands of those with ND filters in the past decade). You are right. I like that texture slider on the waterfalls and water.
Dehaze? I use it sparingly, but I do use it - usually when weather conditions are such that I already know I'm not going to be happy with the results of my shooting that day. Dehaze can rescue it a bit.
I live in Texas and rarely if ever see snow and ice. But I was down in Patagonia before Covid and shot tons of icebergs, glaciers, frozen tundra and icey mountain tops. I didn't have the texture slider then but just played with it on those scenes and I like it.
I shot in Iceland during Covid and same thing. I never touched the texture slider in post on those shots but just did. I like it! Thanks!

 

[Johan Elzenga]

The interesting story behind the texture slider is that is was originally designed to be used with negative values, for softening skin. Only later it was found that using positive values can do wonders for certain landscapes.

 

[Jimmsp]

... Does anyone use the texture slider much?

A lot of good responses so far.
I use it quite often, but not global, and only with a brush mask on some selected areas.
Same for clarity.
I do a lot of darkening of the backgrounds using masking, and I generally use some negative texture and negative clarity - depending on the photo.
Using a mask allows me to not use texture on a sky, for instance, and use it where it does the most good.

 

[GregJ]

A lot of good responses so far.
I use it quite often, but not global, and only with a brush mask on some selected areas.
Same for clarity.
I do a lot of darkening of the backgrounds using masking, and I generally use some negative texture and negative clarity - depending on the photo.
Using a mask allows me to not use texture on a sky, for instance, and use it where it does the most good.

Where do you use negative clarity? That softens it up. On skin? Soft bokey backgrounds? Focus falloff?

 

[Conrad Chavez]

Lightroom Classic originally offered only Sharpening, which addresses high-frequency detail (the finest details). After a few years they added Clarity, which addresses detail around midtones and at somewhat lower-frequency detail, and this addition has been very useful and popular.

But there was a gap in the middle. Other software I tried provided more local contrast control than Lightroom Classic in those detail frequency bands between what Sharpening and Clarity addressed, and if I needed a detail boost in that frequency range, the image had to go outside Lightroom.

Finally, the Texture option was added to Lightroom Classic. Now I usually don’t need other software to enhance local contrast because the combination of Clarity, Texture, and Sharpening cover most of my use cases.

It seems to be much like the clarity slider, but more subtle. I don't shoot people so haven't played with it on skin. I have noticed on my B&W files that it has a nice effect on many of the various edits I do with B&W, but that is like adding a lot of contrast, which often works well with B&W editing.…I think I prefer the clarity slider and that I don't really understands Adobe's intent on the texture slider.

It should be clear now that Adobe doesn’t intend Texture vs Clarity to be an either/or choice, but more like both/and. Use both, each on their intended detail frequency ranges.

You mentioned skin…that brings up certain aspect of Texture that also applies to Clarity and Sharpening: These are usually best used to enhance masked areas, not uniformly across an entire image, and typically not on skin. The reason is you probably don’t want to sharpen random details in broad areas like sky or skin. But when used with negative values, both are useful for smoothing skin.

If you inspect the Soften Skin presets for masking, you’ll see how Adobe set these up. Soften Skin is the older one, and it relies on negative Clarity. Soften Skin (Lite) is a much newer preset they created after Texture was added, and here Adobe uses less negative Clarity but combines it with negative Texture.

For Sharpening, you keep sharpening confined to edges and away from broad areas using the Masking option in Sharpening.
For Clarity and Texture, you confine them to where they need to be by using a mask.

For portraits, the new AI People masking makes this much faster than in the past. If you combine an AI People mask for exposed skin with a preset using negative Clarity and Texture, you can smooth skin in seconds.

 

[Zenon]

I use it for all my wildlife shots with Clarity as well. People use it as negative adjustment for skin.

 

[GregJ]

Lightroom Classic originally offered only Sharpening, which addresses high-frequency detail (the finest details). After a few years they added Clarity, which addresses detail around midtones and at somewhat lower-frequency detail, and this addition has been very useful and popular.

But there was a gap in the middle. Other software I tried provided more local contrast control than Lightroom Classic in those detail frequency bands between what Sharpening and Clarity addressed, and if I needed a detail boost in that frequency range, the image had to go outside Lightroom.

Finally, the Texture option was added to Lightroom Classic. Now I usually don’t need other software to enhance local contrast because the combination of Clarity, Texture, and Sharpening cover most of my use cases.


It should be clear now that Adobe doesn’t intend Texture vs Clarity to be an either/or choice, but more like both/and. Use both, each on their intended detail frequency ranges.

You mentioned skin…that brings up certain aspect of Texture that also applies to Clarity and Sharpening: These are usually best used to enhance masked areas, not uniformly across an entire image, and typically not on skin. The reason is you probably don’t want to sharpen random details in broad areas like sky or skin. But when used with negative values, both are useful for smoothing skin.

If you inspect the Soften Skin presets for masking, you’ll see how Adobe set these up. Soften Skin is the older one, and it relies on negative Clarity. Soften Skin (Lite) is a much newer preset they created after Texture was added, and here Adobe uses less negative Clarity but combines it with negative Texture.

For Sharpening, you keep sharpening confined to edges and away from broad areas using the Masking option in Sharpening.
For Clarity and Texture, you confine them to where they need to be by using a mask. For portraits, the new AI People masking makes this much faster than in the past. If you combine an AI People mask for exposed skin with a preset using negative Clarity and Texture, you can smooth skin in seconds.

Conrad, that is a very interesting explanation. I talk to a lot of other GFX medium format photographers and some of them are high-end pro portrait and fashion shooters (a couple of them world class and one famous). Those GFX files are eye numbing in their detail and image fidelity, but that can cause challenges on faces, even with young super models. At full res you can see the atoms bouncing around in every skin pore and the smallest blemishes look like rocky moon craters at full res. So, they mask and soften skin as you describe, but I had not heard mention of using negative texture in combination with negative clarity.
Interesting. I'm doing a lot of re-editing of old work this month because I can't travel and shoot right now, and I'm using that texture slider a lot after this discussion and me playing with it for a couple of days. I should have been using it more. How long has it been out? It seems fairly recent, like within the last 18 months?

I want to talk a little about the use of highlights, whites, shadows and exposure sliders in combination as we reduce near-blown-out highlights (once blown they are blown forever - I'm talking about near-blown) and enhance clouds while adding exposure to other areas and also bringing out shadows.... But I'm not sure if it should be a new thread. I see from all my recent reediting work that I handle it differently now than I did 4 years ago. I'll say this right here. On 25% of my images that I took in the past I'm moving that shadows slider back to the center more and resisting the temptation to lift every shadow just because I can. I'm also playing with the Highlight slider vs the Whites and Exposure sliders depending on the scene - moving all three for fine adjustments as they counteract, enhance, negate or mute each other in various ways depending on the lighting and scene. With a high-res file at full 1:1 viewing on a good pro 4k screen, you can see exactly what is happening, sometimes you just don't know why, and it is often a matter of taste and what the photographer wants out of the image.

 

[MikeWhitten]

I’ve found it can pop the stars in night shots, especially where I have a brighter foreground. Seems like it can help,the image look more like what I remember seeing when the stars were “oh wow” bright and clear. I use it on clear night, black sky shots, not hazy ones.

 

[GregJ]

I’ve found it can pop the stars in night shots, especially where I have a brighter foreground. Seems like it can help,the image look more like what I remember seeing when the stars were “oh wow” bright and clear. I use it on clear night, black sky shots, not hazy ones.

I used to shoot a lot of astro. Haven't in a while because GFX is not great for that without tracking (in my opinion), but I bet that texture slider with the clarity would be great.

 

[MikeWhitten]

I don’t know if you’d consider these astro or not. I don’t particularly. Anyway I’m not meaning to get hung up on the labeling - this is the sort of shot I was meaning. The aurora one btw is fro Hornstrandir.

 

[GregJ]

I like watching videos of product, art and even portrait art photographers (trying to make a buck on YouTube) doing crazy stuff with the sliders in LR. I watched a video this morning of a product (car) photographer that was using some of the new AI mask techniques to isolate the car and do crazy stuff to the background, foreground and sides of the image in creative ways. In one area, he dropped Clarity and Texture all the way down and threw some overexposure at it to give the background some sort of artistic bokeh light blurry focus falloff. He also said as an aside, that he always pops his landscapes with a little texture to go along with a larger clarity boost.
I never go crazy with the sliders like the art photographers do, but some of those guys are very creative (way more creative than me) and you can pick up some tips watching their shenanigans with the sliders.
I will say this. The product photographer made an observation that is true. This guy was a PS master. He would do 20 layers on some of his work and noted that with the new LR selection and masking capabilities, he was starting to go PS less and less....

 

[Zenon]

I used the linear and radial filters a lot before the new masking for B&W. Sometimes up to 50 adjustments in the history. I like the new masking to isolate subject and background to tune exposures but I still use the brush quite a bit to tame highlights shooting white birds.

 

[vbnut]

Lightroom Classic originally offered only Sharpening, which addresses high-frequency detail (the finest details). After a few years they added Clarity, which addresses detail around midtones and at somewhat lower-frequency detail, and this addition has been very useful and popular.

But there was a gap in the middle. Other software I tried provided more local contrast control than Lightroom Classic in those detail frequency bands between what Sharpening and Clarity addressed, and if I needed a detail boost in that frequency range, the image had to go outside Lightroom.

Finally, the Texture option was added to Lightroom Classic. Now I usually don’t need other software to enhance local contrast because the combination of Clarity, Texture, and Sharpening cover most of my use cases.

Can anyone help me understand the difference between high, mid, and low frequency detail? Maybe show examples?

 

[Jimmsp]

Can anyone help me understand the difference between high, mid, and low frequency detail? Maybe show examples?

Google it, and you will find a lot of descriptions. Most of them involve quite a bit of math.
This one is fairly complete
https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/40401/what-does-frequency-mean-in-an-image
and recommends skipping to the bottom if it gets too complex.
This next one might help
https://fstoppers.com/post-production/ultimate-guide-frequency-separation-technique-8699
and has more images.

 

[Conrad Chavez]

Can anyone help me understand the difference between high, mid, and low frequency detail?

Detail frequency is about spatial frequency — how frequently details appear across a given distance across the image area, which you can also think of as how coarse or fine those details are. For an example, if you imagine a head-and-shoulders portrait of someone standing in front of a brick wall next to an iron gate, the brick/mortar edges and the iron bars would be low-frequency detail (repeating the least frequently across a given number of pixels), textures in the bricks, clothing, and skin might be mid-frequency details, while hair strands and eyelashes could be high-frequency edges (the finest details, repeating the most frequently).

Clouds in the sky of that photo would be low frequency, which is why the Clarity option affects them a lot and Sharpening affects them very little.

Understanding detail frequency is fundamental to understanding sharpening all the way back to when unsharp masking was a film technique, before it was added as a digital Photoshop filter over 30 years ago. Wikipedia says, about unsharp masking:

In the context of signal processing, an unsharp mask is generally a linear or nonlinear filter that amplifies the high-frequency components of a signal…Unsharp masking…can increase either sharpness or (local) contrast because these are both forms of increasing differences between values, increasing slope—sharpness referring to very small-scale (high-frequency) differences, and contrast referring to larger-scale (low-frequency) differences.

That’s why I think of Sharpening, Texture, and Clarity as simply different degrees along the spectrum from sharpening (fine) to local contrast (coarse), depending on the spatial frequency of the details I want to deal with.

And jimmsp mentioned something I forgot about: Understanding detail frequency is also the key to the extremely powerful frequency separation technique for quickly and precisely isolating detail/texture/noise patterns to enhance or smooth/remove them, in ways that can’t be achieved with anything else in Photoshop or Lightroom.

 

[vbnut]

Thanks @Jimmsp and @Conrad Chavez . That is quite helpful, but I have a couple more questions.

I take mostly wildlife photos, and I assume that feathers and fur have high frequency detail. I don't think I've ever touched the LrC sharpening sliders, although it appears that Adobe's Camera Standard profile does set them (I remember reading about output sharpening but that is handled in the export dialog) , but I nearly always increase Clarity because it has a noticeable impact on feather detail. IIRC, when I first started using Clarity, it was described as "increasing local contrast". I'm not sure how that relates to frequency detail (and maybe it's not an appropriate description any more). In any case, the more important question is would I be better off using Texture or Sharpening for feathers and fur instead of Clarity?

 

[Jimmsp]

Thanks @Jimmsp and @Conrad Chavez . That is quite helpful, but I have a couple more questions.

In any case, the more important question is would I be better off using Texture or Sharpening for feathers and fur instead of Clarity?

Like a lot of things, it will be somewhat photo dependent, imo. It doesn't have to be "instead of". One of the major advantages we have now with LR is the masking. It is pretty easy now to brush in a bit of sharpening and or texture and or clarity and setting the flow at, say 30% . Then you can brush in some or all of each in the areas you want until you get it looking the way you want.

 

[Zenon]

I use then all. I've always liked Clarity for what it does. As far as I can see it's the default of 40 for any profile.