Editing A Full Wedding With HORRIBLE Lighting (Lightroom Tutorial)

hey guys ryan here at signature edits and inside of this video we're going to be taking a look at editing a wedding from start to finish now this is going to be helpful whether or not you're a wedding photographer because it's going to show you pretty much every single situation you can run into when you're shooting an event and this is a great example because this wedding was taken on a very very bad lighting day so it was shot at high noon the lighting indoors was horrible the lighting outdoors was less than desirable and so it's really going to show you both what you can do when you're shooting a wedding like this to improve your photos in camera and also what to do when you're shooting a event outside in the middle of the day and things just aren't looking good how you can fix that and produce photos that look well kind of like this so i'm going to show you from start to finish every step of my editing workflow how to create these kind of presets how to make this look how to get this consistent feel between your images and hopefully you learned something so let's not waste any more time and dive in get started and do this thing [Music] all right so i've got all of the images imported into lightroom these are the keepers and i've created a lightroom catalog for the couple i do this with every single session i shoot i want to keep everything separate i don't want to have one big master catalog because this way i can stay organized and move my files to different computers or different hard drives and i never lose anything that's the main thing i want to stay organized so all of the raw files are in a folder along with the lightroom catalog everything from this wedding and this event is going to be in one folder on my hard drive and then if i ever need to move it to a different computer i can so that's how i set it up i imported all of the keepers and the ones that weren't keepers i didn't import i kept the raw files in a separate folder marked rejects but only the keepers get put into lightroom so that's my process it just works for me you can figure out your own and if you want a deeper like step-by-step explanation and showing you how to actually take the 1500 photos you have and turn them into 400 keepers and how to make those selections the best way to do it i would highly recommend checking out one of my other wedding tutorials because i walk through those things in depth step by step and i do everything but in this particular tutorial we're going to skip ahead to the editing because i feel like that's the more helpful thing when it comes to actually cutting the photos you watch one or two of those tutorials and that's enough so let's get on with the editing and i'm going to kind of show you my process so first off we're going to go into the develop module and we're going to start by making some global changes so the way that i like to approach things is just how can i make this as efficient as possible and that's to make the large edits first on the entire wedding and then kind of narrow things down from there so you edit the entire wedding and then you edit scene by scene and then you edit photo by photo those individual adjustments so to do that i'm actually going to find a preset that works for the day and in this particular edit i'm going to be using the signature edit to build your own preset pack and this is a really cool kind of version of presets because you can actually build your own look and you can do that for every single shoot or you can actually create your own looks and just use them on every shoot you use so let me explain what's going on here i've got some pre-made lightroom profiles that i've created in photoshop so i spend a ton of time creating these custom profiles and what's really cool is you'll notice as i'm clicking these the colors are changing pretty substantially but the only thing that's actually moving on the right hand side here is this guy the profile and so what's really cool about these profiles is that you can actually slide them just like you would an instagram filter and everything else in your lightroom situation is kept blank so that means that you have a lot more flexibility to be able to adjust and tweak things individually from photo to photo whereas some presets all of these have already been adjusted so if you want to dial things back it's impossible with this you want to dial back the look it's easy just grab that slider so you select the kind of preset profile that you like i'm going to go with cleaning classic two and then we're going to go down to our tone curves and it just goes from the top down so profile you select a tone curve you like so we can go with maybe a blue shadows or a green shadows see what we like let's go with a light film fade then we go to our hsl if you want to you can add some extra effects there actually this is kind of weird looking at this strange photo of a dog let's let's go to a nicer photo of the day this one okay or one with better light this one this is the photo of choice that's that's what we got so far we can go down we can grab a tone curve we like the looks of we did that we did the hsl sharpening we'll just add some bass maybe medium or high i don't know let's stick with medium for now so we go through we select what we want you can do some light film conversion to make it feel more like film or reset that reset any part of this panel maybe add a little bit of grain i normally stick it on light or medium and then this is really cool i like to use it all the time the vintage lens effect which is just going to add some softness around the edges and a light vignette good and of course you can go as heavy or as light as you want with that effect personally i just like it a little bit lastly you can do some split toning so we can add some cool tones in the shadows or some warmth overall i probably want to stick it somewhere more or less natural we don't want to push it too far the warmth one is probably my favorite on a bright sunny day like this might work might not we'll see and then we don't need any noise reduction right now but we could stick it on light because overall that'll just take care of some of the noisier images and that's it so we've created a base preset let's take a look and see how it works on different parts of the day so i'm just going to scroll around here and basically i've copied all those settings and i'm pasting on just random photos to see how it looks overall now you're going to see this wedding very harsh lighting conditions it's all over the map we've got super dark shadows and really really bright blown out highlights so it's going to be a lot of work and any preset you use is not going to look good on every single photo when you've got such a vast array of different lighting situations so we're just going for one that is going to be good overall seems to work and has the nice look we're going for notice how much better this preset works just on these photos where the lighting is much more soft and just nicer versus the photos in the middle of the day we are we've got really harsh light it's going to be really hard to get anything to look as good as you'd like it to so just prepare yourself in advance now i'm going to go through and just select from some of these pre-made looks just to save us a little bit of time i actually made one called this wedding tutorial that i think works pretty well oh but of course it didn't save everything so we're going to just grab one that we think looks the best i'm leaning kind of towards this guy right here with a couple changes we're just going to take the saturation up a little bit in the greens take the luminance down a little bit in the yellows and the greens and hue is going to go slightly towards green with those greens the reason i'm doing that is because what i noticed earlier when i was just testing these different presets is that the greens in the background with these presets tend to be a little bit washed out and warmer which works on in a nice lighting situation but when you've got harsh light it can feel a little bit too like kind of washed out and just icky so that's the adjustment once we add some saturation and just change the hue of the greens very slightly still not perfect we're still going to have to make some major edits to pretty much every single image but that's kind of the point is to show you what it's like to edit a wedding that is not perfect is not ideal lighting even a little bit and hopefully you'll learn something as i struggle through this together so let's head back here i've got a base preset that i like the looks of and i'm going to apply it to this photo and sync so i'm going to check everything except for adjustment brushes crop exposure and white balance i uncheck those because we don't want to set those things globally we want to adjust it image by image every image has a different exposure different white balance et cetera the one exception is sometimes it can be handy to actually go up here to lightroom white balance and set it to auto and then you can sync the white balance it'll set all of these photos to auto white balance which sometimes depending on your camera can be more reliable than your camera actually was so we'll do that for this why not now we're going to go through photo by photo and we're just going to adjust the basics i'm not going to i'm intentionally going to try and go pretty quickly here and that's because i'm going to do a second pass later and catch anything that i may have missed the main thing is i want to go through and just make the basic adjustments to my white balance into my exposure get the colors looking right and most of the time if you have images with decent color in them already decent lighting the framing is right the exposure was pretty much right already in your camera you're not going to have to do much more than just adjust the exposure a little bit maybe add a little bit of contrast or increase the effect a little bit and then adjust your white balance just dial it in once you got those things down everything else should be pretty simple and straightforward so let's do this thing starting with poppers here and the one thing i am going to edit is this eye for whatever reason it was reflecting a lot of light where this one was not so we're just going to do an adjustment brush press o if you're wondering how to show and hide that overlay and we'll just darken down that one little area and while we're at it we can just zoom in here and brighten the other eye so we have a catch light in both eyes good okay one photo down you know what we could maybe add a little bit more contrast because it's a dog and dogs love contrast all right so you're gonna see right away here less than ideal lighting circumstances and there are definitely some things about this wedding that if i were you know there again actually i wasn't there to begin with i didn't shoot this wedding ps um but if i were there i would have tried to do things differently of course sometimes things are just moving so fast you don't really have the chance to do so um and you only know in hindsight and you just kick yourself later but you can see here we've got overhead lights and then we've got natural light and that'll be the theme i want you to notice as we're editing these bride prep photos is that everything in terms of lighting is so messy because we've got mixed light going on the number one thing you can do to improve your bride prep photos and your groom prep photos is just to go in there and actually shut off the overhead lights and just use the natural light that'll instantly improve everything about those photos because when you have mixed light like this you've got one that's warm and one that's cold it just feels so weird because the color is off the main thing you can do when you're editing i found to just make things feel better if they don't feel right things just aren't working for you it's probably because your lighting or your color is off it's not natural and your mind might not your mind might not know specifically what's wrong but it can feel something isn't right so you can see what a big difference that is to our original we've just made the light a lot more kind of pure it matches the colors aren't different and it's brighter and just less yucky moving on okay so these photos we're not going to try and make them look amazing because honestly they are what they are it was a super sunny super bright day on the beach i'm not personally a huge fan of this decor but it was for them and they liked it so good for them but one thing that i have found is you should not try and make the photos anything but what they were if you are trying to make a chocolate cake but all you have is vanilla flavoring you're just going to be wasting your time and kicking yourself in the long run so if your photo already looks like this i'm not going to be able to make this look dark and moody it's just not going to happen or it's going to feel really weird as a result so i'm going to embrace it now this looks really washed out and just the colors are not right so let's try this again we're going to take the exposure up we're going to grab our vibrance take that sucker where it starts to look normal somewhere around there and then go down to our hsl and see what we can do specifically for those greens which are not looking so good they look kind of sickly so yellows and we can take that more towards green that'll fix that a little bit you can also take the green's luminance down sometimes that can help make it a little bit more kind of poppy okay again i'm not going to fight this this is what it looked like in real life so it kind of just is what it is i am going to crop in to get rid of this distracting i think it's a boat razor or a cd razor or something and then on this side we've got the edge of this table and a tree so we can crop those out too just a little bit more of an effective composition compared to that but again it is what it is it's not the photo i'm going to focus on they're not going to frame that on their wall so let's move on here okay we got some sandals looking good some beautiful glasses and obviously these details are not ideal and that's because it was very bright outside and also things just aren't as feng shui shall we say simply because we've got the whole small events only situation going on and sanitization and masks are required so it's an interesting time to be a wedding photographer so these ones again they're more about capturing the details from the day than they are about creating works of art and if you can do both please do but if you can't make sure you capture the day as well because at the end of the day i can say from getting married myself i would much rather have photos of the things that happened even if they were kind of ugly then not have any photos at all of those things i hope that made sense but for example i don't have a single wedding shot a wide photo of the reception area and i wish i did it's just one of those things i'm like why didn't i get that i wish i could see what it looked like now some of these things you don't realize until you're married yourself like family photos i used to think family photos were just the dumbest thing ever like why do you take so many of these things and then i got married and those are the most important photos to me so haha ryan jokes on you okay so photos like this where the light is just atrocious and everything looks bad in this photo why is that well it's because we have a huge contrast it's way blown out in the background here but not only that we have see this green coming up that's reflecting off of the grass and the trees outside we're just filling the room with green light mixed with the overhead lights which are orange and so she is a oompa loompa mixed with the grinch in terms of skin color so we can try and correct for that partially by just grabbing an adjustment brush here and we're going to take it towards blue to cool things down then we're going to take it towards magenta to get rid of the grinch factor from outside then we're going to grab our saturation and take it up a little bit and see how bad of a adjustment brush job i did make sure we get that okay so that's looking a little bit better a little bit more normal and maybe raise the whites up so here's before and here's after we've just made it a little bit more normal it's still not great the one thing i do need to do is erase it off her legs because you can see it was really doing some weird stuff so something like that and then i'm going to do the same thing again on her face so again we'll cool it down a little bit more add a little bit more magenta maybe a little bit more saturation and we could play with this hue tool that's fun this is new in the new version of lightroom and i have to say i'm digging the fact that i can add some orange to her skin that's pretty cool before after so again not ideal still not a great photo because there's clutter in the background the composition isn't really good it's just capturing the moment she's hanging out okay fair enough we move on with our lives maybe add a little bit more contrast here and realize that you've pushed this way too far so you back off on the saturation now if you get to a point like this like me and you're saying this just doesn't work it's still so ugly you have one more option and that is to put it in black and white because black and white tends to just fix the color problems in your image so if it's primarily a color thing you can't get a handle on it that's my go-to is just put it in black and white you can feel however you want about that but at a certain point i realize my limitations and i can't fix a photo that just had a horrible situation going on in a way that i'm ever going to be happy with again if you're trying to make a chocolate cake and you only have the ingredients for something really gross fish pie you can't turn fish pie into chocolate cake people okay so we've got some really weird white balance going on let's fix that see what a big difference that made so here's before here's after the photo is all of a sudden pretty nice compared to this way way more fresh and just feels good rather than yuck next we'll adjust our crop here now as far as keyboard shortcuts go you might be wondering how i'm doing all of these things and i will tell you there are a few keyboard shortcuts i use more than anything else shift plus and minus sign and r so the plus and minus sign will adjust the exposure up and down if you hold shift it'll do it in larger increments and if you press the period key you can change what you adjust with the plus and minus key but personally i just adjust the exposure because i find that's what i need to adjust the most now the r tool will pull up the crop so between that that's probably 75 percent of my keyboard shortcuts right there you're a master look at you look at you learn okay this dress photo uh it looks okay obviously when it comes to composition you want to get rid of distracting things so hanging this dress somewhere else would have been ideal now i don't know what the situation was there just might not have been any time in which case it is what it is you get the decent photo and move on but try and minimize distractions in the actual composition because no amount of editing is going to make this really into a beautiful photo because there's just so much going on here that's fighting it what we can do is we can put on a dreamy dehaze filter and you can just copy this if you don't have these presets these presets come with every one of our preset packs if that's something you're interested in but i don't really care one way or another feel free to just copy it save your own preset and you're good to go so again here's before here's after it's a little better but it's still is what it is i'm not able to make chocolate cake from fish pie also if this is helpful at any point for you do me a big big favor and hit that like button for me it just makes a big difference and same goes with the leaving a comment if you can do that if it's extra helpful leave me a comment how about that that'll be our agreement because that just helps youtube let you know helps you let youtube know that you're enjoying what's on here if you have questions i'd be happy to answer them just again leave them let me know i'll get back to you if there's something i missed or you would do differently let me know we can talk we can chat okay so again we're just adjusting our white balance here we've got atrociously dark shadows and bright highlights so it's gonna be a fight for pretty much this entire wedding lucky me so we're gonna raise up our shadows but not too far because that reveals the nasty overhead tungsten light we had going on i'm also going to adjust the white balance down a little bit to combat that and maybe add some green just a little bit okay shadow's back down that's better not amazing but okay now the last thing is her dress very blown out so go in here with our adjustment brush you'll notice 90 of my adjustment brush is literally just contrast down and white's up or down i find that's really transparent so i don't have to be super careful about like how accurate i am with this brush but it's just going to even out the lighting overall in the scene now the last thing to be aware of overall i found like the biggest success when it comes to indoor photography and outdoor ii but particularly indoor a tip i can give you is just try and even out the lighting the more even the lighting is the more even the skin tones are the better things are gonna look so even now like i'm looking at her neck you can see that right around where her hair meets her neckline for whatever reason the light hitting it is just more green than everything else so we'll just grab some magenta add that back in there and maybe cool it down a little bit just experiment until it kind of matches better with the rest of the neck and then this section which is getting more tungsten light on it needs the opposite so we'll cool it down and we'll just brighten it up raise the whites so again here's before here's after good fit see how we look okay that feels fine so that's the thing about a wedding that is shot with less than ideal background less than ideal lighting you're going to be doing a lot more work than if you had been able to just get it right in camera presets go a long way but they won't fix the clown scaring you in the background that that truly is a clown props to them for having a crazy clown and so many things in the background all at once it just just makes the photo but seriously be aware of the things in the background because that makes such a big difference the actual moment being captured here good the light not horrible but what is really making this photo just not good is the distracting and kind of ugly elements happening here in the back that would have been so easy to kind of work your way around by facing in a different direction standing over here by the window and shooting this way so that this nice glass door is in the background it's not always possible but where it is make sure you take advantage and just try and do it okay photo like this obviously we have a whole lot of nothing and then some rings that are actually interesting so i'm going to crop in like so next thing i'm going to do is just add some focus to that ring by grabbing that same creamy dehaze brush or go one step further with the brooding d haze darken now if you ever want to intensify or unintensify and effect you can hit this little triangle in the copper top right of your adjustment brush that'll minimize the whole section and then actually allow you to adjust it all with one slider so we're going to do that somewhere around there here's before here's after just focus is in your eyes naturally drawn to the brightest part of the photo so that's what we're going to do lastly we're just going to reset that brush and add some texture just on that one spot enhance the details in those rings just a little bit maybe raise the whites ever so slightly good and spread it out spread the love okay before after okay this one i honestly don't like this photo at all i might just get rid of it but for now we're just going to embrace i can always get rid of it later again i'm going to do the same thing only this time we'll try just the normal dreamy dehaze good just adds a little bit more focus to the photo overall and let's intensify that effect see if we can make a bad situation into a decent one you know what i don't hate that don't hate it okay you can see decent lighting because we've got nice window light coming in here but it's really just mixing with these overhead lights and making a disgusting mess so let's start by trying to mitigate the damage of this nastiness so i'm just drawing with my adjustment brush on that entire section and we're going to grab our white balance and even it out again we just want to even out the lighting even out the color it's going to make everything feel and work a lot better next we're going to lift the shadows a little bit and raise the whites because it's clearly darker than our window light and that's getting a little bit closer now next thing we have to focus on is her skin because it's caught in the middle of this war zone of nice light and ugly light so we're going to warm it up a little bit somewhere around there maybe okay that looks not too too bad contrast down that's fine now we'll brighten everything up and maybe overall just take the white balance down a little bit i don't know something like that okay could it be better yes i'm sure it could but with the elements going on in this photo it's just it's a tough edit it really is and so when you have this kind of a situation you just got to make the best of it do what you can keep tinkering until you get it right but for the sake of this tutorial i might go a little bit faster and then i'll come back and adjust these things later because i don't want you to have to sit here and watch me edit one photo for 10 minutes at a time especially when the photo itself is not particularly amazing to begin with okay this one let's do a similar thing so we've got this beautiful beautiful overhead light happening we're going to cool it off something like that you can see what a big difference that makes just really makes the photo feel a lot better and we've got overhead light on her hair up here it's just a jolly good time for everybody over here anywhere the overhead light is hitting i want to try and even it out okay something like that now we move on to round two which is over all the photo now that everything is kind of more balanced we can adjust everything globally and then bring some focus in on our bride because the rest of the photo is pretty distracting so we'll do one of those brighten everything up and we've gone from this to this again it's maybe a little bit subtle but i think it's better and this is another one of those watch for the background because it would have been so easy to either use a lens that had a shallower depth of field so this was hidden or just shoot in a different direction so that we didn't have so much makeup there's even a camera bag back here so this was the photographer's camera bag that he just forgot about and was in the shot so those kind of things just clean up when you get there if you can move what you can um again if the makeup artist or hair stylist is set up way inside away from the window and it's possible just ask them hey would you mind moving over towards the window and i can shut off the overhead lights that would really make a huge difference for me oftentimes it can be done and they're happy to do it especially when you ask them nicely and explain and you can see we've got this beautiful beautiful green cast happening on the ceiling here so i'm going to try and get rid of that just by adding some magenta like magic it's no longer as horrible okay that's fine next step we've got some nice magenta purpley happening in the corner here that's from where the green isn't hitting the ceiling and where the overhead light probably is lending to this beautiful visage we could take our saturation down overall i'm not gonna worry about it too much because you know this photo not necessarily the ones we want to spend the most time on so i think that's okay for what it is and we'll just do one of those call it a day move on with our lives all right we've seen this guy already again it was a harsh day very bright sunlight i'm not going to try and fight that too much i might add a little bit of vibrance to the photo because he's maybe slightly too desaturated his skin we could also take the contrast down maybe saturation up a little bit and highlights down something like that i think that's about what we got is what it is move on with our lives i've said that a lot of times i'm doing a lot of moving on today bear with me i'm sorry if if this is all too fast too soon for you okay i'm gonna just dial back the intensity of this effect before after kind of just focuses the eyes a little bit makes everything else a little bit less distracting now ironically wherever the guys were getting ready really bright beautiful beautiful light and we've got the light reflecting off this cedar paneling which is making it nice and warm and creamy and amazing it's too bad that everything else wasn't happening in here because it's awesome okay so let's just focus in here on this bird by adding a i've got one here i know it add texture brush so we'll invert this mask by pressing the apostrophe key and now we're just kind of bringing out the texture in this bird's feathers because i think that's fun also why wasn't the bird in this wedding if i had a bird i would put it in a top hat for sure and it would be the efficient how awesome would that be please if you would like to have a bird as an officiant for your wedding let me know i'm testing a new business idea if i get 10 people who say i want a bird to officiate my wedding i will do it i will purchase a bird i will train it i will get it legally certified and it will officiate your wedding that is a promise a guarantee all right now we've got we went from beautiful beautiful messed up light indoors to beautiful messed up light outdoors and it's one of those pick your poison situations i guess right because we're shooting at high noon everything very bright very harsh best advice i can give for you is to find the best light possible in the situation you're in so first off we're going to try and adjust our white balance but you can see if i go too far with the magenta everything just looks weird and particularly their skin tones it's because it's mixed light so the greens out in the sun are different green than what's underneath here under this patio and at the same time they've probably got light coming from inside of the house that's hitting them as well it's just weird so we might just put this in black and white i think that's not too too bad right here let's move on and show you what a massive difference just the angle can make so this one we've got tons of blown out loveliness in the background whereas this photo we're focusing more in on the tree we don't have as much blown out and the light is just much more manageable still not great but more manageable you'll see when we go a few photos further that the light actually is decent once we point the camera in the other direction so we're shooting basically in full shade instead of trying to capture everything because cameras just don't have the same level of ability as your eye does to adjust to these bright crazy situations and that's why it just looks like a messy hunk of garbage to put it nicely okay so that not like super in love with those but i think we're getting closer it's not horrible i'll say that now their shirts maybe we could actually talk about going to the hsl panel and lowering the purples it looks like their shirts have too much purple yeah there you go so here's before here's after just kind of cleans it up getting rid of that it's not adding anything to the photo anyways so i'm just going to adjust that in this photo as well and then overall this whole thing looks kind of washed out so we might try adding a little bit more vibrance or even a little bit of saturation might help now if you're wondering what is the difference between vibrance and saturation ryan you are not alone in asking that question in fact i recently asked it and found out that vibrance is pretty much saturation but it's just weight weighted towards adjusting all of the colors instead of skin tones or except skin tones so what i mean by that is saturation takes every color and boosts it the same amount as you go up and down whereas vibrance actually will take every color except for skin tones and it will boost it skin tones it will still boost just not as much so you'll see that everything else gets really saturated and the skin tones don't move as much as everything else does that's the difference so use vibrance when you don't want to affect skin tones use saturation when you want everything to be adjusted now you can see how much better the colors feel in this image compared to this image you know what the difference is the light and really it's not even the light so much as the direction the camera was pointed pointed towards a darker background everything pops off that background life is beautiful we've got nicer colors nothing is as blown out just easier on your eye so always be conscious of that oftentimes the difference between a good photo and a bad photo is just where you're standing the angle you're shooting at same preset same everything different direction different result i'm just blazing through these bam okay now we've got another ugly lighting situation where we've got it looks like window light kind of hitting her brochure everything else is covered in this tungsten light so we're going to do the the right thing and we'll fix that for her like so raise the whites up a little bit maybe one a little bit too far somewhere like that basically i found the best possible route to doing all of this is to take things to where i think they look good and then back them off just a little bit it's like this is nice but i think i went just a little too far in the warmth so we'll back it back we'll back it back and that will never be a hit song back and back all right okay again this it's a good moment it's nice and i don't want to get rid of it for that reason but all of the clutter in the background just makes this less than ideal now i'm sure this was just the situation and the photographer did the very best he could with what he had and he did a good job but if you can take control of the situation and just let them know what you need because people aren't photographers you got to remember that nobody else knows what you need except for you and so you need to let them know because oftentimes if people are able to they want to help you they paid you because they want great photos not because they want crappy ones so don't be afraid to ask for what you need and at least explain and let them know hey this is a pretty you know crowded cluttered space it's going to be a little crowded and cluttered in the photos is there somewhere else we can go or are you okay with that and if you get there okay on a less than ideal situation well then it's okay right whereas the last thing you want them to do is come back and this does happen is they'll come back and say why the heck did you take photos in here why didn't you ask me to move or tell me this didn't look right and that my friend is not a good feeling when you have to explain i was scared to ask all right so again we're going to be the masters of light there's some nice beautiful beautiful puke green up here on the wall fix that shabam okay there's some more puke green hanging out over here over here up on the ceiling it's just a puke fest all right that's just the thing when when it's bright outside you're going to be fighting the reflections of the grass if there's a lawn right out there so just be aware of that when you're actually taking your photos and also when you're editing the more mixed light situation you've got going on the more different sources are creating these different color casts the harder your job is going to be and the more you're going to have to watch for that if things just don't feel right that's probably what's going on you've got a lighting situation that needs to be corrected so let's reset this and all i want to do is just get rid of the tungsten cast which is mostly on our subject and the makeup artist a little bit so on this girl's hair in the back and this girl's hair right here so we're going to raise our whites up and maybe take a little bit of magenta out because they look maybe slightly too magenta around there here's before oops wait for it here's before wait oh boy here's before and here's after i got there it happened and as i'm seeing it there's like way too much kind of texture clarity going on here so i'm going to just soften it down like that that's better i could be happy with that hold my head high is it perfect no but it's better that one is actually much better in terms of light kind of interesting hey i'm just going to adjust for that tungsten you can see how much it just it didn't feel wrong before it still felt okay but once you actually adjust it and everything is blending in better together it makes a big difference and that's what you're going to find as you watch people who edit better and i'm saying better than me not just not as in i'm great but people who edit even better than i do what i've noticed is that they tend to make little adjustments that i would never think of making so these little things like adjusting this pole how yellow it was obviously we don't want to push things too far we're just going to cool it down a little bit maybe raise the whites a little bit so you do little things over the photo and do 100 of those and they all add up and after you've done that you're going to notice a difference overall to the entire photo it'll just feel better bit better it'll feel better now one last thing her arm for whatever reason very dark so we're just going to go down here reset our filter here and brighten it up we want to adjust and just have a nice clean um even exposure on the entire image as well as an even coloring so here's before and here's after again it's not you know night and day way way way better but these little things do add up now getting oaks let's just straighten things out here again our keys for crop and we're going to have to adjust our light so let's get started ladies and gentlemen set our temperature down start with the most extreme parts of the photo which is the back here the flooring her arm just wherever it's very obvious there's a color cast going on and don't worry i'm not going to leave it like this dial that back a little bit add some white to brighten that up in those areas contrast down it's just gonna help everything blend together a little bit better okay so that's better i missed the mirror so you can see that's feeling a little bit weird good something like that and erase down the middle here because joy oh joy the middle area was getting some natural light and so it's not as warm as the other areas were okay so here's before here's after i know it feels weird bear with me we're going to warm everything up now a little bit and that should feel a little bit better so here's before and here's after not bad now her hair definitely clipped so a person could just experiment here and see what happens if we lower the contrast raise the shadows a little bit just get some of that detail back i think that actually works pretty well so embrace it side note her dress is actually pretty cool again similar lighting situation as our earlier outdoor photos but what a difference in color it makes and it just looks so much better when we have a nice dark background behind our subject and not a super blown out distracting situation okay this one just white balance looks a little bit off somewhere around there maybe add some vibrance i don't know what's up something like that and his shirt being as white as it is we just need to roll back on those highlights roll back the highlights on his shirt [Music] you know the song you sing roll back the highlights roll back okay my bad a certain amount of talking you do by yourself can be bared and then after that you just start saying really weird strange things so my bad if this is somewhat entertaining well i'm glad if it is not i apologize i will try to get back to the point okay so i'm just making her a little bit more out of focus i don't know if that's actually something i like or not probably gonna ditch it okay crop in a little just so we kind of have an even spacing here and that's fine by me although we still feel kind of crooked try that okay this one exposure and we're good that's perfect looks great this one again actually a beautiful shot if we didn't have this kind of distracting situation in the back the green on the grass the yellow here and smoke detectors i will tell you if i can get rid of one of these things in a photo i do because i hate them i just think they're so [Music] unpleasant so at least i got rid of that i have some control next we're going to try one of these again it'll probably work better actually if we put the auto mask on press o so i can see my mask good see how it found the border a little bit better than last time okay that's better and now we're going to do the same thing on her skin so again this part of her is going to be less orange than the part that is being hit by those overhead lights so we just need to go on here even things out the areas that look too orange we fix i told you this wedding is less than ideal when it comes to light and situations okay lastly we've got this beautiful beautiful green cast happening up here now one other thing that i should mention if you have a situation like this where we've got blue light kind of slowly blending into warm light another thing you can try after i get rid of this green cast i have to do one more right there okay so one more thing that you can try is you can actually say okay it's the most blue here the most warm here i can grab a graduated filter and just compensate for that in either direction i can grab one like this and go from warm down to cool or i can grab one over here and go the opposite way and just warm it a little bit on that end add some magenta as well to counteract that green tint and if you're lucky that will be enough to kind of blend it a little bit better i'm gonna also crop in to hide some of that okay also hides that water bottle not much but it's a little bit now if you're not happy with the color still again you can just go to black and white i think that's what i'm going to do for this particular photo stick with something around there all right moving on with life we've got a similar photo right here same kind of situation now another thing we could try that might be sort of interesting is we could do a two-tone effect we could actually try and harness this mixed lighting situation for good instead of for evil so i'm going to grab my graduated filter as you can see we're going to emphasize this blue make it even more blue and more green just roll with it people and then we can grab another one and we can make this area even more yellow and more bright and more orange and i'm not guaranteeing it's going to work of course we have to invert it but it's worth a try sometimes probably the easiest way here is just going to be to brighten it up lower the contrast and even it out overall that's typically going to be your best option so we'll get rid of this graduated filter or do the opposite just stick with our plan of evening out the light somewhere around there contrast down much better so again here's before and here's after just made it a lot more consistent and we do need to remember to get this mirror in the side here like so and of course if you're funny like me and you do a really sloppy job just clean up okay that's better we could work on her hair just raise the shadows a little bit make sure we turn off auto mask we can even add some texture and even enhance this really nice lace okay something i like that before after now it is looking a little harsh as from our sharpening we could take our clarity down a little bit and that'll kind of give it that dreamy effect okay just paste our last photos settings this one again it is a beautiful beautiful example of mixed light so i should be grateful that's what i tell myself get rid of our smoke detector anything that i can get rid of that's distracting i'm going to do so next we're going to work on this lighting situation first the easiest way is probably to be focusing on this daylight rather than the tungsten because there's just so much tungsten all of the areas that i'm seeing daylight hit we're going to hit those and warm them up and i know it looks shocking but bear with me and grab some magenta to even it out somewhere around there and this extra corner up here you need some extra love and some extra help because it's just unreal unreal green and royal green might okay now we're going to worry about her area here so you can see that helped a lot already cool it down maybe a little bit more even add some green so that we're kind of blending a little bit more with the outside here okay something like that now it's not perfect and it's not amazing but it's better that's what we're focusing on right now is better so i'm going to cool it off on the contrast because it looks a little bit harsh maybe grab this profile bring it down make it a little bit more dreamy and i'm thinking i'm thinking that's pretty close we're going to zoom in see what we got down here hair looks okay but i'm going to just exaggerate the texture a bit not click that okay i've actually got a texture brush i'll just select that add some texture to her eyes make sure we get the earring back the dress perfect so before oh before and after and we're definitely adding too much contrast we want to actually back off on that a little bit before after okay i'm happy with that here's before years after this one looks alright maybe a little bit a little bit cold something around there you'll see once i get a photo the way i like by default i just tend to copy it and then i move on to the next photo because most of the time your photos were taken in a similar situation so it might be helpful to have that as a backup so if the preset doesn't work i can just paste the other photo i have or the other edit i have really quick and see if that works better let's get rid of these little bugs or whatever they are shabam you just got debugged shabam again looks like we have some kind of spec down here take care of that actually i guess that's a button but it just looks weird brighten her up good now the yellow in this tree is really just bugging me it looks too yellow so i'm going to take my hue maybe shift that towards green see how that feels take the saturation down a little bit i think that's a little bit better before after not too bad you can see the difference that green adjustment makes hello this is definitely too cold so we'll warm her up now one other thing to just add in general if you're finding that your photo just doesn't look good and the lighting is reasonably matched and you just can't figure out what's going on another thing to check is going to be your white balance because nine times out of ten if your white balance isn't right your photo is going to look nasty like this one the auto was set here and it just looks not good but we switch it warm it up a little bit that's all we had to do and it feels a lot better that's too much contrast we'll dial back one thing i really like about these presets using a profile so you can have the profile nice and high so you can still get the effect you want but you can dial the contrast way back so you can get away softer if you want to which is nice particularly in weddings like this where you've got really harsh light going on so you can still get your preset look without making it way too contrasty like that that was just that was pleasant okay so let's grab our contrast bring that down grab our clarity bring that down preset up a little bit maybe raise those whites a little okay now this photo um a bunch of clutter going on not really that interesting and our light is really just not cool so i'm going to turn it to black and white and then i'm going to do one of these guys radial filter drag it over here we're going to go with a brooding dehaze darken brush darken things way down make everything nice and soft and then lastly we're going to grab some crop action on here something like that now it kind of tells a story there's some drama there there's some interest just becomes a better photo i think if you don't like it that's okay okay this one again we've got some nice mixed lighting this photo i'm not a few huge fan of at all anyways but typically the hair stylists actually really like to have photos of the hair in the back when it's something complicated like that so that's why i have it in there always be thinking of your vendors as well clients first but think of the team members that you're working with and what would benefit them because that is going to help you get more referrals and just be you know what i mean be nicer to work with enjoy each other help each other more everything is better when you help other people okay i'm going to crop in to hide a little bit of this pile of stuff and that's about all i got that one is what it is this one you can see right away white balance is way too cold once we warm it up all of a sudden life feels good same thing with this one okay a little bit crooked i think she looks a little angry just side note i wonder if i should put this in here i think it's kind of funny so i'm going to keep it in there she's probably focused on not dropping these drinks that's what i would be focused on side note we're gonna get there and i'll show you in a second but the bridesmaids in this particular wedding forgot to smile when they were walking down the aisle most of them so that's one thing as a photographer always if you have a chance you have a second before the wedding talk to the bridal party and say remember i know you're going to be thinking about walking and not tripping and all those good things but please make yourself smile have a big force smile or you know what i mean like make yourself smile as you walk down the aisle because if you're concentrating too much you just look like you have to go poo or something like that you know and honestly you'll get a laugh out of them if you say it in the right kind of charming positive way and they'll remember to smile and people smiling that makes for a good photo people frowning that does not so it'll make your photos better as a result you'll be amazed just by taking some ownership and asking people for what you want how much better your photos will be from just small things like that to smile or not to smile that is not a question as you can see here all i really have to do is adjust the white balance the preset is getting all the colors the way i like them before after looks good to me and if you're wondering about kind of this pixelation going on that's because i'm using a smart preview as you can see once i actually zoom in and lightroom loads the full res file that is gone so if you've been thinking this whole time what is wrong with these his photos that's what's happening that's what's up okay this one one of those photos that was taken in super harsh light so it's going to be a struggle street we can take our exposure up and see that our white balance is really weird and again we've got a big mixture of shade and sun and just a really ugly the kind of background going on super harsh light so there's not going to be much we can do to turn this into the mona lisa but we can take the contrast down on his face make this a little bit less harsh and then maybe cool his face down a little bit because i feel like he is warmer than everything else there we go that feels better here's before after and the reason it still feels not so good is because we just don't have really great coloring in this photo overall okay head back over here copy paste okay those greens way too saturated so let's just dial that back and we can maybe take the luminance down a little bit see how that works for us again if i zoom in that blotchiness goes away okay i think we're still looking too saturated here you don't want to take it too far you can play with the hue see if that adjusts things not great it's not great last thing we could do is maybe darken things down and place a radial filter on our subject here and make her a little bit cooler and brighter contrast down whites up and add some saturation to her skin something like that now everything in this photo looks way too saturated so go to basics and maybe try taking the vibrance down i think that's better it's not great i'm not super happy with it but it's a weird color to begin with look how blue she is and that's the thing when you got shade mixed with sun it's going to be the hardest situation possible because you've got really warm and really cold all mixed in one beautiful beautiful photo that your camera is just going to struggle with now one other thing if you've got really harsh highlights going on and things are just blown out in the background another thing you can try is going to the tone curve enter one point double click on the side it's going to create this kind of clippy thing now you can take that and actually just lower it down it's going to give you clipped highlights which is going to get give you a bit more of a creamy feel as opposed to just a harsh white feel i hope that makes sense hope that makes sense that good english ryan hope you get what i'm saying okay so what a massive difference white balance can make huh let's take that probably around there-ish sounds good to me okey-dokey all right that is a hot mess let's undo that take our white balance take our exposure maybe add some more of this preset or dial back the preset see what feels right probably around there now again we've got really weird mixed lighting going on and that's why she doesn't look you know the way i'd like that skin tone to look we could go to our adjustment brush here like so reset that and just add some hue until we find the right kind of situation and thinking around there and then i just want to add some warmth maybe a little bit of saturation to her skin skin tones are the hardest man and if they don't look right everything feels off so you can see she's got so many different colors hitting her skin she's got green from the grass down here reflecting up on her chin she's got some red reflecting from who knows where maybe there's that balcony that was covered in that red pine so we're going to try and even out the skin a little by little see what we can do so we'll cool that off so it blends a little bit more and we'll go up to the top where it's more kind of magenta and we will try adding some green and a little bit of warmth before after and then her cheeks seem to also have that really warm kind of green cast so follow those now should you do this on every photo no you would absolutely just not work you just have to cut your losses at a certain point but i'm just kind of showing you what you can do to try and improve things if it doesn't feel right so if i were to just reset all these adjustment brushes you can see we're kind of evening out her skin a little bit still a ways to go this could be a little bit more purple a little bit colder race up here because i went too far hopefully you see what i mean so you can make a big difference but it's going to be a lot of work to fix something that just didn't start off right so if you can get it right in camera please do focus on the light in camera focus on getting it right in camera if you're editing a wedding right now and saying i wish i were able to go back in time so do i so do i dear friend okay this one looks kind of harsh and blown out that's because it is it's very bright very harsh contrasty lighting so we're just gonna embrace it and let it be what it is this one again pretty similar story he's a little bit kind of reddish purplish whatever so we can fix that i can do him a solid cool it down a little bit contrast down white's up maybe don't go quite so far on the magenta okay before after and that is very sloppy ryan definitely need to watch out for that okay that's better and again we could adjust our subjects up here not really subjects because they're sort of just background elements but they're looking pretty orange so take that down evens that out a little bit b4 after okay sometimes that's helpful you go before after and you're like oh man the before looks actually better then you realize you need to make some changes okay not too too bad i don't know man i don't know his skin's pretty orange and then the shadow area of his suit is pretty dark so we're going to adjust those things raise that up raise that up reset contrast down white's up oh and if you're wondering how i get to this little reset thing just hold alt on your keyboard that'll toggle off a whole bunch of other hidden menu options throughout lightroom but specifically to get to that reset button that's how you do it much better hey okay do the same thing again we're actually just gonna skip ahead here assume this is gonna be a trend and get our brush ready okay next again and if you're wondering where this orange tone is coming from just got to think what is the light reflecting off of and the light is hitting this bridge which has this really warm kind of stained wood and it's reflecting up making everybody orange but only in certain spots before after just cleaning it up so you can see that it may not be possible to get rid of all the orange in every photo we've got this really weird split situation because on the one hand the light hitting him from the top is pretty cold on the other hand light hanging him from below is pretty orange rock in a hard place okay this is bugging me too much we're going to zoom in and see if we can do something in the hsl panel sometimes it could be helpful just to toggle it on and off and see if you're actually making the problem worse i don't think it's necessarily doing that so we're just going to adjust it do some fine tuning in here just the orangest spots we'll cool those down before after oh and again we meet grab our trusty brush here it's better probably do it again even his his suit is being made orange isn't that crazy also if you're wondering how to toggle between the eraser and the brush it's the alt key if you hold down alt you will toggle between eraser and brush so if in doubt just go for the alt key you'll probably do something cool now one thing that's very confusing about this whole situation to me is this random person hanging out on the deck apparently she wasn't here for the show maybe that's the neighbor that must be what it is the neighbor's house all right so this one good i like the white balance of the shot but he looks maybe a little bit warm so i'm gonna where just a little bit take it down all right here's our groom we've got a really nice dock happening in the background that's kind of distracting and our white balance can maybe be a little bit cooler so something a little round there in general your camera will look at the scene overall say what do i need to make this whole scene overall gray in terms of white balance and it will try and set it according to that so if you have a lot of blue in your photo it's naturally going to try and compensate and make everything a little bit more orange all right i think that looks pretty good before after not bad we can maybe take our trusty brush here i don't want to do too much to the color i just want to brighten up his face and kind of even out some of those harsh shadows in a very subtle way okay one of those and lastly we could make everything darker and him a little bit lighter so we'll invert this mask using the apostrophe key reset that holding alt and we're going to go to our dream ed haze again invert it because i did it wrong the first time something like that we got before we got after now maybe feels a little bit too dark so sometimes you do one thing you break three others there i'm committed to that that's my look hello winky face okay now i'm gonna do this all over again with the dock make sure you grab the sample point from somewhere very similar so it's the same amount of out of focus and color everything it'll blend better and turn your feather up that'll help i'm definitely not going to do that for every single photo but for a couple it's okay all right he looks pretty good grab that radial filter the same thing okay so first off that one's going to just even things out lower the contrast on him so before after now we're going to do another one with the dreamy darkening thing like that just add some focus on him and i might dial it back if in doubt you've gone too far which might be ironic if you're watching me and you're like he's gone way too far in every single photo however if that's the case you probably already left so [Music] there you go now if you still haven't hit that like button and you're still watching and this is still helpful do me a big favor just take two seconds and hit it leave me a comment below it's a huge favor to me and i would appreciate it also just let me know what you think or what you're wondering or how i can make these more helpful in the future because really that's what it's all about sharing the things i've learned along the way hard lessons so you don't have to learn those yourself the hard way by just wondering because that was a thing like when i was first editing people never explained this kind of stuff like hey you need to have the right lighting or else your photos are going to be crap no matter what editing you do no one mentioned that or hey the colors in your photos have to be good or else you're just never going to get the look you're going for oh no one ever mentioned that and maybe that sounds obvious but it wasn't obvious to me again we've got our kind of default brush now if you can make a default brush if you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again it'll save you a lot of time that's one thing that always blows me away very few people in lightroom seem to actually make use of these custom brushes which is so strange hold on let's grab those highlights pull those back which is so strange because what's the point of every time you want to add some texture to hair going through and making your own brush and going you know okay i want to have some contrast i want to add some texture clarity dehaze whatever no just go down here go to add texture bam done make your brush once be happy with it and then move on with your life that's what i have to say about that if you can copy a photo from a different section and just paste those settings i am noticing as i go back here that this is too cold so let's make that a little bit warmer pop it back here that looks horrible let's grab and copy these local adjustments that should make it better there we go okay so this one is just darkening everything else down and this one is adjusting for the warmth on the skin i'm actually going to raise the shadows a little bit drop the highlights a little bit in an effort to hopefully even out and compensate for this harsh lighting don't know man i think this would be better in black and white we'll try it yes the answer is yes okay that looks pretty good interesting the difference in color i think this is with the canon 5d mark iii you can see a massive difference between this and this one one is much more green than the other you just gotta be aware of that stuff okay that's not horrible the side of his face is kind of blown out so let's paint on there highlights down contrast down that's better okay now this one clearly much cooler and we've got this beautiful beautiful weird reflective light so we'll fix that just selectively i'm going over the places that are the worst in terms of just the orange-ness like a so contrast down points up before after you know it doesn't go all the way but it does help a little bit okay make sure i don't copy my brush because very rarely will you be able to reuse that also this lady in the background kind of distracting let's just get rid of her and make sure my horizon is reasonably level and her hair is sticking out so i'll just use one of those bam okay okay cool this down let's use a radial filter to brighten them very basic contrast down white's up you guessed it maybe a little exposure perfect it's amazing what one little filter can do in terms of just enhancing the whole image now i don't think there's anything i can do about the light in the background so we're just going to embrace it now we have to try and match these two so let's grab some magenta cool things down add a whole bunch of extra saturation that is the struggle hey that's reasonably close i think somewhere around there all right reset highlights down contrast down white's down okay and one last thing is i'm going to brighten up our beautiful bride here contrast down whites up like that before after good good it's always nice when you have a set of photos and you can just copy paste those are beautiful days right there okay this one way too warm compared to the rest and just want her skin to match so up here much more green reflected from the trees i guess i'm not sure so we're going to just brighten up the skin that is covered in shadow although that's kind of revealing some strange shadows happening on her skin so we're going to lower down the texture somewhere around there do another brush and this time we're going to try and even out the skin tone so we'll get some of that green out of there add some magenta maybe cool it down warm it up let's see when will it blend somewhere around there maybe i should start a tutorial series called will it blend and it'll be totally different from the will it blend of the iphone and the blender okay just trying to figure out what i want to do now this side of the photo kind of more green kind of more warm this side of the photo very blue there's blue reflecting off the water and there's blue just overall dominating this part of the frame so that makes sense so we're just going to add some warmth here a little bit of magenta a little bit of contrast take those shadows down just to even out the light so i want the same kind of brightness overall so here's before and here's after that way my eyes can be drawn more towards the actual subject rather than this out-of-focus background okay just paste those settings contrast is pretty flipping high on her hair because we've got really harsh lighting going on so we're going to dial back on those highlights raise the shadows up okay it's not perfect it's not great you know what i'm thinking you know what i'm thinking black and white i love black and white it's beautiful all of a sudden the actual harsh light kind of looks cool okay i think this could just use a little bit more pop a little bit more color take our saturation up just slightly exposure down maybe and shadows up a little bit but not too far you push it too far things just look weird ideally you want it to look the way your eye would have seen it that did not work okay i don't even know if this photo is worth keeping to be honest because i can't see their faces there's nothing going on you know what i'm gonna get rid of it i'm making a call gone all right this one looks like it's just a little warm again just be aware if you've got a photo with lots of water and sky where most of it is blue lightroom is going to tend to be too warm in its estimation of white balance hello guy you look very red why is that some people just look more red because they were to begin with so this guy is an example of that but all of the skin tone is looking a little too red so we could maybe try dialing back on the magenta a little bit if not that then maybe it's the white balance yes i'm thinking it's the white balance and a little bit less contrast all those things together you've got a recipe for really red skin they look happy i'm a fan now that look at that lighting look how beautiful that is wow it's amazing the difference a dark background makes a nice even backlight oh it's beautiful so one thing about ceremonies is most of the time people who set them up don't set them up in the right direction and then you wind up with not amazing light but this this is one of those few times in life where i can truly relish i wonder if i could add a sun flare i could try let me just show you how you would do it go up here we're going to go to sun flare basically i've just made the temperature really high taking the contrast down we can take texture and clarity down it's going to give us this kind of effect obviously so what we can do is have it come down like this and follow the kind of natural sun flare going on but then go over to our brush hello i want my eraser and we'll just erase it come on you're doing great it's thinking very very hard i think you see where i'm going with this but lightroom does not lightroom is really really fighting me okay come on come on so just so you know if you want to do a sun flare it's going to cost you some serious cpu apparently okay well anyways you do something like that and then we dial it back if lightroom ever catches up take that dial way back so it's really subtle and it's just not going to work because lightroom is being silly but see how much beautiful just drama it was adding so we're going to try something else instead you can do a radial filter and do the same thing sunflare inverted apostrophe key and at least we can kind of do one of these so we can take it adjust the angle something like that put it onto them like this and then we're going to do the brush again but we're not going to be as greedy we're just going to hit erase a couple of times hopefully lightroom will not spaz out the same amount okay and of course i went too far so we'll take our flow down shoot something like that so here's before here's after and because you want to be subtle we're just gonna make it a little bit less crazy something like that there you go beautiful moment captured and enhanced i'm not going to repeat that experiment though because that took way too long so there we go now there's a lot of backlit and stuff going on in here i think this is actually sensor dust which is not good so we're just going to take care of these really quick as quick as one can take care of this this kind of stuff only really appears when you've got sun directly behind you directly going into the camera most of the time you don't have to worry about it or if you're stopped down it'll show up more okay and there's that and we could we could just because do the sun flare but without the fancy erasing something like that just to make it a little bit more enhanced here's before because after just kind of add some magic crop it in a little so i want to give them a little bit more room on this side the direction they're looking then the other side good and we rinse and repeat just copy paste the sunflower because ain't nobody got time for that go on a magical quest to find all of the dust particles again because this is my dream and then get rid of this ugly red patch of grass because patch of grass patch of tree because no one likes a dead tree good adjust and here's before here's after look at that look at that we did good together okay this one i like this shot i think that it would benefit from her just being a little bit brighter just like that just kidding we're going to take contrast down white's up you guessed it and maybe even add a little bit of texture because it looks like she's not super sharp like a so i can get behind that i really can something like that you know what i think we could also use a little bit more saturation so see how the vibrance isn't affecting her skin tone so much more the purples and the greens whereas if i do the saturation it's affecting everything equally somewhere around there that feels good that feels good we're on a roll now okay that that does not feel so good we got some weird lighting weird white balance going on so i'm thinking very harsh light very harsh colors i'm gonna go with black and white i think that's gonna be just nicer good this one is more doable we're gonna brighten him up a little should probably have our default brush not be sun flare because that's not helping anybody something like this looks like he's gonna cry i'm not sure and the last thing i'm going to do is very purple in this photo so we'll just maybe warm him up a little bit add some green something like that good and very contrasty we could definitely take the shadows up like i saw warm that up okay now honestly the bottom half of this image is just very dark overall so we'll add a sun flare just kidding we will actually do is just brighten it contrast down lights up fixes everything people if you have a go-to trick in lightroom like the brush you always use or the setting that you know always just rescues you what is it let me know mine is contrast down lights up apparently contrast down highlights down there we go i have two tricks okay now we've got some really harsh light on i think it's mom i'm not sure but on this lovely lady we just need to contrast down um highlights down rescue some of that good how many photos of the same thing can we have answer lots i like that i like that a lot i'm going to just zoom in a little bit because i feel like getting a little tighter on the action we'll actually add more to the photo and then this one area of her chest that is just blown out we'll see if we can't recover that better now one last thing just to place some emphasis on our puppy you can tell i like puppies there just brighten a little bit add a little bit of texture just make her pop off the screen a little bit more bam puppy before puppy after okay feels good whoo we got some white balance issues here people what a massive difference white balance makes honestly if you can develop an eye for it it's going to make the biggest possible difference in your editing or almost any other skill just getting an eye for what colors look right and what colors look wrong like this you can play with any of these other settings as much as you want you won't get it looking right unless you actually adjust the white balance and i'm no expert by far i get this wrong all the time but i'm getting better than i was that's the main thing and sometimes it's counterintuitive like this looks too blue but it's just because there's so much water in behind him that's my theory or it's actually too blue and i just missed it you're laughing at me aha okay we got another cool shot zoom in a little bit she's got a flyaway hair here that is just catching the light in the way that is distracting spot removal click and drag a lot of people don't know that you can click and drag the spot removal tool but you can so there okay and because hubby is very bright pull that back something like that he's also way warmer than her in skin tone so we're gonna just even that out and because we just love it so much we're gonna correct for this really warm lighting on her neck like that even it out and of course her face is a little bit too cold so her face was cold just in white balance if we wanted to go all out her arm is a little magenta hello just realizing now the flow is way down that's why that's taking so long okay a little bit too blue around there and again if you're wondering about these weird kind of areas just because the full res preview hasn't loaded okay that looks fine this looks dark but the lake is not so she must have been standing in the shade obviously we're going to have to compensate with a nice radial filter really the brush i use as little as possible when you can use the radial filter because it'll just do a better job it's quicker it's more subtle more of a subtle edit you can get away with the better results you're going to have okay so i've just darkened down the water i'm going to raise the exposure of everything see what i can get away with somewhere around there so here's before here's after honestly it might be better with the bright water let's go in the middle and maybe raise the saturation of that water up a little bit something like that before after good and we can copy paste that bad boy like i saw she has kind of like an anne hathaway vibe just in that specific angle says i okay this is really cool i'm just going to enhance it one step further using our dehancer dehancer our dreamy dehaze bring out the d answer this one same kind of deal but this one i'm going to just brighten up this area actually let's go with our add texture and then brighten that is definitely too much in hindsight i like it but it's too much i want things to be softer and we'll do the dreamy thing too okay three fellas another reading and she told a funny joke what do you think it was did you hear about the snake who got taken to court and lost yeah it was really sad he had no leg to stand on ha ha if you know a worse joke than that please leave it in the comments below this has been your daily dad joke of the day if you think i should start a new youtube channel dedicated exclusively to dad jokes please let me know dad jokes and parrot officiated weddings that'll be the thing 2021 people the year of change for us you'll be getting married with a cockatoo maybe i'll do a mixture of bird efficient and dj slash comedian what do you think about that all right this looks like a sun flare situation just adds a little bit of interest to the shot i find you might find that is atrociously annoying and ugly that's cool so i'm gonna i'm dragging it out to make it larger and then i'm putting it way up at the top so it's going to be more of a subtle effect as it comes down is before and here's after we just add a little bit of dreaminess a little bit of romance all right looks like they got enough romance going on by themselves amazing the difference an angle can make hey like that is unbelievable i would have shot the whole wedding from this side if if i could it's easy to say right you can see somebody else's work and be like oh i should have done this well in the moment it's not so obvious always okay so he's very bright in the sun she's very dark in the shade what can we do about this well obviously we can brighten her up a little bit by painting a sun flare on her or contrast down lights up a little bit of extra exposure something like that i don't know man looks a little bit cheesy let's try just a radial filter just brighten that whole side that's better and take it back a little bit in case you went too far so there's just so much headroom in this photo i really don't need that much so i'm gonna crop in looks good now it looks like he had i don't know if it's a mole or not right here but i think just in this particular photo we're gonna get rid of it of course it's still showing up good cute okay something like that that's a beautiful photo maybe a little bit cold i don't know it's hard to say her skin looks really perfect okay we do have some coloring situations going on so the lake blue light you can see her forehead has a little bit of blue on it and under her chin not so blue so let's just go up here and very slightly just warm that area up a little bit good a little bit around here is a little cold that's better okay and then one more just to cool down these hot spots reset make a little colder eyelets down there pretty subtle but we could also maybe dial back on the contrast good okay hello come on copy paste and wide shots you can normally get around get away with a little bit more contrast a little more color this looks very green so we're gonna add a little bit of magenta maybe a little bit more blue still somewhere around there okay now we could crop in i'm going to just a little bit to hide this seat ever so slightly i still want it to be a wide so i'm not going to go too far and we'll just copy that now that i flip back and forth definitely too much magenta added that's better and all of the bottom of this frame very dark so we'll just brighten it up contrast down whites up something like that and then brush so you can actually brush and add on to your graduated filter unless you're like me and make a mistake and it doesn't seem to do anything take your flow up that might help so just the dark areas of this image i'm going to go over okay that's better i don't know what was happening here but it looks like it was fun one thing little stuff like this on the corner of the frame just watch for it if you can get rid of it why not that looks good a little more contrast perfect done done now since these are two very similar shots i'm actually going to just take this one put in black and white just gives us a little bit of a different perspective good again he's full sun everything else is very shady so let's actually just take a radial filter invert reset exposure down we're going to just try and level this out a little bit something like that so here's before here's after we've just made him ever so much less bright and then we're going to radial filter it up here again contrast down lights up and brighten up the other parts of this image it's not perfect i'm not trying to you know totally change the light of the situation because that's how it was you can mess around more if you want to me i don't think that's necessary with this particular shot okay this one i don't know why there's so much headroom happening we don't need it better this one add some warmth up in here and i'm actually just going to reset this brush we're going to do contrast on white's down yeah a little bit of warmth that's going to be our shadow brush because i feel like we're going to encounter this a few times and yeah that's about right in terms of adjustment turn our flow down a little bit so we can add this more selectively again before after you can really see the brush marks and that is something i never want to have happen so just erase from up there okay that's better showing now just be aware the further you go with stuff like this the less natural it's going to look so if you can get away with just not adjusting it or a more subtle adjustment that's most of the time going to give you the best result the less noticeable it is that you edited it the better things are going to be and your mind knows even if your subcon even if you're conscious mind isn't able to grasp why something feels wrong your subconscious even if you're not a photographer is able to pick up on stuff like oh she's in the shadow but she's as bright as him why is that it just doesn't feel right this is something i tell myself it's a theory okay this is really cool i love this moment because she's like in the middle of a laugh it almost looks like it's cute we're going to brighten her up a little bit shine bright like a diamond okay success if there's ever a photo it's worth editing it's the first kiss huh make a virtual copy and this virtual copy we'll do in black and white i want to give them one of each something like that okay that's weird somehow i made that into a black and white by accident okay i'm actually going to just enhance this a little bit more make sure we're level and copy and paste why are you copying the black and white settings that's so strange and why are you changing it to black and white copy paste there we go every once in a while it's like there's a ghost living in my computer i've not named him yet but casper seems appropriate okay we've got several of these kiss pictures so let's do another black and white some all about that variety and we'll crop in a little bit hello come on there you go man these are some awesome kiss photos most of the time you get like one good one nope tight wide medium all of the kiss photos were had all right now it looks like we switched cameras because the color is much different and of course we've got a super bright background or we've got super dark subjects so let's go with the dark subjects to start with contrast down white's up exposure up there we go that's one problem solved now the next thing is we look like we don't have much saturation going on somewhere around there okay we can maybe make it a little bit more blue a little bit more green something like that that feels much better compare just make sure we match yeah pretty close and we could pull off our highlights maybe raise the shadows a little bit too good that feels better erase my radial filter off of there brighten things up nice okay this orange sailboat that that is what we call an eyesore so let's just get rid of that good and a person could get rid of this boat reflection too if it's quick i'll normally do it if it's going to take a while then it just depends on whether the photo is one of those important photos or whether it's a photo that you know they're not really going to notice or care nice good make sure you don't accidentally copy your spot removal stuff because that's awkward you look so happy i'm happy for them congratulations you guys you did it ain't no plague gonna stop you pandemic okay that's super cute now the question is do we do it in color or do we do it in black and white i think the answer is clear one of each although too repetitive let's instead do black and white on this one good here's a furball he is cute looks like the other dog is taking a i don't even know what the other dog is doing to be honest but it does not look appropriate for a wedding i will say that good and again we've got very very dark it's like he positioned himself perfectly to be in the most awkward spot to edit just directly in the sun i guess it's that extra six inches of height okay i'm going to try and recover the shadows of her hair because it's a black ball something like that good nice i love those shadows very pretty okay a little bit of a radial filter would be nice on him probably i like that a lot and we can grab a radial filter on both of them reset this bad boy go down to our dehaze just kind of dreamify the background there it is okay nearly missed that and again i'm sure there's other stuff i've missed that you've seen and been like why didn't he do that might be because i just missed it it happens to the best of us and also to me [Music] nice that we need to do something about highlights down contrast down texture down looks like we we just lost that that battle he's definitely blown out an area of his forehead all right we're making progress here let's grab a radial filter dreamy dehaze darken down a little bit shoot dial back on that clarity because that's a little too far it just helps you know where to look in the scene not bad not bad take this radial filter move it up a little bit bam take this radial filter move it down a little bit bam look at me look at me go how far i have come warm that up bring the contrast down a little or a lottle there what do you know there's about a million bridge photos so it's a good thing that we got our settings kind of dialed in here something like that i can maybe take the contrast back up just a little bit um everybody's always so happy after the wedding i think it's honestly because you just have nerves and things on your mind prior to and so you just don't look as happy and then you're done and you can relax and all of a sudden people start looking like they're having a good time or maybe it's because it's emotional and you're just you're torn you're happy sad you know okay crop in here a bit and darken down okay so father on the left here is just a little bit dark so let's brighten him up white's down contrast down you mean white's up ryan good this one can be in black and white why not good gotta cheers now this is one thing that if you have the opportunity and you come across a moment like this and you know it's really cool really organic really lovely just take the time to say hey can you guys do that again because i'd love to get a photo of this and 90 of the time people will be like yeah for sure so then you can reframe get you know everybody set up nicely drop this little flyer thing just get it really beautiful and have that moment be even better take control of the situation and you'll get better photos as a result that is my wise words for the day okay so this one just dark on this side but on the other side so let's just brighten up like that and since it's the shade we're going to warm it up a little bit like that and make sure you don't go too far like me and definitely don't copy that however we could probably use that on this side since we have a similar situation happening good and a little bit of green coming in here so i'll add a little magenta okay and her fingers look actually a little bit dark so let's brighten that up too that'll work and there's a speck here the old hair speck and lastly this photo just keeps i noticed things at the very last second her skin just the way the light is sitting is not really super flattering light so let's just grab this and smooth it out just a little bit just to minimize the way that that's appearing there we go perfection take this copy everything except for those graduated filters i love it and i'm just going to crop in here because that's not really adding to the photo but the brightness is just sort of distracting from it this is a beautiful moment absolutely love it one thing i am going to do is just darken down this side like that much better now one other thing that i could have done in addition is do a range mask so we could do a range mask set it to luminance and that way it's only going to affect the bright parts of this area and leave the shadows alone so you can see now we can reduce the brightness or adjust the brightness of those bright areas we can maybe play with the texture bring the clarity down but it's not going to affect the shadows as much which is good so i'm going to copy that and actually paste that over here you should see now we've brightened up these pillars that were previously being affected okay and you know what i kind of want to crop in even more just to focus on this moment love it super cute dad looks shook nice okay this looks a little purple for some reason so we're just gonna warm it up and also drop the shadows if you push the shadows too far that's why things are looking weird your eyes know man they know when things don't look the way they should you can see when you have better light you're not out in the middle of the hot sun it's much easier to get a flattering photo and as soon as you go into a section that has you know mixed light we've got super warm bright background super dark cool shadows it's gonna be way more of a fight to get things to look right you gotta fight for the right to party okay so you can see i'm able to just adjust the shadow parts of the image thanks to that range mask so we can do stuff like this to brighten it up and also add a little bit of warmth to match with the grass back here something like that not too shabby i'm gonna copy that see if i can use it elsewhere warm you up i think this photo will look good once i can actually just play some more focus on our subject here so we're gonna grab not the add texture brush let's go with dream eda haze see the difference before after it just focuses the eyes makes him the brightest part of the photo everything feels better good a little more saturation maybe somewhere around there that feels pretty good that photo makes no sense until you see this one so if you're wondering that's why [Music] okay all right so our background very washed out or our foreground super dark so you can see huge difference in exposure easiest way to address this is probably going to be with a range mask so let's start by just making one of these bad boys i'm going to cover everything with a graduated filter reset that filter next go to range mask set it to luminance and just go for the bottom area we just want to adjust the shadows here so set that down like that take your exposure up your whites up you don't want to do the shadows up because that'll just make it really weird highlights up we basically want to just increase the exposure of everything but nothing too much and then we'll just see where we can sit that somewhere around there now we have to back it off to where it doesn't look weird anymore so probably start like so okay something like that take that off on yeah not too bad extend this out and increase this luminance mask so it's going to grab more of the overall area not just the darkest parts of the image that'll make it more kind of subtle good and then smoothness we can increase that or decrease just to see what's going to work the best definitely somewhere around there okay lastly pull it back a little bit because we want it to be subtle something around there seems the best we can come up with i'm taking my time on this one because i know there's a bunch of family photos so if i can actually get this dialed in the way that it should be and looking good then i'm gonna be able to just copy and paste it it's gonna be way better than if i tried to do this one at a time so we're gonna take our shadows up take our whites up a little bit our blacks yeah let's take them down a little bit good good try and pull back the highlights even a little bit more the further you go with this the less natural it's going to look so it's kind of finding that sweet spot of how far can i push things before it's gone too far so here's before here's after we've got a lot of it back but maybe we've gone too far i don't know let's pull back the shadows just in case i think that's better that's probably about as good as we're gonna get with this situation the last thing we could try doing is taking our luminance down in the blues maybe adding a little saturation in the blues but i feel like that's actually not working for us it's taking it too far so that's what we got compared to this i think we've come a long way so now i can take this and paste it onto all these family photos everything and with any luck we should have a pretty easy time on the rest of these so this one obviously not working get rid of that just see what's happening so this is adding a lot but we we're just going too far so roll it back let's just try a radial filter here something like that and that'll be our backup so for ones that don't work like this hopefully we can just copy paste that backup settings now another thing we could do is we could try playing around here with that dreamy a fact so we could do it with the dreamy dehaze and just see what that does to the background maybe increase the intensity that's an option it does kind of help a little bit and we can add some more exposure and get away with it it's really up to you what do you think i think somewhere in the middle will be good what the heck just happened here let's stick with that compared to this uh you know what we need just to settle in between those two so let's do it again dreamy dehaze drag that back so it's very subtle there that's the way i like it okay we got some weird splotchiness going on probably from our oh just from the smart preview not so bad but definitely that is happening because of our range mask it's a danger of range masks you push them too far they just don't look good i lied it wasn't the range mask it was just a really obnoxious sailboat that was blown out of proportion to begin with so there you go so let's start by just grabbing the texture clarity contrast pulling those all down then let's go to our spot removal tool and see if we can just get rid of it could we get so lucky probably not looks like it's not gonna happen for us try one more have no idea why the opacity is set at 100 but i can still see this boat through here what's the deal yo turn down our feather size maybe honestly i don't know it might be better than what we had before so there's that there we go we'll just stack the adjustment brushes on each other then we'll go on here and last of all take our clarity down texture down sharpness down just blend it all together it's not perfect but it's better than that and of course we could always crop in a little bit seeing as we have too much headroom anyways okay that one in black and white good and i'm just going to zoom in and make sure that the splotchiness goes away once the full res preview loads yeah perfect i thought as much so one thing about smart previews that really does suck for some reason that kind of thing can happen with your presets and you think oh my gosh something's wrong here but really nothing's wrong it just her eyes are closed let's delete that just remove it and his skin looks pretty green in this photo so i'm going to try just adding a little bit of magenta and still not quite so let's try once more maybe just warming up his skin a little bit of magenta something like that a little bit better and then sun's skin in the middle looks a little bit blue so we'll warm that up brighten it at the same time good okay ladies be chilling oh we don't want that one you can see what a massive difference that's our bright try and get rid of the dynamic range photo from our family photos so it just shows you how crazy that lighting situation was in the back okay so the white here we could go to our tone curve and do one of these and just kind of give it more of a creamy effect yeah it's up to you i personally don't really like that so we're just gonna stick with having it kind of blown out that's okay we can't recover it once it's gone so why cry over spilt milk so we have a lot of these chair photos i think i could probably just you know do one in black and white that's enough chair photos for me oh perfect how's that for timing all right so this one obviously we've got super blown out background or very dark ladies i'm going to start by just worrying about the background get the colors of the background right now i'm going to see if i can recover these girls and we can actually do a range mask but just on a specific area with our brush so this might actually work better than our gradated graduated filter again we're going to just target the shadow areas and you can see that does an amazing job perfect so good just double painting on the areas that are still too dark okay just like that oh my gosh i can't believe how awesome that was worked amazingly well just for reference before after okay we're still a little bit kind of green in the background so we'll adjust that a little bit maybe make it a little more blue as well we haven't even rolled back the highlights all the way look at that just look at it okay there's that so props to lightroom for that cool tool again why don't we just copy this photo we're going to try something super cutting edge here and paste it over here bam oh yeah i present you with before and after huh you can see how effective that was now there are limitations obviously you can see we're not really recovering everything here anymore it looks kind of weird but if we switch to maybe a little dehaze a little bit less saturation and just don't pull it quite so hard we can still recover quite a bit compared to where it was i think that's good just copy paste see what happens that one not so much where's our adjustment brush no idea i think this one will just go black and white looks good to me okay copy this bad boy paste it over here find where our adjustment brush is that i can't find there it is and we're going to erase everything draw it on again just copying it for the settings again if you want to see the overlay you just press o good press organ to hide it pull back on that exposure good compared to what it was it's actually pretty amazing what you can do in lightroom once you know what's there okay that'll look good in black and white i'm just gonna go in black and white just gonna do it people taking a risk now how many of these do you really feel like it's appropriate to sit and draw on individually before your workflow is just way too much all right let's erase off this hill oops also if you're wondering how i changed the brush size that's just with the trackpad swiping up and down with two fingers or if you're on a mouse you can do just with the click wheel so that's one thing a lot of people don't make use of because if every time you want to adjust your brush you're going over to the size and the feather in the flow it takes so much longer just do yourself a favor and don't do that it says all right okay not perfect not bad good we're finally out of that darken this down good that looks real cool i don't really know what the sword collection was for in this wedding but it sure was dope okay oops another thing other than white balance that can make a big difference to your images that just getting the right feel for is the amount well two things i guess the amount of saturation and the amount of contrast because if your saturation is just a little bit off so like it's this instead of this or this or this right like figuring out where it should naturally sit because your tendency when you start off is to go like up to here and it's just way too far when really reality normal life is more kind of that zone if you go too little too washed out you go too much it's just gross that's a very common mistake i see when people send me photos is they've just gone way way too hard on everything all of the saturation all of the contrast all the everything the idea is you want to add pop to your images you still want them to be you know like wow wow factor you want color whatever but you don't want to push it so far that it's like this could never be actual real life you want it to look real and natural even if it's not also this is the most amazing champagne bottle opening of all time in my life like look at that it's like millions of beautiful butterflies in the air and i don't even know what to do with this like should i try and enhance it or should i just leave it is that good we could try adding some texture let's just see what happens if we add some texture honestly does that add or take away doesn't really do much much i think i like it better dreamier honestly i'm cool with that or if anything let's just add a little bit of texture like right around here now i'm going with dreamy i'm going with dreamy that's really cool it's so cool i kept about a million of them because i couldn't decide which one i liked it would be a good gif actually that's another thing that if you're looking for something interesting and kind of a bonus to give your clients you can make gifs really really easy just by going to giphy.com or there are some other websites online you can do it through too and they are so shareable so much more than photos so if you make a gif and actually have your logo on it just you know signature edits or whatever your photography name is and you send that to your client i guarantee you they will repost that whereas you send them photos they won't always repost them and if they do they won't want to have your watermark on them but it's no big deal with a gif especially if you have other stickers or whatever so hot tip for you make gifts all right bridesmaid number one is feeling thirsty look at that car so that's actually my car i drove it here just kidding i feel like i would be afraid to drive one of these anybody else feel that way like not because i wouldn't want to i would love to drive one of these it's just like i don't know if i trust myself this is one car you don't want to not see the curb or back up into a fence you know it'll just be a whole new meaning to the idea of a bad day okay let's edit this guy so there's a few things we could do we could mess around in the hsl panel and just kind of focus on the different colors we've got going on in this photo we've got red we've got blue we've got green we've got brown it's kind of messy because of that so we could try just limiting the colors we could take the saturation down in the yellows and the greens and that'll just make it a little bit more focused maybe add some more saturation in the oranges because their skin is a little bit desaturated looking and of course let's grab one of these guys and go with a dehaze darken just to put the focus on our couple a little bit more now lastly i think we could really benefit from warming this particular photo up awesome something i like that so here's before years after look at that like james bond and i don't know james bond's new wife love it love it love it love it now honestly this photo i think would be even cooler if we were to go with a different aspect ratio so right now it's locked but if we went with something like 1610 a little lack of so you just give it more of a kind of cinematic feel or even if we want to go real crazy and go with like 16 9 bam now it's like three in the movies cool i like that a lot all right this is more of a standard just shot a little green so we'll add some magenta still a little cold warm that up and we have the same photo pretty much again so let's do one in black and white it's actually really cool i'm digging it in black and white people we could maybe add some texture to her hair texture clarity contrast do the same thing with his glasses make them pop out and the bow tie because bow ties are bala that did not work get rid of the bow tie contrast cool [Music] i'm just thinking this one is probably yeah too warm not too cold warm that up much better all right now we got these photos which are some of my favorite now the only thing that's kind of a bummer i'm sure there's just no time to do anything about it but if this car were moved it'd be so much better and same with the one in the background you can't always do it but if you can try i don't know what just happened but i skipped a photo all right let's do one of these one of those contrast down a bit exposure up okay i can see everybody now let's take the contrast way down take our preset up and then just sort of find a sweet spot maybe around there i can dig it i can do it okay so this area a little bit dark compared to the bottom of this photo which is also very irrelevant because it's just grass so we'll darken that down like i saw nice look at all these cool cars come on [Music] individual roses cool oh i guess that makes sense considering people can't share drinks for safety how interesting has 20 20 been for weddings just been truly different i for one am looking forward to 2021. although i will say i really love allotment and smaller weddings are if i have the choice they're so much better i personally find them the best because you got to connect with a couple more normally get more time things are more chill [Music] just my thing other people like to party that's cool too so fun story the couple actually didn't want to do couples photos at all at this wedding and so levi the photographer was like hey guys can i borrow you for like 10 minutes please and they said yeah okay honestly how great are these for the 10 minutes he had the key is find great light find a nice dark background shoot in the shade if you can still just have nicer light now of course it's later in the afternoon which is also helping the light is better and another thing is it's later in the summer so this wedding was the beginning of september i don't know if i'm gonna be able to get rid of these i'm hoping i can i don't think i can not without attitude at ryan anyways this wedding was the beginning of september and the difference is that in the oh i can't multitask oh that almost works did we do it are we gonna get away with that almost probably not because of this grass okay well anyways as i was saying we're gonna give up on this it is what it is we can maybe darken it down weddings in september the sun is lower in the sky even in the middle of the day because as winter comes around the sun never really gets as high in the sky which means that the light is just better for photos all day long because it's going through more atmospheres being diffused if you want to learn more about that just watch my video on lighting that i put out a couple weeks ago or a while ago depending on when you watch this video but essentially the later in the year it is unless you're in the south southern hemisphere the better the light is going to be southern hemisphere is the opposite june july august that's when the light starts to get at its best in the southern hemisphere but anyways it's because the skies the sun is lower in this guy you have a better angle it's kind of like having sunset all day long sort of but seriously imagine if they didn't have these they didn't have any bridal party photos i mean they wanted a bridal party they didn't have any of these kind of photos would have been a travesty i'm going to do one more radial filter here just to highlight the bouquet mule hmm it could actually be a little bit brighter something like that i think is good okay so the bridge in the background kind of distracting because it's so blown out i'm gonna see if i can recover some of that and also just kind of de-clarifying that's better now another thing these people back here just notice them not much i can do other than just make them less clear actually one thing that i kind of like doing sometimes is using the d haze tool in reverse so you actually use it as a haze tool instead of dehaze can't take it too far like i just did because it looks ridiculous but a little bit of haze it's a good thing and you white balance it up here something like that you can see how harsh the light still was it's really just about finding shade shooting backlit rather than straight into the sun like this that's just a very hard spot to find good light when you're shooting and they're getting directly hit by the sun like this i don't know probably leave it in color and brighten her face little do a range mask good good we're getting there people we are getting there let's do this one in black and white honestly i feel like we've got a lot of these photos and this one just isn't of the best quality so i'm gonna get rid of that one all righty and now it's time for shots okay this one very bright on the sides nice exposure in the middle so let's just do it graduated filter bam highlights down contrast down white balance down just want to make nice even light and then it's way easier to do anything you want to do get the light right we should get t-shirts say that there we go another business idea i'm going to start a photography t-shirt company don't know what the situation is with this looks kind of like pirates of the caribbean gold i'm sure it's not but let's just place some focus on it copy that paste that um white balance to the rescue a little extra saturation and a little less vibrance so by doing that you take down the saturation in all the colors but more so the other colors that aren't skin tones then this way we add saturation to raise this saturation of the skin and lower the saturation of everything else kind of relatively hope that makes sense and then it was night time i think black and white yes definitely yes very cool those are awesome cufflinks okay this guy seems like he knows what he's talking about you'll see later why i say that spoiler alert he is a magician get that white balance right probably more saturation less vibrance careful ryan careful somewhere around there maybe a little bit cooler a little more saturation just finding that balance that's the trickiest part once you get it if you get it right you can just copy paste which is nice i love it so much more when you get to this part of the day because the light is just right and it's so much quicker more easier and more satisfying to edit photos where people look great because their skin looks great the colors look great this is why people shoot at golden hour this might be cool in black and white and by might be i mean it would be but well we have one in color so let's do one in black and white i like it okay [Music] feel like we use a little more saturation right around there so if you can't tell i'm just using the plus key the minus key and the shift key that's pretty much this entire thing hello there we go a little too warm a little too much of that one thing is around sunset you do need to watch your white balance because it changes pretty quickly also side note look at that view man beautiful on the one hand you have this really really beautiful sunset the other hand you don't want to make them too dark and strike a compromise hmm crap this out just don't have his ear chilling by itself in the background there side note look at the size of that rock well done my friend you her teeth for whatever reason just are not being flattered by this light so we'll just smooth those out first thing contrast down wait up a little bit desaturate a little bit ever so slightly towards blue now you may or may not like the amount of grain i have on this you can always just take it move the grain setting down that is found in the detail panel so you just grab actually detail it's found in effects take the size of the grain down and you'll fix that problem size and amount but i'm kind of digging it i think it has sort of a filmy vibe so let the good times roll says i and we're so close people we're so close we've got maybe 50 photos left at this point i'm not surprised if you're no longer with me and i'm talking to myself but i have 50 photos left and i'm enjoying every minute of it also side note how different does the bride look when her hair is down okay now it might be a little bit too much green now that i set it so let's take the size down a little bit mount down a little bit and we're just going to sync that cinco de mayo but just copy the grain so we'll check none and go to green paste it take a look see what difference we're making honestly ah it's not really making much of a difference and i'm kind of digging it anyways so i'm just gonna stick with tricky part is getting white balance right with these shots because around sunset everything still looks sunsetty you know if that makes any sense so it's like the sun is hitting him and it is pink so you do want everything to have kind of a pink tone to it you don't want to fight it and try and make it not pink because that'll just feel weird the main thing is making things warm enough hello come on great shot all right the grain is too much now i can say it probably because we're at iso 8000 probably so at this point all right here's his magic trick you ready so he's talking he's got a 20 bill i have no idea how one thing leads to the next but all of a sudden he's got this 20 bill and voila there's this guy in front of a sunset that's not what i meant to show you but whatever we're just gonna show this dude it's that sounds sad come back to my story um you know what we're just going to grab mr black and white okay so now remember our magic trick we've got this guy he passed a thing to our groom and we're at iso 10 000 so let's definitely go to a noise reduction setting maybe medium oh yeah medium is probably too heavy let's go back here noise reduction turn that down a little bit okay somewhere around there maybe let's sync that before i forget and i'll show you the rest of this match trick check none noise reduction check okay so we've got this guy he passes this thing to our groom who takes it and holds it aloft as i said holding a loft next thing we know it it's a kiwi okay interesting so far that needs to be in black and white because it is definitely too blurry go down here take our sharpening up clarity up also side note if something is blurry oftentimes you put in black and white it just looks artistic and cool no longer looks blurry it's a fun fact for you okay so he's got the kiwi he's holding it aloft he's thinking what does this have to do with my wedding and pretty much everybody has no idea but then then people this guy takes out a kiwi peeler i don't know he takes it out after we fix his strangely red skin tone something like that okay we'll get there we'll get there bear with me all right so 12 000 so that's why that's what's going on here he takes the kiwi out and there's a 20 bill inside the kiwi okay what i was not there and i wish i were because people how do you put a 20 bill inside of a kiwi that is what i ask you tonight all right so we got our kiwi shot we got our kiwi story are you not entertained i'm gonna use a dehaze darken that looks like a black and white to me nice hmm the groom's just like well dude you just blew my mind my actual flipping mind and all of a sudden it's iso 5000 so i don't really know what happened here i guess this was a 2.8 it was a 7200 and then he switched to a 35. side note the reason they could do this is because they're in canada and canada has plastic money this would be a very disappointing trick if you tried to do it in america and your money just melted inside of the kiwi do not try this trick in the states official warning given also if you know how to do this kind of magic trick please let me know in the comments below it would it would mean a lot [Music] mm-hmm that really doesn't serve any purpose so i'm going to get rid of this photo and then we switch to some really weird lighting go black and white and then they're dancing on the beach man probably what's going to make the most sense here is black and white because we're at iso 2500 only 1 160th of a shutter which is making everything really blurry and that looks pretty cool anyways now one thing the grass is green obviously but if we take the saturation down in the yellows and the greens that might kind of make this better or we could try making the grass more of a red less green i think that's gonna be better for us then we can add some saturation maybe to the blues and the purples and just bring out that sunset a little bit maybe maybe not i'm thinking it's probably pretty good right around there and things get crazy up in here with the purple lights mm-hmm i love the shot it's really cool in black and white in not black and white it's pretty meh great we're almost there i think we got like 10 photos remaining side note if you have an older version of lightroom and you're not able to use the texture brush i'm just going to say it you are missing out before i had the texture brush i mean my life wasn't much different but i'm going to be real it's very handy because more than just adding texture you can also use it just to sharpen things that aren't sharp in a way that is way more convincing than clarity or sharpening is in certain situations not a magic thing but it certainly feels like magic sometimes okay shadows up a bit the art of the night time photo the hardest photo to get looking good and honestly a lot of it comes down to your light if your light is good your photos look good if your light is not good your photos are just me so we're going to go with some black and white erase that clarity and the texture not too far though because then you start to look weird something like that feels cool good this looks alright but they're just a little bit too desaturated so we'll add some saturation and maybe a little bit of whites anything with a weird color cast i'm not going to be able to fix so we're just going to do the right thing and put in black and white apparently they really really like their purple lights there we go these guys look like fun okay so i mean that's okay in black and white it might be better yeah it's got more party vibes more classic retro cool feel so if it doesn't look good in color maybe just put in black and white give it a try of course you need the kind of the right black and white profile for that to be effective but once you got one you're in a good place i think we got about 20 photos left people okay that's out of focus so the old black and white steps in to save the day and watch this texture bam it's like it's in focus it's clearly not in focus but that's okay because we have the brooding dehaze darken and we make everything else less in focus and all of a sudden they look more in focus how's that for reverse psychology huh okay fix this white balance issue brighten things up a bit somewhere around there okay this will never look great in color or at least not with my editing capabilities so we're just going to do want a damn take our bass player and make him darker hey bass player don't be afraid okay somewhere around there cool i have no idea what happened here i'm assuming it's major league's white balance and in fact he was correct but i still don't like the looks of it the color just isn't good so do one of those with a dreamy d that one looks cooler i'll leave that one in color hmm you guessed it it's time time for some old-fashioned black and white now we can try some of these other presets and see if any of them work better for night i do have some night presets which are just meant to have they have more um denoising on them they tend to help with the colors a bit but when you're in a situation like this where they were using concert lighting with you know really colored situation going on you're probably not gonna have much luck looks good looks good i wonder where the groom and bride went i mean there's the is that the groom he looks so different literally even lost track of who's who at this point i've been editing for too long oh there's the groom there he is i know who he is okay let's just darken everything down except for him a little bit more subtle and then we'll add some texture a little bit of dehaze something like that this photo has nothing in it i don't know how it passed the test of should i keep this that photo is hilarious and i understand exactly why i kept this i love that okay let's put a little bit of denoising on here we've already got some but a little bit more a little bit more sharpening there we go that's so awesome i hope when i'm old i'm still that fun i hope i'm even that fun to begin with finally picture with some nice color perfect okay now rather than brighten the whole image i'll just brighten this one spot it makes more sense contrast we'll add whites and drop blacks something like that i don't even know what was going on here but it was definitely a party and or color that is the question honestly if i can get it looking good in color i prefer color if i can't then you know what happens but i think that looks pretty good so let's stick with it this guy looks funny all right we got an eagles drummer here ain't no party complete without an eagle's drummer nice we got a nice wide shot the only thing that really needs touching up is our bass player just some highlights pulled back on him as much as i can get away with which apparently is not much that's the thing about high iso a lot of people don't realize it's not just about grain the higher you go with your iso the more dynamic range you actually lose as well and dynamic range is just the amount of difference between the brightest part and the darkest part of your image that your camera is capable of capturing before it starts clipping blacks and making them pure black and clipping whites and making them pure white so that does it people we have gone through 414 photos together and this wedding is almost complete the last thing i'm going to do but i'm going to do it tomorrow when you're not watching is go through these photos one more time and anything that just stands out to me i'm going to adjust it so i'm going to do it in the library mode because it's actually a lot faster to scroll between images i'm just going to go like this and anytime that there's a photo that something sticks out i'm going to adjust it so we'll go through and if something is just super obviously needs an adjustment like this dress i think could be brighter and also i could bring the detail out a little bit more so i'm going to go down here a little adjustment brush just swing add some texture a little bit more brightness like that here's before here's after just a little something something right so i'm going to go back to our library view and continue my merry quest till i find another one that needs adjusting like this rock is definitely too blue so we will warm up the rock like i saw you get the point so i go through i double check everything is good and then i export now i normally have some actual presets made for exporting however for some reason those seem to have been messed with with the recent update to lightroom so i'll just run you through my export presets i go ahead i put them in a subfolder labeled with the couple's name so in this case it'll be rachel and michael and custom name okay i put in that name for the file that's actually not true i don't and the reason is i used to but then a couple would come back and say hey can you give me this in black and white and they'd say you know rachel and thomas 14 596. and i'd say perfect yes and then i'd have to go in and find what that actual file was so if you have the actual file name it's a lot easier just with clients talking about which photos need adjustments that kind of thing so i'll export them like that with the original file name i go down here i'll do full size i sharpen for matte paper and i set that to low and then the last thing i do is once they're exported i'll upload them to pixie set and pixie set is an online platform where you can create custom galleries for your clients and the great part about pixie set is it will actually create multiple versions of photos and then the couple can download those different versions so what i mean is i used to have to create several sets of exports one for print one for facebook etc now i just create the full res ones and i will upload them directly to pixie set and then pixie set will actually allow the user to go through on the front end they have their own nice gallery it gives them instructions on how to download how to purchase prints that kind of thing they can go through they can make favorites they can add them to a cart they can download them and they can actually select what size they'd want them for whether they want them for web or for print use that kind of thing so pixie set just saves me a whole bunch in that i'll make sure to leave a link below if you're interested in checking it out it does give me a tiny little bit of like extra storage and you get extra storage too if you sign up through that link i don't really care you don't have to use it that's totally fine so that's my process i hope it was helpful for you if it was do me a big favor hit that like button make sure to give me a thumbs up i just said that it's late uh leave me a comment below questions or just saying thank you or hello or telling me a hilarious joke about a fish i don't care please leave a comment please like and subscribe if you want more great content resources and tutorials i will see in the next video until then create something awesome peace [Music]

Channel: Signature Edits

Views: 21,920

Keywords: wedding photography, wedding photographer, wedding photo, wedding photo editing, wedding editing tutorial, how to edit wedding photos, lightroom wedding, lightroom tutorial, wedding workflow, photography workflow, photography, photography editing

Id: wBtZltJaQBc

Length: 181min 42sec (10902 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020