EVERYTHING you need to know about Adobe Lightroom in one video.

what's up guys ryan here at signature edits and inside of this lightroom tutorial we're taking a look at lightroom cc and doing an edit along with me video which means you have the chance to actually edit along with this tutorial and learn and kind of apply all these techniques as you're watching so head over to signatures.com free dash raw dash photos you can grab these free raw files and from there you can keep watching this video and we'll edit along together so inside of this video we're covering some different portraits some landscapes all sorts of stuff and just getting a better handle on lightroom cc and all the different tools and techniques that you can use inside of here to edit your photos better okay so if you're new to lightroom cc this video is going to be fantastic as a crash course if you have used lightroom cc for a while this is going to show you kind of some of those little nuanced tips and tricks that maybe you weren't aware existed yet so hopefully this video is helpful let's hit that intro and we'll find out [Music] okay so after that gloriously long intro we're going to head over and start editing together so you can grab these free raw files if you want to edit along with me go to signatureedis.com free dash raw dash photos from there you can grab these files or any other files you want to practice with those are there for you to use and if you want to pay it forward upload a couple of your own favorite images okay with that said thank you to the awesome photographers who uploaded these photos once you've downloaded them you can head over into lightroom cc open it up you'll get some kind of screen like this and import them if you've never done it before you're just going to click and drag them on in so i've already imported them that's why they're gray but you're going to hit import it will add it and it will sync all those photos to the cloud now if you're new to lightroom cc what that means is that it's going and taking all those photos uploading them online so that you can then access them from any device that has lightroom app on your phone on your phone any device that has the lightroom app on it so if it's your phone your ipad your computer it doesn't really matter it's going to sync those libraries across all your devices and so that way you can edit these photos on the go or you can edit them at home once you sit down on your computer which is pretty cool so i always like to edit on a computer because it has a bigger screen which makes me just better able to see the details and kind of finely tune things my edits end up better so if you do have access to a bigger device i'd always encourage you edit on the largest screen that you can and the nicest quality screen that you can so i'm on an imac right now i've edited on cheaper pc desktops that i got free and the results just weren't so good it looks really cool on that desktop and then you import it over you look at it on your phone you're like this is way overdone or this the colors just don't work that's because the display needs to be good if you want your edits to be accurate and work on all sorts of devices okay so that's kind of an aside you've got your photos imported by this time i'm going to stop kind of blathering on we're going to start editing starting with mr fluffer right here so let's head over here if you want to edit inside lightroom you just hit this little three icons and that gives you access to your main editing panel so in here we can edit all sorts of things we'll start by just resetting this photo hit these three dots and click reset now if you're doing this on a phone or an ipad all of these are going to be in slightly different places but very very similar the same icons everything is going to be pretty much exactly the same okay with that said we're going to start by just erasing our exposure here and i like to start just by getting my photo first i'm correcting it then i'm going to color grade it so what that means is first i'm going to fix the issues in the photo and get it looking as nice and natural as possible then i'm going to add my stylistic stuff after that so i'm going to start by brightening it because it's just a little bit too dark i want this to be a nice bright happy photo right we're also going to want to add some color it's looking kind of gloomy and washed out we'll get there i'm going to take my highlights pull them back just a little bit why am i doing that because things just look slightly too kind of bright now i'm going to take my shadows i'm going to raise them up a little bit okay then i'm going to take my whites up to around there and my blacks down to around there now how am i determining this i'm just looking at and doing it by i feel so i'm going to take my blacks just to where it looks like i'm adding slightly too much and then i'm going to back off i find in general my best bet is to take things where i think they look good and back off by about 20 because my eyes always want more than is necessary and so by doing that i kind of reign myself in and i get more natural looking at it just me maybe you see things perfectly i do not okay so so far if we toggle we can actually hit the backslash key on our keyboard that'll show us before and after you can see we've brightened things up kind of added some flair some pop to the image okay making some progress now i'm going to head into my tone curve and add a little bit more pop so first i might actually grab my highlights bring them down just a little now if you don't understand this tone curve i'm going to give you a crash course right now so you kind of know the gist of it and then you can play around and honestly the best experience the best teacher is experience when it comes to this thing it's really easy and free to experiment so let me explain how this works on the far left we've got our blacks just bear with me it doesn't make sense but just try and remember this far left equals black far right equals white the middle is your midtones the right but not all the way to the right is your highlights and the left but not all the way to the left is your shadows so we've got blacks shadows midtones highlights and white okay now why does this matter because now we can add little dots to this image called points and anywhere in the image we can adjust things so we can take everything that is in the shadows of this image so everything that's kind of let's say 90 dark to 70 dark we can take that and say okay all those shadows we want to make them really bright or all those shadows we want to make them really dark we do the same thing with the mid-tones and say okay the mid-tones normally are at about fifty percent brightness right because a hundred percent is white zero percent is black well we're going to take our mid tones and make them 75 percent bright so now all of our mid tones look kind of weird we can do the same thing and say mid-tones we're going to make you 25 percent bright now they're more like shadow darkness right so we can do this and make different adjustments to our image so by increasing the highlights like that maybe make the midtones a little bit brighter and the shadows a little bit darker we've added quite a bit of pop to our image so let's just see if i can hit this eyeball to see before and after hello so you can see by holding it there's before and there's after so we're adding some pop to the image now that's way more than i want to add i want to keep things looking a little bit more natural than that so we're going to back off on the highlights we're going to back off on the midtones we're going to back off on the shadows i am however going to take my whites and i'm just going to grab this point and take it down a little bit not all the way down here because that'd be weird but to around here so now the brightest parts of the image that were previously white are now more like a very bright gray so again here's before and here's after so look at the brightest parts of this image on floofer's white hair over here before they were super bright now they're more of like a muted gray and we've also sort of blended all of this together it's looking more creamy maybe a little bit more film-like you might like that or you might not you just got to figure out what works for you experiment see what feels good and go from there so common tricks when it comes to using the tone curve is always to lower the shadows raise the highlights and then maybe raise the blacks a little bit and lower the whites a little bit and you kind of get a creamy more filmy vibe to your image okay so i'm going to back this off once again here's before and after okay so now that i've done that i'm going to head over into my next panel which is our color a little bit different from lightroom classic which has this at the top of the panel we're going to adjust our white balance things are looking a little cold so i'm going to warm them up good then i'm going to grab my tint and things are looking maybe a little bit too green so maybe a little more magenta to the image now what do the these sliders actually do honestly i'm not sure how lightroom has set it up other than the fact that when you take it this way it's more warm you take it this way it's more cold it's adding blue to the image it's adding yellow to the image not 100 sure if that's actually what it's doing but that's kind of how it responds same this way adds green as magenta and the temperature is typically determined by what kind of light surf surface what kind of light source you've got so if it's a cloudy day it's going to be more cold you're going to have to warm things up if it's a very bright sunny day it's going to be a little bit cooler you're going to want to cool things down likewise if your light source is say in the park and the sun is going through a bunch of trees you're going to get really green tinged light and so you're going to need to add some magenta to counter that up and at the same time sometimes you're in a situation say you're shooting in a room that's really beige that might be reflecting a bunch of light making things more magenta than they need to be so you add some green so you're just going to gauge it based on how the image looks it's not about getting things to be perfectly white a lot of people will grab this eyedropper they'll take it they'll find something they think should be white on the image so say the dog's hair they'll click it lightroom will say okay based on that we think that the white balance should be this in this case it actually isn't that bad it's pretty close used before here's after but oftentimes whatever it is you think should be white actually shouldn't be so for instance fluffer here is a golden retriever so his widest white is actually more of a gold and so by doing that lightroom's probably going to make things a little more cooler than they should be so see how much nicer it looks once i warm that white balance up a little further than where lightroom naturally wanted it to sit which was let's try this again right there gonna sneeze okay i'm feeling invigorated i sure hope you are okay so we've got our white balance better if you look here's before and here's after it really helped warm things up made the colors feel a lot better next we're going to go to our color mixer now this mixer looks complicated but it's actually really simple you've got all the colors that this image is made up of you've got your reds which is everything that's kind of red in the photo your oranges again it's not just this one color it's everything that's kind of orange your yellows greens blues whatever this color is called cyan purple and magenta i think it doesn't matter but you can adjust each one of them individually so we can grab all of the greens see this green grass in this photo and grab the greens i can take my hue which is just the shade that we want that green to be so we can shift the shade of the green to be more warm or more cool it's kind of like white balance but for your colors so i'm going to take this shade i'm going to make it more warm because we've got a fall themed image so i actually like it better like that then i can take the saturation of these greens which i think is a little strong i can take the saturation back i can take the luminance which is just how bright things are of these greens and take it down so if we look at before and after and why have i done that i've done that because i want the greens to blend in better with the rest of the image and honestly your eyes are naturally drawn to the brightest part of the image so before i did that your eyes were drawn to this green because it's really bright and really saturated after i made those adjustments hello and we desaturated that made it darker now your eye is more drawn to the front of this image where floofer is hanging out so that is exactly the motivation behind that i can maybe make it slightly less dark i'm going to do the same thing with the yellows now yellows oftentimes have a lot of green in them naturally so you're just going to have to figure this out you can see that as i adjust the saturation it's not only adjusting fluffer here which is nice and yellow but it's also adjusting the grass a little bit more in the leaves in this background so you're just gonna have to find a nice balance i'm gonna go with somewhere around there now we've got our oranges which i think yeah floofer is very orange so i'm gonna take the oranges up and i'm gonna take my hue maybe towards red a little bit okay and then i could even take my luminance up in my reds now this is too bright but i can counteract that by going back up to my exposure and taking it back down now fluffer is going to pop even more out of the photo because he's way brighter than everything else i've taken things a little bit too far so we'll dial it back a little maybe and then take my contrast down a little bit it's kind of about going back and forth seeing what feels good you know you're never going to get it right on the very first try so it's about experimenting seeing what works for you okay now we got our reds again i'm going to make my reds pop if there is any reds in here not a whole lot going on floofer's nose this leaf that's about it but we'll keep them there and i find honestly when it comes to editing photos and just taking photos in general addition by subtraction is the best possible rule and what i mean by that is you want to find the things that take away from your photo and address them first if you can get rid of those distractions you're going to make your photo more focused you're going to make the composition just more effective as a whole and it's going to be just nicer to look at for your eyes so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to leave the oranges and the reds nice and saturated that's floofer in these leaves everything else i can take the saturation down and the luminance down let's just go in here take our saturation down luminance down to blues and you can try taking it up and down just to see what part of the image it's affecting i'm actually going to take the blues up in luminance you can see that's because it's affecting floofer's eye here so if i take the luminance down you'll see his eyes look kind of dead and lifelike lifeless but when i take the luminance up i'm adding a little bit of sparkle back into his eye now with the saturation on the other hand it's not really adding to the image it's just taking away because that blue isn't really adding to the nice warm aesthetic of the image whereas if i take the saturation down it's no longer distracting okay that's looking pretty good we've got our cyans or whatever color this color is called we're going to do the same thing raise the luminance a little bit and we already did the green so if we look at it here's our color before and here's our color after that's truly amazing before after okay so if louver is looking pretty good here what else can we do if we move down here our next effects we've got texture clarity dehaze vignette now i don't normally apply a ton of these to the whole image and that's what this panel is going to do if i take my texture down or up it's going to add texture or take it away from the entire image at once now that can be kind of cool and helpful a little bit so i can maybe take my texture down slightly just so everything's a little bit more soft and then later on i'm going to add it back into fluffer because i want floofer to have that nice punchy skin nice punchy fur and everything else to be kind of more painterly and soft and dreamy so we're going to take our clarity down and our texture down a little bit clarity is very similar you can just experiment see what feels right and it goes somewhere around there then dehaze does exactly what it sounds like it either takes away haze or it adds haze depending which way you go and then vignette we'll add a little bit of a vignette not too too much because again we're going to do this more selectively in a second here with our local adjustments and then our grain you can add grain you can take it away honestly in this particular photo i'm not thinking it adds too much so i'm going to just leave it without now i've got our sharpening of course we could sharpen things but again in general when you're adding effects you want to be as strategic as you can so instead of adding sharpening to the entire image i'm just going to sharpen the parts of the image that actually should be sharp for instance floofer's eyes his ears his nose that kind of thing the rest of the photo if i sharpen this out of focus bit in the background it's not actually going to help me and make the image any better see look if i take my sharpening up okay what did that do anything helpful no not really whereas if i just sharpened a floofer the rest of this background would remain nice and creamy and just be a better overall result noise reduction you can apply that and it'll make it even more dreamy as you can see here's before and here's after lightroom is going to go through and remove some of the grain from the image so if i reset my image here's my effects before and after we've just made things a lot softer and now we're going to add some of that back here in two seconds so that's my effects my detail we've got sharpening obviously we can take that up or down if you expand this little panel with this triangle you'll get access to different effects we can actually adjust our radius which is how thick of the lines that lightroom is targeting and our detail which is just how much lightroom is trying to maintain the detail and then masking is which parts of the image lightroom is and isn't going to sharpen so when you have your masking all the way open at zero that means that lightroom is sharpening everything in the entire image as we drag it up i'm seeing this overlay by pressing option or alt on my keyboard by the way everything that is black is no longer being sharpened everything that is white is still being sharpened so i can take it up to say here and then that way only these lines here these white lines are actually being sharpened everything else is being left the way it was so it'll be nice and creamy we can sharpen just those really important lines so that's a nice trick for you let's go to our optics if you want to you can enable lens corrections so lightroom is going to look and say okay because of this particular camera lens we were using this body style we need to compensate for these different things so the lens might be a little warped a little distorted we need to fix that so that's what happens when you enable lens corrections most of the time honestly i find it's better with it being off oftentimes lightroom will just over compensate and i don't really like that so i can turn off that maybe keep the distortion correction but everything else stays the same okay chromatic aberration is when you have really nice fine lines of contrast like the hair on floofer before i edited it chromatic aberration would be like purple showing up on the edge of these white hairs and in this particular image i don't have to worry about it so i'm not going to worry about it too much we're going to skip that step geometry of course if your image was taken at an angle and you've got a weird skew you can adjust that or sometimes you can use it creatively so i can maybe make floofer look a little bit more like a puppy a little bit skinnier if i take him in this direction or if i take him in this direction i can make him look giant and very very floofy so i'm going to take it down just a little bit and use this creatively and then you can hit this little button down here called constrain crop and that's going to just make sure you get rid of all that white space so here's our image so far before and after so you can see we've made floofer much more puppy like made the image nice and warm and bright and clean now we're just going to add a little bit more detail and focus on fluvar and i think we're going to be golden so golden see it see it okay let's head over into this little i don't even know what what you call this icon it's like a it's like a thumb print hit the thumbprint icon and from there you can create new masks now a mask is just a specific area that you're applying effect effects to so we can hit select subject which is lightroom's pretty new tool that they've added which will auto detect whatever they think is the subject in the photo in this case floofer so you can see that lightroom is grab floofer and now we can apply edits to just floofer which is great because remember how we softened everything else and we took the texture down the clarity down well now we're going to add that back up so you can add texture not too too much just a little add a little bit of clarity add a little dehaze add some sharpness and then i'm actually going to take my shadows up a little bit and take my blacks up a little bit because i don't want it to be too crushed good so now you can see if we click these three little dots here and we go delete all masks here's before and hit command z or control z on your keyboard to undo and there's after so we've really made fluffer stand out from the background a little bit and what's kind of cool is we can brighten him up and then darken everything else in the image down by hitting these three little dots go back to our main exposure like that hit our thumb print again and you can actually grab the same mask hit those three dots hit duplicate and just so we don't get confused i'm going to label these masks so if we double click we should be able to label we'll call this one floofer and this one we'll call background so i'm going to take my background mask i'm going to hit these three little dots i'm going to go invert subject selection so that's going to do is it's instead of grabbing floofer going to grab everything in the photo except for floofer so i'll do that if you ever want to see what the mask is actually doing and where it is you hit o on your keyboard and that'll show you an overlay over overlay of what's being affected so you can see it's everything except for floofer now i can actually take things a little bit further in terms of our effects here i could darken things down if i wanted or in my case i am actually going to take my temperature up a little bit make things even warmer i'm going to add a little bit of hue to my image so i'm just going to see what feels good probably like that make those leaves a little bit more red then i'm actually going to take my clarity and my texture down my dehaze down a little bit i'm going to brighten the background and then i'm going to add some saturation because i really want those fall colors to pop something like that so if i look at before by hitting the backslash key on my keyboard and after by letting go of it you can see we've made some nice progress our image before and our image after pretty different we can do a lot of stuff in here now we haven't totally exhausted all the tools inside of lightroom here there is still a couple of other tools here like the color grading panel that i kind of skipped over so now that we've got an overall image and we're feeling happy with it we can add some overall color to the highlights to the mid-tones and to the shadows so in my case i don't know how crazy i'm going to be about all this but i do want to add maybe a little bit of warmth to the shadows so i start by just adding a whole bunch by clicking and dragging this little wheel from the center all the way out to the outskirts of the image that'll add a lot of color i think 100 colors on the outside zero percent is on the very middle so i can grab that and i like to do it very intense and then that way i can find the right color or the shade that i'm liking and at first i thought i was gonna add some warmth but now i'm thinking maybe actually the blue feels kind of cool so we're going to do that we'll leave it there for now we can always change it later then we're going to grab our highlights i'm going to add a nice yellow because that's what's hitting floofer we want fluffer to be nice and yellow and fluffy and that's all something like that none of my mid-tones i'm going to make those nice and orange because we want to keep our fall theme going somewhere around there okay so if i hold down alt or option on my keyboard i can reset that color grading as before command z and see it after or you can just hold this little eyeball it'll show you before and after now i think i took it a little too far so i'm going to dial everything back and i might grab my shadows take this little line here and actually pull it backwards that's just going to take the shadows down make them darker i'm going to take my mid-tones make them a little bit brighter my highlights i'm happy with them right where they are so here's our image before and after so if you've got a nice edit you're proud of i would encourage you do me a favor head over to instagram post that photo and tag at edits co so i can see what you came up with i would love to see your creative take on floofer and what you created let's head over into another image and kind of repeat the same process alright alright so this photo absolutely brilliant whoever uploaded it is an anonymous photographer thank you because you're amazing now let's head over and start with our main edits we're going to grab our exposure take that up my highlights are very bright i want to recover all that sky so i could grab my highlights pull them down and that seems to capture those clouds nicely or if you needed to there is a sky mask inside of lightroom hit the thumbprint go up to select sky lightroom is going to auto detect the sky and now you can see we can grab our highlights pull them down just in the sky grab our exposure crap that down now what i like to do with the sky grab our shadows and take them down grab our highlights take them up just to the point that we're kind of about to clip the clouds and we're basically just trying to add a little bit of depth to the sky by adding contrast so i'm going to do that and then of course we could grab our temperature and take that down and that's going to add some blue to that sky nicely as well this will take the sky temperature down and last of all maybe a little bit of clarity will sometimes bring out the texture of the clouds a little dehaze okay so here's our sky before hello we'll just oh here eyeball hold the eyeball and obviously before and after now it's looking a little bit dark so i might actually brighten it up slightly which means i'm going to pull those highlights back down so i don't clip them so once again we got before and after we're making progress before after let's head back into our main panel by hitting enter on our keyboard or just hitting these three little dots so we've added some exposure we've taken our highlights down a little bit now what else do we want to do i'm thinking overall the image feels pretty good maybe we could warm it up a little so we'll go to our color and warm it up just a bit to around there now the thing to remember here is you don't actually have to edit every single piece of this image in every single tool inside of every single photo you don't have to do everything if the photo looks good to begin with and all it needs is a little exposure and you feel happy with it that's great you don't have to feel compelled to go through every single one of these sliders and adjust them you're going to notice i didn't touch the shadows i didn't touch the whites i didn't touch the blacks that's okay if you feel good about it it is good if it looks good it is good there's no rules here we're just using a framework to kind of go through and edit our images but there's no set process that's going to work every single time you just have to experiment see what works right and just enjoy the creative process so tone curve we could go back in here just for some practice sake add a couple of different points you remember this is the highlights we can increase that slightly this is the shadows we could decrease that slightly this is the mid-tones and you can experiment does it look better if i raise the mid-tones does it look better if i lower the mid-tones or how about if i just shift this point to the left or to the right what does that do to the image the best way to learn is by practicing i'm actually just gonna leave it in the middle i think that is naturally where it wants to sit feels good i'm going to maybe raise my blacks just a little bit my whites i'm going to lower them see how that feels honestly i like them right where they were to begin with now we do have these three little icons here a red a green and a blue tone curve now what do these mean what are they for when should i use them it's exactly the same as the normal tone curve only it allows you to adjust individual channels of your image so this entire image is made up of red green and blue so every single pixel in here if we zoomed way in each one of these has a value which is a combination of red green and blue now when we edit the tone curve with our reds our greens and our blues we can actually adjust and say okay in the shadow portion we want to add more reds overall in the highlights we want to take reds away and in the mid mid tones we want to add them as well right and by doing that we can creatively adjust our image in ways that sometimes are not so flattering and in other ways can be very flattering so i'm going to grab this i'm going to reset it by right clicking and going reset channel i'm going to go over here to my green tone curve i'm just going to take my black point which is right here on the far left i'm going to take it up just a bit now as i do that you're going to see that my shadows now have some more green in them i personally like this effect i like adding a little bit of green to the shadows i think it adds kind of a sort of filmy nostalgic moody feel to the image overall now same thing with our blues if you want to you can grab your blacks and take the blue out of the blacks like that so here's before if i right click reset and after pretty subtle in this particular image you're seeing that the mountains because they're in the shadow are going from blue to a nice warm yellow so do you like it great if you don't like it don't do it you feel it out see what's right for you so here's our tone curve before and after we've added some nice pop and some color to the image moving on here i'm overall pretty happy with the colors of this photo i think now i've maybe added a little bit too much yellow a little bit too much green so i might go to my greens and just see what happens if i desaturate them i like them better actually with the color in but the yellows i think i'm going to take the saturation back a bit somewhere around there feels a lot more natural and i want to keep things feeling sort of like they actually looked like that in real life i don't want to take it too far now if you've got too much saturation in your photo but you still want to add pop you can do that oftentimes by taking your saturation down and your luminance down or up so just experiment that contrast will often times make your image pop more so just see what feels right i'm going to raise the luminance a little bit here's before and here's after so kind of cleaned up the color just a little bit and then our blues which is the sky color over here we can take the saturation up a little maybe brighten them slightly and then i'm going to darken the entire image just a little bit go up here to my exposure take it back okay so here's before where we started and here's after we're making progress now if i go back down here we could do some color grading i'm just going to add a little bit of warmth to the midtones probably the same with the highlights ah not so much highlights i might just leave double-click to reset it and the shadows again i might add a little bit of green because i like things nice and warm and kind of moody feeling so here's before after okay good good good good and lastly i think i'm going to go down here create a new mask we're actually going to go with a radial gradient filter this time click that what is a radial gradient filter it's just a circle so we can select anything in a kind of circle alveolar shape by clicking and dragging and lightroom will come up with annoying tools that get in your way i'm just going to put it here on this little pawn because i think that's really the main focus of this photo now you can invert this mask by hitting the apostrophe key on your keyboard you're going to see if i press o so we can see what we're doing here that lightroom will either have the mask outside of the circle or inside of the circle now if you want to invert it a different way you can just go over here to these three little dots and select invert now make sure you scroll down to like this sub menu because for some reason it doesn't always show up in the top menu of the mask anyways that aside i'm going to hit o so hopefully i can see what's going on here there we go and i'm just going to take the exposure of everything down and you're going to see that now the eye is naturally going to be drawn to the brightest part of the photo which is this pond right here so here's before and here's after now that's too far i don't actually want to do that i'm going to go back to my little thumb icon select my mask and then i'm going to hit the subtract guy here i'm going to take that option go with brush and then i'm going to be able to brush on whatever i don't want to be darkened in this photo whatever part of this mask i want to erase so i'm going to erase it a little bit off of these mountains because i don't want them to be darkened too much and same goes for the sky i think this guy was already dark enough so you can see here's before i did that hitting command z and shift command z will redo it before and after okay so here's our overall image before and after i'm pretty happy with that i think we're gonna stick with it keep on our merry way i might kind of go back here to my overall controls and just dial back the amount of color i'm adding in the color grading panel because i liked it before i liked it a little bit more all natural okay before after i'm happy post whatever you come up with signature edits co on instagram all right we had floofer and now we have hoofer huh get it get it okay we're gonna scroll in here first thing that i'm noticing is this really lovely fly now as voluptuous and thick as this fly is he needs to go so i'm going to hit this band-aid icon and we can use this to get rid of the fly we're going to do that by grabbing the size icon you could just scroll on your mouse but this is going to be a little faster in this case and make it around the right size to get rid of mr fly and click once shabam fly magically gone so you can do this on acne you can do this on flies you can do this on whatever you want to get rid of now one thing that you should know is it's not limited to just clicking once you can also click and drag so we can grab our size here you're going to see this time not so good because it's overlapping on the horse's ear so what do we do well we take our feather and take that down now you can do that with this control right here and you're going to see that now we can make our fly a little bit smaller and he'll fit properly we can erase him or you can hold shift and it'll do the same thing so you can hold shift scroll up or down on your mouse that'll allow you to adjust the feather okay i'm going to erase the fly now if you wanted to get rid of more than just one little spot you could actually click and drag and lightroom will make a selection of whatever you've dragged on so that's an option too so in this case whatever this little hair is i'm gonna get rid of it as well okay so again first when you're editing an image you start by removing the things that are distracting so that was very distracting oh it's out of the way next thing that's distracting me this horse's tail and this horse's butt i can't do much about this horse's butt but this horse's tail that i have control over so we're going to go down to our crop tool here i'm going to go with aspect ratio we're going to make it a 9 by 16. and i'm going to zoom in cropping is one of the most powerful tools in all of lightroom which seems silly because all it is is cropping but when it comes to your composition nothing's more powerful than the power to just get rid of stuff that isn't working and isn't adding to your photo so now a quick little shortcut to any edit improving it's just saying what can i get rid of in this photo so i still want mr horse to be in the center of this shot so we're just gonna have to play around until i get it right because my eye is not so good today that feels okay and now we want to make sure we don't crop off his hooves all right hoof to apologize also if you have a good horse joke please leave it in the comments below i would really really appreciate that all right we've got mr horse we'll call him mr ed we're going to do our normal stuff at this point which is just brightening up our photo overall we're going to grab our highlights bring them down a little bit you're going to see we've got really really bright background really bright horse back and that's going to be solved a little bit by taking those highlights down shadows all take up a little bit i'm basically smoothing things out and then i'm gonna go back and add some pop later now you don't necessarily have to do this if you like it without doing this that's okay you don't have to follow this exact recipe every single time it's an art not a science then we're going to go into our tone curve we're going to add some pop back into our image by now you should kind of have a better handle of this we've got our shadows our midtones and our highlights i click to add these different points and then i can adjust them up or down so i'm going to leave my highlight to where they are because i actually don't want this photo to be too too bright but what i am going to do is i could try raising my mid tones and lowering my shadows just a little bit and that's going to do the same kind of thing we've added contrast to the image by making the mid tones brighter and the shadow is darker so the farther away those two things get the more contrast we're adding to our photo which is going to add pop so here's before here's after now that might be a little bit too far we'll take our midtones back down just a bit okay looks alright now there's some things standing out to me about this image that i don't really like i don't like this this particular horse looks like he's on steroids and has some serious veins going on so we might see if we can soften those a little bit i'm also not loving the bottom of this image it's just kind of ugly so we're gonna see what we can do to minimize that i think part of the reason it looks so ugly is because it just feels muddy and dirty and the green popping out in the mud is just enhancing how muddy it is so we're gonna try something here just by making the photo a little bit more kind of film-like i'm gonna lower the whites raise the blacks that's gonna make things a little bit more pastel for us we're going to warm up our temperature here and add some magenta because things feel a little too green good and now we're going to go to our color mixer grab those yellows take the saturation down and the luminance up same thing with the greens saturation down luminance up and you're going to see already we've got this nice area effect happening before and after so that's how you can get kind of more of a bright and airy look and it's addition by subtraction right we're going to get rid of the things that aren't working in this image which for me was the greens just felt kind of messy and weren't really adding so we're just going to make it all about mr horse here so you can see he's very much in the orange category of the tone so i'm going to take my oranges up a little bit and i might even take my luminance down which is going to make him pop up out a little bit more still because remember everything else we brightened up the oranges were taking the luminance down a little bit reds will probably do the exact same thing saturation up a little luminance down a little so here's before and here's after okay okay we're making this progress magentas i don't know we can do the same kind of thing although i don't think there is much magenta or violet or blue to worry about in this photo all the same you can see what a difference that can make you can try taking your luminance down or up just see what feels right in my case i think we're going up so color before color after all right actually maybe like it with a little bit of blue tone to it so we'll leave that saturation up okay floofer and hoofer best friends forever we're gonna keep moving on into our color grading ah maybe not first let's go into our adjustment panel and just make some adjustments more specifically to certain parts of the photo so we're gonna hit our little band-aid we're going to go to select subject so there were a couple things that i wanted to do i do want to make him stand out a little bit more still so we're going to do that by dropping the blacks a little raising the whites you can see we've added a lot of contrast to mr hoover take the highlights down a little bit shadows up a little here's before and here's after really made him pop right now i'm going to do another mask here hello create new mask i'm gonna go with the brush mask this time i'm just going to brush on all the areas that are kind of a little bit too veiny for lack of a better word areas that i'd rather be softened instead of sharpened because we do want him to feel fluffy and like we want to pet him that's my goal he's a tough horse no he's a cuddly horse okay now that i've selected those areas and grab our texture turn that down clarity down dehaze down you're going to see where exactly i'm affecting sharpness take that down contrast take that down so we should have a softened horse before after you can see it really didn't do everything i wanted it to do we could try going in with our little band-aid and selectively removing a few of these veins that might work for us so let's just give it a try there we go that's nice and again we'll increase our feather a little bit click and drag lightroom will think for a second and then it's actually doing a pretty good job sometimes lightroom really rubbish at this other times it guesses pretty good and you can get away with a lot more than you'd think now you're going to see that lightroom is making the selection and then it's trying to find a different spot that it can copy the image from to kind of heal that spot that you're removing so you can actually take and move that around if lightroom hasn't done a good job of guessing where it needs to grab that from so for whatever reason you select a spot and it's just not working try changing that selection location and it should clean it up nicely okay okay okay hello come on hoofer you know it's kind of funny let's hit fit there we go all right now these veins are the ones that bug me the most and they're also going to be the hardest to get rid of so we'll just see you know what that's not perfect i'm going to move this up a little bit lightroom is going to try again with that new spot that looks better but it's still grabbing this vein right here so let's try somewhere else we want it to be similar in like color and shadow so it'll actually blend and sometimes you get lucky i don't know if this is one of those times but we'll find out soon you can see lightroom is really slowing down as i'm doing this like it's taking a long time to do it so certainly do this at the end of your editing experience because it's just going to take a long time a lot more computer power [Music] okay okay now the last thing that's really bugging me i could keep going in here hello come on you can see here's before and here's after we've healed a lot of those veins i could keep going i think for the sake of this tutorial you get the picture you can do a better job and i believe in you we'll get rid of this one if we can the last area that's really driving me nuts other than these veins is all the dirt on the side of mr horse now the easiest thing if you're the photographer and you happen to have access to these horses would be to go and actually just wipe off your horse right always try and get it right in camera if you can because it's going to be so much easier and the effect will be so much better than if you have to try and fix it in camera but that said sometimes that's not so much of an option so let's head back over here into our little adjustment brush selection create new mask we're gonna go with brush i am going to select mr horse's dirt and you can actually expand this little panel and adjust the feather in the flow now the flow is how fast think of it like ink and you're drawing ink on here how fast is that ink coming out i'm going to take my flow and turn it all the way up you're going to see now it's coming out a lot faster good doing a really rough mask because all i'm really going to do here is just try and hide the dirt by making it appear less like dirt how do you do that get rid of this contrast take the sharpness down a little bit and if you're lucky it'll be convincing if you're not lucky like me in this situation it's not going to work super great so we're going to kind of split it down the middle dial back my effect so it's not quite so strong and then go to our band-aid see if i can get away with actually erasing a larger section here i think in context once we zoom out it's actually going to be okay you can see that my mask is still showing up in a pretty painful way press o so i can see which mask i'm looking at so we're just going to dial back these effects a little bit okay so here's our image before here's after hoofer is just just beautiful just wonderful what a man what a horse what a legend okay so i could take my detail add a little sharpening i'm thinking that this photo is feeling okay the last thing that maybe i would do is go back once more add one last adjustment brush and we are going to add a brush press o so i can see where it's painting and just on this dirt clumpiness down here i'm going to attempt to make that a little bit less ugly by making it smoother and softer you can see i need to make sure i get in between the legs so it blends [Music] and if you hold alt you can actually toggle to an eraser and erase anything on the brush that you don't like so hold alt and you can erase if you need to so i'll just clean things up by erasing it off of his little legs these little hoofs hooves his hoofs okay something like that hoofer before after so whatever you come up with i'd love to see it tag at signature edits go okay we're three images in we're like 30 minutes into this tutorial as i said you're going to learn in depth how to use this by editing a whole bunch of different images so definitely download these files and practice even if you're not doing it right now it's going to be really helpful for you to remember and kind of just learn and master these techniques by doing it yourself and as always tag at signature edits go so i can actually see what you're coming up with leave a comment too if you have questions along the way as i'm explaining any of these things i would love to be able to help okay so this photo let's reset too much contrast that's the first thing that struck my mind so i'm going to take the contrast down i'm going to take my highlights down a little bit and by a little bit i mean a lot i'm going to take my overall exposure up and you can see i've got a much flatter image here it doesn't necessarily look better at this point but what i've done is i've gotten rid of those really really harsh bright areas in the image i've also gotten rid of those really really dark areas of the image because i want to do that selectively i don't want to have it just be done for me i want to have control and decide where i want that to happen okay a few things that i'm noticing when you're dealing with an actual person in the photo you just got to be careful of certain things so for example if you zoom in here you can see just the angle that she was at she's a beautiful girl nice and skinny but it's just whatever clothing was not riding the way it was supposed to be so we might need to try and fix that a little bit and just smooth things out but she's pretty flawless so overall not too much to do let's start by just cleaning a few things up starting with hello we got a bunch of spots here so we're just going to grab those really quick with our healing brush bam bam the lightroom is going to be really clever and add spots to where we didn't have spots because go lightroom okay so i'm not going to mess around with this too too much i'm just going to really quickly get rid of the bulk of these spots if i were editing this for a magazine yes i would take more time but for our tutorial you get the point okay now another thing that i could possibly do is actually go in here on the edge where the clothing is kind of riding on her funny and sometimes the spot removal tool can give you some interesting options in terms of just getting lines the way you want them and other times not so you can see that i can probably grab this line down beneath just to smooth things out so we're going to do this again just right there make our selection point up here now this would be much easier if you just went into photoshop but if you don't have photoshop this can sometimes be an option now there are two options when it comes to the healing brush there's the heel and the clone so clone is going to just copy whatever area you select it from and heel is going to try and intelligently like okay based on this i think this area of skin should look kind of like this okay now it's already on heal i was hoping is on clone and maybe heal would work but in this case it looks like that's not gonna work sometimes your ideas don't pan out that's okay it's about experimenting learning figuring stuff out as you go let's undo that okay head back over to our editing panel click and drag to move that image over now let's just start by getting the overall image right and then we'll worry about those more finer detail spots so we've got our exposure contrast highlights kind of dealt with next thing that i'm going to do go into my tone curve and add a little bit of contrast back so i actually don't want the shadows to be too dark but i'm going to make my blacks a little bit more black if that makes sense so now instead of just everything that's 100 black being black now i've taken this point and i've said okay i want my shadows to actually be black anything below 80 darkness i'm just going to call it all the way black and that's going to make things a lot more popping on my image so here's before here's after now here's the overall image before and here's after so you can see even though i've added contrast back in i've done it in a way that is actually helping the image now instead of making everything really dark and shadowy and really bright and highlighty okay okay so we've done that i do want my subject to be brighter overall in the photo we're gonna come back to that part in a bit though i think first i'm just gonna do my main changes so i'm gonna adjust my white balance a little by adding some magenta she's under these trees they're reflecting all sorts of green light that's why i'm adding a little bit of magenta and then you could try making it a little bit warmer see how that feels or a little bit colder sometimes i find wiggling it back and forth honestly is the easiest way to get a sense of okay this feels right this does not and depending on your exposure the white balance might actually change what feels good at one level once i brighten her up might not feel good at a different level so for example this feels way too warm but i think if i were to go to my masking hit the thumbnail select subject and then i brighten my subject up once it's selected hello highlights up white's up the white balance isn't going to be quite the same at this level as it was when she was darker so let's go back here try and dial things in okay probably around there feels good and overall i honestly like the image brighter but i'm not digging how this shirt is getting really blown out so i could do a couple of things i could take my highlights down in the tone curve and that'll give everything a more soft look and then take my whites down as well that'll make it really buttery and creamy so here's before here's after or i could leave my white point where it was leave my highlights where they were or just pull them down slightly and then i could actually go in and mask the shirt and take the highlights down that one area because that's kind of the only area that is actually being affected and i'm not liking the rest of it i'm not not hating it's okay i'm all right with things being really bright in the rest of this photo but i'm thinking probably around there feels pretty good okay here's before here's after making some progress making our way downtown walking fast faces passing okay so we're gonna go down here ignore color grading for now because i don't want to worry about it i'm going to go to my color mixer and her skin's looking like really red and pink so i'm going to take the saturation down in the reds maybe the luminance up a little bit you can experiment see what happens when you take it up or down probably right around there oranges again looks a little pink i could take it towards green slightly saturation you can play with it up or down you want it to feel normal and real so what would this feel like in person i'm thinking probably closer to there luminance slightly up here's before here's after okay now with the greens and the yellows i'm going to take my yellows play around with the hue just see what feels right i think kind of around there ish and then saturation definitely is going to go down a little bit luminance do you want it up or down ryan i'm thinking up i'm thinking up we're gonna be bold and then you okay we're gonna take it maybe this way so one of the things is if you ever watch lightroom tutorials especially the ones that are just set to music and it's like pull this slider this way this one this way this one 73 this one minus 82. it's not really helpful because you don't know why they're doing that and that's also not the only way you could edit that image so and it's not going to work on your images i don't know if you ever tried that but you look up like a dark and moody tutorial and works on their image and looks nothing like that on yours it's not your fault it's just because they're not telling you how to do it they're just showing you the specific settings for that particular image which isn't really that helpful just saying okay in this particular photo i could take the saturation way down obviously now it feels really unnatural so i'm just going to dial it back kind of around there and i'm sort of almost feeling like if we go with more of like an aqua aqua green that might be kind of cool it's like that then the yellows i might even boost them up a little bit more i don't know or try the hue more towards green no i'm gonna keep it like that okay so here's color before and color after all right all right all right so we've got optics and geometry i don't really think we're going to apply this too much sometimes you can make short people look a little bit taller or tall people look a little bit shorter depending which way you go i don't think that's necessary with this photo overall something about the color just feels kind of weird i think i probably went too far on the skin here and i flatten things out pretty far so i can maybe add a little bit of contrast back into the photo like that and then then we go into the stylized edits so we're going to go up to create new mask i'm going to go with select subject okay now i'm going to hit these three dots go invert i'm going to rename this so i don't get confused later we're going to call it background okay then i'm gonna experiment with a few things i could try making it really bright take my highlights down though and my contrast down press o so that stupid overlay goes away now i actually want the background to have a nice pop and color and stuff like that so i am going to try adding a little green that's going to add some green back into the trees naturally i'm going to add some saturation maybe take the shadows up maybe try taking the exposure down i'm just messing around i don't have any perfect answers here i'm just seeing what feels good and what does not feel good and sometimes by doing that you come up with creative things that you wouldn't have thought of doing otherwise like now i've got a girl in heaven right beforehand she was in a forest now she's in heaven i could expand that perfect right case closed just kidding but by experimenting you sometimes come up with different strategies that you never would have thought of doing otherwise so that's why i do it and i actually leave it in here even though it would look much better if i just pre-edited all of these and knew exactly what i was doing and it was perfect every time but it wouldn't be that helpful to you so there you go okay i'm going to duplicate this mask i deleted the background mask i'm okay with that i think we just need to make our subject here a little brighter and then we are going to need to fix this shirt so we're going to go to subtract go brush hit o so we see our overlay and we're going to erase the shirt out of this mask so we're no longer making it brighter and more contrasty and ugly okay hit o so you can see it's a little bit better i'm gonna go back to our other mask here too and do the same thing select subtract brush and you're gonna see as i do that the shirt is much less obnoxious okay let's just zoom out a little bit as you can see here's before here's after if you like it great if you don't make your own thing up i'm cool with that you could of course take your saturation back up in the greens maybe take your greens in a different direction if you want or you could take the saturation all the way out of the greens and out of the yellows and then add some color back in selectively too right so we could go in here to our masks we're going to duplicate this mask again we're going to invert it so we're making another background mask hello wait for it does not want to be inverted subject invert there we go so you can see we've got a really kind of cool situation going on where the background is really nice and desaturated oh come on you come on you work with me now whatever i'm going to do it this way brush and then if you wanted to you could add color back in so pretend i had this mask a lot better and wasn't just doing it really quickly because lightroom isn't doing what i wanted to i could grab my little colorize tool down here and add whatever color i want once i desaturate things so i can make things really blue press o so i can see the effect instead of the overlay and of course you're going to want to make sure you actually do a good job masking but you can make it blue if you wanted to be a horror movie let me make it green see what feels right we could go with like a really kind of blonde warm thing going on on golden pond if it bleeds onto her a little bit it'll help blend the mask a little better i'm gonna roll with it i'm even gonna paint it on her shirt and her pants okay so here's before here's after something interesting never would have thought of it and i actually think it's kind of cool kind of different okay moving on got one more actually we got three more i don't think we're going to do them all today but if you want to you can it's the beauty of lightroom just goes on forever grab your healing brush and just start removing distracting things so you can see we got a really ugly radio tower good lightroom got rid of that let's see if we can get rid of this lady okay so obviously lightroom is not so good at picking points that are similar so we're going to scroll down here somewhere like that and if we're lucky we can line up the pillars here not super great not super great but i think once we actually zoom out that's gonna be okay it's gonna be a little funky but it'll work this guy i don't think i'll be able to get rid of this guy if i can i'll be amazed okay that wasn't bad i mean if we actually press enter you're going to see that the top part of this doesn't work so if we go back to our band-aid we can actually add another mask on top and that'll kind of blend it in [Music] it's not horrible not horrible because i think your eyes not gonna be drawn to that part of the photo so we're probably gonna get away with it i'll zoom in on this guy this is a great practice how many people can we remove from this photo now could you do this better in photoshop the answer is yes but do you want to go into photoshop the answer is probably not if you're like me and don't know how to use photoshop very well just saying okay so we got rid of several people so far we're going to keep going because we're just amazing lightroom is the best okay this one we might not be able to remove these people but we can probably almost remove them and then darken the rest of this corridor because it's already in shadow and that will finish the job so let me show you obviously that's not a great mask we just want to get the railing lined up properly okay somewhere like that okay and now same thing with this dude dude you have such a big pointy stick where'd you get it the big pointy stick store okay same thing we just want that railing to be good and honestly it's not great you can still see these smudges here when you zoom out you probably wouldn't notice it but i'm going to so we're going to zoom back in we're going to add a little brush here go to brush and just brush in that area like so i'm going to take our texture down clarity down dehaze down just so we can see what we're doing clean up this mask a little bit so it gets this entire inner corridor okay take the dehaze back up because that was unnecessary and then we're just going to take our sharpness down and you're going to see things start to blend a little bit better hopefully as we continue on our merry way there now here's before here's after we've removed addition by subtraction now the scaffolding on the side of the building i hate but i don't think i'm going to be able to get rid of it so we're probably going to have to live with it however it's worth a shot right lightroom honestly it's not horrible i've seen worse just the hill needs to line up something like that and then the roof needs to be proper okay so clearly something's up there you're not gonna be able to get away with that but it's kind of interesting sometimes you can do a lot more than you'd think other times you just have to be creative so you could say okay i hate that so i could just crop in and that would solve that problem but so far we've made some good progress now let's assume that this girl is supposed to be in the picture i don't really know but we're going to assume if that's the case she's kind of the focal point of the image next step i'm going to do is grab a radial filter here paint it onto her and remember the brightest part of the image is what your eye is naturally drawn to so we're going to want to make her a little brighter make everything else a little bit darker so brighten her up like that i'm going to go create new mask select subject it's hopefully gonna see her okay good and i can invert that so now this is my background mask i'm gonna make everything else a little bit darker take the highlights down and of course you can only do this a little bit take it too far it's just gonna be too obvious but so far before after right as far as travel photos go much better now the next thing we're going to do that is really important to actually learning how to do in lightroom and doing well is dodging and burning now that is just selectively going through here and adding different brightness points and darkness points to add contrast to our image so let me show you really quick what that looks like we're going to go in here go create new mask go to there's a couple ways we could do this i'm going to show you the old-fashioned way first okay first way grab a brush and we're going to just paint on any areas of shadow in the image so we're going to start with this tower so the darker parts of this tower where the light isn't naturally catching where things a little bit darker we're just going to go in here and we're going to draw it okay just like that so inside of these pillars inside of these windows if you want to get really detailed we could zoom in here [Music] now of course you want to do a reasonably decent job here but it doesn't have to be super accurate better than that and if you want to sometimes it can be helpful to take your flow down so you can refine your mask and sort of like slowly get it exactly right for the sake of our demonstration here i'm just going to go quick okay so you can do this to your heart's content all the dark areas of the image now what do we do once we have all these dark areas of the image i'm glad you asked grab our exposure take it down a little bit now as you do that obviously this looks ridiculous but once we take it just a little bit you can see there's a little bit of depth coming through in the image that wasn't there before we're kind of giving it a three-dimensional feel so just take it down a little bit and apply that to the rest of our image press o if you ever want to see your overlay and all of the areas of shadow we're just going to enhance what we want to enhance okay for the sake of being really quick we're going to do that we could also take our shadows down and that will help filter a little bit so if we accidentally got something that was in the highlights lowering the shadows won't affect the highlight so much right whereas lowering the exposure will affect everything okay so here's before and here's after see the depth we added now we can do the exact same thing with our highlight so we'll go in here brush i'm going to do the same thing so any areas that are really bright that we want to showcase so you just watch for natural areas that the sun is hitting right so it's hitting these spires on this side this is an area of highlight highlight highlight so this is really good training for your eye as well just getting used to seeing where highlights are and where shadows are generally where there's a shadow there's a highlight right next to it so the shadows right here the highlights right there and then sometimes there might not necessarily be so much of a highlight in one spot but you just want to exaggerate it anyways you can do that exactly the same so in a way you can actually sculpt shadows and highlights where they weren't to begin with and that's why when you see instagram photos and they're so fake most of the time they've done some different stuff in photoshop but a lot of it is just dodging and burning so muscles look so much more defined when you actually take the shadow and make it deeper and you make the highlight brighter it'll make the muscle itself look more defined and just way bigger okay so we've gone through and we're going to brighten up our highlights you can see before and after now that's taking it way too far so we are going to dial that back a little bit but hopefully you see the power of that now another way to do the same thing that's faster is just go to luminance range when you create a new mask i'm going to set that luminance range just to the bright parts of the image as you do that you're going to see okay it's automatically selecting my highlights which is really cool now you can adjust this guy here which is going to be like the transition of how smooth that fade from selecting to not selecting is grab your highlights and your whites take them up right you can get this really interesting effect by doing it that way do the same thing create new mask color range or actually that's not correct color range would work if we had a color we wanted to select but we're going to go with luminance range and this time i'm going to set it to just the shadows dial in our kind of fade point like that okay and take my shadows down a little bit now sometimes it makes more sense to desaturate the shadows add saturation to the highlights you can see the creative possibilities here hopefully here's before and here's after now overall this is feeling kind of dark like a horror movie instead of a nice whimsical fairy tale vacation so we are going to go in here grab our background mask and we're going to take our saturation up if i can find it and take our shadows up because we don't want them to be too dark add a little contrast and maybe even warm things up okay now there's a bunch of different things i could do with this photo honestly the light was taken this photo was taken in the middle of the day you can see how harsh the light is on our subject and on the castle and in the background so i could keep working on this photo i could make it way better and so can you and you should play around see we can come up with but i think because the light is so harsh i'm not going to keep going too much because i'm just going to be fighting the light and it's just going to be way more work than it's worth for this particular photo so hopefully this was helpful just showing you the dodging and burning techniques and now you can take that apply it practice on this photo yourself and show me what you come up with because i'm sure it'll be better than what i got okay we got just a couple more photos got a landscape shot here i'm gonna brighten it up to start and just see what we got as i do that you're gonna see we've really got some low noise some camera noise going in there but that's okay because we're probably not going to actually do that i do like to darken things down and just see if i've blown out the sky and if that original sky can be recovered and i can in this image which is great so we'll start by just getting the sky right because the sky is kind of the main point of this image always edit around the most important part of the photo not the details so you want to get the most important part right so if it's a portrait you want to get the person looking great then worry about the background if it's a landscape you want to get the background working great then worry about any other elements in there okay so i'm going to get that right i'm going to try and play with the white balance just to see what gives us the best sunset vibe so i think actually a little bit colder is where i'm feeling it you could do the really gold yellow sunset but i think a little bit cooler because then we start getting these blue tones in the sky i like that next a little bit of magenta in there because everybody likes a pink sky more than they like a green sky it's just a fact of life okay add some vibrance add a little saturation add some highlights and again i'm just looking at the sky i'm not worrying about the rest of the image for now we'll fix that in a second add some highlights scroll down here i want to add maybe a little bit of clarity yeah definitely and that's feeling pretty good as far as the sky is concerned we'll maybe raise the whites up just a bit to around there and take our contrast down okay so we've got before and after the sky itself is looking a lot better the rest of the photo okay so what are we going to do we're going to go over to our brush here select subject and just see what happens now let's just see what have you decided this subject okay this little tiki hut that works for me because i do need to take the contrast down in the tiki hut and maybe raise the whites a little bit so it's a little brighter okay that works create a new mask and go select sky and it's obviously going to select this guy now we're going to invert it because i actually want to edit the rest of this image go in here take our contrast down we're going to take our shadows up a little bit white's down a little bit we're just going to smooth it out raise our exposure a little clarity down somewhere around there so here's before here's after now i do think our kind of water background here is still too bright and kind of just like ugly and garish so i'm going to go back here take the exposure down a little but take the shadows back up we want it to just blend really nicely okay it's not perfect but i'm kind of happy with it so i'm going to move on you could of course go in and dodge and burn exactly the same way go into your masking new mask brush and we're just going to grab these clouds really quick i'm going to do the world's sloppiest cloud mask as you can see i'm absolutely brilliant when it comes to doing a bad job okay and you could just grab our whites take that up blacks take those down and that's just going to add a little bit pop a little bit of contrast to make those clouds stick out a little bit more and then play with does it look better with the texture up or down i think in this case down gives us more of a watercolor feel and hold alt to erase your sloppy mask and move on with your life okay we got two more a nice portrait here i'm going to try something nice and warm vintage vibes so we're going to go in here and this one's going to be quick because i am running out of daylight contrast down okay highlights way down because i want that window not blown out go into my tone curve take my whites down and we're going to take it kind of extreme same with the highlights and that's going to give us a really creamy photo right so here's before and here's after really creamy and take our blacks up a little bit go into the rest of our colors here i want my skin to be a little bit more orange a little bit more saturated everything else i'm going to take the saturation down a little bit that's going to pop our subject hopefully out in the scene a little better and yeah the red can maybe actually go up okay we're gonna do a little bit of a vignette add a little bit of sharpening make sure our mask is up hold alt so you can dial it in i like to have my sharpening all the way up it's just me and then some noise reduction is going to just smooth everything out and then in our effects somewhere here we've got our grain i'm gonna expand this panel i'm gonna take my grain all the way up so i can see what it's doing i'm gonna take my size i'm gonna increase it until it feels really really great somewhere around there basically i just wanted to be noticeable on instagram then i'm going to take my amount down once i've got the size sort of where i want it to be you can see if i hold alt and reset these effects how it just adds more of a vintage softness to the photo overall okay now last of all we could go into our tone curve and take our blues out of the highlights that's gonna make it more yellow right and then we're gonna add some greens to the shadows okay okay now go to our color grading i like to just make everything warm that's kind of my vibe just gonna make our highlights and our mid-tones and our shadows nice and warm mid-tones we might leave alone a little bit okay so here's before and here's after so if you want a vintage vibe that's one way to do it got one last photo for us here we go so this one looks good obviously the skin tones look really really nice but a little bit magenta so i'm gonna go do my obviously maybe you don't notice that at all i do it just looks too pink let me grab my exposure and let's just go for like a really classic but clean kind of adjustment here by the way if you want some free presets i'm gonna have some in the link below so you can check them out so i can do this really easily just by whites up blackstone and the reason this photo is so easy to edit is the light is fantastic if you look at the original photo like nothing is blown out it's super creamy super beautiful super even no harsh shadows no super harsh highlights so it's really easy to do whatever you want to this photo and it's just gonna look great almost no matter what you do okay from there we're going to clean up her skin i'm going to do that with a nice brush brush just like that okay texture down clarity down dehaze down and now all of a sudden her skin is just wonderful from mozelle we're going to add another brush and do this one on her hair and we're going to add some detail in here some texture so just say which elements do i want to bring extra attention to which elements would benefit from having some sharpening a little more contrast most of the time it's the hair the eyebrows the eyes as you do that you can see here's before and here's after you don't want to do that to the entire image just to the parts that need it next we're going to grab one more this time we're going to tackle those eyebrows and the irises over her eyes and her lips same kind of thing so we're gonna grab our contrast take it up blacks down lights up okay now that might be a little too far as far as the lips are concerned so i'm going to hold down alt to erase and erase that off of there okay so here's before here's after now the only thing is we've kind of lost our sunset vibe in behind her because we've made the entire photo so much brighter it's the easiest way to get rid of that obviously creating a mask select subject now we can just darken the background or brighten the subject and then darken everything so i'm gonna make her brighter take the overall exposure down and you can see here's before here's after nice sunset portrait super clean super natural super easy so we could do a million other things you could go mess around with your color grading you can make her look like a smurf you could make things really warm which is where i normally like to sit not like that that looks horrible let's make this look realistically good i'm thinking in this case i sort of like having some pink in the shadows maybe a little bit just like that so see what you come up with tag me at signature edits go so i can see what you are thinking and we can kind of share some creative ideas if this video was helpful can do me a big favor hit the like button leave a comment below and subscribe if you want more tutorials like this i would love to hear from you let's have a discussion share some things learn from each other and i hope you create something awesome in the meantime see you next video peace [Music]

Channel: Signature Edits

Views: 5,979

Keywords: new lightroom, lightroom cc, lightroom crash course, in depth lightroom tutorial, lightroom course, lightroom mobile, lightroom for beginners, adobe lightroom, lightroom update

Id: oFFVt0JXN0Q

Length: 82min 36sec (4956 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 24 2021