3 Reasons to Use Adobe Photoshop Instead of Lightroom

what's going on everyone Brian Matthias here so last week I released a video called three things that I used to do in Adobe Lightroom that I would never do today and I want to thank all of you who sent me so many positive comments and emails just it was really well received them and that made me feel really good because that video was all about introspection learning to look inside learning to see the kind of photographer you used to be in order to grow into the photographer that you want to become I think that's really important that's something that we as photographers need to do a lot more of and more often so today's video is not about Lightroom but about Adobe Photoshop now here's the thing I've used Lightroom far longer than I've used Adobe Photoshop even though photoshop's been around longer the thing is if I'm being honest is Photoshop is an intimidating product it is gigantic I mean people make entire careers learning and teaching Photoshop so for a while Lightroom just fit the bill for me it was able to get me to where I wanted to go but in talking about introspection and the process of looking through all the photos that I took you know 10 11 12 years ago it's immediately apparent to me that a lot of the photos just kind of looked the same because I really only I was limited to the tools in Adobe Lightroom develop module not that there's anything wrong with them they're super powerful but there comes a time where you may reach a plateau where you're like you know what I kind of want to be able to do more with my photos and really that's where Photoshop comes in I mean Photoshop opens up this entire world of opportunity so in this video we're gonna jump over to the computer and we're just gonna work on one photo we're not gonna go too crazy and on this photo I'm going to illustrate three different things that I can do to it that I cannot do in Lightroom that can just really refine the look of the photo and I'm not going to go too deep into these tools because in all honesty I mean each of these things I can make an entire video on or an entire course I mean there's so much to it so I don't want you to freak out don't worry just watch the video and if anything even if you don't do anything in Photoshop but as long as you can walk away that idea that you know what I you know been this you know working in this one product this one application for so long I need to start reviewing how that has affected my photography you know as are my photos just kind of looking the same and if that's the case if all you take from this video is like alright maybe I should at least just kind of let me launch Photoshop and just try a few things and that's perfect then that's great because you just need to take that first step once you get into Photoshop and you start exploring trust me things will start to make sense and it is a big program but you know anything that's really powerful it requires time and it's worth the investment so let's jump over the computer and we'll have some fun alright so here we are in Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 and this photo is essentially taken straight out of camera the only thing I did was I hit auto to fix the tone and the color but otherwise the composition is exactly as it was taken I took it in 2015 so almost four years ago and it was with the Sony a7r and the Sony e-mount 16 millimeter F 2.8 fisheye with an amount to full frame he mount adapter and you can see one of the caveats of using a fish eye especially vertically if your camera and tripod aren't her level with the horizon is that you get this gnarly curve this radial Distortion and that right there is Scott he was a workshop attendee he showed up a day early and shot with us you know before the workshop started and we caught a pretty decent Sun reset so the thing is there are a lot of things obviously the Photoshop does that Lightroom can't do but both of them have spot healing and Spot Healing is one of those things that you know if you're like me you use it a thousand times a day but I genuinely believe that photoshop's results are far superior to light rooms I don't know if it's the fact that Photoshop has better content-aware or what but let's go ahead we're gonna do a an adobe taste test right now so here okay we have this photo in Photoshop but we're going to jump over to Lightroom and is the exact same photo and I've got the Spot Healing tool selected so let's go ahead here and make our selection around Scott and you can see it is not very good I mean we can work with it we can kind of you know do a few things and it's just making it worse but this is you know sometimes it's good like if I undo and let's try another one you know I'm not saying it's always terrible because I mean it's not then you can see that's a little bit better it's a little smudgy and stuff so let's go ahead we'll move over to photoshop here I'm gonna select the Spot Healing tool from the toolbar I also want to make sure that the content aware is selected and you'll see if you press and hold there are several tools I'm on the Spot Healing Brush with content aware so there's something to consider there let's go ahead and before we do anything I'll just duplicate this layer we'll work off of a dupe layer and I am going to make my selection around Scott just like we did in Lightroom like that and so you can see it has this weird artifact here but everything else is really nice so this is an easy fix I mean there you go like watch Scott no Scott compared to here let's do this one more time and see what we get so let's just go there and that is just I mean that's a mess and yes sure I can hit H and we can kind of resample where we're gonna kind of heal from and it does a decent job but this is far superior and then of course we can go ahead here and just kind of get rid of these little gnarly notches in the same on this salt rather so you know there we go and I do genuinely believe that photoshop's Spot Healing with content wears it does a better job with analyzing the surrounding pixels to give you that kind of seamless look so now let's move on the first thing I want to show you was the Spot Healing and that just kind of makes sense right actually let's get rid of that right there too the next thing is this is just something that I would say Photoshop is amazing at so I want to fix this horizon I'm gonna go ahead here that's just kind of the what can we do well I mean yeah sure well in Lightroom for instance let's see what happens we'll close this and I'm gonna go ahead and hit Auto and look what it does I mean it kind of you can see that it tries to constrain the crop and we can kind of go ahead here and fix that but for the most part it really sacrifices the composition you lose a lot of that foreground so here what I can do which is really fantastic is I can go to edit transform and then I'm gonna select warp and I'm just gonna start massaging the photo so I'm gonna start dragging downward you see what it's doing it's like it's like magic the way I'm able to interact with the photo and I can grab these handlebars here and I'm just getting it to a rough place where it's level so somewhere around there then I'll hit the checkmark and let's just I mean from there to there and let's quickly look at all the foreground stuff we have here and it's like mostly gone you see we kind of get this top part of this geometric pattern but here we have the whole thing now we'll do is I'll take the ruler you want to make sure that the ruler is visible and if you don't have that you'll go to view and then select rulers and then I'm gonna click in the ruler and drag down to get a guide and so this is just a straight horizontal guide and I'll just use this I'll go back to edit transform warp and I'll just make sure that you know I have the horizon kind of level so well not kind of level definitely level and the guide helps me visualize that so kind of like right there and look the check mark and then if I want to go to view and then we can just clear that guide right there and now that I'm looking at this right side needs to be fixed a little bit so and the other way that you can get to your transform is if you hit command or control T to get the transform this little button right here is the warp and now I can just go ahead here and just kind of straighten that little right piece up just like that and then hit the check mark and we are good to go and so just to kind of again one more time that's what we started with that's what we ended with and if we compare this horizon with Lightroom's I mean we have a straight horizon as well but we've sacrificed a lot of the composition because we don't have that warp capability as we do here now you know I can spend another 10 minutes really dialing in the horizon but for the sake of keeping the video going let's just assume that this is actually perfect because when I look at it I can probably straighten a little bit more but I don't want to spend that much time I think you get the idea the benefit of using the transform tool in Photoshop as opposed to what you have in Lightroom now the third thing is this is kind of this is really massive because there are so many things you can do using adjustment layers so an adjustment layer you'll see here there is an adjustment panel and you have all these different options and these are essentially adjustments that you can apply to a given a layer if you don't have the adjustments panel visible just go to window and then select adjustments and then it'll be over there now the first one is black and white so with black and white you know I can just click on black and white here and this is something I've had conversations about with other photographers where maybe Adobe did start improving light rooms black and white conversion where you would go in over here and you would scroll up and click black and white and you'd have this conversion here let's actually just look so here's this is black and white standard so looking at the black and white mix here this is standard black and white and it's looking pretty similar to what we have in Photoshop with the black and white adjustment layer but this has some of the color values changed in the properties these are the default values that come into it and in Lightroom you know we can go ahead here we can take the target adjustment tool and you know maybe on the blues really darken those blues and even bring in the purples and the aqua and that's okay but with nice thing about Photoshop is you have a lot of different options so there's kind of a targeted adjustment tool too it's kind of a finger with those two arrows by clicking the Blues and drag into the left you know that's okay and then can kind of adjust the Reds and the yellows so you know we these are things that we can do in Lightroom no big deal right I mean these are again I can go into my room and you know start adjusting the yellows and the Reds just like just like we did in Photoshop however let's say you know I just I want to try something different that that right there that's the sentiment that where you stop about being able to work in Lightroom and you have to go into Photoshop is when you say you know what I want to try something different let's say here I want to take this black I want adjustment layer and maybe you know drop that opacity to let a little bit of that color come through just a little bit something you absolutely cannot do in Lightroom you there it's not really a layered workflow or I want to go and say you know what I like the black and white adjustment but I actually want to leverage one of these blending modes something like maybe soft light which adds this really nice rich contrast and you know I can further drop that opacity down or let's say I want to take a different route altogether let's say I want to use something really fun like a gradient map which is I mean kind of kind of kind of like split toning but really not it's actually a lot more powerful in Photoshop so you know let's turn off that layer there we'll go back to our the base layer here and I'm gonna add a gradient map except instead of kind of a black and white gradient map let's say I go here and I select this color and then I'll just double click on the black so what I'm saying here is whatever color I have in that I have selected here in the color picker I want that to be applied to the black so you know as I you see here the higher I go up on this color picker the stronger that saturation is so here we have if I go to say the blues for example somewhere here and I make it make any kind of a I know kind of a dark blue and then I go to the highlight it's the white point and I'll go to something like that like a yellow you know let's just click OK just for just to see so obviously this is awful this is not something we would normally do unless you were going for this kind of an interesting screen print look but what I can do is go to the blending modes again just like we did with the black and white adjustment layer and select luminosity which gives me this really interesting look again I can go and start dialing back the opacity of the layer I can go here back to the gradient map and start manipulating the color some more you get to kind of like a live preview and then of course let's just say this is the look we want but I don't want it really in the foreground well again this is something that you cannot do it all in Lightroom I can just take this layer mask here I'll select G for the gradient and I'll just drag upward and boom I essentially remove that effect from the entire foreground and I kept it into the sky you can see what it did there and so you can see like just how many things you can do in Photoshop and again these are I was just skimming the surface and really you know kind of going off the cuff shooting from the hip with these edits it's a lot easier in Lightroom to to dial things in because you have all of these different absolute values but with Photoshop there's a lot of nuance and there are a lot of controls that you can manipulate there are all different ways that you can blend these adjustment layers together and there are different filters that you can apply again you know like we can go ahead here and just add a blur just like I did in the video that I showed you a few weeks ago if I wanted to apply an Orton blur so here we'll go and enter in 42 change that blending mode to soft light drop that opacity like it's maybe 8 or 9 and then we can had a levels adjustment layer and add a little bit of contrast off the wim just things like that if you wanted to say replace a sky or a head motion things that you can do in Photoshop that you really can't do in Lightroom so again the whole name of the game here is to take the time and look inward and think like alright am I ready to move to that next level do I want to start look at different ways new ways to work with my photos and I think you'll be really surprised with the results so you know again I hope you enjoyed the video I hope you found some like interesting ideas and inspiration of like you know what I'm gonna go ahead and try Photoshop now with my photos if you liked the video please hit the thumbs up button it means a lot to me and be sure to hit the subscribe button with that bill to get know for all future videos if there are things you want to see or you have questions about the video leave them in the comments below alright everyone I will see you on the next one

Channel: Brian Matiash

Views: 27,150

Keywords: adobe photoshop, adobe lightroom, adobe photoshop cc, adobe photoshop cc 2019, adobe creative cloud, photo editing tutorial, lightroom or photoshop, brian matiash, how to edit photos, how to be a better photographer, adobe lightroom classic cc, digital editing, photo tutorial

Id: TsbyUO_j__c

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 08 2019