How do I Edit my photos? || Editing bird photographs in Adobe Lightroom

hi everybody my name is and in this video we are not meeting from the field but at my computer that and here i will show you my editing process many of you asked about it how it's going and stuff like that so we'll go through start to the finish on four different pictures that i took on my trip to iceland you can see the behind the scenes of those pictures in the card above so let's start with importing the photos we we go to the library model add folder i have them saved in one of the folders i've got them cataloged by um by the location then by the year that's the folder that we're gonna post process i'm gonna process those four four pictures and import okay and now we're heading into the develop model first let's look at this redneck follow-up overall an okay image straight from the camera but the greens are not green there is a bit over exposure here here in the whites and we would like to be a bit closer so because i'm using the r5 i have a lot of pixels to use so i will cl crop it probably like this that will be my final crop and i will start with the global adjustments i will try not to blow the highlights so i'm clicking on the button in the top right because if i would blow the highlights the red spots will start to appear first i will just a bit of contrast then what i usually do is i play with the sliders to see what works the best definitely we want less highlights in this image because you can see this area is pretty blown out we won't add whites but we may take blacks a bit down add a bit of vibrance and just a tiny bit of saturation and that's a good image from the basic editing maybe just a bit of less blue on the bird and a bit more orange now we're going to specific editing specific parts of the image so with we're selecting adjustment brush here and let's start with the eye is pretty well visible but we just want to give it this a bit kick with adding a bit of white clarity and just a tiny bit of exposure to make that up that blue i really pop at us so second one this really bothers me so i will just clone it out in lightroom because it's easy fix for for the lightroom but maybe not from here where is is suggest just from the area nearby done second of all we'll do the overall bird adjustment which means the bringing just a bit of sharpness i'm pressing an o button to see um where is my selection i'm selecting the bird okay now that we have a better selections what i usually do is i bump up the textures just a tiny bit and i add a bit of clarity to the bird here i will take a bit out of the shadows recover a bit of shadows and maybe just maybe take a bit of highlights off but add a bit no we won't add whites maybe a bit of blacks to to make it stand out from the background okay now it's time to deal with the overexposed water here and simple fix another brush adjustment and it will be highlights all the way down and blacks i mean and why it's pretty significantly down also now i'm pressing alt and deleting just a bit of the mask that i went too far off and that's that i went a bit too much here so i need to recover just a bit of whites more and now this um it's also overexposed so let's now as you can see it's over exposed and we're taking the highlights down as well as taking the whites down and now we're masking it again just like this easy as that and just a bit less okay now you can see um what the adjustment that we added did so this is the image without specific adjustments and this is with them so we want to make them stay and the thing that i usually do with my bird portraits is um i adjust a bit of uh vignette ja just to make your eye really focus on the on the bird and now i see that um that i need to um focus more here and just a bit of shadows recovery maybe a bit of to make your eye go straight to the head because that's what the most important part of the bird now is good it was taken in the iso 1600 which means it's a bit too noisy for my liking as we can see from there five so i will use a plug-in that i have bought that i highly recommend from you and there is a link down below that if you buy the product i get a bit of commission so if you like what you see here you can use it yourself and it's basically an ai editing tool that does the best job noise reduction wise from what i found here i don't need to tweak it maybe a bit less of the noise reduction we'll see what that does okay that's perfect we just click apply and easy as that [Music] our image is is noise free okay so just for the sake of it i will show you the before and after that's the before and after i think it's pretty significant difference between the first one and the second one so moving on the second image something less typical which is going to be the um this oyster catcher and a car showing the environment that those birds live on iceland which is pretty neat okay first of all we need to fix the horizon and crop it just a bit to make the composition more balanced so that's what i will go here i think no just like this first of all again uh highlights down to get the details back um shadows up to get the details in the details in the car and in the bird um contr will increase the contrast of the scene just because it looks nicer again vibrance and saturation i would usually remove the saturation from just this part you can see here this yellow sign but because i want this image to be like this uh urban style photograph i'm gonna leave it uh just to use this image more like a journalistic type of image not a pretty portrait as they fall off wrote just before so this image will take a bit less editing um we'll start with blurring out a bit of this foreground because it's a bit too much in focus for me so we'll decrease the clarity here by about 50 i don't want to go too much because it will look fake so i will go something probably about 50 plus minus i never go likes i see some other photographers shooting oh it has to be -5 or -10 it can't be minus seven or minus eight i don't care i do adjustment as my eye feels like that's basically how i do it um i'm gonna try a 16 by nine crop here because i believe it might work a bit better with the less of the sky and i like this version of the picture more so i'm gonna stay with that and now we're gonna focus on the bird as you can see we lost a bit of blacks so we need to bring them back again with the brush tool um i'm just painting in here and how am i doing that i'm not using the blacks because that will make the blacks to lose all the details inside of them i'm taking all the whites uh not all the way some whites and some um highlights of the parts that are too bright for my liking and now i will take uh the whole bird do my usual sharpness thing uh which is uh just a cl a bit of clarity and a bit of texture now what is unique about oyster catchers is the red eye i want it to stand out as well as the beak so i will just place it on the eye and on the beak make sure that it's nicely done it's okay to go out a bit because then i'm again pressing alt and just making it go away once again and here i actually had some default presets that i might leave maybe not the hazel one oh i actually liked it so yeah that's that and now just a tiny bit of vignette to place the focus more more on the car and the oyster catcher so something like this maybe and a tiny bit of graduated filter here maybe let's make it more expanded and just show it like this and it's another image that will probably okay i just noticed this this is the thing that i don't want in my picture it's some weird reflection of the something on the car so what i will do is i will again mask this area and i will take a clarity off of it for now it may look a bit weird and i will take the texture off and i will take the sharpness of this area to to basically reduce the lines that happened there and now this image goes again into the tapas denoise my go-to software to denoise my photographs and it's been a game changer for me so definitely a software i would recommend if you're using using lightroom it works as a plugin you set it up as a plugin and it works flawlessly um doing really good job of denying an image you can obviously play with it a bit this is even less noisy than the previous one so i will take the nos it's off and you can see here it didn't do a great job so i will add a bit of the noise reduction and about probably 15 here just it was native is great for this particular image so second name is done it takes a bit of time for the software to analyze the whole image and denoise it especially if the recorder running but this is a before and after again more colors just a bit of my more distinguished eye as you can see here the bird looks simply better and a bit of nicer blues colors that's what it's all about and uh the last image for today because i don't want to make this video horriblely long will be this quarter the puffin i want to go vertical and i will go four by five just because that's the instagram crop and i actually really like this crop for uh birds in the vertical frames will go a bit tighter and just a tight portrait of the other puffins everybody's favorite you can see this video to check out the behind the scenes of this image first of all a bit of shadow recovery not too much but just a bit to get the detail back here in the neck i will not play around and remove all those white spots on the further so i just don't see a reason to do that improve a bit of contrast as i a lot of contrast uh add a bit of clarity and here again we are doing the um i trick so selecting just the bright pipe earth of the eye clarity at adding a lot and then whites then contrast a bit of exposure and and it's a bit too much so we'll add a bit more more clarity to balance it out and now we have a pretty um pretty nice eye just a bit of less of this and i think it's really looking good um the big is rookie looking pretty sharp does the 408 amazing detail so it doesn't need a lot of sharpening so i will just select the white part of the bird and get just a tiny bit of whites added here and clarity to maybe contrast not that much to get the the way that i want the bird to look and just a bit of highlights less because we don't want overexposed pictures um i will add a bit of luminance to the orange to make a build and the legs stand out more and then add saturation to them and just a bit of more more luminance to the yellows um i don't i'm not the biggest fan of this bright spot here so i'm using an inverted uh radial filter here to get rid of it just a tiny bit darker and does that make a good difference or bad one yes i like it better darker and now what i will do here is what i don't always do but it will be um a vignette but i'll only add it only from the one side to make the illusion of the light coming in from that side it was coming in from this side but adding a slight vignette like this makes the image more dynamic and more pleasant to look like look at so there is no need of denoising this particular one so i will just go with before and after again more punch to an image not a huge difference i could probably clone out this poop in a photoshop but i'm not gonna play with that so those are the three images that we post process today i'm actually really happy with all of them so thank you guys for watching if you want to see more of the editing hit me up or leave something in a comment that you have a question maybe about cloning out the poop or something else so thanks for watching and don't forget to check out the link to the topaz product there is also a 15 discount code for you to use in this vid when you decide to buy the product and that's all for me like and subscribe for more materials about wildlife photography bye

Channel: Grzegorz Długosz

Views: 1,009

Keywords: Editing bird photos in lightroom, editing bird photographs, adobe lightroom, lightroom, editing, workflow, my editing workflow, radial filter, selective editing, bird photography selective editing, contest editing, nature photography, editing wildlife pictures, editng wildlife photos, editing nature photos, how to edit bird photographs, red-necked phalarope, puffin, editing a puffin picture, develop module, importing to lightroom

Id: uVY1C59dT1I

Length: 20min 10sec (1210 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 12 2021