Complete Architectural Photo Editing - Professional techniques Lightroom Photoshop and Luminar

architectural photography if that's your thing this video is for you i'm going to be sharing with you a recent interior architectural photography shoot how i approach the images and we're also going to look at the post-production involved in getting those final images looking really nice to send back to our client firstly i just want to say a massive thank you to all of you have left really positive feedback on the previous architectural photography videos i know they've gone down really well and i know that it's been a long time since i've done one of these videos and that is a lot to do with the fact that covert 19 has meant that a lot of the bookings that i had for architectural shoots have just been taken away a lot of companies have just like tightened up their books and said we're not spending anything for the foreseeable future gone but thankfully just this week they're all coming back out of the woodwork and all of a sudden i've got a calendar full of architectural shoots so i'm really excited this is the first one that i've been out to do for a long time so i'm going to share that with you guys we're going to take a look at the set of photographs i took on site i'll talk through why i took those ones and then we'll do a full edit of one of the images and you can see exactly what process i go through i'm going to be showing you my workflow which in this case takes three pieces of software we're using lightroom for organizational purposes and a little bit of light editing and correcting things like vertical stuff like that before taking those images into photoshop as layers creating a really nice finished composite before using luminar ai as a plug-in inside photoshop and i've got a template that's just a one-click template and i'll show you that and it really improves and enhances the photo gets it ready back to wow our client now before we get into the photo editing a lot of people ask me okay your architectural photography shoots how do you approach them what's your technique when you're on site do you use off-camera flash are you just bracketing and the answer is i use a combination of all of those techniques but in this particular case this this is funny i went out and i bought myself a brand new light i was really excited to use it this is the godox godox 600 ad it's a really really nice light i've done my research on it it's excellent i did some test shots before going it's awesome and it's bright it's 600 watts in this bad boy with the battery pack so it's really portable and you can get a lot of power so you can light large areas much better than you can with little speed lights so before i go to shoot any project i always ask the client could you please send me through some background images just anything something you've taken on your phone ipad when the build has been there a floor plan the orientation of that building for the sunlight so i know what direction the sun's going to be coming through the windows just stuff like this so i can get a feel for the project they sent me some images and they looked so dark but this was pre-renovation and so i went all equipped with this bad boy um but when i got there it's bright it's white it's light like i didn't need this so i just went and spent 1500 new zealand dollars on a light that i didn't need but it will come in handy in the future if you guys are shooting a lot of architecture and you need to light the interiors yourself if you do your research like i did and think this is a really great light and you want to get one there's a link below and please go ahead and use that link it just helps me with the channel it doesn't cost you any more but it's like an affiliate link and amazon like gives me one cent or something great like that it's got one of these bad boys that sits on top of your camera and you've got all your controls on there it's really nice it just feels great anyway this isn't a product review thing so let's get rid of this in fact i'm gonna light this video with this and this modifier so let me switch that over and we'll make a start boom i love it when you buy something for one thing and it double purposes video light now nice anyway let's get into our architectural photos here we are inside a lightroom and you can see i've broken my own rule which is you never mix personal projects this star wars shoot that i was working on with your professional project which is this project here but so let's let's have a look at what we've got here this is what my client sent to me so these are the shots that are before the renovation was done this is how the kitchen used to look and as you can see i received these and thought it's pretty dark inside this kitchen space hence the reason i went equipped with a nice powerful light for doing some bounce flash and all of that good stuff but i walked in and i was greeted with a very different space indeed so this is more like the the space as it is now so these are test shots that you see here can you see i've got a folder here called example shots and what i do when i first turn up at a project is i'll just get my camera out of my bag after i've done an initial meet and greet with the client who owns the home normally the designer or architect is often on site with me and i will just walk around with them and i will just be taking some shots to some example images these are just free handheld images so they are not on a tripod i just want to work quickly and fluidly you can see the settings here for architecture aren't great at the moment so iso 400 normally for a finished shot i'm around iso 100 or 64. normally the that would then force up the shutter speed for a longer shutter speed and i'll normally shoot at f11 not f8 i like to get things a little sharper from front to back so if you see here we're a little bit soft at the front here and nice and sharp in the background but my finished image for the client i would like it to be sharp front to back but i just want to show the um the people i'm working with example shots of what we could be getting ask them what do you like and here we can see i'm starting to problem solve as well so i walk into the pantry i see that this is a full reflective surface and unfortunately if i take it where i want to take it there's this weirdo with his scrunched up face in the mirror so obviously that's no good and we could retouch that but then it involves taking a photograph from where these lemons are here back so that i can see what the mirror is so anyway a way around that is just to get lower down slightly lower and i can hide behind these lemons when i'm actually taking the photo which is what i did in my finished one another option is to change the angle so i showed the client this is why it's important to get some initial shots because i showed the client this i thought oh this could be a really good problem solve for that particular space rather than worrying about having me in the shot i'll shoot it like this and problem solved they didn't like this shot reason being it wasn't the fridge freezer which was important to them they want the joinery that they've done here so they don't mind having the fridge in the shot but they don't want that to be the main focus of the shot so by doing this quick round of images that i can show to the client on the back of the camera they can give me feedback right there and then in real time and i can say okay this shot's no good i need to rethink it the same with this one i quite liked the idea of shooting into the space that showed the living area behind but the designer was saying to me we don't really like this side of the benchtop we prefer the other side and so between that liaison and that discussion between us we were able to come up with six shots that were going to represent the space so let me show you the five shots that i have so far so these are five which i've finished so far and we're going to work on the sixth one together so this is my finished shot of that pantry space that i showed you before it's not my finished shot i thought it was but look i've just spotted a rogue hand here which i'll need to clean up but that's the an easy fix but anyway you can now tell exactly where i was positioned so the camera lens is about here and i'm wedged up against the wall because i didn't have space to get the tripod in so i'm shooting this at 125th of a second at f 8 at iso 100 not ideal settings but sometimes you can't get the tripod into the space that you want to get a wide enough angle wide enough field of view so what i do is i wedge myself against the wall i create a man-made tripod if you will so that i can get a steady shot off i'll make sure that i have my in lens stabilization on and i am not breathing at this point i'm holding my breath and i'm keeping as still as i possibly can so that my finished shot is pretty much pin sharp like it's nearly as good as you would get from a tripod apart from the fact that there's this rogue hand here so let's have a look at a couple of the other shots as well before we move on and you can get a feel for what i'm trying to achieve so we want nice straight lines we want to make sure our horizontals are perfectly horizontal verticals are perfectly vertical if there is light excessive light in the scene like out of a window or there's this really bright hot spot here i want to be able to control that in post-production so here we can see as well we have very bright out of the window these strip lights also became very hot very bright but i tried to control all of that in post-production similar to the pantry shot this involved me wedging myself against the wall because being the kitchen designers they wanted to showcase the lovely marble that we have right here and they also wanted to show that nice lead through from the kitchen space to the rest of the home they've got this beautiful infinity swimming pool just outside here which overlooks the city amazing amazing place and then finally this shot here but in my opinion these are all what i call supplementary shots they support the main shot so what is the main shot well let's have a look at our source files and if i just open up one of these this is the angle that between myself and the designer we felt this is the money shot this is really going to showcase the kitchen show it within its environment we can see the pantry around the corner we can see how the kitchen sits within the space it involved moving a very expensive very heavy table out of the way so that i could get a full view here but what i like to do before i go to work on any of my images or even taking the images i'm assessing the scene for problems for photographic curve balls that i am going to have to solve so if i jump to an image which is exposed a little better let's go for this one let's say this is a nice base exposure for this photo straight away we can see that we are bleaching out out of this window same here and we're also extremely hot in the background here very very bright for me that's not ideal having this light pouring through here your eye just goes straight to this piece of artwork here and not really to the kitchen itself which is the most important thing for the designer so as is often the case with these kind of projects the designer architect whatever they leave the photo shoot till the absolute last minute before they need the photos entered into a competition for example so we have a really limited window of opportunity for me to shoot this so basically it was a one o'clock appointment in the afternoon and it was the only time i could shoot this so i have no flexibility around saying i'm going to shoot this later in the evening when the sun's not going to be blasting through here i didn't have that option so i need to solve these problems another way and i'll share shortly exactly what my thought process was to get around this and if i show you this image here which is a better exposure for the carpet even though the rest of the scene's gone nuclear you can see that in fact the carpet under here isn't actually finished so that's another problem one more issue that we also had after much playing around with these chairs trying to get the height absolutely perfect because of the carpet being bulged up here these chairs just would not sit flush unfortunately another problem which i didn't really want to say in front of the homeowner but it was the truth the metal framework around the chairs wasn't actually dead plum it wasn't dead straight so the fact that they're wonky that's actually the chairs themselves that were wonky unfortunately so i may well need to fix that up too another problem that i have to solve is that the light that we have underneath here this strip light and also underneath this area here that's very important to the design and often if i were to shoot this at my preference i would shoot this when the value of the light outside is less bright and so these lights these internal lights in the interior of the home they would be showing up much much more but relative to the light level that we have coming from outside these are pretty dark so i need to make them shine and bring that value up and one other issue that i had was this little bowl thing this little ornament here with the metallic fruit in here after i'd done my whole series of imagery the designer said to me i really don't like that can you get rid of that in post-production and i said i would much rather get rid of it right now and shoot it without it there so i took another series of images without that i hope you guys are still with me i just wanted to go over my thought process while i'm shooting this and before i tackle it in post-production because inevitably i always get a whole heap of questions about that in the comments so hopefully that's covered everything in terms of what i see as potential problems for the shoot because everything was so bright inside this home and we have lovely beautiful white walls white ceiling a lot of neutral light bouncing around i felt like i didn't need to introduce any artificial light and i was just going to work with what was already there existing in the scene now while i'm shooting this on a nikon d850 which has an amazing sensor inside it with great dynamic range i always want to cover myself in terms of making sure i get home with several files that cover the full range of luminosity values the full range of brightness so that i have images shot very very dark and you can see that our exposure is still while a little dark down here i'm making sure i'm covered if i want to bring in detail for this or this strip light and at the same time you can't even see the carpet here if i go to a kind of middle exposure point you can still see that we're struggling to see detail in the carpet struggling to see detail over here as well so i have a much brighter version where i have all of that detail in the shadows too so i shot a series of seven images on a timer and basically it starts with a mid-ground exposure what the camera thinks is exposing correctly which as you can see is very dark but we have a full range of histogram data here but i'm covering myself i'm going very dark some three stops under here two stops under one stop under and that's one stop under our base exposure here now we've got one over two over and three over so i've got seven different exposures to work with now i've got those seven exposures i start thinking about things like okay there's this hot spot of light up here on the ceiling i really don't like that so what i did was i dropped the blinds all the way down as you can see here and i've run a set of another seven exposures so now we can see that we're getting slightly different look to the scene and you can see in this exposure here and actually the brighter one here which is a much better representation of it see how smooth the ceiling is here we don't have anything catching our eye like we did here when the blinds were up so although i prefer the kitchen and the overall scene here i know that i've got a much more flat and neutral ceiling that i can bring in to photoshop to composite with the other one now because i was having such problems with the chairs and the carpet that we've got here it's kind of bulging up here and i actually um got a stanley knife and i cut some of this carpet because it was double folded over all the way to the midway and it was just so bulbous and sticking up and the carpet fitter is coming one day later so unfortunately if i had been back there today it would have all been fixed but i couldn't do that so anyway i cut this and took these photographs as it is i can touch that up in photoshop but i can't see all of the original framework here or here so what i did is i removed the chairs and i did a whole another seven photographs with those chairs gone and so now i'd be able to use this whole metal framework i've got the full thing and i can just put in the carpet and the chairs if i want to i've also got the option that if the designer wanted to see the kitchen without the chairs we've also got that too and then just as i thought i was done that was when the designer mentioned about getting rid of this here so i did the whole sequence again without that right there so that is a lot of frames for just a single photograph currently we've got four times seven 28 photographs representing just this one shot so how are we going to fix this up well the easiest way for me to work on these i feel is to select all of the photographs so select the full range click on the first one and then hold down shift and click on the last one so now we have all of our photos selected i'm going to find something that i feel is a nice middle ground exposure perhaps this image here and i'm going to come over to our developed module now i have presets set up which are designed to boost dynamic range give a good overall starting point when i send back proofs to my client i'll often go to one of these presets do a really rough and ready edit based on this like just clicking this preset some people may feel that's good enough and send it to their client and for real estate it may maybe good enough with a bit of a crop maybe straightening the lines that might be good enough but for the clients i'm working with and possibly the kind of clients you want to attract you want to make sure that your images are as good as they possibly can be so in this case i'd already agreed with the designer on-site which six shots we were going to go with so i don't need to worry about proofing these back and quickly sending a rough and ready edit so i need to just get the full finished version done for them so i'm going to start with a much more subtle edit and build it up from there so at the moment we're at our base starting point so here we go let's make a start in lightroom first of all we're going to make sure that our profile is what we want so i'm going to come down to a camera matching profile i like the flat profile i also like the neutral profile so while something like a vivid profile might look like a good starting point much more contrast and much more punchy i actually find that you want to stick with something that's flat or neutral so that you have more dynamic range to actually work with because you can control the contrast and add it yourself later and i think that's a much better approach because you have the control now a lot of people have told me in the past i don't have a neutral i don't have a flat your camera matching profiles there will be something in there that is similar you just want to find basically go through them it might even be that it's a case of using something like portrait but basically you want to find the profile which has the least dynamic range the one that actually looks flattest to your eye go with that one so in my case camera flat or i could choose neutral if i want just a little bit more punch but i honestly feel that going for something that's a really flat profile is a great place to start so now let's look at our white balance now i like to do this by clicking the white balance selector and coming over to an area where i feel it should be neutral now although we've got a very very neutral scene here you're going to find that if you click in different areas like if i click here we've suddenly got a much more yellow kind of look to our image if i click here it cools it all down even if i click to the front here we're going to be picking up different colored light sources so there is no real pure gray pure white point so to find a perfect point without any color balance one way or another is actually quite difficult so it comes down to personal preference and i'm going to go somewhere around here on the kitchen itself and say this is going to be the neutral point for my color temperature now because we've got auto sync on here by selecting this rather than just normal sync we've gone to auto sync that's going to apply that to all of these photos so we know that the color balance for every single one of these photos is going to be the same and that's what we want we want that consistency we don't need to worry about changing anything with the exposure because we have different variants shot with different exposures so that was taken care of in camera contrast i may add a little but i will come back to that so i'm going to bring the highlights down just for a little protection i'm going to boost the shadows up slightly and now i'm going to also bring the whites up now you might be thinking well you're blowing out the whites that were already like really bright you're sending them nuclear this is this is crazy but it's okay it's adding a bit of contrast and i'm going to be bringing back detail into those highlights later in photoshop it's a really simple technique but i'll show you that later because it's really powerful i do like to add just a little bit of clarity just that local contrast that's added it just adds a little bit of pop and i like that now depending on your particular camera and how it records color you may want to increase or decrease the vibrance and saturation normally for a starting point i'm not going to add much in but i do like to add just a little bit just at this stage because i can always take it out later and now i'm going to jump into the curves and i want you to take note of something we have photographed what is predominantly a white scene but if you look at the histogram you'll notice that we have a massive spike right in the middle which is indicating that most of the pixels in our scene are 50 percent gray and that's no good we want those whites to be a little brighter so what i'm going to do is actually just pick this midpoint up and just bring the whole tone curve up slightly and i'm going to say i'm happy with that i'm going to jump into the color section here and oftentimes if you're photographing interiors and you have lights on you'll often find you're getting a yellowy color cast and that can be controlled by just clicking into the yellows and basically bringing that saturation down not the case here though but the same thing if you're shooting during the daytime sometimes the light coming through can look very blue when it reaches into the shadows so over here for example where the pantry is we've got a lot of blue and you can test that by boosting up the saturation just to see where these colors are appearing and say oh yeah we have got a lot of blue here even on the front there up here and if you want to actually take that away you can just start to ease that back and that will neutralize the whole image but i normally feel you don't want to take it away completely because it starts to look really unnatural but if you do want to just reduce it a little bit you can do that now i don't need to worry about anything with the color grading but i might just add just a little bit of sharpening detail let's zoom in and see what we're doing here so things are looking pretty sharp already but let's just have a little play around maybe if we go to about 1.5 we won't over sharpen it and i think we'll also just introduce a little bit of noise reduction and that will just make sure that our shadow areas aren't getting too grainy and if i jump into lens correction this step is hugely important so if you're building any presets for yourself make sure you come in and turn these on so you want to remove the chromatic aberration so that's the fringing that you might see around the edge of the frame so if i zoom in here and turn this off you can see a very slight green tinge down this line here if i turn the chromatic aberration removal on all of a sudden that's gone now if i zoom back out the next step is also massively important we're going to enable the profile correction if we click that the change in this case is subtle but sometimes depending how zoomed in or zoomed out you are you'll find that your lens may suffer from some barrel distortion or pin cushioning that's when all the lines start to pull in towards the center or push out give it a bulbous look just by ticking this box as long as lightroom has your profile in its database it will be able to fix it for you which is brilliant the other thing it's doing is also removing any vignetting if there's that darkening around the edges of the frame just ticking that box is going to get rid of it magic and if you are making any presets and you're including these things i'm showing you before that's about where it stops because the next section which is transform that is image specific every photograph you're going to need to deal with on an individual basis but this is massively important if you're using lightroom go about it this way but you can also do this directly in photoshop with the camera raw plug-in you can also do this in luminar as well by actually changing things like the vertical and horizontal sliders those are all accessible in there but i'm preferring just to do it in lightroom because this is where all the photos are set at the moment so basically what we're going to do is use the guided option here and that is going to allow us to draw up to four lines i like to do two for my horizontal two for my vertical and i keep them as far to the edge of the frame as possible there's no point putting parallel lines here and then doing it right next to it here because there's too much margin for error as you can see there i thought i was drawing nice straight lines along there and lightroom said sure i can correct that for you and it's disastrous it's absolutely awful so let's undo that if you ever make a mistake and you want to undo what you've done in a panel all you need to do is hold alt or option on your mac and you get an option to reset the panel and the changes you've made so now i can just click reset upright and i'm back to where i was so let's give this another go it's not too wonky it's not too bad but if you look to the left hand side here you can see this door frame is not parallel with the side of our frame this side is pretty good but the horizontal lines now they may not be perfect i tried to get them as close as i could in camera but sometimes that just doesn't happen it's not possible so let's draw a line here for the top of the horizontal let's draw one here where the carpet is and you can see you've got that little magnification box so you can make sure that you're exactly where you want to be and now we know that we've got nice parallel horizontal lines perfect the next step we could either draw a line down here or we could go for a longer line down here but i think we can see quite clearly on the window frame here so we'll we'll just use this for now i think this will work quite nicely and i like that zoomed in view because it allows you just to get things a little bit more finessed so here i'm going to do the same on the left hand side pull my line down there and get to a similar point at the bottom and then just release that and now we have a beautifully straight image and designers and architects they love that and doesn't that look so much better if we look at our before which didn't really look too wonky when we first looked at it but then we turned those corrections on and bamo we've got something that's really beautifully straight and that is now synchronized across all of our images so if i jump to another one in the set we can see that everything will be perfectly aligned because it was all shot on a tripod happy days okay that's a lot to take in but i hope you guys are still with me i know it seems like we've been through quite a lot but if you can master these steps and implement them in your own work you'll find that you'll keep coming back to this process and once you've mastered it it's super easy what we've just done in lightroom you can actually build that into a preset so that pretty much everything we just did you can just go bam apply that and it's done all you need to make sure that you're changing is the color balance specific to the images and also using the transform tool to make sure that the alignment of the verticals and the horizontals is good for each picture so from here your processing could go one of two ways and i work both ways equally option one which we're not going to be doing is actually to export that series of seven photos and put that into aurora and just say composite that into an hdr image and that's very different from using lightroom's merge to hdr because i love that feature in lightroom but it's creating one file that has the dynamic range in it but then it's up to you to use lightroom's highlights shadows sliders things like that and the local adjustments to bring that dynamic range back into the image whereas i prefer using something that's more automated and i finally found a really good hdr program which actually does a realistic job and one that i'm happy with basically you can use aurora throw those seven images even like three five whatever you've got in your bracketed set and say merge those to an hdr and the finished image that comes out of that that you can save as a tiff and then work on in photoshop is it's golden it's really really good even if i'm not going with that hdr version for my client what i'll often do is export the hdr version from aurora and where it merges say the windows with the window frames i might just use that in a layer in photoshop and it saves me having to cut out things precisely and everything i can just get a mask a brush and mask in pretty roughly and it's just like oh there's all the detail outside the window there's those highlights brought back in it does a really good job if you do want to get aurora you can use the link below and a discount code at sky10 it saves you guys money and gives me a very very small commission and just helps me out when i'm making these free videos for you guys but let's look at option two which is what we're going to be doing today and that's luminosity masking within photoshop okay so as you know we've got 28 different photos which is crazy we're not going to need anywhere near that to create a really nice finished output what i would like to do is have one good base layer so perhaps the one we selected on at the moment we're going to have something that's going to control the highlights and be able to bring those details back there and then potentially we'll have another frame which is going to take care of this little hot spot up here and i think that pretty much should do it we could bring in a fourth layer which would deal with the shadows but maybe it's not necessary we'll see so what i'm going to do is deselect all the photos and i'm just going to work with that one image that we had before so we know we're in a pretty good starting point with this one but i'm just going to make just a couple of changes to this image perhaps i'm going to add a little bit more contrast you can see we're darkening down the carpet there and i may just boost the exposure up ever so slightly so we're brightening up the whites at the same time i want to keep a nice level of detail so i might even increase the clarity just ever so slightly so now i'm happy with this as our base layer what i need to do is create another layer which is going to take care of these overexposed areas here so let's have a look maybe we're going to use this one here we've certainly got all the detail we need what about if we can go for a slightly brighter one yep i feel like we've still got the detail here and things aren't getting too dark here so what i want to do is actually brighten the blacks and the shadows up pretty much all the way i'm also going to boost the exposure ever so slightly so that i'm trying to get the overall image closer to the one that we're going to be working with which was this one here now while i'm on this image i'm just going to click p on my keyboard so that i know that this is the photo that i've picked as a base layer i'm going to bring the whites down just a little bit it's just getting a little bit nuclear getting away on this a little bit and we're going to jump to this image here we're going to push p on that one so that we know that is the one that's going to control these highlights they're still a little bright there so now let's bring the highlights down and grab the whites and start to bring that back as well as you do that we've reduced the contrast in the overall image here and things are just getting a little bit washed out so that's where i'm going to grab the contrast and start to introduce more contrast like that i think we're in a pretty good place here but i might want to be just a little brighter for outside here but i don't want to overexpose here so that's where we can just grab a local adjustment brush here or sorry a radial mask and i'm just going to drag over this area and i'm just going to bring the highlights down and the exposure down ever so slightly and we will bring these shadows up and the blacks up a little bit as well not too much okay so now i've got this area here where i'm able to recover these details that were too bright in the previous version and the same for the windows here as well the next thing i need to do is select an image which has a similar brightness value to our base photo this one which i'm now coming back to and thinking we are a little bit bright on that so i'm just going to double click the exposure and as you probably know double clicking any of these little triangle sliders here just resets your tool to zero and we're going to look for one of these images here where we have a similar brightness value so i'm thinking this one here is very very similar and if you look at the ceiling here that's much much smoother much better than what we had going on before so let's press p again to pick this one and the final thing i mustn't actually forget is this little pot here let's scroll down until we find one of those images that does not have that pot in well there we go so let's use this one in fact because we've got the best of both worlds clean no pot and if we want to repair the carpet down here we're also going to need one of those files where i actually removed the carpet so i'm going to select the same photo the same exposure in the series so it's the third one from the end and i'm going to synchronize the settings that we did for this photo with that one so these are the ones i know have the carpet gone i'm going to control click so i have those two photos selected the one you see here and now the one without the carpet in i'm going to turn off the auto sync click sync dot dot dot and now i'm going to check all and that's basically saying that every single setting from that previous photo i want to synchronize with this one so now if i jump to this photo we can see that we've got the same settings applied but the carpet has been removed so i can actually see this little part of the metal here i know it seems really pedantic but these are the kind of things that you need to pay attention to um when you're working with more high-end clients so i'm just brightening that little puppy up as well and clicking p there and now i can come to my filters and just click that click the flag and now i can see all of the photos that i've picked and so in this series we've got these five photographs here so i'm just going to right select them all by clicking one and then shift clicking the end and now from here what we're going to do is just right click or option click on a mac and we're going to go to edit in and we've got a couple of options we can either go to edit in photoshop which might think well that's what we want to do but in fact my preference is we go to open as layers in photoshop which is the very last option another really handy option that i will often use is open as smart object in photoshop and then you still have access to all of these changes that you made in the raw file you can make alterations within photoshop directly on that raw file and that's very powerful the only problem with that is that they're open to separate files and you'll need to drag each one in to create just one file so in this case let's just go open layers in photoshop and photoshop will do its thing bringing those in for us okay now we have our photos all loaded as layers and if i hide these ones let's see what we've got so i like to stay organized when i'm working so i'm going to rename these layers that one can be ceiling this one can be metal frame this one was also our ceiling one but we don't need both because we've already got a ceiling one initially so this is our base layer this is one that's closest to what we're going to be getting back to the client and this one here is going to control our highlights so now i'm going to just reorganize these i'm going to pull the base to the bottom hide the rest we're going to have highlights just on top of that because that's what's going to allow us to bring back those details there and then ceiling and metal frame yep i'm happy with those where they are so let's have a look at luminosity masking and how that can bring in the details into these highlights here so all we need to do is firstly just show this layer and then drop the opacity so it's on zero now we're going to create a mask by just clicking the mask icon here and we are going to apply a luminosity mask that is basically a mask based on the brightness within the image so if i come over to image apply image we are basically using a black and white version of this photograph here to create the mask anything that's white is going to show through what's on this layer anything that's black is going to hide it so if i click ok you'll see nothing's actually happened visually because our opacity is at zero but you can see here we've created a mask and if i hold alt or option mac and click this mask here you can see this is our mask pretty cool right super detailed i really like it that we've got that option so if i turn that back on and push the opacity 100 and now hide it and turn it on you can see that it's bringing back details in those highlights but it's also bringing back a little bit of it in the mid tones and we don't want that so if i turn the eyeball off so we're using this layer here we're just going to run that apply image one more time click ok and now if we look at that actual mask itself you'll see that we've got much more contrast between the bright highlights here and the shadows and that's what we want so let's turn this back on and if i turn that off and on you can see that we're bringing back details here in the highlights but it's kind of washing everything out so what we're going to do is create what i call a double mask and this is stupidly simple but really really powerful basically all you need to do is create a group and you can put that layer inside a group now what that's going to allow you to do is create a whole new mask so we can come here click our mask and that puts that on there and using black we are going to fill that mask so i use alt and delete to fill with that foreground color so now we can't see what we did bringing back those highlights we can be much much quicker now using a paint brush with white and we could either build this up at 50 percent so let's do that we can click and start to paint that highlight retrieval just where we want it so let's paint it over here paint it in here you could think why didn't you just do that in the first place why worry about that luminosity mask but trust me if you would start trying to paint that mask the layer in just using this technique it would be so so ugly it's basically the combination between that really detailed mask that we had before plus this mask here which is only showing through that mask in these certain areas it's the combination of both of them that is allowing us just to bring back those highlights just where we want them and you can finesse this as much as you like you know if you've painted over areas where you don't want it you can come in and you can remove it by using black if you want to bring in detail through here on this little highlight strip here what we could do is crank our opacity let's say to 100 and we're going to just click once with a small brush there and i'm going to come to the end and i'm going to hold shift and click here and just like that did you see that we've basically brought the orange back there you can do the same on this back part here if you need to dull that area down but just be careful of doing that because you can get that like darker strip underneath so we will now just switch out to black and just remove it from that area there now we've got a bit of an ugly bleed where we've we've brushed over the edge of this pillar here so i am just going to quickly tidy that up using our tried and true polygonal lasso tool nice and easy so we're going to come down here click there we don't need to be too precise with this make sure our mask is selected and just do alt delete to fill that with a black so that mask is hiding that and now we've got a bit more control of that so that's without it and that's with it without and with and as i mentioned before probably a much quicker way to achieve a very similar result would be using aurora hdr but this is an equally valid approach and i really enjoy using this technique because it gives you ultimate control over everything but if you're after a quick fix then aurora hdr would be the way to go we could do the same over here on this side you can see we're getting just a little bit of bleed there and so let's let's just be let's do things the right way let's clean this up let's clean this up you know your client would never never notice if there was that little bit of bleed over there but we are good at our job and we are attentive to details so let's just get rid of that there press ctrl d and to deselect it and off and on and off and on and i think we've done a great job of controlling those highlights there so this is our before and this is our after so now it's time to take care of this little highlight up here on the ceiling which i find really visually distracting you might think why are you getting rid of it because it's part of the scene you can see it's light outside it's bouncing out there just leave it alone but for me i find any distracting details just kind of detract from the overall image you want to keep things nice and clean and pure for architectural work so that's why we're going to bring in this ceiling here so using this i'm just going to create a black mask i'm going to press alt or option as i create the mask and that's going to hide it straight away and i'm thinking we're going to have a bit of a color discrepancy here as i paint this in yes we are but let's uh let's cover this whole area here with just a big fat brush how about if i paint over that dark bit there there you go and the reason we've got that discrepancy is because here in this scene we've got blue light bouncing in from outside and in this scene that we're painting in we actually pulled the blinds so that basically nullified the blue daylight that had been coming in and so we've got no blue cast there but don't worry we're going to fix that let's also get rid of that pot there just by painting that bad boy out nice and easy let's also brighten these bits up around here why not why not brighten all of that up because this layer is slightly brighter what we could do is actually with a 50 by pressing 5 50 percent opacity here just paint in a bit of this carpet and just brighten it up slightly yeah yeah i like that nice so here's our before here's our after we're just heading towards a much cleaner file to take care of the discrepancy between the color of the wall here and the ceiling what we could do is just add a slight curves layer and we're going to hold alt and click in between the two layers just so we're saying this curve is only going to affect this layer here so if i pull this massively around you'll see that we are just affecting that layer only so that gives us the ability to come into the blue channel and now we should be able to just you know add a hint of blue in until we feel that that matches what we had in the original scene if i turn that off and on off and on oh it's very very subtle isn't it off and on off and on i think that's close enough now one thing i'm noticing is this area is much brighter where this pot was and i might want to just darken that down slightly i'm finding it a little distracting so let's grab a curves layer again and again clip it to this particular layer down here and we're going to darken things up just uh just a wee bit and now we're going to mask that curve out by pressing um control and delete so to fill with our background black color here and now i can just paint in let's go for something low like a 25 opacity i can just click and paint now i've got my wacom tablet in front of me but i'm doing this all with my mouse so you don't need to have a graphics tablet if you don't have one if you want to just darken things down and paint things we can be pretty rough and ready if i show you the mask that i've just worked on that's what i've just painted in with my mouse and if we look at what that's actually achieved if i turn that off and on it's just darkened that area to tie it in with the darker shadows in the rest of that zone okey dokey now we've got to deal to this metal frame down here so let's have a look so this is with all the chairs gone i can now see this metal frame so what shall we do what shall we do so i'm noticing that there's going to be a problem problem being that the metal frame being a kind of chrome entity is going to reflect whatever is just below it so if i take this away you can see it's much darker because it's reflecting the carpet as soon as i got rid of the carpet it's not reflecting that anymore it's reflecting the floor so that's actually a little bit of a problem so i'm going to scroll to this side because really it's only affecting this area here so i think i'm not going to worry about this layer i think it's overkill i don't need it so i'm going to chuck that away we don't need that and we're just going to create a brand new layer and i'm going to call it carpet fix and how i'm going to do that i think is we are going to create a polygonal lasso again and i'm going to just make a selection where i feel that the frame would be and that's going to allow me just to clone in from slightly further over this way if i click here i'm stealing from this part of the photo actually i'm not because i'm on current layout i need to say current end below so i'm selecting from all the layers here i'll click there and just where this carpet little nubby is here i'm going to click and i'm going to paint over that and i'm gonna say i'm happy enough with that no one's really gonna notice that i can do the same in this corner here as well i can just make a pretty rough selection around the frame itself just to get rid of that bit of carpet so now i can come down and i can sample from just here make my brush a bit smaller using the left bracket key and i can start to paint in that little bit there and i can borrow from up here on this front panel front front plane sorry and just by stealing from the two different bits i can rebuild that now by pressing ctrl shift i i'm inverting this selection so now if i paint i can actually paint everywhere apart from this selection so now i'm going to borrow from that bit of carpet and just paint out that funny little lifted bit there i could um make a mask around the stool bases but i'm not going to worry too much i think i'll just try and paint it accurately that's what i'm going to do i'm going to try and come around here and just paint this bit out and as i get further away from there and i know i can be a little bit more relaxed about how i'm doing this i can make my brush just slightly bigger and i'm using the right bracket key to do that and make it smaller with the left bracket key as i come in there okay let's do the same again here i went over the edge of the stool just ever so slightly there going in again but i'm not going to worry too much about that no one's going to notice you guys will because you're paying attention but the the client would never know never know and then if you see other little rogue bits of dust on the floor you can just clean those up while you're there just by sampling close by and i can press ctrl d to deselect that and let's turn that off and turn that on and we fix the carpet up nicely so if we're happy with how things are looking here what i'd like to do is make a stamped visible layer and then i'm going to do a quick retouch because i can see in the top right here there's some sensor dust up there and i want to get rid of that but there will be other sensor dust floating around because i did not clean my camera sensor before i went out shame on me so i have an action set up that is going to do this but first of all let's create a stamped visible layer and i've done that you can see i've got brand new layer that's got everything on it there is a monster shortcut key for that and that is ctrl shift alt and e massive shortcut but it's awesome so control shift option e on a mac control shift alt and e on the pc oh you gotta learn that one it's good it's really good now i can throw away the carpet fix and i can come in and retouch anything else that needs retouching so in order for me to actually see where these dust spots are i just created a video on how to do this um so if you want to see how to set this action up go and watch that video but basically i am going to play this sensor spot revealer press play and all that's done is add this curve over the top of everything okay but as you can see if i zoom in up here oh what a good job that's done of saying here is where your sensor spots are your dust spots so now if we select our layer below so this is the actual layer we want to work on and we grab the spot healing brush tool basically with a circle that's just slightly bigger than the dust spots we are just going to tap away and just like magic they are gone gone if there's little small specks around you can get rid of those as well here you can see lots of little dust spots so you can be just pretty crude with your clicking but basically you can tidy this up really nicely really efficiently but there's nothing like putting this curves layer on to actually showcase exactly where all the problem areas are now this is entirely up to you but one thing i sometimes do is if i see an extractor fan and i think it looks ugly as anything i'll actually remove it the same for a smoke alarm for example so while smoke alarms we love you you have your place you're extremely valuable and important i may want to get rid of it now i'm going to throw the sensor spot revealer in the bin and this is one of my favorite bits of the whole process so i've just done another stamp visible layer let's have a look at the photo as it is right now and while it's a nice image it's certainly lacking something and whereas in the past i would spend a long time working with curves masking things out bringing in a little bit more local contrast here and there i've got a much better solution now i love this so come to filter and you want to get hold of if you don't have it already luminar ai so just invoke that filter luminar ai is going to open up and it's going to open up the layer that we're on currently and here we are inside luminar and i've created a template and i can show you guys how to make this template but basically it's really really simple if i click this luminar applies a really nice intuitive edit and it's all based on ai so if we look at our before and after before after we're adding contrast a little bit of color saturation we're brightening things up where they need to be brightened up i mean it's night and day for me like looking at that it's it's a nice image it's a clean image but it's very flat here we've got a lot more dynamic interest going on and this is the kind of file that i'm happy to send to my client if you feel that the effect is too much whatever you've created you've got this slider in the bottom right and you can ease it in ease it off but i'm happy with it a hundred percent let me just jump into the edit section really quickly you don't need to worry about any of this because this template is just super simple but the two key things that are the two key ingredients that go into this is enhance ai now this is accent ai if i turn this off and then i turn it on you'll see that it's got so much more punch straight away and that is literally with an ai slider and i've just saved this and said i'm happy with a 42 amount for this slider that's nothing that's 100 way too much but i'm happy with that sort of 42 for this particular template save it same with structure ai as well i've only got 10 but if i reset that again we're going back a little bit flat and you might be thinking that's really nice as that is but if i throw a hundred percent of this on you'll see it's kind of like clarity but it's more intuitive it's not destroying pixels and adding dirty bits where you don't want it sure it is a hundred percent but geez no one's gonna be using it 100 not unless you're crazy so i'm happy with 10 it's just a little something something to elevate this photo so let's look at before and after i've even got sharpening ai sharpening built into this so i don't need to worry about sharpening in photoshop none of that i'm just going to hit apply and luminaire is going to do its thing and bring that back into photoshop as a layer for me so if we wanted to we could just leave that there or what i may do is just try and draw our attention to the center of this image a little bit more there's always little tips and tricks and more things that you can add just to keep improving your image uh you've got to draw the line somewhere but let's let's just boost up a little bit of brightness into the center piece here and maybe just bring the shadows down just creating that s contrast curve one that's brightening things up so turn that off turn that on and let's just affect that through this middle part here so we can press ctrl and delete to put a mask over the top of that and then we can we could do a radial mask so we are just painting with white with a radial gradient from the center of this fading out to the edge so if you look at our mask here so if i press alt and click on that you can see that's our mask and now if i turn that off and on just brighten that center piece just helps bring your eye into that and conversely what we could do is darken the edges or actually reduce the contrast around the edges so we can drop this down just ever so slightly and we can reduce those highlights just a little bit and if we boost the shadows or keep them where they should be we've actually reduced contrast and we could apply that just around the edges of the frame so what we could do is get our gradient tool again and we're going to delete that mask or turn it black so that it's not active and now we are going to just paint back in that effect so i'm going to draw a gradient from the top here oh sorry we are still in radial gradient so we are going to go to a linear gradient and we're going to draw one in from the top here we are going to draw one in from the side here and from the side here as well and also from the bottom and now so we have created a kind of square around our main feature point and if we turn that off and on we can see that we've just darkened down around the edges and reduce the contrast there so our eye goes bam straight into the middle i feel like we may have just darkened off this area just a little bit too much so we're just going to paint that away with black again so switch our colors to black just paint over that increase the opacity to 100 so we get the job done much quicker okay that's gone so before and after just darkening down those edges and our eye goes nicely to that central focus point which is the kitchen that is the most important part of this image and the final thing that i would want to do before exporting this is just crop this image down just so i'm losing a little bit of this ceiling here but before i do that let's just have a look at our before and after so this is our before the kitchen's looking quite dark and muted and our eye goes more to this brighter area back here so that's our before this is our after and if you didn't see the before and you just saw this as an after you'd think that is a really nice image with a nice bit of pop and punch perfect for the award entry perfect for going into magazines and i know that my client is going to be happy with that before after so i'm going to quickly jump into lightroom and i'm going to pick our base exposure here and i'm just going to reset everything and i'm going to come to edit in photoshop and now photoshop has brought that in as a new document so i'm just going to break that away there and holding v and i'm going to drag that in and put that into the document we were just working on we'll close this down and now at the very top we've got the original base file and now if i hide that we can see this is our finished image and if you look at where we came from and where we got to i think you'll agree that that's a much nicer cleaner image that we have as a finished article wow that was a long one guys i really appreciate you sticking with me for this architectural photography editing session i really hope it's made sense to you and if it has do me a favor just write made sense in the comments so i know that my teaching was on track for you if you felt confused by any part of it perhaps try re-watching that component of the video and hopefully it will cement that learning for you if you're still a little bit lost by all means leave me a comment and i'll try and get back to you with a an answer and clear things up for you if architectural photography and editing is your thing just write more please in the comments and i will look at making another video for you guys there's always more tips and techniques to share with you because every single shoot requires different tools to bring out the best in the image but this is certainly a really good framework on which to build it's a good process to build your workflow around if you liked what i did with that finishing touch with luminar you can certainly utilize the ai that's inside of that if you don't have that software yet there's a link below and you can use a discount code at sky10 which will save you money at the checkout personally i think it's a really great tool to have you can do a lot of what we did in lightroom photoshop and luminar you can do a lot of that just in luminar but this is my workflow here but certainly for that finishing touch just be able to do a click of the button and really enhance that image just that next level utilizing ai i think that's yeah it's just a game changer for me so get yourself that below and i will see you guys in the next video i think you deserve a medal for sticking with me for this video and i think i am due a glass of water i'll see you in the next video guys cheers

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 25,839

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Lightroom, Photoshop, Post Processing, post production, photography editing, Adobe, Photographer, Photo education, Photography education, HDR, architecture photography, architectural photography, architecture editing, Luminosity masking, real estate photography, interior photography, kitchen photography

Id: rKndrRGKlmI

Length: 61min 47sec (3707 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021