ARCHITECTURE PHOTOGRAPHY - Shooting, Editing, And Getting Paid Well

in this video I'm really excited because I'm gonna be sharing with you some insights from a real professional architectural photography job I've shot recently I'll be talking to you about how I capture the images and how I take the raw image from something like this and through some quick processing I'm able to get back to the client a really nice professional result like this if you're new to this channel my goal is to help improve your photography and editing skills through sharing some of my hopefully valuable insights I've learned along the way during my professional career if that's something you're interested in please go ahead and like the video subscribe and hit that Bell icon so that you're notified when I release a new video but in this one you're here to hear about architectural photography and me sharing my workflow so let's get into that I'll talk about how and why I shoot the way that I do and then we'll look at the actual editing of the architectural photos so how I use Lightroom to quickly get the proofs back and then when the architect lets me know exactly which images he'd like from the shoot I then process them in Photoshop and I'll share with you some of my thoughts behind how I do this and then at the very end of the video I'm gonna talk to you about how I add what I call my secret sauce it's the little bit of differentiation that elevates my imagery hopefully above my competitors in the field and I think that's really important nowadays more than ever in this world that we live in where imagery is all around us with super saturated in often high quality imagery and if you want to stand out from your competitors you're going to need to find an edge and I'll share with you a tool that I'm currently using and have been for a little while now just to finish off my imagery and take it to that next level so let's dive into it guys when I first get back from a shoot I'm really excited just to see the imagery see what I've got I'm all excited and I can't wait to download it so that's exactly what I do I head in here to the studio and I get the photos downloading room has an import feature where you can pull your photos straight from your card put a preset on at that point I don't use that feature and the reason is I like to do it manually and be sure that I'm actually backing up my imagery not just to my computer but to other devices as well so my workflow goes something like this I'll come back with my memory card that is going straight into Dingley tangley like this also known as a card reader that goes in there I'm backing them up or downloading them straight to my C Drive and for my C Drive I'm using an MDOT two SSD currently the fastest hard drives that you can use and for me that's really important because everything's moving as quickly as it can through this workflow and I'm gonna work on those photos from that drive until I'm fully finished and the clients picked everything and all the editing is done at that point I will then move them away to some secondary storage I don't format the card I keep all the imagery on the card until the final delivery is given to the architect the reason for that is just absolutely covering myself if anything happens to any of those images I've got one more backup here another backup that I make is to another SSD an external drive and basically that is just one of these SSDs that I'm plugging into another card reader USB 3 connection and I'm literally just backing up that folder of for me any F files just my RAW files straight for my camera it is purely for peace of mind they are then going into a safe and being locked away and you might be thinking well this is crazy all this backing up that's just too much but part of your professionalism is making sure that your clients images are 100% safe so let's have a look at the project and see how actually imported the imagery I have a folder set up with a folder structure within it which includes interior/exterior rejects details and unsorted and that is where my photos will first go into the unsorted folder and I will literally just paste those into there from there I'll open up Lightroom and I will use Lightroom's file import photos and video or just come down to this button and click import and this section is key for getting things done quickly what you want to do is actually have a develope setting applied during import so I can come to my 80 architecture presets and I will put import proof full dynamic range from there the photos will then appear within my folder relating to the project and within unsorted from there I will group the photos into stacks and actually just move them into the relevant folders details exterior interior and if there's shots that I took as test imagery or a sequence that I'm just not happy with that finds its way into this rejects folder here once I've done that I can get rid of my unsorted just to clean things up slightly when I want to get the architectural photos back to the architect as quickly as possible I'm doing that in a form of proofing basically sending an unfinished representation of the shot it's going to be close enough that the architect can get a sense of what the finished image will be like but it means I'm able to do that showing what I captured without spending too much time because after all when you're doing a professional job time is money the old adage is true so you want to get those photos turned around as quickly as possible and there are three main things that I do in Lightroom to make that possible the first one is what I talked about just previously which is making sure you've got a preset applied upon import something that's going to get your photos looking pretty good straight out of the gate and the key to having that work successfully is to have that preset work on a universal level and what I mean by that is it's not going to be perfect for every shot but you want it to work for as many photos as you possibly can straight out of the gate and my approach to that is increasing the dynamic range when you're shooting architecture often they'll be enduring interiors you'll see the exterior or if you're shooting a building itself the sky might blow out the foreground is very dark but you want to be able to show all the detail so that the person who's actually viewing the image will actually get a sense of what is possible what the final image can look like so what I'm going to do now is just walk you through what I have set up on my preset and then I'll talk you through the two other key ingredients to making your photos look really good really quickly in Lightroom okay the image that we see here in front of us is what I actually sent through as a proof to the architect so there is still a lot of work that would need to be done to this particular photo to make it something that they'd want to put in their portfolio or enter into a competition but it certainly gives the architect enough to visualize where we're headed with this photo if you look at what the before of this image looks like you can see that we've actually come a long way from that to this but we've come a long way with just those three keys that I was talking about before that allow us to get there really quickly so let me share with you exactly what that is first of all let me just talk to you very briefly about how I shoot so as you can see here we've got a bracketed set of five images as in I'm shooting a base exposure the first one I shoot to that a darker two stops under one stop under one stop brighter and then two stops brighter and that just gives me the flexibility when I get back in front of the computer and I'm putting my final shots together that if I need pieces that need to be brighter or darker I've got the resource material right there to use when I shot this we can see that I'm actually looking up towards the building we're at pretty much head height I would say on a tripod and I'm working very quickly because it was actually a news crew that was right there on the pavement sidewalk for you Americans and I was I kindly asked them just to move while I got this shot and they were really gracious about it but they also had their work to do so I moved quickly to get this shot I may have actually gone in and picked up some of these bigger leaves that are scattered around and things like that cleaned up just a little bit in camera but I didn't have time so that's all stuff that can be fixed later but we don't need to worry about that for the proof as you can see here so this bracketed set of five images what I would do is take the first of those images and the preset would be applied on import so let me show you what that preset would do to it so that's a tea-import proof for dynamic range so if I come off of it and apply it you can see that it's really making a big difference straightaway so let's see what changes that preset is actually making and if you want to copy this preset by all means use my settings it's a really good starting point for architectural photography so let's click it and see what it's doing first of all in the basic panel we are applying a profile the standard Adobe color one just doesn't cut it so let's browse for something that's camera matching and in my opinion flat is a great one to work with for architectural work if you go to something like landscape or vivid it's really high contrast and we don't necessarily get the detail out of it that we want so let's double click flat and that is applied I'm going to leave my camera white-balance as shot again it's just one more thing to worry about if you start trying to tweak that at this point sure for the finished image you might want to come in and change the color balance slightly but we'll leave that exactly where it is the contrast is going to be altered but for now I just want to show you what we do with the highlights and the shadows we bring down the highlights and we push up the shadows and straightaway we're getting more dynamic range as in we're getting more information into that image but that comes at a cost and that cost is that it's losing contrast so what I will do here is I'll actually boost that contrast up to around there and now we're starting to see a little bit more of an interesting image with that contrast so if we just reset that change we've made so far and then reapply it we can see that we're now seeing all the details of the architecture we can see that this has come at a cost though we have not got any pure blacks we've not got any pure whites and it's looking very washed out so the whites will need to be bumped up and as soon as we do that we're starting to see that the image starts to come alive again we can bring the blacks down slightly and in our contrast we can reintroduce contrast I believe on weight import I have this quite high and probably don't have the blacks pull down or the whites pushed up quite as far something like that I will also come into the presents tab and clarity is a really powerful tool let's throw it all the way to a hundred percent I like to actually push these sliders all the way so you see what's happening and then just pull it back to a point where it's much more subtle and believable we can have a little bit of d haze but not too much we could add the texture slightly and vibrance I also like to increase that just slightly so that any colors that are present in the image are starting to come through again to help the architects and hue or designer whoever's looking at your photography to actually visualize what the end result might be like my preset also boosts the midpoint of the tone curve that's just to give a little bit more life to the photo as well so if we turn that panel off and then on you can see that it's again just breathing a little bit more life into that photo my presets leave the color hue/saturation all of that alone also the split toning is not touched detail I do not sharpen at this point either one of the main reasons I don't at this point is because any change you're making slows your system down slows the processing down sharpening is one of those tools that is just adding another level of processing that we just don't need at the moment the next panel which is really important is lens correction this one is super important and I really advise that you turn on remove chromatic aberration and that will just take care of any of that fringing that you sometimes get particularly in the corners of your frame so if I turn that off you'll see that we're getting a bit of magenta on the left-hand side green on the right it's pretty nasty to look at but as soon as we press remove chrome attic aberration it's taken care of light rooms done a really good job the next thing we want to do is also make sure that we've enabled profile Corrections so tick that and because it's set to default light rooms very clever at getting information from your file it knows that I shot with a Nikon lens the 16 to 35 vibration reduction lens it knows that and it's got a predefined profile which can actually correct the distortion so if I turn that off and then back on the original you can see it's actually got a little bit of barrel distortion where it's kind of bulging the image and that's taken care of and it's also brightened the edges which look like they've got a bit of vignetting around the edges a bit of darkening the Lightroom is also taking care of that transform effects and calibration at this point are all left alone so basically what I've shown you here and if I expand all of these you can see that what changes we've made we've done a profile change to camera flat and that's a camera matching profile we've boosted the contrast and we've dropped the highlights and boosted the shadows which reduced contrast but added detail and that's why we bump the contrast quite heavily up just to counteract that the whites bringing those back up from zero all the way up there basically brightened up our image and made it look a lot more appealing as I move down to the presence tab sure clarity is going to help us as particularly when we're visualizing architecture D Hays yeah let's put a little sprinkling of that but not too much and let's boost the vibrance so we can start to see those colors a little more from there it's just a case of just boosting the mid-tones on the tone curve and making sure that our lens correction is applied which is simply ticking two boxes and the Lightroom is going to take care of the rest so all of those changes that I literally just showed you they're actually applied during import you're going to apply preset during import you've got it saved it puts it on the photos and so you're ready to start work at this point on your photos so so far it's taking you no time at all so the next two steps of take your photos to the next level and actually get them to a point that you're ready to send them through to your architect your interior designer or the real estate agent whoever you're sending these architectural photos through to you need to have them kind of at this place so the next two keys are make sure your verticals are vertical there is absolutely no excuse for one key or non parallel lines there are some fantastic tools in Lightroom and I'm going to show you my favorite one which was introduced in later versions but it's a brilliant tool to make sure that your photos are looking really at their best and the other key is using local adjustments just to fine-tune things and deal with brightness and darkness issues that may be there in the photo and I'll show you a way to do this really quickly so let's dive in and look at the verticals first so back in the old days you probably would have been using these transform sliders and we would have been getting hold of vertical and we would have been tweaking that and then we would have been using horizontal perhaps and then we may have needed to rotate it slightly because we weren't quite dead center then might have to come back ah geez just does your head in don't like that way at all the best way to get rid of that is just hold the Alt key or option on a Mac and just hit reset transform there we go so we're back to where we started I would recommend coming into the guided option so by far the best all-around for doing this in my opinion is using this guided option and that's going to allow you to put four guides on your image usually two is enough to drag down on the left hand side and match the angle that exists there and do the same on the right hand side you're going to click and drag and match the angle on the side of the building let go and pop magic we have a straight building and I love this feature it's so called from here if you want your image automatically cropped we just click the constrain crop button and then if you feel like the composition is off slightly you can use the X and Y axis to actually reframe things ever so slightly so we might want to do that and is part two of our three step process in getting the image ready the next one is looking at localized adjustments so we'll come up to the top and the two that I'd like to use at this stage are the radial filter and the graduated filter graduated filter is great for skies so if we bring a graduated filter down from top to bottom you can hold down shift to constrain it so it's not going off at a weird angle at all hold that shift key pull it down and here whatever your previous setting was is still there so at the moment our temperature is being reduced which actually works quite well for a blue sky you can head the blue further into that blue and you could drop the exposure slightly because skies are usually a bit brighter and you can do whatever you want really here just increase the shadows maybe bring the brightness up slightly and we could certainly increase the clarity because clouds like a little bit of clarity put in there but the problem that you see here is it's applying over the building itself as well so what we gonna use is the range mask and just use color and we're going to grab the dropper here and just drag so don't click but actually drag over a section of the sky and all of a sudden it's applied more to the sky than it is to the building and at this point yes we are still getting a bit of color bleed over the building but I'm not gonna fret about it at this point we can fix all of that later if the client decides to choose this photo which incidentally in this case they did not so you don't want to be spending too much time editing refining removing all those leaves from the foreground retouching the real estate agent sign off the fence at the front what a waste of time that would be if you did all of that and then you're not actually being paid for that photo you're not being paid by someone to license that photo a complete waste so keep it super simple at this point the next tool I'm going to use is just the radial filter and I'm just gonna bring something over the building itself and we're just gonna reset that by double clicking on the temperature and now if I want I can bring the exposure up to brighten the building just to bring our eye in closer there maybe we want to bring the black stay on so it's just a little more dramatic perhaps a little more clarity through on the building something like that and then at that point we can say we're done so if i duplicate this image by making a virtual copy create virtual copy and we just reset that virtual copy will be able to see side by side our original and our edited proof so here's our original here's our edited proof and as I said we've just gone through a three step process one of them is automated we've applied the import preset the second thing is we've straightened the edges and the third thing is we just used localized adjustments bringing down a bit more darkness and detail in the sky and then brightening the building itself super super simple to get all of my photos from that whole shoot to that point where I can send them through to the architect it shouldn't take more than sort of half an hour 45 minutes at the most and you've got a really nice set a nice clean set of images to send through and say hey which photos do you want and just so you know I'm not billing my client for a job saying this job is two thousand dollars or whatever my pricing structure works like this I have a shoot fee and that's five hundred and seventy five dollars plus tax and that gets me there to capture the project to do what I'm showing you here and then send those proofs through to the client at that point they own zero imagery no photos whatsoever that is my time and that is covering myself if they pull the pin for whatever reason or they say our we just want one photo uncovered in terms of my time and just going out for that shoot from then I'm charging eighty five dollars per image so for example if they choose ten photos that's another eight hundred and fifty dollars and the shoot is somewhere around seventeen hundred dollars plus tax if they choose twenty images that's seventeen hundred dollars if my maths is right plus the five hundred and seventy five so you can see it's a nice billing method which is scalable depending on what the client actually wants and I feel that you're being fairly remunerated for the time that you're then putting in into actually finishing those photo and when I say finishing them I mean getting them to a point where they're ready for that architects portfolio or for the architect to actually enter them into some kind of awards on that night let me show you just how I'm exporting these images as proofs so that the client can't just take the photos and go and use them so I'm using a watermark I'll show you that and then beyond that I'll show you Photoshop how I actually just finesse the imagery and the final thing is the secret sauce just how I elevate my imagery just at one step further so that it's differentiated from the competition and people look at it go that's a really cool photo so let's take a look at that so once the photos are at this stage I'll export them as proof so what I'll do is I'll actually select the photos right click and come to export I will click export dot and from there within my commercial exports I actually have a proofing option so if I come down to proof image 980 pix that's going to create a relatively small file but one that they can certainly still see so here guys I'm just going to talk to you a little bit about my export process I'll go into a lot more depth but really is a video all on its own but this is super powerful if you're using more graphite too and I strongly suggest Google that look into it and install that as a plugin because that's going to allow you to do three really powerful things one is we're going to put a border on the outside that allows me to put a thin white border of one pixels around the image and then a black border with a larger bottom border the reason I do that is because I then use the text annotations and I use the file name as the text at the bottom of the photo so that the client can easily reference the file name so this is 0-9 Cranmer square so they can give me a list back where they're saying I want image zero one zero four zero nine etc etc it's all there on the file name but actually physically in front of them as well on the photo it's actually printed on there show you that in a moment but the other really powerful thing is to add a graphical watermark I have mine saved as a PNG and it just implies that over the top the reason I've used a PNG not a JPEG this PNG can have transparency so my logo is fifty percent transparent so the photo shows through but my logo is still there and you can even specify where it goes so I'd hit export choose where I want to export the photo to and then Lightroom would just do the rest so let me quickly show you what those proofs look like once they're exported let's jump into the proof photos folder so here is that image that we were just working on before and this is what it looks like I was telling you that it has a watermark over the top so the client can't really go and use that without you getting a lot of credit and honestly they're not going to they're really not going to use this image like that with your logo over the top of it but here underneath this is really useful it has photo reference 0 9 and then the name of the photo so I just say to my clients please give me a list referencing the numeric prefix of the file name so for example and I'll just make it super simple 0 9 12 15 etc and that makes it straightforward enough that they can go oh yeah number 14 yes I like that it is written here on the actual file itself but it's also written here directing on the photo which is great once your architect sends you back that list the first thing you do well the first thing I do is account how many photos they want because each one of those photos is dollar dollar signs in the bank right so I count them up and I go oh there's a two thousand dollar project I've just shot great the next thing I do is I start my final edit on those photos and that might be that I'm now using not just that one photo that we sent through as a proof but I might be compositing elements from the different set so if I've done a bracketed set of exposures and going through from dark to bright there might be different parts of each photo that I want to combine and I'll either do this with HDR software and I'm using or or 19 for doing that and does a really great job really easily which is which I really like and I can use that as a layer it within Photoshop and then I can either use it as it is or if I just want to take parts of that HDR image into problematic areas like deep shadows and things I can do that or I use luminance blending within Photoshop what I'll do now is I'll just really quickly show you one photograph show you my layers palette and I'll talk you through what I've done in Photoshop to get that photo to a really close point to delivery and to be honest it's what most people most professional photographers would probably be happy to deliver and then I'm gonna show you one more thing which is kind of like the master chef who just puts in those secret ingredients you know just to take their dish to that exceptional level it's the same kind of thing with the photo editing there's just one more tool that I like to use that just adds that finishing touch that usually sequa so I'll show you that shortly but let's jump into Photoshop here we go guys this is one of the interior shots from that project that we were just looking at so if we hold down the Alt key and click on the eyeball here in Photoshop we can see what I imported which is not too dissimilar from the finished shot so finished shot so before and after really not too much in it but we've brightened up some of the shadow areas we've brought in a little bit of blue for the sky out there not too much but we've gone from a pure white to a little hint of blue and I've also corrected the distortion that we were getting on this lampshade here see how elongated and stretched out that is we just fixed that up so in terms of editing I initially imported a base layer I've then imported another layer which is brighter and that's just correcting some of those areas that we're just falling into a little bit of dark shadow there and even bits where I've got a little bit of darkness on the wall here that I think was like a kind of shadow from maybe a light or lamp in the corner there we're just correcting those kind of things as well but nothing too difficult if I show you the mask I was using it's pretty gnarly but it did the job I'm then doing the same for the highlights you can see here I'm just bringing the highlights in as I said before I could have used HDR software Aurora 19 if HDR is your thing guys I'll put a link in the description below again fantastic bit of software real time-saver but I actually used luminance masking for this so if I show you my mask here it's pretty detailed masks super easy to create though just you go image apply image when you're on the mask layer and that will actually create a mask based on luminance and then where those white parts are we're actually revealing this darker image below which actually has all the highlight detail so the blue sky a little bit of detail here in the wood so without that it's it's so subtle but without that we can't see the wood there though it's completely blown out so we're just bringing that back and then if we look at the final thing I did here which was literally I just cleaned up this lampshade up at the top here because it was getting a little distorted it's affected by exactly the same distortion that everything else is in the frame but you don't notice the other things quite as much so at this point you might think I'm done I'm happy with that image and I am happy with it but I just think I can take it to the next level so now I'm going to show you another tool that I use just to take things a little further and this tool is luminar and you can use it in several different ways the new version which is currently 4.1 you can do sky replacement which I've used in a lot of my architectural projects that's super handy I didn't use it in this particular project but one thing I did use is a preset that I've created and you can do the same it's really easy and it's using AI within luminar 4 just to finish off your image so let me show you that because you can do it to one image what I like to do in this case is when you've got 12 images that I'm working on here I can apply it to all as a preset I just synchronize it between those and the finished photos will all have that applied and they look great let's have a look so for the editing of all of the images I would load a luminar as a standalone program and do it through there but for the sake of demonstrating what we're doing I'm going to use it as a plugin so if you get this piece of software what you can do is use it as a plugin or as a standalone editor so if you're interested in it as a photo editor on its own it's really inexpensive and unlike Lightroom and Photoshop it's not a recurring subscription you pay once and it's yours which is great and if you are interested in it I have a code that you can use which is apps guide 10 sky lamb who make the software gave me that code and that is yours to use as well if you would like saves you $10 at checkout unless they've already got some other promotion on and then you know it's like don't be greedy just have the promotion that's on but in any case go for gold and use that so to use luminar on this image as a filter what we're gonna do is actually create a stamp visible layer and that's just saying everything that we can see at the moment put that onto one layer and that is the monster shortcut ctrl shift alt + e will ctrl shift option E and then BAM did you see up here we have a whole new layer which is just being created we then come over to filter and if luminar is installed you'll find under skyline software luminar 4 it will load up for you and now your image is yours to work on within luminar and when you're finished you can just apply that look ultimately what I'm going to do is create a preset here a little like I did in Lightroom and just apply it to all of my images and once you've done it once you can use it on every photo you ever do so let's make this fullscreen and I'll show you some of the things that I like to do a couple of great options are to use the artificial intelligence within luminosity ai enhance and I'm just gonna push it all the way to the right which is gonna over bake things but I'm just showing you what happens here so AI accent if I turn it off and on you can see that it's adding contrast adding color just generally enhancing things but I find that normally if you go to the fullest extent just with any filter it's too much so let's maybe pop that somewhere around 25 high structure that's a little like clarity in lightroom except it's a little more intelligent being AI so again if we go all the way to the right you'll know if you use Lightroom that if you go to 100% in clarity your image just looks like absolute and that's kind of the same here you know it's too much a hundred percent but I certainly want a little bit of this because it's just adding a little bit more structure hence the name you've also got a details enhancer that you can use here and I don't like to do too much of this but if I push it all the way up you can see what's happening and that's very similar to Lightroom's texture that's been added but I just feel it's done in a little bit more refined way and so the large medium and small details I'll just boost them up a little bit I might then sharpen my image so it's the final output of this image and I'm just going to sharpen it because of all the changes we've made along the way we've probably introduced a little bit more noise in the image so I will normally denoise this slightly as well and if you want to you can use a vignette but I normally steer clear of vignettes particularly in architectural photography but let's say you wanted to put in a little bit of vignette just to focus people's attention more towards the center of the you can do that so just through these few changes and you can see which changes we've made because they're highlighted white we can look at our before and our after and things just really start to pop nicely said before and after before and after I love that and the great thing about using this particular tool is because a lot of it is AI driven it doesn't matter whether we're talking about an interior and exterior something that has sky something that doesn't have sky the software is smart enough to make those contrast adjustments color adjustments and all of that stuff bearing in mind what scene it's actually looking at so you can create this preset and it doesn't have to be altered image to image it can just be applied if you like the look apply it to the whole lot today I'm just going to show you a couple more things that I like to add and once I've done that you just save this as a preset and it's it's yours to apply to all of your images which is great so we've been in what they call the essentials tab but we can now come to the creative tab here click that and you get a whole different set of tools these are really powerful in their own right particularly the AI sky replacement that is insanely useful sunrays I've used in a lot of like my landscape work but there's a couple of things here we could look at for architecture dramatic is quite good too much again on the right but always push things too far and then you can see where your head is and you go okay that's what it's doing that's the effect do I want that effect or not or do I want maybe 2/3 percent of that just something just a little tickling in amount let's go four percent why not mystical I quite like this because it gives you an imagery a dreamy hazy kind of look it's almost like that eighties Kalama glow look but which most people can never dream of using for an architectural image but I like to actually just put a little bit in and that's that's what I'm talking about when I say the secret sauce this is your recipe for your look and talking of recipes and looks this is one of my absolute favorite things you can now apply a and if you don't know what a lot is it's a look up table it comes from the movie industry and it's basically color grading that's put over your photo and Lightroom in my opinion has it all back to front they apply the lot which I've only recently really introduced in the grand scheme of Lightroom but they put it at the front end now I prefer on the front end using a camera matching profile so that any editing you're making is relevant to your sensor your camera you can get the purest colors of purest contrast all of that good stuff and then at the end of that process I think you should be able to color grade your image and that's where I think Lightroom is kind of got it flip the wrong way luminar allows you to put a color grade a look a color look after the fact that you've done all your processing and I really like that so let's choose ourselves a lot just just as an example I don't normally utilize this in terms of architectural photography for a client but if I'm posting something to Instagram I might be doing this so if I flick through these you can see that it's actually applying different color grades so for example we might like to use this wooden color grade so let's click it currently we're at thirty percent if we cranked it all the way to a hundred you can see exactly what it's doing to the image I certainly wouldn't recommend giving this as a professional image to a client like this but you may you may want to have just maybe say sixteen percent of this is your secret ingredient for your particular style and once we're done with that we can just have a look at before and thereafter and we can see that we've certainly made a difference to this image this is that before this is our after we've got more style to it we've got a bit more pop and the photograph is just a lot more visually interesting and if we like what we've done here we can save this new look and we can apply that to every single photo so let's do that eighty our key demo and now that becomes accessible to us okay so I've opened up luminol as a standalone photo editing program the last project that I was working on is visible here so I was here photographing this Shearer's shed which is a really nice fancy building in the middle of nowhere in New Zealand and but unfortunately we had a really boring dull day so I actually used luminar to actually change the sky and so it was no masking from my part it was all done driven by AI so as you see there that the difference with them without I really feel like it enhanced that image for me and the same the Sun came out later here was kind of cloudy but came out but I was able to change the sky for something a bit more dramatic I was with the client on site just for two hours it was a we're in we do the shoot we're out so while we were on site this is probably 10 o'clock in the morning something like that it was really drab gray and overcast I was really disappointed by that but I sent the drone up the client wanted an evening shot obviously we're not able to get that there and then but with a little bit of AI help there we have an evening shot that was all done just using Luminas sky replacement tool which is cool anyway what I want to show you with this project at the moment is how we are going to apply that preset we were just working on so let's add a folder with images so here I have my JPEGs that were sent straight out from Photoshop and I'm going to just click OK and they will be loaded into luminar and as you can see these are the finished shots that were chosen by the client so it's a nice selection of images but I just think that we can tighten that a little bit further with that preset that we made before so you'll remember that we actually worked on this particular image with the preset which was our key demo so if I click that is going to apply the our key demo preset and we can see that before and after and if that is what we like we can then apply that to all of those I also have a very similar one I worked on earlier called our key finisher and it's just a little bit more subtle but if I turn it off and on it's just that little subtle pop I'm using exactly the same tools I showed you before the AI accent filter the structure but just at a slightly lesser amount and that's what I'm going to apply to all of these photos so the easy easy way to do that is this is our photo that's selected we're just gonna we're gonna shift-click on the top and bottom just to make sure they're all selected we're gonna right-click adjustments and sync adjustments and now just like that all of these photos will have had that same look applied to them so if I click on this one here which is a front on view of the party that loads up and we were able to see a before and after and it's a really subtle change but it's nice the images really kind of pops now so before and after a love lap so now all we need to do is just export these photos we can go right click export send them to the appropriate folder and we done well guys have really hope this videos been useful to you just in review really quickly we looked at a way to proof our photos back to our client really quickly and that involved having a good solid preset setup in Lightroom that we can apply to our architecture on import from there within straightening the photos and using local adjustments just to make them look pretty good pretty close and we export them as proofs client then comes back to us with a nice big list hopefully and they're the ones that we're going to edit we're then going to use potentially our bracketed photos or maybe even just ones enough but we're gonna take it into Photoshop just to finesse things just finish things off to a finer degree if there's things like leaves in the way scuffs on the building whatever that can all be taken care of using like the Healing Brush for example in Photoshop once those images are saved out what I like to do is just add my secret source just add a little bit of finishing against elevate your work to the next level so you really stand out with your architectural photography the process of just taking the photos to the next level with a preset in luminar you can actually do that for any genre of photography I've used that for a set of landscape images for example but there's no reason why you couldn't create your own look for wedding photography for example you could use that nice mystical filter or whatever things like that and then just really enhance your wedding photography and say apply to all export those photos and you've got a whole really nice set ready to give to the client so let's take a look at where we came from with these photos where we finished up and don't forget if you want to get hold of a copy of luminar which i think is really good value because as i said i do i sell each photo for $85 and i think that piece of software is not too much more than that and plussing they use discount code of app sky 1080 sky 10 to save a little more I'll leave you with the transformation of the photos and guys I see in the next video thanks for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 89,608

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Lightroom, Photoshop, post production, photography editing, Adobe, Photographer, Photo education, Photography education, HDR, architecture photography, architectural photography, Luminar, Luminar 4.1, Luminar 4, Architecture photo editing, tutorial, how to, behind the scenes, professional photography, professional Architecture Photographer, Interior Phtography, Exterior Photography, Preset, Import, Back up, Professionalism, Licensing Photos

Id: Zw2FR0LRyIE

Length: 45min 31sec (2731 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 04 2020