Editing YOUR PHOTOS using just LIGHTROOM

big thanks to lexar for sponsoring this week's video morning everybody fantastic to see you all again i've got such an exciting video today i'm editing your photos and i put out an instagram post i sent a message to my master class members yesterday for their raw images and the response was ridiculous it filled up my google drive twice but they were amazing so i spent late into the hours of last night and then all today looking at these photos i've selected a few that i'm going to edit and i'll go through them and stay tuned to the end because they edit something a little bit different a street photo that somebody sent um so um yeah that was interesting but the photos were great the main things i want to sort of talk about a composition a few lightroom tips and just celebrate your amazing photos really so we're going to get straight into the first one which is this amazing sunset on the south coast of england by tony utting so thanks tony this is a stunning image it really really is amazing the light on this pier is stunning as well so when i first saw this image i thought what would be really nice is to bring out some of the blues in the sky and then those reflected in in the foreground because quite often you want a contrast of colors um in things to bring out the actual colors themselves so if everything's orange then the orange doesn't look so vibrant whereas if you have some cooler tones then the warmer tones can look can look good in the image um and then the other thing i thought it's just going to straighten it up and then maybe sort out these two boats because i think i only want one boat first of all what i'm gonna do is i am going to just reduce the exposure reduce the contrast a little bit add some shadows and that's pretty much it for the basic edit and maybe i'm just going to reduce the color temperature as well a little bit yeah so i've already brought out some of the cooler tones in the top there and now i'm going to do the rest of it with masks so i'm going to add a linear gradient so this is just going to select the top part and there's going to be a nice gradual fall off to the sun here and then all i'm going to do is just i'm just going to reduce that and make that even cooler add a bit more contrast in there maybe brighten it a tiny bit now i'm going to reduce the exposure a little bit actually and reduce the blacks in it a little bit and then just reduce the clarity as well i notice there's some sensor dust spots i'm going to talk about those in a minute so i'm going to create another mask now and do the same at the bottom probably could have just duplicated that one there we go i'm not going to do much more than that probably should have cropped it first as well so i'm just going to go and do that now i'm going to crop it there gonna crop it about there and i'm gonna bring it in a little bit to about there i think because basically what i want is i want some balance actually i brought it in just a little bit too far so so this distance here to where the sun is i want the same as about this distance here where the pier is just to balance those two sides a little a little bit um obviously this has got quite a strong visual way but this is quite bright so the two things are are quite balanced i'm just going to sort that vertical out there we go the next thing is i am just going to add a radial gradient to the sun here i just want to basically soften that sun down i'm going to add it make it a little bit warmer i'm going to make it a little bit whiter um but i'm going to reduce the haze and what reduce dehaze does is it it sort of softens everything together and in this area here i don't care too much about the details i just want it to look like a glow of the sun and then i might do another one so i might just do another gre radial gradient on top of that one so another one from the middle just a bit smaller and then i'm going to on that one i'm going to make it a little bit brighter and i'm going to reduce the clarity and i am just going to tone that a little bit and make it a little bit yellower so i want to create a very sort of yellow sun here um so i think that's nice i think that's got a nice glow to it i probably want to pull out the glow a little bit on the buildings here so to do that i'll probably just do it with a brush i just add a brush and i've had a little bit more time i'll probably select the highlights and just brush the highlights warmer but i'm just going to add a little bit of white a little bit highlight a little bit of saturation probably um i have it on quite a low flow and i am just going to brush on here and i've got i want to make sure it's auto mask so it'll just be a little it'll just help me out around the edges with the auto mask so i'm just going to brush that on the final two things is one i want to just get rid of this boat so i'm going to select that bow and i'm just going to grab a bit from there there we go okay so i've got rid of that bow can hardly tell it was there i think i'll just want to make that top area i'm just gonna make it a little bit bluer and the final thing is i just want to show you a quick tip for these spots in the sky here so if you just add a mask so if i just find a mask and just do a linear gradient here and i just add it in the sky and i increase the contrast i increase the whites the exposure and the clarity it brings out those um spots in the in the sky um you can do this in multiple ways but now i can go and spot this what i would say tony is you probably need to clean your sensor it's super easy to do i did a video on it i'll link it here um give it a go because you'll get rid of all these spots and you won't have to spend hours spotting them all out okay that's all those spotted so once you've done that you can just go back into the mask and then you go to the mask that helps you find those spots and just delete that mask and that's it so here's the before and after image great image tony thanks ever so much for submitting it um i think it looks great with the cooler tones at the top and bottom and then just that softer sun and i've straightened the highlights and got rid of one of the boats super right okay on to the next one and this one here is from david donnard and david shot this in switzerland and it's a super autumn shot i really really really like it he had to get his tripod really high to because he was using a wider angle lens what was he using 24 millimeters and everything got a little bit distorted so by going higher on his tripod he tried to get um less distortion which is a super good idea and i think it's worked really well i actually think with this image that a crop a slightly different crop will work really well so first of all we're going to straighten those um trees so i'm just going to go down and again like i did on the other image we're going to go to we can just click vertical if you want and it'll do it for us um or we can move the vertical and constrain the crop i think it's done a pretty good job just by clicking vertical so that's great i'm going to go back to the top now and i'm just going to have a look at the exposure and see what i've got so this area up here is fairly bright but the rest of it looks pretty good i think it's a pretty good exposure that but i think that this image will look better as a bit of a panorama by cutting out this top so what i recommend is that we want this path and this area here in the middle so that is pretty much spot in the middle but i think we should probably crop even down to about there maybe we might want to go above this branch i'm not sure so we'll crop below it for now and then we'll see how we go and that means that we get rid of that really bright sky then we've got detail in everything so we can do what we want with the image really so i'm just going to get it to a reasonable brightness i'm going to crop maybe a little bit higher so then it's just a question on a woodland image as good as this is is is just to move around these sliders a little bit so we don't want to go too warm and we can bring out the colors with the hsl slider so i'm just going to reduce the temperature i'm going to add a bit of contrast to bring out the saturation add in contrast add saturation i'm going to add some shadows back in increase the whites a little bit and i'm going to just slightly reduce the clarity i'm not going to touch the vibrance and saturation i'm just going to lift this up i just don't want any true blacks in the image so that's a good basic edit so now i'm just going to mess around with the hsl i'm first going to mess around with the saturation so i wouldn't increase the saturation of the yellows and the oranges and probably reduce the saturations of the blues in the image um [Music] and then probably add some more luminance in the yellows and the oranges as well so that's looking pretty good there's a little bit of a scruffy area over here but we're going to draw attention to this path now so we are going to add in a radial gradient just on this path here um and i'm going to go right close into it and then it's going to fade out and what i'm going to do is i am going to again reduce dehaze i'm going to reduce exposure a little bit i increase the whites and increase the contrast i'm going to reduce dehaze a little bit more i basically just want to create a little bit of a glow down here and then i'm going to do a little bit of brushing as well so i'm going to add a brush and i'm going to go in and just brush this area just i just want to make it a little bit bluer and a little bit brighter just down here there we go that's all that's all i want i'm going to add another um radial filter my third radial filter because i want to just inverse it and just do a bit of a vignette on it so i'm going to go and invert and then i'm just going to reduce exposure of the surrounding trees you know reduce contrast into them as well so reduce exposure reduce contrast so they just look a little bit faded you know they're just sort of fading away in into the distance the final thing is i'm just going to add a bit of color grade on it these highlights here i want to make bluer so i'm just going to add some blues into those i'm also going to do the same in the shadows but a tiny amount just a tiny tiny tiny amount and i'm just going to don't mess with the balance of that there we go so this is my um shot of that i've created a slightly different crop and i've cooled down the highlights and i've just softened it a little bit and then it looks like the lights just just sort of filtering in this is the before and after i hope you like it thanks david for sending that in i love woodland photography as you know and i really really enjoyed editing that photo okay we're going to do some quicker edits now um now we've done those two so the first of these quicker edits is this one from jan dolasel probably pronounced that wrong sorry um but it's this fantastic tree here he took this in snowdonia um he'd actually found it earlier arrived early in the morning before the sunrise and just was patient and weighted always the best thing in landscape photography patience is so important and he's got a fantastic shot of this tree here i think the light's coming from this direction and there's this beautiful background as well of this mountain what i'm going to do is i'm going to crop it uh i'm going to just illuminate this a little bit with a bit of a warmer light here and then pull out the highlights by just selecting them with the luminance mask of this tree so there we are really simple edit it was just selecting these highlights with the luminance and a radial filter intersecting those together which worked really well i've just created a slightly subtle warm glow from this side and yeah thanks jan that looks really really good okay on to another quick edit and this one here is from patrick of this amazing sort of misty scene here again some similarities between um this and some of the others and i'm just trying to work out where i want the eye to go and warming those areas up because those are going to pull out and then cooling maybe other areas down um i don't really like this top bit here so i'm going to crop that completely out and i'm just going to create some balance i feel like the image is about in this image is about here so i just want the similar amount of trees on the left and right here and i've got that image now obviously there's too much at the bottom there so i just want to pull that up so i've got balance between the top and bottom and then what i think on this one is if i just quickly add some contrast and increase the whites a little bit all i'm going to do is just do a radial gradient here um and i'm just going to add it in here like this maybe make it a little bit bigger i'm just gonna make that a little bit warmer and add a little bit more contrast to that and just bring that out a little bit and i feel like that is a good interpretation of that image often um what i find is that the shots within shots and i think this is a good example um patrick i i really like the shot um for me that the one that i liked in the edit was the one a bit closer in and i just wanted to warm that up okay on to the next image to edit this one won't be quite as quick um but it's from a friend actually um this is from jurong um who is an amazing landscape photographer that lives in iceland when i went to the volcano i shot the volcano with him but this was taken on the first day that the volcano erupted he was lucky enough um living there to get to that volcano on the first day he's given me this to edit which is a bit mean really because it's one difficult to edit and two um you know he's an amazing photographer so i i do want to spend a little bit of time editing it but there's a so i'll show you my final edit and i'll talk about it in a second but before i do that there's just one thing on this particular edit that i think is really important so if i just brighten it up a little bit we'll we'll reduce the brightness but can you see down here in the shadows there's different color tones one of the things that a lot of people don't use in lightroom is right at the bottom here there's this shadows tint which is basically all these things at the bottom it's how lightroom interprets the raw files to give you that first look basically and i think on here this shadow tint is going to make a really big difference can you see how it's changing the color of here of this so i think when i'm editing it i'm going to have to really work out where i want the shadow tint do i want it to be more purpley or more greeny at the moment i'm thinking i want it a little bit more greeny so let me edit it and i'll tell you what i've done [Music] [Music] okay so this was hard very hard um it was all about colors and just subtleties of colors really i felt like you could bring out a lot of detail and shadow here but more i brought out the more it just didn't have that sort of sort of um depth to it um i've obviously reduced the highlights of this um lava flow here and it was just about getting the color tones right with the the top and the the sky in the background but making it dark cause i wanted the uh lava to to stand out and um yeah it was all it's all about the colours of the shadows the colours of the highlights and just getting a little bit of balance between the whole thing so i've added quite a few masks on you can see um and it looks pretty pretty epic i'm amazed i can't believe if i had taken that shot i would have been so so pleased um just to see it in the air like that is is something really special and jaron's just an amazing photographer obviously everybody um's instagram where they're giving it me i'll link in the description below go and take a look at them all and and give them some love because there's some really great photos here on to the next image so this one here is from jeffrey um some amazing um snowstorm here it's great to catch snowflakes in in the snow and there's not a huge amount to do to this one really i think what i would do is just crop it um square so i'll probably do a square crop on it i think that looks pretty good and then it's about just bringing out those blues i think i think this needs to look a bit bluer so i just reduced the temperature increase the contrast and the whites to try and bring out some of the snow now that's too contrasty in terms of the blacks are too black so i just want to lift the blacks now maybe just increase the yeah so i just i just want to get to a point where there we go where i can see the snow i don't want to have a complete black you can see i haven't got blacks here because i want it to be quite a soft scene and then finally i just i just add in a um a radial gradient um inversed so just to create a little bit of a vignette there and i'll probably play around with that a little bit make it a little bit softer so that your eye just goes into it and then when you've done that probably need to increase the exposure a little bit more bring out some of those tones there i think that's it it's as simple as that there's nothing much to this fantastic image jeffrey really like it on to the next one okay so this one is a great shot from chris brown i really like how you captured this tree chris now i want to go through obviously all the edits but i haven't got a huge amount of time and quite often when i'm looking at shots like this i use my presets now i've talked about my presets before there's a special offer on them there's a link there if you want to buy them but i recommend that you build your own presets presets are a really good way of of creating a style because then you'll start to apply those to your images more often and then that's the starting point for reddit for instance in this one i think langdale stone or lingmoor fellow look good so can you see that yeah so langdale stone looks really good we've gone from there to there it's brought out the tree a little bit softened those blacks so then it will just be a question of just just tweaking this i'll probably just bring that up a little bit and then i just want to increase the saturation a little bit more of those yellows like that that's a super quick edit on it i think it looks really really good i really like that um quite soft and we just brought that tree out a little bit so having presets are a good way of applying things again and this is another shot that i i would probably apply a preset to so this is naomi's shot naomi sorel i hope i pronounced that right of the amazing vesta horn i was there a week ago and it is just one of the most spectacular places on earth she's created a fantastic shot here of these grasses and what you will notice though in this shot is that there's quite a lot of people walked here so we want to make sure we keep that dark apart from that it's just pulling out the the sky a little bit again if i just apply one of my presets on this it gives it a feel of one of my images straight away so again that would be langdale stone i think and then it will just be a quick question of doing a gradient on the sky there and bringing out some of those warmer tones in the sky and then probably adding a bit of contrast as well to bring out those mountains um and then i might just increase the saturation a little bit in the foreground and there we go you can see the before and after here super super quick i've applied a preset um and it makes it really easy to edit final one i just want to show on a preset is this one here from alex blackburn of this amazing deer here you've caught it it's such a brilliant um pose i feel where you can see the deer's just looking around he's probably caught your eye i think you know he's in his natural or she's in her natural habitat this one definitely needs a crop i feel like this tree is a little bit distracting so but i want to keep the the tall nature of the shot so i just think we want to crop it to about there it's a question of whether we keep these or not but when ideally maybe we should go a little bit lower and we get a little bit more of that in so what we're going to do is we're going to get rid of that in photoshop i'll do that in a second this is another one where i feel like playing my preset which in this thing will be langdale stone just again just creates an instant um edit on it so if you have your own presets if you look at some of your photos you edit them the same create some presets you can apply them you start to generate your style a little bit more that for me is it really i like this branch here i feel like it just holds your eye into the image a little bit um but we wanted to get rid of that branch up there so i really like this alex fantastic shot looks amazing okay on to the next image so this is this is this one from jonas here i know where this is um in fact i was there with jonas i think he i i wasn't aware when he took this image because i don't think i had light like that but this is a stunning image in the finale forest in madeira and this is this is amazing now i have to admit editing this is quite tricky and the reason being is that you really want to pull out a little bit of detail of these trees the sun's up here in your eye and obviously there's a huge dynamic range so you want to pull out a little bit of that detail in the trees so what i usually do is i just sort of brighten it up a little bit i'm not worried that i'm going to blow out some of these bits because i just want to pull out that detail pull out some of the shadows i'd usually spend a little bit more time on this and do it with the masks increase the temperature but the temperature looks good with the sun warm but i don't think the temperature looks particularly good with this with the um trees the back of the trees warm so what i would do rather than increase the temperature of the whole thing just relieve the temperature then do a mask which is a luminance range mask just do it on the highlights so we're just going to do that here on the highlights probably just like that we need it to feather out a little bit so i'm just gonna feather it a little bit and we just want to warm up the highlights a little bit and that will produce something with a little bit more depth i think i don't think there's a lot to do in terms of cropping this i think it's cropped incredibly well brilliant job in in camera maybe if anything probably just get rid of a little bit of the bottom of the image just a little bit um but i really like the trees here i really like that the way your eye sort of follows through these trees this obviously light just looks fantastic it was about luminosity and colour in this so what i wanted to do is i wanted the shadow areas to be a little bit cooler the light area stood a little bit a little bit warmer i messed about with the hsl a little bit just to tweak the saturation and the luminance of those various areas by reducing the luminance of the highlights then you bring out some of the texture in in these sunbeams here and yeah it was it was just an amazing image to edit um those light rays and those trees just look fantastic so jonas thank ever ever so much for submitting this i really really enjoyed it actually got me thinking that um i had not quite as good conditions as you there but i i took a couple of images here that i i printed out um and i talked about this actually um this was one of the image and i talked about these images in my masterclass so if you haven't already check out i've got a black friday deal on that link in the descriptions 100 off masterclass 1 and 2. before i go on to the next images and and show you editing those i just want to thank lexar who have sponsored this week's video um memory cards are the most important thing in a camera they hold our images and they need to be reliable they need to be fast to make sure that if you're a sports photographer you can capture it or if you're a videographer like me then you can shoot 4k 60 frames per second and not have any any issues i've used lexar cards for ages they're amazing and their 2000 x lexor professional range are really good with read speeds of 300 megabytes per second and write speeds of 260 megabytes per second you're not going to have any issues the most important thing is that there is an offer at the moment it's black friday weekend and there let's see i've got an offer on so if you check out the link in the description then you can go and head over to their amazon page and see those amazing offers okay thanks lexor for sponsoring this video i really appreciate it let's get back to the images the next one is from this one from georges berns again i apologize for all these names i am so bad with names this is a really interesting shot because on the face of it you think uh it's underexposed and overexposed and he probably should have taken two exposures um and he may have done that because he could only send one image to this but even with this one exposure i think you can produce something reasonably good on this so it was taken at 12 millimeters this amazing cornfield wheat field don't know what it is should remember mass will tell me off when he watches this because he knows what they all are there's a little bit of a flare there i think but if you yeah there's quite a bit of a flare there but we don't worry about that too much we we're not going to see that in the final edit but you can see that there's quite a lot of detail there and if i go down the other way and we've got a nice sort of sun style there so what i'm going to do is quite simply i'm just going to add a linear gradient and i'm going to bring up i'd spend a lot more time on this i'm rushing a little bit but i'm just going to bring that up and then i am going to do the opposite i'm going to do one at the top another linear gradient here and i am going to reduce exposure the top to about that much i'm going to make it a little bit warmer so the tones in the colors of the foreground and then i am going to you probably guess it i do it all the time add a radial gradient here i'm going to fit this around the sun boom and then i am just going to make it even warmer and i'm going to dehaze it just to create a bit of a glow to about maybe about there that's about right and then what i'm going to do the clever bit is i'm just going to tone that orange now ideally this would be a little bit smaller if we had a lower exposure so we can have a blend from smaller sun into into the rest of the image but that's it i mean it's simple as that you know we've created something from this to this tone the colors sorted out those shadows and those highlights it's a great image i love this foreground it looks so so good fantastic image thanks for sending it in next shot this is from leanne again it's an overexposed shot but that doesn't matter because we can do a high key edit on it so leanne actually said this in the description i look forward to seeing what you do on it so it's a bit of a challenge and we need to you know not worry about that we've not got detail in there if we try and reduce the exposure it's going to look really really naff so what i'm going to do is i'm going to cheat a little bit and i'm just going to apply one of my presets to begin with just to give it the feel that i i like and then i'm going to mess about with the sky a little bit so i'm going to do a high key edit so i'm going to brighten it up a little bit [Music] i've edited it and basically what i've done is i've just totally blown out the sky i don't think it matters too much because i've created a little bit of a radial filter that allows the sky to sort of blend into the rest of the mountain there you can see that there's a bright shot it's just a different style it's not my usual style but i feel like in this image where you've over exposed the sky a little bit by mistake i do it all the time then use that to your advantage it's a nice shot i love this um stream to this hut here super famous shot in in scotland in glencoe and yeah i really like it i think the finished product works really well it reminds me a little bit of a james popcis edit and his style great job leon really like it okay on to the last three now so this this one here is really doesn't need editing again it's similar to that other one where there's no sky there really isn't a lot to edit on this again that won't worry too much you've got that you've got that blown out sky i just crop it down a little bit to about there crop it up here have a little bit of a feel like that and then just tone that sky so all you want to do is you just want to tone that sky a little bit so you've just got a little bit of warmth in there and i think there's not a huge amount more you need to do to this image it's fantastic i love it brilliant it would have been nice to have a little bit more detail in there but again it doesn't really matter okay the final landscape image is this one and the reason i want to show this one is i wanted to show a little bit of something about balance so if i just bring this in here we've got these two elements we've got the horse and the tree and i feel like it's important that they are balanced either side of these lines here so just on either side of the image so what i wanted to do is just think well if you just balance those that looks better already probably would remove this um sort of mess here i don't think it looks fantastic the rest of the image is great so then just with a little bit of contrast um and you can probably increase the exposure a little bit uh maybe reduce the blacks a little bit and then just add a radial gradient just to add a lot more warmth in the sky and also again i would do some negative dehaze i think you can create something that's really quite nice with this image with not a huge amount of effort so that is how i'd edit it i'll probably remove that as well so i'll do that in the final edit here's the before and the after i really like this damiano i've definitely pronounced your name wrong sorry it's a it's a great image and um really well spotted this tree this horse or what make it we need to make those the center of attention before i finish this video i just wanted to show you an edit that i did of this shot here from elwyn so this was the the before and after of this shot i really really liked it usually i don't edit non-landscape images and because i just do landscape photography so much but i do like street photography and i quite like um this type of street photography i really felt like this worked really well in the teal in our orange color palette which is obviously used quite heavily i've just tried to promote that teal and orange palette by just basically using a lot of split toning and just messing around with the hue and saturation of the various colors within within this image so that's it i hope you've enjoyed it i hope you got something out of this i certainly thoroughly enjoyed it it was so nice to see your images i wish i could edit them all it obviously takes a long time to produce a video like this and look through all everyone's images thanks for those who submitted images and i didn't get a chance to look at them so thanks for watching and until next sunday bye [Music]

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 65,291

Keywords: photography, lightroom, lightroom editing, lightroom tips, lightroom tutorial, tutorial, nigel danson, Nigel Danson photography

Id: mGalV84cDvQ

Length: 33min 21sec (2001 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 28 2021