Easy and Efficient Workflow with DxO PhotoLab 4 and Nik Collection 3 by DxO

[Music] [Music] well good morning good afternoon good evening everybody welcome to another dxo webinar i'm your host photojoseph lovely to see you all today happy new year to everyone i realize it is february but it's the first time i've seen you so happy new year to you um we are going to be going through kind of a pretty high level picture today of photo lab and the nick collection we are do the webinar is titled an easy and efficient workflow with dxo photo lab 4 and the next nik collection 3 by dxo we are going to be going into a like it's a kind of a high level view of how i would treat a few photos i have three very different types of photos we're going to look at and we're going to look at basic retouching cropping photo editing and so on that i would do in photo lab and then take those into the net collection for their own special treatment and i think you'll see as we go a lot of what we do is going to be um subjective right because photo editing is very much subjective is this what you would like to do well maybe not you might look at the image say oh i actually prefer if you want darker or less saturated or something along those lines and that's perfectly fine that's the beauty of photo editing you can do it however you want to i'm going to be showing you how i want to do it because it's my show that's how it gets to go again pretty basic agenda edit and fix your images first with photo lab cropping removing removing spots and so on and so on and then bringing the images into the knit collection for the final piece as i said i have three images what i'm going to do is go through one image at a time i'll go through the image and then jump out for a q a period jump back into the next image back out to q a and so on and we'll do that throughout the show to work on all three photos so so as i said three different photos that we're gonna be working with i'm gonna start with this landscape photo this is joshua tree in case you're wondering and then we're going to do a travel photo we'll call this there it is we'll call this travel kind of portraiture but it's really a travel photo so that's this one this was shot in india and then the last one is this kind of fashion stylized portrait thing i don't know what you want to call it but it's totally different than the others so this is what we're going to work with so we're going to work with three very different images take three very different approaches to them and see what we come up with so let's start off with the landscape here this is straight import this is reset just double check that yep the reset button is clicked so i haven't done anything to this image but as many of you who are a bit familiar with photolab already know that when you first bring a photo into photo lab it's not just the straight raw image this already has some work done to it and i can tell what that is by going into the preset menu and looking at the general purpose presets up here at the top and by default it has this preset called dxo standard that's been applied to it in fact if i leave here and we look through the different adjustments you'll see that there are if i just turn all these off a lot of these are already turned on or already enabled so smart lighting has been applied a little vignetting or deviating white balance color rendering denoising lens sharpening chromatic aberration a cropping which has to do with the automatic distortion from the lens correction so that's kind of re-cropped back into its original aspect ratio and all of this has happened automatically and if you want to see what the image would look like without any of that then the way you do that is you click on no correction is when i go to no correction now we see the true original raw image if i hit the compare button now it's going to um well i'm not going to show us much of all but we'll go ahead and reset that and it'll go back to the way it was but you can see that there is that bit of correction that's happening there the lens distortion some exposure adjustment and so on now i'd like to point out two things about this first of all this isn't always better right the dxo standard isn't always better because again everything is subjective so you might decide that you like the way that it started off better than you like the way that it has by default adjusted it and that's perfectly fine that's up to you you have other adjustments here that you can use as starting point presets or again just start with the basic default one if you don't ever want photo lab to apply its default preset on import you can change that by going into the preferences and then here right on the first page under general you'll see under presets it says default preset for new raw images and by default it's set to dxo standard but if i didn't want that i could set it to no correction and then every image that i open will not have any of the default corrections applied to it usually in my experience for my preference usually the dxo standard is preferable not always but usually so i leave it on but i always go in before i do anything to my image as part of my first step is i'll click on no correction and see if i prefer that sometimes i prefer part of it but not all of it so i might go through the other adjustments in here and find something that i want to back off on or turn off in there so that's where we're going to start we do that basic auto correction and it looks pretty good the next thing that i would do with any photo especially one like this that's got some highlight areas that might be a little bit blown out let's get it a little bit closer in here is i want to find out what data i actually have what am i working with in here if i step back the overall image is clearly pretty high contrast right i've got these shadow areas in the foreground here with a bright sun in the background so i've got a really high dynamic range scene to work with here it appears to have captured everything but i want to be sure i want to be sure before i spend a bunch of time trying to recover details in these rocks here and these rocks over here that there's actually data in there so the way that i do that is i always go to the basic exposure compensation first let's open this guy up and i'm not trying to fix the image right now all i want to do is see what's there so i'll grab that slider and i'll crank it down for example and i do that and i can see okay yes there is plenty of detail here same thing over here maybe there's a tiny bit clipped in here a little bit of texture perhaps but certainly nothing i can't live without so i am satisfied at this point that i will be able to recover any texture detail in here that i want to and this might go the other way around i might be working with a dark image and i want to see what kind of shadow details in fact let's just say let's pretend that let's find a dark area here let's pretend that this dark spot under the rock in here was super critical to my photo it obviously isn't here but let's just pretend that it was do i have data in there well i could take my exposure slider and drag it up and drag it up and drag it up and i go ew they're really i mean there's some texture but by the time i get it really up there it's super noisy so i probably am not going to be able to recover that so i might end up taking a different strategy a different approach to my image knowing that i can't recover detail out of here but in my case knowing that i can recover detail here i think we'll be good to go and yes that is soft and out of focus out of there it's actually quite a shallow depth of field photo surprisingly um but but that's what we've got to work with there so all right so with that said now that i know that i have my highlight details in here and i know that i've got shadow details well at least wherever i want it now it's time to start playing with the image now as i pointed out in the beginning it is pretty high contrast pretty high dynamic range a lot of shadow a lot of highlight in here and there's already been some kind of uh bringing these together if we go to the untreated one you'll see the darker areas a bit darker the bright area might be a bit brighter and so the software has automatically brought those together a bit but i'm going to try and do it a little bit more using the smart lighting here so the smart lighting here is just by default set to this slight setting i can go slight medium or strong with the presets or just grab the slider and it's frankly i think it's easier to just grab that slider and start dragging that up and if i go all the way up you can see where it really brings everything into the same range where the highlighted areas in the back are basically just as bright as the shadow areas in the front it looks very flat at this point it doesn't look realistic it has this weird solarized look to it so i know this is too far but if i turn this off i know that that's not enough so i need to find something in between that and of course that slider there is going to do that for us so i'll just kind of drag that back and forth a little bit and i'll find an area that i like and i think when you're doing something like this it's very nice to be able to just go a little bit more a little bit less back and forth back and forth try it out and then just kind of narrow it down and find that happy point where you think it looks pretty good and i think we'll we'll go with that as as with any of these tools if you want to turn off just that one tool just to see how it looks without that one adjustment you can toggle that single adjustment off with the little check box here and if you want to compare back to the original image then you've got a compare button up here that turns everything off so we can easily jump back and forth and i think that's a pretty important thing to do often is to go in and toggle individual things on and off to see if you've gone too far with any adjustment or or not far enough it's very easy to get carried away with these things and to end up going just crazy and let's hear i'm at 63. i want to remember that let's just say that i had been working for a while and i ended up like this and you know i think it's i think it's fine but then at some point i turn this off and i go oh wait a minute i went way too far there okay because i can turn this on and off easily i can figure out where i went way too far and then dial things back into space into a happier place so we're gonna go ahead and leave it right about there i think that that looks pretty good next even though it is well let me back up for a second this is a high contrast scene once again we have a high dynamic range scene we've got bright bright back here dark darks down here and we've brought them well into range within each other so it looks pretty good but by doing that things have gotten a little on the flat side i feel like i need a little bit of contrast in the details in the shadows in here there's a lot of different approaches to this the approach that i'm actually going to use here is clearview now clearview is really designed more for a hazy scene this is clearly not a hazy scene you couldn't have asked for a clearer day but in this case this clear view is actually going to do something kind of interesting to the photo if i back this down back to zero and start to dial it up a little bit slowly you see that micro contrast coming in if i go too high then once again we get too much i mean it may look kind of cool in some of these textured areas on the water but like the snow just looks kind of dirty in here the rocks just have too much texture so we know that we don't want to go this far with it but this clear view again even though it's designed to cut through haze is actually doing something quite pleasant to this photo in here so i'm going to bring it up just a little bit don't want to go too far in there but i like that now overall i feel like it's suddenly gotten a bit dark and that is this clear view has made the whole image feel a little bit darker so now i'm going to go ahead and brighten the whole thing up a little bit let's take the exposure correction and just bring it up just just a touch just a little bit in there and once again let's do a quick little compare back to where we started okay we're definitely we're moving along here we are definitely making some progress in here the shadows looking at the shadows do i want to raise the shadows i think we're probably okay but once again it can't hurt to try it so let's narrow this down to our exposure uh tools let's see there's the selective tone and do i want to bring my shadows up and i can pretty quickly determine that i don't if i do that things get really flat again and i quite like the shadows in there i don't need detail everywhere i'm i'm happy that i've got some kind of some crushed blacks in there and over here and in these darker areas those unimportant areas of the scene that i let go totally black or very close to black add that contrast into it overall and it really makes it look more balanced again if i lift those shadows up things just start to get too flat overall see how the snow has gotten muddy even though i've just raised the shadows the snow appears to be muddy now it just doesn't work so let's bring that back and now i think it's i think it's better without that so we're not going to do any any selected tools in there let's see next i'm feeling like the foreground's a little bit cold it's it's in the shade so yes obviously it's going to be colder color temperature than the background in here the background looks really nice but it just feels a little bit cold in here so let's take a look at my white balance go over here to the color tools and there's white balance it sets it as shot as default curiously it's a very high temperature seven thousand eight hundred degrees kelvin this was shot on a canon camera oops wrong button come back here uh where are we this was shot on a canon we have canon 1ds mark iii um this is quite a while ago this is when was this shot um oh look at that 2010 over 10 years ago um oh february 7th what's today's date oh february 9th so there's saves almost exactly 11 years ago but almost um anyway i feel like it's cold even though the color temperature is way up here which is kind of wild um i just i think it's a canon thing frankly i feel like canon files tend to go strangely warm on their color temperature even though they don't feel warm whatever it's all subjective but i want to play with this manually i could of course go through the different presets in here but if i set it like daylight that's 5200 that's ice cold that's clearly not going to work go for a cloudy day that brings it up to 6 000 and that's even lower than it already was so i could just go in here back to edge shot and then drag the slider and customize that and very quickly it's going to get way too warm i mean well we can go up to 50 000 degrees that seems a little on the high side but i can bring it up a little bit and without going too much higher it kind of looks a bit better and let's let's toggle this on and off so there's the default feeling quite cold turning it up a little bit just a little bit of warmth i like it i like how it's taken some of the cold out of here not too much we don't want to make it toasty in the shadows but just adding a little bit of warmth in there i think that that has worked out pretty well so so i like that okay let's see here let's do a little bit of cropping not much i actually quite like this kind of beach on the foreground in here but i'm going to crop it down just a hair so let's go into the cropping tool and with the cropping tool you can maintain your original aspect ratio right so if i want to say i always want to make it be in this 3 2 aspect ratio i can leave that in the original ratio or i can say unconstrained where i can just crop it however i'd like in here and that's what i'm gonna do i'm just gonna take a little bit off the bottom in there i'm gonna go into the bar we're asking for a little off the top but i'm gonna ask for a little off the bottom right about there close that yeah i like that i just i just like that better it kind of makes the beach if you will less prominent the water in here a little more dominant and i kind of like that so that's what i'm going for so at this point i'm cool with this i mean this is this is a good-looking image i dig it i like the way it's looking but now let's take it in a whole different direction let's take it into one of the knit collection tools and i personally am a huge fan of black and white i think that black and white landscapes can be absolutely stunning you know just think of uh think of ansel adams for example i think it's a great idea to do that and so that's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna take this into silver effects pro and let's see what we can do in the world of black and white now once again or not once again but once again for those who have seen one of these before first time if you're first time caller here we have a ton of presets to choose from here in silver effects pro lots and lots lots and lots lots of presets and what's really nice about working with them in here is you see a preview of what that preset is going to look like in the thumbnail a nice big fat thumbnail here without even having to click on it you can tell what that's going to look like and i love that about silver effects pro getting these nice big presets in here so you can really quickly go through them and find something that's close to what you're looking for you have various categories up here that you can dig into like the 25th anniversary or the latest category of filters but in this case we're not going to worry about that i'm just going to scrub through look for something that looks kind of cool in here and um and try it out so let's start with this one push processing that's kind of interesting we've got a bit more contrast in the rocks in here maybe a little bit too much in this in the sky i've kind of lost some of my cloud detail in here but but it's a direction it is definitely a direction to go through just try some other ones full dynamic harsh that's kind of cool we got a lot of detail in here let's compare it to the original black and white interesting point when you hit the compare button in silver effects pro it doesn't go back to the color image it goes back to the base black and white conversion so simple black and white conversion in here that's what we're seeing happening right now is the original compare point i actually really like this one this feels really nice or is it full dynamic harsh let's try full dynamic smooth no no that harsh is definitely better that looks really good actually i'm kind of happy with that i wouldn't leave it alone except that i want to keep playing in here so let's see what else i can do um why don't we well let's just take a look at some of the adjustments that have been applied if i look over here on the right you'll see all the different adjustments that have been applied because of this preset the full dynamic preset and this is a good way to learn what the tool is doing is simply go through here and see what's been done so it doesn't look like any brightness has been added but definitely some contrast has been added in here and just like in photo lab itself we can turn off individual adjustment bricks if you will so if i turn this on and off we can see what's being applied there a lot of contrast work in there doesn't look like any structure work which is almost surprising given how much extra detail i'm seeing in the rocks in here if i wanted to kind of crank this up a little bit i might do that and really just oh yeah really pump up the structure in there easy to overdo but you know it looks kind of cool i dig that so i'm actually going to leave it like that i kind of like that adjustment change that i just made i am starting to see some spots in the sky that i didn't notice before so a couple of things notice there is a sensor spot here and a sensor spot here and another one over here so that might be something that i might want to go back out of here and retouch and then come back in which is generally what i would advise so at this point i would say just hit cancel on here or if you had made a lot of tweaks to this to these settings here and you're going i just love the way this looks but oh bummer i just noticed those spots then what you could do is save this as a new preset and then come back and reapply that later in fact why don't we just do that let's just do that let's go in here and we can do a custom one click the plus to do this we'll just call this feb 2021 because that's a good name for it hit okay it is now save that in there i'm going to cancel out of here and we'll just delete that that tip that it made because i no longer need that one so let's just get rid of that tiff file remove that remove and let's go back into here and see in here i really i don't see those sensor spots isn't that interesting i don't see the sensor spots in here so how am i going to find those sensor spots well that in itself can be a bit of an adventure trying to figure out how to spot those crazy sensor spots one way to do this would be to add extreme contrast to the image even just temporarily so let me go to the tone curve here set this to master and i'm going to do this right add a massive s-curve in here to find those spots and i'm sure they're around here somewhere and oh there's one of them i knew one was there that is wild and it's so hard to see that spot this way so man let's not i honestly i thought i'd find a little bit easier oop there we go okay there it is check that out there's that sensor spot so now let's go ahead and fix that grab the uh the healing brush the healing tool in here let's make this a little bit bigger should be an easy one to clean up just swipe over that and boom that's gone okay so that's good and the other one well you get the idea we'd find the other one similarly i don't remember where it was now it's somewhere over here but we're going to call that good enough let's close out of the retouching let me get rid of this tone curve we don't want to we don't want to add that in there accidentally because that is not what we wanted the image to look like and now let's go back into silverfx pro and then i will apply that preset that i had started with and see if there's anything else i want to do before we call it a day so hopefully i did a good job of getting rid of that sensor spot let's go ahead and load up my custom presets there's one i just made fab 2021 yep so we got rid of that spot over here there's the other one that i needed to get rid of and of course you can do it afterwards as well but i personally tend to prefer to get rid of my sensor spots before going through the filters anyway so that's the process that we're going through now let's uh let's do one more thing on here before i jump out of this i want to try and brighten the snow on here a little bit it's gotten a little bit on the darker side and i'm going to do that with a control point so let's grab the control point we'll just drop one here on the snow make that kind of big ish we want to make it too big i do want to see what area of the snow i'm affecting so i'll turn on the mask on here oh yeah that's a nice clean mask over the snow so we're going to need that one we're going to need another one over here so i'll just option drag that over to get the get the whole snow area in there now let's group these two together so i'll select those both hit on the group button there there we go now they're grouped together and i could also protect some of these other surrounding area from the adjustment i'm about to make but i think it's going to be okay the way it is we'll find out in a moment let's turn off the mask back to that selected i'm going to take the brightness bring that up a little bit and that is brightening up that snow you've got a little bit of contrast in there as well brightening up that snow in there yeah i kind of like that and leaving most of the image alone it has brightened up some of the surrounding area but i think i'm okay with that let's toggle that on and off yeah that's totally fine and i like that i just like that little extra kick of brightness in the snow there okay i dig it i'm good with this i'm happy with it i like it trying to make up my mind do i really am i really happy with it let's do one more thing let's knock down some brightness on this rock right there let's add another control point to that part of the spot of the rock let's make this smaller and just take the brightness down on that just a little bit there we go just to add a little bit of darkness into that spot now as we do a compare back and forth yeah oh yeah i like that a lot okay i'm gonna apply it i'm good i'm happy i hit on save now remember if you wanted to be able to go back and re-edit that there was the checkbox there that i didn't check that time that would allow me to return and re-edit that photo later but i'm gonna be happy with this the way it is so we'll just let that finish updating here and there we go there is our black and white landscape so two two nice versions of the image a color one that is beautifully balanced warmed up a little bit i've done a little retouching in there done a little cropping and then that black and white version of that that i like really really well as well i think that's pretty cool all right that concludes the first one let's go ahead and jump into the questions here and see what has come up while i was babbling away in there someone has asked is raw editing work or does rioting work the same as working with tiff files no you it depends on what part of broad processing you're talking about so within photo lab itself when you bring a raw file in versus a tiff let's say that it's a tif that maybe you processed a raw in some other app and brought it in or maybe it was a scan the scan is a good example that you had a negative scan at a higher resolution as a 16-bit tiff file there are things that you can do the same as you can do with raw and some things you can't within photo lab specifically it looks at the metadata in the raw file and it knows what camera was shot with what lens what focal length what aperture and everything else it was shot with and it goes back to its database of corrective adjustments that are built into the software that it knows need to be applied or should be applied to a specific camera and lens combination so let's say for example that you're shooting with some i don't know let's say a 14 millimeter lens that is um has a little bit of chromatic aberration it's a problem in the lens it's a physical process and the lens that just all photos get a little bit of chromatic aberration out of this well photo lab over the folks at dxo will have profiled that lens and built a correction into the software that once the software can identify what that lens what that photo was shot with will apply the appropriate corrections that's not something you get with the tiff file that can only happen at the raw level so those type of things will only happen with raw they won't happen with tiff if however you're thinking about things like highlight and shadow recovery then yes you can get the same amount of data out of a raw file as a tiff file as long as that tiff file is sufficient bit depth so if your camera shot a let's say a 14 bit tiff file i'm sorry 14 bit raw file and you then converted that into a 12-bit or even an 8-bit tiff file then you would be losing a bunch of that data if however you converted it to a 16-bit tiff file then you would have all the headroom that you needed and all that data would still be there you'd be able to recover those highlights and shadow details so there's two different approaches there so the simple answer is no they are not the same if it's only highlight and shadow recovery that you're concerned about as long as the tiff file is sufficiently high enough bit depth then you will be fine next question what uh what you are adjusting to your eye is on your screen correct how will that translate to when you print an image and print an adjusted image will a print necessarily look the same that is a really good question the easy answer is no so what you see on your screen first of all no matter how good the calibration let's just say let's take a step forward from them let's just say that you've done some massive screen calibration compared to a printer and so on to make the colors virtually identical will it look the same they'll look close but it's never going to look the same simply for the fact that a screen is a transmissive device meaning that light is shining through the screen at your eyes whereas a print is a reflective device reflective medium where the light is bouncing from the room hitting that print and bouncing back at you so right there there is a fundamental difference which means that they will never be identical so identical out the window but can you get it close absolutely you can there's two different approaches to that there is the calibration approach where you have a calibrator light from a company like spyder or um who else makes them anyway you get a calibration device you put it on your screen it runs through software and it builds a custom profile for your screen to make it look correct and then if you have your own printer so you've got a really nice high-end printer you can run similar calibration profiles on the printer and everything kind of matches up and you end up with something that looks very very similar if however like most people you're not working with your own custom your own high-end printer you're just sending the files out to a lab the lab is going to do a fantastic job of calibrating their printers and they're going to have much bigger better printers than most of us can afford at home so personally i don't print that often so i only ever ship it out i've never in my life owned a really expensive color printer i just don't see the value in it but that's me um but that means that i i kind of lose control over that process some printers will provide a color profile that will allow you to embed that in your software and make the colors on screen more similar to what they're going to get in print but unless your screen is is color calibrated it's still not going to be the same so here's the most important thing that you can do that cost you absolutely no money at all and that is to pay attention to the histogram the histogram is the truth think of that as the truth and that's this little window up here right this little guy up here tells me that i do not have any clip shadows and i do not have any clipped highlights now this is the black and white image so we're no longer seeing color balance in here but one of the most important things in the histogram other than knowing that your shadows are not clipped and your highlights are not clipped is knowing that your whites are white if you have something that is supposed to be white classic example the wedding dress it's supposed to be white then you need to look at the histogram or look at the rgb readout you see here you've got these rgb readouts in here make sure you go to a color image that'll make a bit more sense here if i do it here so if i hover my mouse over the white snow right here look at the numbers up here i can't point to both at the same time but watch the numbers up here when i put my mouse over the white's note red is 171 green is 181 blue is 194 that is not white now that's okay for this photo because this is white in the shade it should be cool it should have a blue tint to it but if this was supposed to be pure white and on my screen it'd appear to be blue white pure white but then i look up there at the rgb and i see that those numbers don't match then i know it's not pure white if those numbers were 180 180 180 then i would know that it would be actually white and at that point if i get a print back and it's not white that's the printer's fault that's on the printer not on you but if i am providing a file where my grays my whites my blacks are neutral where the same color in r g and b or very very close to it typically you're not going to get identical but very very close within a few points then you know you have done the best that you can do and at that point it's up to the printer so a big long answer to a relatively simple question but that's kind of the truth of it there's a whole lot that goes into it but but there you go okay um next question uh already already behind schedule here so we're gonna move along are the color temperatures dependent on the dxo color space i thought daylight was about 5800 daylight is 5500 is kind of the standard but daylight can vary anywhere from the high 48s to the high five thousands of 5800s it actually depends on where you are what part of the world you're in your altitude a lot of things will contribute to that so again it is very much subjective software will have a built-in default so let's see here if i go back to the colors in here and i set this to daylight it says daylight at 5200 uh that might actually even be different from different software i think maybe in lightroom it might be 55 i don't remember offhand but that is again subjective there is no true color temperature of daylight it's somewhere in that 5000 range give or take a little bit next question instead of brightness for the snow why didn't you use amplify white that's a perfectly valid way to do it absolutely as well no reason that i didn't it's just that there's a lot of choices in here to go with and that would be a good one let's actually oh we're talking in in the knit collection itself so i'm not going to go back into into silver effects but yes the amplify whites option would be a great way to do that as well it might have worked better one thing that did allow me to do by using the control point is isolating it so i guess there's also the amplify whites in the control point so different approaches different approaches no wrong answers okay uh one more question can you reapply the same nick settings to the same image after it was edited again in photo lab well i think we answered that by saving it as a preset that's the easiest way to do that save it as a preset cancel come back in once you've done whatever correction you need to make like in my case the retouching and then reapply that preset and continue on where you left off and then you can just delete that preset if you don't need it anymore so it's kind of an easy way to save those settings all right let's move on to the next image i'm going to turn my camera back off and next up is this photo here i i personally i absolutely love this photo it's one of my favorite photos from this trip to india and to me it has this very national geographic feel to it from the cropping of the framing the framing i should say not the cropping the framing of the photo to the colors but looking at it right now it feels bright it feels too bright to me now look at the settings and i go well it's reset so that's kind of interesting because i pretty sure when i shot this i shot it a bit darker than this so let's jump into the presets and take a look and already see from the preset here the no correction if i apply that is going to be a darker image and that that's more what i wanted that's how i remember the scene that's how i photographed it so in this case remember in the beginning i said sometimes that default correction is not what you want it is doing the software is doing an auto balance it is trying to figure out what it thinks the scene should look like but the software's not creative it doesn't know what you wanted so sometimes it does a great job and sometimes you go you know what no thanks i want to start back with my original the way that i shot it more true to the way that i shot it and that's what i'm going to go with so that's what we're going to go with all right so what am i going to do to this photo it doesn't need a lot i like the exposure i'm looking at the cropping i really debated should i crop out this shadow line there but i decided not to in fact let's just let's do it and i'll show you what happens i feel like if i do that i'll just crop it a little bit there take that edge out i feel like it's it's kind of unbalanced now the image is very bottom heavy i think having that line that shadow line in there really kind of helps to hold the image together now you know if i hadn't shot it with that way would i go in and add a big gold burn on the edge there no probably not but i like the way that it looks that way so that's that's just how i'm gonna leave it again very subjective you might think that i'm totally wrong i think it looked better with the crop in which case go for it when you go and shoot that photo you can go ahead and not and crop it that way but for me personally i like it without the crop i do want to play with the colors a little bit this green even though it's a bit darker now i still feel it's a little bit too bright so i'm going to do this with the hsl tool hsl allows me if you haven't played with this before allows me to adjust the reds orange yellows greens aquas blues purples and magentas individually separately i can adjust their saturation their luminance uniformity is a that's a whole other discussion we've done webinars on that i'm not going to get into that right now but i'll give you a tip this is fantastic for working with skin tones not going to get into that today but what i can do is choose a base default color or i have the eyedropper that i can then sample the color that i want so i want this green click on there we can see that my green selection shifted ever so slightly and that is the green tone that i want to adjust and i'm just going to take the luminance down on that i just want to darken the green a little bit not a whole lot but just darken it a little bit notice i toggle this on and off we can see the difference in there maybe even pull the saturation down just a tiny not much just a tiny tiny bit okay cool so i like that better for the green again on my screen now let's look at the uh the the um what do we call this the clothing she's wearing we'll just leave it at that nice engineer the clothing that she's wearing do i want to play with the colors on that i'm not totally sure actually but let's let's try it i'm going to grab red incidentally it doesn't matter i could go you know i can grab this blue this is just a preset and then grab the eyedropper and click in the red totally up to you all these little color dots are as starting points you can change them to whatever you want but now i've selected that reddish and let's see do i want to maybe make a little bit darker maybe i want to make a little bit brighter a little bit darker might be okay saturation let me bring it down bring it up actually i kind of like bringing it up a little bit so a little bit increased saturation a little bit darker kind of dig the way that's going if i toggle this on and off we can see the changes in there and i like it i like it i think it looks pretty good that way there's again not really much that i need to do to this image i like it the way it is but there is one other interesting thing that i noticed let me go into the let's get rid of this let's go into the one-to-one view go up nice and close now look at her face on here look at her nose even looking in the background i can see there's a little bit of noise in here that's fine a little bit of noise but her nose and i'm seeing some kind of color noise on her nose which is interesting because this is only shot at an iso of 200 so there there's not really any good reason for there to be color noise in there it's very slight but it is bugging me so i'm going to go ahead and use the denoising tool in here and i can do the standard hqd noise or i'm just going to go for the full on deep prime d noise let me take the the preview window it's actually already drive added over her nose and if you look up here now at her nose and i recognize this might be a little bit hard to tell over the go to webinar screen but the nose that i'm seeing here the preview in here definitely has eliminated that color noise entirely whereas over here i am seeing a little bit of it and it is bugging me honestly by the time this image is scaled down for social media or even printed and the inks start to bleed together you probably wouldn't notice it but you know if we're gonna we're going for purity here we're going for the best image possible i'm gonna definitely clean up everything that i can before i go into it all right let's see here next what i want to do notice there's a bit of a shadowing from the top here a little bit darker on the top down i kind of want to amplify that i want a little bit more of that in there so i if i had a vignette to the whole thing then it's going to darken the bottom here as well right but because of this framing i don't want to darken this i like the light on her arm in here and on her her head scarf so i don't want to darken this i only want to darken the top so let's go into local adjustments right click and i'm going to choose a graduated filter and let's just do a kind of dark to light so the way that this works is everything over here will be on this side of this line so you have a little dot in here on this side of that line whatever i do on this adjustment whether i'm adjusting the exposure or the contrast or color settings or anything else will be applied at 100 percent anything on the other side of this dotted line in here will be zero percent applied and then the gradation in between is that falloff the transition from 100 to zero so with that in mind let's go ahead and take this and make this a little bit darker and immediately i can see that that's a bit much lighten that up a little bit immediately i can see that this gradation this transition here is just it doesn't look realistic it doesn't look believable so what i'm going to do is move this all the way to the top and then make a really big soft gradual fall off and now as i darken this a little bit now the whole thing looks much much more natural i think this is good advice whenever you're doing anything with a graduated adjustment like this linear gradient in here is make that gradient big the bigger it is the softer it's going to be and the more believable it is most likely going to be in there let's go ahead and toggle that on and off i'll go to the local adjustments here i can see the graduated filter in fact let's just go ahead and rename that so i don't forget what it is we'll call this green background uh what do you call it grad sure green background grad and i can just turn this on and off on here and we can see it's a it's a subtle but i think important adjustment to that overall image and i like it i think i like the way that it is cool all right so that's i'm good with this man i love this image the way it is but you know let's keep on playing with it let's take it into the knit collection and this time i'm going to use analog effects pro and we're going to do something a bit uh a bit kooky a bit fun we'll go for kind of a vintagey filmishy kind of a look i am going to oh by the way so if you hadn't seen this pop up before this is telling me that it's good to know when i'm working with a tiff file that if i click on this little box down here save and edit later this is going to allow me to well it's the name implies save and edit later so i will be able to come back in and re-adjust anything that i had done to this i'm not going to worry about it for now but i can do that all right so this is don't have time to go through this whole tool but this is one of my more this i love this tool just to play this is a fun adjustment to play with all these cool little black and whitey film looks and wet plate film looks and all these different kind of even these funky multi-lens things all these fun film looks in here some of the most useful ones i think are found under classic camera and you can see once again just like in silver effects pro you have a nice big preset here that shows you a preview of the preset that shows you what it's going to look like each one of these you apply it does take a moment to render so it's nice to be able to see that big look over here and i'm going to start with this classic camera 9 look which i think is it's kind of cool i kind of like this look it's a bit much but i like where it's starting so now let's talk about how to break down a filter like this and figure out what you do and don't like and what should and shouldn't be worked on in here so i'm looking at this whole image and i see these big old weird water spots on there now hold on a minute my photo didn't have those water spots hit the compare button and nope they definitely aren't there so this isn't some sensor spot that i need to retouch what is it well if i look over here you'll see that there is an analog effects pro an entire category for dirts and scratches if i turn this off well there you go there's my nice clean image again so let's see what's in there let's turn that back on and it has this you can see right here in the preview this weird water spotted look to it so okay that's interesting but probably not what i really want in there do i even want any texture i don't know let's just click on a few different textures and and see you know that's that adds kind of a nice roughness to it that's all right go to this one here let's see what this looks like i think that's from the preview i think it's kind of like a stucco wall-ish kind of thing you know what i'm kind of good with that that's cool maybe i'll dial it down a little bit it's a little bit intense let's take the strength of that down a little there we go yeah i'll just add a little bit of texture to it okay cool that's good i'm good with that one now let's look at the rest of these there are four groups of adjustments being made in here let's figure out what each one of these is doing basic adjustments what is that done let's just brighten it up a little bit okay lens vignetting what is that done well that's a huge amount of vignetting okay i'm probably going to dial that back a little bit too much in there and then film type what's that done well that's where this entire look is coming from is the film type all right cool let's go through this one at a time basic adjustment um i probably leave it the way it is what's been done in here a little bit of detail extraction a little bit of under saturation which actually i want to bring some of that back because i like my saturated image so let's just pump that back up a little bit i like that better okay good let me leave that one dirt and scratches we played with lens vignetting well this is a big you can see here this is kind of neat as i go to hover over these sliders you get an outline of the adjustment here which means i can actually just click and drag in the window to adjust that let's do let's see here let's make this a little bit bigger and position it down low i don't want vignetting to happen on the bottom there like we discussed already i've already darkened the top of this so i really don't want to do too much but you know maybe a little bit more it's not going to hurt so we'll just do a little bit more vignetting in there from the baseline so backing it off from the preset actually having a little bit around the edges here is not such a bad plan after all so yeah i like that it's subtle it's subtle but i like it all right next film film type this is where the big one is there's a lot going on in here there's these different color presets that i can apply they're kind of a color gradient that's on top of the image but i did like the way that one started you've got this neutral versus faded slider if i take it down to neutral we're basically going back to a kind of a high contrast version of where we were faded is of course fading that up meaning the black points are getting raised up i like the faded look i think it's a little bit too strong so we're going to back it up just a touch there how about some green i like green in there let's let's do green but whenever you're going to play with grain always always always go into 100 so let's take the green if you've never played with the green filter or green slider before in photo lab or in any of the dxo apps green per pixel the highest number means that it is um because it should turn off notifications um great the highest number means the highest amount of green which means the finest grain as i bring this down you see more and more brain grain coming in so that's how that works so we want to find a kind of a happy medium in there you can make that a little bit softer or a little bit harsher green let me go for something a bit soft maybe not quite that much just to add a little bit of that green texture in there and i dig it toggle this on and off to see the before and after i like it zoom back out and overall i think it's pretty cool image i dig it i'm going to hit save we're going to be done with that one all right time to jump into the q a once again there's a couple more questions that have come up and then we're going to wrap it up with our final image in here when using local adjustments can you drag the menu bar for the various adjustments to the side of the screen instead of having it appear on the photo no um what they're asking let me go into the photo in here and go into local adjustments okay seriously notifications need to be turned on there we go um they're asking about moving this around you can't let me put another let's just say that i was going to do something right on her face so i add a control point right to her face in there it's the the adjustments are always where they are those can't be moved around you can hide them temporarily so if you hit let's see if i get the right keyboard shortcut oh that's not it um yeah there we go shift question mark will bring up the the uh what do you call this thing the heads up display the little floating palette here that gives you some hints of what you can do in here there is one that's show and hide the equalizer is shift e so if you forget it just as long as you remember the question mark basically it's question mark right but it's shift to hit that key to get the question mark um bring it hit the question mark and then now you know okay shift e will hide the equalizer so i can go in here and make my changes and then i can quickly toll that on and off to figure out what i do or don't want to do in there just to get that out of the way but that is that is the way to do it unfortunately there's not a way to move that whole control palette by itself i noticed with the histogram that you did not adjust it so the histogram went all the way to the right correct so i guess you shouldn't do that for all images absolutely true i thought it was a good rule to do that that's a great observation so if you just very quick kind of tour of the histogram looking at this histogram up here this edge this left edge is black pure black the right edge is pure white i if i have anything beyond that range then it is not going to be in the image it's getting clipped out of the image you're not going to be able to see that um so i want to make sure that everything's in that range should you go all the way to black and go all the way to white well think about it from the stance of what type of photo let's say you've taken a photograph of a dark-skinned person wearing dark clothing standing in the shadows there's absolutely nothing in that image in that scene that is pure white so there's nothing in that scene that should go all the way up to pure white take your photo of the caucasian woman wearing a white wedding dress standing against a white wall there is nothing in that image that is pure black that should go all the way to the left so it's not about making sure that you have something from full range of pure white to pure white to pure black it's not about that at all you definitely don't want to go beyond that because you will lose details or i shouldn't say you should you don't want to go beyond it you just have to be aware that if you do go beyond it you're losing details so things like specular highlights can get blown out they're gone there's no texture there anyway the darkest shadow that you don't care about the texture in that can go to pure black that's fine but if you want there to be visible texture in there visible detail it has to be within that range but it doesn't the whole scene does not have to go from pure black to pure white it doesn't always make sense so this scene right here there is nothing in this scene that should be pure white if i look at this image here we see it's predominantly in this darker shadow area if i was to go in here and adjust it to make it stand out so let's get out of local adjustments here i'm going to brighten it up so that i do go all the way to the edge on here wrong tool not smart lighting exposure here we go take that up see i'd have to go pretty far before that happens and now the image is just bright and kind of washed out and that's definitely not how i want that image to look so so the simple answer to that question is no you absolutely do not have to go to the full range that is just going to depend on the image great question good questions today are you using the essential or elite version of photolab great question this is the elite uh version right as i was called uh yep elite version in here um yeah i've i've always got the elite version on here also i'm on a mac if we hadn't noticed that yeah i am on a mac today so if i talk about keyboard shortcuts although i don't think i've done too much of that um they are mac keyboard shortcuts but um most of them carry over to windows as well um can you use a mask to remove the grain from the woman's face and nose excuse me you can um you can if you wanted to get into very precise noise removal grain removal noise removal then there's actually a nick collection tool that's even though it's quite an old tool um does work very very well for that that is um is it define you remember yeah define define will allow you to do isolated noise removal honestly the noise reduction that's part of prime deep prime especially the new version is so good and it is not applied uniformly it is very much analyzing the image and applying it certain areas more and less than others i would before i went down a path of trying to be very specific about it i would hit deep prime and just see what happens with it um and if you don't like it then define is a great way to go just keep in mind it is an older tool it's an older ui um it's not even high dpi so it's a little bit of an older tool but it still works it totally works um one more question can you demonstrate saving as a tiff and nick exiting and then going back to re-editing okay i'm thinking of doing it right but i've never seen to be able to re-edit interesting also are you able to bring up your previous question got cut off but okay um yes where are we on time we got 10 minutes okay let me i'm i will do that with this image if i forget yell at me and i will come back to it okay next photo turn off my camera again that was my tummy grumbling it is lunchtime okay um so this photo like i said kind of a weird stylized portraiture fashion thing whatever it's very flat normal looking right now we're going to do some some fun work to this let's start by looking at her face and doing a little bit of retouching in here so young woman she's got a few little spots on her face let's take care of those i'm not going to get super super meticulous about this but i grab the little band-aid tool in here the um the repair tool you'll see in the lower left there are sliders in here first of all you can switch between repair and cloning mode i'm going to be in repair mode you can adjust the size of the brush the feathering of the brush and the opacity of the adjustments i'm going to leave it at 100 opacity take the feathering up a little bit in here and then to adjust the size i can actually do that by holding down the command key and i believe that's control on a pc and running the mouse up and down if i hold down shift i can adjust the feathering this way as well so i'll make this pretty small in here and i'm just going to go in here and start knocking out some of these spots i'm just going to very quickly go over and resize the brush to be a little bit bigger than each spot i want to get rid of and i'm just going to kind of very quickly go over and do this i'm again not going to be super meticulous about it but i am going to clean this up a bit in here a little bit on her nose there let's see here a little bit down here and a little here a little on the chin and we'll call it a day that's good enough so if i toggle this on and off um there we go kind of before and after there you can see a quick little amount of work in there could do more but it's good enough for now anything on her that i want to do no i think we're going to leave her alone all right close that so quick little retouching i'm kind of blasting through it right now but i just wanted to do that that bit of retouching in there all right basic exposure this image especially this is a great example of that whole idea of the histogram this is obviously a very dark image we can see it just by looking at photo we can see it by looking at the histogram but i wanted to be even darker i want this kind of dark moody look to it so i'm going to go up to my exposure slider and let's pull this down a little bit when we really darken out those shadows i do want to bring up the highlights a little bit i want to bring up their skin a little bit so i basically want the background to be darker the front the main subject to be a bit brighter so i could try that by bringing up the highlights in here a little and actually that works out quite well it gives me a little bit more contrast in there a little bit more punchiness and i kind of like that again comparing before and after getting some of that punchiness in there digging it looking good check out this background here it's kind of interesting and it's a little bit hard to see but i was there so i remember exactly what it was we're inside of this warehouse kind of a thing it's a bit smoky misty dusty whatever these are holes in the wall like i don't know someone shot a gun at it who knows but there's holes in the wall and these little white lines those are actually sunbeams coming through which is kind of a fun thing to play with i want to enhance that a bit now i know that i'm not going to be able to go crazy with the enhancing of it but i do want to bring some of this texture some of this background into the into the scene even though the scene is clearly about them their environment is an important part of this and so i want to enhance part of this environment i'm going to try this with a local adjustment i'm going to go for a graduated filter i'm going to drag this out and i'm actually going to be very careful to align my gradient with the lines in the wall in here just to help make things kind of blend together and be believable i might end up changing my um my fall off there a little bit later but but i think we're going to be okay now i'm going to play with these different sliders and again i want to make that those sunbeams really pop out so what do i do is it is it exposure well probably not that's probably not exposure is it going to be contrast contrast i mean it makes the darkers darker but the highlights aren't getting bright enough um let's start maybe the highlights bring the highlights up a little bit and there's not much highlights to work with in there so it hasn't really done a whole lot there and i'm just going to kind of keep playing with this i'll talk through it a little bit but we'll find what it is i'm looking for micro contrast is bringing some of that texture in that's pretty cool kind of actually kind of like that um i'm going to bring up my mids a little bit maybe a touch it's actually doing a nice job of bringing up some of the smoke down at the bottom in there um anything else i want to do on that here don't shadows no i definitely don't want to mess with the shadows i like those the way they are the black point is dark enough don't want to mess with that i think it's pretty good like that actually let's just close that go over to the local adjustments and toggle that on and off and yeah actually that works out really well it's done a nice job of pumping some of that texture into there that i wanted okay so i like that now let's play with the color i think i want this scene to have this dark moody kind of a very cold look to it lots of different ways to go about this personally i really like working with tone curve how does tone curve affect color i mean tone curve is just brightness and contrast right if i do this i've added a whole bunch of contrast into the scene well let's delete that point delete that point you can change your curve to adjust adjust just the red green or blue channels in here if i want to add some blue into the shadows i can go to the blue channel go down here in the shadow area and just raise that up a little bit now i can also flatten out the curve in the middle there so it doesn't add blue into the mid tones or i could even reverse the highlights to kind of compensate uh for the blue that i've just added into the darker areas to make sure we don't get too much of that into the highlights and that actually works out quite well so remember the lower i go down here uh taking blue away i'm basically adding yellow so adding blue adding yellow or removing blue you can look at it however you like i'm gonna pull that down a little bit kind of like that toggle that on and off we see i've added this nice cold blue into the shadows in there digging that the skin tone it's okay that it's cool but it's maybe a little bit too much i'm actually going to try to play with the white balance on this let's add a little bit of warmth into the whole image that pulls those skin tones back up so that's good it's got this slightly bluish skin tone without going too far i like the way that looks i've got the blue in my shadows i'm actually going to go back and add a little bit more blue into the shadows in here there we go yeah i kind of like that actually i dig that okay now let's do a quick little before and after yeah we're really getting somewhere with this image cool cool cool i'm going to do something to her eyes let's go to local adjustments 100 here definitely running out of time let's go in and add a control point onto her eye there let's actually do this at 200 and make this nice and small and i just want to affect her eye let's show the mask on there to make sure i'm just getting the blue of her eye or at least predominantly the blue of her eye there we go that's cool that'll work and then i'm going to here's a neat little trick you want to add some color into it shift the color temperature like i can go in and adjust the saturation right so there's saturation i can bring that up which is going to do something but if i take the color temperature and make it bluer make it colder it's going to add even more blue into that i'm going to add another control point to her other eye there just to hit on there as well and now if i close that out and i do a little preview let's see where are we over here local adjustments come here hello there we go uh control point if i toggle that on and off you can see it's added it's it's subtle but it's added that little hit of blue and i really really dig it so that's cool all right i like that looking good definitely getting somewhere um i like this image the way it is but we are going to once again take this into a plug-in this time i'm going to take it into color effects pro 4 and i'm going to do this for one specific purpose i'm not going to play with the colors i'm just going to add film grain to it i like the film grain tool that's in color effects pro so this is what we're going to use let's jump on in here and again there's that dialogue there's my reminder i will show you how this works so let's make this nice and big different presets are in here i'm showing you different options in here stop showing me that morning but i don't want to apply any colors although actually to be honest that actually looks really cool it wasn't quite my intention but oh fine well be that way have a really cool clarity bump man that looks awesome okay i'm totally sticking with that but i'm going to add green on top of this so i'm going to click on add filter which adds an empty filter holder go over here and i find from my filter library my film grain where are we here we go film grain add that in let's zoom into 100 always do film grain at 100 oh yeah i really like this i'm going to keep this image and let's see here i'm going to take the grain down a little bit i don't want too much i just want like a little bit of a kiss of grain in there yeah turn that on and off digging it okay so now to address the question that had come up before i want to save this in an editable way so let's go ahead and click on this box then here save and edit later it warns me it's going to make a larger file but i click on the click box check box there make sure it's checked and then i click on save and it is now rendering out a tiff file that will have kind of two versions of it it has the original image it has a render of the adjusted image and it stores the metadata of the work that was just done if i reveal this in the finder reveal image in finder and i open this in preview we will actually see in here both versions there's the original and there is the adjusted one what you're not seeing here in preview is the invisible metadata that is stored in that dxo will be able to read so now i go back in here and i decide i want to continue editing this photo where i left off so what i'll do is i'll go back into net collection back into um where are we colorful remember where it was and i did this properly we are oh i did that wrong what did i do i haven't done this in so long ah crud what am i doing wrong cancel that and back to this one what did i do wrong oh quick somebody help me um why am i not exporting no i want to export i did that right open that collection did i oh export is tipped there we go here is my problem sorry folks it's been a little while okay so let me go back into that there's the one that i just created right there's the one right there i go in the nick collection if you open up settings you'll see your your options are to export as a tiff that will have rendered a new tiff from the version that i had i don't want to do that i want to edit the original without processing which is in this case a tiff file so i want to edit that original tiff open that in color effects pro and hopefully i grab the right one because now these are looking identical and if i grab the right one we're going to see the adjustments here if i grab the wrong one then we're not going to see the adjustments up there we are there's the adjustments and so now i pick up where i left off so there's my different tools that i had access to before so now i can go in here and say something like um let's see your brilliance and warmth let's add another filter onto this and let's do a little bit of let's actually add another brilliance in warmth we're going to add a little bit of lightness into the shadow area down there a little bit warmth into that okay it's probably a bad example but anyway you can do that sort of thing and add specific individual areas of adjustment in there anyway you get the idea all right there you go sorry about that little confusion on there but hey that's how it goes sometimes all right well that's oh there's two more questions okay quick other questions is this photo a composite f zero and zero millimeter the two girls ah this photo is not a composite so they are observing that over here it shows f zero um and a focal length of zero millimeters that's because this was shot with an adapted lens so a mechanical lens adapted for what was a shot on a lumix s1 so it is a non-a digital lens so the software has no idea what the lens is or was and so it just put zero in there that's why that was but it is not a composite can you use photolab if the camera system is not supported okay so the short answer is not really like any raw decoder you would have to you have to decode the raw file photo lab has a very extensive list of formats that it supports but especially with brand new cameras or less popular cameras that support might take time to come to if you don't have support in photo lab for your camera model but it's coming well first of all you can find out what's coming by going to the dxo modules and it says here man i'm not managed uh here we go dxo optimus module roadmap it'll take it to a website that shows you what is planned and when it's coming so definitely you can do that and see if it's coming if it's coming but you're not there yet then what you can do in the meantime is your camera manufacturer let's just say that you've got some new canon and nothing out there yet supports it canon's own software will always support it and so you could do a raw decode using their software export out a tiff file and then bring it into photo lab hopefully that will be a short-lived problem though on before before photo lab supports your new camera that's generally the way you've got to work with it so convert it in some tool that does support it into a readable format in this case tip is a good way to go okay that's it thank you very much for everybody for tuning in today and i'll see you next time you

Channel: DxO

Views: 7,238

Keywords: DxOLabs, DxO, Raw Editing, dxo photolab, photolab, photolab3, Dxo labs, photography, Raw editor, Raw editing, photoshop, Lightroom, editing software, photo editing, photolab 4, Dxo Photolab 4, nik collection 3, photo workflow, workflow, Dxo Photolab 4 with nik collection 3, workflow photo editing, photo workflow software

Id: lPPy1VRuXlE

Length: 63min 35sec (3815 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2021