Advanced Editing Techniques in Lightroom | My Complete Workflow

I'm taking north and in this video I'm gonna show you my entire workflow editing a photo from start to finish in Lightroom [Music] what is up YouTube I'm photographer Tim Northey or TK North thanks so much for coming through to my youtube channel today's video is all about editing in Lightroom so the idea of this video is to show you my workflow in Lightroom see how I achieve different effects using different panels in Lightroom and edit a photo from start to finish now I do all my photo editing in Lightroom with the occasional little tweak in Photoshop which I'll also be doing today I do use a lot of my own presets when editing as well which you can find on my website if you have purchased them in the past I really do appreciate the support it means you value my work and it really allows me to keep doing what I love so thank you for the support if you're interested you can check those out as well but today I'm going to be walking through a photo edit from start to finish so let's jump into Lightroom and get started so we've got a photo open here in Lightroom it's actually a photo I've edited before but I'm gonna go back and edit it again it's one of my favourite photos it's a picture of my fiance Michelle our first big trip away overseas together to Japan this particular view of Mount Fuji I haven't really seen before and we kind of stumbled on it by chance so it's real favorite shot of mine so my first step when editing any photos is to come to lens Corrections I like to turn on remove chromatic aberration and enable profile Corrections I recommend doing this for pretty much all your photos it's just gonna fix any abnormalities that may come in depending on what lens you're using it will fix the distortion it's also going to remove that chromatic aberration so I recommend doing this for all your photos you can even switch this on so when you import it automatically applies those setting which can be worthwhile doing as well so the next step usually I would crop the image this image I know I'm gonna do a little edit in Photoshop later on so I don't want to crop in until the final step just in case I want to use different aspect ratios I'd rather keep the file as big as possible and then crop mean later on although I'm not going to crop I'm just gonna straighten it a little bit make sure Michelle is right in the center of the image there which is so the next thing I want to do is just straight in this photo a little bit so I'm going to come down to transform usually I'd hit Auto for this one it hasn't found any upright correction so I'm going to come over to guided and just mark a couple of points let's go from there to this line so they become nice and straight and to make a vertical point let's just put one on the telegraph pole so it becomes nice and straight as well and you can see there I've got a pretty straight photo I might even just rotate that a fraction and just bring in so Michelle is nice and centered the next step I'm going to start adjusting the tone of the image I always do this as my first step after straightening and cropping so let's come up to the tone curve initially actually for this one I'm just going to play with the highlights a little bit in the basics panel just to get back my sky and then come down to the tone curve so if you're unfamiliar with the tone curve my last video I explained in a lot more detail how to use the tone curve how to get the most out of the time curve and why you should be editing using the tone curve because it is such a powerful tool this I'm going to go through quite quickly though so make sure you check out the video if you don't quite understand or follow what I'm doing here the first step I'm going to put 3 points on my curve one for shadows mid-tones and one for the highlights I'm just going to tweak those a little bit so I'll bring out my highlights a tiny bit those mid-tones I'm just going to bring up a little bit as well shadows I'm just going to darken a tiny tiny bit bring up to create a very slight fade at the end of the tone curve there and maybe do the same on the opposite end for those highlights so just a little bit the next thing I want to do is come down to my blue curve again I'm just going to put three points on the curve and slightly adjust the blue in the shadows and the mid-tones so the shadows is down here I can pull adding a little bit of yellow or adding a little bit of blue I'm just going to add in a tiny bit of yellow to the shadows there and maybe add in a tiny bit of blue to my highlights so I turn that off you can just see those slight adjustments that I've made with the tone curve there so the next step come back to our basic panel and start playing around a bit more with the tone of the image so I'm going to increase the shadows a little bit just to get back a little bit more detail in Michelle they're also in those trees and I'm going to bring down this why it's a little bit just a fraction maybe bring those shadows up a tiny bit more and I'm just gonna darken the blacks a little bit about they're still losing a little bit of detail here so Karen let's just bump up there shows a tiny bit more tiny bit of contrast I also want to add in so let's just drag that across a fraction I don't want to add too much I'm gonna leave clarity D haze and texture for the moment because I'm going to use a radial filter later on to play around with that so let's just leave that there for the moment the next thing I want to do is play around with my split tones so split tones usually I will be pretty consistent with this too the highlights I'm gonna add kind of a yellowy orange or is it optional when you're doing this just so you can see which color you're adding in as you slide and then I'm just going to increase that a very tiny bit so let's just go maybe eight on this one shadows I'm gonna add in a little bit of a quarrel blue so let's go about two hundred two will do and again I'm just gonna bring that up a real tiny bit so my next step after those spit tones I'm gonna come all the way down to camera calibration and just tweak my colors a little bit this is where you can change your colors and kind of manipulate color a little bit I usually do this before going to my HSL tab to make further adjustments now again I'm gonna start with red primary so I'm going to bring those Reds a little bit more to orange and then I'm gonna bring the blue primary a little bit more towards aqua you can see how that's just changing those colors a little bit then I'm just gonna play around with green have a look what it does you can see a little bit more orange or a little bit more green that way so let's bring it a little bit more towards yellow if I'd turn just camera calibration off you can see just the slight difference it's made in the color there so the next thing I'm gonna come up to HSL and play around with that color a little bit more now the Blues I'm reasonably happy with that shade of blue of course I could make it a little bit more awkward if you wanted or a little bit more kind of deep blue I'm just going to bring it a very fraction towards aqua and bring the ackward towards blue maybe just bring that back a fraction so the next thing I want to do is bring these yellows a little bit more towards an orange about there let's come over to saturation I'm gonna reduce my blues a little bit just fade that out desaturate that a little bit then I'm going to come over to luminance and play around with the blue as well now luminance if you're unfamiliar it's basically how the light reflects off the color so if I change that you can see it's going to be less reflective to light if you bring it to the left and I often like to do that with my blues I'm going to play around with orange and yellow here as well you can see how that's kind of affected that 40 on the road and also the trees a little bit I'm gonna actually reduce the luminance there on orange and maybe bring it up just to save some of that back in the grass and the trees let's go about there so I'm gonna hit before-and-after just to see where at with this edit you can see it's already had it in change the color a little bit I actually think it needs to be straightened tiny bit I think that is probably more accurate yeah I'm pretty happy with that so the next step I'm gonna add in a couple of radial filters before I play around with a few other things so let's add in one around Michelle there this one is going to try and draw a bit more attention to the subject so I'm gonna bring clarity up I'm gonna bring my whites up reduce the contrast a little bit just make that a little bit smaller so it's a little bit less obvious and then I'm just gonna use my brush and erase parts of that radial filter around the outside so if I turn on show selected mask overlay I can see a little bit more but I'm actually erasing there on the road this just means it's mostly going to be affecting Michelle rather than area around her so you can see if I really crank that up it's not affecting the road as much so the second thing I want to do is add a bigger radial filter around Michelle this is to create a little bit of a vignette rather than great one around the edge of the border by using a radial filter you can kind of select the area you're creating that vignette so make sure this box is unchecked I want it to affect the area outside of the circle I'm gonna make that nice and big and not too dark I only want it to be kind of a fraction maybe reduce the clarity just a little bit on that again just to bring a bit more attention into the subject I'm also going to just reduce the sharpness a tiny bit with that other radial filter I'm actually just going to increase the sharpness a little bit again it just helps add attention to your subject so again let's have a quick look at before and after see where we're at and see where this edits kind of heading still losing a little bit of detail in the shadows there so let's just bump that up a tiny bit more and I'm reasonably happy with that so the next step I'm going to add another radial filter over to this area it's already a bit of natural light there you can see where the shadows are falling so I'm really going to increase that and make it look like the sun's really bright over in this area of the image let's grab another radial filter nice and big this time place it there I'm going to increase the exposure on this one add in a little bit of a haze I've already got a negative clarity there which I want which is great and then bring it towards orange I'm just gonna do that maybe to about there and just drag that over so it's nice and big maybe reduce my exposure a little bit let's have a quick look at before and after again starting to look pretty nice definitely like that a little bit of extra light that's added in from that radial filter so the next thing I want to do I'm gonna start to play around with the detail a little bit so if we come down to detail I'm gonna start by sharpening this image a little bit I always like to hit option or alt when I'm doing this because you can really see what you're doing so I'm just going to increase that a little bit not a bad idea to really zoom in as well when you're doing that so you can really see the detail and the sharpening that you're applying so let's just go up to about 50 there so it's really useful to use this masking slider because it's going and going to sharpen areas the photo that you want to sharpen so again I'm going to hit option and just slide across until I'm happy with that which for this one is probably about there but I want to sharpen too much of detail around the road it's mostly on Michelle there which is good so add in maybe a little bit more detail as well and I'm pretty happy with that so let's zoom back out now noise reduction there was a little bit of noise when I zoomed in there so let's just bring that up a fraction maybe a maybe to about ten happy with that detail I'm just gonna bring up a tiny bit contrast up a tiny bit color I'm just going to make sure there's no kind of colors where there shouldn't be so usually I bring that up to about 40 even a little bit less it's fine so let's go about there a little bit more detail and a little bit more smoothness now I've gone through this quite quickly because these are settings that I usually use for most of my photos obviously some you would need to play around with a bit more but that's a pretty standard adjustment for sharpening and noise reduction when I'm editing so pretty much finished with the Edit here in Lightroom the next step is I want to open it up in Photoshop remove this car here and maybe remove some of this detail on the road so let's jump into Photoshop and get started so I've got my photo open here in Photoshop the first thing I want to do is zoom in and get rid of this car here now lucky for us as soon as we stopped here and got this nice shot this couple decided to park in the background and take some photos of their own which is always the way when you find a nice spot so first step to remove the car I'm just going to draw around that very quickly so let's use the polygonal lasso so quickly I'm just going to draw around the car make sure my feather is not too high I've got it at five they're quickly kind of draw around that don't have to be too precise see my feather at five and I'm going to right click fill content-aware and that's gonna do its best to fill in that area which has done a pretty good job already I'm just gonna fix up this line a little bit to do that I'm going to copy the line from this side so again I'm going to use the same tool and just copy that line all the way up through there I'm going to right click and I'm going to lay out by a copy that so a bit of an amateur mistake here in Photoshop it's always a good start to duplicate that base layer or your background layer just in case you make any changes and you do want to come back to the original image you've always got that background layer as of backup I forgot on this one which is not a good habit to get into so let's go back to that layer that I've copied I'm going to hit T to transform and I'm going to flip that horizontally and then gonna bring that over to this side and just line it up as best I can with that line and then I'm just going to erase part of that so just make sure if it's in nicely arrays those bits of the trees if i zoom back out you've got a nice line there and I've got rid of the car which is great so the next thing I want to do is get rid of some of these markings on the road which are a little bit distracting so for this I'm just going to try and use the Spot Healing Brush and see how that goes so come back down to this layer and I'm just going to draw over those areas on the road which I want to clean up be a bit more precise when you're doing this but I'm just going to do it nice and quickly get rid of some of those spots and a little bit less distracting for your eye this is a handy tool doesn't always work well like you see just there but in most cases it will work reasonably well so you can always just try again and move it slightly and it might do a better job could also use your clone stamp for this now for this area here I might just use the clone stamp I'm gonna select my area that I want to do just make my brush a little bit bigger maybe turn down the opacity and I'm just going to draw over this line a little bit just so it's not as obvious there the only thing I've created a bit of a line here so let's just draw another point there and tidy that up a little bit so if I turn that off you can see it's kind of just tidied up the road nicely there so the next thing I want to do is just increase the shadow here where Michelle standing so you can see there's a nice bit of light coming from here that we've already increased I'm just going to match that by increasing the shadow where Michelle is so I'm going to come up to this reasonably clean layer that I've already got here when I come down to the brush tool gonna select my color so let's zoom in a little bit so we can see what we're doing I'm gonna come up and select the color that's already there in the shadow so that's pretty perfect and then I'm just gonna paint in a little bit of a shadow out through here so let's start with a really small brush and just increase that a little bit there you can see my opacity is turned down a lot that's because I don't want it to be super obvious I'm just doing this very lightly and even though I'm pretty happy with that I don't want to go overboard again if I turn that off and see it's just increased it a little bit without making it super obvious I'm gonna hit command s to save I've got that saved and I can open it back up in Lightroom final step is to make some little adjustments and to crop in Lightroom so it will automatically open back in Lightroom because of how I opened it in Photoshop so the first thing I want to do is I want to crop in so let's go 5 by 4 because I've left this to the final step it means I've got the whole image to play with if I decide to export in a different ratio it's all there ready to go so let's go 5x4 there to start with maybe I'll just go up a tiny bit even let's go to about there just so Fuji kind of stands out in the center of the image now the next thing I want to do I still like this little bit of light but let's increase it a little bit more I'm gonna go pretty heavy on this edit which may not be to everyone's cup of tea but I am quite a heavy editor this one I'm just gonna increase that a little bit more make sure that's not too bright and here you can see they're completed before and after with all those edits in Lightroom Photoshop and then back in Lightroom so there you have it that's my entire workflow from start to finish editing in Lightroom and a little bit in photo hope you did find this video useful remember to give it a good old thumbs up if you did get some value out of it and remember to subscribe so you can check out my other content as well for now thanks so much for watching I'm ticking off hope to see you guys here very soon bye for now [Music]

Channel: TKNORTH

Views: 40,339

Keywords: lightroom, tutorial, tips, editing, photography, photo editing, tknorth, tk north, lightroom tutorials, education, adobe lightroom, learn lightroom, lightroom tutorial, lightroom editing tutorial, instagram, how to, lightroom workflow, advanced lightroom editing, lightroom edit, lightroom tips, advanced lightroom techniques, adobe photoshop

Id: 4qRqe_5De3A

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 14 2020