Adobe Lightroom Tutorial: Professional Photo Editing Tips | B&H Event Space

[Music] my name is Clifford Pinkett and I'm here to talk to you today about advanced techniques for post-processing your images inside of Lightroom I've done several classes here you're free to look them up last week we were just doing how to speed up Lightroom which is very important I would say that's even foundational but this is something that is this is like the candy of photography right here right it's taking your images and making them look beautiful and I if you've seen so many other presentations I welcome you to go check them out if you haven't I typically go through and show people two before and after I'm gonna do that again to help you understand a little bit about what's possible but there's this always enough time to go through and actually show you how I do it it's more and it's actually most important to just to know that it's possible because a lot of people don't think it's possible right then they take it into Photoshop and take another software and it gets unnecessarily complicated it doesn't have to be that way like this my whole mission with this is that it's to simplify things as as simple as possible right so today I'm not just going to show you the before and after I will do that but I'm also gonna walk you through some of the decisions I make some of the processing sliders adjustments and then we'll go into little bit more advanced techniques as well alright so this is gonna be my actually while I have it up that's my info feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about this the slides any of the presentation I can send you a link to you it's going to be posted on B&H event space website as well but i'll say in advance if you have any questions do feel free to reach out at any time I throw all my emails I love helping people out this is why I do this so definitely definitely reach out so the before and after because it's helpful to get an idea as to what's possible for those who have seen my the bnh optic event presentation I did a couple years ago I showed a few of these images I was just talking about this before we went live sermon recognize this this is Banff up in Canada half Lodge so this is one of the images that I'll be editing but the idea is just to show you where we where we wind up and where we start right so that's he after and that's the before and I kind of reversed it to show people they'll see these images and then they'll say all right well it doesn't look like this on the back of my camera I must be a terrible photographer right who feels like that sometimes that's how I felt when I started to so again it doesn't have to be you know hit you over the head it can be a very subtle I do tend to exaggerate it a little bit mostly mostly because I like saturated colors but also because it makes for a better presentation I want to be able to actually show you the power but it doesn't have to be crazy complicated a lot of these actually after I make these adjustments I save them as a preset and I just apply them afterwards so again before and after all right this is the stitch panel I'll show you how to do that as well it's one way that we can use to increase the resolution of our files so if you have a camera that's 12 megapixels like the iPhone that I use for almost all my photography these days or 24 megapixels don't think you have to go out and buy a 50 megapixel camera you can that's great we're in the right store for it so you know come to be an H if you want to but also what you have is probably going to be good enough right that's before that's the after this is one I'll be editing as well and then cropping even makes a big difference right we're bringing some colors out where we're changing the dynamic of the image where we're kind of showing people what's important that's to me that's photography you will look at the entire world everything in our field of view and we say look at this this is important stop and look at this and we can emphasize that in Lightroom so the goal is not to completely change our images the goal is to enhance our images and the reason that and that's the case our reason why we need to do that is because if we're doing this properly there's this concept of getting a right in camera it's a little bit misleading too to take that out in face value because it's not necessarily the idea of getting a right in camera meaning that's the final result right to me getting a right in camera means you're getting the right ingredients much the way a chef would go out and get the finest vegetable and fruits and ingredients to cook the finest foods so that's what getting arraigned camera means it means getting the right composition getting there in the right light nailing focus but the colors I could not get this for instance in the camera you don't get this in the camera what you get out of the raw ingredients right a chef doesn't walk into a supermarket and say this is the best lasagna ever no he goes through a market he gets all the wrong grades and then he cooks right and or she cooks and the point is that you always start with the best ingredients but you need to cook it right and then and when you get to a point where you understand how to do is you get a little more familiarity with it familiarity with it then it just starts become second nature then it starts to influence the decisions you make of the point of capture and that's the whole point of this is to understand at the point of capture that this is technically the perfect exposure because I'm not blowing out the highlights and then I can come back and I can get something like that but I would never know to make that decision then unless I knew at the time of capture that this is what I need to do and this is what I can do in post processing it comes full circle so just some before-and-after shots that's Death Valley right notice the crop again it's a cinematic crop I'll show you how to do that it's a crop wish of 2.39 to once and anamorphic anamorphic ratio but you're just removing photography a lot it often is about the art of removal right you're just minimizing and minimizing someone's told me the perfection is achieved not when there's nothing left they add but when there's nothing left to take away all right so cropping is a great tool to do that you just remove and remove and remove so these are some other before-and-afters most of these are just iPhone shots actually and my concept is to help you understand lighten this is a question I get often as well is when do I use light minimum when do I use when do I use Photoshop so I'm just email this a few days ago I'm using Photoshop my whole life why am i why should I use Lightroom and the answer is you don't it doesn't replace Photoshop at all you know Adobe doesn't cellulite room and then Photoshop they sell the photographer's kit as as a bundle for a reason I have this question yeah the question is have all the audits been done and rightly yeah in Lightroom yes yeah that's the point is to show you like it doesn't have to be this you know hit you over the head but just an image like this it's very simple this is just a shot with a basic phone but you're just bringing out the color and the detail right I'm eliminating everything that's distracting and I'm cropping in I'm bringing out the texture in the detail that's all and a lot of these because it's in Lightroom it's a recipe in other words it's just code so I can apply that to other images means I can create a preset I can just burn through my presets to see which one applies all right before now this is Soho we just did there's a few here that were in the throat the Soho photo walk better recognize so that's from Soho this is in Soho as well all right it's just subtle changes but you notice the difference there you're just bringing up the color why does this work because we're using there's fundamental ways in which we can process our images that take advantage of the way humans interact with the visual world right we always will go to the brightest part of the image the sharpest part of the image whatever has a more visual weight so I'm creating color contrast we're creating luminosity contrast does anyone recognize this who viewers in the Soho for a walk earlier this week okay you guys fail this is literally the hotel that we met at and everyone stood right underneath this lamp right it's everywhere but if you see this on the backyard camera you don't necessarily think you can create an image that has this kind of drama and it doesn't have to be this dramatic either but just know it's possible and you don't need complicated to do it I just changing a little bit of a color question in the back questions are these in Lightroom mobile ah are the enhancements made in light removal the answer is it doesn't matter because Lightroom will almost at this point June 2019 if I'm correct we almost a full feature parity meaning I can start the adjustments in Lightroom mobile and I can finish them on my desktop and vice versa it's a two-way it's a fully interactive two way sync so adjustments where no one will affect the other so I often I'll start in on my phone it's nice we're going a bigger screen when you have a chance but then again at this point it's just whatever I have available it doesn't make much of a difference if you start with lightning mobile then that's the workflow that I would especially if I'm shooting my iPhone now I would start editing and then I would tweak it further what I have access to Photoshop I'm sorry what like best offers all right something like this was very subtle I know this is one of the images and I'll show you as well all right so let's let's move on a little bit but I want to show you just giving it an idea of what we can do right and to answer that that lady's question that email the other day the real answer is it's not Lightroom or Photoshop but that's an unnecessary question it's like no man Photoshop but the real answer is going to be when do we need to take this to Photoshop right the answer to that question is really when you can't do it in Lightroom and that's the point of this class today is to show you what we can do so then you can make that decision when you hit the limits of Lightroom and the reason why I said that there is a lot of overlap we can adjust color exposure saturation and all of that inside of both programs but Lightroom's always going to be the better program where there is overlap does anyone know why there weren't that the answer is none non-destructive workflow that's exactly two lightroom uses math or Photoshop uses pixels so items accessing all of the information available to you in the raw file and it's just using the math a little bit of code to push that information so you're not losing an information you're not compressing anything that's completely non-destructive nonlinear workflow also choose you to adjust anything at any order any time Photoshop it's very very different it's not a bad thing but where there is overlap you want to start in Lightroom the second you send it to photoshop unless you have a very very specific workflow which I teach they use the Smart Objects you sever that nonlinear non-destructive relationship because you have the export an actual pixel based image to send the Photoshop and import that back you can't undo the adjustments that you made on the previous image all right so let's get started with a couple of these this is just the raw file as it shows up I'm just starting with this because this is the image that we used to promote this on B niches event spray so hopefully this this looks familiar everyone guess where this is now floating village Cambodia but outside of Siem Reap the Tonle Sap alright so I always start with looking at the histogram alright this is how we understand the exposure in digital photography you want to get the brightest possible picture but no brighter meaning that you want all the information white is literally information in a picture right that's digital photography we're capturing light the more light the more information your binder files will actually have a larger file sizes you want the brightest possible image but no brighter and how I did is I look at this histogram alright I want just actually it should look like that right there if we're looking at the upper right hand side can you see that right that's the right histogram every time right do you want the brightest possible picture that means that I can come back even if it doesn't look perfect at all on my on the back of my camera you need to get to the point where you can understand the potential of an image before you process it and we're getting to a point now there's where it's going to be less and less of an issue there's something called a feedback loop right and if anyone shot film photography they know exactly what I'm talking about you take a picture and then you send it out or any wait a week to see if you got anything that's incredibly inconvenient when you're in Cambodia and you're staring at a beautiful sunset alright so then with digital photography where we can look at the back of camera get instant results the next level is we have previews while we're taking pictures and that's where that's the stage you're getting into you now where we can preview the results of an image the iPhones and the Android phones I believe as well you can do this already you can get black boy previews you can get certain kind of effects once we get to a point in lightroom through light and removal app or we can preview the presets that we have it's going to change a lot of things it'll help you better understand the potential until we get there though you need to see enough before and afters and understanding to process it so you can make the right decisions in the field so the first oh there was a question in the back yes this is bright enough not brighter with the same shouldn't go anymore yeah so the question is about the histogram how do you know what's the right when it's too bright right so here's it let me just give you a really kind of rough let me give you the cliff notes of the histogram the only thing that matters is this right hand side panel this little bar right here that's pure whites all the histogram does is measure your blacks to your whites that's all it does and this is a range of tones it doesn't matter the shape at all it just doesn't matter right if I'm taking a picture of a black cat from a black wall it's gonna be a big bell curve over here and if I take a picture of a white bra next to a white wall it's gonna be over here the shape doesn't matter the only thing that matters there's a right hand side it's not climbing up that right hand side wall that's where you start to get highlights blown out right the left hand side hits it's important but it's not as important as blowing it out the middle of the histogram does is not relevant it's only the pure blocks and the pure whites and so if you see these little triangles here if this will even give me some warning so if I over expose this image and I click on this triangle you'll see these little bling keys you'll get something back your camera - if you have the settings adjusted I turn it off because it tends to drive me crazy but all you have to know even if it's slightly blown out if you have a raw file you'll be able to capture it right it's a little bit more of an advanced technique but you understand that this is based upon the information of a JPEG not a raw file and we've more information to recover our files from in a raw file alright so how would I start with this image yeah so what I'm saying is you don't want the histogram climbing up the right-hand side like this it shouldn't look like that see that second that starts climbing with the right-hand side you're starting to blow out your picture when that happens I won't be able to take my highlight slider and bring this back down you see that just that one click if I double click on this little nodule here it'll just zero back up so I'll do is recovering my highlights and while I'm at it I can come over here and bring up my shadows this is what we call normalizing the picture I'm just retaining bringing up some of that detail back right that's basic right that's pretty basic stuff because we're in our basic panel but then correct the height so we want to do a little bit more advanced things how do we actually make an image look better right so if the subject is this guy over here and also a secondary subject on what's in my foreground I want to add a little bit more drama to this right one of the ways I can do this is I can start with my D haze tool and I see that kind of it just brings everything out if I go the opposite we can get a little bit more of a hazy look obviously maybe they just call that the haze tool but we can go both ways and now I have a little bit more detail it does add a little more contrast and come back to my shadows and bring it up all right so just that alone I'm gonna hit the the backslash key that's just my before and after so I'm already starting to get a lot more color and detail out of this let's do something you know let's spice it up a little bit first of all this is a little distracting in the corners so it's a while ago it when you have triangles or the corners and get a little distracting right so let's get rid of it because I'm going to get rid of a an object a lot of people don't know if you can do this in Lightroom we have our dust removal tool here and it was intended to remove dust but then they realized well we want to remove a lot more than dust sometimes so I just come in here I can just drag that top left corner and it just disappears if I hit H key for hide it's going to show what it's doing is just picking another part of the image and it's replacing it right so now I have that and if you can see this this is my little light switch I can choose the part I can pick up yes and so I can click this little light switch here I can turn that on off just to show you the adjustment so now I'm cleaning up a little bit let's add a little bit more flavor to it we have these other tools here right so everything in our in this right-hand panel or what we call global adjustments for the most part other than HSL it's coming a middle-of-the-road but most adjustments to D are just in this basic panel but then we have and the reason why we call is advanced photographers I won't show you a little bit more about these tools I never really get a chance to talk about this because we don't have a lot of time so I want to kind of dive into that a little bit more so let's let's kind of bring things out a little bit if I click on this is our gradient tool and traditional landscape photographers are just going to use that to darken down the sky like a 2 or 3 stop graduated neutral density filter but what's cool about doing this in Lightroom is we can do not just yeah we can darken things down a little bit but we have all these other adjustments over here that we can do it's not just darkening it down so for instance I can just create more color more saturation like a blue or cooler tone on the right and conversely I come over here and this will be by non-destructive I can adjust the sliders at any point it doesn't make a difference and I can kind of warm this up over here alright maybe just a little bit more magenta now if I want to hide this because it's a little distracting to see this bar right what key word would I used to hide it H so this is gonna make it go away it's not going to turn it off just gonna make it go away just gonna hide it then I'll fit this little light switch you can see there's like a lot a subtle shift in the mood of the image alright so I'm just playing with light I'm just kind of tweaking it a little bit because we've already covered the highlights we brought the shadow detail all it's doing is turning on and off the effect of the image but I also - because this is a sunset shot is split toning was designed to use on black-and-white images right and like everything else to do OB does they think it's supposed to be designed one way and photographers find another way of doing it so that's what I do I use this magical number 39 I don't know why it just works and I just bring the saturation up and you can see how it just gives a little bit of a warm glow to it all right this is the before that's the after can you see that I'll do the two before that's a qu after all right that's pretty much all we need to do but we can take it further too while while we're at it but for the most part you don't have to be looking for ways to adjust the image it's pretty much all you need to do but my dis to give you some inspiration also show you how the tools work a little bit yes sure if you guys can't see the sliders and adjustments let me know I'll just zoom in so I put that in the hue of just the highlights slider 39 I use this to give a little bit of a warm glow you see the difference it works really well on sunset it works in other applications too but it just really works for first sunset sunset or sunrise images anywhere with little one a little bit of a warmth 39 and almost every time it's weird I feel like I should patent that or you know it's a Michael Jordan that's 32 right I should have I should have 39 there you go I'll sell a preset call and it would just be this one adjustment all right so let's move on a little bit this is a little distracting here on the right hand side right I have a couple options one way I can do it as I can crop right that's the easiest way to remove a distraction this is one of things were getting the right in the field is actually helpful I would have been able to stand back I'm gonna tell you right now I was precariously balanced on a little dock there was no way I was able to stand back would have been floating so what I can do is hit our for the crop tool so that the icon right here and when I crop a couple things one you typically you want to choose a crop ratio and standardize that if not it throws people off when you show them a collection of images not every time but you'll see this little lock icon if I click that now I can crop it to anything I want to all right another thing that's really helpful is if I hit the X key it's going to switch between landscape and portrait I don't know why I kind of resizes it there because that's the that's the equivalent of portrait you can just click the reset button it'll it'll go back yeah all right so I'm gonna lock that in place and also a really really handy tip is L for lights out what that's gonna do is just darken down the panel right you'll see it on the right but when it gets helpful is if I really want to crop out this right hand side here right I'm still seeing it's very distracting so if I hit Alfre lights out twice now I can crop and see exactly where I want it so I make sense so I always kind of crop in this lights-out mode that's really handy so I'm on a Mac right now that's a good question it doesn't work on both yes every time I hit command and control on a PC and everything every time I say option think alt and then your earring good shape I just I can't say it all the time it would drive me crazy I would get very distracted too okay so another way that I can remove this distraction is I can go to my gradient tool this will icon right here and I could I can just drag this to the right let me just preload this so I can show you what I'm doing right when I drag this kind of gradient out the less I drag the harder the gradient so it's like a hard stop and the more I drag the smoother it is right so and again you can drag and then make your adjustments or make your adjustments and then drag either way because it's completely nonlinear non-destructive so I'm going to drag this out a little bit more but I only want to affect this area here I just want to darken it down I don't need the detail in here but what's happening is as I do this it's starting down the sky as well and I only wanted to affect this area so how can I try to get that adjustment to just this area the the answer is is start by pulling it on the upper right corner that's not necessarily the best way to do because it's still gonna darken the sky alright I can come in here and I can move this I can come over here it's still gonna darken the sky I only want to darken that the the objects nope so here's how we can do it I just seem to cover basically cover the area that's all I really need to do there's two ways actually one I can paint it that's going to take too longer use a paintbrush what I want to do instead is we have this new feature called a range mask and I don't know how many people are familiar that's relatively new it's basically luminosity I'm asking but we could also go mask by color if I click on that I have the option to either do color or luminance and if you look carefully we're not going to demo this today but depth is grayed out that's coming do you guys know what that means depth mapping that happens when you have two lenses while cameras have two lenses your iPhones right the portrait mode so soon we'll be able to make adjustments based upon the depth map the embedded depth map in the hdic files from the iPhones which is which is really cool week actually this is already enabled we can do that we can do that now okay so here's what I we do I would say luminance and I'm gonna make adjustment just basic cause this is dark the sky is bright this is dark alright and I'll see this over and over again I'm gonna come in here and then i have when i click luminance I have my range and I have smoothness and show luminance mask will basically show me my mask that's what I'm doing right now but that is affecting the sky I'm gonna bring this element work and what I'm gonna do is just like my histogram above I have my range from pure black to pure white and that slider means if I pull from the left I'm gonna be removing all the darks that's the opposite of what do I want to do often I just don't even think about I'll just try one way it doesn't work try the other way so here if I take my whites my bright and I and I start removing it from the adjustment you'll see it's kind of targeting just the darks and that's how I make my selection but it's also helpful if I hold the control key sorry the option key on a Mac it'll give me a live mask is what we call it so everything that's white is being affected everything that's black is being removed so we no longer have to sit there and paint with our brush to get all the edges this is a much more advanced feature this is a much better way of approaching it's a lot quicker too so now I know when I make my adjustments I don't hit over overlay I'm come in here and I could just affect that so I'm just going to darken that down a little bit that makes sense okay enough of that image let's look at another show you another but that's how we get to you that's it before that's a rafter alright once you do this long enough you'll start to realize in the field you can kind of pre visualize this that's the before picture all right without I don't even know how many miles away quite a far distance drive up this mountain because I saw the shot once where and I couldn't see it when I was thinking this is the bamboo hotel and I couldn't see at the time but it's it's so perfectly situated in Banff it's a very historic hotel it's beautiful the property but I wanted to compress it and show it inside that landscape so this is what I got right so first of all if we're looking at the histogram again let's examine this I don't have any pure blacks I don't have any pure whites that's what everything kind of looks gray right all I kind of need to do is I can take my whites and I can just move it to the right until it starts touching the right take my blacks move it to the left and just that alone that's over before that's why after they're just adding that a contrast back what we're mapping bar tones from black to white but I want to add a little bit more one to this I want to make things stand out because what's the brightest part of the image right now right it's the boring sky and that's not what interests me about this your eye will always go to the brightest part of the image so how do we darken that well for starters I can take the highlight so I can bring this down but I want to darken the top part of the image so what tool would I use to darken just a top part of the image right because I if I could adjust the brightness of the whole image that doesn't really help me much right I would use the gradient tool right up here when I come over here and drag now have you guys ever had trouble just that this drives me freaking crazy if you hold the shift key down it will give you a perfectly straight line it just makes life a lot easier and that goes in both way both directions so I'm just going to drag a gradient down if I really want this to pop one way I can use is the dije stool so bring a little bright sound and I'll just use the T hey storsie brings all that detail back but it's a good it's a little blue so I'll probably warm this up a little bit when a warming up we're getting this kind of like green cast so I could just offset that that's nice as you can actually see the colors the sliders the temperature and the ten sliders so if I want to offset the green adjust dragging the opposite direction I add a little magenta and they were just just for a fact I'll give a little more tea haze all right now let's do the same thing from the bottom I want to preserve this kind of white cloud layer so I'll drag up from the bottom and the more I drag the smoother that gradient is and I can kind of D haze as well I can the add some more clarity all right that's good enough for now what else can I do how about the magic 39 split toning it's a sunset 39 add some more warmth to the image all right that's what before that's the after just that one slider now it's really starting to take effect that's the before that's the after all right if I click on here Batsy after I'm just dragging that one slider down this is really one of why I focus on now so if I darken down the whole image just a little bit that's a global adjustment I want to target just this hotel I want to make my subject the brightest part of the image alright so how am I going to target this hotel there's two ways I can target this hotel I can either brush or I can use another target adjustment or sure I'm talking about yet that's this guy your radial filter if you hover over this and just let go if you have a little patience it will tell you the name of the tool which is helpful for me cuz I sometimes forget I just do it right but shift M is a shortcut and once for the gradient shift M is for the radial tool the reason why we want is a radio tool not the gradient is I just want to select our region so now I can select this region and I want to make it bright so let's brighten it what's happening it's affecting everything inside that right this is how this is where we were stuck up until a year ago maybe a year and a half ago something like that we have a range of a so we do have another option too we have a brush tool up here but if I click on that I can't come down to my erase I want to make sure auto mask is on so it will detect the edges then come in here probably add a little bit of a gradient and I can kind of paint this is your old school way of doing it but I can paint away the effect by l-c it's not perfect so I'm going to undo that commands you don't undo that instead all I really need to do range masks luminance and just remove it just remove the the effect from the darks now I can come in here and I can brighten it more I can add a little texture and really make it stand out maybe give a little bit of that warm glow and that's just that one effect here so this is the power of a little bit more advanced post-processing that's not just using the basic sliders we're making target adjustments and typically what you want to do it is you want to work globally first bring about the highlight detail bring about the shadow detail removing any distractions and anything like that you could even crop because the crop itself is even non-destructive but you do want to get into when it makes sense you know what to do for every image you want to get to make target adjustments that's really where this starts to shine so again these are distractions too right we want to minimize all distractions we want to make it so obvious that this is a subject and remove everything else it's like a it's like a solo in a song right everything else needs to shut up so you can really understand that one instrument that one vocal and so we want to just keep it that way so how do I do that just darken or bright I can come in here if I want to select this area I'm just gonna drag my gradient soul hit H to hide it and I can just kind of darken that maybe bring the highlights down a little bit more and I can kind of mask up by just adding a larger gradient that's all maybe I'm just warming up a little bit and that's all we need to do I'd probably also add a little bit of vignette why are we out of in yet because it keeps your eyes in the middle of the frame which is both good and bad we don't have any options as far as where we place the vignette right now subject always isn't always in the center of the frame more often than not it shouldn't be in the center of our frame so if that's the case right if a vignette doesn't work and that's the powerful now if you really want to see you can change the feather I'll turn that off and this will help you understand the midpoint that we can adjust the size of it and we can adjust the shape of it but we can't adjust the location of it which is really frustrating right because my subjects all the way down here so that doesn't really help me much so I'm going to double click this to zero it out but anytime I double click the slider is going to zero it out now I'm going to create my own vignette in another way how would I create a vignette that I can move the radial filter tool right now I can create it just the same thing as that vignette that I had before so now I can kind of move it wherever I want to and then I can darken it and this is gonna happen to you all the time don't freak out it's always gonna dark in the middle first or depending on your computer I don't even know at this point and why don't we start going the other way the bottom line is that 90% of the time it's not going to do what you want it to do alright that just seems to be the way it works out so it's this little icon right here invert if I click that it will just reverse it so now I do have I can move this around anywhere I want to all right so it is sort of a nice vignette but what's cool is it's not just the vignette that I have now so I can move this down you've got to bring this up a little bit I can make those large as I want to you I'm obviously going to might not make it too dark but we have options of all these other tools that a vignette doesn't offer us so if I wanted to I can add a little bit more of a D haze I can add so negative clarity to kind of softened things because our eyes will always go to the sharpest part of the image first the brightest part the sharpest part whatever is in focus source is out of focus so we could even take the sharpness and bring it down and you can see it's just going to get a little bit soft in the background and it really makes the subject what I think is a subject is this mountain this Lodge and the landscape kind of stand out we could also create more color contrast we can make that a little bit warmer I can make that a little bit cooler so we have full creative control rather than just a standard oven yet because it's a video you can move around but also make all these other adjustments yes there's a question either the brightest the question is what adjustments I was making you can make any adjustments you want if you use a selective adjustment tool the just when I was making to make it softer there's a couple ways you can you can de-emphasize a subject right you can make it darker you can make it bluer you can change the color temperature but you also have access to the texture of clarity and D haze and sharpness all of these are going to soft in the background right so if I take the texture you'll see that if I take the clarity down and i take the sharpen is down now we're really adjusting the sharpness that make sense all right I don't understand the question yeah maybe if you have the eyes will always go to the brightest and sharpest part of the image yeah yeah think about it I mean everywhere you go especially in New York we're inundated with information everywhere we take in masses of amounts of information every second we're really good you know some friends of mine might even say I'm a little too good at throwing away all that information right so we're instantly processing things and removing everything that even in the background we don't even understand that we're doing it anything that doesn't make sense anything that doesn't even apply so you apply we look at an image we're always going to go to for this for instance we're going to go to the face if there's a person to see you in or the person if there's a face we're gonna go the face if you can see their eyes we're gonna go to the eyes right but anything that's not in focus anything that's too dark where there's no detail we're just going to discard it and we can use that to an advantage so we started getting to HDR imagery for instance it was great because we bring all the detail but we don't need all the shadow detail if there's not relevant information in the shadows it's a really good creative tool to let it go into silhouette to let it go dark right so we can we can affect that if we as long as we understand how the human mind views and interprets images that's a really powerful - I call it a visual roadmap I've done one presentation on that previously as well so that would guide every decision this is what I talk about in my in my Lightroom mastery class this coming weekend on the 6th and the 7th but basically it'll guide every decision you make on how you process an image so if I look at this image for instance this is a neurosurgical big life I was working with out in Kenya I want these are local farmers essentially that are protecting the land from poachers the large herd elephants from poachers and in my mind they're heroes are really on the front lines but they're just protecting their families really so I wanted to show them as heroes and so I brought one light with me and I had them kind of backlit by the Sun that had a strobe let off to the side but what's the brightest part of the image it's good this is the Sun it's always going to be the Sun in a little bit we can certainly do emphasize it but I want to draw the eye to his face and that look right it's you don't quite know what that is is that hesitancy is that confidence so how would I do that well I would take the highlights and I can just bring the highlights back that alone does a really good job then I could take the shadow detail so I always start my global adjustments and I can kind of bring that that's gonna be a little bit too much again we don't need so we told me a long time ago if you want to make things look interesting don't light all of it right you want to have something fall into shadow and if you're gonna have light shadow light shadow light shadow it really creates these layers in trauma and an image so we have light shadow light shadow light shadow and so now I want to know it just that alone right makes a big difference but I really want to emphasize some more so how would I do that well first of all when you're using the light especially in a limited circumstance like this that had one person holding it because the umbrella stand broke it's lighting the foreground I don't need that foreground lit so what would I do I'm gonna take my gradient tool hold the shift key down so it's straight and I'll just drag it up it's not gonna do what I wanted to do just by default it never does but then I can come here and I can darken things down a little bit right I'm removing the possibility of my eye going to a bright part of the image which doesn't necessarily occur to people I when I was first learning this I'd see these these you know instructors making all these adjustments and they never really explain why I'm just gonna darken this gonna bright this well why cuz it would never occur to me to brighten his darkened down by his feet but when you see the before and after well yeah it kind of makes sense right you you want your eye to go where you want the eye to go whatever your subject is that's why you took the picture in the first place so how do I make the eye more about him again well that was one tool I can darken down the distractions I remove the brightness of the Sun let's target him more what tool can I use to target him more radial filter tool this I think is the most powerful tool so select him and I have two options I could either brighten him where I can dark in the background I kind of doesn't make a difference so let's darken the background I already know this isn't gonna work right I just wanted explain it to you I can just reverse it I can brighten him that's fine or I can invert it and darken the background but then the whole image starts to look dark right but that's fine because I have a selective adjustment and then I have the exposure I can make a global adjustment back up again so I can make a I can warm the entire picture up and I can go back to my selective adjustment and cool just the background because I have two different regions now that I'm creating a light is that making sense a little bit the global adjustment will only give me that one global one region adjustment and I want to create layers I want to channel the light I want to push the light where my subject is so now just with that one tool I'm kind of really channeling the light a little bit more I still want to channel the light a little bit more so what's cool about this filter is that unlike the vignette tool we can use it more than once click it click it again I can draw a little circle right on in just on its face and now I can just add a little bit of sharpness and just a touch of rightness actually what I typically do is I usually don't teach these in my classes as much until it's like one of the advanced courses if I hover over any of these any of these adjustment sliders here I can use the up and right arrow key and you'll see let me zoom in a little bit it makes the adjustments in discrete increments right which doesn't occur to you at first but when you're trying to adjust an image and you're adjusting the slider where are you looking you're looking at the slider right that's not where you should be looking you should be looking at where the adjustment is so what this will do is you kind of hover over where you need to make the adjustment and then you just look at the image and then I can just hit the plus and minus key mm-hmm that's correct you can also apply this to a mouse with a wheel I haven't used those and I think in like ten years but you certainly can you can hover over and you can apply it so we can just make those as good adjustments what's nice is you if you hold the shift key down you can make larger adjustments all right and then let go of the shift key and you can tweak it and the reason why I'm showing this is because you should be looking at the image not the slider and if you're like me you're working on a smaller screen like my laptop is my main computer now because of the travel and I'm doing it it's just too bulky otherwise so that screen real estate is really important so I really make this as small as possible one trick is that you can just drag this panel to the left and now you actually have a little bit it's not going to be a sensitive because you have more room so if you have a large monitor that's definitely one way you can do it because the sliders can be very sensitive I usually make it all the way to the right because it gives me more screen real estate which means that I definitely need to hover and then just use this up and down arrow keys all right it just gives you very discrete results that's pretty much all you need to do this for this image maybe one thing more so I'll just drill this into you guys I will do some split toning all right and just kind of add a little bit more punch to this just a little bit more warmth that's our before that's or after all right doesn't have to be anything more than that if we wanted to sharpen this because I just had someone reach out to me this morning about sharpening this is already pretty sharp but when you sharpen you do want to sharpen in a one-to-one mode or at least zoom in so right now you'll see that I'm in a one-to-one mode all I really do is is click once and I'll zoom back out but this is how you'll actually see the sharpening and what's good to know is I the reason why this kind of came about is someone reached out recently and they said well I have a JPEG and I have a raw file I'm a JPEGs look sharper and that's correct your JPEGs are sharper because JPEGs are cooking in sharpening already well your RAW files aren't and this went on and on to the point where Adobe was tired of fielding questions about this because your raw files are giving you the opportunity to sharpen creatively is that now they just give you our deep a default sharpening is that 40 now it used to be at 20 they might have increased it but basically the default sharpening will get you back to where the captured sharpening stages from JPEGs right especially on the older cameras a lot of that almost all the Canon cameras still have an anti-aliasing filter which intentionally blurs the picture a little bit so this will bring back that sharpen when I sharpen though what I'll do is I'm sorry sharpen I just go out and around 100 and I'll drag my masking tool and this is important now I'll just mask us can you guys see this no of course you can I can't see it either that's why they give us the masking tool and if I hold option down then I can see what I'm doing don't when you sharpen you only really want to sharpen the edges right and I'm using the turn sharp and loosely because we're not technically making an image sharper there's only one way you can do that you can go downstairs and you can buy better glass from B&H right but it's the illusion of sharpening what that means is this taking the edges where brightness and shadow meet and it's exaggerating it's making the bright bright clear bright brighter at the dark darker all right a student write the address so what I'm doing is I'm making sure that only focuses are sharpening on the edges if i zoom out I'll see what I mean I don't need a sharp in the sky all right there's no detail in there I don't want to sharpen the edges this is really handy especially when you're shooting portraits especially shooting portraits of women right they don't want all the detail all the texture on their skin so you can just focus a sharpening right to the edges the other two sliders forget about them right I'm here to simplify this for you honestly the amount and the masking is pretty much all you need what the radius is going to do is going to look at that edge that I told you I told you about which is where the brightness of the shadow meet and it's just going to if I click on this little icon here I'll show you and it's just going to take that sharpening effect that contrasts at the edge and it's going to expand it further from that edge that's all it's gonna do honestly I rarely use this and detail the same thing it's just gonna give you a little bit more micro contrast in the areas around that edge I don't use either of those it's just the amount and the masking there's also while we're on the subject of sharpening I actually know what let's go into another image or we can talk about textures and there is it this is a nonlinear editing but I'm also nonlinear so I just kind of go because the whole idea is to show you my process and then really get an opportunity to really go into actually how I sit down and edit I didn't show people before and afters and that's great let's really get into it so what would I do with this image right what's the brightest part of the image what's my subject so how do I fix that I can start globally which means I come down and I take the highlights I can recover the highlights how do I know I can do that I'm looking at the histogram it's still just a touch too bright but I know that that histogram is also based on the back of the camera that's not a JPEG image I have a little more flexibility especially with the Sony sensors and numerous already sensors you have an incredible range so I can just retain that highlight detail without a problem but what if I want that's got to be a little bit darker right I already took my highlight slider and I brought it down as much as possible I just don't want that's got to be a little bit darker you'd think dije is right but that's gonna adjust the whole thing all right and it's gonna change the contrast of the image what I do is just take the exposure slider and just until that sky looks good to me everything else gets dark too but that's fine because that's what we have our shadow slider where I can bring it all back up again I had just that alone and you'll notice the histogram now that's the before where everything is either almost pure white or really close to the blacks and now I'm kind of evening everything out a little bit but I'm also making sure I have a white and a black point so it's not just muddy and I'm expanding the range of the tones so just that alone that's before and after but this is an advanced course I want to show you how we can take it even further so once I determine what my subject is what tool can I use to select the subject all right the radial filter tool come over here select this gang over here and the DJ is probably a good place to start again it's gonna be the opposite so I'll invert it and just that alone if I double click it'll zero it out but I want to add maybe just a little bit of warmth to it and that's great but they still look a little dark right eye dark in the background but I want to make them brighter well we can do rather than just adding another filter I can right click and I can duplicate this that kind of looks cool but it's not what I wanted right it's a happy mistake but I can invert this so now I'm selecting the inside of it if I double see I have these sliders kind of set up already and I can certainly just zero these out but a quick way to do it if you have a lot of sliders in play just double click this word effect and it will just zero everything out for you and now I can come in here and I can just bring them up which looks great but you'll realize if I see oh four overlay it's not just affecting them it's also affecting the sky right if I chose color as a range mask tool that wouldn't work because all these different colors I could come over here and I could judge my loot luminance and I can start reducing the effect that way but it's also going to affect that boat because it's the same brightness value right so that doesn't always work all the time what I would do instead is I'm gonna hit over overlay that's gonna show me a no mask overlay take my brush tool go to erase make sure Auto mask is on how you tell my feather up almost all the way I can just start masking away let me zoom in a little bit more I'm just kind of masking away so now it's only affecting them that's it yeah now I can make them as bright and add a little bit of contrast a little sharpness texture clarity zoom back out to kind of finalize this I would go to my effects I would add just a little bit of an yet very subtle increase the feather I probably would warm it up just a little bit to that little split tone and check because it's later in the afternoon and then total curve this is another tool use if I just want to add I think a little bit of punch to an image people talking about punch all the time almost like when you turn the brightness up of your monitor and everything just looks punchy or brighter can't more contrast see I always work at this maximum brightness that's why I carry a battery charger with me everywhere on my phone because it's always at 100% brightness I don't understand why I know what doesn't anything else so what all I do is this is how I use the tone curve I just go to the lights and I and I go half way that's I don't just anything else and all it does it it almost gives you the effect of turning the lights on right and if that's too much because we have that now that starts to look a little blown out in the sky well how would I adjust that it's a little bit of a dance it's a give-and-take I can go back to my highlight slider and I can bring the highlights back down again except my highlight slider is already maxed out so how would I do this further I would recover the highlights when I've already recovered all of my highlights shift them select that region and just bring the highlights back down again and you can even bring the exposure back down if you don't like what it did with the shadows I don't have a problem with it but if you really wanted to effect just the highlight part of that sky that I selected come over to arrange masks go to luminance and I can remove all the shadows from that adjustment so it's only affecting the highlights that's why before that's what I see in the back of the camera that's why after that's the potential I'm seeing well I'm looking at what I'm seeing in the back of the camera quickly you get there to quickly make that bridge the more it's going to inform your photography does this make sense okay let's move on question is depth of field can i narrow the depth of field it's a one-way street if I capture all of the depth of field if everything's sharp from front to back I can isolate if I did that with this I would select my subject I can come in here I'm going to zoom in just a little bit and I would take the sharpness and I would bring it down it's subtle you don't see it much right I can also take the clarity and bring it down well invert this it doesn't give me the full range like we don't have an out-of-focus tool yet in Lightroom but what we do have is the ability to duplicate and resize so you don't have that hard edge it can also feather this off a little bit and then duplicate and then duplicate it again now you should be able to see the effect see that so we can reduce the sharpness which is almost the effect of having a shallow depth of field but it's only one way street if you have a shallow depth of field if you're shooting with an 85 1/2 or 1/4 and everything's out of focus except part of the face Francis is very popular for portraits there isn't really a way to get that back you can't bring things back into focus right but you can take things that are in focus and remove it or just soft in it so it looks like it's out of focus yes so very interesting point I do shoot with an iPhone a lot it has a portrait mode and what that is it builds in a depth map and it create uses parallax between two different lenses and everything's in focus when you're shooting with the phone because it has a small sensor right which traditionally was a problem now it's actually a really great asset because with everything's a focus like I just said then we have the ability to take it out of focus then we can play with a highlight then we can play with anything we want to because we could build a depth map until the larger cameras have that capability you're gonna have more creative control with focus with your with your cell phone which is really interesting and now that we have the depth map built in a Lightroom it's not just focused but you can select parts of the image based upon the depth the z-axis in the image which is really it so I wouldn't even have to select the sky anymore it'll just know that that's the furthest part of the image away all right what's cool is if anyone were taking a portrait with a shallow depth of field and it focused on the nose all right this will happen is for shooting pets this will happen every time unless you have the new update from Sony which will do animal Ayano focus the newer camera will have i aughtta focus because every time when you shoot a child is feeling about that eye and the near eye to be in focus but the camera is trained to focus on whatever's closest which is the nose which is a problem right and you can't go back and fix that so you have to be critical you have to be really careful about getting that eye and focus and if it's not you're kind of Sol but if you're shooting with an iPhone or you're shooting with a cell phone or something has a depth map you can retain that depth of field you have everything in focus and then later you can choose right it's the same effect as a tilt shift lens but I don't understand why people just tilt shift lens is that much anymore and they use it to throw the back in front out of focus well we just do that here with our gradient told a lot more creative control and it doesn't really cost us a lot of money because we use the lenses that we already the reason why those those tilt-shift lenses are actually handy because it changes the the plane of focus so it allows you to get everything in focus that's the point is to get everything to focus from front to back without having to stop down f-22 that's a whole different conversation but just know that you have a lot more creative control with this because not just the focus but now we can just highlight shadows color temperature texture all of that how would we lighten the faces well let's do it let's find let's find a face let's choose this guy this is actually how the image turned out for several reasons one is it was a long day we were hiking for 15 miles in the desert I think probably one of the adjustments were knocked or whatever here's the thing it doesn't actually matter that much if I had I for information I'm shooting at ISO 100 and a lot of people don't know this I didn't realize this for years when I first started out when you're at your base ISO your lowest ISO you have a lot more creative control a lot more flexibility in post-processing a lot more dynamic range that's captured if this is ISO 16 I wouldn't be able to do this now look at the detail alright that's pretty insane for that image it's almost like you can't even see it right so yeah I can brighten this but to go back to the question how do I brighten the face well I would select the region of the face I use that radial filter tool since I'm using what we call short lighting we have highlights and shadows his face is a brightest part of the image that there's a reason why I did that you get it above the face it creates this kind of jawline shadow and then you have bright shadow bright shadow right if you use broad lighting and I shot on the other side of him it would just be one wall of flesh and almost no circumstances of one wall flash a good a good thing right you want to shoot from the shadow side the short side and so now I can just come in here I can kind of brighten this and again I can take my range mask tool go to luminance and I can isolate it just to his face now if I wanted to I can add more texture really bring out that texture when I did when I actually post-process these images I just removed it was kind of a a look maybe three four years ago this kind of desaturated hyper texture kind of look and all they were doing is removing the vibrance kind of like that and adding clarity they didn't have texture at the time texture is a brand new feature and you'll see the difference so clarity kind of adjusts it kind of it messes with the contrast and the color as well where texture doesn't it just adds but it's a it's a different frequency it's a very very small lines because what texture is affecting just the very very tiniest textures what clarity is kind of the medium lines that the lines on a shirt versus the the pores in the skin and then Dee Hayes is going to give you the larger lines which will drastically affect the contrast as well so texture is a really cool slider and that would be my before that would be my after all right if I wanted to I can this might be a little distracting so I come in here with my brush tool which I haven't talked about too much now I can just take the maybe the highlights down and I would just kind of brush over yeah that's it you see how it didn't bless you so yeah it didn't pick up because I had the auto mask on this is gonna happen every now and again so what you do is instead you turn auto mask off and it will just give you a very smooth line does that make sense so often times you want to mask the entire thing and just kind of paint away to give you an example of that let's see here this is a good example so I shot this a few weeks ago for SUNY Cortland and we were photographing the entire campus and that's the final shot right this is what this is the shot they were trying to get this is what I was kind of encountering when I walked in there and try lighting a pool unless you're a cliff Hausner and you have your access to 20 strobes and he will do this that's very interesting Lightroom can be your friend year so for instance this pool look at the color of the water here and then look at the color here why would I choose this image be that by the way it looks kind of dark right but look at the histogram right if I wanted any brighter I wouldn't have any detail in the highlights and since I had a tripod I was able to shoot at ISO 50 which is my absolute lowest ISO which means I have all the range in the world for my exposure it's one of the reasons why we use a tripod otherwise I wouldn't bother I can't stand using tripods necessary evil alright so what I would do is I would brighten this entire image then I take the highlights and retain that highlight detail back so it's a good start right it looks a little warm so I'd probably cool this off a little bit I don't need to do this all the time often I would just auto white balance it does a pretty good job so I don't know what the shortcut is for wipeouts white bounce take a guess W press on anything white press again press again the reason why getting kind of weird results because you have mixed lighting with the interior lights and then we have the exterior daylight right so it gets you may be in a starting point but I would definitely bring this back up a little bit so I would start there and I really want this to be very bright but then I have that issue of the highlights again right so I have the shadow detail where I want I'm bringing all that back but now it starts to get kind of blown out a little bit so I need to select these windows because I already brought my highlights down now what's the best way to select the windows here I'm just electing the very brightest part of the image right go to my gradient tool drag it down so already affecting windows now they look great but it's affecting everything else too it's always a constant dance back and forth so I need to isolate it out of my luminance bring that range tool back I'll put on that live mask to show you I'm going to bring this only until we're isolating just the brightest part of the image and if that's not even enough we can adjust the smoothness and really kind of tweak this right if you ever hear the term luminosity masking being thrown around in Photoshop circles and this is the ultimate way well yeah it is it's the ultimate way of getting fine-tuned detail but we have a version of that in Lightroom that gets the job done really well so now I can come in here and I can adjust the windows the way I want to right I don't need all that detail there so I would probably fat I think when I actually had to do this I just brought the texture down a little bit I kind of let them blow out so now we have this that's where before that's where after starting to look better but this pool would you want to go swimming in that pool all right now I wouldn't want I want a nice clean brew bright pool all right needs to be inviting so how am I gonna make an adjustment of this it's a very irregular shape so that gradient tool isn't going to work because it's not on any one side of the image the radial filter tool might work but it's not really we can try it right I can adjust this I can grab it I can bring this over here now I want to make it blue there you go now that color is perfect that looks excellent doesn't looks terrible because affecting everything else so I can come in here and I can kind of just brush all this away but actually what I typically do is this is an advanced course I'll take my brush I'll take the feather off entirely and I'm going to darken this down just to show you what I'm doing I'm going to turn auto mask off I'll add that color blue I'll just kind of preload it and I'm just going to paint I don't need a dark let's I'll just add that color blue and I'll do was kind of covering very very loosely like in kindergarten right but the reason is it's giving me 100% opacity over the entire color of the water because all color is made up of you know different variations the way their lights hitting it especially with water so Auto mask will work but I'm not getting the lines perfect I don't care because then I can come in here with your race tool I can turn off auto masking again but then we have this really interesting feature that they did borrow from Photoshop I'm gonna just finish painting this tire here go to my eraser tool turn the feather off and all I would do is I need to make a perfect selection of the edge I would click once hold shift down and click again and it gives you a perfectly straight line I'll do it on this side click once line it up hold shift down and click again now it gives me a perfectly straight line so I'm making a pixel perfect accurate selection of the pool I couldn't do that with a radial mask so this is how I do I go to the rest let me just finish this come over here go over the rest and you can kind of tweak it if you don't get it perfect because everything is non-destructive so I can come in here and just give me a perfect selection you click once before you want to start and then hold shift down and click the second time right if I didn't get this that's fine I just pain away but if you want to make a perfectly straight line this is how you do it so I'm not gonna do this entirely but I'll just give you an idea this is why I get paid by the hour sometimes actually if you get paid by the average coming here and do it manually pixel by pixel alright I was born at night but not last night alright so let's assume that's a perfect selection now I'll hit hold it turn the overlay off now I can control that color of the pool maybe make it a little bit brighter maybe lift a little bit more saturated now I was out of pool you want to swim in yeah alright that's our before that's our after all right we have this a little bit of Andy adding around the side this will happen this was a 10 millimeter so widest lens in the world it's a 10 millimeter rectilinear lens so you're gonna get this natural vignette in what I would do is come over here to lens corrections and one click is going to remove most of that right this will happen with most cameras and most lenses Adobe's profiled the natural fall-off is what they call of the lenses so it's good and in fact if you wanted to a nice little shortcut to to keep things efficient is you can come let's say every image you you look at you want just a little bit of sharpness a little bit of contrast a little bit saturation just a little bit of punch you can just dial all those settings in and over here where it says reset if I hold the option key it'll say set default and I click that and it's going to say all right from every picture from here on in I'm just going to default to these settings so if you like the auto lens correction and it's not on by default you can turn it on hold the option key down alt on a PC set it for your PC guys and click set default and now we'll always apply that lens correction the other way you can do it is create a preset way it would just turn everything off except for your lens correction all right so those ways you can automate it the reason when I did it you see this is oh no so that says ISO speed rating right because I can adjust the noise reduction based on ISO so I never have to touch that again and for each level so I don't even touch my noise reduction until I get to 3200 right and then I could say I apply 5% and then default and then apply 10% when I get so 64 apply 15% when it gets to 12,000 whatever right so it's just something you can fully automate everything really handy feature to have so if I wanted to brighten this even more how would I do that right it's still not this white that's perfectly kind of white I want this to look pristine like no-one's ever in this building before I'm going to grab my gradient tool drag it over done they're going to double click the word effect and I'm going to remove the saturation and then we're going to brighten up just the highlights a little bit I mean I would just brighten up the shadows as well I'll just give it a little bit more punch and then some clarity some textures of contrast there you go now if I only wanted to apply to the brightest parts again I go to that woman's mask and drag the shadows up a little bit but in fact if I don't want those whole whites to blown I could do the opposite as well all right it's very subtle but it's giving me a lot more vibrancy in the image does that make sense so we go from that to that and this isn't something that you go into this knowing that you're going to capture it that you need to do all these things that's just once you understand the effects and how to use these tools and I know I'm sure that ISO 50 and I know I'm a tripod on lockdown I have all the the focus that I need and the depth of field I know I can play around with this after the fats the question is can I make a preset for import well yeah I mean you can make a preset for anything and then correct and then I can apply that at the import stage so if you like seeing only black and white images you can say all right I like this image I'll get to it and then I'm just going to bring let's just go to black and white I'm going to add some clarity and texture and a vignette and I really kind of like this look in general but we're turning over bring this up I can create a preset I can label it black and white high contrast and when I go to import my images I can choose that preset to apply to every image before I even look at it right so if you're shooting black and white images specifically your best bet is to shoot color and then make adjustments after the fact there's probably a good example in here for that I'll see if I can find one this would be a good example and recognize this I'm looking at you the people that were in the solo photo walk yeah so you can know I did this connected that let's see if there's another one here that we can do here we go so this is a black and white and you can adjust the sky just brought the detail down in the sky that's all we did I don't know why I just remove that file but let's go back to you let's go back to this so if I wanted to adjust this right and I want to take the color out I could just remove that saturation and just bring that down in fact I could do that and I have a black and white image but I don't have much creative control right otherwise I can come in here if I click on black and white I don't want they put it in two different places that's weird but you have to go down to the slider over here black and white and I have full access to color but how do you really know what color is what all right you can reset it now let's say I want to darken down just this one color well you kind of don't need to know what the underlying color is anymore the important thing is that it's there then you're shooting a raw color image I have this little thing called a target adjustment tool and if I hover over that I can just choose individual colors all right and it's making tonal selections based upon the underlying color so always want to shoot in color and then post-process using those color ranges to make specific isolate adjustments in black and white so if I wanted to brighten up to his face now I'd have to make a complicated mask or selection to do that all right again what I would do for this image probably won't do black and I actually like the color but what's the subject it's him right and it's his kind of like I just caught him in this one moment he's a shop owner I was just walking the shop owner took this one image I just come in love like that that puzzle kind of look I don't know exactly to try to say so I'm gonna go to crop [Music] right does that have more impact because he's the subject just a simple crop makes all the difference in the world sometimes where you wouldn't think about until you see the before and then the after it's his look it's his eyes as his face that's the subject nothing else is really a subject that's why I wanted to darken even more like a probably too much just go to the vignette I come in dark in the edges if I really wanted to do it properly I would go this radial tool select him invert it I kind of darken that even further all right that's her before that's her after how are we dealing with the time here we got something we got some time good all right good all right let's take a listen look at this one so this is one of my best friends when I was in Kenya she would wake me up every morning really like with horns poking through the tent it was a problem when it rained and then I realized when I got back they reach out they're like there's a kudu by the way my first introduction to kudu was when I ate one at a barbecue in London and I never heard of it before now Lisa became my best friend and they were like nope all the males have horns so they don't want to call her Lisa I still call her Lisa all right so how would I adjust this right we were trying to get like I was showing before the kind of hero shots and she was following me around everywhere so we kind of decided to get a little profile shot of her kind of short lighted her so I want to bring up the brightness a little bit all right that's Kilimanjaro in the background by the way how else would I adjust this right what's the subject it's a kudu all right what's the brightest part of the image not her so how would I make that adjustment I would start by using this radial filter tool inverting it darkening it down but you'll notice right away it kind of just selected the middle portion of the image so what I can do is either I can brush it out or I can kind of mask it just to show you that again I will brush it out go to auto mask choose a little feather turn over overlay on so I can see what I'm doing I can kind of brush it either now if I kind of go over parts first of all I can hit shift out and that will change the colors make a little bit easier to see depending on the image and so if I paint it over the legs if I hold the option key down alt on a PC I can what we call spring-loaded keys I can temporarily load up my brush tool the opposite of it so I can brush back in the area that I want to except the auto mask isn't on I'd probably want to turn auto mask on so it preserves those edges then I can come back in here paint back in I can go back and forth just by holding that option key down something like that alright I'll paint that backing so I got the face as well get the horns that's too much draw this edge over here and call that good Oh for overlay now we actually have two discrete ways to adjust the image I can either darken the background or I can brighten brighten up the foreground how do I brighten up the foreground well I just brighten up the whole image now our just brightened up everything come back over here and then dark in the foreground you start making extreme adjustments you'll see that halo it's not a problem you can just paint paint that masking so you get exactly how you need it to right everything is non-destructive so you're not kind of stuck I didn't change any slider I'm just adjusting my mask right now but I would adjust just the exposure I would darken down the exposure I went through that much but I wouldn't it was maybe warm this up a little bit and add some D haze to give some contrast to this and now it also maybe go to the DA stool at these tase the whole thing I would warm up the entire image and again you have to be careful with lighting the nice little trick when you're lighting is if you put it on motor drive right most flashes have a recycle time of at least one or two seconds and most cameras have a motor drive of at least five images per second put our motor drive that first flash is going to pop the second one won't and then you can just kind of mask in that darker exposure but for this I would just bring my gradient tool darken down that foreground right if I wanted to I can come in here and I can either add another gradient tool ranking this kind of paint I kind of paint over here yeah that's too much fat let's do it too much I can always come back and just tweak it right it's all non-destructive so it doesn't doesn't actually make a difference has some more vibrance to this ads [Music] probably would add a little bit of warmth that's how we go from that to that oh so that's actually the mask because it's not a perfect mask so if I wanted to tweak the mask I come back to my brush tool and I would find the mask on fact that wasn't the brush tool it was my radial tool right I can click on that icon it would take me right back to where I left off I can hit o for overly in fact I don't even need to do the overlay I can kind of zoom in here I can see where it went wrong right over there and go to my brush tool and just fix it at any time all right this is where having a larger monitor does make a difference but again it's all non-destructive so at any time you can realize that so it can come back to you and say hey what happened you just tweak it it if you're using Photoshop it doesn't make it more complicated especially if you're not using layers because then you have to go back and undo all bunch of steps you can do you can fix anything or do anything in any order at any time that's why we call it nonlinear workflow okay let's talk about some other advanced techniques HDR all right look at the histogram here it's not bad but you'll notice that it started to creep on the right starts creep on the left I can probably get away with this but I also shot this with brackets to show you the process all right so now I'm capturing a little more detail in the highlights and then the Sun and now I'm capturing a lot more detail in the shadows but so often you run into the situation where we're not actually able to capture the dynamic array and generalize see so this is how you do it you just bracket your images the newer phones including the iphone have an HDR feature that works remarkably well but it does it is limited I'll put it that way having a bracket of rock exposures is always going to be a better bet so all use you take that exposure and they hit ctrl H it you're gonna select the bracket of images so if you bracketed 5 or 7 degrees you're gonna select that there are ways to automate that if you do bracketing a lot there's this option called stacking if you come down here and stacking and you can say Auto stacked by capture time alright and what that will do anything you see with three dots there's options what that will do is group everything into stacks based upon the interval that you set so if you're bracketing for instance you're going to want to ideally you're gonna want to have it a tripod and have it but not always but what you do want to do is put on motor drive so that when you hold it down it's going to take three pictures instantly or five pictures or something is instantly right because clouds move branches move cars move whatever right so if you say that time between stacks is literally one second you're probably just going to capture all of your bracket and images and it'll automatically put them in a group citruses and when we do this we can do it Matty just by looking at it honestly that's that's an easy way to do it I also what I do and I teach us in the workshop that I'm doing next weekend is you have all this information available right here at your fingertips on this grid view but I hit G to go into our grid view if you right-click on any one of these you can change the information that's being showed on that overview grid kind of layout so you can change common attributes there's one for exposure and ISO and there should be one for exposure bias here we go so now it's going to show you here this is your normal exposure zero here's your negative to you and here's positive so you don't have to go into the image to understand what that bracketed sequence is right so you'd select all three option eh sorry ctrl H and then proceed auto-align is going to be really handy especially for you down on a tripod you do have Auto Sales I usually don't use that and you have this decoding option and it works pretty well but all its going to do is if there is like a child playing on the side that's gonna in different spot and all the frames or even if there's a lot of motion with the wind it's gonna try and mask one of the images out so you don't have this kind of ghosting and overlay right so you can try it with different things and then you have this option to go back to your point create stack alright so what that's going to do is going to take all three of these images create a single HDR raw file and that's the key here is that it's using math where every other program Photoshop Aurora what's the other one there's a couple HDR programs out there photomatix they're all using pixels right so you need a tiff file an actual pixel based file this is using math which means this computation create the raw file so you always have access to the original all the information you're not compressing anything and you don't actually wind up with technically even another file it's referencing the original raw files so it gives you the best possible quality I can stack that and if I do it's going to create a raw file and because I don't I don't know why there's one of the images missing it's going to try and send it but if I did this properly you would get the raw file but you need access to the original exposures to do this I think one of them might have been missing that's it and then what you'll wind up is something that looks like this which kind of looks identical to the first one alright if you look at the top right here when it's a raw file once in HDR or what you'll see is with an HDR file we can now take an exposure slider and recover all the highlight detail and bring our shadow detail all the way up we have a much larger range so 32-bit floating-point file is what they call it all that really means is now we can make global adjustments bring the highlights down bring the shadows up right that's a start maybe warming up a little bit add a little color temperature add a little vibrance do you know the difference between vibrance and saturation by the way all right this is actually really important vibrance is an intelligent saturation so you see this saturation slider over here forget about it just pretend it's not there basically it's an older way of doing it just makes everything more saturated well vibrance is going to do is look at the areas intelligent look at the image and look at the areas that are already saturated and not saturate them as much and we'll only saturate the areas that need more saturation the areas that have less saturation it will also protect against skin tones right so if you have people in the image it won't saturate their skin make them look orange I won't insert any political information here at all but if you use our gradient tool now I can select just the sky and I can bring this down I can maybe warm this up a little bit maybe add just a little bit of negative texture just kind of softened things out I can come over to the global adjustments and add more texture and clarity so I have isolated ways of selecting different regions of the image right if I wanted to select these flowers how would I do that right I think this is maybe a little bit too dark so I'm going to bring that back and just recover the highlights a little bit more a little bit more warmth to the image I want to add a little more texture to this first I think I think really just having a little vignette is gonna help kind of bring the eye into the scene a little bit if I want to add more detail to these flowers take the whites maybe just a little bit of the exposure then kind of paint which is great but it's painting everything again if I want to isolate this the flowers range mask this time I can select color I could select just that color purple you notice now I drag this over it's selecting only that color now I can make those brighter I can even change the color and opacity if I want to do sharpness clarity and really make those stand out then I can do the same thing with those all right just kind of make them stand out of it if I wanted to adjust the grass how would I do that you haven't use this one yet HSL it's sort of like a middle ground between our global exposure and our target adjustments because it's gonna select just the color green all right so I can take the green if I wanted to make this more saturated I can come over here to green and I could saturate it or I could desaturate it that's the wrong way to do it all right I want to show you the wrong way to do it why is because there's not just always green in any there's not only just one color in every were just multiple colors right most things are made up of multiple colors you wouldn't know what color to choose especially in which ratio so if you come over here this target adjustment tool over here I can hover over the grass and when I do that now it can adjust a set rate and you'll realize that there's actually more yellow than there is green right but it's making a much more accurate selection from a point from a standpoint of color because it's selecting all the underlying colors I'm clicking on I'm hovering over the color that I want to adjust it and I'm clicking and dragging up and down that's all in there so I'm selecting saturation or hue or illuminance depending on what do I want to adjust if I want this grass to be brighter now I can select this for those of you that really like shortcuts there's a shortcut for this it's shift control command H for hue which is control man ask for saturation shift control command hell for luminance I don't expect you guys remember I'm not going to quiz you this time next time I might so there isn't much too much else that we do I'd probably come over here my to uncover again brighten this up a little bit putting the whole thing dark in just to create a little bit more drama something like that and then bring the shadows back up maybe add just a little bit more texture and clarity and call that a day I probably would just because the sunset again got away split toning and add just a little bit of one right you notice what a difference that makes that's number four that's our after all right makes a big difference but they're not really complicated adjustments once you get an idea of what we're trying to do right you're just kind of normalizing the photo and adding color and light where you need it now these flowers obviously needed some punch so we're just exaggerating that let's look at these that was too good my iPhone yeah that was a Cliffs of Moher in Ireland so this is again because I've when I started shooting my phone I realized you know I have to overcome all these hurdles one of them was resolution the other ones dynamic range so I started bracketing multiple RAW files put any one HDR bring them into Lightroom but resolution was another one too right so I can take a 12 megapixel image and turn it into a 20 megapixel or a 60 or 100 megapixel image so I just take individual shots just like that and we can stitch them into just a panoramic image merge the panorama and then I'm just going to spit this out that's the before that's he after all right so I'm creating that glow which we really talked about yeah too much so let's do that we're still good on time so first the crop this is actually what it's going to look like you do have the option when you create a panoramic to auto crop are for the crop tool and I like to just do this manually and I can just crop this out crop this out the reason is with a panorama you don't wind up with the normal ratio the way you do with other images right so it tends to be a little bit wider so I can unlock this checkbox hit L for lights out and I can capture the entire width right up into the edge all right now what else we going to do we want to add that glow you want to add some drama we want to add that the color that I saw when I was there I intentionally put the Sun behind this tree so it wouldn't be completely blown out and I'm everything is becoming the leaves are becoming back and so I want to showcase that I'm gonna make the whole thing brighter I'm gonna bring down those highlights to retain the detail I'm gonna add White's a little bit and go to my turn carve tone carries I'm gonna brighten that up a little bit I may be some shadow detail I'm just gonna play with these sliders until I get a little bit more retaining of the highlight in the shadow detail I will warm this image up a little bit more that alone makes a huge difference and which of the two sliders am I going to use vibrates or saturation vibrance just those thoughts and that's just the basic panel right so we've recovered a lot of information we need to talk too much about the difference between texture clarity and D haze this will give us a better idea texture is just going to bring up if i zoom this in a little bit texture is going to bring out some of the details the very small details like on the edges of those leaves where clarity is going to give us a lot more contrast I usually don't like using clarity too much because it does adjust the color relationship in the contrast relationship too so I feel like texture is going to be a little bit better of a bet and then D haze will just bring back a lot of that color and contrast back as well so with those sliders now we're getting somewhere right we want to add even more color and punch and a little bit of a glow to this right so how do we do that well we haven't really talked about this yet but there the sun's behind this tree we want to create these kind of beams right so one way we can do that is to simulate it had a little bit more warmth a little bit of exposure a little bit of whites you should bring the clarity down just a little bit now what I do is I turn auto mask off turn my brush down low and I would just kind of paint in fat that I would turn the density down a little bit so it's not as obvious I'll just start kind of painting and you know so I'm going right back to the source I'm painting outward and because after I made these adjustments I can come back in and I can adjust however I want to all right so I can add a little bit more warmth of this and a little bit negative clarity which is going to give me a little bit of that glow that's number four that's or after I can exaggerate that a little bit more if I really wanted to just to kind of give you an idea the effect can you see the difference now if I like that and I want to apply that to all their images where it says custom over here I can click on it these are basically presets for your brush tool come over here and I could say save current settings and I can label that sunrays demo because I already have a sunrays one all right and that's how you can save it so you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time once you look once you have a certain brush that you like you can use it over and over and over again if I wanted to add this even more radial shift tool select the tree right where that Sun is and I would probably go to my luminance and reduce the shadows so it's only kind of affecting the highlights essentially it's not affecting the tree I don't want to affect the schepis of the tree but I do want this kind of warm glow on the outside and then I would just bring this up a little bit and warm it up a little bit maybe add a little bit more a little negative clarity a little bit more saturation that's how we get from that to that fast starting to make sense we have any questions on that right I'm hoping that if I do this more and more more you'll start to see the decision making process take place this is something that we do next weekend for hours and hours and hours until it everyone's kind of drilled into them this visual workflow it's very important once you understand it you'll never you're never going to be at a out of gas test of what to do with your images that's the whole point when I learned all these tips and tricks and I know what these videos and got all these books it sounded great and then I looked images and as well where do I start where do I like what what slider do I to is first all right and how would you even know this one well I like that bright light personally it depends on how you captured it if you captured it with the HDR raw file and retain all the highlight detail you can but to me again I want to retain all the information and image but if it's not relevant I don't mind it being blown out because I know that you're always going to go to the brightest part of the frame so if I want your eyes to go to where this tree is and then go outward keeping that blown out a little bit it means that your eyes always going to go to the middle that frame right if there's something really like a really beautiful sunset then certainly I would have come down here I would have brought the highlights all the way back and retained that information make sure I captured it as an HDR raw file for me that that's not as critical in this image the way it is in other images this is actually a good example negative - positive - and that's your HDR all right you can't capture this will happen a lot when you're shooting indoor and outdoor scenes you can't capture the detail on both it's actually very difficult to do they're massively different exposures so you capture one for the highlights one for the shadow so you do want to be careful the one for the shadows because your shutter speed you'll notice the shutter speed here is 1800 right here it's one twentieth of a second if your shutter speed starts getting slower and slower because you need a brighter image you can wind up with a blurry image on your brightest so you want to check your brightest picture when you're bracketing and your hand holding it to make sure that it's not going to be too soft or blurry and then you can just merge the two so the question is what happens if you change the ISO you don't want to use the ISO to bracket your images because your ISO doesn't do anything and also a weird thing to think about there's only two ways you can add light to your image and what we're trying to do is capture the range of light right the dark image then the bright image if we use there is L all we're doing is turning the volume up the gain on our camera we're not actually increasing the amount of light that's touching the sensor so it won't change the image quality if you want to capture the bright exposure without any artifacts or noise you actually want to add more light to the sensor there's only two ways you can add more light to the sensor aperture and shutter speed right your ISO is basically they're just you can see what's going on in the back of the camera for the most part right for the newer cameras that are ISO invariant there is a little bit of a quality game for some of the older cameras camera cameras I believe as well so any cameras it actually doesn't make a difference if you're on a tripod you just want to increase the amount of light that's what actually is going to change the quality of the image so we're capturing both of those but you wind up with an HDR image because if we took this bright image and we try to bring it down this is what we're gonna get this is why you don't over expose an image you can't recover those highlights and if we brought our shadow details up see all that noise it's gonna look terrible why is all that noise there is because noise is literally a lack of information and like I said at the beginning of this digital photography just capturing light light is converted into information so noise only shows up in the shadows because it's literally a lack of lights a lack of information right so if you get a brighter image you won't see noise because there's enough light there there's information there all that noise is just it's it's the they're trying to make up information that doesn't really exist there so if we bracket it put it together in HDR then we have full creative control it's gonna look exactly like the previous one alright except now I can take the highlights bring it down shadows bring it up go to my turn tone curve bring that up and the shadows up even more let's do something like that maybe bring the black stop now if I wanted a little bit more I already wrote my shadows up all the way over expose this then I can come in here with my radial tool and just bring the highlights back down again and then my exposure back up just to kind of exaggerate this for for effect probably arranged this so it's only effective the highlights there you go now if you look at the difference you try to mash out exposure here it's not even gonna let us if you want to compare two images I'm hit the C key now what should you guys prefer right that's why we shoot HDR especially we have a smaller sensor like I figured all these things when I start shooting with a phone so I love the idea of just being able to put it in my pocket and go anywhere with it so now I draw the line where I have to carry something to carry something like I want to carry a camera bag so the cameras in it so it fits my pocket but this is how you get around those little limitations right and this will apply to any camera you're using if you have a dynamic range that looks like this pure black when you expose properly for the highlights and pure white when you expose properly through shadows capture that full range it's super easy to do in Lightroom just put the two together just to control H and it's going to give you an HDR image you right-click photo merge HDR right and it will even know if you have multiple images so you can have an HDR panoramic and we'll build in one click an HDR panoramic which will solve the issue of both dynamic range and also field of view something keep in mind crop we didn't talk about this yet I said I was gonna go going to this is New Jersey right the other side of the bridge I have the GW right at my back so there's again this is just the panoramic I think mosquito do not like that joke so what I do is crop it but again I can just crop out this part and that's fine and I'll unlock this but what I like to do when I have a panoramic or even when I have regular images that's a crop to like an anamorphic format it's a cinematic format what you see when you go to movie theater you have that super wide angle so sometimes it just looks really cool but it works really well on landscapes because here all the information that I wanted to really show is right in the middle right so what I can do is if I come down to crop ratio all I do is click on original I can do enter a custom I can either do three the ones is the easy one but it's really 2.39 click okay and it's gonna give me this kind of anamorphic widescreen feel hit L again for lights out I can kind of now if I grab the corners I can also rotate if it's not perfect so I never the first thing I do want to get a camera is turn off that auto level I don't understand it's literally this simple in fact it's even simpler right you can you're going to automate you click auto and it will just find the line for you it'll automatically what so I don't ever really worry about it it is a little more critical when you have a lot of panoramas right because then you are gonna crop off but for normal images not about it alright what's gonna work really well right off the bat here don't look at my histogram everything's kind of in the middle it's muddy I need a triangular contrast out brights and darks first of all the auto key that helps a little bit right it's actually very intelligent these days Adobe's using something called Adobe sensei and AI algorithm that it's it's more complex than just dragging the sliders around and taking a guess it's used a whole algorithm that relies basically on information about a large range of photographers that post-processing images so anyway the D haze is really what's going to bring that that out but then it kind of changes the color a little bit so I might just warm that back up again and that was a little too green so I'll add a little bit more magenta and now we're starting to get somewhere maybe some textures gonna bring that out some contrast so I'll bring the highlights down a little bit more I'm just starting to get those godrays right just those like simple adjustments that's all that's all we're doing which is kind of cool I probably since this is a sunset I do want to add a little bit more warming so we'll bring that out a little bit and then the information that where do I want to draw the eye is right into the middle where these godrays are right but right now it's kind of you're gonna run into this a lot the lights kind of like even right so what I want to do is change that what tool could I used to change out I'm gonna use a gradient tool and just drag down and just darken the top if you add a little bit of contrast maybe a little bit of D haze no Thea is gonna change the color maybe a little bit of clarity there you go just a little bit I'm also go through the same from the bottom something like that don't make that a little more drastic I'm gonna H to hide it and I'll see what just with that one tool it's something that you shouldn't notice that's like makeup right you shouldn't notice until you take it away and so you never notice that that's what we did it's sort of like I've been yet but it's the whole top and bottom part of the image fact I could probably add a vignette as well in it what that wouldn't hurt because I want to focus your eye right in the middle of frame and it actually is in the middle of frame now I can take the roundness sorry the feather off so I can see where I want to adjust this and what shape I want this to be and then double click out to zero back out before after but you can't get this in camera you're not going to get this looking camera you capture the wrong ingredients in camera but this you have to visualize this this is what I can do with this image if you get to the point where you look at the backyard camera and you see this and you're thinking in your mind you're seeing this you're in a good spot right and seeing this will help you inform you when you're going out shooting in the future and you look at the back of your camera I got that shot I can move on right don't throw it away how else would we do this further well we can burn a Dodge we already have our Sun race I could start there I can go to my brush tool click on custom and I should have here warm light race probably make this smaller to simulate the light race probably change the feather a little bit I can kind of drag that out such a weight that just a little bit that's I was gonna be way too much but it doesn't matter cuz I can bring that down just a very very very subtle way that I might even see if the DA's is going to bring that out further I really want to do is I want to do the opposite as well so I hit K and K again that's a shortcut for brush now I have a new brush I could just click new as well now I'm going to darken things down a little bit in Ella more contrast I can kind of paint in here as well it's very basic but it's just there to kind of show you that it's something you can used to accentuate it double click this and just a little bit of contrast is all you need it should be very subtle all right can you see that difference you're just adding a little bit of mood to the image and I'm just accentuate those godrays that's all it's even a little bit too much but I wanted to I wanted it so you can actually see what I'm doing that's it we did talk about HSL much but it's also something you want to consider as we can adjust the hue click this target adjustment tool and we can tweak the hue so if that looked a little too yellow we can tweak that we can also just illuminance if that was too bright hover over there and I can bring that detail back just in the brightest part of the image right I could also use a radial filter tool and highlight and just mask by the highlights but this is just a little bit easier to use all right so that's our before that's or after it's supposed to look like this it's like being a recording studio wants to capture the entire range of information and it's your job and it doesn't have to be complicated to get that because that's what you want to pre visualize but you're not going to get that in camera you shouldn't necessarily get that in camera you should capture all the details and you have a simple way of doing this questions about that how are you looking on time here two minutes okay well then I will leave it at that let's just say if you do have any questions again I'll bring up my information send me an email I'm happy to answer any questions I know it's a lot to take in this is kind of the fun part but it can sound like a little complicated if you do this over and over and over again feel free to watch this slow it down look what I was doing for those of you that are in the audience or those that are the intrastate area next weekend Saturday and Sunday this is a deep dive on literally everything we need to know they cover this but we do everything else workflow digital asset management kind of share your images how to social media how to do everything with them right from soup to nuts everything about Lightroom this is a part of it but this is a really important part if you have questions about our process questions about anything at all Lightroom wise or just put photographically send me an email I'm happy to help you out and we'll take it from there you can also look at my website I have resources on there as well the gear that I use there's apps that I use some of the older presentations this will be recorded and beyond be Nations website as well if you don't see it reach out to me I'll get you a link but again I'm thank you so much for coming out I'm really happy you did if you have any questions reach out anytime thank you very much thank you

Channel: B&H Photo Video

Views: 151,707

Keywords: photography masterclass, lightroom photo editing, how to use lightroom, editing photos, photography course, photo editing tutorial, lightroom tips, lightroom editing tutorial.adobe photoshop lightroom, lightroom portrait editing, how to edit in lightroom, editing photos in lightroom.how to edit like a pro, lightroom editing pc, photoshop lightroom, how to use adobe lightroom, post processing, lightroom tutorials, lightroom course, editing in lightroom, photography class, bandh

Id: OpwMlDtqbK4

Length: 119min 23sec (7163 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 27 2020