Complete Lightroom CC for Beginners

hi and welcome to another essential Lightroom tutorial in this video guide I'm going to take you through and show you the basics of working inside Lightroom cc this is a super quick start guide it's gonna give you up to speed as quick as possible so if you're new to Lightroom or you're used to working with Lightroom cc classic then stick around because this is gonna get you where you need to be quickly and easily so let's take a look at Lightroom cc in action so at the moment we're in the gallery module of Lightroom cc and as you can see I've got a range of images that I can go through and select and choose to start editing we look on the left hand side you can see all of the albums that I have synchronized across my Clio count so let's use this particular image and I click on the press D on the keyboard to go to the develop module and that takes us in so we can start editing the image if I want to close this left hand panel down I can simply click on this little my photos box or press P on the keyboard and that'll close it down now the interface is pretty simple easily laid out and quite accessible because the left-hand side is all to do with dealing with your photographs at the top we can search for Adobe stop images then the bottom we've got different ways of viewing our photo grid we've also got the ability to rate and rank the images the image that we're looking at on screen we've got a couple of options for how we see the image on screen so we can fit we can go to fill we can go to one to one so to see it full size we can use the hand icons we just simply hold the left mouse button down drag that around and see the image and we can easy just jump back after that to fit we've also got the option at the show or hide the filmstrip which is basically the same kind of views when you're in the gallery just shrunk down to a little film strip at the bottom so any folder you're looking in on your Lightroom catalog that's what you'll see displayed here you can see I can scroll across left and right in there I can show and hide that easily just by clicking on this or pressing the forward slash key on the keyboard so that's the film flip on and off finally on there we've got the option to show the original so we start making edits we can easily use that to take a look at what the image is like before the edits press it again to take us back if we take a look on the right hand side there are the tools that we've got to start editing the image we'll take a look at those in a moment we take a look at the bottom we can tag any of the images with that keyword to these so we can then start to use keywords to search through our catalogs and find images that are all using the same keyword so for example we could use mountain views we could use lakes we could use person whatever you kind of want and then you can group your images and search based upon that keyword we then finally got the info button which gives us information about the image that we currently have open so you can see this gives us all the copyright information any information is stored any meta information is stored as part of the image including what camera it was shot on what lens what focal length and so on again we can close that down finally right at the top we've got the option to simply upload to the cloud or share with a cloud and we've got the option to synchronize and backup so that's the basics of the interface let's take a look at some of the options we have available and start editing this image and see what we can do with it so if we click on any of these icons on the right hand side that will lock them open up the corresponding tools and panels that are associated with that particular section so as you can see this is our basic editing section so we can come in we can adjust anything to do the light of the image the color affects detail optics and geometry if we expand any of those out you can see we have a range of tools and options available in there and depend on which panel you've got open you'll have additional switches so you can see at the moment we have the tone curve open we can get rid of that just by clicking on the tone curve icon bring it back up by clicking again so very simple easy interface to work with and we just streamlined it if we want to if there are too many things open so we don't want to use so let's take a look at some of the basic tools we have available in here so you can see we've got exposure contrast highlights shadows whites and blacks this is how we can deal with all the tonal information in the image so for example if we've got an image that's under or overexposed we can easily use the exposure slider by dragging it to the left we'll reduce the exposure by dragging it to the right will increase the exposure and you can see we get a value at the top if we want to input something directly we can simply click in there type in the value we want and you can see pressing enter or return on the keyboard will commit that now everything you do inside Lightroom cc is completely non-destructive so all of these edits will make no permanent effect to the image that you're working with so you can edit and just to your heart's content and you can come back in a day you whatever come back into Lightroom and you can edit that image again with none of those changes committed permanently to the actual file so it's like working with a digital negative it's all weekly retain its original source details information all the settings name associated with it so very easy if you want to reset any of these values you can simply double click on the little slider and that'll take it back to its default value pretty quick and easy we've also got the auto option which we'll take a look at the image and decide what it thinks is to be the best based upon looking at tens of thousands of images that are all based around the same kind of content there's sort of artificial intelligence has been introduced into the recent version of Lightroom cc that helps get better basic auto adjustments so you can click on that and you can see that goes takes a look what it thinks is a good starting point like I say non-destructive so you can edit this to your heart's content so we're going to reset this back to its original we just need to press shift + R on the keyboard that resets everything or reverted back to its original so again like I say very easy so let's take a look making some basic alterations this and seeing what they do so exposure as we already know will increase or decrease the exposure that's pretty cool but we've got lots of other tools contrast is going to do exactly what its name suggests it's going to look at the edges between the lightest and the darkest and then increase the contrast between those to give you a much more contrast the image and you can see as I start to push that up where we have detail like in the mountain range in the clouds in the grass and everything anything there's a good strong contrast will start to increase the darkness in that contrast therefore making everything look considerably more contrasting so that's a pretty cool way of dealing with things like that the highlights do exactly where its name suggests if you've got something that looks a little blown out we can pull the highlights back and that'll sort of bring back the highlights a little bit so if you do find whose blown out or looks blown out chances are with modern cameras these days there's still a lot of dynamic information in there dynamic range in there that you can pull back by using the highlights alternative like I say you can go the opposite way and push your highlights up now one of the cool things about this if you want to make sure you don't start clipping those high lights or shadows or whites or blacks you hold the Alt key down on the keyboard when you adjust the slider you'll see it gives you a black representation of the image now as we push that up anything that starts to get clipped out will start to go blue now you can't really see them because you're a tiny tiny little bit but let's just say let's put that back to where it was and do the same thing with the white so I'll hold the Alt key down the keyboard drag the whites up and you can see once we start to get that blue that's starting to get close to being clipped highlights when it goes white we're basically blowing that part of the image out now once we let go of that take a look at the histogram at the top and you can see over on the highlights side the right-hand side of the image you can see we've got this completely flat flush against the right-hand side that's telling us that we basically we've clipped the highlights in a particular part of the image but your non-destructive it makes no difference we can simply drag that slider back down hold the Alt key if we want to to adjust that to get to a point where there's no clipping but we've pushed those white cepa's far as they can go without clipping same goes to the blacks if we hold the Alt key down on the blacks start to drop that down to the left-hand side you would get a white representation of the screen and you can see once we start to get to the point of clipping those blacks you can see it now goes black on screen the further we push it the more we sort of see the different color information that shows us we're starting to get close to clipping black means we've clipped it for the blacks and the shadows white means you've clipped it for the highlights and the whites so you can see you can make sure that even if your monitor isn't perfectly well calibrated or you don't have the best monitor in the world you can still ensure that you don't clip those highlights or shadows blacks or whites by using this simple methods we'll double click back on that okay so we've got some basics there let's just take a look at fine-tuning this image to get a little bit more a little closer to what we would might like it to be so we can use these in conjunction with each other so we push the whites up we get the point of almost clipping so for example we take a look at this we started to clip in there what we can do is we can use the highlights and push those over to the left-hand side and we can then compensate for anything is clipping so we're doing is we're protecting those highlights but still pushing up the y so it's a balance between the highlights and the whites or the shadows and the blacks so you can darken the areas you want down without making them go completely black or you can do the same with the highlights by using the shadows and the blacks or the whites and the highlights I hope that kind of makes sense but it's a good way of balancing things off to make sure you get a great end result speaking of end results we just made a couple of simple alterations the contrast that highlights the whites let's take a look at before and after so this was the beginning so you can see a little bit flat a little bit dull just that simple alteration will give it a much more punch to the image despite making a couple of simple alterations we do the same thing with the shadows we can simply come in pull the blacks down a little making sure that we don't start clipping so if we do we can then use the shadows to ensure that those areas don't clip out so very easy to start manipulating things and making sure that you don't end up making a complete mess of your image but if you do everything is non-destructive so you can simply just reset it or double click any of those sliders to put them back to their default setting so now that we take a look at the basics of the light panel we've got the tone curve we can take a look at now I've covered the tone curve its own dedicated video and I'll link that in the description below if you really want to see how to start utilizing this to its full extent I'd recommend check in that video it's gonna give you tons more detail that I can cover in this particular video links in the description ok so basically we have 5 different modes we can work with the tone curve we've got the tone curve as it is at the moment where this is broken down into five different sections you've got your blacks you've got your shadows you've got your mid-tones you've got your highlights and you've got your whites so we can simply manipulate that you can see that if we grab any of these it's giving us a representation of what kind of total information in the image is going to be affected so if we grab the center point we start to bring that down we're taking the mid point and we're darkening things down so you can see we dragging that down darkening everything down but you can also probably see that I don't really get a huge amount of control of what's going on if I lift this up it creates the curve for me so I'm not really in control of what's being done so I don't tend to work in this mode so we can reset that and we just get everything back to where it was and to do that all we need to do is right-click and we can say reset or reset all so let's just reset that back to where it was so let's put the tone curve back now to its basic original starting point the better way of working is to switch this over to the point curve mode and what the point curve mode allows us to do is physically add our own points and then we can manipulate those points easily so let's put a point in the center so you can see now I've added that in and that's directly in the middle or the midpoint of our entire tonal information in the image so if I start to drag that down you see we create a much more natural curve so it's getting curves not being influenced in the shadow area it's not being influenced in the highlights it's simply dragging down and create a nice smooth curve alternately I can drag that up and we'll just lighten all the mid point with this nice roll-off we can also add additional points in there and start manipulating however we see fit so let's just say for example I want to crush the blacks to make sure that the blacks are not black they've become slightly gray well I can do that I can just add a point down in the black point drag that up and I just effectively lightens all the black point in the image so you can see through this method we can very quickly and easily adjust in conjunction with the light panel to get much more control but like I say this is one of those things that you really need to understand how the tone curve works so I'd recommend checking that video ok so it's just right-click and reset that's just to say reset all channels so I put it back to where we started the next three options are where we can influence the color so the red channel the green channel of a blue channel the RGB channels in our image so you can click on there and you can see that if we want to influence the colors now as opposed to the tonal information in the image then so we can do it so we could say we want to take all our mid-tone information and push that to introduce more red into it so we can add a point into the center drag that up towards the red which at the top left hand side you see now the overall image starts to take on a much more red hue we can do the opposite we can bring that down and the opposite color weakest are they introduced a sort of teal color into it so you can see again we can easily go in and start manipulating colors and this is where the power of the tone curve comes in is that you had you can introduce sort of information into the colors you can adjust you can adjust those colors inside their tone areas as well so you might want to adjust the colors inside the shadows or the black point well you can do that using this method I could say check the video at the dedicated video to get a lot more information on this so we leave that where it is for now and we move on to the next panel which is the color panel the next step we have the color panel and the color panel gives us a lot of control over the colors in our image it also allows us to create black and white images so let's take a quick look at this again we've got a couple of switches at the top that allows us to adjust and switch over to additional functions you can see we can click into black and white mode that then changes the slides we have available to us and push the image into black and white we can click put that back to color as you can see everything is non-destructive the other option we've got then is the color mixer which we can click and open that up and it gives us a huge amount more control over the colors and how we can influence and change the hue saturation on luminance of any of the colors in the image that we're working with we'll come and take a look at that in a moment so other than that we've also got the white balance option and we've got the white bars picker now what this allows us to do is to change the white bars of the shot now normally when you deal with more expensive cameras if you're shooting in RAW you're gonna have the option doesn't matter what white balance you choose it's completely it's just sort of stored alongside the file it's not committed to the file so if you choose the wrong white balance you could be shooting in tungsten but you're actually outside in sunlight then you're gonna find your image is going to have a strange color cast if you're shooting in JPEG that information has been committed to the file if you shoot an in raw it doesn't matter it's completely independent so you can see if we wanted to we can just choose the eyedropper for example we can come down to our image and we can look for something that gives us a sort of neutral gray a sort of 18% gray you can see we get a little sort of loop kind of view on this so we can see what we're actually going to select and if I click on that you can see the color temperature of the image changes if I choose a different part you can see we warm it up which is a different area it cools it down and you can see what's happening is the temperature and the tint are being adjusted so we can create our own custom white bars and if you using a sort of a custom color card then you can easily just select mid-point gray on there and you know your colors are going to be perfectly spot-on again you're going to find that if you don't use a calibrated monitor you could be getting thrown out a little bit by what your monitors display and not necessarily what you're seeing so bad that thing in mind as well such as reset those back to where they were so underneath this we've got our shot or we've got Auto or customs so there's not a massive amount of options in there like you have with the desktop version you know sort of light through CC classic or earlier versions of Lightroom where you have a lot of options in it but you can customize it if you need to speaking of which the next lot of sliders allow us to customize the temperature and the tint now the temperature allows us to push things over to make them cooler if we go to the left hand side it's will introduce more blue into the image if we want to warm things up we can push it over to the right hand side so as an example if we push this over you can see we start to get a much cooler much bluer looking image again if we push that over to the right hand side we start to get a much more yellow a much warmer image double click resets that so this for me wants to cool down just a tiny tiny bit so a roundabout but they look a little better then the tint does pretty much the same kind of thing but only this time with the greens and the magentas so we push that over to the left hand side we introduce a green cast in if we push over to the right hand side we introduce more magenta into it now generally you're gonna find the temperature is what you'll adjust more often than you'll tend to sort of work with the tint but you've got those tools they should you need them next up we've got the vibrance and saturation now if I go to saturation first it does exactly as its name suggests it'll increase the amount of color saturation across the entire image no matter what color so your greens will be greener your Blues will be bluer your reds or redder and so on it's indiscriminate whereas the vibrance will actually take things like skin tones and so on the warmer colors in the image and actually accentuate those so you can see it's a slightly different effect so you can see the things like the Greens get a little bit more lush but they don't become intensely green sort of become fake as it were obvious if you go too far with that it can go a little silly but it does allow you to sort of easily tweak your image to get those natural nice warm colors warm tones in the image without over saturating every single part of the image that you're working with so you will find on color image especially things like landscapes or portraits where you've got human skin vibrance is a great starting point when you want to adjust anything to do with the colors in there if you want more control than that then obviously you've got the color mixer option underneath now you can see the color mixer gives us the ability to adjust the color the hue the saturation or the luminance so we switch the hue for example you can see we now get all the sliders to do with the Hill same goes for the saturation same goes for the luminance however the color works slightly differently it gives you all of those tools all those options and what it does is it breaks them down into the composite colors so you've got your red you've got your dream and you've got your blue but you've also got orange you've got yellow you've got cyan magenta and so on so you've got additional options in there which you can then pick and choose and adjust the hue and saturation so for example if we wanted to change this grass we can take a look at the sort of component colors on there that would be yellow and green so we choose the yellow for example we can grab the Hill and we could push that over so you can see if we take that over to the right hand side we start to strip out the actual natural yellow tones that are inside the grass alternatively if we push that over to the right-hand side we start to introduce more orangie tones into it so we sure will go through the yellow through the orange and maybe even touch upon the Reds so you can tweak the key one name so let's just say we want to sort of introduce just a little bit more yellow in it make it a little bit more or less if you make it to green it kind of looks a little fake and unnatural a bit like astroturf next that we've got the saturation now the saturation is only going to influence the color that's selected in this case we've got the yellow which is kind of pushed a little over to the orange range so if we start to pump the saturation that only that is going to be affected so we'll over saturate that particular color the luminance is more the sort of tonal value so in other words if we take this to the left we'll take those shades and make them darker if we take them to the right we'd make them lighter so you can see if you look at the grass those yellow tones start to be brought out a lot more so if you have things like yellow flowers for example we've got this one little yellow flowers in the foreground it'll start to accentuate those we take this on and off we can turn on and off the color mixer you can see the difference that's being made to this so you can easily come in and start tweaking colors this is a great way of dealing with things like grass again skin tones the orange color works really really well for skin tones so let's just say for example you wanted to adjust the sort of the reddish kind of orangey colors in there well we can come into that we can adjust the saturation on those and anything you can see if you take a look at the mountain range this an orangey kind of tones that are in there so we started to push those up we start to bring more color into those bring the luminous down to darken those down or sort of brighten them up by take it to the right-hand side and you see these sort of natural formations in the rock they start to change color so let's take a look before and after fairly subtle but you can see we're targeting those just by using the color mixer okay so I still think my image looks a little warm so I'm going to come back up to the temperature slider I'm going to bring that over to the left-hand side just a little more introduce a bit more coolness into it okay so we've kind of finished with the color section I'm not going to worry too much with the black and white we can switch that on and we can start to create black-and-white images so that's pretty self-explanatory let's take a look at the effects section now the effects section is pretty cool we've got some really nice options in here clarity and D haze are great tools you need to be careful with them because they can really really degrade an image if you're not careful so let's take a look at D haze first of all OD haze is fantastic for two purposes one as its name suggests if you have a natural haze in the image so let's say for example you have a mountain range sort of three or four levels back in your image and they kind of just look a little bit flat and dull then you can use the D haze to sort of just grab the contrast in there and accentuate that anything's kind of grayed out would be brought sort of more to the forefront so it's great for that side of things you can also use it as a sort of super-powered contrast so let's just say for example I don't really have anything this this is sort of affected by the haze in this but if I start to drag this over to the right-hand side you'll see that the image starts to darken down but we also get considerably more contrast in it so we take a look at the sort of the differences in the rocks you can see we get a super sort of contrasting luckly so you need to be careful with that alternatively we do the opposite way it'll kind of introduce haze into the image so it kind of looks a little bit flat as if you really take in the contrast and suck that out of the image so there's a couple of ways you can use that and we'll take a look at that in its own dedicated video further down the line but just know that you can use it for that contrast side things as well as what it's name suggests which is to do with taking out haze and things in your images next up you've got clarity now what clarity does is again this is sort of like a super-powered contrast but not quite to the extent of what the D haze does so you can see if we start to push this up we start to get a lot more contrast in the sort of contrast the areas of the image so we've got this nice stark contrast of the sort of almost black to the almost white it really does help to accentuate that particular effect so again you need to be careful this because what it can do is if you've got high contrast areas you can tend to introduce some weird artifacts in there so use it sparingly but use it in conjunction with either the D haze or the contrast next up you've got your vignette and your vignette as its name suggests will allow you to bring in darker edges or lighter edges so let's take a look at that if we drag over to the left hand side you can see we start to darken off these edges which is a great way of drawing attention into the main focal point of your image now the opposite effect of that is where you tick over to the right hand side and what that does is that lightens off the edges you can see we start to take the edges and make them all the way to white so kind of that retro kind of photograph effect so as we said that you've also got these little options that give you additional tools and additional options and functions for this particular function there's a lot of functions so you can see once we start to introduce a vignette and let's just pull in to make it quite extensive you've then got the option to increase or decrease the feather now the feather is how smooth the transition is between the darkest areas of the vignette and the unaffected areas of the vignette so if you want to have quite a large transition so make everything really really smooth you can increase that alternatively you can decrease it to get a very hard as you can see if we bring that down right the way down we know have any feathering on there and we have this sort of like you looking through a window kind of effect so that's the feathering and then you would the midpoint the roundness and the highlights and so on I'm not getting into too much detail about that but you can adjust those should you see fit and I'm I playing about with them to see what they do for you just close that down next up and finally we've got the grain option now again has its name suggests it is pretty self-explanatory it's gonna introduce grain into the image you've also got some additional options so we can expand that out and you can see we've got grain and once we bring some grain into the image you would see we've then got the option for size and roughness let's just zoom in so we can see exactly what's gone so let's find a nearly agree with the sky so you should be able to see if I take that back to where it was there's no real grain in this image we've got nice smooth transitions everything looks pretty cool if we start to introduce grain in you should start to see that we get a simulated film grain effect so if you were using higher ISO films years and years and years ago then you'd have this sort of grain effect that we brought in now this works really well if you've got black-and-white images you want to create a gritty kind of effect great for concert photography or low-light photography so you can introduce grain into the image you can then adjust the size of that grain so you can make it larger so you can see that brings in a much larger grain effect or you can take it as a left-hand side and make it much more subtle much smaller grain effect put that back to where it was and then you've got the roughness so as his name suggests is as you sort of bring this over to the left-hand side you get this more sort of uniform effect which isn't the nicest it looks like a kind of leather effect particularly to the right hand side we get a much more rough much grainy effect so you can find the balance between use in the grain the size and the roughness to recreate the sort of film effect that you might want to create with this particular tool let's just reset that I don't want any grain in there and let's just close those options down zoom back at okay so that's how you deal with the effects panel so there's some pretty cool things in there even they look first glance they look pretty sort of plain and boring you can use those to get some amazing look and effect in your photographs so next that we've got the detail panel now this is where you're going to start to sharpen the image that you're working with so let's just zoom in and take a look what we have working with now this is a pretty sharp image to start off with so you can see that on the detailed panel we've got sharpening we've got noise reduction and we've got color noise reduction so again if you're going back to shooting images with quite high ISO in low-light situations then noise can be a contributing factor and something you may not want in all of your image so if you've got things like skies or you've got solid colors they can really show noise up quite badly and this is a great way an easy way of dealing with that now each one of these panels has the option to toggle down and see additional options in there so start off with the sharpening let's expand that out and see what we have so you've got sharpening which is the amount of sharpening being applied the radius is the number of pixels that are good to be sharpened so you can see by default we've got one pixel I highly recommend unless extreme circumstances 1 pixel radius should be more than enough for pretty much everything you want to do you can experiment with it but the larger you go the more extreme the sharpening gets and the more unnatural it can look so be careful using the radius the detail is how much detail is kind of kept in the image so the more sharpen the supplied you could start to lose details so you can use the detail slider to make sure that you've retained the important details in your image and finally the masking now the masking is one of those tools that kind of a it can cause confusion but what it really does is it allows you to fine-tune what edges are going to be sharpened because what the sharpening is doing this is look at the contrast between the parts of your image so high contrast areas will start to get more sharpening and you can use the masking control to apply how much sharpen is going to be applied to the overall image so the lower to the left you've got that more the image is going to be sharpened which might sound like a good thing but the reality is it didn't tend to give great effects you're better off pushing that over to the right hand side where it looks at the contrast edges and introduces sharpening into those contrasts the areas now let me just show you what I mean by that again we can use that holding the Alt key down to get additional tools let's apply some sharpening now you can't really see too much because I only applied a small amount of sharpening but there is sharpening being applied now if I hold the Alt key down on the keyboard you can see when I drag the masking over this is now showing a contrast simulation of what's going to be affected so what we're looking to do is find those nice contrast the edges so you can see the white is the areas that are gonna be sharp and the black is gonna be left untouched so if you push this over you can see because obviously we're dealing with quite a detailed sort of image at the moment we're controlling what's gonna be sharp and so this is gonna be sharpened but if we should have scrolled to the sky hold the Alt key down again you can see none of the sky is really going to be sharpened which is exactly what we want because there's nothing that really needs to be sharpened in me it's all very soft edges so we start to sharpen that we'd introduce crazy-looking weird artifacts into it it just doesn't look very good so this is the easy way of dealing with it holding that Alt key down and using this tool so you can see just by sliding that over what's going to be affected so we take this over to the left hand side you can see pretty much all the image is going to be affected which isn't necessarily the best way we can do the same thing with the detail we can hold that down it you can see this gives us sort of an unsharp mask effect so as we sort of take that over to the right hand side let's just zoom in and see we seem a bit better you can see there's a huge amount of detail that's gonna be sharpened in it and it doesn't look very good so by using the detail slider you can just make sure we get a nice fine balance between the amount of detail you want to sharpen and the detail you want to be left alone as it were radius you could use the same on there sharpening you can see what that does that switches to black and white to reduce any color information to sort of cause any confusion when you're sharpening now I've already done a video dedicated to sharpening which is in Lightroom the desktop version but the tools are exactly the same so I'll link that in the description below so you can get a much more detailed description of what's going on and how to sharpen your image is the best way but hopefully this is giving you a sort of an insight into what those tools do and how you can utilize them to get really nice sharp end results so let's just drag that masking right the way up there to about they just to make sure I don't sharpen things I don't want the sharpen okay we're looking pretty good let's just toggle that back up noise reduction there's not really any noise in this image nothing to really write home about but again like I said you can expand this out and you've got noise reduction and you've got color noise reduction now these are two different types of noise and depends upon the image if you've got color noise reduction you'll see that because it'll have sort of colors red greens and blue pixels in there and you'll very quickly see it you can use the color noise reduction for that normal noise which is a grain effect you can just use the noise reduction so like I say I'm not going to too much detail on that we'll leave that as is next up we've got the optics section now the optics is when you shoot your lens has its own specific characteristics now that might be one of those things that means that you get some kind of distortion you could have distortion on the edges you could have some vignette intense all different types of lenses will have their own optical characteristics and what this does is it looks at a database of the most common most popular lenses and it will try to compensate for any kind of effects that that lens will apply to your image if you shoot in wide-angle it'll try to get rid of those sort of fall off sort of vignette in effect from the edges but also get rid of some that distortion so I'd recommend that if you shot the image yourself try the remove chromatic aberration try the enable lens correction let it see if it picks up the actual lens that you were using if it doesn't you can customize and adjust this yourself if you want you can see we've got a distortion correction and we've got a lens vignetting there's sort of two key things now I didn't shoot this image so I don't have that option available it's probably already been done anyway so I'll deselect that the chromatic aberration again this is something that isn't evident in this particular image but some lenses cheaper lenses will display it even more on what chromatic aberration is it's basically where you get the sort of purple fringing around the edge of high contrast areas or sort of blue fringing around it and what this will do is it'll try to compensate for that it'll look at the image look at those high contrast areas and compensate for that and reduce it as much as is humanly possible so it's worthwhile applying those to your image and seeing what they do at the bare minimum I always recommend using the chromatic aberration to remove that even if your lens isn't supportive okay so that's the optics section of finally got the geometry now geometry is where if you're dealing with shooting something like a sort of cityscape you'll know yourself the things will happen like converging verticals in other words as you look up as things get further away they're straight lines start to converge towards the top this will allow you to easily go in and correct you have the option for things like guided Auto level vertical and full try them out they're pretty self-explanatory one that really isn't is the sort of the guided where you'll draw guidelines on it and again I've got a video tutorial on how to use that I'll link that in the description below so you can see how to use that and that's basically the first panel covered so we've gone through the real meat and bones of what you can do with Lightroom now let's take a look at some of the tools that are available to us so next up we've got the cropping options so an click on there you can see we can crop we can straighten we can rotate we can flip really easy in all honesty I've done a dedicated video on this that again I put in the link in the description below so you can check that out but the honest fact is it's really easy to work with you simply leaving everything set as it is at the moment you come and grab any of these handles top left right bottom center wherever you want and drag it down and that will allow you to crop the image again like I say this is all non-destructive if you want to change the crop at a later date you can simply come back into the crop module activate that all these crop handles will reappear and you can simply readjust your crop so really cool really easy if you want to reposition where the crop applies you can just simply come inside the crop area you see the hand symbol click and hold down your left mouse button and then you can reposition that as you see fit once you're happy you can simply press the Enter key to commit that or just close the panel down now let's just revert that back to its original you've also got some other options you've got the aspect ratio so we've got popular screen sizes or screen ratios as well as photographic ratio so things like 8 by 10 is 5 by 7 and so on also things like 16 by 9 so by choosing any of those you'll see that the crop handles will resize to keep that aspect ratio now you can resize as you see fit based upon that particular aspect so more like a cinematic effect there we go there's a cinematic effect so we said that if we want to flip so at the moment we've got a landscape image we might want to do a portrait crop well we can simply hit the flip and we're now in portrait mode and we can then go in if we want to ensure with any of these options so one to one for example so that's going to create a square crop come back in and say we want an 8 by 10 so you can see we just flip those around anyway we want very quick very easy we said that final option on there is the constraint aspect ratio once that selected then we'll know that no matter how good our mouse control is it will keep that ratio so in this example for example the the 8 by 10 or something however if you unlock that we now have free reign to create any kind of crop we want we're not limited to an aspect ratio so again really really easy we can reset that we've also got the option to rotate and straighten so we find that our horizon isn't straight for example we can easily use this we can also come in and directly input a value to get exactly what we want finally we've got the options then to do things like to rotate left rotate right and we've got a flip horizontal flip vertical you all as you'd expect so we click it it flips it click it flips it rotates it rotates it pretty self-explanatory nothing really rocket science involved in there so that's the crop panel pretty cool so next up we've got the healing brush so let's open that panel up now this is a pretty simple and straightforward tool we've got clone and we've got he'll now clone as his name suggests will allow us to clone certain parts of things with the heal will allow us to correct it a mistake in the image so let's just zoom in to something let's go to one-to-one let's just say for example we wanted to deal with these couple of little flowers we've got now we can do is we can adjust the brush size so you can see I can use the scroll wheel or I can use the slider whatever I want the feather is basically how soft the edges are going to be so we take that over to the left-hand side we're going to get a very hard edge where if we take over to the right-hand side we start to feather that out and you should hopefully be able to see that we've got sort of two circles now the inner circle and the outer circle is denoting how much sort of softening is being applied to the edges of it and opacity exactly isn't him suggests is it deals with the opacity of the actual brush the effect that we're doing we're healing or cloning so we'll leave that at a hundred will bring the feathering down a little bit size is probably a little too large let's just reduce that down and let's just take a look say we've got these three little flowers we want to get rid of those so just simply hold the left mouse button down paint over those and you can see what it does is it now shows us these our target and there's our source so we can easily reposition either of those so you might say well we've kind of missed the flowers let's position that where we want I might say well I don't any of those set of flowers in there I want just plain grass so I can drag the second part and you can see now it'll update and we've now got rid of those flowers so you can see very easy very easy to do same again let's just go to this stone over on the right-hand side click on there you can see it now pulls up where thinks is the best source I think a better source will be down here click on there go go to second or so to sort of refresh itself and there we go we're pretty much done let's move that over a little bit we kind of duplicate in the little flower of stone but they have to look a bit weird and there you go we very quickly and easily healed different things that we didn't want to see any image this is a great way if you've got dust or you've got dust bunnies on their stones or just things you want to kind of get rid of it's very easy to deal with using the healing or the clone brush the next tool we have is the brush tool now the brush tool is one of those things that has a huge amount of power associated with it the brush tool is basically as his name suggests it allows you to paint effects now that could be you want to paint a color change you might want to paint to make part of the image cooler or wall by using the tint or the temperature you might want to over or underexposed something so it's pretty much the same as kind of doing a Dodge and burn effect tons and tons of options so you'll see that once we select the brush we now have some options available we've got things like temperature tint exposure contrast and so on so what you should see is that a lot of the tools that are available in the develop module right at the top we've got the edit options are all available in here so clarity D haze saturation and so on so we can do is we can use the brush and paint those effects on so let me just give you an example then we just hit the saturation freak that right the way down make my brush a little larger and what I do is I'm just gonna simply paint an area and as I start to paint you'll see as I keep paint in we start to paint the color away so we're doing it effectively painting desaturation so we desiccated it by using the paintbrush so this allows you get very silly active in where you want these particular effects to be taken place great if you want to do things like skin smoothing you can take things like this the clarity slider reduce that down and then you can paint onto the face to create nice smooth skin tones and when you're working with the paint brush in much the same ways you could move the clone and the heel brush around you can do the same thing with this so you can see where we take our most of it once we've got this tool active any area that we're using a brush you can see this little blue dot now we can create multiple brushes and we can apply the effect and different effects all over our image just by simply clicking on the plush but plus button to create a new brush what we can do is we can move this around so let's just say for example we've done something and then we crop the picture or we do something and we need to move that effect well all we need to do is come over the little blue dot grab that with the left mouse button drag it to reposition it where we want very very easy you can see if we take our mouse over you'll see it now shows us in a red overlay that's the actual area that's been affected and because we've got a soft brush with a feathering on there you can see we don't have any hard edges so it's really cool we can also come up and we can use the eraser and this does the complete opposite this will paint away the effect that we put on there so you see as I start painting holding mouse button down we now start to reintroduce the color back in this in other words we're taking at that D saturation effect by painting away the areas that we've covered with saturation so if you're used to working with masks inside Photoshop this kind of technology is going to be very familiar with you it's like working with quick masks and the red overlay is very similar to the way quick masks work in Photoshop so by painting things on and using the eraser to remove them it's like using a mask nothing is permanent it can be adjusted corrected removed whatever you want to do with it now the brush also has some additional options so we come up you can see this little toggle arrow click to show more options and you can see we've got size feather in exactly same way as we did with the clone we've also got flow and density we've also got the option for auto mask now I've covered this in a lot more detail his own dedicated video but the auto mask technically looks at the edges of the contrast so for example if your paint on someone's face you might want to make sure that you don't go over onto the background for example don't spill over onto the back when the effect you do it by checking the auto mask what Lightroom will do is it look at the contrast edges look where you're painting an attempt to a really good job will creating a mask effect so let's just say for example I wanted to paint this on when I reduce our brush size down reduce the feather don't I don't want to have anywhere near that amount of fair that we leave everything else as it is but I'll just check the auto mask we're going to do is we're going to increase the exposure so you see nothing's happening at the moment apart from this area because we've got that as a brush we've already created screen click on that delete that that gets rid of it completely again so that's got rid of that so we're gonna do now is we're gonna come back on with click to add a new pet brush and we're going to do is we're gonna start painting over our figure now what you should start to see is because I've adjusted the exposure the black areas should start to lighten up and I'll see on his legs is feet and so on so I'm just painting on today to try to get just the man a little lighter because he's a little too dark property everything else I'm quite happy with so you can see now we've done that we've applied that but we haven't made any effect on the sort of the ice or the water behind or the grass or the earth I think because the autumn mask has enough contrast there to know that we want to paint just on the areas that we're going over so you see if I did my mouse over that little blue dot we get a red mask that shows us all the areas have been affected as you can see it's not spilling over onto the background it's pretty much all contained inside our figure and that's how the auto mask works just make sure that when you don't want that to take effect you just want to be sort of quite liberal with your effect that you don't have the auto mask applied because what that'll do is it really does slow down your whole process of painting because it's trying to mask at the same time as you're trying to apply the effect so on a slower computer it can get a little bit slow and unwieldy so just make sure you use that and that's the brush tool all those different options then they only apply to the area that's been brushed on to the part of the image that you want of that makes sense like I say it's a very very powerful tool really something you want to get into you when you want to get selective on your edits so let me take a look at the brush tool we've now got the option for the linear gradient and the linear gradient on first look may look very much the same as the actual brush tool and in a certain respect it does work in a very similar fashion the only difference is we caught obviously can't paint directly on the image we're going to create a gradient a gradient the effect that's gonna happen is based upon what these sliders do it so at the moment you can see the saturation said to -100 and exposure set to almost plus two stops so if I create a gradient now it's gonna desaturate where I replace that gradient it's also going to put an exposure bump in there I don't see I don't wanna do with that so what I do is set it back to zero making sure the linear gradient is selected and we sit you're gonna drag down the screen now if you hold the shift key down on the keyboard you'll constrain this to make sure that it goes perfectly straight so you can see what happens is we get three lines now these lines pretty much just show you the grade year the graduation between the maximum effect and no effect so we're saying is anything above this top line is going to be completely affected by whatever we do on the sliders on the right-hand side and it's below the bottom line nothing's gonna happen but what happens in between the two is going to be basically a soft graduation so we can reposition this if you want to grab in that blue dot you'll also see if we take our mouse over we get the red overlay showing us the masked area where these effects are going to take place and you can see a visual representation of what I just said so what we can do now is we can just simply come in and just do things like alter the exposure so you can see we now start to bring a huge amount more detail into the sky without really affecting anything to do with the actual mid ground or the foreground so that's pretty cool if we find it has too much of an effect we can simply bring that up further up so we start to reduce the effect we've also grabbed these any of the sort of the top or bottom lines and what we do is if we click and hold and then just drag we reduce the actual amount of graduation that we see in other words we make it a much quicker graduation between the full effect and no effect obviously depend upon the image you're working with and most of the time if he did him things like skies and that nice smooth graduations gonna work really well for sometimes you don't want that you want to have that sort of hard edge you can do that very easily you don't limit it to this being perfectly straight you can easily come in and you can rotate this to any angle you want so again like I say you've got tons of control over there just undo that a second okay so now that we've done that we've just dropped the exposure down there we can now do things like we can say well let's just bump the clarity up on that to get some real nice strong contrast in there we might say well let's bring a little bit of d haze in today just to really bump that contrast you can see what happens if we go a little too far this isn't taking too much in the way of the D haze this is only sort of plus 20 or so you can see it has quite a marked effect on the image so we need to be careful we're doing me once you've done that we can do things like we can use the contrast if we want to we can do things like the highlights we can make sure we push those highlights or we'll protect them by pulling things back a little bit but you can see we've created a much more dramatic sky with a couple of simple alterations and just using that gradient that linear gradient over the sky itself if bring that down a little more just making sure that we get exactly what we want on me that looks pretty cool now there's a little tip for you you can see that we started obviously influenced the mountain range which we may not actually want to do so we could do is simply come up to where we've got our shadows or we can push those up and what that's gonna do is it's gonna lift those shadows a little bit and make sure that the blacks are not quite so dark in there so we can compensate for things along those lines so there's pretty cool that's very very easy to do use in the gradient tool so now that we've seen the brush tool and how that works and we've seen the linear gradient how that works we've got one other tool that works in a very similar fashion and that's the radial gradient so we click on there you can see that activates the radial gradient same options we had in the linear gradient and now evident in there it also retains the last set is that we used so we can reset those if we want to double click on any of those and it'll reset everything back to where it was originally so quick and easy so what the radial gradient does is pretty much exactly the same thing but in a radial fashion so if I just click drag that out you can see we now create a circle or an ellipse anything that's just basically radial so we do that we could reposition if we want to just by grabbing the little blue dot any of these little resize or reshape handles we can grab those and adjust things on there so you can see what we can do now is we can sort of focus on our character at the moment you can see if we take our mouse over everything outside is being affected or protected we might not want to do that we can invert this if we want those things to be click on they come back over and you'll see now that what's masked or protected is the actual inside of the circle so when I invert it if we just zoom in let's go to one-to-one so we can see what we're doing so now let's just say for example I want to affect the darker areas of this you can see that we've got a little bit of Earth Day and obviously the clothing is wearing so we could do is we could come over to the shadows for example and we could just sort of lift those up you can see as we do that we start to lift those shadows up but only inside that circular area now obviously if we find with just influencing a little too much we could simply come in and adjust this circle just to get exactly what we want and we've got a nice feathered edge we know we're gonna get a nice smooth graduation between these sort of affected area and the unaffected area obviously it depends what you're doing on here if we started playing about with the saturation for example then that's gonna affect the outside because that's where there's more color so not just his legs gonna be affected the actual water itself and things gonna be effective as well so this is where you'd use the paintbrush and this is where you'd go in and use the auto mask and so on but you can see again it's a really easy way of working another great tool that we've got inside light from CC and there we go that pretty much wraps up what we've got inside light from CC that's your quick start guide to how you can work inside light from CC so let's just quickly take a look at the before and the after and just see some of the things we've done now obviously this isn't a final image I spend a lot more time working on this but what I wanted to do will just show you some of the main tools how you use them and how you can quickly edit the image very easily so this is the before as you can see it looks a little bit flat and washed out this is the after we didn't make that many tweaks to it but we made a massive effect to the tone and the colors and everything else inside the image itself so that's how you use Lightroom cc that's a QuickStart guide to getting the most out of Lightroom cc quickly and easily if you enjoyed the video please give it a thumbs up hit that subscribe button don't forget to click on the bell icon to be notified every time a new video is uploaded to the channel if you need comments questions or feedback on this video or anything you'd like to see covered on the channel please pop those in the comment section below and until next time take care

Channel: LightroomTV

Views: 86,015

Keywords: Adobe Lightroom, Lightroom Tutorial, Image Manipulation, Photo Editing, Photo Manipulation, Photoshop Lightroom, PsmegTV, LightroomTV, lightroom CC, lightroom, adobe, lightroom cc tutorial, lightroom cc 2017, lightroom for beginners, lightroom for beginners tutorials, lightroom for beginners youtube, how to use lightroom cc, how to use lightroom cc for beginners, how to use lightroom cc 2017

Id: SyVTntCeAYY

Length: 51min 32sec (3092 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 06 2018