7 SIMPLE LIGHTROOM TIPS to TRANSFORM your photos

[Music] morning everybody great to see you all again well all the calendars have gone to help now so that was quite exciting I had a few issues so this was a print that I signed what can you see the obvious issue with this quite like it this way around but obviously it's meant to be that way around late nights signing just got the better of me so I've got a coffee now to keep me awake and we're going to need a bit of time for this Lightroom tutorial I'm quite excited about this it's been something that I've wanted to do for quite quite a few months really I have a lot of people ask me how I edit my photos in Lightroom and I've got sort of seven steps that I always do the things that I always do on every photo to make sure that I get them looking as best as I can so get a coffee and let's dive into Lightroom okay let's go into the basic settings so the first thing I would do is just scroll down to lens Corrections and I have automatically set it to remove chromatic aberration in my default settings for Lightroom and then I enable profile Corrections now in this one the raw file is embedded the profile correction for this particular lens my Fuji X t2 and 10 to 24 if I rolled over this I button here and you can see that light was telling me that now with my Nick on it doesn't do that so lightning does that correction I always do that first so then I go back to the basic tab and the first thing I would then do in the Edit is go and look at crop in it so I'll probably crop it this way a little bit I might come back and change this afterwards but I want I always like to do a first initial crop I just want to move it down a tiny bit there and do that crop and then I would go down this and do the first basic settings so I'm going to slightly warm me image you up and I might come back and change this later because when I go into point two which is around color I I'll come back and probably edit the temperature a little bit differently so I'll probably look at changing the exposure and I'm not too worried if I start to burn out the sky here because I can bring that back when I start to apply or the sort of local edits to the image I'm going to significantly increase the contrast because I want to bring out this sort of beam of lightness or came down to this valley this was a workshop that I was taking in the Lake District and we had this amazing evening we got this really really great light and what I want to do with this image is create that story tell that story about this really strong light coming down so then I'm gonna go further down maybe just reduce the highlights slightly just to bring those back in here again I might change that with it curve later and come back and and tweak these it's a very emotion iterative process I'm going to pull out some of the shadow detail just to counteract a little bit of that contrast maybe increase the white slightly I'm going to reduce the blacks a little bit and I'm going to add a little bit of clarity and again I might come back to that later so clarity is just basically local contrast so it you don't want to overdo it because you get really funny edges but it's it's really good for just pulling out local contrasting images so now if we look at the before and after of this image with these basic settings then you can see that's before and that's after so we're starting to get something that looks quite good so the next one point number two is color and how important color is you can be able to tell that story and be able to improve the composition of your image and I've talked about that in the video that I did a few months ago on composition so take a look at it if you haven't seen I talked a lot about color and composition and how that works really well together talking about the color wheel so we'll stick with this image for now and then I'm going to show and demonstrate some of these points on different images as well and I'm going to do them in order of how I do them so I would look at the white balance then I would probably look at the HSL slider which I'll go into in a minute then I would look at split tone in the image and then I potentially look at the tone curve and actually going into each Channel and changing the red blue and green on the tone curve and then finally I may go into the camera calibration and change the color the last to the tone curve and the camera calibration I don't do that often it's usually white balance then the HSL slider and then potentially for cement images split toning and they're the three tools I tend to use more often than not for fine-tuning the color of my image so for instance in this image here I've obviously changed the white balance a little bit the next thing I'll probably do is go into the HSL slider and what I want to do is probably just change these greens a little bit now usually what I find is that it's the yellow and green sliders that change it now what you can do is you click this little button here and I can just click on a point here and that will then show me which sliders are affected for that color so I usually do that first to see what will change it but I then switch that off and then go manually change these to fine-tune my image so in this particular image I want it to look slightly lusha the green yep so I've done that I also want to change the blue so again I go and choose this and I can see that the Aqua and the blue of the two colors have been changed and then I can go and change them until I think that that they're more in keeping with the rest of the image and I'll probably come back and alter that when I've put a graduated filter on the sky which I'm going to talk about in a minute and then I would go and look at the saturation probably increase the saturation the green and the yellow so I tend to when I'm changing saturation change change it locally against colors rather than against the whole image and if I do do it against the whole image I do that right at the end and then I may also increase the brightness of the yellow slightly so yeah I might just want to pull that out a little bit cuz it seems that these highlights oh yeah so that's looking better there's a lot to do on this image but we're getting there things are starting to improve and yeah I mean that's that's color so let's go and have a look at another couple of images and just show how Cullerton alter those images and how I've used color to to edit those images so this shot that I took of the bluebells this spring I was really pleased with a real lattice fern in the foreground the gain this was taken with my GXT to ten to twenty four millimeter lens and if I look at the before so before I've edited this then that's the before version of it and then basically I just turned it into that so there's not a huge amount of change and it looks like it's just been it's just being brightened up a little bit but I haven't changed the exposure a huge amount what I have done is is that doing a lot of basic edits you can see that I brought the blacks roll right up because I wanted it to still maintain a little this little bit of this mysterious element but on this image what I wanted to particularly talk about is the color because this is where HSL and split toning came into their own so I spent quite a lot of time messing around with the sliders in HSL to get the saturation and hue of the colors in this image exactly right and how I wanted them to look and how I felt they were when I actually took the photo with bluebells anybody that's taken bluebells has probably had a conversation of what color bluebells are whether they're lilac or purple or blue and it's sometimes difficult to get that right in camera depending on what sort of can you have you're certainly if I take it with my Fuji in my neck on in JPEG then the both come up with something that looks very different even if I set the white balance the same so you can then change this quite easily by just picking the hue of the Bluebell and and moving it from left to right so for instance if I just thought that these bluebells should have been more blue then I can just move it to left if I thought they should have been more purple than I can move it to the right now I personally think that that's about right everyone's going to disagree with me on this there's a right or wrong answer well the probably is a right answer because they are the actual color they are but you've got a bit of creative license with it and then the other thing that I did with with this image is split tone deck so split tone in is basically a way of looking at the luminance values within your image and whether that's the shadow and luminance values so the darker parts of the histogram or the lighter parts of the histogram which is the highlight luminance values and then changing hue and the saturation of that hue across the board across to all the pixels within that luminance range so the way I usually do that is I bump the saturation right up and then I change it to the color that I think's about right so in this case I want it to be quite green and then I reduce the saturation until I think it's not overdone so that's zero and I might just bring it up to about there so I'm not changing it very much it's quite subtle but it does make a difference and then I again I do the same with the shadows and move them around and if I just switch this on and off you can see it just has a suckle it almost just crates just a little bit of all warm is probably not the right word but just blends those colors together just a little bit nicer it basically brings color tones closer together so yeah I really like doing that I don't do it with all my images probably about 20% of my images but it does it does make a difference I've also want to show you color on another image which is this image so again if I look at the before which is that and then the after now I've done a lot of local contrast changes on this as well but what I did in this image if I go to the HSL slider is reduce the saturation of a blue which is all this element so if I just change this you can see that the blue element of this image is the sky and I think this makes a significant difference to the feel of this image and I wanted to take that blue out of the image so I reduce the saturation of the blue so using the HSL and the split toning I think you can be quite creative and you can do some quite clever things with your with your image on to point number three which is using blushes and filters and particularly gradient filters in your image so sticking with this image let's have a look at point number three which is brushes and filters and how important they are so if I just look at the filters that I've gotten here I've got three graduated filters I'm actually gonna add another graduated filter cuz I wanted to darken the sky just a little bit more just to make it just slightly more Moody this image it was a series of images that I posted on Instagram as part of my Pharos series and I wanted to have those images look quite similar and create a quite a dramatic mood because I felt that when I was in the Pharos it was a dramatic place so I want to darken the sky down a little bit more so I'm just gonna create a graduated filter there and I've already dialed in a little bit of the negative exposure and then I can just have a play with that until I think that that's about right I'm probably gonna reduce the blacks a little bit but what you can see is it's also darkened here so if you want and you do have something like that you can you can use this brush tool and the erase tool and I just switch on the mask overlay here and it shows me what's been altered and then I might just roughly just just change that now you've got to be careful I've done that far too much so I probably just got to lower my brush down and I'm just gonna paint that on there now what I find is that sometimes doing this it's too obvious so you can spend a little bit of time getting it right and maybe you just need to create two graduated filters one here and then another one a little bit higher to darken the sky more but if I just switch that off and then shut that down there we can have a look at that and I think yeah that's looking pretty good now I probably spend a little bit more time over it but on the whole I think that looks fairly good okay so finally on this point I just want to go into the brushes a little bit so if I just click here and choose an adjustment brush I'm going to do this really rough and ready so what I want to do is reduce and then make a bit bigger I want to reduce the exposure and contrast in the dark areas so I'm going to just in a bit of negative exposure a little bit of contrast reduce the blacks a little bit and and I'm going to paint that in so what I want to do is just just reduce the blacks a little bit going in here on to do the same because what I want to do is just create more drama again into the image I don't want to overdo it though so I think that's that's probably okay so put them before is using these graduated filters but actually using the range mask so going back to these graduated filters I've also put one on here if I just show you this one that affects the image in a slightly different way so you can see that it's just picking out the greens in the image and that's how I do local color changes and local color contrast changes with this graduated tool so what I've done is I've just created a graduated filter there I'll do that again so I'll repeat this so if I just delete that all I'm gonna do is put a graduated filter in it doesn't really matter where it is as long as it's going to incorporate all this element here just going to reset the exposure there in the saturation and now I'm going to scroll down and switch this range mask on and what this allows me to do is say with this graduated filter only apply it to a certain color range or a certain luminance range so in this case I'm going to go color choose the picker and I'm going to say okay just select this color range here and once I've done that I can hover over it and you can see that it's selecting quite a lot of other stuff as well so I might just want to just reduce that down little bit and once you've selected the area that you think you want to edit it wishes these greens then I can do some quite clever things because I can then just on these greens change the clarity I could also reduce the highlights increase the why it's reduce the blacks and add some real drama into this image so you can see that that's made quite significant difference if I the before and after of that you can say that that's significantly different with that graduated filter using a range mask so it's a good way of selecting colors that you want to change in your image and you can do the same with luminances as well on some point number five which is just making subtle changes I alluded to it just before and if I take a look at an image where I may have done that was a few inches here so this is a good example so this is an image that I took in a woodland that I go to all the time I really loved it and there was this one time I went there where it's quite wet and damp and the greens were quite lush and I was really taken aback by the sort of browns and greens of this image and if I if I show you the before and after so before is that and afters that but I've made a significant number of changes but it's not made a huge change the image but it's significantly improved as it's made it have more of a character to the image so you can see I've done lots of basic edits around the contrast and clarity etc I've done small changes to the HSL and all the colors of it I've done some split toning as well so I don't split tonin's to change the highlights and and make them slightly sort of more green and then make the shadows more Orange and I think that's made a big difference to the image so for getting a look at the split tone look at the before after it's not huge but it's it's enough change to make a difference but all those things added together make for a very much improved image so so on all my images that I am editing I'm just looking at small changes how I can make small changes as I go along to improve that image rather than just going in really heavy-handed and making big big changes okay we're nearly there now I want to point number six and that is don't have black and white in your images so don't think you need the deepest black and the whitest white in your image and a real good tonal range across the whole histogram you don't need that it's not important and when you've exposure image you're trying to use all that histogram but then when you edit it you might change that somewhat so this is a good example here you can see that this is quite a sort of pastel type shot it was really misty and there was no blacks there was just not any blacks now if I increase the contrast of this image so that I stretch this out and then I reduce the exposure so now I've got I've sort of spread out that histogram you can see that looks horrible you know we don't want that so you know we want it to be this very passive image there's no whites in this image and there's no blacks in this image so don't be tempted to put blacks and whites in or I think you will always need a dark tone in your image or a really light tone in your image because you just don't need to yeah again going back to this image here there was no really whites in this image so you can see there's a big gap there and again you can think okay well I could probably increase the exposure and move it to there and it looked better but it just doesn't it doesn't create that mood so don't be afraid of darken your image images is down not to have too many whites or increasing the exposure of your image or reducing the contrast of your image and I think you'll find that you'll get much more atmospheric shots the final one the seventh one he's going to get a cup of coffee or even better just sleep on it so just go away come back and then just take a look at the image the next day I mentioned this before in videos but I can't stress how important it is there's so many times that I've started editing image spent maybe two hours editing an image tweaking everything on it and then just thought yeah just don't like it come back the next morning thought wow that's really good I really really like it or I've come back the next morning thought if I just change that maybe darken the sky or light in the foreground then that might make a difference but it's always a good idea leave it preferably overnight or just go and get a coffee and come back to it and I think you'll find that you either hate it more or like it more or find some changes that you want you want to make to it but it will make it will change your opinion of that image and I think that's really really important okay that's it I hope you've enjoyed it I've certainly enjoyed making it and it's made a difference in my photography I think because I've sort of start to think a little bit differently when I've been editing my photos and perhaps slow down a little bit and try to be a little bit more precise one of things that I did do during the making of this as well as complete or nearly complete my presets that I use I use these myself as a starting point occasionally when I'm when I'm going through my photos and just trying different settings I find it's another good way of seeing whether something works or it doesn't work I can often do it when when I'm away on my laptop as well when I perhaps haven't got so much time to sit down and start from scratch so I was in two minds of whether to put those up for sale I think I probably will do but I'd be interesting to know whether anybody's interested in them you know they've taken me a long time to produce a real a really long time but I don't I don't want to charge you know all that time in in the actual price of the presets III expect I'll probably charge around about ten pounds for the presets but if you are interested if you if you do want me to put those up for sale then let me know I'll put a link in the comments below and when I do finish them I'll send out a link to those people and I'll probably put a link somewhere else on my website as well I've also just released four or five workshops two of which are worth really worth noting one is a really great one in the winter in the Lake District and I release those to everybody on my email newsletter there's two places on that left now and then and mate may have gone by the time this video goes out so sorry if that's wrong and the other one is in Iceland sort of video and photo trip so there's only three places in total on one of those places gone so again there's only two places left on that trip the links in the description below yeah that's that's it really thanks ever so much for watching and until next Sunday bye [Music] [Music]

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 350,920

Keywords: photography, lightroom, lightroom tutorial, how to, how to edit photos, lightroom editing, landscape photography, lightroom classic cc tutorial, photo editing, nigel danson, nigel danson photography

Id: VOlavBjmDr0

Length: 22min 20sec (1340 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 09 2018