The wrong way to add contrast (and what to do instead)

Hey there, good to see you. Today in this video, I'm going to share with you a very simple but also very effective and important uh technique to [music] learn when you are applying global contrast to an image. And this, you know, could be something that is obvious and second nature to some of you watching this video, but I would bet for some of you out there, this could be something entirely new. And this could be something that you've never thought about or noticed before. and it could actually uh resolve some problems that you've been having when applying global contrast. And we're going to start here in Photoshop and then we'll jump over uh into Lightroom Classic in just a second. Okay, so this is a landscape image of mine from Nevada uh taken earlier this year. Not one of my best photos taken, you know, kind of uh in the middle of the afternoon, but it's a good example image uh to start with. And let's say that I want to add some contrast to this image. Well, this being Photoshop, there are infinite ways of doing it. But two of the most popular ways and common ways is to just throw a brightness contrast adjustment layer on here. Crank up the contrast like so. And now our bright uh pixels are brighter and the darker pixels are darker. We have increased the distance between them and effectively increased contrast. Now, another way of adding contrast, of course, is to add a curves adjustment layer and then come up here to the preset dropdown and choose one of these built-in presets. I'm going to choose strong pre uh strong contrast here. And we effectively get the same thing. And that's um that's not an accident, by the way. Uh the contrast slider in brightness and contrast. This is true for Lightroom and other tools as well. That contrast slider just basically applies a standard S-curve. So, you know, it's it's effectively the same thing. So, if you just want an S-curve, you can just use that. The curves panel obviously gives you a little more uh you know customization, a little more control, but yeah, they're practically the same. All right, so we added contrast to this image here. Now, let's jump over to this one.