DxO Webinar: Black and White fashion portraits in Silver Efex Pro with PhotoJoseph

[Music] good morning good afternoon good evening everybody welcome to another DxO a webinar I'm your host photo Joseph and today we are talking about Silver Efex Pro specifically we're gonna be doing high-fashion black and white we got some cool pictures of some cool looking people that we are going to take through solar effects Pro and try and do some interesting things with I do want to apologize for everybody who was obviously you've signed up for yesterday's I had to move it to today just to explain slight medical emergency one of my front teeth exploded and I had to get that fixed and the only time the dentists could see me was yesterday at 8 a.m. which took me well past the webinar time so I have we have a new tooth but yeah I couldn't do the webinar with a hole in my face I sounded funny I look funny it just it had to be fixed so my apologies I'm very glad that so many of you are able to reschedule for today if you have or if you do miss any of today's session today's webinar or if you just want to go back and watch any part of it again about 24 hours after the end of this webinar you will be getting a copy of it by email you'll be getting a video in your email inbox so be on the lookout for that let's see here any other housekeeping oh if actually just make sure make sure everybody can see in here we find just say quick hello in the chat room make sure that every seeing and hearing you should be seeing my screen as well right now so let's just make sure that's all working and Joni is already saying you missed yeah you can see me and you can hear me that's awesome I'm calling since you missed the creative portrait webinar so I can't send you a link directly right now Collin was asking about that the you these will be uploaded to YouTube eventually I don't have any control over that I don't work for DSO in case you're wondering I'm a freelancer I don't have control over that but I do know that that is the intention to get all these up there I also know that this is August and Paris is largely shut down DX as a French company so there's very few people in the office I think that these will happen come the end of the month that will this wall get uploaded I'm also writing written tips around a lot of these videos that will get posted over the next few months so it will show up on the blog there as well okay let's see here anything else throughout this presentation ask your questions whenever you like if you haven't seen one of these with me before I answer the questions as we go I will be regularly jumping over to the chat room so anything you want to know drop it in there and I will go back many times and try and answer those and of course at the end we'll go back and try and catch up on any that I missed and finally last bit of housekeeping there is a website that has all the webinars listed Nik collection DXR comm slash webinars for some reason I can it has to do that vacation time the last one listed on here already happened so the future ones aren't on here for everybody that not even this one is on here for anybody who has signed up for one of these you probably got an email from DxO about it there are more coming I've got to think four or five more of these this month so be sure to register for those if your if you love this sort of thing we're doing a lot of different education in here hopefully if you're watching this not live this website will be updated you can go to the website to sign up for the other ones ok let's get into this show e today I'm gonna be using Lightroom as the host throughout all these presentations I keep using different apps as host apps of course we're ultimately working in silver facts are in the neck collection but if you are not a Adobe user if you're not using Lightroom specifically let loose EC as we are today don't worry about it we're still gonna get to we're gonna spending be spending the majority of our time in the plugins themselves but I do want to spend time talking about the host apps a little bit too and in today's case it's what's quite important about what we're doing in the host app and it doesn't matter what host app at this point it could be anything is adjusting the image to prepare to send it to Silver Efex Pro we generally do not want to just send the image off as it came out of the camera there's probably some adjusting that we want to do before we send it into the plugin so we'll be talking about that today again I will be using Lightroom cc but no matter what tool you're using it's going to be the same the discussion I talked about exposure retouching and so on it's all the same we're working with three different photos today I'm going to take three different approaches to getting into Silver Efex Pro from Lightroom cc and once we're in silver for X Pro for each image we're gonna take a difference so total different approaches to the black and white conversion the as far as getting out of lightroom we're gonna go as a edit in Photoshop so we can do some additional work in Photoshop before sending to the plugin we're gonna do an edit from Lightroom opening as a smart object and we'll talk about why that's important and then we're gonna do a straight on just go straight into the plugin from Lightroom cc and talk about primarily the disadvantage of doing that but you'll see what that workflow is like as far as the approaches we're gonna go for a kind of high contrast high grain black and white type of look for one of them we're gonna go for very traditional and clean black-and-white look for another and then another one we're gonna go for a bit of a let's call it a vintage film old look type of a thing so three different approaches to the black and white conversion again starting here in Lightroom I'm gonna take a quick look at the questions if there's anything urgent that has come up Gregg Nicholson asking how you find the blog from the DXL website so if we just go to dx.com there is a blog button right here click on the Z blog button and you will find a lot of articles in here mostly written by me actually most of these are my articles that are up here so I've been doing this for several months now so there's quite a few on there and there's a whole bunch more coming in there so be sure to check those out thank you for asking that okay into Lightroom we shall go alright so these are the three photos there's one of this girl here one of him and that one of her so kind of fashion II edgy different you went up the pictures of people obvious who the subject matter is is not super important when it comes to this but I am gonna be treating each photo to go along with the style of the photo so this photo here we're gonna start with this one this is of Kenna lovely model she had this great look going on with the the kind of very gothic look the black hair this vintage dress I shot her against this old barn and my intention from the beginning with this photo was to make it black and white which is kind of fun the others that wasn't the original intention but this one I absolutely intended to so we're gonna start with this one you're looking right now the original photo in Lightroom no adjustments made to it at all if we look closely at it you can see that there's a little bit of retouching we're going to need to do in here just get it into the develop shall we there's a bit of retouching we're gonna need to do in here but basically the photo is pretty much okay as it is there is the odd tilt to it I'm not quite sure what happened there but it's tilted so let me just go to the adjusted version of this now what I've done in here is a fairly heavy amount of adjusting inside of Lightroom obviously I've straightened it but if we look at her face in here we go zoom in close to her face and I look at the radial adjustments in here you'll see that I have applied a negative texture to this so the negative texture in Lightroom or Camera Raw and this is in both Lightroom cc and Lightroom classic is a great tool for smoothing skin now her skin certainly wasn't bad and she's young but she had some spots on there and I'm maybe retouched some of those manually but the smoothing of the skin by using the negative texture slider is quite effective now I've kind of overdone it on this picture but I've done that deliberately because of the overall look to this picture I want this almost ghostly ethereal look to this photo so I've kind of taken it overboard I think we can all agree that her skin is a little bit over smooth but again this isn't meant for as a traditional portrait so I've kind of over smoothed it intentionally in there and sorry I said a little bit of retouching and so on so let's let's zoom out of this and take this thing into Lightroom so I'm going to do this this first one by sending it as a rendered file to be retouched in Lightroom if I go here to the Edit in you'll see that there's multiple options I can edit in Photoshop which is what we're going to do I can just go straight into the plugin we'll do that later and I can also open it as a smart object which we'll do later as well and make sure I only have the one image selected here we go I'm going to choose edit in Photoshop at this point which means it's going to render from Lightroom as a tiff file to open in Photoshop now I already have the default settings set up in there you can choose whether you wanted to go as a tiff or a PSD and other options in there but that is that opened the original hold on one second which has happened there let's go back into this actually the edited one okay that's the edited one we get out of the egde load here and let's try this again edit in Photoshop was very curious I was expecting the dialogue to come up and it didn't and it's opening the raw file it's not supposed to happen it says it's raw file but it's got the retouching done to it that is the weirdest thing I've ever seen I just set this all up why in the world it's not the raw file this is not a smart object pardon me while I figure out what is going on here what has just happened in here well you are getting to experience in real time troubleshooting there's the original that is a raw file there's the retouched one back the library module that is also a raw file ok well we may have to just go back to the original one that is so great I'm just gonna do a quick little quit of Lightroom and launch that opening I've never seen that happen before it is just in case you're not quite sure what's going on there it is opening the retouched version but calling it a raw file and not opening is a smart object so that just doesn't make any sense at all because it's kind of not actually possible so let's try this one more time there's the original there's the edited version ok oK we've got that right adjust you have cropped it's cropped this is the this is the right one okay right click edit in Photoshop it's happening again it's opening the raw well I don't quite know what's going on there but that's ok we're gonna move on it's really just the only problem is that it says RW 2 up there I guess that's really the only issue ok all right we're just gonna move on so I have on here a partially retouched image and one of the reasons for this specific image that I wanted to take this in rendered out as a tiff file that's showing as an RW is because I want to do more retouching in Photoshop that is easier to do in Photoshop that it is in Lightroom what I've given up by doing this process as I no longer have access to the original raw file but I do of course still have access to the hopefully 16-bit typically that's what it's sent over let's double check that image mode it is sixteen-bit okay so I've got the file over here as I want it's just the file extension is weird so I still have access to all the data but it's just not a raw file but again this does make it easier for me to do some retouching so if we look closely interface you see there's a bunch of stray hairs in front of her face it's actually a wig that she's wearing and the hair is kind of all over the place so I'm gonna fix that using this retouching tool here the middle one and just do a quick little bit of retouching that's going a little bit closer and let's make this brush a little bit smaller in there all right I am I'm going to temporarily make my mouse smaller again I have it set to be big so that you guys can see it easily but it messes with the brush size notice just to show you see how the brush size looks really big on there but when I adjust it it's smaller that's because I am artificially enhancing the size of the tool there we go so now now I'm seeing a Nolan I'll try to remember to go back to the bigger mouse in a minute anyway to do the retouching in here super simple hit a clone point a source point and just start dragging over and I'm just going to very quickly get rid of some of these hairs in here and I'm not gonna do all of it and there's a reason for that other than the obvious you don't want to watch me do this all day long but let's just get rid of some of these here let's go down to the line there there we go get rid of that one or that spot get rid of some more here and then we'll call it a day I just need to get rid of some of these bigger ones because they are a little bit distracting and not particularly pleasant okay I'm going to leave deliberately leave these ones here we'll see why in a little bit okay so I've just retouched this let's just say I think I'm done retouching this is now not a smart object right because I sent this over as a tiff file if I go into the plug-in now once I hit OK in the plug-in there will be no way to get back into the plug-in in to Silver Efex Pro or any of the ik tools and readjust what I've done so for me the one of the main advantages of going through Photoshop is the ability to add a filter as a smart filter and the way the UI to filter is a smart filter is first convert the object to a smart object so if I right click on this object here and I say convert to smart object all this is actually doing in Photoshop is embedding this photo into another file and then replacing that file in the layer stack so now instead of a file I have a file within a file I can go back into this smart object and retouch this image at any time without the filter applied to it and that's what we're going to do we're gonna go back in there later and get rid of some of those extra hairs just to show the workflow but now that I've created this as a smart object when I go to the filter stack and I choose where are we silver effects probe it's actually going to pop up a thing that tells me hey we've detected this is a smart object which means this is now a smart filter which means I can go back in and edit it at any time and there's that dialog is this is the active layer as a smart object now is a smart filter okay thank you very much and you can you can dismiss that dialog so it's super super important for me to have this ability because it does allow me to go back in and change the filter at any time which i think is a really important part of it okay so let's let's get a quick tour of the of the plugin the tool the app itself I I may refer to solar effects Pro as an app because it really kind of is it's like a miniature app that we have launched into I may call it a plugin I may call it a filter may call it an app but we are talking about silver tracks Pro here let me give you a brief tour of this just in case you are new to silver effects Braille on the left hand side you have the preset library which shows all these different presets also called recipes and some of the filters some of the plugins I'm all these different presets with different styles and so on including the on vogue ones which are the new ones that are part of the Nik collection - I've said this before I'll say it again one of the reasons that I really like presets is because it allows you to learn how a tool works we're actually going to see a little bit of that in today's presentation I'm gonna load up a preset where I go oh this is interesting and why is this happening and we're gonna reverse engineer it to figure out why it is creating a certain effect but for now we'll just leave it at there's a bunch of different presets in here you can click on these to try different looks to your image now whenever you load up a preset here on the right hand side this is where all of your adjustments are and all of these adjustments are of course controlled by those presets or or what we're looking at now is controlled by the presets there is a stack of five different adjustments each one of these adjustments is always here you can turn any one any one of them on or off if you want to and each one of these adjustments of course has a whole bunch of controls inside of it now if you're familiar with some of the other plugins for example color effects Pro color effects Pro works quite differently in that you have a series of filters over on the left hand side do you add into the filter stack on the right in Silver Efex Pro there aren't any filters to add there's a series of adjustments that are always there again you can disable some of them if you want to but they're always there they can't be reordered this is the workflow this is the filter stack the adjustments stack that's in here it's permanent stack and so a very different approach to how severe effects Pro works but of course the load effects Pro has tons of other filters in there that you probably want this probably like 100 things in there do you may not want all the time so this we have five and this gives us access to everything so that's how that works another thing I want to point out so I've got a preset loaded right now this one called dark selenium and if I hit the compare button up here it goes back to the original but notice that it is not showing me the original in color it's showing me the original original in black and white and this is important because if you were in color effects Pro and you are doing a black and white conversion or analog effects Pro another great example and you're doing a black and white conversion in there when you hit the compare button you see the original color version because Silver Efex Pro is all about black and white what it's showing you when you hit that compare button is a base level black and white conversion in fact it is if I go to the all presets here the very first preset is just called neutral if I select that one that is the base conversion it is a simple no effects applied black and white conversion on there so if I hit the compare button now we don't see anything happening because they're identical but if I load it up another one here hit to compare we're getting them before and after to that um there's also two other ways to view your before and after so we're looking at the single image view when I hit compare the whole image goes and it's a button you press and hold down or I can go to a split view here which I can move the split point around I can also make that a horizontal vertical split me whatever you like in there and then there's a side by side which is super handy as well a lot of people like working on this side by side I usually don't just because it's obviously smaller at this point I like to see the image large so I will typically work in this way and I'll just hit the compare button when I want to do that alright so let's let's just start let's just add something in here I'm gonna go through some of the new presets and at this point let's hit the second I really like presense and that's for inspiration quite often I'm looking at an image and I know exactly what I want to do with it but sometimes I'm looking at an image and one I don't know let's have some fun let's see what's in here and by going through the different presets and just clicking on all of them maybe not all of them but clicking on a bunch of them you can get inspired you go oh well that's interesting I hadn't thought about doing the image that way before but now I've been inspired in that direction so for this on its own I love using presets so here's one called dark glow okay there's one called dark pop there's one called dark selenium a lot of dark ones are here highlight fade that's kind of cool but you know it doesn't really do anything for me intensifier that's kind of neat in there more silver it's got a more silvery look to it ominous fade that's pretty cool and again it's just a way to get inspired see what the filters can do see what the plugin can do see what all these different adjustments are and and find something ultimately that you quite like so I'm gonna start off with one up here called dark selenium I quite like this one in here and I want to take a quick look over on the right hand side and see kind of what has gone into this image and going from the bottom up you have something called finishing adjustments film types color filter selective adjustments in global adjustments global is the of course the biggest the globalist one globalist and this is where I'm gonna start so looking at this photo I dig the whole image it's maybe a little bit dark at this point so you know I can take the brightness up and just increase the brightness but it's it's like happening everywhere right it's a bit bit too much so what I really want what I really like about this image because she's so pale and the background is so dark and she's got this white vintage thing on and as I said in the beginning there's kind of this ghostly look to it what I really want is for her skin to be really really bright so I'm gonna set the brightness back to where it was around 20 and if you toggle this open you'll see that both the brightness and the contrast have sub sliders to them that allow you to get really precise with your brightening and your contrast adjustments so in this case what I really want to do is brighten just the brightest parts of the image so if I go to the highlights and I drag the brightness up on that you can see that her skin just the brightest parts of her skin are what are getting enhanced in there that's that's exactly what I want I want to have that really bright white skin without going in and brightening up the entire image so opening this up to get into there gives us a lot of control or the individual ranges see the mid-tones there it's too much I don't want to do the mid-tones the whole thing is brightening up too much of the shadows what I would really just want is the highlights in there so that's a really powerful way to adjust this now this is similar to what you would do if you were quite well-versed in curves and you do have curves inside of here however the curves tool is relegated to the film types specifically now this does still apply to the whole image but a lot of the curve profiles that are in here are designed to mimic certain film types so if you're trying to mimic a specific film type you might actually start with the film types go through the presets and find something in there and then backed up to the global adjustments and will actually take that approach in a little bit but I want to continue to play with play with some of these now if I go back into global adjustments so there's the brightness we played with that we've got contrast I like the contrast but there's this one called structure now structure is something you might already be familiar with and it essentially is enhancing the micro contrast largely in the mid-tone areas and if you would enhance the structure on a textured wall like for example this wall behind her here the barn doors it can really make it look quite crisp and and almost grungy if you take it all the way up and it can be fabulous but where it's not fabulous is on skin structure on skin can be quite bad now remember we've already done a negative texture which is a similar effect to structure but in within Photoshop or Lightroom texture and structure are actually two different things but I've done the negative structure negative texture to smooth out her skin so by adding structure in here I'm gonna be kind of bringing some of that back and I definitely don't want that to happen so let's take a closer look at her face and then zoom into a hundred percent on here and right now we're seeing still nice smooth skin we're seeing some nice grain in here and so you might be wondering well what does the structure actually doing well here's the thing this structure is kind of being hidden by the grain that is already added to the film type so let me disable film type for now just for a moment here and now when I look at the structure now we can start to see some weird things happening in her skin so the structure has amplified what structure was left in her skin and it's not really working that for this photo that had been hidden by the grain but I don't want to be hiding something here I want to get rid of it so I'm just gonna go back into the structure and get rid of it like if I take it up all the way just to show you like really amplify what it does you can see it's doing these really weird things to her face in there we definitely don't like that so I'm just gonna take that back to zero so we're not adding any structure in there and then I'm not gonna be trying to hide anything now I am later on going to add some structure into specific parts of the image but I don't want to be adding it to the face so this is one of those big kind of high level tips if you're working with portraits working with fashion and photography or anything like this and you're starting with the presets make sure that your presets not adding structure that you are then babbling with later trying to get rid of it's just it's a good idea to jump into that global adjustment look at the structure slider and make sure that it is not adding things that you don't want let's see here a quick look in the QA Carl's asking about cc or classic we are working in classic today rial is also asking do I use Lightroom cc or classic personally I use CC now I'm not using classic anymore on a daily basis but today's presentation I am using classic for those you that are using classic one of the big big differences and actually have an entire blog post on this on the D F sub website one of the big differences is that Lightroom cc does not give you the ability to send the image to Photoshop as a smart object so what we're doing right now is identical in Lightroom cc because I just sent the rendered file into my room into Photoshop to work with the next photo that I work with that one I'm gonna send as a smart object and that's something you can't do with Lightroom cc but in the blog post I've talked about a workaround it's quite convoluted it's multiple steps but there is a workaround and you'll want to look for that in the blog post on the txl website if you are using Lightroom cc okay let's see here dawn says in an earlier webinar there was a button I could separate the speaker screen from the speaker on the demo screen oh you're talking about okay you're talking about the DFS oh sorry the GoToWebinar interface the interface hasn't changed I have no control over what you guys are seeing on the DxO oh sorry on the good webinar interface there are buttons in there to show just me just the screen or side by side you'll have to find that interface controls to do that but it is all there David pointing out I did not send it as a smart object that's not what I wanted to do okay so let's see here's something else call says when you set texture to negative 100% on her face doesn't that diminish the impact of her eyes wouldn't be better to paint in the negative texture so the eyes are not affected I think what I did in that photo and I just didn't go that deep into it is I brushed away the effect on her eyes so in Lightroom you can do that radial gradient and then you can brush away the effect of that gradient and I believe that I did that on her eyes a little bit although I gotta say the texture thing is pretty good at just grabbing these larger areas and leaving the fine details alone it's kind of a really awesome tool alright and Karen's saying how do I see the chat area it is it is I see two things I see one that's called chat and one that's called questions I talked to you through the chat I see what you say in the questions so look for either one of those tabs on there okay moving on so we've got the smoothed out skin I got rid of the structure in there so that's good so now we can move on I am going to also highlight something else down here at the bottom of the screen you'll see this thing that says loop in histogram when you open this up so the loop is just going to show you a close-up of the image if you're in the histogram mode then you're saying a histogram but at the bottom of this you see these row of numbers these are the zone system now this is incredibly incredibly powerful I'm going to only touch on this briefly today I'm actually doing an entire session around the zone system which i think is my last webinar so if you really like the idea of taking your black and white to the whole next level then you'll definitely want to watch that webinar today we're only going to touch on it briefly but to give you a little bit of education about the zone system if you don't know anything about it there is a great article on Wikipedia I'm going to copy this URL and drop it into the chat so there you go everybody should have that link now in your in your chat this is a great article about the zone system and where I've scrolled to on this page it explains what each zone is from zero being pure black to ten being pure white and everything in between open this up open this webpage up bookmark it something to come back to later I am usually when doing black and white photos of people going to ensure that I do not bring the skin tone past zone seven here where it says very light skin shadows and snow with acute side lighting so again you can take your time to read all this later I usually won't go past that zone but because this image I'm trying to get that ghostly look I will allow it to go brighter but I really don't want the skin tone I certainly don't want it to hit zone ten which is pure white that's essentially blown out I might let it go into zone nine but for the most part I want to keep it a below zone nine so with that said let's go back into the plug-in and you'll see down here the zones zero through ten and as I roll over them they highlight on the screen what is in that zone the real power of this is that I can click on any one of those zones and it locks that highlighting on the screen so if I click on Zone seven now as I work I can see part of the screen that's in zones are part of the image that's in zone 7 if I for example took the brightness down on this you can see where a zone 7 is moving to and so on so I can keep an eye on that it's kind of like having clipping which you're familiar probably with highlight and shadow clipping it's like having that except that you can have the clipping indicators show up for any particular zone range it's super super super powerful and again I'll go into this a lot more in the final webinar but for now what I am gonna do is I'm gonna enable zones ten and nine just to make sure that I don't go past that point and I can already see once I've enabled it that I I have gone past that point right I've blown out her face just a little bit it's just a little bit too bright in there now all of this said the zone system is super critical if you're going to print if you're just looking at it on screen a bit less important because what you see on screen is what you get however as we all know everybody's screen is different and so it still is a good idea to keep as your baseline the the keep the highlights from getting blown out using his own system because then you know it's still gonna look on anybody screen unfortunately you of course have essentially zero control over what other people see on their screens but having a good solid baseline just like working well with your clipping to make sure that you're not clipping your highlights or shadows working with that baseline is generally a good idea so I'm gonna toggle this on and off a few times as we go throughout the editing of this image but for now I'm turning on zones nine and ten and I can see that her face is a little bit blown out face we might have to come back to that but what is more blown out that I'm more concerned with is her blouse look over here on her shoulder on the right-hand side of the image you see that is quite blown out as well as the hand on here now if I take my brightness down even if I take just the highlights down by the time I get that out of range I've lost some of that really punchy brightness to her face on there so I don't want to do that so I'm just gonna undo to go back to that and we're going to adjust the the shirt or blouse here specifically individually using selective adjustments so this brings us into the next control set here selective adjustments a loop of my mouse back to big again there we go okay alright so selective adjustments are control points if you're not yet familiar with control points let me give you a brief tour of how these work you were probably familiar with brushing dodging and burning using a brush right in this area dark in that area great you're probably familiar with masking going in with perhaps a lasso tool or something like that to go in in or even a pen tool and very precisely mask out an area that you want to affect you might even be familiar with luminosity masking which is a very complex way to build masks based off of the luminosity of an image what you're doing with control points can most closely be associated to luminosity masks we are creating a mask in real time that is based off of the brightness and in the case of a color filter also the color but here in black and white so it really is just the brightness the luminance of the area that we click on so if I click on a really bright area of the image the mask will be built off of areas in the image pixels in the image that are of similar brightness now there is a what I like to call a circle of influence so if I just drop this in the middle of her face on here and start dragging this out you see the circle there the size of that circle it's not a hard line to when the effect ends but you're basically saying aren't you basically saying focus the the effect within that circle of range but it's not just a radial gradient it is not just applied at a hundred percent in the middle and fade out to zero at the edge of the circle absolutely not it is building a mask and to see the mass that its building you open up the control points here there's the one I just added and you click on this little mask button right here and that shows you a mask view so I'm going to turn off the zone system at this point because that's getting in the way this there we go this is own system by the way let me just turn on ten again you see it's showing up there like really strong that is not the zone of the image it's the zone of what's on screen right now because I'm looking at a mask I'm seeing that in zone 10 so if you're gonna be working the mask you might want to disable that just because it can be a little little disconcerting anyways I drag this around you'll see that I can affect just the brightest parts of her face or the darker parts of your face and it's not like there's a pure on/off you see those shades of gray pure white it is where the effect will be applied 100% pure black is where it will be applied 0% any shade of green between is a variance of that so the darker the mask like over here the less it's gonna be applied the brighter the mask the more it's going to be applied so in her case I want to adjust the the shoulder on here so I'm gonna move this around until it really selects quite solidly that shoulder area that was being blown out and if I make this bigger you can see how it's expanding beyond there make it smaller it can be a bit more isolating and this is great because what it's doing is its selecting the shoulder almost entirely selecting a bit of this down here it's also partially selecting your hand which I do also want to darken a little bit but I don't want to reduce completely so this one adjustment might actually do everything for me then I'm gonna my not but we're gonna find out so I'll disable the mask so that we're no longer looking at the mask view I'm gonna turn my zones back on so we can see what is being blown out in here and then within that control point there are three adjustments by default there's a brightness a contrast in a structure slider if you click the little black triangle it actually opens up to some more you've got an amplify White's amplify blacks fine structure and selective colorization adjustments in here in this case it is the brightness that I want to take down the amplify whites actually might work as well by going negative and reducing that a little bit but I'm just going to keep it simple in here focus on the brightness and I'll take the brightness down and I'm just gonna pull it down until all those little hash marks disappear because I don't want I mean if you leave a couple of them but I really don't want to have that super-bright shoulder on there now if I go too far we're starting to see a little bit of shadowing on her shoulder there and if we look closely here we can actually see that I am NOT selected or clicked on the blouse but I've actually clicked on her shoulder so I'm gonna move this a little bit over to make sure that it's actually just the blouse that's getting selected and we can always preview the mask and see exactly what we've got in there again let's hide the zone hashes so now it's probably little bit better we can see we're not getting her skin as much so now it's going to turn that off turn my zone hashes back on again and don't even I did leave it on and actually that's great so it has reduced we've gotten rid of the hashing in there if I disabled that temporarily you see it all coming back turn it back on and we have nice to reduce that in fact it might be a little bit too much let's bring it back up that compact down a little bit and find that happy place where we are getting rid of the majority of those and you can see that it has affected her hand largely as well not completely so I'm gonna go ahead and add another control point onto her hand on there I'm gonna make it quite small now here's an interesting thing to understand about control points when I first added that let me just redo that there delete it notice I got some hashing on her hand that tells me that the hand is is a little bit still overexposed in those in the spots where it's hashed if I disabled that control point that I've already added then we see that gets a lot bigger right so the whole hand is brighter reenable that most of the hand where the whole hand has gotten darker but we saw some spots that are a bit too bright so I'm going to add another control point but when I add this to it immediately notice how the hand gets brighter click on that and the hand gets brighter I haven't actually done anything to the control point but the hands brighter well why is that is super important to understand that the control points are effectively doing battle with each other every control point wants to dominate its region we need to put two control points side-by-side they are trying to cancel each other out which is exceptionally powerful because it allows me to add a control point to an area and then add another to affect it and then add another control point to a nearby to protect it so because I've just added this control point haven't done anything to it effectively what I'm doing is I'm protecting the hand from this control point that's been added here that's not what I want in this case I actually do want it to be darker so I'm gonna bring the brightness back down and it gets us back to where we were and then very quickly I can go just a little bit more and boom there we go we've gotten rid of the hashes on our hand and that had we've done that without overall affecting her face so if I toggle the both selective adjustments on and off let's you know we'll go ahead and leave that on there turn that on and off you can see quite dramatically how we have reduced the brightness of the shoulder of the hand but her face is minimally affected and I say minimal because it's not zero affected one of them one or both of these masks has affected it a little bit but that's just the nature of how those guys work okay let me take a quick look at the QA I realize we're this is moving a little more slow than I expected today because we're already at 36 after the hour when you change the structure in global adjustments this is Catherine asking to smooth out her face will her hair lose structure too so in global adjustments absolutely absolutely if you're doing it globally which is why we get into the Selective adjustments to take control of these things okay let's do another selective adjustment I want to brighten up her hair a little bit and here we're gonna see how the the control points can kind of work for and against each other so it's sumit a little bit tighter here her hair as you can see is quite dark and blending into the background now this is gonna be a really tough area to isolate but we're going to see what we can do I am going to let's go ahead and no sorry I'm going to add a control point onto her hair and enable that mask and we can see that it is selecting largely the background in there as well so let me reduce the size of this and let's see if I can get any isolation and we can see a little bit of isolation here all right there's a little bit of separation let me turn off those hashes there's a little bit of separation here where the hairline is so that's encouraging this tells me that I might actually be able to isolate the hair so let's add another control point there and now we can see the mask that's being built very effective we've got our hair and not the background can one another negative control point over her I hear I'm just gonna option drag to to duplicate another existing one so that works so now let's try making this one a little bit bigger nope that doesn't work so let's make it a little smaller and I'm gonna option drag that to make a second one of those okay so I'm building up the mask in here you need option drag another one of my off ones make that a little bigger let's try this one as well can I get that kind of focus polka spot there and we're getting somewhere right I mean we are really doing a pretty good job of isolating her hair in there so this is it's not gonna be perfect right but we don't need it to be perfect we need it to be just enough to actually see the difference in there but we're looking for the two areas here let's see if I can make this a little bigger I'm trying to have not quite such a hot spot in there it's a lot of trial and error it's a lotta just dragging it around and see what you can get that is probably gonna be good enough both of these adjustments I'm going to want to brighten right I haven't done anything to the images yet we're just looking at the mask I'm gonna want to brighten them the same amount instead of going in adjusting one brightness and then the other I can select both of these just hold down the shift key to select them both and on the control panel of sorry the yeah control panel for the control points there's this little grouping button I click that and they become a group where now any adjustment that I make is applied to both of them so let's get out of the mask view in here and take my brightness up on her hair just a little bit and you can see what's happening that we're brightening up her hair a little bit now I might want some more control points it's add another one of this group up to the top there there we go yeah that's working out pretty well let's zoom out of that a little bit maybe maybe we do a little bit more oops that's the size that's not what I want too let's come back to the main one there get a little bit more brightening on there here we go there we go wrong one that one kami are you there we go and we can just write it up a little bit and it kind of works right it's subtle it's subtle but we're getting there we're getting somewhere out of it I like it too much back down a little bit so it helps it just helps to offset the hair a little bit so I just show this you to drive the point home about how powerful these control points can be I could be a little bit more precise with this than I've been but but you get the general idea let's do a little bit more with control points I want to affect the structure of the the wall behind her the door behind her so I just click on there we're not gonna go into the mask so I'm just going to crank that structure up cool it's curricula people more maybe brighten up just a touch on there looking good let's drag another one over to here option drag that over and make that a little bit bigger structures way up right this up a little bit nice yeah so we're getting there were getting some of that cool structure added into that okay now let's move on to the next series of adjustments in here um close that out the next one is called color filter if you heard on black-and-white photography before I especially film photography you might remember you're old enough that you could add color filters onto the camera sort I can film camera lens glass filter color filters to affect the tonality the image the way a color filter works is on for black and white is whatever color filter you put on that color in the scene gets brighter there's another article that I want to point you to because this is very interesting stuff in here this website photo photograph my photography mat photography mat p.m. anyway this website let me copy this link and drop it into the chat if you're not watching this live you're gonna to pause it and just copy that URL let me paste this into the chat as well a really interesting article about how black and white photography is affected by color filters so encourage you to check this out for now what we're gonna do is based off of that understanding that the colors that the filter is will get brighter I'm going to play with the color filters in here so her skin tone of course it's kind of in that orangish yellowish reddish hue and if I click on these different ones in here there's different color filters you can see how it's affecting her skin so there's off it's very subtle in here but red is brightening up her skin a little bit orange is brightening up maybe not quite as much yellow is affecting about the same as orange or just a pretty common color filter to use for skin tone it really tends to smooth things out looks it makes it look quite nice so and we're gonna go with that I like that okay so we got that one on there I mean next up is film types and member film types I turned off a while ago so if I turn this back on right now the image is gonna change pretty dramatically but partner now this was intentional usually yeah usually you would leave your film types on while you're making these adjustments I had it all so I could kind of play with all these things uninterrupted unobstructed by the film types but now that we're in here let's see what is going on in film types so in here you have a series of preset film types that are meant to mimic real film you've got your Ilford pan plus 50 L for Delta 100 you've got AG Phi a px 400 and codec try X 400 and a lot of different film stocks in here that if you ever shot film you may actually look and feel familiar in here these are pretty cool right there's a lot of different fun ones to play with but I'm gonna leave it at neutral and just take a look at some of the other settings that we have in here you've got a grain setting grain per pixel do I want to add grain into this we talked about wanting to make this one kind of a grungy that go in G but a high contrast black and white high ISO picture adding green in here is where this is gonna come into play so I currently have a set of 500 that was just the default for this preset 500 basically means no brain it's notice that it's kind of weird cuz it's backwards but notice it says grain per pixel the highest number is effectively no visible grain it's not adding anything to it as I bring this down I'll take it down almost all the way now it said only 27 green per pixel so far fewer green which means the Greens bigger and as you can see on the screen there it becomes very very grainy and chunky so I want something that looks good in here but isn't totally overdone but I want that kind of higher iso look so I can adjust it'll maybe I'll set it right about there you can also adjust the hardness and the softness of that green if I go too hard the difference between the black and the white points of the grain itself or more it's more contrast effectively if I go soft it's a more softer less contrast II grain pattern so you might wanna find the spot for the head in there so you just you just got to play with it and see what see what works for you I'm gonna leave it right about there levels and curves again this is levels and curves for the green for the film response this is basically trying to mimic film house shadows and highlights were affected in particular film types we've set it to neutral but if you were to say she was like an ilford one in here you would see it darkens the shadows brightens the highlights a little bit we undo that let's try them something else a bit more dramatic maybe now I want to find something that's like really yeah there there's one that has clipped out our blacks and really push the highlights up high so a lot of different approaches to this I'm and it's all controlled through the levels and curves in there you also have color sensitivity in here so you can adjust the sensitivity of the film to particular colors in the scene which is a great way to let's say you're looking at a landscape you want to make your greens brighter there's the color filters that we looked at earlier but this might give you a little bit more precise control over individuals I want to make my blue sky darker and my green foliage brighter you can adjust all of that through here so very very powerful as well and then under finishing adjustments you've got tones that you can add if you want to add a color tone over the image you can do that in here let's zoom back out of the image you can add color tones to these I'm just gonna leave it at neutral you've got vignetting controls and here burning the edges control so let's say for example I want to darken the bottom of this a little bit let's do that with the burn edges I'm gonna go to the bottom edge in here and I take the strength way up you can see this dark edge that's happening at the bottom I can make that bigger if I wanted to make the transition between dark and light smoother or harsher in this case I'm gonna bring it down quite small and just add a little bit of a darkening at the bottom in there I think that looks pretty good and then there's the borders these image borders you can see got this little white border that is being applied in here it's just a bunch of different border types that you can do we're gonna turn it off I don't really want the border on there and there we go maybe that darkening on the bottom is a little bit too much let's take that down here cool and when you're done you hit OK and you're back out of here and you're back into in this case Photoshop now because I converted this to a smart object remember I did that before I went into the plugin this is now a smart filter you can see here in the layer stack it says smart filters there's the filter remember that I did not retouch part of the hair on her face now let's just say that at this point I go oh my gosh I forgot to retouch it it's not that I can treat uh CH on this version of the image but that might mess with my grain pattern and I just if I overlay the texture on this be in there retouch that so in this case what I want to do is retouch the original so I double click on the smart object it is going to open up the file because members have file within a file and now when I look at her I can see look at basse I can see we're back to the color one there's the retouching that needs to happen so let's just do a quick little retouching on here and get rid of those other hairs on there so let's just clean that up super quick again you're seeing like a deliberately blown-up cursor in there so it's a little bit bigger than it should be but this I'm not doing a fantastic retouching job obviously but it's good enough for the presentation here alright so there we go so I've done that I hit save it is saving this it's actually a PSB file not a PSD it's a PSB doesn't really matter to you it is just a file within a file and once that's done I can close this I guess I wait for this to finish rendering out here I can close this go back to the file that we're just working on and we're going to see this photo now retouch with the hair gone gone with the hair gone with that black and white effect applied to it and of course if I want to go back into the black point filter itself I double click where it says solar fix Pro and that takes me in and I can make adjustments here so for example I go you know I just I don't know the let's say that bottom vignetting thing that I did was still a bit too strong so let's go in here bottom vignetting there it is and let's dial that back in size and strength a little bit hit OK and we're back again so we have that ultimate flexibility super super super important for me personally at least the way that I like to work so let's go ahead and send this back to Lightroom so where we are we've got the image I just hit command s to save it command W to close it it'll close when it's done and then we go back to Lightroom and sure enough there's the photo in Lightroom so you've got the original but I made a virtual copy of the one that I had to just stand there and then of course this one alright let's move on to the next photo we're gonna be working with this picture next let me take a quick look at the QA and I'm realizing we may not have time to do the third image but that's okay it's not a whole lot new in there Jarrell says when returning two silver effects from a smart object are the control points also retain from reddening absolutely there's control points will all be there once again a super good reason to do that okay moving on so this photo let me let sere yeah reset the exposure on this one this photo is I would say properly exposed I know I'm gonna take it into black and white and because of that and because he's dark-skinned I don't want to end up in black and white kind of losing a lot of the texture and detail in his skin in here so what I'm gonna do before I send it over to to the plugin is I'm going to brighten the overall image a bit brighter than I really need it to be but because that'll give me more data to play with in Silver Efex Pro which I can then pull back down again I don't want to be trying to boost up detail and shadows that I've already hidden I'd rather start with detail in the highlights that I can pull back down and this is just good advice when we were working with a darker image like this one is to kind of boost it up a little bit artificially so that you can pull it back in later and of course with a raw file on any good modern DSLR you're gonna have tons a latitude to play with but if I go in here and I take the exposure way up on here it's technically all still looking good we saw lots of detail in there obviously it's really overexposed but the raw file allows me to do that so I'm gonna bring it up a little bit not a whole lot I'm watching the histogram up here I just want to get a little bit more into the mid-tones in there so let's say maybe right about there and now I'm gonna send this file off is off the Photoshop I'm gonna do this one as a smart object so this is what you can do with Lightroom cc sorry what you can do with lighten classic what you cannot do with Lightroom cc without a massive painting that took us workaround but again I've outlined that in a blog on the DxO website okay I hit open the smart object now it opens Photoshop we can see that it is a smart object here because that little icon if I double click on this it opens up the smart object and because it's came in as a raw smart object I am now in Camera Raw where is with the other photo remember the photo of the girl when I opened that up as a smart object we were just basically in the land of regular Photoshop because it was effectively a tiff file a rendered out pixel file but this case because it is a raw file we're seeing the original raw and look there's the adjustment the exposure adjustment that I made there's the exposure adjustment that I had made inside of Lightroom and if I want to make any further changes to it here I can but hit OK from here right so I'm now let's go ahead and apply the filter now here's something interesting I'm gonna go into the filter menu and choose Silver Efex Pro and that is from the recently applied list in there which is something that obviously you can do because I just did it and in here we are seeing ooh it didn't happen this time very interesting okay all right so backing up a little bit that was not something I wasn't expecting to show when I was going through my my demo this morning I thought I discovered a new feature but apparently not I don't know why this happened before but we're already seeing some anomalies in today's presentation so when I did this earlier by selecting that drop down it applied the same look that I had done to the previous photo to the photo of the girl it even had the control points and I thought oh that's really cool that it did that but now I just did it and it didn't apply the control points so I don't know um this is what I expected pulling up this filter should not have applied the previous effect I thought maybe this was a change in Photoshop because it did just update yesterday but um but apparently not so nevermind you can select the filter from that previous menu or dig into the menu if you like okay so for this one I want to do a very simple traditional nice clean black-and-white look to this one so we're gonna start with our Neutral settings and just go through the adjustments here overall exposure looks good but I'm gonna start with these film types and I'm gonna see if there's a film type in here that I really like that I like the look of and this is just great it's awesome we can just go through these and pick one that you think you might like in here now there's one that I know I want to get which is which one did I decide oh yes critic plus X this one right here so let's say I like this so I apply this I think this looks really good I'm it's darkening the image quite a bit and we can see that if we do a side-by-side comparing the image quite a bit and this is a great example of going you know I love the overall look but it's darkening it too much now maybe I can go into the global adjustments and brighten it up a little bit but but I would rather do this at the raw level so here's what I'll do I'll hit okay apply this filter and because it is a smart object a smart filter on a smart object I can go back into this into the raw image and now let's take the exposure up we're going to full-stop let's go +1 on their hit okay and we're going to see this image brighten up that half stop in there and we've got to happen to see any questions while we're waiting for that question from Raphael is it possible to create a control point based in a certain amount of luminosity in the image well that is exactly what the control points are control points are based off the luminosity not you can't create a control point here and say based it off the luminosity here it is based off of where you click so maybe that was your question but it's only based off of where you have clicked all right let's see here so now we're back into this so that the image is not a little bit brighter and of course I can go back into solder hearts Pro and continue to edit this image so we're gonna do a couple of quick things with control points in here because because I can and then we're gonna jump out of this one so the shadow side of his face overall his face is a bit darker than his body the shadow side of his face is a bit too dark so let's go into selective adjustments with the control points drop one on the shadow side of his face bring up the brightness of that just a little bit on there I'll add another control point behind his head and take the brightness down there and notice here I'm not even bothering to look at the masks I'm just jumping in and doing it real quick like let's grab another control point and add it down here to the field behind him darken that a little bit nice separating him out a little bit better his jeans have this nice texture to him let's add a control point to his jeans and let's bring up the structures create the structure way up on there now that's actually an interesting point so the structure on his jeans looks fantastic and I told you you want to be really careful of adding structure to skin because because it can make it well not look nice that is okay nothing's 100% rule but that is a pretty solid rule when you're working with skin primarily or especially I should say with women's skin tones women you don't generally want to add texture into the skin on men it's a bit different especially if you have a picture of someone who's a bit grungy maybe a dirty like a farmhand or maybe an older guy that's got a whole bunch of wrinkles as a face in his face and sometimes you want to enhance that because it looks really really cool so in this case maybe that will work so let me just turn off temporarily turn off this control point over here I've got my control points listed if I click on this little checkbox here it turns it off I haven't deleted it I've turned it off and now let's go back into global adjustments and take the structure up overall and see what happens and in this case you know it looks kind of cool but I think I still prefer the look of him without all that structure in there but I just I do this to show that sometimes structure works I mean you see what it's doing to his hands imagine if he was older and you really wanted to amplify the wrinkles in his hands that could look really cool but in this case let's not let's go back leave his skin nice and smooth and reenable the structure over the jeans because I think that really did work quite well in there all right that's it that's all we're gonna do in there hit apply and now we've got a nice clean black and white image isolating out certain areas that we want to make brighter or darker really Mickey and pop out of the background a little bit brightening up the side of his face a touch enhancing the structure on the jeans on there if this is a jeans added denim ad you probably would want to really make those jeans pop and by adding that structure we've we've quite nicely done that hit save hit close and we're gonna be done in here so now the next one we're only got three minutes left for the scheduled time I don't mind going over a little bit I know some of you may have to go so I'll remind you that if you do have to go um you will get an email 24 hours after this ends with the with a link to watch the video I am gonna go very very quickly though into this next one specifically because I want to show you something that I've done inside of Lightroom itself so here's the picture it's actually zoom back out real quick so there's the full picture let's zoom in here I've already done some work inside of Lightroom to this one so we're not looking at the original here doing some curves were lifted up shadows can a lot of stuff in here actually but one of the points that I want to show you is my sharpening is down to zero usually you wouldn't do that usually you're gonna leave your sharpening at its default position but watch if I double click on the sharpening reset it to zero look at what's happened how well this is translating through the oops through the gotowebinar screen but notice that it's kind of it's too sharp like there's there's pixels that are being kind of over amplified in here this is a pretty high ISO image and so it's really amplifying that noise that's in there and I don't want that now I've also already added a little bit Grainne to this image I take the greenback down to zero we even though are sharpening is at zero we are still seeing some of that some of that noise in there and I don't like noise I like grain but I don't like noise so for this particular photo what I did was I brought the grain up just a little bit and just that a little bit of grain hides the noise and grain looks way better than oiz and then by turning the sharpening off I'm not amplifying the noise that's already there so that's the important stuff that I've done in here I don't want to send a noisy image off to Silver Efex Pro I want to send a clean image off to it so now I'll go into my filters well there it is photo editing and this time we're gonna just go straight into silver frets Pro 2 so what this means is I am losing so here I can choose what how I want to send the image I'll do the no Adobe RGB leave it as a tiff off we hope what I am losing by doing this is the ability to go back and re-edit the filter so this is an unlikely way to work because again for me personally I like to have the flexibility to go back at any time I don't care if it takes up more space in my hard drive I want that flexibility by doing what I'm about to do Here I am throwing away that flexibility but sometimes maybe you just don't care you just want to get in do something you get out and that's just fine so let's uh let's see here I'm going to go into vintage start clicking those and presets in here and there's lots of cool presets in here lots of kind of funky ones the main thing that I want to show you in here is again reverse engineering and looking for an effect so this particular image has a couple things going on first of all there's a really really strong vignette going on in here and there's some weird stuff happening to her face in there so the first thing I'll do to figure out what is happening where is individually toggle on and off these adjustments okay so global adjustments ok well that's certainly brightening up the image but it's not counting for the thing on her face and it's not accounting for the strong vignette selective adjustments nope nothing in there color filter ok that's affecting the brightness oh and that weird blotchy thing on her face is gone that's interesting ok film types no if that's not doing the vignette affinity adjustments ok well they've been yet he's in finishing adjustments cool all right let's open that up and figure out where it actually so let's close all of these down I look at this and says been getting is off oh okay so it's not been getting Tony is a seven is it in the toning no it's not in there okay burnt edges well that's off image borders close image borders maybe it's there know if that's just those borders in there well that's weird so where's that fanning coming from well I show this to you to make the point that just because this says it's off that doesn't actually mean vignetting is off all that means is that you haven't chosen one of these presets if I open up the vignette even Anning is actually applied I call this maybe a slightly not the greatest interface design right here that probably shouldn't say off at this point but I've just do this to drive the point home that if you're trying to figure out where something is happening and it says off in there it doesn't mean it's off at this point now I can move the beheading slider and you realize okay that is where this happens let's lighten it up a little bit I can recenter the vignette end of put it there a little bit and we're good we're doing good but now let's take a closer look at her face and we see this really weird thing happening on her forehead and we did see when I was toggling these on and off earlier that that was coming from the color filter this strange place for that to come from why is that well if I open this up we've got these color filter presets in here but if you open them details you'll see the individual hues and so if I go through and start moving the hue slider you'll notice that that weird thing on her face gets stronger or lesser so there's something in the original image some color in the original image that is causing that to go all weird so now that I know that maybe I want to choose a basic red or basic orange or just get rid of it all together or don't get do it manually in there take the strength of that up a little bit maybe play with that and find a good place for that where it doesn't have that weird effect and let's say right about there so I'm choosing what is it some kind of a greenish yellowish green actually more like a Bluegreen tone in there and it just works for this image does really matter to me what the original color is it just works from this image so now that I've done that I hit save and we are gonna be back into Lightroom but again this is not an editable image and just to prove that point here's the image let me right click on here and choose I'm looking for show in finder there's the image in the finder let's open this in Photoshop and sure enough in Photoshop it's not a smart object it's not a smart filter it's permanent now with that said what I can do in Lightroom is I can still add things to it Lightroom so let's say I decided I want to add a color tint to this I'm here in Lightroom let's go to split toning and let's add a color to the highlights I said like a blue into the highlights and if you reduce that down a little bit and it's going to the shadows and add maybe like a red into the shadows and down that back a little bit so I can do other effects to this image in Lightroom but I can't go back into the plug-in and fix that okay that is the end of the presentation well only three minutes over there wasn't too bad let's see what else is going on in the QA and otherwise we're gonna wrap this thing up Rachel is asking what's the name of your other webinar about the zone system and where do you find it okay it's it's Ansel Adam it's something about edit like Ansel Adams something like that it is let me look at my calendar it is not on the webinar website right now which I don't know why like I said I think they're on vacation that just needs to get updated hopefully that'll happen soon but I'm trying to find the date of this it is the end of the month it is August 31st it is called do it like Ansel take your black and white landscapes to the next level and so that is where I'm gonna really be getting into the zone system let me make sure there's not another zone pre webinars preceding that one get the look of classic film and analog effects Pro on the 22nd make the best of your architectural photographs on the 20th processing snowing landscapes and color effects Pro so yeah that last one that that Ansel Adams one is where I'm really gonna go to the zone system as far as how you register for that one let me see if I can do this maybe I can paste that into here so you probably you registered for this via a shoot via a newsletter that you got from DF so if you open up that newsletter you'll find it I'm trying to get to the URL if you open up a newsletter you will find it in there but until then what I'm trying to do is copy and paste from my iPad the link to that let me do this I'm gonna stop sharing my screen for a moment so that I can open my email so let's just pause on there and or my calendar and grab that URL and then I'll paste it into the chat for you let's see here where did I say August 31st 31st 31st here it is there we go this will work alright copy into the chat there you go okay so I've just pasted that into the chat room now you have the link to register that particular for that particular show and that's that let's see if there are other questions in there thank you for asking that I'm sorry it's not a little bit easier call a halt sorry says is it better to choose film type before making other adjustments I would say if your goal is to create a certain film look then absolutely if you're just looking for creative inspiration then yeah go for it try those out if you are trying to make something that's just more neutral and you're not looking for a specific film look then maybe you can do that later it's kind of a back and forth there's no easy answer to it as you saw in the demo there I turn it off to do the basic adjustments and then added the film kind of effect on top of that which is a perfectly fine approach but some of those film effects have so much contrast added to them then it is better to start with that and then make your adjustments before it there's no easy answer to it but if you know you want that film look then I would say do that first and then adjust from there Patrick can you do a variation show variations in contrast using control points show variations I guess sure let's go into this image and know that's not what I want is this the one that it is a smart object it is so um so if I oh this is the smart one right yeah that was oh this is interesting someone is trying it when I say edit in oh here we go edit in Photoshop sorry this is what I want edit in Photoshop and it original that's what I want so that's gonna open the smart object layer yep there it is so let's go back into that image and you wanted to see contrast with control points so where don't want to change the contrast on this photo it's let's just say his skin will do is his whole torso let's play with contrast in there so when you're adding so in this case I want to add a control point that's gonna get as much of his torso as possible so I'm gonna pick a mid-tone range I don't want one don't want to pick the highlights I want to pick the shadows and to go for something mid-tone in here and as always enable that control point will allow or the mask view will allow me to see what is being affected in there so see if I went for the highlights it's gonna be quite isolated if I go for the shadows quite isolated go for a mid-tone in there mid-range and there we go that's pretty good okay so that's good so now let's see what happens if I just the contrast I'll take it all the way up and that is really again it's affecting just that area I'm affecting the contrast in there and you can see how the shadows have gotten darker the highlights have gotten brighter in there and that could look really cool let's crank up some structure it's like now we're getting into some really stylized hard image on there but yeah so there you go so there's contrast applied there I hope that's what you were asking about we'll leave that open in case it wasn't Gregg Nicholson how to tell the difference between noise and grain interesting question me let's go back to Lightroom let's go back to this original photo it is and going 100% on here it's subtle it is a subtle difference but let's see here I want to show that was right I need that detail slider don't need that um don't need basic where are we I'm working on a low resolution screen to make it easier for you guys to see and that doesn't make it challenging to find things in terms okay there's effects with green and there's detail with sharpening okay let me turn green off and sharpening on I'm going to enhance the sharpening notice and again I don't know how well this is gonna translate on your screen because you're going through the internet it's like GoToWebinar is not the sharpest screen playback sharing tool in the world so maybe a little bit hard to see it but if you look at the pattern in here her foreheads a good place to look or actually here look up here under the light that's probably a little bit easier to see there's it's a random pattern but there's a harshness to it and a blockiness to it that to me screams digital noise let's go even more zoomed in we zoom in farther there we go that now we can really see it see the individual pixels and how every every block there is very harsh very hard-edged that to me screams digital noise let's take the sharpening all the way down and even with the sharpening off I can see it a little bit now this is a pretty high ISO image so we are seeing some noise in here and so yup so there's that now the noise reduction is also off if I bring up noise reduction on a little bit it starts to smooth that out but I try to avoid noise reduction if I can help it I would rather mask the noise with great personal taste so we're back to zero sharpening zero noise reduction and zero grain so we can still see that digital noise in there now let me take the grain up a little bit take it up to about 25 or so and draw I guess it did draw actually let me take it just even a tiny bit let's go I'm gonna take it up just enough to start to see it in there gonna get to a point right about there yeah it's about 25 or so it's a good starting point where pardon me it has blurring is the wrong word it's not blurring it but it has obscured those square corners notice that you no longer see those sharp edges that scream noise i I have texture in there and that's the grain that is not revealing the noise so it's a subtle texture in there let me zoom out not zoom out 200 cent there we go so now at a hundred percent we can see a very nice textured pattern here that is not noisy let's send making sense I hope that makes sense let me at this point let me take the grain all the way down to zero we see the blockiness of that take the sharpening back up and it really gets really gets amplified so that's noise and that's grain and grain hands down looks better than oiz okay I hope that and your question Gloria thank you for a very informative webinar you're quite welcome other people saying excellent webinar glad you enjoyed it you're welcome for the links Rachel Joel says quick one can we can we revision all the presentation later on and where will the video be okay can you revisit the presentation sorry um you will get an email 24 hours from now with a link to this video so you can watch it again if for some reason you don't see that or miss that or whatever this will end up on the DxO youtube channel eventually just not right away because it's August and France is basically closed it's a French company if you do that why are you saying no voice I think you musta lost audio but nobody else is saying that so I guess we're good um Adrian says bringing you your last image of the young girl it seems if you printed this shot it will be muddy you'd referring to the color version of the black and white version of it oh yeah that one would be a bit muddy I mean it was kind of the effect that I had gone for him that is kind of vintage II old look let's go back to that here is ooh mad about let me get rid of the color toning that I added in Lightroom um open up the where was it split toning let's get rid of that set that back down to nothing there it is muddy yeah it'd be a little bit muddy but that's you know it's kind of the vintage look I was going for in here this wasn't remember this one wasn't meant to be like some kind of super accurate image Raphael I think it would be interesting if that control point can be made based on a certain value of the zone system Oh interesting select the range of this zone I like that I like that that would be neat select everything in zone 8 build a mask off it I like it that's a good that's good feedback Raphael um I would highly recommend do you provide that feedback to EXO remember I don't work for the EXO I'm not an engineer for sure so I can't really do much with that but I like the idea so yes submit that there's feature feedback I think on the website there's a contact page I like it you tell them that I said I liked it don't photo Joseph said this is a brilliant idea maybe they'll listen then Joanie so appreciating the fine tuning you showed in this video excellent I'm glad you like that I'll be taking my images to a new level awesome love to hear that excellent makes sense thinks this has been wonderful perfect well thank you everybody for enjoying that I really appreciate all of you tuning in today that was fantastic again apologies for the change in date on there but um I couldn't do this presentation with a hole in my face so we got that fixed up alright guys thanks a bunch don't forget to follow me on social media I'm footage of everywhere including on YouTube I got our YouTube channel there with a ton of other education go check that out and if you have any questions about what you saw today that you didn't get to ask here feel free to hit me up on Twitter at photo Joseph just tweet me the question and I will do my best to answer it for you take care of yourselves everybody we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Nik Collection

Views: 1,821

Keywords: DxO Labs, Nik Collection 2 by DxO, Silver Efex Pro, Portrait, fashion, webinar, PhotoJoseph, Nik Collection

Id: 7VrEzihjzME

Length: 74min 14sec (4454 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 30 2019