Adobe Lightroom: My FAVORITE HIDDEN Tools and Features

[Music] what's going on everyone Brian Matthias here in this video we're gonna take a look at some of my favorite hidden features in Adobe Lightroom now the reason why they're hidden is because you can only access them if you're pressing and holding a certain key on your keyboard while dragging on one of those sliders in the develop module and actually these features should work in Lightroom classic as well as a leg room CC so everyone who's using Lightroom should be able to make use of what I'm gonna talk about so the thing about it is what I'm talking about as far as a particular key I'm referring to what we call modifier keys so on Windows your keyboard like a PC keyboard you'll see those modifier keys as shift alt and ctrl on Mac you'll have it as shift option and command now the basic definition of a modifier key is if you press and hold it it'll change the function of another key while you're pressing and holding it so easiest example if you press in the hold the shift key while pressing on a letter that'll make that letter capital as opposed to if you just press the letter it'll be lowercase so that's a modifier key and in this video we're focusing on just one modifier key and that is on Mac that would be the option key and on Windows the equivalent is Alt so because I'm a Mac user for the rest of the video just to make it easier I'm just gonna reference option if you're a Windows user and you hear that word train yourself to think alt so if I say option drag you're gonna press alt drag and it will give you the exact same functionality now you may be wondering why are these tools kind of hidden you know why do you have to kind of know to press a certain key while dragging or manipulating a slider part of that has to do with user experience so imagine if every single possible function within Lightroom was laid out with sliders and buttons and all that stuff that would really make the user experience I would say very poor the the goal is to give you all the most important tools the most powerful tools and have them available for you right there and as you become more kind of comfortable and seasoned with the product you start to learn of these little shortcuts so you know Photoshop is riddled with them a lot of applications have those kinds of shortcuts sometimes if you go into your menu and you press and hold on one of the modifier keys you actually see some of those menu items change and it's just one of those things that you have to know about and I've been using Lightroom since the beta days and in that time I've become very comfortable with the product so what I want to do is jump over to the desktop over here and I'm gonna show you a handful of my favorite hidden features that pretty much only use the option or Alt key while dragging on certain sliders and once you get used to them you're gonna question how you ever worked without them because in some cases they make editing and fixing your photos so much more powerful so let's head over here and I want to show you some examples so you can check it out for yourself all right so this is Adobe Lightroom classic and what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at three key kind of hidden features all using the option or Alt key with Lightroom and I broke them down into the three different images we'll start with the first one which is going to be about fixing tone second one's gonna be about split toning and the third one's gonna be about sharpening now as we go from image to image I want to kind of build on it so in the first one we're just going to use the hidden features to fix the tone kind of like your highlights and your shadows then the second image we will go and we will fix tone then we'll do some split toning and in the third image will fix tone split tone and then fix the sharpening using these hidden features so with that this first photo here I took it in Detroit it was an abandoned school and when you look at this photo so this photo typically is ripe for HDR you know if you look at it there are super bright areas and super dark areas you've got bright areas here in the windows and dark areas throughout and you can see in the histogram if you hover over these warnings here basically when you hover over a lit triangle it'll show you where your belonging your highlights where you're clipping your shadows it's the shadows are a little bit harder to look over here as I hover over you see how they get blue so not as much in terms of the shadows but definitely highlights so this is how I typically fix tone I'm gonna start with exposure and open it up just a little bit usually what I'll do is I'll just brighten the image overall and now I have you can see here still obviously highlights and shadows so watch what happens if I press and hold on the option or Alt key while dragging on highlights you see here what happens you actually see the areas in the image that are blown out so if I start dragging to the left what I want to do is get to the point where just barely anything of those white dots are visible if a few of them are visible don't worry you don't want to have to crush your highlights or your white point so that the bright parts are actually gray and muddy that's a kind of a common thing that people do when fixing tone is you you tend to you know you want to wrangle it back so much that you end up crushing it all together so here we'll go here with the highlights we're also going to press and hold the option key and drag on the white points that bring the actual white point in and what I'm doing here is I'm getting it to the point where the histogram no longer reports that if you look here the highlight is no longer clipping that is off and you'll see that we actually have some detail in the windows that weren't there before so now let's do the same thing with shadows so the shadows let's start with the black point I'll press and hold the option key while dragging out and you see there's not that much and I usually go about to about plus 20 I don't know to far with the black point and then I'll go to the shadows I'll do the same thing I'll open up the shadows until we have no more of a warning in the clipping area for the shadows so right now as far as tonality goes we've got all of the data brought in to the photo which is really what I want and again you can tell that because the warnings are gone and if I press the backslash key to give you an original I mean look at that look over here in the windows that was the original and then we were able to get some good detail brought in now now here's something important point I want to make just because this is showing you how to kind of bring tone back in doesn't mean that it's going to restore all of the information even if you're shooting raw which I highly recommend you do if you don't have that information here you can't really do much with it which is why in these situations HDR and tone mapping is really important because there you can actually use actual pixel information now you know to show you what I meant a lot of people will bring their kind of white point down and their highlights all the way down and you can start to see that it's starting to get a little gray watch when I bring the highlights back up how they get more of that kind of pure white and that's what you're looking for you really don't want your highlights two little gray that's kind of a sign that you're really trying to bring the tone back where it doesn't exist or where you're trying to kind of make something out of nothing where there's not enough data and so with that we took a look here of how we're using kind of the option or Alt key for tones let's move on to the next photo here and we're gonna fix tone but we're also going to use split toning and split toning is a really cool kind of stylization effect I'll walk you through it so here first things first let's like I said open up the exposure just a little bit you can see that we are blowing out our highlights just a little bit on the top over here and clipping shadows kind of right over here in the foreground so same as before press and hold the option key let's drag highlights until we don't have any of a warning anymore we'll do the same thing with shadows let's bring the shadows out and also the black point out and so here we have now reached a good tone you can even bring the highlights or I'm sorry the white point down a little bit more just like that so here nice evenly exposed photo and if there was a theme in terms of fixing tone that would be it is you want to get your photo to be evenly exposed so that there's not anything that's overly bright not anything that's overly dark and then you can start stylizing and there if you want to make it overly bright or dark that's fine but at the starting point that kind of that the starting line you want to be evenly exposed so now let's move on to split toning which is another panel and develop it's right over here and split toning is basically the ability to specify in lightroom a hue or color value for the highlights and the shadows you can use them together you can use one or the other it's typically used in conjunction with certain color theories where if you have something kind of like yellow or warm in the highlights you would put a blue or something cooler and the shadows that typically plays off really well it's the most common way that I use split toning and but it works on certain images and doesn't work very well on every type of image but I'll show you here how I use it so you can see here with full tone and I mentioned there the highlights and the shadows to sections and they both have the same exact sliders hue and saturation so hues the color now watch if I drag over just dragging with nothing nothing happens you don't know what's going on the only way that you really can tell what's going on with the color is if the saturation slider is up so as I drag it up to a hundred you see that whatever color the the sliders on that is the color that's going to be applied to the highlights and as I drag over now I can see that preview but I don't necessarily have to drag the saturation slider to 100 every time so here is where the option key or the Alt key comes in if I press and hold on that option key while dragging on the hue slider notice how saturation is at zero but I still get that 100% preview so this is how I split zone is I drag over and I get to a place where at a hundred percent I think it looks really good and around this color here between kind of yellow and green looks good now I can take my saturation slider and just add you don't have to add a lot you can go kind of like right around there and then the same thing with the shadows if I press and hold on the option key while dragging I'll get it kind of to a blue right around there and I can start adding some of that and then there is the balance slider and this allows you to kind of bias towards one side or the other so if you go to the right here it'll go more towards highlights you go to the left that biases it towards the shadows so I'm gonna kind of bring it a little bit more to the right here and you can see if I toggle split toning on and off see just kind of a subtle change not much but it is a stylistic change which when used you know sparingly and effectively it can do some really nice things to your photo so with that we have covered using the option key to fix tone to identify where you are actually blowing out highlights and clipping shadows and then we just used it to apply split toning without having to fiddle with the saturation slider now the third and final hidden feature that I want to show you has to do with sharpening so sharpening is one of those things that I typically do at the very end it's one of the last steps that I take usually it's a vignette and then sharpening or sometimes sharpening and vignette but I say that for the very end so let's go here we'll bust through applying the toning fix and then the split toning and then I'm gonna show you how to use sharpening all right so let's get up here same thing as before let's open the exposure just a little bit and we have I because I opened up the exposure I introduced a little bit of blowing out the highlights especially up here where the Sun was visible so again let's press and hold the option or Alt key and you can see there is the blown out areas will bring the highlights over a little bit and I'm also going to bring the white point in just a little bit and that's okay now remember as I showed you you see there still are some of those dots up there don't worry about that you don't again want to necessarily just get rid of all of it if there are a few dots that's okay but what I mostly look for is on the histogram I want to make sure that the warnings are not illuminated so now we still have the shadows to deal with and you can see there over on the left there so I'm gonna take my Black Point press and hold the option key I'm gonna bring it out just until it disappears and then I'm gonna take care of it with the shadows and we are looking good now effectively what you're doing by kind of wrangling in some of those highlights and shadows is you're somewhat reducing your contrast just a little bit so if you want you can go ahead and add a little bit of contrast back and then we can go over to split toning same as before let's press and hold the option key and just like before I'm gonna go kind of to the yellows over here and bring it over and then we'll do the same thing with the shadows kind of to the blues and open up the saturation now you can always just flip them around if you want to see what it looks like with the shadows warm and highlights cool it doesn't look as good in my opinion so I'm just gonna undo those and then we can bring the balance towards the highlights a little bit and now let's just say that this was done let's say I didn't want to do anything else and I was ready to kind of finish this up now it's time to sharpen sharpening is one of those things that is so easy to mess up or rather maybe not easy to mess up but easy to over do and I'll show you why a lot of times when people sharpen they go here to their photo and they just kind of like add sharpening and that's that problem with that is it's easy to over sharpen and you'll know you've probably seen your fair share of overly sharpened photos they just look a little too crispy like super crispy and that's not good you want it to be just the right amount of crispness and to make sure that you have that you want to pay attention to the areas of your photo that are sharpest that have the most detail so this is how I do it first I'll usually kind of zoom in on an area that I know should be sharp like this rock here the other way that you can do it is you can take this a little target under detail and then hover over an area and it'll kind of give you a magnification now like before remember I showed you how people will just drag the amount slider there's actually a more effective way to see what sharpening is doing to your photo so we'll go to the amount slider here and like all the other sliders we've used I'm going to press and hold the option or Alt key and start dragging and as soon as I press you can see how the image turns grayscale and the reason for that is because it's easier for the eyes to see detail when color is removed so by presenting a grayscale image you can see the sharpening effect and so watch as I start bringing the sharpening amount over you can see the detail on the rock coming out now the problem is when you go too far you see like look over here in this part of the rock I'm gonna drag out it doesn't look as bad here but when you get way out that gets a bit too crispy so really we're we're looking at is like right around there maybe 65% and that is okay there's still one more step and that is in Lightroom for the most part everything you do is global so when I use that amount slider it applied sharpening everywhere but do I really need sharpening in the smooth water right or if you have a sky and it's just a blue sky do you really need to sharpen a blank blue sky no you don't so that's why there is a masking slider right here but the thing is if you just use the masking slider as it is I mean you really don't know what it's doing right I mean it's it's hard to see what the effect is and this is where I'd say the probably the most effective use of the option key that you'll find in Lightroom or at least one of them watch what happens when I press and hold the option key while dragging so from the start it's a white which means that sharpening is applied everywhere for those Photoshop users out there this is what a mask is you know white reveals and black conceals so as I start dragging to the right it starts to intelligently mask out the sharpening and what I want is for all the smooth areas specifically the water in this case to be black so as I go here you can see how sharpening is really only applied to all of the high contrast edges pretty much everything that has detail so if it has water and it's smooth you don't want sharpening there so let's mask it out but if it's a rock or a tree or a leaf we want that in there so usually what I do is I bring this masking slider over until I see a rough outline or a sketch of the photo and so when I let go now I know that the sharpening is being applied only to the areas where it really should be applied to and masked out of the smooth areas and so there you have it those are kind of like my three favorite most used hidden tools in Lightroom using the option or Alt key modifier it's super powerful and once you kind of get it as part of your workflow you're gonna think like how did I ever not use it before so do me a favor leave comments below let me know if you found these tips helpful did you know about them are there other kind of hidden things that you find useful that maybe I don't know about always learning if you liked the video please hit the thumbs up button and be sure to subscribe to get notified for all of my future videos alright everyone I'll see you on the next one

Channel: Brian Matiash

Views: 65,405

Keywords: Adobe Lightroom, Adobe, Lightroom, Adobe Lightroom Classic, Adobe Lightroom Classic CC, Adobe Lightroom CC, Adobe Creative Cloud, How to, How to be a better photographer, how to edit photos, photo tutorial, digital photography, photo editing, post processing, Apple, Windows, tutorial

Id: Lgrb7JGR_T0

Length: 18min 29sec (1109 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 11 2018