AMATEUR VS PRO PHOTOGRAPHERS: Here’s the difference.

hey guys Ryan here at signature edits and inside of this photography tutorial we are going to be talking about one of the most important things you need to understand to improve your photography and your editing now this one little thing pretty much makes the difference between professional photographers and amateurs and if you understand it it's going to improve everything about your photography your photos your editing your life in general okay so let's get into it cue that intro [Music] alright alright so let's get into it as I said today we are talking about probably the most important component in photography you work on this you improve this it's going to affect everything about your photos both when you take them and when you edit them can you guess what it is so I'm going to give you a hint it starts with a C and it's under the exposure slider in a Lightroom yes we're talking about contrast today and everything that contrast means it's not just this slider it does a whole lot more than that and really everything about your images is made up of contrast and whether your images are good or bad is a result of what kind of contrast you're using so we're going to talk about contrast what it means what it is different types of contrast and how you can use it to improve your photography and your editing okay so with that out of the way what exactly do I mean when I say contrast well in Lightroom you might think contrast is just when you make the brights brighter and the darks darker and you wouldn't be wrong when you grab this slider the same goes if you're using luminar or Photoshop when you increase contrast you're basically making the brights brighter the darks darker and the difference between those two that's the contrast the amount of difference the juxtaposition between white and black between light and dark is how much contrast there is going on but that's really only one component of contrast that's basically the contrast of brightness now I think one of the key things that most amateur photographers miss out on and that professionals really kind of hone into is that there are more types of contrast than just the contrast between lights and darks in your imagery both in your edits and in your actual shot so let's head over to an example photo and show you what I mean we're going to go over to the HSL panel here which stands for hue saturation and luminance now we just talked about the luminance contrast basically the contrast between the lights and the darks so for example if we have this dress here this dress is white or bright and there's a green grass is darker now we can increase the contrast in this image and make our subject pop out of our background by simply taking the greens and lowering them and likewise we could take our blues and we can make them brighter just watching her dress here's the contrast before and after you can see how she just pops out of the image when we actually make that one simple change of luminance contrast now the same thing goes for our saturation that's a different type of contrast you can have saturation be a form of making your subject pop out of the background and just enhancing things in your photo so for example if we here we've got this saturated grasp and a pretty desaturated dress we can enhance this even further about taking the saturation down in the blues so that we just take the saturation out of her dress and let's just zoom in here so you can see and then we're going to take the saturation up in the greens now this is going to look you know a little bit too far but it's just for the sake of this example you can see the contrast once we reset our illuminance panel here in the saturation makes her pop out over the background even more now obviously this isn't an example of a good edit is just showing you that you can use saturation contrast as well as luminance contrast now the same thing goes for hue so I'm gonna jump over here let's reset our saturation and show you our hue so if we pull up our basic color wheel image again here so hue is just a fancy word for what color we are choosing it describes different wavelengths of light and red has a different wavelength from yellow from green from cyan now the farther away these wavelengths are from one another the more contrast you're going to have between your color so for example if we have a red subject and a blue background we're going to have maximum hue contrast likewise if we had a purple background and a green subject that's going to be maximum hue contrast so if we zoom in here on to our example photo again we look at our subject who is wearing a white dress but it's kind of got a blue tint to it because of the sky the reflections the shadows well blue is the opposite of yellow so if we wanted maximum color contrast we would go in here and instead of having green grass which is right next to blue in terms of contrast we'd shift that green towards yellow and maybe make sure we shift the blue towards magenta a little bit so that they're exactly opposite each other for maximum contrast so I can go in here to the hue I can grab it my green green grass and take it right down towards yellow now this is just for the sake of this example not an example of a perfect edit we're going to then grab this dress which is probably under the Aqua and teal and it'll take it up towards more of a navy blue or a purpley blue now you can see we've created quite a bit of contrast where there was none before here's before and here's after so you can see how our subject is now kind of popping off the background a little bit more so there you have three massive ways you can improve the contrast and kind of the focus of your edit simply by paying attention to the luminance saturation and the hue again we can go in here we can use our subjects luminance by raising that up and then lowering the background luminance will create contrast we go to our saturation we can erase the saturation of our background lower the saturation of our subject for improved contrast and we can go to our hue and make sure we're using opposite ends of the color wheel for maximum contrast so we'll go in here and we'll take our greens we'll take them down to maybe a brown and we'll take our blues up towards Navy for kind of maximizing the contrast in this image now this isn't an example of the perfect edit but you can see the difference in our contrast and how our subject just starts to pop off the background so so much more so you can apply this to all of your images and all of your edits start thinking about okay what contrasts am i working with between our lights and our darks between the saturation of different colors and between the hue of different colors and really that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding and using contrast because contrast is what allows us to see an image and even know what's going on inside of it in the first place so you see the sky well the reason we know that this is sky and this is a mountain is the different contrast between the textures between the different colors between the patterns that are going on here the reason we know that her hair is here and her face is here is because of the different contrast between her hair in both brightness and in saturation and in texture and in pattern all of these different contrasts help us understand what's going on in an image and the more aware you are of contrast in your photography and using it to really enhance your photos rather than distract in your photos the more kind of leverage you have to create beautiful imagery so with that in mind let's jump over into another practice image here and in this photo you can see that we have lots of contrast in terms of luminance we've got some very bright areas and some very dark areas our subject is quite a bit brighter than our background however in terms of saturation and in hue we've got very similar colors working here between the background and our subject and same goes with the saturation there's not a big difference so let's see if we can enhance the contrast in this image and what happens when we do that so I've already gone in here and I've created a mask to just mask out the background now if you're wondering how I did this I used a combination of just a normal adjustments and the auto mask and if you wanted tutorial on that I will leave a link in the description below or check out my channel we're going to grab our saturation in the background we're going to turn that down you can see as we do that now this isn't a perfect mask but as we do that the contrast is increase between the saturation of our subject here in the saturation of the background and so they it just naturally looks better things pop off the background more so here's before and here's after right now we can do the same thing with the color with the hue so right now we've got very similar hues between the background and our subject what if we were to take our temperature here we're just going to turn it down the temperature and make the background let's say blue we're going to go completely crazy here looks totally unnatural but that's okay you can see that our background is totally being separated from the foreground as we do that we're increasing the contrast and things just look a lot better so we wouldn't go that far in real life maybe I would grab it to say minus 11 and then after that maybe we'd grab our tint and we take that maybe towards green a little bit so you can see that we've made a lot more contrast in the background and all of a sudden our character is popping out of the background a little bit more and one of the reasons that Hollywood films typically use that teal and orange look with all of their color grades is because it's such a nice contrasting color scheme for skin tones so skin tones naturally fall in the kind of orange yellow red area right around here and then the opposite contrasting color to that is going to be somewhere in this bluish greenish purplish area so we can grab our background and we can put it somewhere into that area so maybe make it a little bit more blue and up here so somewhere around probably there will be more of like the cinematic grade and then we'll just dial everything back so it doesn't look like we've taken it way too far here's before and here's after we've added a lot of contrast to our image and we could do the same thing with other areas of our image by increasing the luminance contrast just darkening everything down and another thing that we can do is increase the contrast of the texture so right now our subject is sharp the background is reasonably blurry but we could even enhance that by taking our texture down or clarity down our sharpness down and of course this is just for demonstration purposes not necessarily the perfect edit but you can see we've made our subject pop off of the background quite a bit so all of these different tools we can use to enhance the contrast in our edits and the same goes when you're actually taking photos so now that we've talked about contrast and how you can use it I want to show you in real life some amazing photographers and some different work that they're creating using contrast both in their compositions and in their edits just to enhance their artwork we're gonna go through that together if this video has been helpful for you please do me a big favor and take a second hit that like button make sure to subscribe and leave me a comment below okay now let's head over and look at some different examples alright so this first example by Maggie Madison beautiful photo I want you to try and think of all the ways that contrast is being used in this image just to enhance and really make it pop the first thing that you should see that's pretty obvious is that our foreground here has really been enhanced there's tons of texture and sharpness in the foreground whereas our background is contrasting it's very smooth very out-of-focus this is both a matter of using the right lens with a low f-stop and also probably enhancing it afterwards in a Lightroom using something like the clarity filter and the texture filter I know if you call these filters sliders whatever it is those tools the next thing that I'm noticing here is we've got a nice contrast between colors so look at the difference between this color here in the background which is kind of this nice I know we'll call it a burnt grass and then we have this really nice kind of saturated Orange so that's another area of contrast next we have the exposure on our foreground versus our background so it looks like at the same time that Maggie was painting through here and enhancing the texture of our foreground she probably went in here and after she did that she raised the exposure up a little bit too just to make the foreground nice and bright while the background was either darkened or just left the same so she probably went in here brightened up her foreground and that added a little bit more contrast to the image made it pop a little bit more now the last thing that I'm noticing here really strong contrast is the contrast of the motion of her hair and our background everything else going on in this shot is static with maybe the exception of these clouds these mountains not movin whereas her hair adds motion to the shot and so our eyes naturally drawn to that motion and the contrast between what's not moving in the background and what is moving in the foreground so I know she might not have necessarily been thinking of it in this way but this kind of contrast going on in the shot really adds that dynamic interest to it okay let's move on to another one this is another example of a movement contrast shots we've got lots of movement in the foreground we've also got really out of focus objects going on in the foreground here and then our background nice and InFocus we've also got something really big in this palace or whatever you want to call this large building next to something at very small these people or also contrasting the fact that birds in a real life are quite small compared to people but in this shot this bird is almost as big if not a little bit bigger than these people so sometimes contrast is not even a matter of editing in your composition it's a matter of doing the unexpected or perceiving and portraying things in a different light than what we're used to so we're not used to seeing a bird bigger than a person so this really makes it a much more dynamic and interesting shot we've got contrast going on in our luminance so you can see that our couple here very black everything else in this shot very kind of washed out and white and bright okay so thanks Lyn for that as beautiful next we have Jan Roboto I think and this shot is both hilarious and there's a lot of contrast going on that I want you to think about so what we normally have here is people sitting in a car pretty standard situation but because of their expressions and the motion going on in their bodies that's adding a whole lot of contrast to the shot because what we expect to see which is people just normally driving in a car is not what we're actually seeing and so I want you to think of photography and your framing and your compositions it's all about contrast but not just in terms of light not just in terms of color but also in terms of energy and in terms of what people expect to see if you give people the unexpected you add that level of contrast to your shot and that's what's going on here really really cool we've also got motion going on here we've got motion contrast but then we're kind of static in terms of they're sitting in the car not moving but they're also moving because they're clearly reacting with their facial expressions and then we've got a really nice sharp area and everything else has been softened and made to look like it's giving it this motion blur effect I don't know if they were actually moving or not my guess is they were just sitting in here with a nice wide angle lens they did this shot and then afterwards most of this was added in post by the photographer okay let's head over to our next one here's another example of contrast that's really really cool so we're not just talking about contrast in terms of light and dark we're also talking about contrast in terms of what you expect so normally people obviously are not rotated this way simply by rotating your image adds contrast to what we're normally used to seeing a human body looked like when we see it sideways and parallel it's just different there's a contrasting ideas a contrast in expectation okay this here an example of something small next to something big so we've got contrast going on in that way we've also got contrast our foreground and our background our background is obviously very very blurry here and our foreground is a very very sharp this photo here we've got something very very small next to something clearly very very big we've also got really really nice color contrast between the bridge and our background below I'm sure that this was probably burnt a little bit by the photographer so the exposure might have looked like this to begin with and they painted it in darkened it down enhanced that contrast there we've also got texture and then this has been kind of made less texture II is that a word less texture II it's been defined okay this this photo is just hilarious and brings a smile to my face so I thought I'd put it in here but thank you Nicole for being such a wonderful photographer this photo is an example of something we're used to which is just a normal photo of a dog next to something we're not used to which is a party hat on a dog so I think that's really cool we've also got nice contrast going on obviously between the background light background dark foreground and a nice contrast between everything here how to focus because there's nothing in focus and then the dog our subject very powerful contrast because we don't have anything going on in the background and that's one thing that I think as a photographer you can work on maybe more than anything else and see instant repent is focusing on your backgrounds a little bit more because if your backgrounds are distracting it doesn't matter what's going on in the foreground is going to take away from your image so for example this photo here pulled off the internet we have our subject here and we're not going to talk about the pose or the lighting or the quality of the camera we're just going to talk about the fact that everything in this photo is in focus and everything in the background super super distracting so we've got it's just really busy there's these plants going on there's this ugly kind of planter these ugly bricks this ugly cement this ugly path in the back I mean I guess the path is not bad but my point is we've got a lot going on in the background whereas if we were to say enhance the clarity and the texture and the sharpness to add an absurd degree of our subject I made this mask in advance to make this a little faster take our texture down and our clarity down in the background darken a little bit and brighten our subject it's still not a good photo but you can see what a big difference that makes compared to beforehand so using a faster lens or enhancing that inside of Lightroom is really going to make a big difference to your images and also just being aware if the photographer instead of taking this particular shot had moved our subject now let's say I can't really see very well but let's say we got her under under this area right under this tree and we were shooting in this direction so now we don't have anything right behind our subject we have quite a lot of distance before these trees so even though this lens doesn't have a lot of depth of field because we've got so much distance between our subject and between the trees these trees will be more out of focus and not as distracting so that's probably the way I would have shot it were I doing it also the fact that we've got contrast working against us in that this part of the image the background is way brighter than the foreground so one of the best tips I can give you is when you're looking for background look for one that hopefully has some distance between your subject and the background and also look for a background that is darker than your subject if your subject is the brightest thing your eyes naturally drawn to the brightest part of the photo so that's going to do a huge amount of favor to you as a photographer okay let's jump back over here to our good examples moving on over we've got another photo here by Silas Chow and this one's really cool and hilarious again we've got contrast here and what really makes the shot is we've got really out of focus foreground and a nice InFocus background contrast in composition and here we've got another one that I just thought was kind of interesting that we don't think about too much is contrast in posing so the man is looking towards the woman here and the woman is actually looking in this direction so you see the contrast in directions going on here same goes with these kids one's looking this way one's looking this way and if we look at different poses let's go back over here most of the time you'll find poses that seem to work and flow our couple is looking in different directions not right at each other but slightly off to the side of one another seems to make for the best kind of poses so this one again this butterfly probably is more like this and the girl is looking like this this isn't hard and set it's just an example of how I lines and posing you can use those to create contrast as well okay job and back over here we've got an example of contrast in motion so we've got our subjects which are not moving at all this cool photo by Meg Beathard and then we've got our background which is full-on motion blur this is a really cool way to use contrast in your image create motion or use motion to set your image apart next year we've got opposite directions so we've got a couple things going on first we've got a static background so our background not really moving and then we've got people here who are all clearly seeking shelter trying to get out of the rain and then we've got our subject which is coming forwards towards us so we've got a contrast in movement going on here that's really adding powerfully to the image contrast that too I've got another one in here somewhere hello this photo where pretty much everyone in this image is walking away from the camera and although obviously other things in this photo are not as good either the contrast just isn't there if our subjects were coming towards us and everyone going away it's much much stronger hopping back over here we've also got the contrast of movement in this direction for the rain whereas our subject is looking in the complete opposite direction so giving us that contrast there alright this is another example of contrast between something big and something small but also something kind of unexpected giving it a different perspective so we've got our subjects here who are larger in our view then the entire city and they're higher than the entire city which is interesting in itself because it's the opposite of what we're used to we're used to being below in the buildings and having everyone be underneath but these people are above the buildings which gives us that contrast and also something big next to something small we've got contrast in light versus contrast in dark all around them this one's really cool Mick panic we've got a photo here that has lots of contrast going on in the colors but I think the main kind of thing that about about this photo that is so beautiful is the contrast in textures so everywhere we have different textures moving against each other we've got these bushes then these leaves and the main reason that this couple doesn't get lost in the midst of all this texture is because if we actually zoom in here and you look at what's surrounding the couple the photographer has both framed our subject so that they're kind of in an area that had some empty space behind them but it looks like afterwards in Lightroom he's gone and he's further enhanced that by just painting in here and I don't know if he did this or not but I'm assuming he went in here he painted and he just took the exposure down around them for contrast and brightness and he took down something like the clarity or this sharpness in some way shape or form if we zoom in we can see that we have texture everywhere except for immediately framing our couple which makes our couple stand out so so much more than if there's texture and the same exposure going on around the outside of them so I'd encourage you look at the photographer's whose work you really really love and dissect their images look at them say okay what's going on in this composition how are they using contrasting ideas contrasting framing contrasting colors or textures or brightnesses to really make their images work for them and when you master this when you start applying this to your photography to your composition and to your editing it's going to improve everything so that does it for our tutorial today I hope it was helpful for you if it was do me a big favor hit that like button make sure to subscribe and leave me a comment below if you have different ideas techniques or tricks surrounding contrast I would love to hear them alright I will see you in the next video peace [Music] you

Channel: Signature Edits

Views: 756,842

Rating: 4.9011135 out of 5

Keywords: Learn photography, photography techniques, photography tutorial, editing, photography, photography fundamentals, photography lighting, lighting tutorial, photography basics, lightroom, photo editing, lightroom for beginners, wedding photography tutorial

Id: oeS25WrpMkA

Length: 22min 2sec (1322 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 27 2020