 So in the past several episodes, we've been talking about knit collection, a free plug-in for Lightroom and Photoshop and what I've been doing is kind of dissecting some of the filters that are my favorites and how I like to use them, whether it's for a black and white photo or a color photo or whether it's to do some sort of creative adjustments like reduced noise, those kind of things. But one of my absolute favorite filters built into this collection, which is free by the way, is the Pro Contrast adjustment. And it does exactly what it says it does. This is for enhancing contrast in an image and I think that it just works fantastic. If you're someone who's not really familiar with ways to increase contrast and kind of give your photograph that punch or that lift that you've been looking for, this filter right here is going to be the one that does that for you. So what I've done is pulled up three completely different photographs and I've brought up three this time because they're unique in the way that I sort of interpret them. And so if we look in the upper left-hand corner, we have an image that's very monochromatic. There's not a lot of color. There's really only a few colors in here, but this image is really flat. And whenever you have a photograph that's flat or lacks contrast, this adjustment is going to work really, really well. But it also works in an image where we have a photograph that actually does have contrast. So if we look in the upper right-hand corner, we have an image that has a lot of similar tones in it. There's a lot of green in this photograph, predominantly green. And while it's flat or lack of contrast because it's a flat, unprocessed file, there is contrast with respect to the lights in the sky and the darks in the shadows. And so I want to show you what this pro-contrast adjustment is going to do to an image like that. Then where we don't have a flat image or an image that has sort of a single color or high degree of contrast, we have another image down here at the bottom that has a lot more color in it. And I want to just show you how this filter is going to interact with these three different types. And then you can kind of play with this filter on any image that you have to see what the results are going to be. So let's jump into Lightroom and give this a shot. So what I'm going to do is just grab, say, the first image, take it into the Develop module. And from here we're just going to go up to Photo, Edit In, go to Color Effects. Now this is the trick, okay? Pro Contrast, it's not its own plugin. It's a filter within one of these other filters. So you just need to know where to find it. So it's in the Color Effects Pro 4 section. So we're going to click on that. And here we are. We're in the Color Effects Pro panel. Now if you're looking at all of your filters, these are alphabetical. So just scroll all the way down till you hit the P's and then you'll see Pro Contrast there. So I'm just going to apply the Pro Contrast adjustment. And by default, when you look over on the right-hand side, you'll see Pro Contrast there now that I've selected it. And you'll notice that all of the values are at 0%, which means that as of right now, unlike some of the other filters, when you apply it, you instantly see a change. This one when you apply it, you're not going to see any change whatsoever. So if you go in here and you start toggling on this checkbox to see the before and after, you're not going to see anything happening. So don't freak out. The reason is because you need to go and apply the adjustments that you want. Now there's three here. You've got Color Contrast, Correct Contrast, Dynamic Contrast. And the one that I use 99% of the time is Dynamic Contrast. You can play around with Color Contrast to see what that's going to do, what kind of boost that's going to give to your color. But since I have other ways of adjusting color, some of which we've talked about on this channel, I don't really find myself using this color adjustment very much, but the Dynamic Contrast adjustment just in itself is amazing. So that's the one that we're going to focus on in these three examples. So what I'm going to do is start to bump this up and just pull it all the way up to 100%, which is the max, just so you can get a sense as to what this is doing. And so if I toggle this before and after, you can see what that's doing. Now, I don't know why this is, but I find that my magic number on this, the number that I like to find myself at with Dynamic Contrast most of the time, is around 40%. Sometimes a little less, maybe between 20 and 40%, but typically I find myself at about 40%, depending on the photograph. So I'm actually just going to bring this down to about 40% since that seems to be my magic number most of the time. And now I'll just toggle this before and after. And you can see what a nice job this does. What I find that this does most of the time is it's tackling the midtones most of. In other words, it's protecting the really bright, bright stuff and the really dark, dark stuff. And it's concentrating itself in those middle tones, those gray tones. And so I think that's why this works so well. It doesn't really over-contrast the image, but it really gives it a lift. So I'm going to go ahead and save this change. And then we'll go ahead and try this adjustment on one of the other examples to see what that looks like. So I'm going to try this image that does in fact have some contrast with the bright sky and the shadows and has a lot of similar color in it. It's got a lot of green in it. I want to just see how this is going to act. So we're going to again, we're going to go up to photo, edit in, go to color effects, pro and accept this. And we'll wait for this dialog box to open. Alright, so we've already got pro contrast loaded and it's already got 40% in here. If you're jumping from image to image, this might be the case because it's going to grab the last adjustment that we used. But don't take that for face value. Make sure that you check that pro contrast is being applied and make sure that there's a value of some sort in here. In fact, mine does have 40% since that the last that I used. And I'm going to just toggle this on and off. And if we look, you can see how it really gives this photograph a lift. But our highlights aren't really being overexposed and our shadows aren't being darkened to the point where they're unmanageable. So I really like what this is doing. I think that this works well. So I'm going to go ahead and save this change. But now let's see how this acts on a photograph that has not a lot of contrast in it, but has a lot of different color variations. So we're going to choose this last option. Go to photo, edit in color effects. And here we are. We have our image. We have pro contrast applied at a 40% just to keep these consistent. And if I toggle this adjustment on and off, again, you can see what a nice job that's doing. Now just for the hell of it, I want to just pull up on some of this color contrast just to see what that's going to do to the photograph. So I'm going to go ahead and bump that up. And if I just drag it all the way to 100 and back down, you can see how this really lifts the colors just a little bit and sort of warms them up. I'm going to keep this maybe around 60% for this photograph. But again, it's going to vary from image to image. You might try this on your photograph and find that you're not really crazy about it. And that's okay. I also want to try the correct contrast. And when we correct the contrast, you can see that this really does start to boost the contrast both in the highlights and the shadows. And that's something that the dynamic contrast wasn't really doing before. Again, that's the reason why I like it so much. But with all these three adjustments, we go from this to this. And I think that that does a really nice job. Now, there is one thing about this that I'm not really crazy about. If you look in the upper left hand corner of this image, it looks like I'm getting a really dark shadow or a vignette in the sky of some sort. And I'm not really crazy about what that's doing. But one of the things that's built into all of these nick filters is the ability to drop a control point in there and remove this adjustment from a particular area. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to grab the subtract control point right here, which is the negative. We're going to just select it. And then we're going to come over to the dark area of this photograph and just drop the pin by clicking. And just like that, it's going to take that out. I'm going to grab one more negative control point and drop it all the way up into the tippy left hand corner and take that out also. So if I go before and after, you'll notice that that whole left side of the sky isn't being changed at all. It pretty much stayed exactly the way it was. But now we have the whole bottom section of this photograph being adjusted with these three adjustments that have been applied. And that looks really nice. So we're just going to go ahead and save. And from here, after you do this, like always, you can go into Lightroom and continue adding any other adjustments that you want, whether it's from the basics panel, a curves adjustment, playing with the colors some more, adding a vignette, whatever it is that you want to do to your photograph in Lightroom, you can do. But go ahead and try these filters on your images and see if they don't give your photo the lift that you were looking for. Thank you so much for watching. We'll catch you in the next episode. My name is Adam. I'm out.