Dramatic Landscapes In Lightroom: In depth tutorial + FREE Raw Files

what's up guys ryan here at signature edits and inside of this lightroom tutorial you're going to get the chance to edit along with me in this video so what that means is we're editing some landscapes some portraits some different animal shots today but all of these photos are actually uploaded online to signature edit.com free raw dash photos they were shared by awesome photographers like you who want to just pay it forward and help you get to know lightroom better so i'm inside of adobe lightroom cc today whether you're on lightroom classic lightroom cc or editing on your phone or your ipad you're going to learn some great stuff here especially if you can apply this by trying it yourself so go ahead grab those free raw files and then i will see you on the other side of this intro [Music] okay so by now you've gone you've downloaded those photos hopefully or you've just grabbed a snack because i'm so entertaining to watch you just don't even want to do anything but stare at my awesome edits all day i understand me too so with a further ado out of the way we are going to just dive in right away to this landscape photo so the first thing i like to do before i actually start editing is just sort of in my head say okay what am i going to need to adjust here obviously we've got a sky that is very bright we've got some highlights in the background with this cliff that is really really nice lighting but it's still very bright then we've got shadows in the foreground so we're going to just start by evening out the light and getting things where we want at first then we're going to apply our creative edits after that's kind of the best way to approach it first you want to fix the light fix the things that need fixing and then you want to apply your creative touches after that it's just a more kind of logical way of going about things so the strategy you employ is going to save you some time when it comes to your actual editing all right so let's start by heading over here to this adjustment brush thing i'm going to hit select sky and lightroom is going to auto detect the sky now if you don't have this in your version of lightroom it might mean that you just need to upgrade to a newer version if you don't have this you could do it by auto masking go to create mask select brush and then you'd make sure auto mask is turned on and just brush on the sky i'm going to do this because it's faster so i'm going to take my exposure down and the easiest way to add blue to the sky is just go down to your white balance so here where it says temperature i'm going to grab that take that towards blue bam see how much blue i just added to this guy now you have to be careful because if you take this down too far your eye's gonna know so you can look at this and say okay it's blue but it's way too dark it just looks unnatural that's because i took it further down in terms of luminosity it's darker than the cliffs underneath it so if i take my exposure back up a little bit you can see it starts to feel a little bit more normal so somewhere around there is probably more natural and if we want to add even more color of course you can grab your little hue panel play with that or hit this little colorize button and add whatever color you wish to that sky so let's make it real nice and blue something like that then i also like to take my highlights up if there's clouds and shadows down and you can even add a little bit of clarity and that's going to enhance whatever clouds are in this guy in this case this guy's pretty hazy and so that's not going to do a whole lot for us but if i go back by hitting command z a couple times you can see it's adding a little bit of depth and dimension by brightening up the white areas and kind of enhancing it a little bit okay so here's before and here's after it looks really great we've added a nice pop of color now you might not want to add that or you might it's up to you but you can practice it's a great thing to try next we're going to try and mask out the foreground which is all in shadow so this is a really good practice image for just figuring out your auto masking all of these different tools that you can use so let's try select subject sometimes lightroom will actually know what you're going for especially if there's a person in the photo other times lightroom will say i have no idea what you're trying to get so in this case it said this is your subject over here this part of the cliff so that's not going to work for us let's just delete that delete mask too and we're going to head over to create new mask brush okay now what i'm going to do is i'm going to hold shift on my keyboard and then i can scroll up or down on my mouse trackpad and you can see that it's adjusting the feather i want my feather kind of smaller now feather is just the gradient the gradual change from 100 opacity in the middle of this brush to that feather is going all the way down to zero so by doing that you can get you see how we've got a nice haze going on it's feathering it's sort of blending that mask in whereas if you take that feather all the way down you're not gonna have any feathering it's not going to blend so just depending on what you want to do that's what you're going to apply so let's just delete that take my feather up a little bit and then i'm going to go down here and look for my auto mask which i've forgotten inside of lightroom cc you don't have auto mask because lightroom's weird it's like we're going to create a new version of lightroom but we're going to not have all of the features that the old version has so that's okay we're just going to do without i'm going to do a decent job of masking out the shadow area and because we don't have auto mask i'm going to just try and blend it a little bit and not try and get it exactly perfect so i took my feather up by holding shift on my keyboard and then scrolling up on my mouse wheel trying to remember those keyboard shortcuts as it will come in handy as you're learning to edit just makes things a lot faster than every time you go half over here and have to adjust things and if you are wondering where that feather is option optional where you can get that option it's over here in the little panel here you just hit that little arrow and now you have feather flow is how fast your ink comes out if you're painting think about it that way and density is whether it's 100 opacity zero percent opacity i don't know why it says a density instead of opacity that'll make more sense anyways so i selected that now you can see i can add some exposure i like to do it like way too far and then that way it'll show me exactly where my mask is and i can go in make my brush a little smaller and then just kind of fine tune it because there's a couple areas here that i didn't hit that i missed so we're going to go in like that now the thing is when you're not using auto masking you're doing this manually you're not going to be able to push it as far as if you had a perfect mask since this mask isn't perfect you can see i have to be more subtle in what i'm actually applying so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take my exposure up but only a little bit i'm going to take my highlights up and my whites up now i'm doing that instead of the exposure because that's going to feel a lot more natural if i took everything up including the shadows it's going to feel weird it doesn't look right but if i just take the highlights up and the whites up those are the naturally bright parts of the image so by enhancing them we're just adding some contrast a little bit of pop to the image not making it overly like way too bright okay next thing i could take my contrast up a little bit and then take my exposure up it's going to do kind of the same idea where it's going to take the shadows make them darker take the highlights make them a bit brighter so here's before that mask and here's after so you can see it's still pretty subtle we've kept the contrast feeling natural and the same it's just we've made everything brighter now what i can do is grab this mask right click here on these three little dots and select duplicate by doing that obviously we're duplicating our effect and that's where you're really going to see how terrible my mask is in the top right so if i press o it'll show me the overlay of that mask i can go in hold alt on my keyboard and that's going to actually toggle between my brush and my eraser so by holding down alt i now have my eraser and i can erase the mask off of the sky here and kind of clean it up okay press o again voila try and re-center this photo zoom back in okay so it's still a kind of messy mask you can see i'm going to need to fix that a little bit more so let's go in here we got this one which i kind of cleaned up and then we've got this other one which i did not so i'll go in there again okay press o again and you can see here's without those masks and here's with so we've brightened things up without making it look like we've edited it too much now the only other thing to be aware of here is that when we brighten an area that's normally in shadow light depending on whether it's in daylight or shadow cloudy indoors right it's going to be a different temperature now shadows tend to be cooler so as you brighten up your shadows you're going to notice more and more that these colors aren't matching between the background here with the cliffs in the sun and the foreground here with the shaded area so i'm going to have to take my temperature up to match the white balance because as i make it brighter it's going to become more and more obvious i am going to need to dial in this mask a little bit more or it's just going to feel weird okay so we got that here's before here's after now other things in this image that i do think need to be fixed other than the fact that my mask could still be cleaned up a little bit we're going to go over to this band-aid and i'm going to try and get rid of this metal bridge because i think it kind of just does not add to the photo so i'm going to click once use the spot removal tool something like that seems to align pretty well you can turn your feather up that'll help it blend a little bit there you go before after okay good enough you can practice figure out what you like in that photo and post it on your instagram tag me at signature edits go and i can actually see what you come up with okay let's go to the next one we got a nice portrait here okay first things that we're going to assess her skin needs to be cleaned up so we're going to make sure we do that overall we've got a really high contrast photo so i'm going to want to dial back the contrast to make things softer take my highlights back a little bit too and increase the shadows so i'm just making this photo really really fat flat not fat then we're gonna add some pop back to it later okay so i've got my light adjusted so here's before here's after i took all the contrast away we're gonna add it back in a second so i can take my blacks down a little bit that's fine and it looks like we also have a lot of noise in this photo that we're gonna have to fix as well so let's head over to our tone curve i'm going to just add some pop into this image by taking my mid tones down a little bit my shadows down a little bit i'm going to take the white point down as well and that hopefully is just going to give me a creamier highlight rather than making it feel really really bright so look at this little orb here of the sun here's when the white point is white here's when the white point is more like a bright gray see how it blends better it's not quite so harsh we're just going to stick with that and take my overall exposure up a little so here's before here's after and now we can just blend that contrast back in a little bit keep the highlights down before after so we've brightened her up we've made the sky a little bit more creamy now we can go ahead and grab some adjustment brushes and fix her skin so we're going to go to brush rather than select subject because i'm just doing a little specific area in here i'm going to grab the area that i want to clean up and then i'm going to take the contrast down a little bit basically going to smooth out her skin so texture down clarity down and dehaze down a little bit not too much or it's going to look really weird sharpness way down you can even take stuff like warren defringe noise reduction we just want to make things really really fuzzy good then any area that doesn't need to be sharp i can just brush on top [Music] like that so here's before and here's after okay now i'm gonna grab another brush i might even duplicate it so we can just make her skin even softer okay now you do need to be careful because you can see that i went over onto her nose and it's just not blended very well so make sure you zoom in when you do this of course lightroom is frozen so we'll wait for it to unfreeze then you can see the spot on her hair that i went over just not gonna work when we duplicate the mask so we're gonna delete it and not push it quite so far oh boy try this again delete okay and then dial back this effect because it's definitely too intense for some reason lightroom absolutely hates me right now it's going so slow hello come on stupid thing okay that that is not working right there so let's make another brush try this again see why lightroom isn't doing what it's supposed to do and what i'm going to try instead is i'm going to go over her entire face like this and then i'm just going to sharpen stuff after and then that way my mask won't be so obvious it won't need to be so accurate so we'll zoom out all of our skin we're just going to cover good then we're going to do the same thing again we'll take our contrast down texture down clarity down dehaze down a little bit sharpness down okay now i'm going to create another mask we're going to go to our brush and then we're going to grab all the areas we want to sharpen back again so eyebrow eyelash this entire line of her face being silhouetted her lips glasses okay i'm going to take that we're going to take our texture up a little bit clear it up a little bit sharpen this up a little bit okay so here's before here's after okay maybe a little bit of contrast a little bit of white and a little bit of saturation okay now let's talk color because this image has so many different colors going on i feel like it would really benefit from some focus so we're going to say okay which colors are important here which ones are kind of distracting for me i think it's just a matter of having less color overall so i'm going to start by taking the blues and take the saturation out okay purples we'll try the same thing pinks are pretty integral but our yellows maybe we could try desaturating those a little bit and our greens okay so here's before after and you can see just before and after the color mix i'm going to take the luminance of the oranges up a little bit it really just depends at this point like what creatively you want to do definitely her skin is still not fixed so we'll keep working on that we can use our blemish brush which is going to do a horrible job lightroom okay you can make a smaller point and then lightroom will do a better job hopefully of auto fixing these blemishes i'm just doing this very quickly you get the point something like that and because she's not wearing earrings i could also get rid of her piercing okay looking better before after now we could keep massaging this or i could keep showing you some other edits in different photos so i think i think we're going to bypass we go down here to our detail make sure you fix stuff like adding some noise reduction a little sharpening add the contrast back in that we lost before now here's one thing that might be interesting we could go to our adjustment brush go to select subject see if lightroom will grab it properly there we go not bad not bad so we can actually make that slightly brighter increase the highlights and the whites on our subject then we can darken everything else down which is going to get us slightly more pop in the photo so here's before here's after before after okay so now we have a really really beautiful engagement shoot of some kind looks like if we zoom in that our couple sadly was not quite in focus but we can fix that that's no big deal and grab an adjustment brush go select subject and see what lightroom does oh we got lucky perfect we're going to add our texture in there a little bit of clarity a little sharpness a little dehaze okay that's looking much better here's before here's after so they're now just popping out of the background okay so we got so much color so many options here what i really want to do is just make this purple pop so let's go down to our color mixer you're going to notice i'm not fussing around with all the stuff at the top of this photo i'm not adjusting the exposure the contrast because that stuff actually looks pretty good to me it's pretty close it really depends what you want in the photo but it doesn't mean you have to edit every single thing every option has to be adjusted in every single shot so we're going to take our purples and our pinks the saturation up and just see what we're working with okay now if we want to add a little pop sometimes actually taking the luminance down will make the color more visible in this case it's okay not amazing it's almost like we need to add some color so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to make a adjustment brush go to brush i'm going to zoom in on these flowers and i'm going to attempt actually let's do a color range that's going to be way better so i've got a color range and we're going to select this purple and just hit o so i can see my mask you're going to see that i've accidentally added it onto my subject mask so we're just going to undo that delete we're going to go create new mask and then color range perfect we don't want to add it on to our subject mask we want it separate so now we're going to tap on the purple in this photo and if we hit add we can actually add another color here perfect so now we've got all the pinks and the purples in the image now the only problem is it looks like we've also selected our couple at the same time so that that right there is slightly too bad so what we're going to have to do is just roll with it we've got our mask now we can adjust the temperature of that mask towards purple and that's going to add purple to it we can even take it towards blue a little bit that'll add some bluish pink purple and then we can go to our colorize select a color we want to add and now we've got a whole bunch of purple pop in that image so if i press o to show and hide my mask you can see here's before and here's after we've added so much purple the only problem is that the rest of the photo that might actually work and it looks okay but our subject looks really purple so we're gonna have to just counteract that by going to our subject mask and selecting it press o to see that we've got our right subject selected press so again to hide it and now we're just going to do the exact opposite we're going to take our tint towards green a little bit and our temperature towards yellow not that far a little bit just to counteract what we did in that other mask we're going to go to our colorize and the opposite of magenta is green so we're going to try and shift away from the magenta that we added just like that now when we zoom out our couple looks kind of normal again we've got our nice purple background added a lot of color and pop so now now we can do some fun stuff we can add some pop to the image overall do all sorts of things so let's start by going back to our main adjustment brush we're going to take our subjects exposure up and then i'm going to go back to my main photo and take the exposure down so in effect our subject remains the same amount of brightness but our overall photo is a little bit darker add some pop i'm going to add some contrast maybe even a little bit of vibrance that's going to make the greens nice and bright and then this i don't know what it is a fence or something in the foreground i think it's actually a really interesting element in the photo but it's too dark so what i'm going to do is go to our brush again we're going to grab a brush like that and you can see i've done the world's best job at brushing this photo take the exposure up a little bit or in fact let's take the highlights and the whites up a little bit instead that'll be more effective and less noticeable so here's before and here's after just a little bit and here's our photo overall before after now there's one last thing that i think might be really cool with this shot it looks like we've got a nice sunset it's hitting the trees in the background i don't know where the sun is in the photo but i do believe it'd be amazing if we added the sun flare so let's go to our masks once more we're going to grab a i'm radial to click and drag i'm going to make a giant sun that's what i'm doing i'm going to put it somewhere over here because i feel like the trees are golden over here and it'll just add it in a way that is believable and realistic i'm going to take my contrast down highlights down exposure up then i'm going to add a whole bunch of yellow and pink we're going to have a nice pink sunset then you can take your texture and your clarity and your dehaze down and it's just a matter of dialing this in until it feels more realistic so it's going to change depending on the photo but something like this is getting closer to what i want right around there and then you can go to colorize and let's say it's a really pink sunset just see what works somewhere around there feels pretty good so in the end here's before and here's after all inside lightroom no photoshop added a whole bunch of color you can just dial that in that might have been a little bit too extreme with adding the color to the flowers but i like it i'm digging it so i'm going to move on okie doke later lightroom later let's yeah just leave me alone let's head over here got a beautiful beautiful shot now the nice thing is when you take a nice photo in camera editing it becomes so easy you can see that this photo whoever did this absolute legend of a nighttime photographer this must have been a long exposure somewhere which is why the water is so nice and creamy and it's got this glow i don't know what this is about there must have been something in the foreground that like i don't know i don't know maybe as a composition but basically when you have a nicely taken photo and you get it right in camera editing it on the computer becomes very easy and much more creative it's less about fixing things more about creatively what do i want to do here so let's start by fixing the one thing that's really standing out to me which is that thing and then we've also got some kind of like weird banding going on in here so i'm going to grab the same healing brush and you can just click and drag it for a larger area selection something like that so here's before here's after right first we're going to fix what needs to be fixed then we're going to say creatively what do we want to do here overall this photo is amazing like i don't have much to do other than maybe just add a little bit of vibrance it just depends on the style of the photo that you're going for we could maybe take our highlights down a little bit play around with our black point in our shadows a little clarity little texture something like that and then we'll zoom in and you can see there's like a little bit of grain and noise going on in here which i'm actually fine with because it's kind of more analog feeling anyways but if you want to get rid of that we can go down into our detail panel take our noise reduction up until it goes away so somewhere around there feels okay then we zoom back in see what else we could do the photo isn't super sharp right now so if we zoom way in hold down alt and take these sliders up you'll be able to see a lot more what's happening when you adjust the various different things so i'm going to take my radius up a little bit my masking up now everything that's white when you hold this down when you're holding down the alt or option key on your keyboard everything that's white is being sharpened everything that is black is not being sharpened so you can see with no masking everything is being sharpened so take my masking up only the buildings are being sharpened now only the major lines within the buildings are being sharpened so i'm just going to dial it in because there's no reason to sharpen the sky when the sky isn't meant to be sharp in the first place okay something like that and i do want just a little bit more pop in the photo so we'll add a little d haze here's before here's after pretty subtle but i like it now if you wanted to you could add maybe a little bit more color in this section of this guy a couple ways to do that first go to select subject that was not the right thing let's go to select sky hello come on you wait for an undetermined amount of time and eventually lightroom says is this right and i say yeah good job lightroom so we're just going to add some pink to our white balance and a little bit more blue i found for whatever reason when you warm up a photo it tends to wash out the sky when you cool it down it tends to add a little bit more color mostly because the sky tends to be blue so we're gonna make it a little bit more blue a little bit more pink and then if we wanted to we could raise our highlights a little bit and our whites and then lower our shadows and that's just going to enhance the contrast that's already in the sky just like that before after and we'll move on so let's head over to this jungle ruin first things first let's just adjust the really obvious things we're going to start by straightening this photo out okay and then we're going to need to adjust the perspective because you can see that it's not quite exactly symmetrical even though i tried to straighten the horizon now down here looks a little crooked so we're going to go down here to our optics and geometry sections where are we hello minimize that to minimize that optics enable lens correction that's going to help a little bit and then geometry we should be able to straighten this out so we could go with auto and see if that'll be about right nope definitely not so let's undo that let's try instead going with guided so what we're going to do is we're going to find two straight lines so we're going to start with the line of the building right here which should be straight and then we're going to try a horizontal one so we'll go with probably this line here should be straight so lightroom is going to try based on those measurements to get things straight now since i was a little bit off didn't do the best job so we can just adjust it until things look about right here's before here's after you can see it's closer it's still not quite right so i'll just fiddle a little bit longer i think that's getting a lot closer if we go back to our crop we could probably reset that okay before after i'm thinking that's closer so we'll keep rolling with that next these backgrounds really take away these backgrounds these buildings in the background really take away from the rest of the image so i'm going to go up here i'm going to try select sky and hopefully lightroom is going to grab those backgrounds the buildings as part of the background looks like not quite so we're just going to go down here to where it says add select the mask add brush now we're just going to be able to extend that mask by brushing onto our building here and our building over here something like that now we could zoom in take our time with this do a better job this is one area where lightroom classic works so much better because unlike lightroom cc lightroom classic has auto masking and it just makes it a lot easier to get a really nice effective accurate mask with stuff like this but oh well i don't think it's going to be that big of a deal we can kind of bleed over the edges of these branches a little bit okay let's drag this back into the center here go back to our mask take our exposure up and take our dehaze down not too far because you can notice it looks kind of weird around that the branches and we can also just make sure we grab all of this building press o to hide or show your mask just like that okay so a few pigeons had to die in order for us to do that but that's looking a lot better and then again these branches that mask looks pretty sloppy so hold alt on your brush remember that'll toggle to the eraser and we can erase we'll just turn our flow down and just erase a little bit to clean up that mask get a few more branches in there okay is it perfect no because you can see the building's still kind of in behind the trees here so of course we could go back keep massaging it but i think you guys get the point the easiest way to kind of minimize these buildings in the background is going to be turning our flow down going in with our brush kind of like that and making sure our texture and our clarity are way down okay for now we're going to say that's good for instagram or something on a small screen you wouldn't notice if you're going to make a print you're going to be a lot more careful with the actual mask itself next you can take your overall exposure up a little bit take our highlights up shutters down white's up black's down like that adjust our overall exposure maybe a little bit too far ryan then we can do some dodging and burning so there's two ways to do it one is we just go through we create a brush mask and we grab every area that already is kind of in shadow so all of these door arches like that both sides okay so we'd find all of the arrows of shadow and we just emphasize it so then we take the exposure down and basically the areas that were dark are now really dark that's just going to add some extra dimension to the photo by doing it see just before and here's after right you're just sculpting the light the other way of doing it that's a lot faster is we're going to create a new mask we're going to go with luminance range and we're just going to grab the shadow areas of the image so we're going to go like this and you can see that as i do that it's only selecting areas of the image that are between 0 like all the way black and say 10 or 20 percent brightness so just the darkest parts of the image and then this little thing here if i can grab both of them there is a feather in here that for some reason there we go that area right there is the feather and kind of the falloff so if you want to make it more of a gradual transition you can so we're just going to grab the darkest parts of the image kind of the same way as we did manually a second ago we're going to do just automatically like this then we can take our shadows exposure down or up you can see we kind of kind of sculpt the light that way so you can take your exposure up maybe we want to add some blue to the shadows make them more magenta right we can do all sorts of different things and do the same thing we'll do one more create mask go to color luminance range and this time we're just going to grab the highlights of the image so just the very bright parts i'm going to take the exposure on those up maybe a little bit highlights up whites up of course you push this too far it's going to look ridiculous like that but just a little bit you can add a little more dimension to your photo just make sure that when you're doing this you're adjusting the feather so that it's a little bit more gradual so let's see if i can grab it come on there we go that should make it smoother like that so here's before and here's after okay so now it just comes down to what you want to do with the image stylistically go down to our color mixer maybe take some saturation out of the yellows and the greens add some saturation to our reds and our browns and our oranges and then adjust our hue maybe towards red a little bit that depends what you're feeling something like that okay before after i'm gonna move on lots of different things you could do there but i'm not super inspired so we'll keep going mr giraffe okay couple things here first off really beautiful photo the giraffe is in nice lighting it's not super harsh so we're to be able to do a lot of different things here but as i increase the exposure on mr giraffe the sky is getting blown out so first things first let's go over to our adjustment brush we're going to select the sky and just like we did in our earlier video we can take our exposure down highlights up put our shadows and our blacks down then add some blue maybe even increase the saturation a little bit add a little bit of color and voila your sky is much more sky now you can play around see what feels right sometimes taking the highlights back down will actually be better other times not so much so just feel out what's right you want to keep it looking pretty natural still if you can okay so here's before here's after making some progress next let's grab mr giraffe see what happens when we go to our subject mask select subject there we go mr giraffe so we'll make him hey look they think the tree is his tail that's kind of funny so we'll take the exposure up a little bit take the contrast down a little bit and then we can take our blacks down our whites out we're basically just adding some pop to mr giraffe a little saturation maybe hue could go slightly towards red like that a little bit of de-haze sometimes is nice a little clarity a little texture okay so here's before that and here's after see how much he's popping from the background and by having the giraffe brighter more saturated it just makes everything in the entire image look like it has more pop okay so next up we can do the same thing with this mask with the background so we're going to duplicate it oh that was the sky mask scratch that i'm going to take our subject mask we're going to duplicate it and then we're going to press the apostrophe key or the quotation key on our keyboard or go down here to invert now you can see it selected the background so we can hold alt and sometimes that works sometimes it doesn't okay we're just going to reset the sliders on our adjustment brush and now we can do whatever we want with the background so what i like to do take our texture and our clarity down a little bit that'll give us even a little bit more background separation and a little bit of dehaze maybe okay now we can add some contrast make sure our shadows are not getting clipped too much take our exposure down ever so slightly here's before and here's after right little by little we're just adjusting our image to fit the vision whatever that happens to be now our giraffe looks probably a little bit too bright in this photo not really blending with the background so we'll darken them back down okay so here's before and here's after so so far so good now we can do some stylistic stuff we can maybe try and get this guy back a little bit more we've definitely got some fringing going on see all that purple that's called fringing it's when different edges in the image just refract off the glyph glass of the lens i don't really understand how it works but what you want to do is go down to your optics and you should be able to select defringe see how it has a purple slider we've got an amount and lightroom is going to find it and get rid of it so without and with from a distance you can't really tell much at all but when you zoom in it makes a difference okay we can actually expand that because it almost looks like we're getting some fringing around the blues as well so by expanding it i can kind of dial it in okey-doke so giraffe progress being made next up it's just a question of what do you want to do to really emphasize the image make it more beautiful what things do you want to exaggerate what do you want to minimize so i'm going to grab a brush i'm just going to paint on the grass just around the giraffe a little bit to make it slightly sharper and pop because right now it feels like the giraffe is too separated from the rest of the photo so let's go in here we're going to grab just these kind of little clumps of flowers i don't know what they are but i'm grabbing them and then maybe even this tree stock itself a couple branches i'm being really sloppy with my brush because i'm not going to do any extreme adjustments you're not adjusting it in a super extreme way you don't have to be as careful okay increase the highlights a little bit whites up a little you can see it's very subtle and that's because my flow was down if i were to take my flow all the way up to 100 opacity that effect is a lot stronger so again here's before that and after very subtle just making a few more things pop out and last of all maybe we want to add a little bit of texture and interest to the background so we're going to grab our brush just select my trees back here i think if we made them a little darker we're going to add more contrast overall to the image so let's try let's just add some contrast take our blacks down a little bit not too too much somewhere around there so by doing that see the sky before and after the sky hasn't changed but now the sky by contrast seems brighter and seems to pop more because the background itself the trees are darker so the darks against the lights that contrast makes it seem more poppy so before after and then you can do some stylistic stuff if you want like we could desaturate our greens and our yellows we could maybe go for more of like uh african desert vibe by taking our greens and our yellows the hue more towards orange you could desaturate the blues maybe if that's what you're feeling or take the blues towards teal the world is your oyster i think i'm gonna actually just get the blues way down like that saturation around there greens can stay saturated that's fine i'm just not feeling like the blues are really helping the image so i'm going to take the saturation down on them and the luminance up so after all that work we did saving this guy i just got rid of it anyways because i thought just the colors didn't really add to the image overall so we could even go back to our sky mask here take the exposure back up just like that okay so here's our image before and after tag me at signature edits code and share what you came up with now out of curiosity let's just copy those settings command c or ctrl c on your keyboard i'm going to paste them with command v on a mac i think that's control p on a pc you can see that this is why presets oftentimes people buy them they get really confused they're like these don't work on my images what's up with the presets it's not the preset that's the fault it's just the fact that every single image is different and unique and so you're gonna have to edit it fresh in some situations unless the photo has the same lighting the same colors the same camera style whatever you're going to find that more often than not presets are not going to be perfect but once you get the white balance and the lighting dialed in things just work okay let's go to versions we're going to go to original i'm going to reset close that so let's do the same kind of concept but this time a lot faster let's grab our select sky take our exposure down a little bit i'm gonna add some nice blue to the photo there we go emphasize our highlights and our whites bring those way up bring our shadows and our blacks down somewhere around there okay sky looks good giraffe not so much but we're making progress one thing at a time now we're going to go to create new mask select subject now mr giraffe just doesn't look very saturated and wow not the best auto mask job but we'll go to add brush and we're just going to add his neck beautiful just beautiful now we can take our exposure up contrast up whites up maybe even the shadows up a little bit now this looks silly right now but the key is we want to just brighten things up to start with see what we're working with we can dial it in as we go so i'm going to warm the temperature a little bit and then it looks a little green to me his skin tone his giraffe tone so we're going to take this up somewhere around there so here's before after and then we're just going to dial things back yellow of course sometimes it just doesn't want to work get all things back mr giraffe that's the sky undo that let's label these so we don't get so confused double click and you can type in giraffe hopefully i spelled giraffe right might have two r's i'm not sure something like that now sometimes taking the clarity down and then taking your texture or your dehaze up can be really helpful they kind of smooth each other out a little bit of sharpness i could play with the hue a little bit and then i definitely need him brighter he still looks too dark so like that to start i want some saturation okay so that's not bad here's before and here's after probably made them too red we can fix that later now let's go to our oranges take the luminance up yellows luminance up reds luminance you guessed it up okay we can take our saturation up as well particularly in those reds and then adjust our hue so the red is more of like an orange than a bread okay there's mr giraffe before and after obviously we've still got some stuff going on with like some banding around his ears it just looks like we've pushed it too far so we could grab our sky or just grab our blues take the luminance up a little bit or down i'm not sure which in this case there you go is it better i don't know is it different yes and last but not least we have bambi's cousin bamboo so we're going to start off by going down here getting rid of mr fly well thanks ryan you're welcome bamboo it's been a long day we're gonna go to our crop make him a little bit more centered in this photo and then we have to decide what do we want to do now what's kind of interesting is his natural color is so gray it almost looks like i've desaturated it but let's see what we can come up with let's do a black and white just for fun now the way that i like to do black and white is to take the saturation down the reason i do that rather than switch it to black and white mode is i just find the colors you can do some more interesting things so we can take our saturation way down like this and then take our saturation up in the oranges and in the reds of our color panel and then down across everything else and then what you're left with is like a 99 black and white photo with just like this tiny pop of color that you don't even necessarily see you just feel it so just a little not quite that much somewhere around there okay so here's before here's after pretty basic right and then we can do different things so if you want to go like really hardcore really gritty we could grab a tone curve make a nice s curve on here maybe even do an inverted color would be kind of cool do one of those bamboo the horror movie by disney something like that and then i'm going to go down and look for my texture [Music] take my texture up a little bit clarity way up the a's way up vignette way up i'm just messing around you can see that this is pretty awful so far so i'm probably going to wind up taking it in a different direction but sometimes you'll be surprised when you're just messing around the things that you discover it's like oh i didn't know those two tools could work together that way so maybe if we take our texture down but our clarity all the way up all right we try it the other way and we take our clarity all the way down our texture all the way up we just see the way that things work together and you'll learn by doing it i'm a big fan of learn by doing when you can okay i'm thinking something like that and then what i'm gonna do is take my highlights way back my contrast way down and i'm going to go to select subject see if lightroom's good at it perfect okay now i can take my subject make it quite a bit brighter in the frame add some clarity smooth things out like that take my overall exposure down then if you want more texture you want more contrast whatever you can just go back to your tone curve take it down just depends what you like i'm thinking somewhere around there it's kind of interesting he kind of pops off the screen here's before here's after million different ways you could treat it i'm no amazing perfect michelangelo i'm just showing you some different techniques you could try yourself so share what you come up with tag me at signature redisco that kind of does it for today's and this week's and this particular lightroom tutorial hopefully you learned something in here if you did can you do me a favor can you share whatever it is in the comments below so that other people can learn from what you learned and i would love to see your own photos tag me at signature edits co like this video if it was helpful dislike if it wasn't that's cool we'll have a conversation i will see in the next video in the meantime create something awesome peace [Music]

Channel: Signature Edits

Views: 11,133

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Id: 7PFBXBPx9XU

Length: 53min 23sec (3203 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 07 2021