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One of the wild new features of Lightroom 2 Beta that I overlooked until now is that one can go negative with the Clarity slider.

You'll notice that the default position of the Clarity slider is now in the middle of the slider bar. Now one can go up to +100 or down to -100. See the images at right for examples. The top image shows the new Presence dialog box containing the Clarity slider. The next three images are samples of the Clarity slider in use starting from the top at Clarity = 0, middle with Clarity at + 90 and the bottom image with Clarity at -72.

Now my first thought was why would anyone want to reduce Clarity but once I started using it I quickly realized that in contrasty conditions this new control could become very handy. I am sure there are a lot of other images this could be useful for.

And if you consider the fact that one can paint a mask with the new localized correction tools and then reduce Clarity in only one part of the image this new "negative" Clarity starts to make more sense and become a seriously powerful new tool.

That's it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael Clark