In Lightroom 3 Adobe had the ability to really open up the shadows. With the fill light slider you could bring back a lot of detail and Adobe replaced this with the Shadow slider. Although you would loose a lot of quality in the image when you used the fill light slider and cranked it all the way up it did really lighten up very dark shadows and came in handy sometimes like if you wanted a fake HDR effect. If you want to get the same affect in Lightroom 5 you still can, here is how.
Before we cover how to do this lets take a look at an underexposed image and what happens when you crank the shadows all the way up in Lightroom 5. Here is the original underexposed image.
And now if I crank up the shadows all the way here is how much it brings them up.
To bring back the fill slider effect from Lightroom 3 you lets head on over to the camera calibration section in the develop module. It’s on the bottom right hand side. Here select 2010 from the process drop down.
Now we have a fill light slider that we can adjust, if I move it all the way to 100 here is the difference. The fill light slider did really overdo things and I think it was a good move for Adobe to get rid of how heavy this effect was. But if you do need it for a specific image it’s quick and easy to bring it back 🙂
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