7 Editing SKILLS you should learn during lockdown | Lightroom and Photoshop

in this video i want to talk about seven lightroom and photoshop skills that you can work on when you're stuck at home during lockdown morning everybody fantastic to see you all again oh we're in lockdown again the third time in the uk which means we're not allowed to travel outside for anything that that's not non-essential we can have one form of exercise a day and we can probably take some shots whilst we're walking around on that form of exercise but that's going to be local so it means that landscape photography is still possible but we can't go further afield but now is a perfect chance to improve skills that you don't need to go out for and some of those skills revolve around editing so take take for instance ansel adams he wrote an entire book on the print so a third of his process and i think somewhere he actually said 50 of the processes in the edit was all about how to print it dodging and burning and obviously that's what brought his photos to life so nothing's changed nothing's changed in the you know 50 plus years since he's been doing that and you've just got much better tools to do it with it lightroom and photoshop now so what i wanted to do was go through and tell you some things that i've been using the tools that i've been using and give you some real world examples of how i've been using them with a hope that that might give you some inspiration to go away and edit some photos yourself now what i'm also going to be doing which is quite exciting is i'm going to be redoing the edit my raw photo but a little bit of a twist this time i'll talk more about that at the end of the video so let's go over to lightroom and get straight in to the photos and some of the edits that i've done and the tools that i've used actually before i just jump into this if you could give the video a thumbs up if you like it you know so if you're thinking it's useful then please give it a thumbs up and it really helps me with the youtube algorithm okay so understanding colour and colour correction is really important in photos i think it can bring to life a photo as well i think it really makes a big difference to how a photo might look that the feeling the mood it portrays and a good example um is this shot here that i i shot recently which was a an image that i took um when it was probably just before christmas when there was just some snow and it came down it was really fantastic there was some mist as well and a little bit of frost but the actual original if you just look at the original we go into the develop module here you can see that it doesn't quite have that cool feeling to it now one thing you can do is just change the white balance of that and obviously that can give you a little bit of a cool feeling but the other thing that i wanted to do on this is change the highlights and and the shadows but also um tweak with the hsl so in here what i've done is i've gone into the saturation and i have tweaked with the blue saturation a little bit and then i've also had a mess around with the blue color just to get that right and then you can see as well that i've just added in a little bit of blue toning to the highlights so by doing this as well as a few other things on this image then i've managed to create something like this image here which i think has a really nice feeling to it of that cold feeling but sometimes those things are quite subtle those color changes so for instance this shot here again if we look at the original you can see that you know it's okay but it's fairly boring it's fairly fairly drab it was there was no light um and so what i wanted to do was just introduce something that was just just improved it just gave it something a little bit special and adding that blue tone to the shadows but also a little bit of a warm tone to the highlights just gave an impression of of actually the sun coming through a little bit so i i created a blue tone in the shadows here so you can see that i've added a blue tone in the shadows with the colour grading and then i've added a warm tone in the highlights i haven't changed the mid tones at all and then all i did was i also added in a radial filter and then that radial filter had more impact on the highlights than it did the shadows just create a little bit of a glow and add an exposure to that and and that was it really just to create something just with a little bit of color change that has some atmosphere and then the third one i wanted to show you for color was this image here so if i just show you the original you know this is the original which was probably true to how it looked to be honest but i felt that it just needed a little bit more mood i obviously corrected the verticals in this as well but the main thing was the colour in it so i changed the temperature which is the biggest change in this just just literally you know reducing the temperature and then if we go down you can see that i also tweaked the saturation and the luminance of the colours within this image using the hsl slider and then again i did some tweaks to the colour grading but the majority of that change in this image was just from reducing the temperature and i don't think you have to have a temperature that's necessarily true to life in your photos you know at the end of the day it's an art you can just do whatever you want so have a mess about with color and just try different things in color i hope those three three examples have been a good um idea of how to do that and what i'm going to do is in the description below i'm going to put some notes of all the other videos that show you how to do these techniques in a little bit more detail the whole purpose of this video is really to give you ideas not to go through exactly how to do these techniques so i'm just going to glance over them a little bit but the videos below will give you a lot more information of how to go about them all on youtube all for free okay the next one we're going to look at this photo here and this is all about using dehaze and clarity there's a really good video actually from adam gibbs on this so again i'll link that in the description as well about using the d haze tool um and he explained it probably way better than i'm going to do now in this really short period but i think it's a really good way of adding some atmosphere into your scene and it works very well when you've got some highlights or a little bit of glow to start with so i've got this shot here and what i want to do is i want to accentuate the glow down that path and the easiest way to do that is just add in a radial filter and what i want to do is i want to create a little bit more warmth in that area so i'm going to add a little bit more warmth but i want it to just sort of glow a bit and an easy way to do that is just to reduce the dehaze so if i just reduce that dehaze can you see how it's just creating a little bit of glow now you've got to be careful you don't overdo it but obviously you can do that and then you can tweak with some of the other things as well you might want to increase the shadows a little bit you might want to reduce the highlights you might want to add in a bit more white but by using the d-haze it's it's almost like a really easy way of adding a little bit of a glow to your image also the claritus clarity slider can do that as well i try both of them you know you can just try them see what happens move them all the way over to the to one side or the other it's a really good way of creating some drama now what you might want to do with this and this takes us on to the third technique is do something more with this mask so we've got this radial filter here but maybe i only want it to affect the brighter tones in the image so i can add a luminosity mask in and and what i can do is if i click option on the mac and just move it you can see as i'm doing that where it's going to affect the image and in this image i don't want it to affect the tree trunk so i'm just going to move it like that so it's just affecting the middle part of the image so that looks good and you can also see what happens with the smoothness here as well so how smooth the gradient is of that mask so i'm just going to reduce that a little bit and then now i could maybe apply a little bit more dehaze and you can see that that's creating a really nice effect down that little path there and that is is a really good thing to do just to try different filters another way of using the filters if i use the grad filter here i might just want to do a a grad filter from the top down here and i use this sometimes just to select the bottom part of the image when i want to select a certain color so on that grad filter there i'm just going to go on to color and i'm just going to choose the color of the leaf there and then again what i can do is click option and i can see where that's affecting the image and i can say okay actually i just want to change the color of all these leaves so that's good and then maybe i just want to warm up the color of those leaves or in this case i think i just want to cool them down a little bit i want to add a little bit more exposure and contrast and a bit more clarity maybe and that's again a good way of just doing some local adjustments that are targeted to certain colors or certain luminosity values in your image again there's a video in the notes below that goes through this entire tool in a lot more detail but i think it's something that if you can practice can make a really big difference to your images the last thing for lightroom before we go into photoshop is thinking about keystrokes and there are certain keystrokes that i use all the time and and there's actually a lot of keystrokes to learn to do things quicker and i think there's two things that that are really useful if you can use keystrokes whilst you're editing and just as shortcuts and that is one it means that you're just concentrating on the photo you're not trying to look to the side you can just you know really engage with the editing process a little bit more but also it just means you can do it a little bit quicker and yeah that's always a good thing certainly for me i've got a sore back i don't want to be spending too much time doing it i don't think you should rush your edit but if you can spend more time actually editing and less time worrying about the tools then those keystrokes are a really really good way of doing that so i'm going to give you a few keystrokes now but i'm also working on some informations in my next newsletter that'll detail all the keystrokes that i use so make sure you subscribe to my newsletter again in the description below right so i'm going to go through a few of them that i use quite regularly so let's go to another image let's go to this one we'll be talking about this one in photoshop so this was the um janella that the photo that i talked about in my most recent video the first thing to notice on this one because i use this quite a lot is j so j shows you the highlight and shadows in in the image so say you're doing this and you want to mess around with exposure a little bit and you just want to see how that affects the image so i'm not too bothered about the highlights there but i probably don't want to blow out this area here so it just allows you to just change it really easily while seeing the highlights and the shadows now you can obviously tick these two buttons up here but just jay switches those on and off really quickly obviously the backslash is before and after a really obvious one that i've showed before one that i use all the time is lights out so just to have a look at the image if i want to just get rid of all the distractions then the l for lights out and you can keep pressing it to go completely blank that's super super easy and once i'm on that sometimes i select a couple of photos so say i've got these two photos here that i want to look at just clicking n is a really good way of looking at those and then you can do that with l as well if you just want to look at a couple of photos next to each other and then the other thing i wanted to mention was just the option or the alt key on a pc just how much of a friend that is to you so you can use it for so many things so if you look at this image here so say i'm i'm i'm looking at this and i want to look at exposure you can click it and you can see the clipping when you're looking at exposure most the time you just trial and error just clicking that can make a big difference for instance if i'm just putting a mask on so say i was just doing a mask here and then i wanted to see on the range mask the luminance range mask i just click alt and i can see how that's affecting it so if say i just wanted something that um just affected the sky there then this now would have more impact on the sky it's not going to affect the top of this cliff so much just by using option or alt on the pc is a really good way of just seeing how things are changing as you're changing settings and it works for so many things so just try it okay so we're going to now jump into photoshop and i'm going to start with this image here and i'm going to show you how i created this image because it was quite interesting it might look quite scary to say that this was actually a pano when there's waves involved and things like that but the reason i wanted to do that is because it's a time blend of two different waves that happened at two different times so i'm going to show you how i did that it's super simple and then hopefully that'll get you inspired to maybe try photoshop a little bit more actually before we go into photoshop i just want to show you um and talk a bit about this image so this this was the image that i i wanted to show you how i used a tool that you probably don't use all the time which is masking and blending images together so this is two images this was one image and this was one image and i blended them together in photoshop and the reason i did that is because i wanted i felt this unbalanced image when it was just one image i did have a shot that included it all but the waves here i didn't like but i really like this smaller wave and this together um so i wanted to blend them together and also on this smaller wave here i felt like i had a little bit better light there than when i took this shot so obviously i hadn't told you this nobody would know about it what it does mean as well is i ended up with a 65 megapixel image rather than the 45 megapixel image it's here and there but this would print probably two meters wide and looks pretty spectacular so to do that and i'm not going to go into this in a huge amount of detail again i'm just going to give you the just the minimum things to be able to to to go and have a play with it so the first thing is i've got two images and i've just done a basic edit on these two images so there's this one and this one i'm just going to right click and i'm going to click edit open as layers in photoshop so what that does is it opens two layers in photoshop and in photoshop if you have two layers then you can reveal one layer from the other layer by putting a mask on on top of it so if we just go into photoshop now so you can see that we've now got those two images as layers um within within photoshop and you can see one and the other so the first thing to do is you've got to align them and photoshop's pretty good at this so you can just go to edit auto align layers and i'm going to do the auto and i'm just going to click ok and this usually does a pretty good job so you can see it's auto align those layers now you probably sometimes may want to do this a different way or try different different things there's lots of good tutorials not done by me but done by others on how to do that and to be honest there's so many of them you probably push best just to go and search that on on the internet but what i want to show you is just how easy it is to reveal this wave so we've auto aligned those layers don't worry about the white things at the moment what i'm going to do is i'm just going to add on this top one here a mask and what this allows me to do at the moment because it's all white it's not showing any of the image below the image below is the one with the wave that i want to reveal so i've got black so i've got black selected and i've got a brush here and then you can i've got it opacity 100 and i've got it as a lower flow which means that if the flow's um 20 say it means i've got to go over it five times before you see the whole thing so i'm going to leave the flow at about 50 and all i'm going to do now is just paint to reveal this wave now obviously you've got to be really really careful when you do it and careful around these edges and and check it all works okay but that is pretty much it i'm just going to paint up there where that line is and that is it i've now blended those together so if you want to you can crop and just to really quickly do this and see that that's a pretty good job of blending those together now it works quite well in this case just the wave just is almost like a standalone object but um i then you know when i did it myself i was really careful about this there were some things that didn't quite work so i blended them in a little bit but it's a really good thing to do to be able to understand masks and using masks to combine two images together so this is a good example of showing how to do that but really what i'm trying to say is understanding masks in in photoshop it will really help you out and it'll really take your editing skills to the next level and on on that um same basis if we go back to lightroom and you know talking about the sixth thing which is photo stacking and again that uses masks to actually stack images together so you might have for instance in this image this is the final stacked image where i've got something focused here on this element here within the image you can see the bird right on top and then i've also got a focus point right down at the bottom on this rock and this is two images that i've stacked together in fact it's actually four images that i've stacked together because i've stacked this wave in and i've stacked a little bit of extra water here in from a different image as well so it's actually four images that are stacked together but from a focus point of view you can just assume it's just two images stacked together and again it's the same you either paint it on like that with a brush you use a graduated filter and i did this in a video here i showed exactly how you stack um using photoshop to get um blend two focuses together so yep make sure you try that it will really make a difference to your editing okay on to the last one which is an obvious one but it's just using the content aware fill and spot healing tools within photoshop so obviously you can do that within lightroom but i feel that when you're trying to remove things that's a little bit more difficult then it's good to be able to do that within photoshop so for instance if we just take this shot here you can see i removed the branches here from the shot here and if we go into it this is in photoshop we've got those branches down there now the easy way of doing that is just selecting it and then going edit content aware fill you can select the bits that you don't want it to select from so i don't want it from the tree trunk here and then click ok and it does a pretty good job of removing that but in this case it's got some trees that just shouldn't be there it just doesn't look quite right so sometimes i do that and then i tidy up with the clone stamp tools so clone bits from other places and i spend quite a lot of time just to make it look real but the tool that i find really useful is this spot healing brush so for this especially when you've got things at the edge i find it really really really really good so if i just um undo the content aware fill and just deselect that then with this tool here the spot healing brush i can just go over this and then see how each thing and what it does is it samples around and then just it's almost like content aware every time you do the stroke but i feel like it's a really it's more time consuming but it's a really good way of just doing something a little bit more accurately and then for instance if if here just looks a lot better it looks more like there was never that branch there because it's almost just revealing what was behind those branches so spending a bit of time to understand the content aware fill the spot healing brush tool and the clone stamp tool within photoshop will definitely make a difference and elevate your photos to the next level okay that's it i hope those seven tips have helped i've gone on a little bit but i'm dead excited now to tell you about the raw editing challenge i'm gonna bring this back um and for the next four or five days you've got chance to edit one of my photos there's three photos you can see them on screen now any one of these three photos now i'm showing you the raw photos um i'm not going to show you my edits of these photos probably some of them are on instagram to be honest but the twist this time is i've asked four professional photographers to edit these images as well um they've not seen the images yet so they might refuse but um the people i've asked are mark littlejohn james popsis um michael shaneblum and masterpiece riverson so obviously they're all very experienced probably more experienced than i am editing in lightroom and especially photoshop and i'm sure they'll do their own individual takes on these but then next week what i'll do is i'll look at the best of your edits and their edits and we can compare them and um the big thing is you've got to try and beat them you've got to try and produce a better edit than they've done i'm sure you can try some of these tools out and i'll try and share as many of those as i can um in in next week's challenge and also for the best three i'm going to offer some prizes which are going to be pretty spectacular so the links are in the description there's a lot of links in the description isn't there but the links are in the description for how you can get those three raw files um please don't take them as your own copyright's still mine um but you can edit them do whatever you want with them edit them and then it shows you where to upload those photos as well thanks ever so much and thanks ever so much for watching go and give it a thumbs up if you've liked it until next sunday bye you

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 198,742

Keywords: photography, lightroom, photoshop, lightroom editing, lightroom tips, photoshop tips, photoshop editing, editing photos, Nigel Danson, Nigel Danson photography

Id: nrbTuW3GVPk

Length: 23min 28sec (1408 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021