EDIT AN ENTIRE WEDDING IN LIGHTROOM CLASSIC 2024 (STEP BY STEP)

whether you're editing your first wedding ever inside of Lightroom or you're just trying to get a few more tricks speed up your workflow this video is for you because we're editing a wedding from start to finish I'm going to show you everything I've learned along the way in editing hundreds of weddings are you ready let's get into it [Music] all right we're gonna hop into Lightroom classic today and show you the entire thing now if you're using a Lightroom CC not Lightroom classic that's totally fine you can actually watch I'll do the same wedding with Lightroom CC we're doing kind of a side-by-side test here to see which one is better overall for photographers so you can check that out however if you want to learn Lightroom classic which is the version I personally use and recommend you're going to start off inside a Lightroom classic and I'll just show you my workflow so the first step in any wedding obviously is to organize things the more time you take up front to organize your files and trim it down to just the photos you really want to edit the better and more happier you're going to be you have a much better experience so I start every single Lightroom catalog by creating a brand new catalog for that couple so in this case I've titled it k and t wedding and all the photos from this wedding go into this catalog the reason I do that is because the way that I organize my files inside of my hard drive I put all of my selects into a folder for the couple and then I will have a wedding folder for that couple so let's say It's Kayla and Thomas all right I'd have a wedding folder and inside of there I'm going to put the selects I'm also going to put the Lightroom catalog and then if I ever need to take this folder put it onto a different computer back it up onto a different hard drive send it to somebody else I have everything in one place the last thing you want is to be missing files and not to have an organization system this one might not be for you but for me it's the simplest I've been able to come up with and the way I do that every single year is I buy just one massive four terabyte hard drive which I guess isn't so big these days but it's big enough to cover more than enough room for an entire wedding season so I'll put an entire season on one drive then I'll also buy a second one and I'll have a duplicate of that drive so I always have two copies of the files so I know this isn't editing but we're just getting down to the nitty gritty here you need to take care do you keep things organized otherwise it's going to bite you in the butt later if your couple ever comes back and says hey it's been six months or it's been two years and we've lost our photos do you have any anything else do you have backups this will save your butt um so all that said that's why I organize things that way I try to keep it as simple as possible that's why I just use two hard drives No fancy raid array no expensive system it costs about 100 bucks per hard drive so 200 bucks a year pretty good for me to have some peace of mind all right so I've got my new catalog here I'm going to go into my selects folder and just grab that put that right down here into Lightroom and I'm going to not select build smart previews because this laptop is actually pretty new and fast if you want better performance you want things to be a little bit faster you could build smart previews which just means that Lightroom is going to render kind of some small jpegs for you to edit while you're editing and then it's going to speed up the load time between photos however you're going to see a lower resolution photo when you do that so I just find these days not as necessary you can apply an import setting but I'm actually not going to apply any developed settings and the reason for that is I actually want to feel it out see what preset works best on this particular wedding and then I'll apply it afterwards to all the photos at once metadata if you want to you can create a copyright for yourself so I have one here for Signature edits or Raw photos you can also make your own so let's say that my photography studio is Taylor fit photography I go in here I would put in my name kind of the info that I want and then that way that will be actually imported and added to the raw files and when I export the files it'll actually have that data in there so you can do that if you want to I'm personally not going to bother and then I'm going to hit import so all those files are going to get imported into the catalog and you can see that there are what approximately 600 of them 414 which is about kind of the range that I aim for with most weddings I feel like just try to think things as a prospective client if I received a thousand wedding photos for my wedding day it'd just be overwhelming and so all the photos have less impact because there's just so many of them if there's a ton of photos they're all really similar just it takes away from the experience so you actually want to narrow it down and their experience will be better that's why a whole wedding day 400 photos typically pretty good between 400 and 600 is where I normally wind up and it really depends on the day how many family members they have how long the day was what was going on there might be more or less photos but what I have skipped here is the culling process which is starting with the 2000 or 3000 photos that I had at the beginning of this wedding and culling it down to those 400 and that is really just a process of going through and removing anything that obviously is messy and gross and also just picking my favorites from each so I might have had five photos of this book okay and I'm going to go with this one because it was just the neatest it had the best composition it was the best in Focus whatever I normally do that outside of Lightroom in photo mechanic because I find it's a lot faster Lightroom has this thing it's a lot better these days than it used to be but there used to be quite a bit of drag between these photos as you would try and go between them and so just take a long time to load these days you can get away with it but let me show you the culling process really in a nutshell all I would do is go through all my raw files one at a time just like this and by default none of them are selected I've chosen to reject all of them none of them are in the keep pile they're all in the trash and then every once in a while I get to a photo of them like oh that's really great I'll put a one on that photo and I'll keep going oh that's a keeper too one keep going that's a keeper one so this way by only selecting the ones you want instead of trying to figure out which ones you want to get rid of it winds up being a little bit of a cleanup hack where you have a much easier time of actually narrowing it down to those few photos so I will go through the photos once that'll normally take it down to like half as many photos then I'll go through a second time and really choose my favorite favorites and that is the culling process so it's pretty quick and simple which is why I skipped that just for the sake of keeping it a little bit shorter okay so I'm going to go into my grid view select all my photos by hitting command a and then hitting 0 to remove that rating I just want everything rated zero to start out and then let's start at the beginning so kind of my process here rather than just diving in and editing photo number one and then photo number two and kind of figuring it out is I kind of want to look at everything as a whole and then choose kind of a preset or a look to apply to all these photos and then I'll just tweak each photo individually after that that's my process I find it to be the most efficient so I'm going to find a few photos here and I'm going to just apply a one so I can just give them a star rating so let's find know maybe those flowers one of the Grooms one of the brides you'll see why I'm doing this in about two seconds here so I'm going to try and grab some tights grab some wides that's one from the first look photo shoot maybe a family photo ceremony photo cool and then reception photos so I've grabbed you know maybe 20 photos now I'm going to go and do is hit develop I'm going to select just my one star photos so you go down here into the toolbar hit that one star and it will filter it down to just the ones and from here I can look at all these photos which kind of give me a broad overview of the different shots coming up in the day and I'm going to apply a preset to this photo that I think looks nice so today I'm going to be using the clean and classic version 2 pack so I will leave a link in the description if you want to check these presets out for yourself and a freebie sample but you can see it's clean and it's classic so what it's trying to do is preserve all the colors really preserve as much dynamic range as possible and just give it a kind of nice clean classic beautiful edit make the colors pop just a little bit while still being really true to how it looked in camera so I'm going to go through here and I'm just going to see which presets tend to work best with all of these photos so there's version one where there's a more soft and subdued version I probably like that a little bit better there's a vibrant one which is more specific for blue skies so we don't need to worry about that and then I have a four screens probably I'm just going to stick with just one keep it classic and of course the ideal with this pack is that there's not a ton of options it's just simple you're not overwhelmed with 500 different presets so I'm going in here just making sure they all look all right okay so far they're all working pretty good you can see it's just preserving the highlights colors seem pretty consistent it's raising the Shadows a little bit adding some lens Corrections it's doing 80 of the work for me and then the other 20 I'm going to use my AI presets to do that as well to kind of fix things up and you'll see that in a second all right so this preset is working across the board pretty much all these photos so I'm going to stick with it if I wanted to I could maybe look at one of the other packs like the bright and Airy pack and go oh okay maybe I like that look probably not a little bit extreme or I do have this smooth and cinematic we can check this out that's definitely more of like an intense edit and since this is a wedding I want to keep things a little bit more subtle we definitely want it to feel more natural more Timeless because 10 15 20 years from now the last thing that we want is an edit that looks really really stylized and well out of style so I'm going to switch it up and apply this preset to all of them so go back to the library view by hitting G I'm going to go down to this star hit that that'll show up all of the photos now not just the ones rated one star hit command a to select them all and we're going to go to save preset cleaning classic version two apply that so lightroom's going to think for a bit but we can probably get started on our first image way over here now if your photos for whatever reason aren't showing up in order it could be one of two things one you had two different cameras and they were shooting with different time settings inside of them that's why you always want to double check before the wedding starts make sure your cameras are in sync because your photos might wind up just out of order and that could be a real pain if you do need to fix that there's a pretty easy fix you're going to select the photo so let's go back to grid view for a second say this photo and this photo were just off by 10 minutes because they're from two different cameras what I would do I would start by going to my filter we can go to metadata and sort by camera so I'd select all the photos from One camera and of course Lightroom is really having a hard time doing all this at once but just bear with me pretend the camera's there I'd select that camera and that'll show me all the images from that camera and if it happens that you had two different cameras say a mark three and a mark 4 you can just select one of those cameras and adjust all those photos or if both cameras were the same body like this one both cameras were taken with a mark d53 you can go in here let's back up to our dates and in this case our camera had two different dates so we can select all the photos that were assigned Sunday go command a to select both of them and go up to metadata edit capture time and so let's say that it's just one day off we'd go in here we'd change the date to the 18th instead of the 19th go change all and then they'll be synced properly now if you're wondering how to find the actual time you should set them to the easiest way to do it is you're going to find a photo right next to one of those so let's say the first kiss photo because you want something that's like a certain instant in time you're gonna find the first kit kiss photo from both cameras you're gonna maybe mark it with by hitting six on your keyboard that'll assign it red so let's say it's this with our two different cameras we're going to organize that we just see the red photos go into our develop module or our just Loop view hit I on your keyboard and in theory if things are cooperating let's try this again let's go to Loop view if you hit I on your keyboard you'll actually see the info including the capture time so this was taken at 3 28 pm and this one was taken at 3 28 PM so they're in sync but if they're out of sync by say six minutes then you know you need to adjust it by six minutes okay so that might be one reason those photos are out of order the other is possibly you've got down here in your sort function sort by and you want to have capture time not import or name or any of those other ones all right so let's get rid of the red tag on those photos and let's look at all of them to hide our metadata panel and get started editing together so those presets have been applied and I'm just going to go through you can see here's without the preset here's with and really it's going to be as simple as adjusting our white balance getting the exposure where we like it and then just tweaking things really quick and the goal here is not to get the edit absolutely flawless flawless the goal is to get it 95 of the way there and the reason 95 is enough is because we're going to take a second pass later just to make sure everything is perfect so things I'm looking for the white balance we're looking for the exposure I could probably pull the highlights down just a little bit so we're not clipping anything if you want to hit J on your keyboard you can actually see whether things are clipping so if I hit J of course it's not going to work for me now if you hit J sometimes it will show you if things are clipping other times it will not so that's just one of those fun things with Lightroom I'm going to move on to my next photo here and I'm looking for stuff like the skin tone of this hairdresser so I'm going to take my exposure up to where it should be take my highlights way down whites down Shadows up a little bit blacks up a little bit this one's a bit of a harder photo because one she's orange like an Oompa Loompa that's because we had mixed light always always make sure you shut off the light in the room when you get there because in this case you can see there's a big beautiful window lots of natural light in the background but then we have this super orange tungsten light lighting hour makeup artist and so the photo itself gonna be a little bit of a challenge so we're going to start by doing that and go up here to my hsl go to my saturation and take my orange saturation down that's going to fix a lot of that and then we can maybe add a little bit of dehaze a little bit of extra contrast and there we go so here's before and here's after it's still looking pretty natural overall of course we've introduced Some Noise to the photo so we could go down here to detail add a little bit of noise reduction or that might just be from Green so we could take the grain down there we go looks pretty good okay next photo this one honestly looks really great I'm going to hit shift M on my keyboard this is one of my absolute favorite masks it's just the radial filter it's so easy and so quick and really transparent so you don't have to be super fussy on your edit because while yes you can see the effect it's not obvious where the effect starts and where it ends so by doing this you can make really transparent edits I like to just lower the contrast raise the highlights and the whites and it's kind of like a portable spotlight it's going to make the flowers just a little bit brighter than everything else I think that looks pretty darn good I could pull the highlights down just a little bit maybe in the photo and if I wanted to I actually have these AI presets that I'm using and they save a ton of time I could go in here to say the Vintage AI Bloom lightroom's going to look for the subject in the photo in this case the flowers and it's going to just Bloom out the rest of the background so I'll leave it like that and again this is a little bit slower than I normally be well probably about one-third the slowness because I'm explaining it as I'm going so again there's the AI Bloom you can see there's zero percent here's a hundred percent so you can find exactly where you want it to sit really just add some nice Focus to the center of the photo same thing I'm going to apply this to a lot of photos because it just adds a little bit more depth of field makes things a little bit more dreamy and in this case the dress up here is a little bit dark so I am going to just add a radial filter with shift M contrast down whites up Shadows up take those Shadows down actually it's more transparent if you raise the highlights and the whites rather than brightening everything in the image because Shadows should be shadows and then the other thing is there's a little bit of a color cast because it's up against the tree the grass the dress looks kind of green so I am going to go down here to my color settings I'm just going to cancel that out with a little bit of Tim in the magenta Direction until it looks kind of more white to my eyes somewhere around there probably okay pretty good another thing that you could do is darken down the background your eyes naturally drawn to the brightest part of the photo so by darkening down the background a little bit you're just going to see that dress a little bit more I don't think that's super necessary with this one to go quite so far and if you're curious about what these presets are doing you can do the same thing just manually you don't have to have this preset pack it's just I've created it and it saves a ton of Time Versus creating your own but you can go up here to create new mask and you could go select background and Lightroom will do the same thing select the background and then from there all you're going to do is go to your tone or whatever settings you want to adjust you can take your exposure down take your shadows down your blacks down maybe take the presents texture and Clarity down a little bit it'll do the exact same thing and then you can save that as a preset by going up here to presets create preset give it a title so background darken select the mask make sure that's selected and nothing else so we're going to select the mask make sure support amount slider is selected and then choose the group you want to save it in and voila you will have that preset that you can just click and apply whenever you need to or you can grab these ones I'll leave a discount code in the description if you want to check them out cool all right so now photo looks okay I said I'm gonna go fast but I'm really not so fast so far so I am going to kind of exaggerate the blacks up Shadows up highlights down whites way down because there's so much dynamic range being lost in this shot and then I'm going to try and just add a little bit of it back so we can go to our tone curve and a lot of people don't know you've got all of these tone curves here but Lightroom actually lets you have a second one over here so we're going to take our shadows lower them just a little bit and again we've got the same thing with some kind of indoor light giving a color cast onto our subject so we'll take the saturation down on that and then overall now the photo's feeling pretty washed out so it's going to be a matter of just introducing the contrast back into the shot so we can do that by lowering the blacks down or by maybe lowering the Shadows down or by just raising some of our vibrant saturation contrast it's really just a matter of getting the balance right probably somewhere around there and of course the other thing we can do is just go to this background deepen curve Lightroom will select the background and darken it down for us and just figure out which one works the best okay somewhere around there and it's a little bit cool so I can maybe warm it up just a bit okay so here's before here's after nothing really fancy going on here and you can keep tweaking it to your heart's content but really the ones that I'm going to focus on the most of course it looks much better with those Shadows down you want to keep the light natural if you can the ones I'm going to spend more time on are obviously the money shots later on in the day these ones we want to have clean we want them to be beautiful but I'm not going to spend as long okay let's raise this exposure adjust the white balance because we've clearly got a lot of tungsten going on and we're just going to save ourselves some trouble by lowering the orange saturation maybe raising the blue saturation a bit darken things down okay another thing we could try maybe just copy these settings by hitting command C on your keyboard and command V if you're on a Mac or Ctrl C and Ctrl P if you're on a PC and that'll save us a bunch of time I'm going to hit r on my keyboard and that'll let me Crop so I'm actually going to try and keep this window frame if possible because I think it kind of frames the photo nicely if I can get it to look not too weird so I might need to use the transform but that's not bad I'm going to darken down a little bit and you can see the background our tree here is pretty blue and that's because the white balance is different from inside than it is outside so I'm going to warm everything up a little bit maybe add a little bit of saturation to the photo overall and we can just play with our shadows and our blacks somewhere around there okay that's a nice shot looks like I finally figured out I needed to shut off the lights inside or maybe not okay good we're going to do the same thing we're gonna go with our vintage AR Bloom that'll make this background really really soft we can warm things up just a little bit okay and there's a lot of saturation again the orange and red on her head hands so take the oranges down a little bit take the Reds down a little bit trying to figure out where that's happening that looks more natural to me and so the edit I'm going for more than anything is like what would it have looked like if I were there it was probably closer to here I could say cloudy day outside so it wouldn't have been super bright inside even though there's a lot of natural light and the Skin's not super saturated because that's just not how skin is in real life so probably somewhere around there feels pretty good maybe add a little bit of Pop okay next up I'm just going to copy this one I'm going to copy the masking as well I'm going to apply it to this guy all right that's looking not too shabby we can maybe bring our blacks down a little bit we'll see somewhere around there and really oftentimes if the folder doesn't feel right check your exposure and your white balance first because like 99 of the time if the photo's not right it's because the exposure or the white balance just aren't quite where they need to be so in this case things are also a little bit green make that a little bit more magenta and it feels a lot better to me I can maybe raise the black slightly she's definitely got some major clipping happening in the shadow area of her hair so I hit K on my keyboard to make an adjustment brush I'm going to raise the highlights and the whites first in that area even though it's like all black shadow by doing that it's going to be a lot more natural than if I try and raise the Shadows themselves so we're gonna start there and then if we need to we'll add a little bit more okay that feels better that'll let me darken it down a little bit more too okay not too bad this is one of my favorites I think it's just really cool but your eyes naturally drawn to the brightest part of the image and in this case it's probably this Hillside over here which is really boring and doesn't tell the story I want to tell so I'm going to hit shift M on my keyboard to start with and I'm just going to brighten up this area here where our subject is so you really notice that area first we can maybe do a little bit of dehaze on that area and see if we can get a little bit more definition so she pops a little bit more I'm just gonna mess with the colors a bit so we're gonna have to play go to the colors a little bit more magenta maybe slightly cooler until we're kind of happy so maybe there all right so I'm going to brighten it up and then the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to darken this part of the image so I can do that by making another radio filter or just hit M on my keyboard that'll let me make a graduated filter I'm going to do the same thing but kind of in Reverse I'm going to take the exposure down on this area and it looks much cooler here than the side of the image like more blue less green so I'm going to go down here add a little bit of warmth and maybe a little bit of green I just want it to be balanced compared to the left side of the image okay another thing that I could do maybe is lower the contrast a bit and even take some of the saturation out of that part of the image again your eyes drawn to the brightest part of the image it's also drawn to the most colorful part so another way to do this sometimes that can be effective is if we go in here and let's just duplicate in this particular mask so we'll right click it Go duplicate I'm going to invert it by hitting apostrophe I'm going to reset all of the settings by holding the option key on my keyboard go to my color and just take the saturation down and just watch here's where the saturation up and here's where the saturation down when the saturation on her is higher than the rest of the image naturally your eyes drawn towards our subject so we're going to take it down a little bit not all the way just a bit okay something like that looks pretty good I think we went a little bit too far on our dehaze in the center so we'll grab that take that down something like that and make one more adjustment on her face dehaze a little bit brighter and then I can darken the whole image down and there you go here's before here's after see how your eye is now drawn way more to her because it's brighter now I might have gone too far and you have to just dial that back because you always want to take it where you think it looks good and then go back maybe like 30 so it just feels more natural but that is going to go a long way in making your eye just drawn to the part of the image that you want we can go one step further by just taking our vintage AI Bloom and applying that or maybe trying our make it Airy brush there we go you can see the background just blooming out and so she's even more the focus because your eyes drawn to the part that's brightest the most colorful or the sharpest your eye looks for lines of contrast and saturation all right this one looks like it's not going to need a whole lot maybe just adjust the white balance slightly cooler and we can maybe lower the contrast a bit and darken things down so I still want there to be some nice pop to the image well also if we can making things nice and balanced so you can see everything so we recovered the highlights and we raised the Shadows just a little bit without losing too much contrasting over all shot I'm going to copy that and paste those same settings over here okay that looks okay but you can see that this white balance kind of way off so we'll warm it up a little bit and then things are kind of hazy so we'll add some dehaze that's looking not too bad but it's a little bit red and maybe a little bit warm somewhere around there raise our blacks a little bit and just play around probably the easiest thing we can do is darken down the background because our subjects are so bright in comparison to that bright window behind them so I'm going to take the curves deepen that'll darken everything down that's a little bit too much see around there okay that's feeling much better and of course your eyes drawn to the brightest part of the image so let's make the brightest part over here instead of this corner of the room and grab my exposure and just invert the mask of the apostrophe key so that we're kind of darkening everything outside of this circle maybe bring the Shadows down a little bit something like that and we could crop into because part of editing is really just getting rid of distractions and getting rid of things that shouldn't be in the photo more than it is even about adding stuff to the photo so in this case these power outlets on the wall this kind of weird stuff going on in the ceiling really not adding to our image neither is this cluttered makeup in behind so I could crop all the way in get rid of so much of that and your eye again is going to naturally know where to look we can then hit K on our keyboard because our Bride is a very very almost out of focus soft so we're going to just add some texture add a little bit of clarity and you have to play with this so it doesn't feel too unnatural so two ways to make something sharper in a photo the first is to sharpen that part of the photo the next is to unsharpen everything else so if I hit K on my keyboard and I go select people lightroom's gonna find with its AI engine all the people in the photo and we can select just our bride here kind of in this case it kind of screwed up but that's okay we're going to create a mask and invert it with the apostrophe key now we can go to our detail and take a sharpness down take the texture down take the clarity down of kind of everything else in the image and notice how now she's just kind of popping compared to before where you didn't know where to look voila so you have to be careful about how much of that you do but it can be a little trick if something's out of focus to make it look more in Focus just make everything else Less in Focus all right I'm going to take my crop up just a little so she has more Headroom felt like she was being compressed the ceiling was going to fall on them and then I'm going to Center my crop I'm using the r tool they are key on my keyboard just to get back and forth between the crop really quickly if you do want a different overlay for your R tool all you have to do is hit o and it will show you different overlays to help line things up alrighty next up this one looks pretty good but again we could probably recover a lot of highlights just like that maybe lower contrast just a little bit darken things down somewhere around there and then I could grab the radial filter put it on our bride highlights up lights up and it's just going to brighten her face good that's a little bit too far I'll dial that back okay and again kind of the point of this photo is the Garter is being put on so I could do the same thing here with another radial filter or in this case just use an adjustment brush click once and just kind of highlight the area that we want to brighten up dial it back a little and voila now your eye knows where to look all right we're on to the grooms okay just adjusting the white balance you can see how much better the color is right away okay I'm going to hit M on my keyboard really quickly just to darken down this part of the shot because it's quite a bit brighter where the window is okay this one looks good but too much contrast and saturation for my taste so I'm going to take the contrast down to around there that feels great same thing so I just copied that photo with command C and command V pasting it onto this one and because I got the last one pretty close feels good now the crazy part is you'd think you could just copy it apply it to the entire scene and be done but because the light tends to change between every part of the room you're going to find it's never quite so simple as just being able to copy paste and be done all right so I swear we edited this one already but I'm going to go in here crop Source flowers are centered and we'll go with a AI bloom in the background maybe just darken things down or brighten up these shoes and darken down everything else cool brighten up this a little bit so you can see when you're using the shift m keyboard shortcut rather than going up here to your adjustment panel and going to select radial gradient it's just so much faster and you can actually edit quite quickly already and this part of the image I don't know if you noticed but this is a lot darker than this part so I could go in here add some highlights add some white and just even out the light by going like that definitely feels a little better we could go even further but we'll leave it alone we got photos to edit all right so this guy good all right here's our groom he looks great I'm just going to straighten out that crop and crop in a little bit because that TV really not adding to the photo so I don't need to have it in there looks awesome and in the past I would have actually edited the photos like this with way more contrast but really you need to have it in your in your mind you need to be like is this what it would look like in real life and if the answer is no at least for a wedding you want to back off you're never going to regret going a little bit more natural a little bit less edited okay so I really do like that we've got groomsmen in the foreground but I wish that I could crop in just a bit because there's slightly too much Headroom it's making them both look short so I could try cropping in a lot more and I think I like that better and then his elbows already being cropped so I'm going to get rid of more so I can have slightly more of groomsmen in the foreground something like that probably closer okay Beauty so I'm just pasting cropping with my R tool and I'll shut up soon and just edit a little bit you can just watch okay this one looks pretty good but I will go with the make it dreamy it's going to select the background and just dream it out a little bit and we can do the same thing contrast down I just want this flower to be a little bit softer and maybe a little bit brighter so shift M contrast down highlights up whites up it's way down okay I like that command V pasting my settings adjust my exposure that looks pretty good but this part of the image obviously really black so I'll hit m graduated filter contrast tone highlights up whites up a little bit brighten that part of the image slightly and then darken things down overall there feels pretty good but our groom's bow tie definitely being blown out if I hit J you can see the parts of the image that are being clipped that are black for some reason it's not showing me the white clipping I couldn't tell you why but I am going to try just taking my exposure all the way down hit J zoom in on his bow tie and you can see that it's still clipped so that means that the actual raw file is missing that information so there's nothing I can do to get it back so the best case scenario for me is probably going to be just to try and hide it and there's a couple ways to do that one would be get rid of Auto mask just by hitting K on my keyboard and drawing on this area that's going to be a problem so I've selected I think all of the clip parts we can go in here to our presence take our texture and our Clarity down and it's going to kind of blend that clipped area a little bit better than it was by itself so it just makes it less harsh you could also try using dehaze I'm going to try and do the same kind of thing and then take our exposure down just a little bit and now we've taken it from like a really bright gory white to a nice kind of more pastel gray now I've taken it too far on purpose you can see you can only get away with so much luckily in the newer versions of Lightroom we can actually take all these settings and just dial them all back so there's with none there's with way too much so we'll just find kind of a happy medium around there and that's better than it was all right meanwhile back at the bride so we're going to darken that down a little bit and again this is a distraction up here with the light so is the ceiling I do like the plant in the foreground but the rest of it not really doing much for me we'll do one of those find our crop ping it out and I'm just going by the line of this window I want that to be a nice straight up and down line as before after okay I can take my highlights down and then go with a Vintage Bloom or maybe a dark in the background we'll see what happens here so here's without here's with a little dark in the background just a little bit and then our white balance is still off we're too green and too warm so we'll play with this okay that's feeling a lot better probably around there so I'm definitely not going to use this dropper much I find Lightroom overall it's just not a very good way to find your white balance because I could drag it onto one of these points and Lightroom will adjust but you can see down here on the dress totally different color to up here and they're both white so what do you go with I vote you go with your eyes and what just feels natural and right so that did a not bad job but I'll dial back the Magenta in just a bit and things are still looking kind of crooked my lines aren't quite right sure stick with that all right take my exposure down contrast way down backs up and cooler down add some magenta it's looking a lot closer to real life now how do you know what looks like real life part of it is just experience and remembering being there hopefully you were there it makes it a little bit easier another way to do it is just find reference photos so you don't want to find reference photos from like a completely different wedding in terms of style and color and lighting you want something like okay this is a rainy day wedding photo let's use that as my reference and what you can do is go here into your reference view I think that's with the y key nope that's before and after in a particular moment okay go into your reference view you can drag the photo you want to have as a reference over to the left and then you can go through and edit all of your shots and use that as kind of your okay this is the vibe I'm going for overall I am just going to stick with the normal flow though for now okay so it's looking a little bit cool for sure but that's okay because it was also a cooler day so I don't want it to go too too far I'm okay with it feeling cold and rainy because it was that day we'll zoom in on them a little bit and distractions to get rid of obviously we've got this clothing hanger always clean up the room the biggest thing you can do for yourself on the wedding day is to think about yourself when you're editing it's going to save you a ton of time and frustration by doing simple things like just going around and cleaning up before you start taking your photos get rid of all the Clutter using our spot removal tool and sometimes Lightroom gets it first try other times you have to try a couple times you're not going to worry about this this isn't a money shot so it's not super important but we do have the same issue down here with our highlights being kind of blown out so pull them back maybe add a little bit of contrast back to the shot we're gonna do the exact same thing so we're just going to grab with our brush this area of the dress highlights down a little bit maybe we'll get away with just doing that nope so in this case texture down Clarity down a little bit dehaze down a little bit you can darken it it's not great but it is better than it was so take our sharpness down okay somewhere around there and we can just copy these settings and paste them onto our next photo now going back and forth can sometimes be helpful in terms of just resetting your eye the longer you look at a photo the more things start to look right even when they're wrong so I can tell you right now yeah I kind of took things a little bit too far with our contrast down maybe too much our brightness could also be up and the white balance was not quite right and never will be so I'm going for like 90 and then come back on the second pass and tweak those things give yourself a couple hours between edits and you can go and kind of reset your eyes all right and keep going so this one I think I already did there's some duplicates in here this one is a nice shot we're gonna warm it up a little bit not that much crazy how much a couple hundred Kelvin difference can be in some photos okay around there looks pretty good except for both of them the skin tone is just too orange so we'll grab those bring them back a little bit and darken things down because they were in Shadow so I'm not going to try and make them super bright because in reality they weren't and the further I try and push this the marsh is going to feel odd whereas I think if I go a little bit more closer to reality it just is an easier time and a more natural looking at it now her arm a little bit too much Shadow some and it's got some weird tungsten Lighting on it slightly too orange so we're gonna go in there color just cool it down a little bit also go into our tone take the contrast down highlights up okay and we can maybe add a little saturation to this one it's feeling slightly too desaturated copy all that paste it over I'm just adjusting little by little by little here I'm going to hit M on my keyboard graduated filter tone and highlights up lights up contrast way down just try and brighten up this part like that and darken everything back down so again not a super stylized edit it's just clean natural there's a little bit of a distraction with the power plug right there so I can maybe crop in just to get rid of it like that feels okay but now we've got this weird baseboard thing on the trim that's feeling all right brighten up her hand because that's in Shadow just slightly that's too far and you know what I think with this one we need to do something about the background because she's just too dark still I'm gonna go down here to our background curves deepen see how that looks okay that's gone slightly too far we'll try this one not too too bad but we do have like some weird green Shadow on this part of the image so go up here add some magenta contrast down highlights up a little bit you can see I didn't do a great job of blending it so put our Auto mask on try it again and then dial it back until it's less obvious so before after I've definitely taken a little too far in terms of Darkness and if you're wondering how to quickly do before and after it's just with the backslash key on your keyboard alrighty so this one a lot of dynamic range we'll take our highlights down why it's way down exposure up Shadows up maybe a little bit and just try and find a nice blend definitely Shadows is always my last resort because it's just the least kind of transparent natural way of editing a photo if possible use everything else before you use the Shadows up so that looks not too too bad I can maybe grab our contrast down a little bit dark in the photo slightly because again the photo was in Shadow when we took it and then I'm just going to grab a radial filter here on our bride contrast down highlights up whites up and find a blend that looks okay that's not too bad down here on the image kind of distracting she's still really dark and the background very very bright so we could play around maybe do another radio filter again we're just gonna lower the exposure on everything outside of this by hitting the apostrophe key and we could also go with a texture down Clarity down dehaze down just a little bit there we go before after we've recovered quite a bit I'm really looking forward to getting outside for these photos because the light will be so much better and easier to work with than it was in the morning okay so I'm going to do the same thing radio filter and I'm actually going to use one of my adjustment brush presets and go with brooding D Haze darken and I'm going to invert this with the apostrophe key then everything outside of this circle kind of get a little bit darker a little bit dreamier with the goal hopefully of our eyes being drawn more to our right okay we're outside we did it so I'm gonna try and get a nice natural looking image here like some kind of in a new set at this point and if I can get this to look the way I want it I'll be able to just copy paste it over so here's no preset here's what the preset we're just brightening it up copy those settings and see what happens that looks pretty darn good pretty natural and of course our bride nice and showing up there in the background if you're wondering how you get this kind of shot you need to use a 200 lens you can't get this with a 35 or a 50. I do want him to be a little bit sharper at least on his face so we'll get rid of Auto mask try this again just add a little bit of texture a little bit of sharpness because I feel like he's just not as sharp as he could be cool somewhere around there and maybe a little bit extra contrast I don't know okay I like that it's before here's after so again we're not trying to make anything super crazy we want her dress to look the same his suit to look the same we just want to add a little bit more pop and make sure that we're preserving as much in highlights and stuff as we can now two options here one we could leave it like this two we can make the background just a little bit more dreamy go to the AI engine toolkit let's go with the AI Bloom plus Let's Go Crazy let's see what that looks like okay that's way too much but just a little bit of Bloom I think it's gonna be nice here's none here's some is your eyes just drawn a little bit more to them okay beautiful I'm gonna raise my whites just a little just a little probably around there so it's not bad to have highlights in the photo the key is you just don't want them to be clipping you want them to be some nice pop without actually losing any detail okay that looks pretty good but again much warmer this was taken with a different camera and so even though both were 5D Mark III is what's crazy is even between cameras the colors can very very slightly looks good nice and because the dress is just in the corner here I am going to crop there's not enough dress for it to be adding to the photo it's just kind of like what is that okay looks good and I think I could probably make the background a little bit more dreamy slightly too far there we go this is probably the best first look ever in terms of Groom reactions the words is when you do a first look and they just don't do anything I'd say that's 75 percent of first looks the groom's like okay it is what it is but it's a nice one you get these amazing reaction shots and for that I would highly recommend having a telephoto so 7200 in your kit because there's just an intimacy you can get with the with a longer lens that even though it's not in style as much like the 35 and the 50s where it's at in terms of like what's popular right now being able to stand at a distance but get nice and up close in these really private intimate real moments honestly is just unreal okay I'm gonna warm that up because you can see probably different camera slightly warmer also I would not bother like it is good to have an idea of what different lighting situations are what Calvin we can see that even though this is a cloudy day we're shooting at 5 000 um is the temperature adjustment whereas really cloudy is normally like 7 500 and look how ridiculous that looks so just FYI not quite enough Headroom on them there so I want to keep her elbow in the shot but I also want to keep them centered so we're just kind of trying to find him happy medium and then on his hair here just where it's parting go in there just to add a little bit of contrast and most of the time that's going to do a good job of blending that part yeah quiet let's try again another way to do it take your saturation down a little bit it Blends a little bit more take our exposure down there we go don't need to get rid of it but just slightly less obvious is always nice okay this one we definitely want to take our highlights down warm it up a little bit and probably take our contrast down to that feels pretty good so again once upon a time I would have left it with all that contrast and some weddings it actually does look good it's just this particular one the way the preset is it's got slightly more contrast than I want air on the side of less you can always add more warm that up just a little bit and then the background's kind of distracting in this photo so a couple things I could do one see if I can literally just crop out this big Pole that's better two we're going to make sure we use this vintage AI bloom and go with the extreme version which will darken it down and really make it more blurry looks good this one I'm not gonna worry about so much but another way to do it radial filter go in here dreamy dehaze invert bam so it's about finding these little shortcuts that really speed up your workflow so I'd encourage you if you don't want to buy these presets totally fine but make your own it's going to save you so much time in the long run to actually have these things saved that you can just flick to it really quick and in two seconds you can edit a photo that if you're just manually creating the brush every time we'll take forever another thing to be aware of too I hate that I have to crop his head by the way another thing to be aware of is that in Lightroom CC you're not going to have adjustment brush presets so that's one of the main reasons I recommend actually sticking with Lightroom classic she's really beautiful blue eyes so I am going to zoom in on this one easiest way to make blue eyes more blue just go to your temperature and just see how much blue we can add just by doing that just like that okay and her teeth almost pure white but just the way the shadow was there easiest way to get rid of yellow on teeth or just color on teeth make them more blue okay zoom on out so here's another hot tip for you if you're actually shooting the wedding this particular one this first look it might look like this is just another camera angle or something we've moved on to but no this is just them doing a pretend for his look all over again so we're actually shooting video at the same time for this particular wedding and so we said all right let's just have you redo the entire thing once more we got a few different angled shots and they're having fun you're making jokes you still get nice smiles and reactions and all is fun okay I'm going to zoom in on these guys a little bit more because nothing in the background is adding to the photo it's just distracting so we'll do one of those and then we can go and let's try dark and dehaze in the background good same thing over again [Music] dark and D Haze brighten up the rest of the image okay now we're rolling outside so much faster so I'm going to keep using this brooding dark and dehaze I'm kind of feeling it right now with this particular shoot darken everything down and then I could just go to my subject adjustments go subject Brighton lightroom's going to think select our subjects and brighten them up now that's a little too far so we'll just do 50 of that but our groom's been here on the end he needs a little love go to the tone contrast Town highlights up whites up can you see a theme now I don't want to brighten all of this mountain behind him the easiest way to get rid of that just go subtract and go select background now in theory lightrooms can be able to figure out what the background is and not mask that so it's only masking on him swell huh I can't push it too far because this tree for whatever reason is really dark and you can see the effect on the tree behind him it's brightened up so I'm going to try and hide that a little bit by brightening up the rest of the tree still no dice so you know when a simple edit becomes a complicated edit I'm just going to subtract brush we're going to zoom in here on here try that again and just paint on Mr tree hey now hey no don't tree it's over okay so in hindsight would have been a lot easier to just hit K on your keyboard and just paint on their faces like that so what's the moral of the story AI is not always the easiest way sometimes just painting it saves you a lot of time and energy love this shot I am going to just make a little bit more pop in the background and also make a little bit more blurry cool and she's not as sharp as I'd love her to be so we're gonna brush on her with cakey to adjust texture up sharpness up take it way back because you went too far I love it cool a little too cold just like that and I think the background a little bit too bright I wish it were popping so we're gonna go with our background curves deepen too much better we could lower our exposure as well Beauty first looks are my all-time fave one you get so much more time to work with a couple no distractions and two everybody's fresh they're still having fun they're not tired now that the bridal party is sloshed yet most of the time just a good time overall this is just a little bit too far cool [Music] so again we're not going for Perfection we're just going for 90 percent I can come back in here later and adjust it I'm just going to make a radio filter brighten them up darken the rest of the image okay feels good okay somehow we're back at the groomsmen in the morning so this is exactly what I was talking about this photo is out of sync for now I'm not going to worry about it because it looks like it's just the one and the colors are really weird we've got some major Flair in the background so I probably wouldn't keep this one because it's not really adding to the story if I could see it was holding a cufflink or the ring or something maybe but it's just him playing with his hands looks like so I'm actually gonna get rid of this one don't think it adds so we'll get rid of it good let's go with make it dreamy crop on in on them so I don't remember if this was a genuine moment as in like just spontaneous or if this was because I actually got them to do something like look into each other's eyes romantically and tell them the name of your favorite vegetable yeah that's a good one [Music] the problem is if you use those tricks in the engagement session and then the wedding you don't have anything to work with so hot tip for you always keep some in the bag okay so in this one I actually added a little bit more pop raised the contrast very slightly and I could maybe even just save this or copy this adjustment brush because I'm using it so much and now Lightroom will automatically apply it for me save a step that is such a beautiful photo how gorgeous is that nice over the shoulder side note if you're ever out of ideas when you're actually shooting on the wedding day and you can't think of oh what pose should I do next I always go into the Wedding by starting The Mooring off or the night before looking on Pinterest grabbing some inspiration shots and taking pictures of them with my camera then I actually have them on the viewfinder and so I'll be like oh just let me check out that shot and I scroll find the next shot I want to do and voila all right let's make a radial filter just to brighten our face up a little bit because that's the highlight of this particular shot not too much because we don't want to be too obvious somewhere around there is probably pretty good Supernatural here's before here's after and again we have the Grooms getting ready doing each other's cufflinks or something and the color in this one not very good the noise super super high so there's two options one I could delete it because I don't necessarily need it or if I decide yeah this is actually a good shot I'll just put in black and white that is honestly like my go-to black and white is for when things just aren't working I personally like this one let's try it sure somewhere around there you look like two angels all right this is a good shot except for your eyes drawn to the brightest part of the image which isn't the shoes so we're just going to make a nice radial filter go down here to brooding D Haze darken and darken down the rest of the image so your eyes are just drawn to the feet evoila looks okay this is back in the day when I took bridal party photos with a 200mm lens and I gotta say they actually look pretty good maybe I'll start doing that again [Music] now the only bummer of using these AI effects is it does really add to the photo overall but and but there's that extra three or four seconds that you have to wait while Lightroom thinks so that's the downside but I honestly think it's worth it because it saves me having to go in here and do a bunch of brushing okay this one looks pretty good maybe a little bit soft on their eyes and really if the rest of the photo is out of focus but their eyes are in Focus you can cover over a whole heck of a lot terms of mistakes if you're wondering what these little specs are by the way it was raining so that's literally just rain being caught on the camera apply Cropper in brighten it up and if you're wondering how I'm doing the exposure that's what the plus and minus key on my keyboard and if you hold shift while you do that you do it in bigger increments so here's adjusting by 0.1 at a time and by holding shift you adjust by 0.3 at a time all right still not quite centered so we'll just slightly tweak all right we're back in the groom's place oh whoops so his shots look actually really great but we are gonna have to figure out why this is happening so I'm going to go into my grid up here to my metadata and see it was taken with one camera so that's not helpful in terms of lenses if I double click on this shot hit I again it'll show me all the details this was taken with a 35 millimeter 1.8 you can also try and sort it by maybe the file extension or the serial number on the camera so we're going to look at the 35 we'll just sort it by 35. you can see we've got all the shots taken with that particular lens let's see if the rest of them are in order so if I jump to this one remove this filter is it mixed in with a bunch of parts from the rest of the day no it looks like it's probably lined up not too bad so we're just going to try and adjust just the groom's photos so we've got a bunch of Grim's photos coming up let's just check this one the time was 12 58 44 pm so I can select all of these in a second first I'm going to go back to say this one of our bride and that was taken at 12 28 so it's basically 30 minutes off so we're going to go in here select all of these go up to our metadata edit capture time and we're just going to take that and change it from 1258 to 12 38. change all now in theory these should now be in order so go back to selecting everything and you can see hopefully no dang nabbit this is 12.49 and this one's still set to 12.50 so maybe this is a different lens so we fixed all the 35 mil but this one was taken on yeah it's still a 35. hmm not looking very smart right now maybe it didn't change all of them maybe just change the one let's try again so we're gonna make sure that's the select of all the ones we've selected go to metadata edit capture time 12 38 try this one at a capture time 12 51 so it did not change all of them so we actually should have set this to shift by set number of hours probably so we're going to select all of these metadata added capture time and we are going to change this to 12. 31. okay and now they're no longer amongst all the first look so we'll try and pick up where we left off which was somewhere around here all right this one out on the lake so everything is very bright in behind them let's take our highlights down whites down and his suit at this point is just drenched so if you're wondering that's not color that's literally just the reality of being out in the rain and we might make this slightly less purple that feels better to me [Music] I love this shot and part of the reason we got such awesome photos from this day is because we just had so much more time than a lot of weddings like I think we actually had two and a half hours for the photo shoot there's a lot of weddings you're lucky to get maybe 20 30 minutes and it's in really not ideal situation you've got you know kids running around uncles and ants you have to round up all that kind of stuff this one we just had the wedding party lots of Time to Kill and the easiest way to make sure you get the time you need is to actually work with the bride and the groom to make the timeline and don't just leave it to chance or whatever they decide because you're the one who does this all the time so you're the one who needs to figure out how much time you need for the different stuff in the day okay that looks okay I'm gonna keep going and really not much to it the better the light on the day the less there is to correct for and of course there's some harshness but our presets combined with the nice AI overlay is really doing a good job of saving us a ton of time nice little detail here but again your eyes are under the brightest part of the photo so we're going to want to make sure that is the brightest part first off something weird is happening here so I'm going to add a little bit more whites back lower the contrast and then we're going to zoom in on this part of the photo with our dreamy dark and dehaze and invert it something like that and when there's no people in the shot you can get away with a little bit more contrast than you normally would just play with different exposure sometimes it looks better when it's underexposed sometimes a little bit more helps okay same thing here radio filter contrast down highlights and whites up and bigger good and because your eyes drawn to the sharper parts of the image we could go in here and just add a little bit more texture just to make that ring really pop I don't know what this is in behind him it's a little distracting so we'll see if lightroom's AI can figure out how to get rid of it and it didn't do the best job but we'll just add a couple spots on top of it until it's kind of gone everything looks good except for their face is a little bit dark because they're kind of blocking the light so we'll start by brightening up hers a little bit [Music] just like that now of course there's a lot of different directions you could take that particular edit this is where they did the first look I think that was just a tester shot because there's no people in it so we can delete that one here we go there's our groom so a pretty decent shot except for the fact that you don't really see him because he's not the brightest part of the image and he kind of Blends in with his suit probably the easiest way once I've got things set sort of the way I like it is going to be one a nice radial filter here that just darkens everything else down and two just select the subject of the photo contrast down highlights up lights up it's really helpful when it doesn't actually select a tree I don't know why Lightroom thinks the tree is the star but nice try Lightroom so we can go in here to our select subject go subtract brush and just brush it off the tree hit o so we can tell exactly where it is okay and for some reason because Lightroom is a genius it didn't even grab his head so we'll go add select brush okay something like that he looks way too bright like it's not natural at all so obviously we'll just blend that in now he's kind of popping off the screen a little bit more and we could always crop it in a bit so he's centered okay way too much work on a photo that probably wasn't that important but we're going to move on and of course the white balance not right so good and I actually like the look of this edit before I did the tweaking on the preset better so we're going to try applying that to that photo instead and of course now that her white dress is in there there's no issue in seeing where we're supposed to look in this particular photo because she's the brightest part you know does look like we might be clipping a little bit so if a person wanted you could go in here and just slightly pull the whites down a little bit and of course don't love what's going on with his face I don't know what's happening it almost looks like the Shadows are being taken up or something where there's too much saturation sometimes you don't know why something is wrong in a photo you just know it doesn't feel right I think we just didn't have enough contrast and slightly too much saturation okay that feels better but if you noticed it there is a little camera peeking in in the corner of this photo so we're going to crop in just a bit and then we can copy everything in this shot because it's pretty much the same angle right onto this one onto this one and then on to this one so obviously they're pretty small in the frame I almost wish they were a little bit bigger but what is nice is if you're doing this as a big print and for a wedding you need to think about that kind of thing this is about the right size and delete that mask I can delete that mask and then we're going to just a little bit of dehaze to the rest of the image not that much and they're looking slightly too red or orange or something so we'll desaturate that a little bit okay that feels more natural umbrella peeking out over there so I will just pop it out and straighten still peeking out of course we could also just grab our little eraser tool better I don't know what the deal is with this one why it was so far out from Center but we'll try embracing it but I don't like it so I'm actually just going to remove this one I don't think it adds to this shot to the Chute overall this one's pretty cool so I'll probably keep it I'm just going to Center them a little bit and we might just go with a AI bloom maybe make it dreamy I don't know yeah I think so like that and add just a little color punch too much Twilight contrast instead you can see how that AI just really totally separates them from the background in this case a little too much it's a great shot love it again we got some really distracting houses in the background so I don't think we need to be quite so wide and if we wanted we can see what Lightroom will do if we go crazy and try and remove these houses but I don't think it's gonna help us much this would be a Photoshop job although that's not bad I've seen worse I do miss the days when you can actually select where it's grabbing from though because I feel like that's slightly too obvious so I'm gonna have to reset it we could go with clone stamp if we wanted there we go that's better got rid of a little bit anyways that's me getting distracted hmm okay so her dress very blown out in this particular shot so we can obviously take our exposure down but I think we actually have to go a step further paint on there take those highlights down whites down the last thing you want to do is blow through us okay this one a little craziness going on in terms of contrast I'm just gonna reset it back to our defaults and grab our cleaning classic preset okay that feels better sometimes you make so many adjustments to a preset it just stops working just go too far what worked on one photo doesn't work on the next okay somewhere around there dial my contrast back a little bit and then I am going to open up my AI engine and we're going to darken down the background but only slightly cool and sometimes radio filter does it best literally just exposure down a little bit Shadows down a little bit slightly more pop this one looks pretty good out of the gate we'll just see what happens when I paste this version yeah something happened at some point that was just way too far all right I'm still not liking this one I think part of it is just because the background all around just still too bright okay so we'll copy these settings try pasting them that looks better okay and we're back this part of the photo darker than this part so I am going to try and merge it together by hitting M on my keyboard graduated filter contrast down highlights up lights up a little bit not too much because I don't want to blow out the sky maybe blacks up just slightly that I can darken everything back down pretty good zoom in on them so there's something funky happening overall up in here so we're going to start by taking our highlights and our whites way down but then we're also going to add a little bit of contrast and a little bit of dehaze and hopefully that'll help things feel a little bit more natural and they'll just pop of course it was not to be okay so you can see how your eye isn't naturally drawn to them because there's so much contrast going on in the rest of the image so I'm just gonna hit K on my keyboard we're gonna draw on here and our blacks up a little bit contrast down exposure down we could even desaturate it a little bit and your eyes just gonna be slightly more drawn hopefully towards the center of the image instead of the sides and then get it where you like it take it back by 20 30 and then that'll be better so here's before years after it's not perfect but for a first pass I think it'll be fine then I'm going to copy all my settings there good everything in this one pretty good except for the dress highlights down whites down that's much better Center them just a little and one little dot right on her face to make it slightly brighter good that one looks pretty good out of the gate and again pretty much all of me wants to go a lot harder on all these effects and colors and contrast because I naturally like it more contrasty but I just know after many years of hard experience that if I do that I will regret it later I think we're actually darkening down the background of this photo too much relative to them okay so this one's crooked I'm actually going to leave it like that simply because it kind of adds to the energy of the shot just like that I'm going to brighten it up maybe do a little bit more contrast in this one because it's more of a fun photo so if you're ever shooting portraits don't do this make sure you get their feet in the shot because you can always crop in you can never crop out it's a real bummer also this is why you take photos with like a 50 ml or an 85 because you can see there's a little bit of kind of warping going on just from the lens that was used to shoot this so it's fine but it's not as good as it could be all right pardon me onwards to the ceremony so again beauty of these particular presets really easy just natural colors right out of the gate beautiful so I really really just not a whole lot to do just making sure your white balance is right on the photos that you have really high dynamic range you're pulling your whites and your backs your whites and your highlights down maybe blacks up a little bit and your contrast down a little bit oh and we don't need that setting for these photos and he has such dark hair I am going to take the blacks up just a bit and this one all of these ones that are underneath I'm going to come back to in two seconds I'm going to edit all the ones that are outside and then edit all the ones that are underneath the building the reason is all the outside ones are gonna have a totally different kind of editing need than the ones that are inside so it's just gonna be a lot faster and more efficient for me to edit all the ones that are very similar in terms of lighting first beautiful and that one's actually perfect I'm not even going to do anything okay so that does it for the outdoor so now we can go back here to the indoor photo that we did that is a there we go so the key is when you're editing a photo like this your eyes want to make it brighter than it probably needs to be you gotta keep asking yourself like okay real life how bright would his skin have actually looked underneath this pillow if it was naturally shadowed you wanted to kind of feel shadowed part quite a bit too dark contrast down highlights up a little bit it looks like our mask needs to be adjusted just a bit Beauty and of course dads wearing a fairy black suit so we're gonna have to go in here contrast down Shadows up a bit that will let us take our blacks back down get a little more punch in the image without completely blackening everything same thing here and that one actually looks pretty good but right here we got a hot spot on our bride's shoulder just take the exposure down a little bit that looks great we do have a camera here so we'll just cut that out after I get this white bounce where it needs to be okay that looks okay cool our bride's arm just a little pink in this particular shot so we're gonna go to our color and we take the saturation down slightly okay so notice I'm raising the highlights and the whites not just raising the exposure on our face because if I did that it raises everything including the shadows and I actually want to keep the Shadows I want you to be contrast on her face or it would just feel weird a little bit pink we can maybe lower magenta just a little bit maybe even lower our white balance slightly and I won't be able to focus on this moment right here so we're gonna lower the contrast make it a little bit darker everywhere else so your eye is naturally drawn to this part of the image here's before years after you can see the original shot quite a bit darker so maybe I'll darken it too I also like these flowers I think they're too dark so highlights up good and we're back at the photo shoot first look so clearly there was one camera out of sync here for the purpose of this video I'm not going to bother worrying about it I'm just going to keep editing since I've already shown you I won't make it make you sit through me getting that figured out again okay everything looks good in this shot except for our ground here probably the brightest part of the image so we're just going to darken it down and then we can also take our presence and texture and Clarity down on the ground as well like that not too bad we can maybe mess with saturation too but I'll leave that for our first pass it's good texture dude everything in this shot I love except for in this beautiful pipe and this stuff on the grass this weird door so by holding shift on your keyboard by the way you can adjust the feather of your brush I'm just going to try and erase that first perfect and then I'm going to try and erase this pipe and that's pretty close let me blend it a little bit by adding one more on top okay before after much better no Photoshop required and then lower the contrast just a bit feels good now rather than do that all over again I could maybe just copy my healing settings and see if we get lucky yeah we don't so let's try this again that's a reset all of these oh come on you reset select this like this and I might take playing for a little bit but eventually we'll get there having your feather up a little bit would probably help okay that looks alright except for our bride and groom still not quite the brightest part of the image so I'd be okay with darkening everything down a little bit more okay and once more pipe not such a good job we'll refresh that everyone will think still get it wrong that's probably the closest zoom in so we can really make sure that we're not doing anything funny it's so weird in the age of AI when Lightroom just can't do a simple task let's try the erase instead of the Clone stamp good and honestly we got some weird kind of like artifacts going on down there so what we could do just sort of follow the coastline and with any luck it'll be better instead of worse but lower our opacity maybe that'll do it I think that's fine of course on my second pass that's when we'll go through and just double check and make sure everything's perfect and so this is an example actually of a photo set that's all very similar this photo almost exactly the same as the last photo so the only difference is they're smiling so I don't know if it's really worth messing around and editing and delivering all three of these when I could just choose my favorite and move on but I left it in here because sometimes you know the couple might want the serious one and I personally like the smiley one so that's why I did it but now I regret it just a little bit and even more than that I regret taking photos in front of a pipe that's the real lesson here don't take photos in front of a pipe close enough another easy way to deal with this just crop in and Meanwhile we're back at the ceremony it's in this particular shot her eyes do not look sharp we're going to sharpen that up a little bit somewhere around there and then everything else in this image is brighter than her face so we'll make her face a little bit brighter this was such a lucky wedding you know there are weddings where you get there and it's just everything goes right well rain sort of sucks but when you wind up getting all these locations to yourself it's pretty cool this one's more of a photojournalistic one so I'm not going to worry about the fact that it's obviously kind of cropped to the side and make sure I don't blow out her dress so just drawn here really quick um highlights down whites down that's it [Music] whoever decided that the groom should wear a black suit and the bride should wear a bright white dress that person must have just had it in for photographers they're like what could we do that would make it as hard as possible to actually get the right exposure and edit photos what would that be and that's what they came up with cool I want to make the color pop so we'll try that brush good looks great and back to the ceremony this way you don't get bored Watching Me edit just one thing great [Music] I love that shot because it's such a nice reaction I'm actually going to zoom in so you can see more what's going on but I'm not going to zoom in so far because it'll be a beautiful print if you want to make it a nice large one and I might actually try having the reflection in here as well good cool make that color pop [Music] it's gonna bring the contrast down on her arm so we smooth out the skin it was cold so that's why she's got some Goosebumps happening this is almost exactly the same shot and really serves no purpose whatsoever so in two seconds when I finish evening out this one honestly there's no reason to keep it I could either make it black and white to make it different or I can just delete it in this case I'm going to delete it and end of ceremony so you can see it's really a lot of rinse and repeat making tiny little adjustments and over time those add up to hopefully a good photo okay this one's actually really really sweet drawn them really quick just to brighten that up and we're going to do a darken down that sky and background cool somewhere around there feels fine got a lot of photos that are very similar to this one so options are one make it black and white two leave it as a nice full size print let's make sure our couples really popping and if we wanted we could go up here go select sky and just see what happens if we use one of these Sky brushes I've got one here Cloud enhancer I'm going to take the exposure down a little bit so we recapture some of the detail of those clouds pretty cool [Music] all right and then this one we'll just copy all those masks all two of them maybe add one more we'll do a make color pop because that's been working pretty well for us so far good I love that that's perfect paste that and because it's AI Lightroom will automatically adjust those masks so they're in the right place hopefully other than this one beautiful so cool this one again very very similar so this one are my two black and white just to mix it up I kind of like this vintage one we'll see how that looks cool [Music] and to me that looks pretty darn cheesy just like almost HDR so try taking the Shadows back down and then it's almost like there's a vignette having this just too far on this so I'm gonna just undo all that go back to the color version stick with that okay they're looking pretty red a couple options one adjust our hue two take our saturation down a little bit and for some reason I'm just not feeling this one here we go yeah things are looking really purple up in here and now really green [Music] so sometimes you're just figuring it out little by little to get it looking right again [Music] a lot of this is because this is a different lens than the last one or it's a different camera body like this is a totally different camera body might behave very differently there we go it was a white balance thing I just want to warm up just a little bit that's such a cool shot and I could crop it maybe a little bit more perfect but I'm almost feeling light because it feels more organic it serves the story better but just to see let's crop in a little bit now I'm feeling it right there [Music] same with this one so cool we could maybe make the background a little bit more blurry this is nice going back and forth between the photo shoot and the ceremony maybe I should do this more often get a little bit of variety instead of editing the same photo over and over again that's nice and pop that color copy that preset and paste and paste so this one I don't really love this particular shot I think if we zoom in maybe a bit makes more sense since we cropped out the bottom of them maybe if we crop out the top of her umbrella come around there that feels better all right we got a really awesome group shot I am going to desaturate the greens just a bit because they're popping slightly too much that looks pretty rad what we could do make a nice radial filter in here again just darken down everything around it slightly so that your eyes drawn even more to the group in the middle cool and now I definitely am seeing took that green too far add some saturation back all right same thing because these are all gonna be family photos and pretty similar I am going to just adjust the greens a little bit I'm going to take the contrast down a little bit take my time on this one because then the rest are going to be very similar and of course with family photos generally you don't want to be this far away I just want to crop in a little bit make sure you can see everybody that's just a detail shot nice view huh and again be really careful you don't crop people's dresses or feet out it's just easier and looks a lot cleaner if you don't do that because now I can't really crop in unless I do this and make it look intentional another nice detail shot and with this beautiful black tuck so we are going to have to manually mask that there's just no way otherwise probably with his shirt too wouldn't hurt you just pull the highlights back okey-doke same thing contrast down sometimes that's enough just by itself this case I think we got lucky and then we could probably do a radial filter on their faces take the contrast down as well [Music] and onward to the photo shoot okay let's make that color pop honestly not feeling it not feeling it as much as I thought I would so let's try maybe just the brooding dark and D Haze that's a little better good straighten out that Horizon and we are looking pretty good and now we have camera number two with the entire ceremony oh my gosh so this ladies and gentlemen is exactly why before you edit a wedding before you start you get all of your files organized you adjust all of your time stamps because this isn't so bad now but it's just so much easier when you have all the shots in the same bundle so that you can copy your settings paste them get them right once instead of having to flip back and forth I will say though I really like this angle on this lens all righty but there's nothing quite as awesome as a nice dark rainy day because they're just so much easier to edit for the most part except for when you have super dark shadows like this so in this case highly Stan Whitestown obviously I did a radial filter just to brighten up this part of the room but the problem is it's obviously hitting the lake and behind the highlights on the floor here so what do we do well make sure this radio filter extends everywhere we need it to Across the entire crowd then go to subtract and we can actually go luminance range set this to just the brightest parts of the image and if you hit oh you're going to see now it's no longer masking out anything except for the darkest parts of that and we can adjust kind of the the feather perfect okay so we can get away with pushing it just a little bit I think our contrast down some and I think that's pretty good so here's where we started and here's after and then just our efficient here needs a little bit of extra love because he was standing in a particularly dark spot and his skin doesn't reflect light as well so perfect and it's okay that things are still a little bit dark right because that's just natural that's how it would have looked in the real life beautiful wonderful nice natural preset like it's so easy you have a preset that does what you want it to do the way that you wanted to do it and I gotta say like to develop these presets it was years in the making it's been two years or more I think since I released the initial cleaning classic pack and over the years as I've been adding more and more and more weddings all sorts of people's other photos different situations lighting conditions whatever I've been slowly adjusting these things over tens of thousands of images all the feedback that comes in and finally version two is complete okay this one feels a little bit weird like something's going on here almost like there's not enough saturation on their skin and also it's slightly too green so we'll try that that feels a little bit better but her dress is still very bright so we're going to darken it down rescue those highlights just a bit I think that's okay maybe lower the contrast there we go if you're wondering how I enter that view it's just the L key on your keyboard that's the loop View sometimes it's helpful just to kind of get rid of all the distractions just see the photo by itself okay so the obvious challenge we're going to have here is our groom is cloaked in darkness and our bright here needs to be toned down a little bit so lower the exposure there just like that then hit M on the keyboard make a graduated filter lower even more and it's not all about getting it in one mask by layering them you can get a much more kind of natural feel to it somewhere around there strain things out before here's after not too shabby then this part of the image obviously the brightest your eyes are being drawn up there so we'll just darken it down slightly and we'll try and add a little bit of extra Clarity to our groom so he pops okay same kind of thing butter chicken wing awesome look at those colors it's so good oh so deciding on the white balance is really up to you like now I'm a little bit warm I'm 58 whereas I think earlier I was closer to like 5 000 on some of the photos so it just depends do you want it to feel like a cool rainy evening or a rainy afternoon or do you want it to feel like a nice warm kind of cozy Fest yes I just used the word cozy fast as if it were a thing if it's not maybe we'll make it into one all right saturation bam take that down just a bit and this one's kind of weird because their feet are just slightly cut off so I'm actually going to lean into that exaggerate it like that but then you lose these pretty roses so I don't know I don't know what to do [Music] too shabby just happened so obviously this white pillar a little bit bright cool that down just a bit then your eyes naturally drawn slightly more where it's meant to go all right we got like a bridesmaids thing going on here so pretty good except for obviously our wedding party very dark and this floor so bright we'll darken that down and look at how they pop like beforehand your eyes just distracted and then as you darken it down so much better I'm gonna go subtract select people and then that way this brush isn't affecting them just the floor underneath them voila yeah these photos are so out of order it's kind of kind of embarrassing yeah well let's give it a slight bump in exposure right here in the center slight bump in texture slide bump and saturation all to help lead your eyes just a little bit and then again we could go with an adjustment brush really sloppily around the outside lower the exposure just a bit okay much better yeah right same story you can tell this is different camera because the tones and the colors so much different okay that actually looks pretty good we're just going to do the same thing with our floor here much better never do this during a first kiss folks because you can always go in and crop to a cool stylistic crop later but now it's like that's all I got not so good luckily I think that's not the only shot but it's just high risk high risk low reward all right so obviously the brightest part of the image is the highlights right here in this chaply area so we could try and darken it like that but we're gonna have to do the same thing as before where we actually go click this mask go subtract and then go luminance range so it's just the brightest part like that and of course I'm doing the exact opposite of what I wanted in theory we just want to select that part it's kind of funny it used to be easier and then Lightroom updated it actually made it harder which I find sort of hilarious okay so then we're gonna have to dial it back a little bit but here's before here's after so we've really calm that down quite a bit that particular shot though I don't know if I'm going to keep it it just it does not look good it looks kind of silly so we're going to delete this one after spending all that time beautiful I love that look how nice those skin tones are just beautiful and the colors probably a weird thing to say about a photo but I just did it's just that's the idea is that your presets don't need a ton of tweaking you just make some slide adjustments show your exposure and your temperature right and it should just work that's the ideal how pretty are those colors just nuts okay so whatever I just did there when I pasted my settings it looked better before I did that so do one of those brighten our groom here up a little bit contrast is a really interesting thing because sometimes you think oh it needs less contrast more contrast and the issue is it needs more saturation not contrast or you add contrast and that's where it actually introduces the color because what a lot of people don't realize is that contrast isn't just about black and white making things darker and lighter it's actually adding color contrast as well okay so it will increase the saturation as you increase the contrast but it's always a balance because oftentimes like forget them the rest of the photo looks great now but then they look too contrasty so what do we do we make a radial filter lower the contrast in that one spot or the saturation just a little bit and voila you feel a little bit better of course we can darken down this part of the image a little bit [Music] um okay his eyes are closed in this one her reaction is nice but I don't know I'm gonna delete that one because we have 19 others warm it up slightly okay we do have a really nice group photo somewhere else and this one doesn't really have everybody in it so I think I'm not going to worry about it too much but I'm probably still going to give it to them just for variety okay and just get my white balance right here dial in the exposure and it's looking really contrasty so okay something like that but the background way brighter than them I just want it to darken down so we'll go with one of our background curves and if you're wondering what is what this actually is it's literally a background mask that I've just created a special curve on different adjustments with the goal of being able to just adjust just how much pop there is in the back all right looks okay except for their dress her dress their dress and the flowers are just a little bit too much contrast we're kind of blowing them out okay now in theory in theory we're pretty close here copy that ooh love that her hair very dark for whatever reason so these couple of spots they're just darker than I want them to be we'll just add some highlights and whites and vice versa on her dress which is just too light the lights and whites down overall we could go with the background deep in the curves it's way too much so we'll try this one something like there feels pretty good but just Bloom the highlights a little bit with Vintage Air Bloom and we're good now we can copy all those paste it see if we get lucky it's pretty good other than the fact that our address selections probably in the total wrong spot yep move that and okay good good and that's why you don't copy all of the settings just some of them all right pretty good here's before he's after and really brought the focus in on them we could maybe brighten the darker parts of his suit and her setup a little bit there we go and of course these are the money shots that were taking a little bit more time on still doesn't mean the edits have to be complicated especially with the AI doing the masking for us like holy crap does that save a ton of time because now it's just like okay a little bit here a little bit there we'll brighten up their faces a little bit and the easiest thing I can probably do here is I'm going to paint on them where I want to brighten things up click that go subtract and go select background perfect now that mask is just affecting them dial it back a little bit voila B4 of course that dress always too bright for its own good highlights downwards down a little bit same thing [Music] okay and then overall that's just looking a little bit too much so we're going to brighten up the background a little bit okay that feels better and once again flowers a little bit on the dress at least down Whitestone all right he's putting on his car moves gotta respect that is just a fun shot so I don't need to worry about it too much but we might as well brighten him up a little bit darken down our background again just a little fun shot so I don't need to be over invested in this but that's fine now how awesome is that for an AI being able to just sharpen things down nicely the only thing is our greens look a little bit too extreme in the shadows so on this particular one I might come down here to my Shadows the opposite of green is magenta so I'll just add a little bit of magenta there you go here's before years after we could brighten up our ride a little same thing as before subtract select background and highlights up whites up cool the last thing I might actually get rid of one of these because it just looks like it's taking it too far I'll try that better okay same thing and it's just crazy because I don't know a year ago two years ago when I would have wanted to edit these photos doing that same amount of masking would have taken me probably 10 minutes to get that photo where I just got it in about two seconds like how beautiful is this four after now this one because it's all off to the side I'm gonna have to use some lens transforms we'll go down here to transform we could try auto and just see how it does awesome Auto is awesome and then this entire area minus our subject here come on we're just going to take the Shadows down add a little bit of clarity good okay rescue that background straighten out those lines subtract the background shabam of course this one it's almost like we're losing too much contrast so we can try taking our whites back up that feels much more natural I love it when a plan comes together seriously it's so satisfying when you actually just hit paste and it looks great really speeds up the process and because their faces aren't facing me in this particular one I can actually Jack the contrast up a little bit more a centered beautiful just stunning what a day that was what a spot okay now the only thing I'm noticing in this well there's a couple there's this Cloud which is kind of weird I'm not going to worry about that but his hair is just a light spot here that I don't it's distracting I don't know why so good blend it back in okay it's still kind of there but I think it's okay then her back is a little dark perfect same thing I love it and we can actually just select them and for some reason this one looks colder than the other one so I'm going to warm it up drop the contrast a bit good this is one of my absolute faves so we're gonna spend a little more time on this one because it's a money shot I'm going to select them contrast and highlights up whites up a little bit good I'm going to go with an AI bloom in the background okay slightly down you try Sky darken see if we can retain a little bit more texture in those clouds okay that's taken a little far it's thinking the lake is also the sky pretty good so far but I do want to bring our foreground here the sidewalk just a little bit more darker and by lowering just the Shadows we darken it but we're also adding some contrast making it pop a little okay and then up on them just in the darker spots his wet jacket her hair and face his hair again we're just going to brighten those areas up and there we go here's before here's after looks pretty good I will maybe bring the exposure down everywhere else our eyes are drawn towards them just a bit more cool okay highlights up lights up contrast down track select background so now we just select them pretty good same thing this one I'm going to go a little bit more to in the all right we've started entering the reception so this honestly that's the beauty of this preset it's pretty clean pretty good out of the gate I think that's fine you can maybe green brighten our highlights down a little bit raise our exposure and that looks good it's very Peach kind of room so I'm not going to worry too much about playing with the white balance that much I think that's pretty close to what it was open it up and move on okay this one might be interesting since we have everything lit by this super tungsten love sign but then outside is really blue so if I try and correct for the love sign outside is going to start to look too blue just going to find a compromise somewhere around there maybe and the solution here is normally just take the blue saturation down a little bit and take the blue luminance either down or up just depends on the photo in this case a little bit down and then we can grab a graduated filter from this side of the room raise the highlights and the whites and we've gone from here to here not too too shabby it's not the greatest photo but it'll do all right this one we definitely need highlights some Redemption there that's better they're really excited about this car after these settings and copy them because I think they look pretty good oops oh come on now my fingers are slipping okay so we're gonna try taking our contrast down and then adding some back in our tone curve this can be a slippery road but we're gonna attempt it and of course complete fail so we're gonna just reset take a step back and try the preset from its base settings and this particular shot was just so high dynamic range and it was underexposed so I'm gonna try just painting on them go subtract background we'll just try and brighten our subjects by themselves and then we can darken everything else down a little bit it's not the best yeah it's not the worst right stick with it copy those settings they're looking a little too saturated so we'll grab our saturation down just in the skin a little bit we could also probably cool it down slightly you can see our temperature is Raising and part of that is because it's later in the day it's actually close to Sunset even though you can't tell because of the clouds in the sky so temperatures just slowly dropping the Calvin temperature that is okay I think I went too far there looks better like that I actually like that one a lot better warmer so we'll try warming up again looks pretty good the only thing is I want this road to be nice and dark and textured so that your eye is drawn to it it's gonna go that Shadows down maybe or try a little bit of texture like that okay cool darken everything down and then of course her dress just kind of capture those highlights prevent them from clipping okay I love it we can maybe play with adding some more blue to it easiest way to add blue to an image just drop your temperature okay that's looking all right [Music] now another thing of course we could have done is just deepen the background or any of these other background curves could have played around we got such cool stormy skies here I gotta be honest I am not a fan of high overcast Skies if it's gonna be overcast it needs to like really rain because when it really rains and it looks awesome and the light is great but when it's overcast oh my gosh you have just the worst light okay so I'm actually going to delete this because I think they're too bright in the image something like that feels okay to me we got our last minute bouquet shot because we realized we didn't get a photo of the bookcase I think the bride actually reminded us gotta be grateful when that happens and because there's no room on this bridesmaid's side just on this one so I'm gonna crop in so they match and because that green doesn't really go with the colors in the front it's pretty good just drop our contrast okay pretty good again just the dress this one we might use just our Sky darken save us some time background Cruise Sky darken I should have a song for every single one leave a thumbs up if that's something you agree with also if this video has been helpful do me a favor and if you would not mind hitting the thumbs up leaving a comment will be very helpful just help this video reach more people it's free okay that looks awesome and I don't even need to touch it whoa love it I could try making the color pop but honestly I think that's just kind of Overkill I think it's pretty perfect that's the one and this one I don't know if it really adds to the album overall but if I crop in maybe it'll be better that's pretty cool our contrast a little bit darken this forest floor it's not a forest I get it it's a Vineyard right about there should bam before after it's easy it's simple just a matter of getting the contrast highlights and whites dialed into the right place I think we have a lot of these kind of photos already so I don't know how important it is for me to save that many more of the entire wedding party but it doesn't take too long so we might as well and then they were back in the reception hall for a total of two photos or that white balance take some of the saturation out of the blue just not too much or it'll feel weird and then brighten up this beautiful cake cool and then of course this is a pretty distracting sign so since it's not adding anything we'll get rid of it and I'm thinking that's quite a bit better than where we started of course if you really want to dial it in take your time I'll stick that for that for now and of course it's a beautiful beautiful yellow toolbox in this shot zoom in see if we can't turn this into a cake shot something like that now if you're wondering how these speech photos were taken well obviously there's big Windows over here so they helped there's also a triple flash setup so I set up flashes in three corners of the room kind of like a triangle all pointed up at the ceiling so what winds up happening is you get light coming from every part of the room and you get really beautiful fill light because obviously there's no window here so this was really dark so you got light on the face but you also have the backlight from the window but there's just light bouncing around in the entire room so I'd recommend if you have the time but you need a lot of time to set that up it probably took me about 30 minutes okay let's grab this car subtract select background foreign was really pumped on the car it is a pretty sick car good maybe zoom in just a bit like I saw this photo so good except for the fact that you cropped off the bottom oh well sometimes I'll leave those kind of ones even though photo isn't perfect you know the the moment matters more that's just a friend driving by and you can see they're taking photos so I think this will actually be fun if you can see that that's what's happening and there we go and it looks like everything in this photo is sort of in Focus so I actually I'm going to just grab these Vines are foreground and put them a little bit more out of focus just to bring your eyes towards the part of the image we want you to look at just a bit cool definitely need to darken that Sky down good much better at this point we got lots of photos like this this one's kind of stretched and weird and I don't think a very good one so we'll get rid of that perfect just darken this down a little bit and once again her dress for the wind good guy darken cool isn't that crazy before after like it's amazing what you can do with a couple clicks now again this one really weird not adding this one looks kind of funky too but we're gonna keep it to see if our lens correction's on or not could be that's what's Happening Here so honestly I feel like it's actually better without the lens Corrections on that kind of solves the problem a bit looks good and the reason these colors are so vibrant so beautiful like I want to just take credit for it in the preset but honestly a lot of it is the light not only is it super overcast so it's super beautiful but it's also right around Sunset so your colors just get that much more vibrant so when you shoot the wedding and how you structure the timeline honestly makes the biggest difference in how your photos are going to turn out much more than the presets that's for sure okay so I'm just writing up our reception here then obviously your eye is drawn to these incredibly bright parts of the photo so we'll try and drag them back a little bit shed a little more light on our couple bam B4 after again on the second pass I can actually come through and just do this a little bit more carefully in-depth nuance what have you but for now it's more about just getting the gist of it getting it right working with momentum because the last thing you want to be doing is working on a wedding for like three weeks you just want to sit down get it done then take a break come back to it the next day have a second ago yeah so this is a good one except for they're so far away so I am going to crop in just a bit and then we've got this super bright background will go like that subtract and now select subject perfect take those highlights down that'll help and we could try and brighten them up a bit I'm not going to do this for all of our speech photos because that would take forever but for a wedding couple they're wearing it okay again same exact thing brighten up our couple here good before after with a small wedding like this always my goal to get at least one shot of each guest there and if there's less than say 80 guests there's really no reason you can't get a photo of everybody there because the problem is no matter no matter what you try to do you're never going to know who the important people are at the wedding and who the not important people are and the worst thing that could happen is you spend all night taking photos of the people who are the most photogenic and then it winds up being random guests that the bride and groom don't really care about trust me I have been there let's take our highlights down put our contrast back up no just trying to get the best possible color here somewhere around there it's feeling a little magenta we can maybe try messing with their skin tones by taking the saturation down just a bit there perfect so before after it's maybe a little bit dark but try that Cake's looking a little dark and again in general the lights in here very good because you can see even the catch lights there's flash flash flash just around the room so no matter where you go in the room because there's three flashes and they're kind of set in a triangle around the entire place you wind up getting good light and you can do the same with video lights as well so in this case because we've got this really tungsteny yellow up here and they're being lit clearly by the window I'm gonna just grab all the tungsten part cool it down and that should fix our color at least do a lot of the work same thing here where our guests are all being lit by the tungsten you can tell that this was the camera not using a flash so we're gonna go to our color and cool it down we're not trying to like completely fake it here we're just trying to make it less less obvious and because this part of the image is so much brighter we'll darken it down then we can brighten everything up nor our highlights just for that Windows here there we go definitely got some green going on in here so let's take our luminance up a little bit color noise reduction up a little bit look at how nice those skin tones are night photos are the trickiest but when you get the light right it makes a big difference and of course one of the big parts of making these presets was just playing and playing and playing and experimenting to get good results even in bad light because there are some presets that just do not work the person who has used them they might work in good lighting but then when you get into a tricky situation they just stop working so I'm not going to try and get rid of this shadow that would be impossible but I can lower the contrast and that will reduce it a little bit now this one if we wanted to make it a little bit more romantic we can make the background dreamy there we go maybe even a little more and go into that mask and play around maybe we'll make the background really dark here's before and here's after fun fact this was this couple's wedding anniversary it's I think the brides the bride's grandparents anyways it was their 60th I think wedding anniversary which is pretty darn cool okay I don't think this one really adds much to the wedding overall so I'm gonna get rid of that one now the party is started so I'm gonna go a little bit higher contrast on these maybe darker down the background a little bit know that that is the best cake photo ever and these ones just happen to be taken off out of sync with the flash that's because the shutter speed is higher than the sync speed of the Flash that's why you got these lines but I think they're kind of cool in this particular shot so that's why I didn't call it out you can see massive difference between no flash just ambient light I think there's a video light you can see there's a flash firing here actually I take it back I think this camera did have flash it's just the settings were higher than the sync rate and so that's why you have these weird black bands there you go so this might be good to make a gif something like that but I certainly don't need to keep this many so when it came time to actually do the final call I would definitely get rid of some of those or turn them into a gif or something so up here very yellow down here very yellow so I'm going to grab all of this yellowness go to my color and we're just going to even out the light then we can warm up the whole shot brighten up our bride there we go crop it in a bit I love it and then so much of this photo not adding anything so we're going to darken it down a bit good here's before and after and of course again not really much going on in this part of the frame we can even crop in and then straighten out our lines the only thing is I really like these lamps hanging above them I think it's kind of cool that's why I'm going to leave it a little wider and we'll just copy this save some time hopefully and up here on the top just darken it down because it's kind of taken away from the activity below I love that fun fact if you're ever selecting a mask and you want to toggle to your eraser just hold down Alt that lets you switch between your brush and your eraser without having to go over into your tool panel and actually select it so just trying to get rid of the distractions those bright Parts in the image before after so that your eye is naturally drawn towards our couple then her face is pretty dark so brighten that up too so this one bad lighting and I already have quite a few with Dad I think I'm just going to delete that one better impact this guy here there's two ways to do it one would be with a couple dancing and Grandpa and grab in the back the other would be just to zoom in on them I think it's better like this tell us more of a story and connects the couple well dad and daughter with parents I feel like I should be singing first dance music lasting the moment with you Etc okay so I'm just going to try and darken down that part of the image we're also going to crop in because it doesn't really add lower our contrast because we got some crazy light going on move on this is a great one so we're actually going to just darken the background like this first we'll make it dreamy little deep in that background and our subject so actually go to the subject adjustments and we'll go with subject HDR soften so this is actually meant for well as you can imagine High dynamic range images just to soften the subject brighten them but just a little bit so here's before and here's after it doesn't totally solve the problem but it's definitely quite a bit better and then we were dance partying so great shot but the background really really lit so if we actually take our floor and our background whatever we try and deepen deepen it darken it down it's probably going to make things pop a little bit better might feel more like a dance party and two for the road so that does it whole wedding and the total time it took was just about three hours in total now it would have been a little bit faster had I been just editing instead of talking through some stuff and showing you how I'm approaching it but hopefully it's helpful just to see kind of my Approach it's really coming down to having systems making sure your files are organized up front you're culling as much as possible so that you don't have to edit as many photos and having systems when it comes to your presets getting an overall look for the entire shoot and then from there applying that preset going through one by one and using things like your adjustment brush presets like your AI engine presets to just speed up the edit and then using your hotkeys really important plus and minus for exposure and then shift M for radiofilter M for graduated filter like those are 95 of the shortcuts that I'm using in here and then the alt or option key just to reset settings in here so yeah hopefully this was helpful if it was leave me a comment what was the most helpful thing that you're going to apply to your edits and what other kind of editing tutorials would you like to see in the future if you want to check out these presets and get it just get a discount grab that in the description below and subscribe if you want more content like this otherwise I'll see in the next video in the meantime good luck and create something awesome peace foreign [Music]

Channel: Signature Edits

Views: 27,911

Keywords: Wedding Photography, Wedding Photo Editing, Lightroom Classic Tutorial, Wedding Album Editing, Wedding Photography Tips, Photography Post-Processing, Photo Editing Techniques, Professional Editing Workflow, Adobe Lightroom Tutorial, Wedding Photography Workflow, Portrait Retouching

Id: oh0S3O5GiYY

Length: 187min 24sec (11244 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 22 2023