With all the editing tools available to us from software to plug-ins, the one nuance that is often overlooked is how do we target the area where most of our photographs live. If you look at your histogram in your editing software, from left to right you have shadows, midtones and highlights. Hovering over any point on your histogram will show you what part of the photography you might be affecting.

The majority of information lives and resides in the middle of the photograph or the midtones. The problem with the editing software is they provide all kinds of sliders for adjustments, the issue becomes they are mostly global, in other words. affecting the whole photograph.

If you were to take the exposure slider to the left to darken, or the right to brighten, it would affect the whole photograph. In the photography above of the waterfall, I only wanted the waterfall to be affected with my adjustments. So, knowing that the majority of the information is in the middle of the photograph, how can I only affect that portion? Ideally, having a midtones slider would be amazing. (Adobe are you listening?)

Well there is a way to do this in Lightroom and Camera Raw. I am sure that most other programs have a similar functionality that I am going to discuss. Now, some are going to say that, at least in Lightroom, using the clarity slider will address this. You would not be wrong but the issue becomes that the clarity slider does not address luminance. Enter color grading.

If you editing software or program has a color grading tool, like lightrooms as seen here, you can target the luminance of the midtones without affecting the entire image. This is helpful for boosting landscape photographs especially where there is generally a wide range of stops in light. It can be applicable in other genres as well such as architectural photography as well. The bottom line is that most of the detail in a photograph lye’s in the midtones and having a targeted way of only adjusting and dealing with those is helpful in bringing the photo to life. So the next time you are sitting at the computer to edit, use the color grading option to improve your photos.