How I Edit My Natural Light Portraits - Lightroom & Photoshop Tutorial

Hey guys my name is Francisco Hernandez and today I'm gonna be doing an editing video for everyone because it's something that I've been wanting to do for a while I haven't made an editing video forever and something that you guys have in question for a while not as well so I'm gonna go ahead and do an editing video but it's gonna be over a photo that was taken with just natural flat or natural flash with natural light so it's gonna be a little bit different than my usual edit usually with natural light I do have to do a lot more editing to get a result that I like and with off-camera flash it's more of like me just adding to the image so I'm gonna go ahead and start now so that we can just get over everything that we need to cover today without making it too long of a video one thing I do want to state before I start is that my editing workflow is not the absolute best in terms of getting the best quality out of their image so I do want to state that because I am gonna be exporting the JPEG I'm gonna be processing the raw file in Lightroom then exporting that as a JPEG and then working off with a JPEG in Photoshop so I just wanted to state that there are other ways to get better quality out of the images but for what I do which is produce a lot of stuff for social media it it's perfectly fine so I'm gonna go ahead and start now and so you can see it edit okay so one thing I do all the time whenever I edit a photo regardless if it's natural light or flash is that always bump up the colors with this blue primary slider saturation slider on the bottom under the calibration area and Lightroom so I'm gonna go ahead and bump it up usually I do somewhere between 40 to 60 I'm going to go to 60 what you're gonna see is that all the clutters are bumped up a bit but usually what happens is the oranges get bumped up a bit as well and for people who have or for people who are not just pale in other words the the skin skin color is gonna get pushed a little bit too much so I usually take that down I will do that in a second but I'm gonna go ahead and just kind of get everything as I scroll up so another thing I always do is enable the profile Corrections and right now I did see that I have the Sony a 5v 1.8 so it made some Corrections in terms of vignetting and distortion I actually do like the vignetting when it comes to just any lens that I use I don't think I've ever experienced one that was too too heavy and thus it was a very wide lens so I'm gonna go ahead just take the video editing off and then I'm gonna go up to sharpening I always sharpen the photos up to about 60 it really makes the photos really nice and sharp and now I'm gonna go ahead and just reduce that saturation with the hue saturation luminance area of Lightroom I'm gonna go ahead and do what I just told you guys earlier which was reduce those oranges because it's a little too much on marinus skin so I'm gonna go ahead and go to negative ten usually negative ten is an area where it's gonna be fine but negative fifteen sometimes I do have to go to that area too that it's that level another thing I like to do in the hue saturation luminance area is go to the hues and see if there's anything in the image that I can kind of change an alter to make the image more whole together what I mean by that is in this image what you're seeing right now there's a lot of different colors everywhere but the main things that stick out are those blues on the car behind her the car is behind her and maybe the greens in the grass so one thing I can adjust without making the image too crazy is maybe those greens that can make it more of a orangish hue so I'm gonna go ahead and go to the hue area I what I like to do whenever I'm adjusting something is I like to go to the far left and far right when if there's a slider available so I'm gonna go too far right see how that looks like there's like minty greens go to the far left and there's a lot more of a orangish tones I feel like it's a lot more warm in other words so I'm gonna go ahead and not go all the way to the far left and keep it at negative 100 but maybe something like negative 40 or negative 50 I'm gonna keep it there and I'm gonna go ahead and just put it back to zero so you guys can see real quick how it looked like it's very subtle it's honestly very very subtle but it's there maybe I go to negative 60 sometimes even though I bumped up the corners a bit I will still bump up the vibrance up to like maybe 20 so I'm gonna do that right now and I feel like the white balance is perfect at 6,100 it's nice and warm if I wanted to just it then I could just go ahead and do so but I like the warmth the image specifically with those orange tones behind her so I'm gonna go ahead just leave it as is right now maybe one thing I will do is just lower the highlights okay no nevermind so usually when I edit sometimes I'll have an idea and it will work but just not as an effect that I'm gonna be applying to the entire image so I do want to reduce the highlights but not on the entire image usually when I edit a photo that's natural light and there's shadow on the subject when I reduce the highlights it just feels like I'm making them a lot more dull so I'm gonna go ahead and get the adjustment brush I hit K on the keyboard it's a shortcut and if you guys are not familiar with the adjustment brush in Lightroom it's basically a paintbrush that you can paint onto the image and all the things that you're seeing on the right here the exposure contrast highlights shadows whites blacks all that stuff on the side is what you're gonna be able to adjust selectively so I'm gonna go ahead and just go to like the highlights because I do want to reduce the highlights on the top there let's see how that looks like when I paint it on to the negative fifty okay so yeah I can see that it did a good job and radition those highlights without looking too bad so let me show you example a bad example I'm gonna go to negative 100 and you can see it just looks bad it looks like there's a little bit of black on the on that highlight so I'm gonna go ahead and keep it at negative 50 because I'm reducing it without looking too much and now what I'm gonna do is maybe I can try to desaturate those Blues on the cars behind her so I'm gonna go to saturation and this is something I'm gonna be changing the saturation of it's already at negative 50 but you can go ahead and just adjust it okay I do like it like that desaturate did so imma keep it there one important thing that I do when it comes to editing this shot is since she's underexposed because there's no flash it's natural light and do like the background exposure as it is right now is I need to add selectively selectively add exposure to her so that's what I'm gonna do with this address adjustment brush I'm gonna hit K go to this effect here go to exposure and right now I have it a at a high level of exposure plus three exposure but I do this for a reason so I'm gonna go ahead and just start to apply it but before I start to apply it what I forgot to mention is that when it comes to adding this effect using the adjustment brush you can either have it at a very high feather so it's kind of the softening the effect around the edges that's what that's why you see a circle hopefully you guys see it on the screen there's a circle and then there's a circle around that circle that's how much the fall-off is and you can also adjust the flow in the density of that effect being applied I have it at 65 on flowing intensity because it's just a good level for me right now but yeah let me go ahead and just apply this brightness onto her and you're gonna see a very big very very big difference I usually have it at this brightness to start with to see exactly the expose the exposure changes that are being made and then I reduce it so just keep that in mind right now while I paint this effect on okay so I just painted all the exposure on her I feel like it's a good level where it's not coming out to the background because you don't want that you don't want it to ever the effect that you're applying onto the subject only to spill onto the background but sometimes I do do this intentionally but at a lower opacity like what I'm gonna do right now is the brightness is on her only but I'm gonna just paint just a little bit off the edges onto the background you don't know you never want to do this very heavy to you all you just want to just very very subtle so right now what I'm just painting on right now it's very subtle or I'm trying my best to make it very subtle and okay so I have it at a very subtle level right now and again what you're seeing is on marina is she's way too bright so I'm gonna go ahead and just reduce that effect now by just sliding that slider the exposure slider okay that's a little too much I feel like C 1.8 I feel like this level 1.8 is a good what what my goal is in Lightroom is to get it to level where it's not to standing and it doesn't stand out too much I feel like she is just a little bit but it's fine and then in Photoshop what I'm gonna do is just alter the exposures a bit more so right now at the level that it's at it's fine so I'm gonna go ahead just back out one thing I also do whenever I edit a photo is bring up the eyes a little bit because there's a flare creeping into the shot I already know that when I just said the exposure it was applying it a little too heavily like that for example if there was no flare and I applied three exposure you know plus three exposure on her then it wouldn't be as bright as if that flare was in the shot so right now when I go to zoom in on the eye that's okay I'm a hick Kagan I'm gonna go to a preset that I made called eyes and all it's doing this on the side there you can see exactly what it's doing on the side there I'm gonna go ahead and paint it over the eye and I already know that because that flare is there it's making everything very very drastic so usually when I would paint the the eye with this preset it wouldn't go this level so I'm what I'm gonna do right now is you just change the exposure level over here to maybe like something like point two I feel like that's still too much so I'm gonna go to point one and it's gonna be fine so sometimes what I do is I'll apply that effect if you hover over that effect where that little circle is then it'll highlight and read what you painted on there so that's what's going on right now but I'm gonna go ahead and just delete that effect and then hit control Z so you guys can see exactly what it did so I feel like it's good there I'm gonna go ahead and zoom out I'm gonna hit backspace and what that's gonna do is show you the before and after so far and that's gonna be the four lip of before and this is gonna be that what I did so far to the image right now so I'm gonna go ahead and now export this image and work on it in Photoshop I know that you guys were probably wondering about the export settings so I'm gonna go ahead and just show you that as well what I always export as when in terms of like the full resolution where I really want to work on the image I'll go on full resolution I don't I think that's a preset that I made but let me just go and slide down so you guys can see exactly everything I don't have any of the image sizing adjustments there have it as JPEG srgb quality 100 I sharpen for screen standard all that stuff you guys can see there I'm gonna go ahead and export now and then work on the photo in Photoshop okay so now I'm in Photoshop I'm actually gonna be using an old version of Photoshop called Photoshop cs6 extended I've been using this one I think since high school so 2009 so if you have an older version and Photoshop in other words you'll be fine I'm gonna go ahead and open the image this is the image here and I'm gonna go ahead and just start editing it's pretty much exactly how I would if I was not making this video so first thing I would do is remove any sort of blemishes and distractions so I'm gonna take a look at the image see the things that are just distracting me from the marina and just remove them and I'm gonna go ahead and just show you guys what I what distracts me right now so there's this little I don't know what it is fly or net that that a little bit the hairs and this and this right here so those are the main distract to say I'm gonna do go ahead and remove so the way that I use better remove those is I usually use the patch tool this bottom brush tool if it's a little spot or the patch tool and I'm gonna go ahead and show you guys both of those right now because that patch tool on the bottom is gonna be helpful on that fence because it's similar patterns I can get rid of all that little I don't even know what it is and glare let's go ahead and remove that right now one thing that you have to make sure is that when you use these tools the spotting brush and the patch tool you have to make sure that this area on the top here where it says sample all layers you need to make sure that it's that's enabled because if you try to remove something it's gonna tell you you can't because effectively why I make a empty layer is because in other words if you were to make a copy of that background layer you're making Photoshop work with two images right there and it's gonna make your computer work heavier then then then it needs to be so make an empty layer and using these tools is gonna be easier on your computer so let me just show you exactly what I mean so I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in go to that bottom where I want to remove that glare I'm gonna be using the patch tool and I need to click on set ball there's on top I'm gonna go ahead and just select that area and then I'm gonna go ahead and see see this is what I mean by it's helpful that it's a repeating pattern because it's easy to remove that thing that I didn't want there so yeah it's really removed and they did a good job so what I mean by what I mean earlier where you're making your computer work harder is let me just show you I'm gonna go ahead and just take off the background layer and you can see exactly what happened when I added the patch tool there it made a copy of that background layer and it put it on to the area to kind of mask it away if I were to work on making another background layer and just do all the edits there and move all the things I want to there I'd be making a whole other copy of that photo there and you're again you're just making the computer work harder I believe there's an area on the scene on the bottom of the screen yeah you can see in the bottom of the screen where it says doc and it says the size of this file right now I've already make a copy of that background layer ctrl J command J if you're using a Mac it'll show you on the bottom the size of the file on the bottom so you don't want to make your computer work harder than it needs to be so let me just continue now when I remove that or when I hide that layer and put it back on you can see those are the distractions that we're really bugging me during the step I also try to remove the blemishes on the skin so before I forget that let me just remove anything that I might see that I want to remove table on and off zoom out everything looks good to me now in terms of not just having distractions and now I'm going to go ahead and do another major step right now this major step is going to involve the levels adjustment layer brush or what's called layers the levels adjustment layer that's what I meant to say when I add this which I always do in every photo regardless of natural light or off-camera flash what happens is that the colors come out the colors come out nice and rich but it makes a lot of contrast so something sometimes it'll be good effects in terms of that contrast in color but sometimes there'll be like a little bit of fringing in terms of the colors on this side or anywhere in the image so you have to be careful about that I do like how the images right I feel like it's a little too dark in some areas but so I'm gonna go ahead and just readjust opacity to maybe I don't know 85 percent how do you like it there and I'm gonna go ahead and just leave it now because the next thing I'm gonna do after this usually what I do after that is go ahead and start to doing to Dodge and burn so I'm gonna go ahead and get a curves adjustment layer bring it down or actually bring it up to the next level that's that it's at that it the level that it started at well next level above that stick stick to there hit ctrl or command I and I'm gonna get another one and that's gonna be the burn and go to the next level down hit ctrl or command I and then start to paint the Dodge but I'm gonna go ahead and fast-forward to this so it doesn't have to be that long of a video but basically what I'm gonna do with the Dutch and the burn is fine areas that I that where the law is already complimenting her in other words these bright areas here on the shirt the bright pants her skin at this area all this area here and I might paint again outside of her like I did in Lightroom so I'm gonna go ahead and that you guys will see exactly when I just speed up the process but I just wanted to explain a little bit about what I was doing before I forget I did want to mention the opacity in the flow usually when you paint something an effect on something you know paint it very heavily if the flow is at 100% I usually like to keep it at a lower percentage of the flow so that it gradually builds on so that's easier to kind of make the effect more gradual and less apparent so Jack just keep in mind opacity 100% flow somewhere between one to five percent you okay so I did a lot of dodge and burn right now I'm gonna hold alt click on the curves adjustment and that's all the area that I made brighter all that bright all that white so I'm gonna go ahead and click on the Garrett click off of that just toggle the effect off and on that's basically what I did right now I will cut probably paint just a little bit of this background over here but like I said before is when I first added to this shot I felt like a it would be improved with a crop so I'm gonna go ahead and maybe add that crop in and just get like a portrait orientation so now I'm gonna go ahead and do the burn okay so I did a lob dodge or actually I did a lot of burn right now so I'm gonna go ahead and zoom out toggle the effect off and on and what I did was add too much so sometimes I don't mind doing that at all because what you can easily do is just reduce the opacity of the effect and I like to kind of just zoom or none drew scroll and see exactly what level and find with and I think maybe around 40% looks good to me so I'm gonna toggle the effect on off and it looks good to me so I'll leave it there again this is not a heavy effect but what I did see is that when I was burning I felt like I could improve a little bit more by using a little bit dodge in certain areas so I'm gonna go ahead and just do a little bit more dodging oh yeah and one thing I wanted to mention before I do this is when it comes to dodging and burning from like a wider view like this if I were to just dodge a burn from this level that's technically we're I don't know if it's technically but it's what you would consider global dodging burn when you zoom in and do stuff very small it's called local dodging burn and the reason why I want to mention that is because there's a little bit of darkness underneath her eyes and I'm gonna go ahead and dodge that area you'll see right now and it's gonna kind of remove that effect and that's gonna be technically I believe local dodging burn so I'm gonna go ahead and just I'm just looking to my curves to make sure that I'm painting on the right layer and I'm gonna go ahead and then zoom out in a second to see the effect okay so I'm gonna just toggle it off and on max I couldn't control Z oh yeah yeah you can see it gradually building on I should have added another layer another curves adjustment layer - so you guys can see exactly what was going on but the fact is there what am i doing now is start to mess with the colors usually I do that first I think that's something I do first before doesn't burn but I'm gonna go ahead and do it now before I forget I use the color balance adjustment layer and again there's no direct way of how I just the colors I just mess around and see how I like the photo to me so I'm going to play with this liars bit so I'm gonna go ahead and toggle that effect on and off it's very subtle it goes from more of a bluer green or green tinted image to more red and cyan so I'll leave it there now the next thing I'm going to do is probably frequency separation and you say that right frequency separation I don't like to do this a lot because it's something that can be easily overdone so I do want to recommend that if you use it don't use it too heavily I'm gonna go ahead and show you guys how to do that manually so I'm gonna go ahead and get a empty layer take ctrl alt shift E that's gonna make a copy of the image I'm gonna hit that again ctrl alt shift E it's gonna make another copy and I know I mentioned before that's gonna make the image or make Photoshop work harder but it's gonna be something that's required for this frequency separation I'm gonna go ahead and hit shift hold down shift and select both of these layers hit ctrl G that's gonna make it into a group and then you can name it and make more organized than I am right now but I'm gonna go ahead and just deselect the layer 3 so you guys can see that I'm gonna be blurring layer 2 which is the lower part of the step blur Gaussian blur for this step you don't want to have anything that's too much of a blur so I'm gonna go ahead maybe put like three or maybe two and then leave it there now that's gonna be blurred but you know you're now gonna alter the layer three and go to image go to apply image make sure that where it says layer you want it to merge into layer two which is that other layer that was blurred then make sure that it's right here exactly how it is on the screen subtract scale to offset 128 click OK change the blending mode to linear light and then basically the whole point of frequency separation is that you're removing your sub separating the image and two colors and into texture so you can adjust both of those a lot more a lot more fine Newt or minut know a lot better in other words that's a more layman term way of saying it so let me just zoom into her and see what that what areas can be improved with a little bit of frequency separation so I'm gonna go ahead and hit L which is a bit layer the lasso tool I'm gonna select this area this area of skin I do have the feather at 8 it could be actually should be like around something like 5 so I'm gonna go ahead and just paint that or draw that again and then what I'm going to do is make sure that I have the layer 2 which is the bottom one the one that was blurred make sure that's selected go to filter go to blur go to Gaussian blur and then you can just adjust it and see how it's gonna make the skin softer so I have the P on bottom let me just tell it off just pay attention to the skin it's just making it softer so 8.4 looks good usually I don't keep go past 10 because it usually starts to get a little bit weird so that looks good to me I'm gonna go ahead and select some areas on the skin over here I'm just I'm doing kind of a quick and dirty version of frequency separation for this video so I will make probably an in-depth version of this this technique so now I'm gonna hit ctrl F which is just going to apply the thing that I did which was that Gaussian burn but depending on the version of Photoshop that you have it'll be some other shortcut so I'm gonna just go ahead filter on the top and it should show it the effect that you just did right there on top you can click it there so okay I feel like it's too much so usually when I feel like it's too much then I reduce the opacity but what I'm gonna do first is just start to do the frequency separation on everything so or everything that I would have normally added on to it and now I'm gonna go ahead and reduce opacity I'm gonna just a little bit and then maybe just go to somewhere like maybe like 65 yeah 65 looks fine to me and now I'm gonna just leave it there oh I'm gonna go ahead and just get this other arm first I'm gonna reduce it just a little bit more maybe so like 50 keep it there and now I'm gonna move on to the next step which I believe is just to add a little more one thing that whether that's happening with this photo is that there's a lot of flare still so usually when I add that levels adjustment layer and apply it to the whole image I you still always see that there's a little bit less contrast around where that ish Elise tarted so I'm gonna go ahead and just see if that's an issue that I can kind of fix right now levels adjustment layer kind of bring it up a bit and then just hit ctrl I and then paint it over and North at computer noise and then paint it over and you've mute my computer okay gets it over meeting be meeting la shortcuts guys so sorry if I didn't mention some let's see painted over the areas where I feel like it can be improved with a little bit more contrast which is the areas over here where it started okay so again I'm using a low-flow so if you're seeing it live and if it sped up you probably will see it a lot better but if you're seeing it as I'm doing it then something you have to train your eyes to see so let me go ahead and zoom out and just toggle it off and on so yeah I feel like they improved the image a lot better by adding that and now what I'm going to do is just maybe increase the brightness of the image overall this is something that's too bright but I always go brighter and then you reduce the opacity so I I feel like 50% at this lower right here it's good I feel like it's a good image but I do want these colors in the background to be a lot more unified and a lot more rich so I'm gonna go ahead and maybe add selective saturation now after I do this step the last one of the last things I should be able to do is just make the colors different so again those blues are not something I like so let me just go ahead and sample some other colors that I've seen like these oranges and then I hit I might be an eye for the eyedropper tool and then hit beach for the brush tool and I'm just gonna paint over these cars and see that act a little bit less ky2 and see how it looks like I'm gonna hit I'm gonna leave it as is and then go to a blending mode and go to color and I do like these colors but obviously I don't want it at this level so what I'm gonna do right now is I'm gonna just change the opacity so something like maybe 20% and see how that looks like that looks pretty good to me one of the last things I can usually do to kind of bring the image all together with with color is I get to get a solid color adjustment layer so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit okay I'm gonna hide that and I'm gonna go back to the color click on that and then I'm gonna just sample one of the colors from the background and I do like these oranges not all of them so maybe these this color here I'm gonna just change the blending mode to maybe screen and then I'm gonna reduce it I'm gonna I'm gonna leave at 7 or 6 you can see this is what it did right now I'm gonna leave it at this for now and then I'm gonna add one more level adjustment layer something I do add a lot of and then see how this looks like I'm gonna hold go ahead and hit alt click on that I on the background layer and it's gonna show you how the background layer look by itself and then I'm gonna click on it again show you guys to edit so I do like this image as it is right now but I'm gonna probably add a crop so I'm go ahead and save this edit because I haven't saved it Maryna edit video I'm gonna go ahead and make sure that's saved one risky thing about Photoshop cs6 extended is that it doesn't save if it crashes so I took a risk here today and now what I'm gonna do I'm gonna flatten the image you guys asked me about sharpness all the time I added sharpness in Lightroom and now what I'm gonna do is add a little bit more in Photoshop so right now this is at 100% it could be a little bit sharp or someone go ahead and hit ctrl J that makes a copy of layer hit filter go to other and go to high-pass and somewhere around this level where you're seeing a similar effect that you're seeing on the screen right now is where you want to be if you're working on a smaller image it might be different levels in the pixel area right here the the level the radius so yeah you can adjust it to see more fine Newt or not funny I'm using that word I even know what it means more detail in other words in this thing that's in the background here so I'm going to hit OK change the blending mode to linear light it's gonna make it way too sharp like gross sharpness so what I'm gonna do is just change the opacity to maybe 10% maybe 15% something lower okay 15% is fine and then what I'm gonna do is flatten the image again what I usually would do right now is go ahead and just resize for Facebook which is gonna be 20 or 2048 pixels on the longest edge but I feel like the image can be way more improved with a crop what I'm gonna do now is this hit crop I'm gonna go ahead and just get the Instagram crop resolute or frame or what's it called the ratio that's what I'm gonna say 4 by 5 I'm gonna go ahead and just hit this corner hit shift and then go up okay that was a little bit that was a weird way of doing that but I think you could just really yeah I could have just rotated it right here that's what you should do you know what I just did and I'm gonna go ahead and just see how this image looks like usually when I I have a portrait in portrait orientation I try to aim for this this right line here to be this bright light in here to be on the eye and it looks pretty good but so I'm gonna go ahead and just leave leave it a little bit off and see how this looks like and I feel like the image is gonna be a lot better with this crop so what I'm gonna do is leave it here and then I'ma resize I'm gonna hit ctrl alt I and this can change the image dimensions changed whatever the longest side is which is gonna be the height and this image to 2048 and zoom in all the way to 100% see how you like the sharpness if it's fine then leave it as is if it's not fine then do that level of sharpening that I did earlier with the over and just add a little bit more sharpening and then save as is and that's pretty much it I think I'm done now if I forgot anything which I really don't think I did I'll let you guys know in the comment section below but that's pretty much to edit for this video if you guys enjoyed it if you guys learned go ahead and leave a thumbs up on the video and if you guys want to see more videos editing videos let me know as well so I can make them so yeah I hope you guys enjoy the video and I'll see you guys in the next video yeah bye guys

Channel: FJH Photography

Views: 21,783

Keywords: edit natural light portraits in photoshop, edit portraits, portrait tutorial, lightroom tutorial, photoshop tutorial, natural light portraits, how to edit natural light portraits, edit portraits photoshop, photography, photoshop, tutorial, cs6, rudnyk, purple, skin, retouch, lens, correction, model, portrait, natural, light, easy, talk, edit, editing, color, colour, how, to, photographer, photo, irene, retouching tutorial, dodge and burn, frequency separation

Id: GuKXjTpWlXQ

Length: 32min 46sec (1966 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 18 2019