Editing A Full Wedding In 2 5 Hours: Wedding Photography Tutorial

Ryan here at signature edits and inside this video I'm going to show you my wedding editing workflow and how I get through an entire wedding in just a couple of hours not days but hours [Music] all right so we're going to get into editing in about two seconds here but really quickly because this video is long sometimes you might want to skip forward make things move faster inside of YouTube you could do that by holding the shift key and pressing period on your keyboard that will speed up playback and likewise if I'm going too fast and you want me to slow down at a specific place you can do that by pressing shift and the comma button on your keyboard okay so shift comma will slow down shift period will speed up and that way you can adjust your viewing experience to get through this monstrous video at your own pace okay without further ado I'm going to walk you through it first off I've already called my photos but I will show you how it's just that there's no reason for me to go through that whole process with you it takes about 20 minutes for me but let me show you exactly what I do I start off with all of my raw so let's just look at the rejects right now because there's more of those and I open those up in photo mechanic now the reason I do that instead of Lightroom which is where I do absolutely everything else is because photo mechanic is much faster at actually scrolling through the images and you'll see what I mean in a second here so let's say that this didn't say rejects it just said all of the photos I would go through and literally as I'm scrolling with my arrow keys I can cycle between images and every time I like an image I hit one and the rest of them are going to be reject so I'd literally start off and I'll just call some for you right now so you can see kind of the speed that I work at I'm literally gonna go through and I'll take one photo from every kind of interesting photo that I see so of those I like that one the most I like that shot that shots not really worth keeping cuz I have one like it already perfect and anything that is kind of a keeper keeper kind of photo and is unique I'm not really interested in a lot of repetitive I'll just go ahead and grab it so you'll see this is kind of the speed that I'm working at I'll just grab the best one from every kind of angle I want all the variety I don't kind of cheap out on my photos or get rid of photos that aren't good but I'm not going to grab for photos of them doing Cheers I'll just grab one that is a nice one unless there happens to be two great moments say a laugh and also just a nice serious one or something like that those photos I don't really like so much so I'll just keep going that's alright that's great but the videographer gotten away hashtag blessed okay there you go ring Shaw I don't need too many ring shots well kind of grab my favorites out of these so I gave them three ring shots that's enough unless I find one that I like more than those perfect that's a great shot dudu so that's kind of the process that I'm actually going through and culling the photos you can see it's pretty quick I'm not taking a ton of time in between to decide what I'm using it's kind of instinctual and I'm just doing a one for every time that I actually like the photo now I've already been through these from a little bit familiar with what's coming and so I can skip ahead a little bit quicker but you get my drift that normally takes about 20-30 minutes to go through all the photos of how many do we have here 2264 rejects I think I kept about 600 so one in four photo is kind of roughly now after that's done I take all of the photos that I marked as keepers so all of the ones marked with the one you can do the same thing in Lightroom exactly the same way it'll just be a little bit slower when you actually try and scroll through the photos I take all of the ones and I separate them by themselves then I right-click and I go copy selected photos and I copy them to a folder marked selects and all of those get moved into there and I go move photos delete originals so what it's going to do is just move them into this new folder for me and now everything left in that folder is going to be a reject and so all of those photos all of these ones right here this other 2000 I'm going to leave in that folder as the rejects I don't delete any of them I can always come back so let's say that as I was calling I missed an important moment or maybe this actually sometimes happens is you'll do a family photo and you'll grab three different ones and find out that dad's eyes are closed in all three well then I have the photos as a backup to go in reference okay you probably know what culling is like so I'm not going to show you any more than that I think that's enough from here I open up Lightroom and I make a brand new catalog so I make a new catalog for absolutely every single wedding every shoot every everything because that way the entire shoot is going to be contained in the clients folder it's all organized I don't have different weddings mixed up together and I can keep track of things a lot more simply so I'm going to choose a different catalog we'll create a new one call it their names perfecto and then we'll put that into their client folder just like this create once Lightroom figures out what's going on we're going to grab those photos grab all the selects just drag that folder into the library that'll open up our import panel now I apply a preset on import and sometimes I'll build smart previews but I actually find with the newest version of Lightroom it's doing very well without them so I'm not going to bother for the sake of this demonstration we'll save some time there so I am applying signature at it's clean and classic as I continue to edit weddings and I look back on my weddings and different work from the past I'm finding more and more often that I wish I hadn't used filters that were really cool at the time but in hindsight two years later three years later that all of a sudden they looked dated right so the new pact that we have from signature edits that we just are working on now is called clean and classic and the purpose of this pact is you guessed it to make those photos look really clean really classic edits really timeless and especially for weddings or any kind of historical documentary shoots these are going to make sure that your photos don't look way too super edited and dated a couple years down the road so I'm going to apply just my basic classic and classic preset and I have a few variations of that we're going to click import simple as that so this is going to take a minute or two and then I'm going to go through the wedding and we'll see how long it takes so it's currently 6:17 p.m. so I'm just going to go through and edit these photos for you live this might be a very long video we might have to separate separate it up into parts but I just want to show you that it's possible to do this without it taking days so this is what the preset applied here is just the blank so you can see that it is very very subtle it's just bringing out some of the colors flattening things out a little bit what else are we doing we're applying a custom profile that we've created for this pack and that the beauty of these profiles inside of Lightroom if you've ever used them or not use them is it's kind of like an Instagram filter esque style slider that you've got here you can control the amount of the profile that you want to affect the image which is really really powerful because it makes a lot more simple to dial in the preset if you find the preset is too strong well that's great you just take the amount slider you slide it back down so now I'm going to go through it is 618 let's see how long it takes to get through this wedding together so at least for the beginning part I will kind of give you my throught thought process as I'm going through I'm using it hot hot keys I'm using keyboard shortcuts to kind of speed up things as I'm actually doing this so I'm pressing shift and the plus and minus keys to adjust my exposure and that is 90 percent of the editing that I'm actually doing to these photos guys it's just adjusting the exposure making sure the white balance is good and if your preset is good you don't have to use this preset you don't have to use hours if you have a preset that is good it's going to do 90% of the work for you and then you just sort of polish it from there and so all I'm doing with this little gradient filter is I'm just adding some light on to this side because the window is clearly here so these guys are darker than this guy here just go through just like that and wherever there's a white balance issue or an exposure exposure issue so on this one you can see this shirt is pretty blown out we'll take the highlights down we'll adjust this and use our cleaning classic desaturate the blues and you can see it took the Blues right out of his shirt that looks perfect and so we're not spending too too much time on any one particular photo just dialing things in perfect their skin looks a little red and a little dark in this so I have a clean and classic skin plus variation and that'll just brighten things very slightly so you can see if you have presets that you're used to and they're honed kind of the way that you want them it makes the whole process a lot simpler now I don't like this window just the tiniest edge of it so I'll crop that out one step at a time skin plus there we go and because I have in this set 589 photos like that is a lot of photos so if I'm finding one is just really fighting me it's not looking the way that I want it to like this one the skin is kind of silly looking it's just not working so we're going to try maybe going with the desaturated blues see if that helps a little bit take our amount slider take that down yeah that's looking a lot more natural perfect next we'll just copy it over because we're in kind of the same light same scene so hopefully that'll get us most of the way they're just the exposure and next so again I'm just using command C and command V on a PC that will be slightly different I think it's control-c control-v to copy and paste my settings from the previous photo you can also use the sink down right here between the photos but it's just easier to not have to actually use your mouse and to just keep your hands on the keyboard themselves and if a photo looks good the exposure is already kind of the way I like it I don't even need to adjust it at all I'll just skip to the next one so again this one too dark on this side we'll just grab that gradient keep on going this one we can copy because it's the same set only of course I didn't copy my gradient so I wasn't taking there good so this one it has a lot of contrast we'll take our highlights down exposure up a little bit that's looking pretty darn good I think I'll just crop it so that this lamp isn't showing up great add a little D haze here maybe because because of the window yeah it looks all right little crooked we'll fix that in the crop tool I'm just using the R key to navigate there and back this one the white balance doesn't look right so warm that up a little bit and the reason that this photo isn't working I think is because the ring in the center here is not the proudest part of the photo genuine generally genuinely your eyes are drawn to the brightest part in the photo so you can see as I take the exposure down for everything else like that's obviously way too far but now the photo just seems to make a lot more sense because our eyes are drawn to the brightest part so here before and after great little contrast you can so we'll just take some that out perfect I just wish Lightroom were faster because that's the only thing is sometimes half of your editing time is spent just waiting for Lightroom to load leave me a comment below that says you're with me and this is not just my own personal thing I'm gonna take this down a little bit because it's looking a little intense for my liking there we go and because this is a similar it's shot in the same room I'm just going to take that paste it see how we're looking just that so it's straight okay same dealio except for this time we have to take our exposure down you can see these presets just out of the box look really really quite natural definitely they're edited but they don't look super edited and the kind of look that it's applying is not something that's going to be dated because it's not super stylistic it's just a basic let's add some pop add some contrast keep the colors looking pretty natural now I love love this dress shot I'm going to invert that so what I'm doing is I'm just adding some whites there to make that the brightest part of the image right I'm gonna take our contrast back up add some texture a little bit of clarity maybe something like that and darken everything down and I might even brush a little bit more on there just to emphasize the dress same saying just take the whites up make it pop there we go so it doesn't really look edited if it does look edited you've kind of probably gone too far I want to keep things looking pretty bright pretty natural actually bright is optional natural is not it needs to look normal if you're people look like aliens you've gone too far that's a little contrast II will take that down a bit looking good maybe add the skin bump their skin bump again come on now the only problem with this is I'm also obviously recording the screen so that's why we're getting some delays - my computer is working hard that might be a little bit too far actually we'll just keep it without okay so her skin's looking a little bit odd so what I'm going to do here is just grab my adjustment brush just gonna brush on her skin really really quickly it's going to be a basic brush that I'm not going to put a whole lot into so it's gonna be pretty transparent we're just gonna take our clarity down to smooth out our skin bring the contrast down there we go so here's before and here's after you can see we just kind of mellowed out those weird tones going on in her skin great pretty contrast II will bring that down a little bit mm-hmm and this weird banding that's just because my computer is struggling to keep up but it'll go away as it loads looks pretty good and so again as I make adjustments depending on the scene what I will make sure to do is copy it so I'm going to get this photo kind of where I like it here maybe bring the highlights down a little bit exposure up okay let's say that's good then I copy it and I have it kind of in my back pocket for when I need it so I'll apply it to this photo right away save me some time so as you can see it's pretty basic stuff it's nothing really surprising probably to you but it's all about the workflow getting the presets that you like that just kind of work out of the box that's why we've gone ahead and made our presets the reason they exist is because I got so tired of trying to use vsco and Mastan and they were great presets that other people got awesome results out of but they just didn't work for me or more so they would just sometimes work and sometimes not work and it wasn't consistent and it would drive me crazy because some shoots it would look great others everything would just look like garbage and I got so tired of the garbage that I was like maybe I can make something that will work or me and so I did I made something that fits me it might not fit you but if it does you're welcome to have it that's why we share these presets so I will actually have a download link below if you want to get a free sample of this exact pack will have the first clean and classic preset that you can download and then if you want the full pack you can grab that too and the difference is the pack obviously has these different variations and we might add some more by the time you watch this video it also includes adjustment brush presets so we'll really quickly show you these we've got all of these different adjustment brush presets depending on what you want to do so I'm sure that I'll make use of these later on in this wedding but because we're in the preps we're not going to be adding a lot of texture to things or really touching up unless they have a close-up portrait or something like that right now most of what we're doing is just getting the colors right we're gonna do a skin bump here that's good getting the colors right getting things dialed in adjusting our white balance and even like back to the whole visco note if you are a visco user or a preset user of any kind and you find that your presets aren't working the first thing that you should always check is the white balance because often times you think a preset isn't working but really it's just because your white balance is out so let's say that my white balance was up here well I mean that actually doesn't look too too bad but often times you'll find that the light just really effects or shows up differently depending on what your white balance is let's reset that there we go looks so much more natural so it's not necessarily the preset that's not working it might just be the white balance and the exposure you don't have those dialed in right and never expect your presets to work 100% of the time across every single image so for example this preset on this particular image looks pretty crap but I'm sure if I were to grab other presets they probably wouldn't work either right out of the bit gate so especially when you have different mixed lighting and stuff like that let's go back here we'll do a skin bump when you've different mixed lighting super high contrast scenes you're going to have a harder time getting things to look perfect right out of the gate you're going to need some tweaking because for example here there's some kind of a tungsten light that's hitting this girl we've got a weird adjustment brush I've been copy-pasting haha so I'm going to have to fix that so we'll just take that down very very slightly contrast down White's up one of my favorite things to do with a brush that just makes see how it things kind of pop out but it doesn't really look obviously brushed and affected grab that blend it in okay something like that that's still too contrasty so we'll see what we can do we can grab our highlights bring those down bring the black sob you don't want it to look the HDR either but and then maybe a little bit less saturation so obviously I spent quite a bit of time on that one photo but I'll make up for it in other ones there we go that looks great looks good we could maybe do this skin bump see if that works better get a little bit of dynamic range back in the bathtub by lowering our exposure a little bit yeah I like that okay skin bump copy-paste hopefully the sound effects and my narration are not driving you absolutely insane doing my best to kind of just narrate and let you know my thought process hopefully it's helpful and not a hindrance and a distraction so again because she's dark I'm just going to take my favorite brush in the world which is contrast down White's up a little bit just brush on there and you see how she pops but it doesn't really look affected I don't have to be super careful about my mask because you can't really see it so much but it makes a big difference that looks good maybe skin bump and we're done you know that's actually slightly too far so we'll just take our exposure it's all about getting used to just seeing things and seeing whether its natural or not so not to say I'm an expert at this because you might be better than me and see some of these photos would be like why is he doing that it looks terrible well as you get better and better and I'm still improving you start to see when things look natural and when you've just taken them way too far so there might have been a time where once I had this happening you know like really extreme stuff and I thought that looked natural whereas now I know okay this skin is way too far it looks unnatural or I've pushed the shadows too far it's just kind of getting used to it and one thing that can be really helpful is actually comparing your it's to somebody you like whose work you follow just side by side import them into Lightroom and actually just take a look and kind of try and gauge okay does this look the same why or why not what is it that I'm doing too much over not doing enough of now I need to stop talking because the multitasking is just really slowing me down white balance is a little warm there and there's too much magenta that's why their skin is so red we'll try and find a sweet spot maybe a little bit colder now if you can't find it sometimes doing the auto and Lightroom will work and sometimes it won't so be warned most of the time I find that Lightroom's auto white balance is more accurate than the in camera however the reason that this particular scene is not working so well is because these walls are blue and so Lightroom start trying to make this wall white when in reality it was always meant to be blue try that it's okay and sometimes you know what if I'm just fighting with an image and just doesn't look good no matter what I do well I'm okay with deleting it once in a while if it's an incredibly important image well sure of course but you see how much of a difference the white balance made so when it was up here it just looked really unnatural the skin looked weird but you take it back down and all of a sudden it just feels normal again and I'm gonna go back and adjust this one to normal see how much of a difference that makes it's absolutely everything white balance most powerful Lightroom tip there is get that right around there good we could definitely do the skin bump on this particular image and that looks way too far we need a quarter skin bump something like that maybe all gonna depend because the issue with this particular photo I'm actually gonna delete it because I don't think it's that great of a photo anyways the issue is that all of this blue light is reflecting off of these walls and getting on to her skin and so that combined with the camera not really knowing what's going on with the white balance is just creating this kind of weird sort of mucky look to her skin okay we're gonna copy absolutely everything in here we're still looking a little weird you see what I mean I speak about it and then it happens it was prophetic I set myself up to experience this hardship there we go it's looking okay all right so now we are through the preps and I pasted that by accident we'll just adjust and it's basically more of the same so we're at 634 now when did we start six nineteen so we've been about ten minutes and we are how many photos in solid sixty-six photos ten percent so we should be done in a couple of hours at this rate so we're gonna add some contrast there it looks a little HDR to me make things darker one other thing that you might find is messing up your photos maybe or maybe it's just me is often times you want to make skin brighter than it was naturally taken or then it naturally was in the photo so for instance if you are shooting an image we'll find an example here for you soon I'm sure but if you shoot an image and that image was taken of a person standing in full shadow and you try and brighten up the exposure to the point that their skin looks like this guys right here really nice and bright you'll find things just look really weird and there's just something off about it but you can't put your finger on it and the reason is because the skin was never meant to look that way in the first place when you see the image your brain subconsciously knows there's something not right about this something isn't it's just off and so oftentimes it might be just because you push the shadows too far you've taken the exposure too far up or things just aren't looking the way they naturally looked so you can push things right like this image originally looked like this I could maybe brighten in the background a little bit here I can take it that far but if I try and take it too for it's going to start to feel really weird because your eyes kind of no they're very smart and your brain is always subconsciously analyzing things and it says something's going on here so you can see how nice I absolutely love love love love this new preset definitely my favorite that we've come out with so far because it's so easy and it just looks so good and the pop is so nice and what I really love is this new slider so being able to actually adjust the intensity of the overall look just like that is amazing especially when you find you know these photos look pretty good just as he is with the preset but if you find it it's just like oh I wish that it were stronger well it's super easy to do okay so we're gonna maybe use the desaturate blues because there's some blue there we go that's looking more natural maybe not so much blue d saturated but a little bit okay next looks good another advantage of just doing kind of clean classic edits is that you don't need to worry now this white balance is way way out I can tell you right now it's too green let's just see what it looks like with nothing yeah okay so you can see how far out we've gone from kind of natural quote-unquote so we'll take that make more blue at some legenda magenta it's like mojo mixed with magenta and also it's too dark so take that we're gonna take our shadows back down there we go you see how much more natural that looks just by adjusting a few teeny little things anyways I feel like I was talking about something important and I totally lost track of what it was so if you were hanging on my every word I apologize good looks good that looks pretty decent or brighter than it would have been in real life so I'm just going to try and brighten it up to the right amount and guys I apologize for every time that my narration stops making sense just because I'm not a natural multitasker here to do it for the benefit of everybody but at the same time it's not my natural forte so we'll take our contrast down a little bit to just brighten up the back my favorite brush now if you wanted to you could take a new brush then we could go to add texture and we could just paint that on the flowers but I think that this preset we've already got quite a bit of texture a quite a bit of contrast going on so we don't necessarily need that I can maybe take my highlights down a little bit though looking a little bit bright there okay that's good enough I know we have tons of details so I'm not really stressing over one specific one and if it doesn't look awesome I can always delete it because we got lots for this wedding wunderbar and you might be sitting here going why on earth did they take so many details and I will tell you why the first thing is when I got married it answered so many questions for me about why photographers stress about these kind of things because all of a sudden I actually cared about them I was like how do we not get any pictures from our wedding we have zero pictures oh I have to reset this brush we've zero pictures of our entire like reception setup we didn't get any wides of it there's the head table we didn't really capture just things that as a photographer previously to this I didn't really notice or think about getting four couples once you get married you realize oh man I wish I could remember those parts of the day because I wasn't paying attention to how the whole room looked and it really sucks not to have a wide at the room or it really sucks not to have a setup of our whatever T station whatever it was so that is first reason and the second reason that you really should take tons of detail photos if you have the ability in the chance I'm just going to brighten that up and that's looking a little too contrast II so we'll dial that down good the second reason is because magazines absolutely look for details that's what future brides are looking for right they're not really so interested in your photo shoots as they are in the actual details to get inspiration for their own weddings and so when magazines look at publishing your work that's they're after they lurk they are looking for details and he forgot how to talk in the middle of that sentence just rotate that so this one I might not actually keep it's kind of a nice detail but at the same time like you can see there's mixed lighting window light tungsten light no matter what I do with the white balance it's gonna look garbage I can try this desaturate blues that's still not really great it's weird it's very very weird and unnatural I'm gonna keep this it's going to be for the couple not for me because you know what they wanted this detail and planned it and it's unfortunate but I don't really like it but we'll keep it in there for them now same goes for this obviously we've got really weird lighting going on some mixed light we could take a gradient filter grab it reset that brush just add some blue on that side to try and kind of counter it and then bring the temperature back up or exposure up it's looking better not great but better it's why it's so important to get it in camera if you find that photos aren't really looking the way you want the presets aren't looking the way you want well again look at it in camera does it look great in camera if it does well then almost any preset is going to do a good job if it doesn't well then almost any preset is going to struggle to fix a bad photo trust me I have lots of bad photos so that cake we've got some weird magenta nice going on you can see so we'll take our saturation I'll just exaggerate it so we're gonna get rid of all that nonsense maybe even a little bit of the Reds I want to get rid of as much as I can without making it really weird writing it back up that's kind of a trick for you sometimes helps you get away with it and again with the weird white balance it's so sad because donuts are beautiful doh not to mess with me okay reset that brush we're gonna do the same trick get rid of some of that magenta some of the yellowness yellow or yellow ha ha ha something like that it's not great but we do what we can I'm a photographer not a magician good that's why you take lots of photos because if one doesn't work out you've got a million more that looks ok again we've got that stupid magenta nonsensical nonsense we'll just take our saturation down in those see if we can't get rid of some of it another cake shot another day brighten that up I'm gonna use my spot removal tool just to get rid of this ugly distraction and it looks oh no I can still see that that was not good showing those try he'll take her feather up see if that helps move it around sometimes moving the point can help still looks really obvious and I hate it come on Lightroom God that is not even a little bit good there our pasady not showing up properly let's try that again too much feather I guess well what we can do is we can take an adjustment brush on this wall we can take that reset it take our clarity all the way down now of course you don't wanna get the flower by mistake I'm erasing that holding alt and we can try and blend that a little bit I have a finite amount of patience with said things so we'll see take her dress down shadows down oh boy oh boy he said you know what I think it's still better than it was before so we'll just keep going because I don't want to bore you normally I would take another second to work on that but I'll go back after so you don't have to sit through it of just how beautiful right here's before here's after it doesn't take much but it kind of adds just some magic some saturation in the Reds without it looking way too saturated some pop without it looking way too edited I love it well go back here just make sure our lines are all straight that is one thing that drives me crazy is when lines aren't straight good that looks good we're just blazing 645 take that and what I'm going to do is just brighten up this end of the image we can use a gradient filter contrast down whites up BAM you see how we kind of just the image makes more sense before after we can darken it down straighten this up this may or may not work with this particular shot you know I'm satisfied good good except for it's dark again down here I'm just gonna reset this and a fun fact for you if you don't use these kind of filters very often whatever you set it to before you actually make the effect it's going to keep that as a preset for you for the next time that you apply in effect so for instance if I applied it now it'll have the same settings until I change it again before I actually make that change hopefully that made sense so for instance if I adjusted this right now now next time it'll have the same settings when I do it adjustment layer it's a little too far I want to keep it natural but I think that's pretty good hey here's before here's after we do have some weird white balance stuff going on again I'm not going to worry about it too too much but we'll take our saturation down a little bit maybe bump it up to try and kind of mitigate it and zoom in this is out of focus I'm actually going to delete that shot if the writing isn't visible and we've got these weird distractions on the on the wall what's the point and we'll just take our greens they look really weird so we'll add some saturation to them and I think it's because this shot it's just too cool well warm it up see what happens maybe maybe it's just not vibing with the rest of the images you know maybe take our effect preset turn that up yeah that's better before after that might be a little bit heavy-handed we'll copy this cuz it's kind of the same sort of setup I think the reason that this colors are different is actually because the lens is different this one was shot on a 35 or weon before no 35 I'm just yeah so well who knows why not me if you do leave it in the comments below you will change my life okay so this one I can actually increase the effect I think and that'll just make it pop more before after really really beautiful so if you have hazy photos this amount slider is going to get rid of that haze which is awesome I think I need lens Corrections on this if they aren't done already yes they are maybe add a little bit more good to Center this now I'm kind of iffy on the blue skies it's like on the one hand it was a nice day I don't want to pretend that it wasn't on the other hand sometimes it's just way less distracting to do that so you know you're getting rid of the blue sky but you're also making it more cohesive now we have just kind of two tones going on these warms and these green tones warms hit the oranges the Reds rather than the blues as well it gets just a little cluttered sometimes if your photos are feeling is strange it's because it's just too more cluttered busy they don't have that magic you'll notice that when you look at people whose photos really just Rock oftentimes they're monochromatic just one kind of color family or they have complementary color families going on and that's why they look so good ooh that sky is very blown out so again if I get rid of the Blues you won't notice it's so blown out hopefully mm-hmm that's too much we're just gonna stick with stick with it embrace it embrace the blow notes guy cuz you know or we could do that that's what I'm gonna do that way we still have the blue of the mountains but it's not so distracting with the weird ugly sky it's funny because a camera with more dynamic range sometimes can work against you because where it would normally be kind of blown out and really nice now it's kind of distracting and sort of blown out but not totally blown out now here's an example of where we could use one of these brushes water Skype pop take that out put that on there good take this little triangle fun fact for you if you take this guy you can actually dial in the amount of your adjustment layer so you can use that with any adjustment layer and our white balance is very cold in this photo so we're gonna need to warm it up that's maybe a little too far the white balance is key if we can get it right life is a dream and I'm actually going to not do that but bear with me will brighten this up maybe a little bit add some D haze that's not working I don't want it looking to HDR but I also wanted to have a little bit more pop than what it has right now okay that is not a great photo I'm not super happy with it but at the same time it's not essential to their wedding day so I'm going to focus and spend more time on the photos of them than on a random photo of scenery okay so that I went too far too cold take that something like this okay looks alright we could adjust our amounts see what happens when we take that up or down I think is pretty good where it was we can maybe add some saturation to the Blues that might make it look better this is all part of the process right just sort of I feel like the sky is more natural slightly more towards this end of the blue towards the purpley blue but I don't want to push it too far when you're editing take your effect and then dial it back to where you can't see it and dial it back even a little bit more just for safety I feel is a good rule at least for me because I tend to look at things in the moment it looks good later on it looks crap but I do like it better with the different blues I hope you do too if not let me know about it in the comments below basically if you haven't commented or liked this video yet and you're still watching please do I would appreciate it it would mean the world to me just helps get the word out there lets me know that this is actually resonating with you okay so these blues are looking weird we're gonna try the d saturated there we go I think that's better and we'll crop out most of the sky because really the shot is focusing on this planty thing the word of the day bland t thing it looks pretty good I could probably crop in just to get rid of this weird negative space on his left good now this shot of Grandma classic bad lighting where she's in shade and then the background is full Sun it's going to be very hard because the white balance is going to be different with them with her in the background that is well come on come on you and you kind of have to choose between person or background and this might be one of those situations where like I told you it looks kind of unnatural cuz I just took it too far because your eye knows like why is she so bright it shouldn't be happening so we'll just dial that back good I love shooting in this direction because the background is dark behind him not bright you'll have a way easier time if your background is dark behind your subjects than if it's blown out that's where you lose contrast life is just weird and awkward and it's hard to get right spoken by someone who has screwed this up many a time okay so that did I lose my kind of purply blues yes I did see much of a difference that makes maybe take the saturation down on them though I think that's distracting in that particular photo now I don't like this shot I just don't I think it's kind of not feeling it I might delete it we'll keep going for now so before I'm actually done the full edit I'm going to go through these photos in the library view and just kind of scroll past and every time something sticks out to me that's kind of my like failsafe and me a second fresh perspective and if you hang in there you too will see my failsafe process it doesn't take long maybe 15-20 minutes to go through the images a second time and things you'd be surprised things that you missed the first time that you're like how the heck did I think that looked good when I went through it the first time so this photo super weird I'm going to am I going to delete it I don't know I kind of don't want to what's going on why does it look so odd take that down you know what it's the D haze sometimes D haze is your friend sometimes it just does strange things and it doesn't work properly so if you find in your life that your photo does not look good try the D haze that might be the issue to be thirst and our white balance still something is not right it's hard because if you actually look at the original image that's kind of what it looked like there's not a whole lot of color going on and it feels sort of odd to your eyes but that's not the fault of the Edit so definitely referencing your before and after and yeah you can do that with the backslash key but sometimes I find it doesn't work on my version of Lightroom this is a better photo than the first one but I think they actually came back later and shot one when it wasn't the middle of the day so I'm not going to stress too much about this but we do need to add some magenta to this photo get the greens right good are we doing we're like a quarter of the way it's 655 135 photos you know about a quarter good guess okay this one definitely is too warm so we're gonna take our white balance down there we go somewhere around there take our texture up just yeah that looks that looks like nonsense but what we can do is use our add texture brush paint it onto these flowers or White's pull those up just a little bit so you see before years after really just makes them pop a little bit you can dial it into with this triangle take that maybe I wanted less or more of that effect and of course it's low to show up because I'm screencasting right now but I'll take this warm it up just a little bit too much and I think this might be one of the ones that need to desaturate the Blues hmm maybe not that far but halfway there we go good again just a little bit of D haze and we should be decent DJ's Didi's it's looking pretty weird so maybe instead of the D haze we'll try adding more of our preset the D haze back down I think that's more natural noonday is not the best time to get landscapes so I'm not super worried about it again the more essential photos I'm going to spend more time on which is a photos of take that down take this white balance looks a little warm a little too much magenta people with red hair I feel like photos of them they just look better I don't know it's kind of this weird I might just be a total crackpot but I feel like something about it Lightroom just likes people with red hair that's it Lightroom is predisposed to make people with red hair have better photos that's nice oh darn her eyes are closed you know what am I going to still keep it yeah mm-hmm yeah I think so because I know there wasn't an alternate and I feel like as the couple I would personally like to have that if I were the bride and groom mostly if I were just the groom if I was the bride and the groom that would just be a weird situation good moving along we are close to the ceremony and then the photo shoot where the real fun begins and that's where we can kind of get creative do some different things for now we're just focusing on getting nice clean edits good white balance you know you know okay now I think these guys are out of focus but they're just on the edge of what I can recover so we're going to do our best reset this open it up then you text your brush in Lightroom I'm finding it super handy for such situations a little bit of clarity a whole lot of sharpness and obviously that D haze looks perfect so we'll just keep it right there just kidding okay let's zoom in see what we got we are still pretty far from InFocus we're going to delete that one nothing I can do if there was an alternate now would be the time to grab it I know there is not do you see that error that just popped up I wonder what it was I might have to rewind the video in Flast but I couldn't read it in time would it be something if my computer caught on fire in the middle of this tutorial give this video like if you think that my computer is about to catch fire leave a comment below with your safety recommendations okay now I this photos okay I could take the amount up maybe take the exposure up and that might make it more normal it just feels like HDR esque and I'm not like there he goes the shadows those pesky shadows and again that's the thing about a preset sometimes it's just Lightroom doesn't want to work the way it should and it says you know what these shadows I'm going to make them look absolutely ridiculous and it's something as simple as just turning the shadows down the preset fixes the preset totally so watch out for that I'm going to copy everything except the crop paste okay now here is the moment of truth do I go with the blues and that's super overexposed I can see if there's any see the sky is there if I could get it back if I could just get it back you know what we could do we could create a brush for the sky so we're just going to brush reset contrast down highlights down clarity down so I don't get so much like kind of weird jagged edges where things are blown out decays down a little bit exposure down add a little bit of blue in the temperature nope that's not going to work highlights down I think that's that's our brush that's it right there we're going to create a new brush we're going to go up here and save as preset we'll call it sky blow out smooth and there you have it the sky blow out smooth brush now available for only three payments of $49.99 I should probably show you before and after if I'm gonna sell this one hundred and fifty dollars there you go I actually think that is it quite nice take this out maybe a little bit I love this effect isn't that cool you can just exactly where you want it you're probably like Ryan you've talked told me about this enough I don't need to hear it again that's how you the first time okay that's looking pretty good and you see I didn't need to darken that but I feel like in real life this is more what your eye would see so I darkened it down good we are rolling just work on our crop because we need well oh Lightroom you're having a conniption let's undo undo I'm supposed to show the people how fast I can edit am I supposed to do that with you Lightroom with difficulty now what I could do for some of these photos I think it actually looks okay as is but I could just do a slight bump right in the center invert that so then the person in the center of the photo really pops out so here's before and after you know what I'm gonna keep that so just copy that copy it over now every time there's an aisle shot that I need to do that I can just paste it and then move that radial filter where it needs to be she's already nice and bright compared to everything else so that's fine well crop in a little bit put her eyes more or less on that two-thirds line rule of thirds for the win but this one for example take that take your exposure up you can see here is without that and here's with just a little pop little less contrast on her slightly boosting without going to too far and you don't have to worry about it that's what I really love about that particular kind of brush is that you don't need to worry if you happen to forget it's there it's not going to really make or break your photo because it's super subtle now this one looks kind of weird because of how dark it is on top so we'll grab our gradient filter shoot ignore the blown out sky smooth brush just brighten it up in the top moving along same thing this one we might need to go a little bit further because she is super super dark here in the shade of the umbrella our contrast way down white balance is really weird so we'll take that up no I'll take our exposure up contrast down even more that might be too much we need to keep it subtle something like that darn these infernal umbrellas you know there we go take this brush and we'll just manually brush on her skin really quick and of course I didn't want my blowouts guys movies I wanted my contrast down little bun before after but you don't have to worry about being super precise because you'll never see as long as you keep that effect subtle enough now this one I'm going to actually invert what I was doing before instead of having her be brighter I'm going to invert that mask because everything else is so dark we're just going to boost it then take our exposure down on everything and our contrast down on everything because she's shining bright like a diamond now what just happened here that umbrella man it is something else okay we're gonna use our sky smooth brush here shoot better much better but again we've got some serious contrasts to fight with here we'll take our whites down maybe shadows up and you know what I have other photos of her that one looks garbage so I'm just going to use this one instead sometimes it's just not worth the fight that's what I say this one we can brush on and in two seconds looks way better than we ever would have got that other one to look take our contrast down a little bit again with this girl and shining bright like a diamond you invert that mask we're going to you make everything else brighter so that we can make everything darker good just cruising now what I'm wondering is I'm actually standing here standing here I'm at a sit-stand desk no I'm not as I'm sitting here is should I just fast-forward this do you need to watch me edit every single photo and my overall thought is if you want to you can feel free to just skip ahead and watch the next stage of the journey which is going to be just going back over the photos and kind of checking things over or you can like this video and leave me a comment and subscribe for more great content and download this preset in the description below filled with a long long video I should just make advertising breaks I should rent out the space read scripts give you something to listen to other than me talking about nothing you can see him just zooming through a couple seconds per image it's all about having the right preset that just works right so here's our before here's our after the preset just does most of the work makes it look pretty good right out of the gate now these are looking a little saturated for me and the reason is that we have this blue sky and I don't think I want to get rid of it completely like we could do our sky D haze trick where are we it's down here somewhere that's a sky blow not smooth but obviously that looks way too intense so we'll just don't worry about it embrace the blue I get a shirt that says embrace the blue it'll make no sense to anyone except for maybe you if you ever meet me in my shirt good that's looking nice copy that man love this preset and the reason I love it so much is because I tried editing this wedding with another set of presets I will not say which and it was just a fight it was so hard to get it to look awesome alright so you can't tell but my screen recording actually stops so I took a really quick break it is now 7 24 so 16 it's later just we remember to adjust that when we actually look at the amount of time it took to edit this entire wedding take our contrast down so yes as I was saying this other preset pack just did not do the same thing it was a fight every single photo as the lighting conditions changed it was just so inconsistent whereas these I find are so close generally right across the board once you get the white balance dialed in you get the exposure you like well then generally you're pretty good which is a game changer for me saves a lot of time gets that nice consistent look and what I love is there's not lots of contrast it's beautiful it pops but it doesn't look edited it looks pretty darn natural most of the time this one obviously looks a little too far we're gonna take our saturation down in the yellows there we go that's closer now all right so we'll copy this guy in case we need it again and sure enough there we go there's a little tip sometimes things look a little too unnatural it might just be the green and the yellow so you can take those down in your HSL panel okay I like that move it forward good we could try with the desaturate of green see how that looks yeah that's probably better apologies if you hear my dog chowing down in the background he needed dinner as well so he's just in the middle of that good good good the skin tones are looking a little bit red so I mine actually go to my HSL panel here take the hues of the reds turn them up a little bit towards green now that's way way better and then dial it back yeah that's much better okay just fix those couple of photos as you can see overall these photos were shot on a Canon and I do find that the canons tend to be a little bit more red right out of the gate with their skin tones so just watch for that take this desaturate a little bit [Music] this is about the worst possible lighting situation where you've got full Sun very very bright background going on Sun right into the lens he lose a lot of contrast and things just look weird where's these other photos taken with the side light here so so much better but we'll do what we can and again apologies for my dog in the background that's what happens when you share a room with a dog a room a House condo if we want to be technical okay and here's where our blown out sky smooth brush is really going to come in handy take it just like that dial it back cuz that's pretty intense there we go better great it's amazing how much different the white balance is on this side hey start brightening that up my room is struggling and then take this white balance up a little bit we got a lot of magenta coming off of I think these umbrellas so we'll take this let's take a little green in there a little bit more blue on that there we go so here's before here's after it looks good if it ain't broke although that one needs to be level crooked lines man there we go and we'll use our sky brush here you can't fix it but we can mitigate now this is where you really start to notice okay that's out of focus just bleeped you really start to notice Lightroom struggling a because I'm recording and B because I didn't generate those smart previews so I think that's really holding us back here you can get through your editing a lot faster with a faster machine slash making use of all the tools that Lightroom has to offer this one I'm very borderline on keeping honestly I think if it had been cropped here kind of at their waist that would have been fine but as it is it just looks really strange so I'm going to delete that one movin on up again we're just adjusting exposure crop next in a perfect world that's all you ever have to do now we don't live in a perfect world so we're gonna have to do more occasionally but hopefully you're catching my drift good and that's looking pretty darn blues take that I thought this photo was kind of interesting its own sort of way make sure their feet are right on that third line and we'll try the skin pop that's probably not gonna do it because our feet are in full shade under that dress so reset do our classic contrast white brush there we go see what I mean though sometimes skin tones just don't work because Lightroom is being strange so we can dry the skin bump and that's maybe going too far now hope do it manually something like that maybe dial back I bet you it's the da's again let's see yep it's the DA's take the DA's turn it up just a little but not as much as it was okay now the issue with this photo is none of them are in focus it's just the background and I thought that that might be kind of cool but in reality it just looks like a photo that the photos focus didn't work so we're gonna delete I have 600 photos to get through I feel no pain whatsoever in deleting just a couple of the ones that really aren't going to be as magical because at the end of the day too you have to think okay well if your client receives 500 okayish photos versus you know 300 amazing photos which is going to have a better effect and the answer is probably the ones that are amazing okay contrast a little bit a little bit of sharpness in there quit again with the skin tones what lens is this it's the 85 which apparently is a very very different contrast in colors than the 35 but we'll deal don't make it work okay add a little bit of this little extra pop sauce with that preset this one white balance is too cold so we'll warm it up and this is where things really start to slow down because obviously in these bright sunny days you're going to have a lot more trouble getting a decent photo every single time because you have to adjust every photo by a little bit just with the contrast and getting the exposure just dialed in way harder than an overcast day and Lightroom is just killing me with the delay but you can see we're still making pretty good time it is 736 we've been going for about an hour and a half I think and we are 219 photos in so not quite halfway but at this rate we should be done in about three hours total I love that shot just love it when the colors work you know and then you have a shot like this where the colors just don't work where Lightroom doesn't even show up so my hunch is if we take our preset up here take our exposure back down d haze down just a little bit and white balance down a little more there we go voila then we'll just copy that and see if that will apply to this next guy bingo you can see how dark it is looking in the middle here so I'm just going to grab radial filter contrast down whites up BAM Oh No I'm getting the Apple wheel of death I need to pause and let my computer cool down or something let's see do I have any other programs running I can close nope good contrast try that now that actually looks a little warm in comparison to these other shots because it is 5,600 versus 5,400 everywhere else so I'll try that if you're wondering how I'm doing this right now it's just with the period you can adjust which effect your plus and minus Keys are going to adjust by hanging period but I just find that the exposure honestly is the most handy thing in there so I keep it on there which maybe use the texture no that looks weird try a little more preset there we go now the really confusing thing is that the white balance is so all over the place even though the lighting isn't changing much so I wonder why that happened if a representative from Canon is watching I would appreciate some answers but here's an example of where the presets doesn't matter which preset you apply even this preset is going to give you some strange-looking results at first and you saw how weird that photo was let's jump back here so if I actually go down to my before the exposure adjustment here's before you'd think that that preset just looked awful but then when you actually just adjust the exposure properly it looks pretty normal so exposure white balance once you get those dialed in most of the time your preset will look ten times better so she's in focus they are not removed that photo it's literally running so slow that I'm using this little preview window here while I'm waiting for this one to show up exposure to the rescue again and voila we have the kiss ladies and gentlemen we have reached it we did it you and I together I think the reason the white balance is actually going crazy is because it's only happening with these really wide shots and you know why because this blue sky the blue mountains and the blue lake in behind trick the camera into thinking that Oh things are blue we need to make it warmer when in reality or cooler now that doesn't make sense that's the opposite of what it would be never mind the theory is still out you know what that brush almost worked except for around here so we're gonna have to erase it and then dial it in so it's very subtle good again we're looking to cold other than that we're pretty good you can see where the two commas just weren't quite synced up so some of these are out of order that's not in focus but I kind of like the moment so I'm going to take this brush just add a little bit of clarity some sharpness onto his face just to make it usable I love that moment now because she's wearing a white dress it's going to be brighter than absolutely everything else in here so we're gonna take the highlights down just on that dress and then take the exposure down just a little bit in that one area there we go now we can dark and everything else good and I'm just gonna sink go one of these set the way I like it and sync across all these images everything except for the crop because they should be pretty consistent with the walk down the aisle good looks good all right we are officially past halfway done look at us go I'm gonna brighten up the center of this image so this one is just really weird I don't exactly know what's going on we'll try dialing that back might be the D haze again when in doubt it's probably the D hey is acting up yeah way better with the D haze down strange now family photos again anything that's going to be consistently the same across multiple images I will do my very best to make use of that and just sync it ahead of time we're gonna just the blues get things dialed in the way we like it massive difference in how much more natural that looks versus this okay so we copy that get our crop right okay now we can take that and sync it across all of these family photos coming up and hopefully they'll be pretty close and if I make an adjustment I just sync it to the rest of them now that looks a little bit green so we're gonna actually undo maybe minus six instead perfect and I can maybe take the saturation down in those blues a little bit not a ton just a little bit even the yellows if we wanted the greens they're probably fine there we go that's better looks like there's a massive change in camera settings obviously so copy and once in a while it can be helpful actually just to hit that reset button see what the photo looked like out of camera and if you're on track or if you're just taking it too far like for example that's looking a little bit too blue maybe the contrast could go up a little bit or the shadows could go down slightly yeah that's way more natural with family photos generally you know you'll go through and grab the best one that you can of each group but if there's more than one good one I'll grab a couple if there's some variety between the expressions just so that they can choose because you know the bride might be happy with her expression but the groom's like oh I wish there's one that I didn't look like such a doof spoken as a past groom who has looked like a doof much of his life granny will roll them pretty good here now he's a little dark in the background of this photo I'm just gonna make an adjustment layer reset contrast down a little whites up a little bit brush that on and just brighten him up just a little bit so before after so again if it looks funny might be the DA's trying just taking that down I think that looks more natural looks good she's a little dark on the end so we're just going to brush gradient filter rather that's probably too far I'm gonna crop out as much as I can because I really don't like that school bus in the background I think it might be cooler if you can't see the top of that concrete I think that's hilarious brighten him up just a little bit looks good crop again get rid of the bus so you can see how much better these photos look just now that they're out of that super high contrast D situation the light makes such a big difference guys in your edits in your photos if you can get good light your photos will look ten times better so obviously this was closer to sunset it was out of that high contrast environment no longer shooting straight into the Sun and losing all of our contrast by having the lens facing the Sun all sorts of different things like that all make a difference I was looking a little bit cold maybe God just warming up a smidge also all this negative space I don't need so much sky really not necessary and there's just more distractions going on same goes for this one man lie room is just not loving me right now now obviously I haven't said anything in quite some time I've just been editing these photos and kind of going through I just wanted to say what's really interesting is how white balance isn't always accurate inside of Lightroom and by that I don't mean just that Lightroom's auto white balance isn't right because that happens all the time but what I mean is sometimes what you think the white balance should be isn't actually what it is so for example this should actually be more like temperature probably 6500 is what I would guess because we're in really really heavy shade outside whereas you know sunlight is 5400 but even 5400 looks pretty garbage until you get down kind of to the high for thousands that's where things start to look natural so white balance in Lightroom is an imperfect art it's about knowing what looks right rather than knowing the exact numbers because if I just went with daylight I guarantee you this would just be the wrong white balance that's too warm at least to my eyes you might look at it and say that looks brilliant Ryan you are full of hogwash in which case you do you I'm not gonna say what you should or shouldn't do and now back to silence as I edit so again their skin look kind of weird here but about you if we just take our white balance down to say 5000 yeah problem pretty much figure it out maybe take our shadows up a little bit take our D haze down that culprit there we go I actually think these might look nicer without yeah there we go without the saturated Blues that's just a preference thing this gives a little bit more focus to the photo this one is not working for me so I could either put in black and white or get rid of it since we have so many of the vineyard I'm actually going to just remove and we'll switch back to the blue sky but we'll take it and we'll make you more of a darker blue good they actually look kind of awkward in that photo I'll just get rid of it because the sky is just white where possible I'm just going to crop as much of it out as I can because it really isn't adding anything to the photo that particular photo I just don't like you can see what a massive difference white balance is making suppose it mess around here if I can find the right white balance it's gonna make all the difference we have so many vineyard ones and this one is just looking kind of hokey so I'm gonna move on instantly this one's better just from the other side good but I still don't like it cuz of this guy we have some really great other vineyard stuff in a sunset shoot so I'm not gonna worry about it too much and take the ones that look good and forget about the others it's kind of a secondary culling process if you will there's some weird smokey things going on in the background too I don't want to have to worry about let's just make sure I don't have anything not creating those am i nope I was worried there for a second either spot removal tool on or something but no it's some other cloud or something that was happening that day this one will just take the highlights down for her flowers so much better without this guy in there what do you think let me know in the comments below do you prefer with the sky without this guy I think as soon as you crop out the sky intentionally in your camera everything starts to look better you've more those moody images rather than just ugly and weird in fact that's too weird we're just gonna keep moving that I could maybe add a little bit more contrast to those flowers make them pop good I know we have so much vineyard stuff that I'm not sweating it not putting all of these in here obviously if this is all I have I would work with it to make it work you know what I'm just gonna do it I'm gonna get rid of that blue get rid of the blue in the sky but then I get rid of the blue in his suit so maybe I could take the luminance up on the Blues and hide them a little bit yeah that's what we'll do we'll hide the Blues little trick for you so there's some really weird reflections going on on the outside of this building and that's just because of the vines literally the Sun is hitting the vines the vines are reflecting onto this building but if I take the saturation down I can probably make it a little less weird and take the Greens more towards a red slightly better we'll do the same thing here so much of photography is just learning to look and see light in a way that you don't normally see it when you're not paying attention as you start to pay attention you get used to okay well these trees are reflecting that sunlight and so there's a skin cast on the skin even though I don't see it with my eyes I know it's there and then you can plan around that you can say okay let's not take the photos under the trees or across the street from the trees let's take the photos over here where we have this you understand somewhere better to work with [Music] there's anything I know it's that the shot of the wine bottles matters the most just kidding okay so something like this the background full Sun the foreground is shade so I know that there's going to be some blue on this sign so we can take that and we can also increase the blues just to make that sign brighten up there we go we can maybe take a saturation the Greens down to it's a little much okay here's a situation where our sky is blown out as can be we can see could we get it back not really so we'll take it down we'll take our clarity down like that yeah we can brighten everything else up honestly not too attached to that photo I don't think it's very nice we'll delete I would rather delete am a photo then put it in there if I have lots of other awesome photos we'll just make the whole experience better for the couple when all their photos are Wow shots okay so I think D haze is working against me again again weird photo just not working I'm gonna delete it not even focus but that's the bride's dad so if I can make it happen I'd love to make it happen for her so grab that photo zoom in here add a little bit of clarity a little bit of sharpness here's that texture I was talking about yeah that's doable here's another one where she's shade background his Sun so it's either going to be way too warm in the background or way too cool on her face but not much we can do about that we just sort of have to deal with it expose for the skin edit around the skin and the background is what it is hmm not worth keeping nice again it's dark up here so I'm going to drag gradient filter down just boost the whites from that direction and then this sign in itself is reflecting all that light it's very very light when everything else is dark let's just take our highlights down a little bit not too too much just enough there we go p.s that is the most awesome welcome sign ever pretty sure it's a Parks and Rec playoff so instead of treats yourself it's each yourself maybe maybe not if it is mad respect put a little bit of clarity a little bit of D Hays good so again he is right under a tungsten light weird mix light situation here so I'm gonna grab gradient filter oh I'm not gonna do that gonna grab a gradient filter over like that just add some blue from that direction and hopefully kind of find a place in the middle where we can rest good that's better before after not great but better sometimes that's the best you can do I could take the Blues down in saturation that might help a little bit too so let's just show you there we go take those blues down so much better so here's before is after just kind of cleans it up nice gonna copy that just so we have it every time we need it so it's these mixed lighting situations that are genuinely the hardest to edit because it's like no matter what you do if the light was not good to begin with if you're working with daylight and tungsten and all sorts of different weirdness going on it's just going to look weird no matter what and that is kind of the limitations of shooting on a camera that is not as good as your eye is at adjusting to things and making things look normal because when your eyes walk into a place they will naturally adjust to make things look the way that they should so even if you're in a room that is full of tungsten light when you look at a tomato the tomato doesn't look yellow or orange it still looks red because your eyes adjust where's your camera doesn't have that same ability and that kind of is what your white balance is doing is telling the camera okay this is what white should be so it compensates with everything else but it's not perfect and so when it comes to mix to light where your eye can naturally look at it and say okay this is supposed to be skin color this is supposed to be that your camera cannot it can do a set white balance and that's about it now this is a cool photo except for so blown out and bright in the back and his head is all red we've got this really weird blotchy skin situation we'll try taking the contrast down cooling it down maybe a little bit brighten in I'm gonna do what I can contain that down that's about as close as we'll get looks good maybe a little bit darker actually yes so again maybe we take the saturation out of the blues now way that distraction out the window is gone so you can see the camera was having a hard time here knowing what was what and so even though I'm messing around trying to find kind of a sweet spot again I don't know if I'm going to and I know there's a different photo of her full holding this baby so that one I can let go of maybe this one I'll have better luck take you down a little less magenta still way too warm here so cool it cool it that is about as close as we'll get and we'll take the saturation down in the blues there we go so here's before after still looking pretty natural ish definitely better than we were when we just had the preset by itself so again it's not necessarily the preset it's more just the fact that it needs to be dialed in properly so now we can copy this one take all that hard work and deposit it into this photo are we in focus moderately and since the other one was we'll delete that here's another example will reset try and get an idea of what it looked like naturally I think that's pretty close you might be better at this than me and you're looking at it saying no Ryan no that's incorrect if it is I'm sorry I'm doing my best good we could take the exposure down on her add a little contrast highlights down exposure down I'm just not feeling it not super happy with it it's all in the white balance if you get that right everything else so far far easier that's a lot closer then our blues we'll take that saturation down again from that window light and there's some weird funky green on that seat so we'll take that down too now if you're wondering what photos what cameras these were taking on it's 5d mark fours those were canons Sigma and Canon glass kind of a mixture of the two and one of the nice parts about a professional-grade DSLR doesn't have to be Canon but the great thing about them is that they have so much more wiggle room in the actual raw file so you'll see a few of the photos that I actually edited here I added like one and a half to two stops of extra light to it and still looked pretty good so the beauty is your photos can be way further out and you can save them a lot more easily than if you're shooting on a t3i or something like that in fact yesterday I edited an engagement shoot on a gh v or I shot and edited one now that is a little bit too heavy-handed I can really see my brush marks there so we'll just dial things back and what I was surprised by is how the low-light was so so much harder to get right and so much more limited now I know I have a lot of other shots of her so I'm not gonna worry about this one with that light being a little distracting now this is so unfortunate that this guy happened to be in this Sun and the couple here is right in darkness I sense a lot of work on the horizon and of course she's out of focus I'll just grab that yeah add a little bit of sharpness little texture good that's one I'm not even going to worry about trying to save maybe take the saturation out of the blues there's not much you can do in this kind of a shot that's alright just take the contrast down here now the reason she looks so funky is because of the videographers light that he set up is really quite a harsh light on her so super super high contrast might look good on video but certainly not ideal I would have preferred just a nice window light you can see how much brighter she is than anything else now this photos interesting the white balance was so far out and the reason is the camera actually saw her pink dress compensated for that and set the auto white balance to this which is far more green than it needed to be so now we're at the sunset shoot obviously we are almost through this wedding probably another 30 or 40 images the sunset shoot unfortunately took place quite a bit before sunset before I would have liked to so unfortunately these photos are going to take more work than they would have otherwise and the reason for that is because obviously I'm going to have to go in and brush their skin cool it off so that I can maximize the dynamic range and kind of get the sunset back if you will so I'm going to just go ahead and make a little preset for my brush I've got it kind of the way that I like it so I'm going to go down here we're gonna call it sunset skin and we'll put 0 1 so hopefully it's at the top here good and now we're just gonna take sunset skin and brush it on top of you guessed it their skin at sunset you'll see that it's just removing some saturation some contrast blending things very slightly and whatever it's too much I'm just gonna take it back down a little bit and unfortunately it's a bit of a necessary evil I thought to myself you know can I get away without it unfortunately the answer is kind of no it adds too much makes it way more organic way less edited smooths out their skin tones so nicely now I could use the auto mask on here and it might be a little bit faster at getting their skin but I think I'm good like this only takes a couple of seconds per photo and the nice part is that the preset doesn't most of the work here I might actually take my saturation up a little bit it's looking a little heavy-handed here so we'll just grab our saturation take that up continue our quest I'm telling you contrast down White's up that by itself is the best brush in all of Lightroom so transparent so effective very good we can take some red out of their skin as well I might update my brush with that take the red down by say minus seven you can see what a big difference it makes so here's before I actually apply that brush if it will ever load he's before and after massive massive difference but subtle like you wouldn't guess that it's there and you don't have to be perfect with your actual brushing which to me is a really big deal now this one I might actually just need to dial back that yeah that's way better copied excel like it now I like this photo but it looks really HDR so I'm gonna see if I can take those shadows off maybe that's what's causing this issue probably our D haze brush is contributing in some way there we go that's a lot more natural there we go I'm gonna do a second brush on their skin just with some contrast and some whites it's better there we go as you can see our shadows aren't just too high at this point that's the thing about nighttime the light changes so much and I honestly find that nighttime presets you really can't predict what's going to work and what won't sometimes a preset will work great other times it just looks better to go straight raw from camera and just add a little contrast and be done especially when you're working with images that are already high ISO you just don't have that much latitude anymore to adjust things and so you kind of have to stick with what you already got fresh out of camera it's a little bit blue we'll go fifty eight hundred maybe yeah sure give that a try use our little brush that's probably too much something around there now one thing you can do if you have this preset pack and you have all of our preset brushes is we can go in at a radial filter and go to where it says effects down here and we have a Sun flare special effect and I think it'd be cool to add a little bit of a flare over here she's walking in sunsets we'll just invert that drag it like that so here's without and with just adds a little interest and if you want to make it more subtle we'll just grab our mount slider drag that down just like that so before and after really makes it kind of interesting hey all right so that's our son shut shoot we've just got a few more dance photos and we are done now the thing is about this particular dance floor I know for a fact that was very dark very contrasty I'm just gonna get things set up here sync it across and hopefully it'll be a pretty quick process to get it all done so we're just going to sync all of that except for maybe white balance and exposure and then fade that preset up as necessary shot by Shawn you can see at this point it was the least ideal lighting situation of all time we've got these big big windows full full dark-skinned might be a little bit interesting to edit I know we have some better shots than that of them so I'm going to delete this one actually there we go like I said way better nighttime photos of all of the photos that exist are the hardest to edit and get right I think that's because most of the time it's high ISO you don't have a lot of kind of wiggle room when you're shooting in high ISO to begin with when you're editing the photos and so everything just doesn't seem to work the way that it should so my advice for you is start just with the raw kind of take it up from there these presets I'm pretty much turning off this profile section because I find when you get too dark it just stops working properly we want to take our D haze off we want to basically shoot straight from camera and if you want to you can experiment with the actual in-camera profile so we could go down here into camera matching and just browse in here and see if any of these do better with the colors personally I'm gonna stick with what I had there because that was close enough for me but sometimes that can help yesterday was editing a session and I found that the in-camera profile was just way way better than anything else I could cook up so there's a little tip for you there you see how much better the colors are in this photo because it's iso 640 instead of our other ones which were iso 2000 so it really does make a massive difference so again trust like this ugly background I've better ones I'm just going to delete it for the good of everyone and I seem to be adding a bit of D haze to all of these so I'm going to sync that across as well we have 32 left now getting these dance photos was actually a challenge and the reason for that is because it would have been way better to shoot in the direction with the window light so all of this light from these windows would have been really awesome however the problem is those ugly shots I showed you the couple that I deleted while they were taken with the good light but obviously good light terrible background so it's kind of choose your poison do you want a bad background and decent lighting on them or do you want an ugly background or a nice background with more challenging light there we go there's a videographer a hero shot I'll go on let me just got some of these if you're wondering how these were taken is just with a flash and a really long shutter so you drop your shutter speed to say you know one second two seconds whatever it is and then you have a flash that fires because the flash is only on for an instant you get that initial kind of image and then the kind of movement afterwards is by moving wiggling shaking whatever your camera after the flash fires and so it's kind of a long exposure that gets baked in and you get these really cool light effects from wherever the lights were as it tracks your movement so that's how you do that maybe we'll do a future YouTube tutorial if you'd like it tutorial on that just leave me a comment below nice part about these kind of let's call them artistic shots is you don't have to worry about things looking too natural or organic because they were never natural or organic to begin with so other than the fact that she is Olympus skin here which we will try and do something about we'll just take this add some blue to the skin oh that looks so much more normal life is good and there you have it it is 904 p.m. - our 15-minute break that was a total of 550 well I think we started with 567 photos edited in just a couple of hours so you too can edit a wedding in under a day it doesn't need to take you weeks to edit an entire wedding if you're using the right kind of presets the right strategy you call things properly and you're just adjusting using your keyboard shortcuts all those kind of tips that we covered inside of here well you two can't get these kind of speed results if you will now this was not an example of perfection I'm still a work in progress still learning things so if you have tips for me my editing strategy things I could do better please leave them in the comments below if this video was helpful for you which I hope it was because it was two hours long and if it wasn't helpful you wouldn't be listening to me right now please do me a favor hit that like button make sure you leave a comment below subscribe for more great content tutorials resources and I will see you in the next video peace [Music]

Channel: Signature Edits

Views: 63,394

Keywords: wedding photography tutorial, wedding photo editing, editing wedding photos in lightroom, editing a wedding, lightroom wedding presets, lightroom wedding editing tips, lightroom wedding editing, lightroom skin tones tutorial, wedding photography, wedding photographer, engagement photography editing, wedding photography tips, photography, wedding editing workflow

Id: MtqTq4_TOfU

Length: 153min 1sec (9181 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 07 2019