From start to finish photo post processing tutorial | Landscape Photography | Vancouver Island

[Music] [Music] [Laughter] hello hello everyone okay I've finally succumbed to public pressure if I I've decided to put together a processing video it's it's taken me a little while to kind of come around to the idea of doing this a number of people have asked me about how I process images and the reason why I've been a little bit apprehensive is that I some of it is confidence I even though I am okay with Photoshop and Lightroom I certainly don't know everything about them and what I'm finding is even though I've been using Photoshop ever since it came out my interest level in processing is I have to really be in the mood to process images and to be honest with you I'd much rather be outside taking photographs than processing them but having said that you know at the same time I mean since you know especially if you're shooting raw images you have to process them I mean if you're just going to present the world with your raw images then they're going to put they're going to look pretty lackluster over the years I've learnt quite a few different techniques from various photographers through videos videos on YouTube and I and I still look at a lot of videos on YouTube I mean there's a there's a lot of excellent photographers out there using Photoshop that really know how to use it well when I've learnt little bit tips and such over the years the problem I have is that if I don't use it that often then I forget and then I have to look it up again so I tend to stick to the same techniques that I've learnt over the years it's just easier that way one of the issues with especially Photoshop is that there are so many different ways to skin a cat but they all end up in the set with the same result so there is no real right or wrong way to do anything in Photoshop Lightroom is a little bit easier in that it's a bit more intuitive and I would definitely recommend if you're just getting into photography or you're not that keen on post-processing then I would probably go with Lightroom over Photoshop it's it's just a little bit quicker a little bit easier Photoshop there's some amazing powerful tools in Photoshop but there's just so much that you can you can do with it that it's just a little bit overwhelming what I would like to do hopefully is like I have these vlogs on these little expeditions that I go on and I you know I some of the images I go through the process of of what I'm thinking at the set at the time when I'm taking these images and this will be kind of an extension of those little vlogs so what I'm what I'm hoping to do is you'll see me take an image and then I'll take one of those images and hopefully by mid week I'll have a video ready where I can just go through the processing of that image so without further delay and me rambling on and on why don't we get right into processing an image from my last trip at Rosewall Provincial Park all right [Music] [Music] okay the image that I'm going to be processing today is this one here so this image here is actually two images combined into one so this is the finished product and these two here are the originals now you'll notice straight away that these are quite underexposed and you can tell by just looking at the histogram here the the graph here is way over to the the shadowed side now generally I don't under expose my images that much this was actually a mistake I tend to expose for bright areas because I'm always worried that I'm gonna lose details in in any of the highlights in an ideal world your best bet is to expose the image so that the histogram is as far over to the right as possible without blowing out any of your highlights or the white areas so if we go into the develop module here you'll see that I have the the shadow box here this little triangle up here clicked and you can see all of the parts that are way past black being black there there's no detail in them whatsoever because they're so black if I this ones clicked also but you'll notice that none of the highlights are blown out if I open up the basic part here and slide the exposure way over to the right here you'll notice that as soon as parts of the river start to get way overexposed then they'll turn red and I generally leave these on just so I know where I'm at with my shadows and highlights it's a nice little feature actually that I use quite a bit so the first thing I'm going to do with this image is obviously brighten it up a little bit it's just too dark so I'll bring it down in this case see I like I don't like my whites to be white white white white I generally like to have a some detail in them even though it says it's not overexposed if i zoom in there there's very little detail in there so we're gonna have to fiddle around with that in in Photoshop probably just to make sure that we keep that nice little detail in there but also brighten up these really dark areas because the way it is now is that the whole the rest of the image is is just too dark so we'll just leave that for now you'll notice that my shadows are still quite dark so what I'm going to do is in my shadows I'm gonna bring my shadows up brighten up those a little bit and the highlights all the whites are pretty good for the highlights just bring those down just a tad and you'll notice what this is doing is it's really flattening out the image and that's fine we can add contrast in the image as we go along I just want a nice file with lots of detail and information in there to start with okay so that that looks pretty good if i zoom in you'll notice that some of the blacks are still a little bit dark so I'm just gonna brighten those up just a tad yeah that should do it okay that looks pretty good for just general adjustments I kind of like my image to be quite cool actually but with moss and trees it's nice to have a little bit warmed up I just don't want the water to be too yellow as far as tint goes I often just leave a tint at zero I don't want to muck about with with reds and greens as soon as you start adding any kind of red it I don't know to my eye if things always just look too red as soon as you even if you just Jack it up just a little bit so I'm just going to leave it at zero for now I mean there's no there's no set way to do this it's all visual and it all kind of depends on how you feel a first time to be honest the like I might do this now and it looks great and then come back in an hour or a day or so and looking and got all that looks that looks bloody awful so it really is just a feel and and and what your preferences are for for processing images right as far as clarity goes with this image I'm just going to leave it I'm not going to touch it vibrance and saturation I'm just leave those for now okay so we'll just close that and now this lens I was using is the 24 to 120 I love the focal length but as far as lenses go it's it's not actually that great it's uh it's it's okay it's it's not terribly sharp on the corners and I seem to get quite a lot of chromatic aberration with it now this image I'm going to be using a lot of fingering on the outside so enabling profile Corrections I don't generally bother with but the remove chromatic aberration I'll definitely use for sure detail noise reduction don't need that we're at ISO 64 there's very little noise whatsoever sharpening I'm finding with a lot of the higher megapixel cameras very you don't need an awful lot of sharpening for your master file the time to really sharpen is when you're actually out put it to something so say you're going to use it as a print then that's what you would do you would you would size the image that you want to print and then sharpen it for that size if you're doing you know if you're going to be using this image to present on social media or your website then you would size the image and then sharpen it the default is set of 25 radius one detail that's fine sometimes now I've this may seem a little bit strange but detail bring way up radius down to 0.5 and then just sharpen it from there until it starts to look really crispy and then back off and you don't want generally your your areas without any detail to be sharpened because it's not sharpening anything so if you hold down the option key and go to the masking you'll notice that the whole image turns white and as these areas fill in with black those are the areas that aren't being sharpened anymore again it's it's personal preference that looks pretty good to me but you can see in the corners here with this lens it's not terribly sharp but you know what nobody's going to notice except for probably you another photographers right okay that looks pretty good alright so now that I've processed in this image we have to do the same to the other ones so if I just press down command now I'm using the Mac I guess with the windows huge press alt and click on that so you select both of them just go over to the sink here we can click it doesn't matter if everything's clicked and and just synchronize them okay now that we've synchronized these two images so there's as the other one the right and left we're just going to select both of those right click and go to photo merge panorama and now there's a number of different ways you can do this there's no right way again it's personal preference you can either Auto crop or you can have you can warp the image so that it crops that way so spherical this is if I'm using the boundary warp which sometimes works really well if you have trees or straight edges on the on the end here it'll actually you can actually straighten them out a little bit or if you don't want to do that just on a crop and it'll make it quite a bit longer Oh cylindrical I mean it really it really depends on on personal preference again there's no right way to do it perspective quality won't look very good at all see this really stretches things out so for this kit for this image I'm just going to use spherical and I'm just going to go down to about fifty and then all a crop from there and that looks pretty good to me and then we just merge okay now we get to do the fun stuff now you may have noticed that this image the light is quite balanced because it was a cloudy day there aren't any harsh highlights and there aren't really any really deep deep blacks except for in the deepest shadows here but there are a few distractions that kind of take your eye away from the main subject and the main subject being this waterfall back here we want to direct people's eyes into that area so how do we do that okay this Creek here is a little bit bright in this area so that's quite distracting this is is not too bad that you'll notice that all of our attention kind of goes on this side but we want to kind of equalize it out now I've been using this a lot lately I don't know if it's just a phase I'm going through I've been using being getting quite a bit there's two ways you can you can do this and the nice thing about beginning is it darkens the outside of the frame so it directs the viewers attention to the middle of the frame there's a couple of ways you can use in if in effects here there's post crop vignetting and it's a neat tool you could what I usually do is I just bring it all the way down the strongest beginning and then the midpoint I just adjust to taste same with roundness and the feathering and then what I do from there are highlights I don't generally bother with and then from from there I just slowly bring it down into its at a point where I quite like it now don't worry about not being out of see details in here we can bring some of those back out and a little bit later when we do some dodging and burning in in Photoshop so I'm just gonna leave that like that for now now this tool here I've been using this a lot lately and that's the circular tool here the really neat thing about this is you can really pinpoint certain areas and and adjust them with I mean there's tons of adjustments here so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to darken the edges even more but I don't want it to affect the waterfall so I've zoomed out a little bit so we have lots of real estate around the photograph and I'm just going to draw a circle let's just start with that let's just drag that down a little bit I want to keep the waterfall here quite bright and this little waterfall here so I'm going to narrow this a little bit and just turn it around something like that should do it okay remember you can adjust this even after you've made some adjustments in the sliders here so say I darken it like that I mean that's pretty extreme you know you can you can drag it over to taste so that that's what I really like about Lightroom it's so intuitive and easy to to see what's going on okay so now I'm just going to drag this up back slowly [Music] something like that it's not a lot just a third of a stop there okay so now I'm going to click on new and I'm going to draw another circle that was just one a little bit narrower we'll just turn it around a little bit just bring that up a bit this one this is getting a little bit bright in here and what I'm going to do is I'm going to brighten this the area up just a tad and do some other things to it so you'll notice there's a little box down here says invert so we click on that so what that I'll do now is it'll in effect the area inside the circle and not the outside so I'm going to brighten this just a tad now then I'm going to use a bit of artistic license here some of you may like it some of you may not I quite like it again it's just kind of a phase I've been going through the D haze now you'll notice that in this image there isn't any kind of mist or fog or anything so I'm going to add a little bit of my own so D haze if you go to the right it'll add well don't do anything just add a bit of contrast but if you go to the left here it starts to fuzz things out a little bit now you have to be careful because you can overdo it and I think maybe in my my other finished image I might have I would did it just a little bit that looks pretty good so you'll notice now that we have a little bit of fog back there that wasn't there before okay you know what I'm feeling somewhat in a Adi haze mood so I'm gonna add just a little bit more make it just just took a bit bit foggier so let's click that so we're just gonna make a slightly bigger circle here we're not gonna adjust the exposure I'm just adding a little bit of fake mist whoops don't forget to quickly invert button let's just stretch that out a little bit we'll make this a little bit wider the idea is you know if you're going to do this stuff Tamiya is trying to try to make it look as as reasonably natural as as possible because you don't want the effect to be distracting you just want you want to add to the overall feel of the photograph all right now I think I'm pretty much done in Lightroom so what I'm going to do now is open up this image in Photoshop and start doing some dodging and burning okay I've opened up the image in Photoshop and you may notice right away on my desktop here I have this colorful box on the side this is actually a third-party extension by photographer named Tony Kuiper and this is called the TK control panel so the colorful buttons here you already have in Photoshop they're pretty much just shortcuts to a lot of things that you may already use like levels that curves and so on and then the bottom box here there's a whole bunch of different buttons these are for what are called luminous luminosity masks and I will be using a few of those in this photograph so as we look at this photograph you've got to kind of figure to yourself okay what is it in what is important and what isn't we've already defined or I've already defined that this is the center of interest I want to draw as much attention to this side as this side now unfortunately in a perfect world it would have been nice to stand in the middle of the creek and take a photograph looking up the creek just like the drone for the that I got but unfortunately there's so much water that you know it would have been quite dangerous so this is the best composition I could come up with it's kind of a compromise and since it's a panorama we even though I've darkened this eye there are some areas in here that I want to brighten up so I'm gonna use dodging and burning to do that but there's some specific areas that I want want to lighten I want to lighten the foliage over here and I want to lighten this a little bit I definitely want to lighten a little bit more in here and these two trees here because they're quite interesting I might darken this area the white patches here a little bit more and then brighten some up just to even it out a little bit again there's no set formula for this it's more of a feeling than anything else so why don't we start off by selecting this is a dodging layer and you'll notice as I look over up the layers over here there's actually now a dodging layer here if you don't have the panel you sit all you have to simply do is just press on a new layer button here and for dodging you would probably go with a soft light anyway viii either any of those will work so we've we've got a dodge layer we've selected it and now we need a brush and the brush has already been selected you can either just click on this button here or just push the B key on your keyboard now you want to set your your paint color to white and you can change that by just pressing the X like so and the opacity up here I usually start at 10% but I don't go any higher than 10% unless I'm using luminosity masks then sometimes I have to use a higher percentage and you can either change that by just changing the number in here on the keyboard or just pressing like I want 10% so I'll just press 1 and they're not bringing 10% okay so now I have my brush but my brush is a little bit too small now if you happen to use a watt compared it's very easy to adjust the brush size and the hardness I I'm an odd person I actually don't like using what compares for some reason I just use a mouse and to adjust the the size of the brush and the hardness I just push down option control key on your keyboard and if you slide your mouse to the left or right it'll adjust the size and if you go up and down it'll adjust the hardness now generally I keep it zero for hardness and then adjusting the size I just go as I go along I just adjust the size so as an example if I was going to do this section here I would probably just zoom in a little bit push B for brush and then just adjust the size and then just start painting brighten in that area painting it in now as far as our pasady goes you generally don't want to go too high and do everything all at once you want to kind of try and build it up as you go along so it's a good idea to zoom out and you know just click on the little eye button here to see you know what's brightening and you know just to get an overall feel because you can do you know you can have too much of a good thing and overdo it okay now I brighten those areas but I want to definitely bright in this area but I think I'm gonna use a luminosity mask because I don't want to brighten the shadows as well and that's where luminosity masks come in really handy as an example like if I press on six here you can see that the bright areas are the ones that are going be affected and the dark areas aren't now this might be a little bit dark so if I go over to the point in between five and six that's quite a bit different okay well let's try it let's try using this so I'm going to open up another Dodge layer separate layer and then I'm going to pick that that luminosity mask and then I would pick selection and you'll notice there's these marching ants now to get rid of those or hide them just press command H or alt H on a PC and I'm on I've clicked the the Dodge layer now about 10% but that might not be enough and so it should just add effects the see the green for ease is slightly brighter than the background it should just affect that so as I paint over it now it's very slight and it looks like nothing's happening but if I click on that you can see that it's brightened it very slightly now I think I'm going to up that a little bit so I'm going to bring it up to 20% so just press 2 and you'll notice that pasady is now at 20% and I'm just gonna paint over that like so and if I click on this again you'll notice that it's bright brighten that up considerably didn't look like he was doing anything but it but it has quite a bit so let's just zoom out here and as we click that box on and off you can see what a difference that's made now the neat thing about dodging and burning is that you don't necessarily have to use a white paintbrush say you wanted to add a little bit of warmth in there and and why don't we do that so I'm gonna make another dodge layer i pressed B for brush the the luminosity mask is still activated you can see that the red lines here now I'm going to click on this color and I'm going to I'm gonna make this slightly warmer so put a bit of red in there okay that looks pretty good okay now let's paint that in and see what happens here probably not gonna notice an awful lot but it will warm it up a little bit okay now if we click on this I mean it's not a huge effect but it all adds to the overall effect of the image okay that's probably enough for that one now I'm going to brighten this area just a tad so I'm gonna make another dodge layer now that I use a different mask from this one let's see here that's five you're going to use the same one again I guess okay so you select that alt H Orkin command H to hide their marching ants and we're just going to zoom in here press B for brush we're at 20% and now I think I'm going to use a warmer color again something like that and we're just gonna paint that in and you notice that it's slowly building up and starting to brighten just brighten up this area here as well just to meld again so it's starting you can see it's slowly starting to come and come together see how we've brightened up that area okay now I want to brighten up these trees here so I'm gonna get rid of that mask so that's command D or alt D and let's try and see if we can find a mask that's gonna control this this might be a little bit harder because this is only slightly brighter than the background as it is let's go with number six here let's know five mmm it might be the same one as before okay let's try that one again okay so I'm going to make another dodge layer and we're going to select that mask again hide the marching Ed's let's just zoom in a little bit here B for brush do I want to warm this up a little bit yeah why not there's stay consistent here okay and we just slowly it's not doing an awful lot so let's go a higher percentage we've got a 3:30 okay let's see how that looks so you can see that's brighten it up considerably but it hasn't really affected the background too much no it's a little bit dark in here and we can we can brain up in a little bit just brighten up this foliage a little bit just make this brush just a tad smaller because we don't want to affect the background too much otherwise it you get those halos it looks a bit odd let's just zoom out again okay so you kind of get the idea of where I'm going with this I mean I don't want this video to go on and on for hours while I want I dodge and burn so what I'm going to do is dodge and burn all of the other areas in in the photograph and then I'll go over what I do for the final step before I present it to the world okay okay I think I finished here I'm just going to do a one more burning layer so burning of course is with a black brush and again I use pick brush ten percent or lower usually unless I'm using a luminosity mask and what I'm trying to do here is create a little bit of separation between the brights and the darks so you'll notice that it's quite dark here and then we have this bright foliage and then it gets dark again and then bright and so on and so forth it just adds a little bit of depth so what I'm going to do is just darken this just a tad more and let's see that yeah I think that looks pretty good alright I think I'm done there so what I'm going to do now is if you click on this top layer here and shift and click select all of them and then go command G or alt G that'll make them into a group and now you can see all of the dodging and burning that I did for this image so you know it's it's like I said before it's a slow build-up to get to this point now if for any reason you say you I don't know you don't like this section here you can what you can do is put a mask on this group and then pick a black brush your brush beef a brush and then maybe go to let's go 30 percent and you can kind of paint this in with a black brush and that'll tone it down a little bit and if you've gone too far then just change the brush color to white again that's it that's not white that's gray white and you can just paint that over with the white brush and it will go back to the way it was so when you're using any kind of masks it's it's very powerful because you can keep going back and forth and changing things another way you could change it is say you wanted to lessen the overall effect you could just go up to the opacity here on the whole group and just slowly bring it down and that all just everything as well so there's lots of different ways you can do it okay we're pretty much done with all the dodging and burning now there is another step that I want to take and now this isn't everybody's cup of tea but I use it on quite a lot of my images it just softens the edges up just a little bit and gives it a bit of a the whole image is kind of a knotted well I was gonna say a dreamy look but you don't want everything to look dreamy it just has a nice to my eye has a nice feel to it so what that is okay so what I'm going to do here is just press shift option alt or command on on a Mac and then press the e key and that'll make a copy of everything that we've done here and from there I'm going to go up to filter and blur Gaussian blur I usually go around just under 40 40 pixels here that looks pretty good just pressure okay and from here we're going to add a little bit more contrast and brightness no don't worry this the image is going to look like this in the end as we just go down here brightness and contrast you'll notice at the bottom here there's a little box with it with an arrow on it I already just click on that and it'll just affect that that layer so we're going to brighten up the the whole image and add quite a bit of contrast to it like that and that's it done no just kidding alright now click on the layer that you blurred and see opacity here we're going to slide that down probably down to about I usually around 17% like that and you'll see that it if we zoom in a little bit here especially with the river scenes like this it gives it kind of a little bit of a misty feel to it notice how the the whole image is is looks like it's affected in this this this mist I like it anyway so what I'm going to do now is if I select both those layers and go command or alt G make them into a group and we're gonna put a mask on that the reason being is that even though I like this effect I don't want it to affect everything especially the foreground like generally when we're looking into a scene say our mountains or something in the distance it kind of gets foggy ER and foggy as we look into it the foreground generally isn't misty so we've got the mask on here I'm going to press B for brush and X make sure that it's black and 30% is okay I will just make the brush a bit bigger here I'm just gonna paint this and what this is doing is getting rid of that effect that I just put on the whole image here see I want the background to stay as it is more or less but we're just slowly getting rid of the effect from the foreground and if we click on the mask option and just click on there you can see where I've masked out the areas and if you press shift and on them on the mask you can see the parts where it's especially down here alright and I think that's that's it done I did notice down here there's a little white spot there I guess when I opened it up from Lightroom we didn't quite crop it enough and just clone that out that's that's really minor you can see the the image is quite sharp throughout and it has a pretty nice effect on it I you know you're now that we look at this image your eye goes to this area here and then down here whoops and lead you to the waterfall at the back here this stream isn't to my eye anyway it's so much in your in your face anymore right and that's pretty much it I really hope that you got something out of this I hope I didn't ramble on too long obviously some images you can get more involved with and some you don't need to but this should just kind of give you an idea of what I do with my average photography post-processing please let me know what you think down in the comments below if you'd like to see a little bit more of this or if you don't want to see this ever again I'm fine with it I won't be offended ideally like I said before if I can go out on a little excursion take some images and then perhaps during the week have another little video where I show you my processing technique I'm happy to do that alright so until next time it looks like the sun's come out so it might be a good time to actually go out and take some photographs be sure to give me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video and I'll I'll see you next time all right thanks ever so much again and take care [Music] [Applause] [Laughter] [Music]

Channel: Adam Gibbs

Views: 69,042

Keywords: image processing tutorials, lightroom tutorial, photoshop tutorial, using luminosity masks, orton effect, lightroom cc tutorial, photo processing tutorial, photo processing photoshop, photo processing lightroom, lightroom classic, layer masks, dodging, burning

Id: KHk_aFXcYxQ

Length: 42min 38sec (2558 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2018