Get Greater Control Editing Skies Using Control Points & Control Lines with DxO PhotoLab 5

[Music] so [Music] so [Music] welcome to another dxo webinar i'm your host photojoseph and it is my pleasure today to take you through some of the more exciting new features in photo lab 5 specifically within the selective adjustments the control points and the control lines and we're going to be focusing today on photos of skies beautiful lovely pretty skies so we are talking again about the control points and control lines specifically with photos of skies now obviously everything you learn today can be applied to any photo it doesn't have to just be a photo of a sky but you'll see that the sky type photos horizon photos landscape photos are particularly particularly well suited to the new control line functionality that we're going to be focusing on today or partially focusing on today so that's where we're going to um that's what we're going to be looking at is what the type of photos we're going to be working in also today i have a little extra treat treat i guess for for the windows users out there as anybody who knows who's watched my previous webinars i'm entirely mac based i do everything on the mac and occasionally questions come up about well hold on on windows things look a little bit different i actually have a very low end pc in my studio that i have installed photo lab on we're not going to be seeing any great performance here but i'm going to pull that up at one point just to show you where some of the buttons that are missing on the pc version of the windows version um should be well you'll see them on the mac side you'll see they're missing on the windows side and i'll show you how to access those same features so we're going to do that after we get through the first photo here i'm just going to show you some of those things because i know this is something that comes up comes up pretty often so we're going to be taking a look at that anyway just to go over what we are going to be talking about today specifically i'm adjusting the mask range with control points and control lines using the fine sensitivity selections this is something that allows us to limit the range of the chrominance or the luminance separately to really refine exactly what is being selected in the control line so if you're used to the previous photo on photo lab 4 and you're now making this move to photo lab 5 you've gone from control points with very little well i should say no control over what is being selected other than the size of the area to now having complete control over what within that range of influence i like to call the sphere of influence i usually call it which is not the dxo term but i don't know i just call it that i'm within the sphere has been influenced we have very very precise control over that and you are now having the control lines so really a whole bunch of upgrades for selective adjustments within photo lab 5 coming from photo lab 4. so we're going to talk about using the control lines to select a sky specifically something that's non-circular for those you who have used control points before you know that it is really focused on a circular shape but of course the world is not full of circles and so this will allow us to have a level of control that really would have before required multiple control points or now we can do it just with one control line which is really really cool i kind of covered this already customize the width and angle of the region affected by a control line this is uh this is adjusting the the lines themselves where they go we'll see how all that works combining control points with control lines which is always very very exciting and then we'll be like it says here in enhancer skies addressing multiple issues with a variety of specific adjustments which is just a all-encompassing way to say we're going to make our skies more better so with that said let's get into this let me slide over to the right screen here we are looking at photo lab on the mac we're actually going to start with this photo here and i suppose it should hit that reset button and i'm going to turn off my camera as we go go ahead and drop your questions into the q a or the chat lori is watching she's going to pull your questions out and put them into a separate document for me to look at so i will take pauses in between stages of the demo and come back and try to answer your question so by all means ask away anything you would like i can't promise we'll get to all of your questions but i will do my darndest to do so right with that said i'm going to turn off my camera give you guys a little bit more room to see the screen and let's get into this okay so first photo this is um according to my title here shot in the salt flat so it doesn't look like it's all flats but um apparently that's where i was and you can see first off this photo is quite overexposed looking at the histogram it's pushed way way to the right you can just see on your screen it's very bright and washed out and as i have said many many times whenever i'm doing an adjustment for a photo like this the first thing i want to do is just find out if i even have detail in here that i that's worth trying to recover and for me the easiest way to do this and i really i do this with almost every single photo i ever touch so i'll go to my exposure compensation and i'm just going to drag this left and right to see what data is there and as i pull this down we see ah yes there is tons of data here in the clouds yes there is some clipped details in these finer highlights we can see that as we bring it down and they're still very very bright so yeah sure i've clipped out some really fine details in there but you know i'm okay with that i can live with that there's nothing critical in there that i'm gonna miss and if this was a darker photo i would probably go the other way with the exposure just to see what details were hiding in the shadows clearly not necessary with this picture but this does allow me to see what details are there and since this photo is in general quite overexposed i am going to go ahead and start with just a general exposure shift let's just pull that down a little bit and that of course makes a big difference to the overall look of the photo now looking at this picture here i see on the foreground here the the ground i should say that it's it's a bit dark but even if i reset this it doesn't necessarily get better it's just kind of washed out and boring and flat in there and i guess the the sun wasn't really exactly hitting here so it's just kind of all in the shade of these clouds it just doesn't look that dynamic so we're going to want to work on that if i look at the sky there is a nice gradient in the sky it starts off darker here than it does on the bottom where it's lighter but i'm going to want to enhance that i'm going to kind of amp that up a bit and make the sky a bit darker at the top and and probably keep the lightness or maybe make it a little bit darker at the bottom there but not too much certainly not as much as the top so you already get an idea here that we're going to need some kind of a linear gradient adjustment to control the top of the sky differently than the bottom of the sky or farther out sky whatever you want to call it and then the clouds might do something with one of the clouds or two of the clouds on their own so that's what we're going to that's what we're going to do so with that said let's let's play with another global adjustment and that is going to be the clear view this is like i said a bit flat down here we see it getting a bit hazy in the distance and so i'll turn on clear view and right away it's kind of a bam huge huge difference there it's a bit too much so i'll pull the intensity down on that a little bit and right away we're definitely getting a nice enhancement to the foreground to the clouds and the distance there we haven't overdone it you know it's as easy to overdo if i crank that up all the way it just looks really over baked but if we just do a little bit in there that works out pretty well for this photo so i like this light clear view adjustment over the entire thing we can toggle that on and off get a before and after on there it's adding just a little bit of subtle enhancement i'm going to leave that there i think that's pretty good so that's one global adjustment that i'm going to make and that's it that's where we're going to stop our globals now we're going to start getting specific so let's talk through the thought process of how i would adjust the blue sky i just want to adjust the blue sky so your first thought might be let's go over to the hsl tools let's see right here we're going to go down to the new well new as of the previous photo lab hsl tool and i could go in here and say i want to enhance the blues so i grab the blue and i do something like take the luminance down on the blue in there and that actually works out quite well for this particular image but it is darkening the blues down here against the mountain range which i don't really want i don't want to darken that down there and i do also feel like the darkening of the blues down here is more than i really want it to do so using the luminance slider of the hsl tool is effective absolutely but it's doing a little bit too much especially down here closer to the horizon so i'm going to say nope this isn't the tool we're going to use so let's just turn that off that's not going to work well let's think about the fact that i do want it to start up at the top be darker more of an adjustment at the top than i do at the bottom and as i hinted earlier that means a linear adjustment a linear gradient so let's go into local adjustments and right click to choose what tool and i'm going to start with a graduated filter another another name for that would be a linear gradient i'm going to grab that and drag a line across the image let's say from like here to here and if you're not familiar with the familiar with the way a linear adjustment works let me control it let me just kind of restrict this a little bit effectively what happens is you have a starting point and an ending point so this little white dot's my ending point this one's the beginning point or the starting point everything on this side of the line in fact let me just make this left to right to make it really obvious everything on this side of the line the left side is going to have whatever i do with my adjustments applied 100 everything on this side of the line of the white dot is going to be zero percent so nothing's gonna apply there and then the space between from this line or this point to this line this point is going to fade off from 100 applied to zero percent applied so if i take the exposure and i crank it that'd be the wrong one if i take the exposure and i crank that all the way down we see here that we have a massive underexposure on the left no effect whatsoever on the right and then that transition in between and if i make this transition larger let's drag this way way big like this then you'll see how we're getting that transition from 100 total 100 here all across this range and then from this line to this line at face from 100 to zero and then past this line it's a zero percent that's what a linear gradient does and we've probably all seen this type of effect before but i just wanted to kind of go over that to really make sure it was clear of what was happening now that is great however in a photo like this it's affecting everything so let's go ahead and put this back as i might for this horizon let's go and drop that up at the top rotate this down and like i said i want to darken the sky well we can already see here that sure it's darkening the sky but it is also darkening all the clouds and if i make this adjustment here we can see that it is affecting everything the sky the clouds everything as it should because this is a simple linear gradient or a linear adjustment and that's not going to work for this photo now in the past the solution we would have let's go ahead and reset this the solution we would have would be the control points and if i grab a control point let's drop it into this corner here and make it nice and big and i want to view i want to affect just the blue sky in there so i look at the uh the show masks option i click that and i see what is being affected so anything that's white is being affected anything that's dark is not being affected and here we can see that i've just isolated the blue part of the sky there so that's awesome right let's hide the masks take the exposure drop that down and that's great for that part of the sky but i'm not affecting this part of the sky so now i have to go over here and say well let's add another control point there and let's kind of i guess we add one in the middle here and shrink that and we try to find a balance of control points where i can select the sky but this is obviously not going to be easy i mean it's not not it's not impossible you know this is how we used to do things before but it certainly isn't going to be easy and it's going to require multiple control points in here so now let's reset all this again and now we look at the new tool the new control line and the control line is a combination of graduated filter so that or that linear gradient and control point meaning this i'll grab a control line and i'll just go ahead and drag this across the image like so so right away we have something very recognizable you've got just like the graduated line the graduated linear gradient everything on this side would be applied at 100 everything on this side zero percent and then in between these lines would be fading from 100 to zero but we're adding into this the idea of a control point selection the ability to refine what is being selected across the entire selection here across the entire linear gradient and that is defined by this eyedropper now remember with a control line sorry control point it's defined by wherever we started so i click on here that becomes the basis of what is selected but that no longer makes sense let me delete that that no longer makes sense with the control line with the uh yeah with the control line because this point right here you know if i want to select the blue sky but i need to start it here well it's selecting the white cloud so that doesn't that doesn't work so instead we have this new eyedropper great the wrong thing let me reset that we have this new eyedropper let's drag that again this eyedropper here allows me to position the mask selection anywhere in the image it doesn't even have to be i could select it down here if i was trying to select some like random green things in the sky but it was hard to select them exactly i could sample green from down here i can move the eyedropper wherever i want and so now we're going to be able to refine what area of the mask is being selected with this control point do i want to select the clouds do i want to select the blue sky what is it that i want to select without having to move this and to really see what's happening in here once again we want to show the masks so i enable show masks and now as i move this around we can see what would happen if i selected the white clouds or the blue sky in here now right away we can tell that we're selecting too much we're getting all the cloud in here along with the blue sky not as much but it is being selected a bit too much in here and so this is where the other new feature in photo lab 5 comes in very very handy and that is under the local adjustments our mask selectivity sliders we have our chrominance in luminance sliders in here and think of this like a well if we actually just do this let me go over to this tool here back to hsl um this right here just ignore what's happening in the image for a moment just take a take a look at the hsl tool if you look at the hsl tool this is a hue wheel right this is a hue wheel we're seeing all the colors of the rainbow around here and these lines here represent a range of what is being selected and the broader the farther i move this out the broader the range so if we think about the blue sky if i have a very narrow range selected it's only going to affect this range of blues if i make a wider range on there it's going to select a wider range of blues eeking into the sky blue and into the purple and if i keep going bigger and bigger it's just going to start to get in the greens and the purples and so on so if you think of this like the slice of a pie let me bring this back down like the slice of a pie here we have a very narrow slice and as i broaden this out we get a broader and broader slice of that well broadening that slice is exactly what's happening when we go into these let me turn that hsl tool back off so we don't mess up the image there we go so this slider here is broadening or narrowing that slice of pie as i bring this closer to a hundred it becomes a narrower and narrower slice of pie so you can see it's getting less and less of the hue so it's very refined to just the blue in here as i back it off that gets broader and broader and we get to a point where for this image it starts to get everything it gets the clouds and everything in there because there is a little bit of blue in those clouds in there but by refining this or by sliding the slider i can refine exactly what is being selected in here so let me move my eyedropper over to this broad range of blue over here and start adjusting the chrominance slider and then the luminance slider exact same thing but brightness am i selecting things that are the exact same brightness as this part of the sky right here or am i saying no no give me stuff that is a broader range of brightness all the way down to zero where it's all luminances so now the mask is based only on the chrominate in fact if i took the chroma is down to zero the end result is a simple linear gradient we're back where we started with the linear gradient tool because we're saying give me all colors all luminance it literally doesn't matter where i put this eyedropper here it's always going to be the same result but with this starting to refine we can say no no i just want the blue sky in there and i want it to be in this particular range and we can refine that down now for this image luminance doesn't matter a whole lot actually does if we get pretty high you can see it's starting to break apart in there or if we bring it down a little bit then we see it's it's not if we get down to zero it's you know there's not a whole lot but this one though a lot changes when we adjust the chromatids so that's going to depend on your photo sometimes you're going to have a very precise chrominance adjustment that you need to do sometimes very precise luminance and sometimes one of them just frankly won't matter at all okay so this is pretty good we've got this mask built now some of you may have recognized that there's a very bright area around the clouds here and that is actually going to be a problem we're going to come back and fix that later so i'm going to leave the mask as it is here let's hide the mask view and now let's make an adjustment to this so i'm going to hide that go back over here and i'll take my exposure and i'll darken that down and now you can see that the clouds are getting adjusted sorry the sky is getting adjusted getting darker it is fading off down here so no adjustment here is happening right if you look underneath this line i can take this all the way down all the way up whatever everything on that side of the line is not being affected at all everything on this side of the line is being affected 100 and then there's that gradient in between so i can pull that down and do that nice adjustment now i might want to make this more gradual so let's take this line move all the way to the top there is no nothing saying that we have to have this line somewhere in the image we have to have beyond 100 or 100 um entirely applied we can move this to the very top of the image that's no problem and do a nice big really soft subtle gradient down and then we get that nice very gradual darkening so this is looking pretty darn good if we look over here at the sky sorry of the clouds around here remember i pointed out in the mask view that that was going to be a problem we can see that here this kind of harsh line and just again to reiterate what we're looking at that harsh line that white line is saying i'm going to adjust at maybe not 100 because it's not pure white but i'm going to adjust a lot here a lot less than sorry a lot more than here and of course on this side absolutely none at all because that's dark going towards black but because we have that line in there that visual line in the mask we can actually see that in the end result so we really need to refine the mask so it doesn't show up with that line so how do we do that well you can go back in and start using the chrome and luminance tools to find the right selection there but a little tip for you maybe it just depends on where you start your selections let me check that eyedropper and move it back over here to the center of the sky and just by doing that just by selecting a slightly different shade of blue to start with the new range really cleans that up and now we no longer have that highlighted edge in there so that looks much much better and of course if you needed to you could still go in and refine that a bit with the chrominance and luminance sliders now while it's great to make these adjustments while looking at the mask view you can of course do this while you're in the regular non-mask view as well so if i want to say well maybe i want to have a broader range selected but you can see how it's selecting those clouds in there or maybe i want to have a tighter range selected you can do that in either view so it's really beneficial to go back and forth this way you'll spot any really obvious errors that might be happening if we turn the mask off then we can see the whole image which at the end of the day that's all that matters is the whole image but you know sometimes you miss fine details if you're if you're kind of too close to the image if you will you can miss details so going back and forth between the mask view and the non-mask view when you're making these adjustments is definitely advisable so here we have this really cool adjustment of the sky going darker down to lighter and then not being affected at all down here i'm going to go and rename my control line here let's double click on that and call this blue sky and i'm digging the way that looks now let's combine this with a control point and the control point i'm going to add to the to the clouds in here so to create a new mask i can click on the new mask button or i can right click up here and click new mask in here and this is important to do because if i didn't do that then i would be adding additional control points to this existing mask in fact let's just do that let me go back to this blue sky select that and i will add a control point to this and i'm going to drop this let's say down here make this really small down here just to make it really obvious this control point is included in this adjustment here so if i make another adjustment to this make it brighter make it darker you can see that this is part of that so i'm combining the control point with my control line in here and not what i want but i could do that so let me go ahead and delete that i'll hit the delete key and let's go back and create a new mask again and now i'm going to add that control point to the cloud to control the cloud separately once again we can show the masks i can refine that mask i really just want the clouds in there so it's probably going to be a bit of a luminous adjustment that's going to make sure i get as much of that cloud as possible broaden that out maybe we'll bring this the circle down a little bit smaller in here and you'll notice here that i kind of need some negative control points to really knock the sky out i'm just getting by the time i get all the cloud in there i'm getting a little bit too much of the sky i don't really want that in there so i'm going to go ahead and use the good old-fashioned negative control points to do that i click down here to choose the negative control point and then i'll drop one up here in the cloud sorry in the sky you can see it just totally went to black totally knocked that out let's add another one down here boom knocks that out and now we've got this really nice range of just the cloud in there maybe i can even make this a little bit bigger now yeah there we go a little bit more of the cloud looking pretty good so now we've got this nice cloud in here let's go ahead and call this cloud and let's turn off the mask and for this cloud what do i want to do i think i'm going to go in here to my micro contrast and really crank that up and pull some detail into that cloud yeah there we go that looks pretty cool really add a whole bunch of punch into that cloud in there liking that so let's get out of the local adjustments and see what we've got so far looking pretty good let's go back uh compare the original to the new one looking pretty darn good in there i'm digging it i like it now i've shown you a couple things that aren't on the windows interface these uh whole bar down here that has the ability to toggle back and forth between the positive and negative control points and hide and show the masks so let me show you how this works now this isn't magic i'm just swiping over to a screen sharing program that is now showing you my pc elsewhere in the studio and in here you can see we are running windows you see the windows taskbar at the bottom and if i go into my local adjustments in here you can see that there's no toolbar so if i swipe back there's the mac version there's the toolbar looking good swipe over to the pc version there's no toolbar i can't explain why it just isn't but dx is aware of this obviously but it's not there for now so here's how this works instead all of these controls that i'm going to show you are all listed right here this little pop-up that comes up when you first get into the tool tells you everything you need to know to add a negative control point right here the negative control point otherwise known as a protection control point you see right here protect an area alt click alt clicking will add a negative control point to show and hide the mask right here this button show hide masks that is simply the m key show hide mask the m key just like on the mac you got the equalizer with the e key and so on so let me go ahead and do this i will take this local adjustment i'm going to add a control point drop that on here so you can see the mask that's being built by that if i want to add a negative control point i hold down the alt key on my keyboard click over here and that adds a negative control point so that is now negative you can see the little negative on there click to add a positive one alt click to add a negative one so it's as easy as that and then to toggle the mask on and off it's just the m key m to go back and forth that's it so those are the most important ones to know there's other keyboard shortcuts in here you might want to pay attention to as well but those are the biggies those are the things that are not showing up down here our negative control point are show masks that is super critical to be able to do um the other one down here the big one is this new mask button but of course back here on the windows you just right click and hit the new mask button within the the tool what is this thing called the whatever this tool is called you can choose new mask there or you can see there's also a shortcut for that new mask shift end so that's it that's all i wanted to share on the windows side that's where it is option or rather alt to make a negative control point and then the m key m for mask to toggle that on and off all right enough of that let's get back over to this version of this i'm going to do a couple or one more thing to this photo and then i'm going to jump into questions because i see there's a few of them in here okay uh the last thing i wanted to do was enhance the foreground a little bit more we did a little bit already but i want to do a little bit more to this so i'm going to right click and do a whole new mask and let's go ahead and start with a graduated filter and drag this across the bottom here and of course if i want to affect just the kind of green foliage in here anything that i do like this is going to also select the mountain range up here a little bit of the sky and so on so already we know that this tool is not going to be the right one so i'll delete that go in here and add a control line instead and i'll do the same positioning i'll just drag it across that mountain range there but i'm going to take my little eyedropper grab it and drag it down here onto the green green grass let's show the masks on there and by default it's too much selection we can see it eeking into the mountains in here so we'll take that chrominant slider and let's reduce or restrict rather the area that's being selected and pretty quickly there we can see how that's starting to refine out i just want i don't want too little i do want a bit of the green and beyond so let's say right about there looks pretty good so now i've got all this kind of greenery down here the mountain range in the sky is being left alone let's hide the mask and i want to enhance the detail in there so maybe you know i don't know what maybe i want to take contrast if i can do it just kind of no that's not doing it maybe microcontrast is not going to do it in there that kind of helps helps a little bit in there but remember there's a tool that we used earlier the clear view the clear view worked really well over the whole image but it was just too much on this earlier so i'm going to take clear view just on the greenery down here and crank that up and now we're starting to get some really cool details in there let me add some color to this as well stick the saturation of that green pump that way up and i can i can go pretty far in here because i'm just hitting the greens and now look at that beautiful greenery down there let's rename this one this is called the green stuff and now if i want to toggle that on and off let's just close this to hide all the ui and i'll go over here and i'll toggle just the green stuff on and off and you can see what beautiful effect that has had there if i want to toggle just the cloud on and off we can see that nice pop we added to the cloud in there just the blue sky we can toggle that on and off and overall this is pretty darn cool again to compare back to the original there's the original fully overexposed back to this view of it and that is looking pretty cool so that's a nice enhancement there again combining control lines control points using all the tools we have available to us and i dig it i love it okay let me have a look over here at the questions that have come up and let's see if there's anything i can answer tim has asked is there a key combo that slows that down for more accuracy of the control line no i there isn't and i know what you're asking for so if you go into um let me just choose a different image so i don't mess this one up although it supposes it doesn't really matter but let me go to another photo here and go in and do a control line and i drag this down if you want to very carefully refine this especially if you're trying to a really little one no there what you want is a keyboard that you shortcut you hold down like option or command or alt or control or something to make this more precise it doesn't there isn't one for that um that is something i know i've asked for in the past and i'm glad you're asking for it because every time somebody asks um an angel gets its wings and somebody somebody somewhere hears about it so yeah that's not there right now i wish it was i'm with you and um let's just keep our fingers crossed and hope that happens tom so for the control line if the chroma and loomis sliders are set to zero basically the functionality is the same as the gradient's local adjustment exactly which means that the gradient local adjustment is now redundant well sure it's redundant in the sense that you can make the control line work like it graduated like the linear gradient but every time you'd have to go in and move those sliders back to zero plus you'd have this extra eye dropper floating around you didn't need so i wouldn't call it i wouldn't call it redundant completely it's redundant in functionality yes but not really in practical use because every time that you wanted to do it you'd have to click it and then drag the two sliders down to zero so it wouldn't be as efficient so it's definitely more efficient to have that for when you want it because sometimes you do want it right sometimes like this photo here maybe i just want to make the whole sky darker i just want to do a quick graduated flip through across the top and boom and that's it that's all oop that's the wrong one and boom that's it that's all i wanted and i'm happy and i'm done so why have to go in and mess with sliders i don't have to however that said if i let's say i do a um a control point and let's go back to positive here and i add a control point to this part of the sky and darken this of course it's just going to focus on that blue area of the sky there but if i wanted it to affect everything okay obviously this makes sense for this photo but if i wanted it to affect everything i can go in and take that down and we now have the ability to have a a circular gradient that is not a control point right is no longer as a control point so i can have a circular gradient that just affects an area completely which there are certainly times where that's handy you just want something that affects everything you don't care about a selection inside of it you just want a simple circular gradient and there you go now you have it so that that does work both ways there's that's a pretty cool thing okay uh next one rick says can you show what the adjustments on the clouds look like at 100 because if you're going to print it that's what mattered oh yeah okay sure thing so let's close this go back to here and let's go into 100 so there's that clouded 100 percent um if i go back into local adjustments and select that if you wanted to see the mask on there but i guess yeah i'm not quite sure exactly what you want to see but there's the image at 100 so of course i might go in here and make some refined adjustments to that before sending it off to print um but there you go so hopefully that's what you were looking for um yeah looks pretty good okay uh let's see here that's all the questions we had so far so again if you have any other questions drop them on in and we will get to them okay let's see here next photo let me close this zoom back out and this photo is yep that's the next one yeah close off the camera here all right this was i shot this in um in mexico in oaxaca and this is a lovely morning mist and this is one of those photos that um this is one of those photos that when i shot it i had a very clear idea of what i wanted what i didn't want was all this stuff in the middle here so i shot this knowing i'm gonna crop all this rubbish out what i was focusing on was this beautiful horizon line here with this nice sun this is early morning this is sunrise um you know bright in the sky pointing straight into the camera here but this mist the cloud the fog rather in here i just thought this is so beautiful this is all ugly i don't want any of this so i shot this knowing full well i was going to crop this out give me a really kind of cinematic look now you might be thinking well gee joseph why don't you just tilt the camera up so the bottom of the frame was here probably because there's a whole lot of sky up here that i just didn't want but also if i tilted it up this is probably a pretty wide angle lens uh let's see here what uh yeah 15 millimeter lens on a micro four thirds so 30 ml equivalent if i tilted this up i would definitely get some curvature around the edges in here so i didn't want to tilt it up i just wanted to shoot straight on with the full intention that i was going to crop all this rubbish out of it so let's start with the crop where's my crop here's my crop here it is and i'm going to turn off aspect ratio so it's just unconstrained crop and i'm going to take the bottom of this all the way up to the top of that little foliage in there now if i wanted to i could go a little bit more and then go in and retouch this but i really don't i just want i just want that so i'm going to go to there pull the sky down a little bit let's get closer to the sun so now we're getting this super wide kind of cinematic if you will look cool let's close that dig it there we go no we're already off to a great start in here so that's the first thing i'm doing and i really make this point because i think it's important to think about this when you're shooting sometimes with a any given lens that you have any wide angle lens or whatever you're looking at a scene you're like yeah this is when you look at it just with your eye you see just the part that you want to see right so in this situation i looked out across this vista and i just saw the beautiful horizon there the mountains with the fog and the sky clearly i can see the foreground but my brain goes it doesn't exist don't care about that all i care about is that stuff that i'm focusing on then you pick up your camera and you're like but there's all this other stuff in there that i don't want remember think in in advance about how you might post-process your image remembering that you can do things like crop you know any photo if you're looking at if you have any particular lens and you want to shoot something like oh but there's this stuff on the side you'll be able to crop that out later it's really important to while shooting keep that in mind keep the post processing process in mind while you're shooting because you know all the things that we can do in the computer really mean that our photo journey the journey of making an image only begins when we push that shutter button right that is not the ending the ending is way later so just keep that in mind it's one of those things you know when you're out shooting and you're like oh the lens just doesn't get what i want well would it would you want if you cropped something out or we touched out a telephone line or something like that that might be on the way keep these things in mind when shooting yeah all right enough little rant let's go back to the photo here okay so what am i going to do with this picture a couple things um it has this beautiful hazy horizon area i might want to enhance it i might not and we'll see the sun i love the way the sun looks in here but let's look at this more closely you can see there's this kind of a a hard line it's it's actually pretty good i'm pretty impressed at how the sensor handled the edge transition from the bright spot off to the uh to the clouds in there but i want to soften that out a bit more i want to make that a little bit more graduated so i'm going to focus on that as well in this image let's go ahead and start by just playing with the um the clear view plus now i'll turn that on and right away boom lots of cool stuff happening down here we are getting a bit of the bit no bit of noise excuse me showing up in here um because it's kind of overexposed in these in this region oversuppose it's the wrong word because it's brighter here where it should be darker how about we put it that way um but intentionally it's getting a bit of noise in here which is kind of okay in here but if you look at the sky it really isn't i don't like the way it's it's kind of adding noise into the sky in there so i'm going to not want that to happen i might want to be able to do a little bit of clear view on the foreground here but not really in the background and maybe i don't want a clear view on the whole thing so well everything i'm saying here you can probably figure figure out pretty quickly is leading up to using a control line so let's start by just dragging control line across the mountain range here about like so and let's go into the mask view and let's see what we're getting with the eyedropper so as i move the eyedropper around i can make a selection based off of well do i want just the darker range or just kind of the lighter range in there in fact let's let's refine this a bit let's take our it's going to be chrominance or luminance well chromis you can see we start to really isolate the noise in there which is interesting maybe it's more of a luminance adjustment that we need so we do a little bit refined luminance oh there we go look at that so as we get into the refined luminance range now you really start to break apart the different ranges of the mountain how cool is that look do i want just this kind of foreground area that range of the mountains this range back there so now it's a case of figuring out well what do i want to do i what is it i'm trying to achieve here i don't know well let's let's play with it let's turn off the masks and let's take our clear view and crank that up a bit and i'm going to do this i'm going to overdo it i'm going to crank it up a bit too much just so it's easier to see what's happening as i move the eye drop around and then we'll back off on it so now we can start to see it's subtle i get that it's subtle and hopefully it's coming through the the go to webinar interface here but we can really start to see different areas of the image that are getting refined and i actually quite like it when we go into the background here and maybe even bring this up a bit more just to add a little bit of texture into the back there but we're leaving the foreground right we're kind of leaving some of the foreground out of that maybe we'll refine that a little bit more take our luminous slider crank that up a little bit kind of like that let's toggle that on and off it's subtle right but subtlety is what matters here now subtlety is what matters is a little bit too much just backed it off a little bit but i like it i like it in fact let's try this let's do something else let's go down here maybe darker in the foreground do i like that oh actually i kind of do that's making a little bit darker in the foreground all right let's go with that i think it's even better there we go a little bit of darkness just in the foreground okay we're going to call this mountain range and that's our that's our new adjustment there all right next let's do a gradient across the sky and let's make it darker starting at the top i want that that kind of view that you get when you have a really big blue sky uh really wide lens and the top of the image gets darker not vignetting but just the top of the image towards the top of the sky so let's do that we'll do another new mask and i think for this one well no i don't want a straight graduated filter let's try it do a straight graduated filter let's see what happens but we're going to end up darkening well i mean it does kind of work doesn't it i think that actually does work pretty well maybe we don't have to get complicated with this one we'll just leave that nice and simple linear gradient darken that part of the sky maybe pull this down a little bit more looking pretty good let's just try it the new way though let's go and delete that add a new control line drag this across and say yep i just want the blue sky let's take a look at the mask on there ignoring the sun so there we can see the sun is being knocked out of that we're not going to adjust the sun on there i definitely want that 100 across the top on there i can adjust my selection in here but i don't want to go too refined like that would look weird i don't want to do that so let's back that off a bit just play with the luminance a little bit which that works pretty good so we're just not going to affect the area around the sun there that actually does work out pretty well now let's take the exposure down just subtle just a little bit okay there we go i like that okay we're gonna call that blue sky blue sky perfect digging that let's toggle this whole thing on and off we can see those adjustments definitely making a nice improvement nice change in here now the last thing i said i wanted to do was work on this sun where we've got these kind of harsh edges in there so i'm going to fix that by creating another new mask we're going to do a control point drop it right on the middle here and i think let's go ahead and show the masks on here i'm going to possibly go all the way down to nothing and let's try that i'm going to go all the way down to nothing here so i have a simple gradient just like we were showing with the previous question that was asked covering that sun let's hide the mass and now i'm going to overexpose it let's just blow this out to the point where the harsh lines disappear and there look at that they're gone love it now i have this beautiful bright sun spot without the harsh lines around it maybe make that a little bit bigger and if i do want to refine this a little bit i can maybe actually it does work out pretty well if i pull that in we get a little bit less hitting the blue around the edges in there the center of the sun is still nicely blown out perfect if i toggle this on and off let's rename this one so we know which one we're looking at that's the sun spot and if i toggle that on and off you can see that we get that line we're knocking that line red out i love it now the overall image here is very cool so i think what i'll do is counter that by going into this adjustment going into my colors and taking the white balance the temperature making a little bit warm adding a little bit of warmth in there now we're getting this warm glow around the image oh yeah that's looking pretty cool love it okay so there let's compare now before and after really really nice this the sun looks way better um the sun yeah sun definitely looks way better like that we get some of that warmth back into there the dark sky at the top in fact i want to make that dark sky a little bit darker let's go to blue sky in here and go back into the local adjustments and let's go back into here and take this down a little bit more make a little bit darker cool digging it all right yeah i don't know about you but i think that's pretty awesome little before and after i love it i love it nice okay and overall remember you've got this um individual opacity slider here for each individual adjustment so i say you know what that blue sky is a little bit too much let's back that off the sunspot's good at 100 the blue skies here and drop that off a little bit and that's important because here it's no big deal because i could have just gone in and made that one adjustment to that one exposure slider but let's just say let's go back into the adjustments let's say that i had also done the saturation let's do that let's take saturation and crank that way up in there let's say that i had done that as well now the opacity slider is going to change the opacity of the darkness and the saturation all together at once it's a really important thing to have in there but i don't like that saturation so i'm going to turn that off i liked it better when it was like that there we go i dig it i love it okay let's see if there's any questions that have come up looks like there's a couple of them and then we've got one more image to play with in here mike says when i drag down to create a control line how much should the lower line be under the upper line how does this affect the image okay so mike just to reiterate this is something we covered but when the difference between the two lines let's go back into this image here and we just reset this local adjustments local adjustments and control line okay so let me just drag the line straight across and take the exposure all the way down anything on this side of the starting point is applied at 100 so whatever i'm doing in here exposure saturation contrast whatever i'm doing is applied at 100 on this side of the line this side of the line is zero percent nothing is being applied so no matter what i do to these sliders in here nothing is affected on this side of the image 100 on this side zero percent on this side this line here defines the transition from 100 percent to zero percent so it's actually a little bit easier to even illustrate if i go to a straight graduated filter i do this let's go into the mask view actually no i'm gonna go mask field just do this take the exposure way down if i bring this really close in here then you can see there's a very very short transition from 100 applied to zero percent applied so that transition is very visible if i drag this out and drag it really far out it becomes a very soft subtle transition from one end to the other so how big that is define is is determined completely on your image what is it you're trying to achieve if like in here and again i'm making this this a very simple example but if i wanted to have a darkness that fades across the entire sky then i'm probably and to make it believable then i'm probably going to want to have a very large gradient right if i did this let's say let's say i wanted to darken the sky and i take this and i drop it down to here and i say okay i'm only going to make the transition from here to here well suddenly we have this weird shadow across and yes i'm totally overdoing it to make the point here but i have this weird shadow line across the bottom of the image there that doesn't make any sense however if i made this really gradual drag this all the way down like this then it becomes much more believable that soft gradient there is more believable it just depends on the image if however i'm trying to do the opposite of this let me flip this around the other way move this down to the bottom and i'm trying to get something just across the mountain range up there well i'm probably and i don't want to hit the sky then i'm probably going to need a pretty fast transition to go from a to b up here from the the affected to the unaffected i'm going to need a pretty fast transition so i'm going to need that line to be short so that's how the line works and it just completely depends on the image how you end up using it i hope that helps okay steve says where you name the individual local adjustments on the right okay is the closed eye at the bottom supposed to turn off all adjustments yes correct so if i go back to here um oh all adjustments at once i think no i think it is simply it's toggling the one that's selected so i can click on here to toggle it or i can click on the eyedropper here to toggle it those are the that's what those are so yeah it's it's an individual adjustment it's the same thing as clicking on here you just have multiple ways to go about doing it good question thanks i'm glad you asked that okay um is that that there you go okay that's that one all right now let's go to the next and final image which is this one this photo is i believe if memory serves um the top of haleakala in hawaii just gorgeous beautiful place okay so i want to affect the sky obviously that is today's theme and looking at this image we have two prominent colors in the sky we have this pinkish salmonish reddish orangish color and then we have the blue and i guess there's also yellow but we're going to we're going to kind of include that with the pinkish semi-lemonish orangish color once we get let's just say we have pink and we got blue that's what we're going to call it and i want to adjust them separately i want to make the pinks be a bit more saturated and i want to make the blues be a bit darker so i could once again try messing around with this with the with the hsl tool um but we can see down here that we have this blue in the clouds in here that kind of fades and bumps down into the top of the mountain range in here i am going to want to be very cautious of how i adjust those and so i think that the linear gradient with the combination of the control point technology so therefore control lines is going to be very handy here so we're just going to go straight into that all right local adjustments control line um i'm going to go pretty big here actually i'm going to start there and just do a simple little transition across these clouds here and let everything up top here get affected 100 take the eyedropper and grab it onto something pink let's take a look at the masks and let's start adjusting the masks in here so let's take our chrominance slider and refine just the area of the pink that i want luminance slider as well do i want to adjust that let's say right about there's looking pretty good like that let's hide the mask let's go into our saturation here crank that up and really enhance that oh yeah look at that beautiful really enhance that pink out there actually you know what looking at this now i think this is a little bit too strong so what i'll do is i'll take my transition up above that and let it start to fade out a little bit sooner that'll fade out that transition there a little bit sooner dig it okay i think that looks pretty good now i want to do the similar thing for the blue and i've already drawn this line and obviously this was just a quick click and drag but let's just say that i had really refined it took me a while to get this in precisely the right point in here so what i want is a new control line but i want it in the exact same position of this one well that's what this little guy right here does it allows me to duplicate a position a mask so let's go ahead and name this first one um the pink and there's our pink clouds in there and then i'm going to duplicate that and you see it just gets an o1 at the end we're going to rename this one to blue sky and now i'm going to take my eye dropper and move that over to the blue sky so i've changed the eyedropper position but the position of the mask itself has not changed powerful right now let's position this over the blue sky let's show our masks in there maybe we want a little bit broader range on that so let's back that off get a little bit more of the blue in there find that kind of right refined range in there i want all that blue sky looking good and i don't want to super saturate that so let's pull my saturation back down i do however want to darken it so let's pull the exposure down there there we go and now once again if i go into my masks and i start refining the selectivity here it might be a little tough to figure out exactly what it is i want because this is the kind of image where i go yeah i really know what i want i just know i want the blue to be darker and the pinks to be saturated or so i'm going to go ahead and and leave the mask off but now go back into the mask selectivity and start to refine this and this is pretty cool because now you really start to see what's being affected oh actually i kind of like that like if i was just looking at the mask here i might go oh no that's way too much of a selection look how much it's getting my pink uh clouds in there that's too much i don't want that but when i'm doing it without the masks i go oh actually i kind of like that i kind of like how it's darkened the pink in there but if i go back to my pink adjustment here i still haven't hear that really cool saturation that's happening so oh yeah that works out really really nicely so i've got that beautiful combination there of the um of the blue sky with the paint clouds and again with the pink we can adjust this as well do i want to broaden or contract the range of what's being selected there let's actually pull it down a little bit yeah change the luminance selection drop that out a little there you go i like it pretty darn good and again if we do a little compare before and after that is a stunning and quick adjustment in there last thing i'll do is to knock out this road we can see here there's a l hopefully you can see a little bit of a road in here i don't want it i just want this to be a total silhouette so let's create a new mask in here we'll do this as a control point and i will kind of make that a big control point there and just take take the exposure of that and just tilt it all the way down there we go nice big adjustment on there just to really knock that out that works out pretty good and then if i wanted to can add some protection points i can do that let's add a negative control point here make sure we're not darkening that because it did start to pick up some of that darken that out there we go protect that and there we have it that perfect silhouette in the foreground and the beautiful clouds back there do i want to do a little bit of brightening on the clouds i don't know do i sure why not let's see what happens let's take a one more local adjustment let's take that change in the name of this to uh the dark mountains there we go and let's add one more so we're doing a new mask new mask let's do a control line and actually here i know what i can do i can just pull this down like so don't have to worry too much about the fading off of that but what i'm going to do make sure i'm selecting actually no i don't want to do that let's do it this way we'll flip it this way around i'm making this up as i go here folks i'm going to flip this way around and let's get just the clouds in there and let's do some uh some micro contrast don't do that it doesn't really work maybe a little little clear view in there add a little texture to this that's kind of cool brighten it up a little bit oh i kind of like that actually here we go brightened up yeah it works pretty good okay i like it why not before and after with that one yeah sure maybe it's a little bit too much let's take that drag it down just a little bit and perfect digging it there's the whole thing local adjustments on and off for the whole thing there i love it and there we have it there is a even more beautiful sunset sunrise than we had before all right very fun all right let's see are there any other questions over here there's one more question that came up this is your last chance you got questions pop them in here cecil says once again how do you access the drop down window when using windows um okay so let me switch back over to the pc again and we just reset all of this reset okay so first of all i went into local adjustments the same way as on the mac you've got your local adjustments button up here that's your kind of easiest way to get into it you can also get into it from the local adjustments tool here by clicking the tool button either way it does the same thing it opens up this window this shows up automatically i can close this but i don't actually know the keyboard shortcut to bring it back so i'm not going to do that right now because i don't know it's different than it is on the mac on the mac it is shift um it was shift board slash yeah shift forward slash or shift question mark brings that up um it's not that on here so i don't know i don't know what it is uh i have not been able to figure that out it's got to be in there somewhere i'm kind of afraid to close it i just literally installed it this morning on the pc um anyway so this gives you all the controls in here so the two key ones that we were talking about was the missing negative control point function this little minus here so to do that you simply hold down the alt key so if i go into the um well the mask view the second one is the mask view so i'm going to enable that by tapping the m key m for mask and now if i hold down the alt and i click over here that adds a negative control points you can see that it is blocking that area if i just click then that adds another positive control point hold down the option or the alt key and that adds a negative control point so there's your difference you can see the little minus on there so alt does that and then again the m key m for mask toggles those on and off um just i don't know what the i don't know what the control is to bring this back up i haven't figured that one out but anyway there you go um okay hopefully that helps that mike says how do i move the sliders away from the default place where they were shown the it's called the equalizer and unfortunately there's not a way to to move it delete that i accidentally created but you can hide it so let me close that and so i've got this selected if these control equal is called the eq the equalizer's in the way you can hit the shift e to hide that so shift e will hide that on windows i think it's just e let's see here over here if i look at these controls where's uh yeah show and hide the equalizer shift e on windows showing how the equalizer is just the e key so over here if i just hit the e it toggles that on the mac it's shift e to toggle that on and off but you can't move it which i know is kind of a weird thing but you can't but um but shift dehydrated so there you go that's how that works michael says also can you use a line to blur the background of a portrait i would say it depends on the background um but yeah if you did let's do this let me go this actually would work out well for this because the background is already blurry here so it's not the greatest demo but let's just let's make it even blurrier so with this photo let's see here local adjustments um i'm going to do a control line and do a greater line down like so and we'll use the eyedropper and look at the mask and i obviously don't want to affect the flower so i will actually add a negative control point on here to protect the flower so let's make sure that's really nicely protected really trying to isolate the flower out of there to protect it might need to add some more to really kind of really protect the rest of the flower in here okay let's add some over to the leaf on here so we're pretending the flower is a portrait here obviously you probably would have to add a whole bunch of negative control points to protect it let's go back to this and make sure we've got most of the sky luminance adjustment pretty well okay let's hide the masks and then um where is the blur there's a blur tool in here somewhere here uh sharpness blur here we go blur so i'll take the blur tool and i'll crank that all the way up so you can see we're definitely getting some haloing around the edge in here um if i do a negative control point there it'd be tough that's going to be tough it's gonna be tough but it's gonna depend on the image i mean you might be able to get away with it you might be able to um you know give it a try but that kind of did it well that's worth trying fun question okay uh let's see here uh mila asks the control point on the control point box on the pc says shift c at the top would that be the keyboard shortcut to show or hide the box no that is let me go back into this that is the keyboard shortcut to bring up the control point so if i if i choose a new one let me reset all this um okay if i right click and choose control point and i add one internal error correct excellent oh there's back shift c is control point if i add a control line shift l is control line so this is telling me the keyboard shortcut to call that up so i hit shift c i can now add a control point if i hit shift l i can now add a control line that's what that is right there that's telling you the keyboard shortcut to call that up [Music] okay i do believe that's it that is it thanks again for tuning in today super appreciate your time have fun with the rest of your week um it's just monday we're just getting started here and we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: DxO

Views: 2,225

Keywords: DxOLabs, DxO, Raw Editing, dxo photolab, photolab, Dxo labs, photography, Raw editor, Raw editing, photoshop, Lightroom, editing software, photo editing, sky photography editing, sky photography editing lightroom, sky photo editing lightroom, sky photo editing app, sky photography, sky photo editing, sky photo editing video, CONTROL POINTS, sky photo editing, editing, photo manipulation, landscape photography, photography editing

Id: wuQ3lDHTGwI

Length: 57min 30sec (3450 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 02 2021