How I edit photos after using Lightroom for 8 years

today I'm walking you through my editing process in Lightroom it is a video where I took the time to explain everything I did and why I did them so it is quite extensive I'm covering the editing part and a little bit of the export setting also towards the end if you want to get yourself very good presets you can head over to my website and grab a pack it is helping me at the channel a whole lot so really appreciate you if you consider that and the video is quite long so let's jump right into the computer so here's a version of that photo I edited yesterday and this is the before this is the after and let's reset that and start from scratch the first thing I like to do is enable the lens Corrections uh removing the chromatic aberation and the profile Corrections and usually what I like to do is sking the Distortion correction but um depending on the photo I like to keep the viting so I will uh slide this uh this down to to zero I like the organic viting of of the lens I'm using but correcting the distortion give a better starting point with straighter line um when you move on to the upright to correct all the lines and having a a perfectly correct perspective talking about perspective this is the second step of my editing process and I usually try auto and vertical and see which one I like best I think here um I might prefer Auto and when neither of them actually work I would try the guided like trying to make the lines by myself but here I think it works well so I will keep the auto perspective now that my lens correction and transform have been taken care of I like to minimize the panels to um make it as clear and as tidy as possible and from there I usually crop my photos um here I will keep it vertical and I will keep the original uh 3x2 aspect ratio and as for the crop I like to put my uh my subject a little bit more in the center um also I often time use the crop to clean a little bit my composition here we see we have a little Shadow and if I crop a tiny bit more I can remove thing without using the spot removal tool I see in terms of the crop we are good here our subject is not exactly on the bottom third but still the start of this little house is somewhere on this bottom third so so I like how balanced is this composition now so I'm happy with that next step is the basic settings and as for the profile I like to edit my photos in the Adobe color profile it is a pretty neutral uh color profile so when I create edits and presets uh I can apply them to files from any camera so that's why I always like to use any of the Adobe uh standard profile color standard sometime portraits but rarely the landscape and viid one here I'm pretty happy with the wi balance because I usually shoot in camera with the daylight um default settings um sometimes if I'm not very happy I try to to use the default daylight from a Lightroom is quite close so it's a little bit more green and the temperature is at 5500 it is usually a good starting point next and very important setting is the exposure and here we have a very contrasty scene so we'll have to reshape the exposure with uh with the Highlight Shadows uh settings with the tone curves and at the later stage uh The Masks uh and definitely here moving the the overall exposure is not helping that much so I will keep it at zero because uh is pretty balanced and then we'll make further more localized adjustments I'm moving on to the highlights what I like to do sometimes is holding on the shift uh key and double click on the Highlight or any of these um of these settings when you do so it gives you what would be the auto setting um the auto adjustment for that particular setting only not for the whole basic settings and here I see that Lightroom considers that minus 81 is a good spot to recover all the Highlight details so I get that but I don't want to go all the way down because uh what I don't like for my photos is uh them to look like HDR and um really fake so I take that into account minus 81 and maybe I would bump that up maybe 30 points somewhere like that I think at minus uh 45 minus 50 is quite good we got back some details and color in the sky so I think it looks okay I will do the same for the Shadows here you see it's bringing to plus 55 and it looks terrible and that's typically a scene as I said it's a contrasty scene and this is somewhere I don't want to recover a lot of the Shadow details so actually I will probably keep it at zero check if I bump just slightly at 10 or 20 I think I will keep it at 10 and maybe do further localized adjustment here around the subject to recover a little bit of Shadow details only here but not in the foreground where I will crush everything with my tone curve and especially the The Masks later then when it comes to the white again I can check plus one looks to be nice but I will reduce that touch to recover a little bit more Det detail not too much as for the blacks Lightroom gives me a plus five but I will not follow that because I like to use the blacks to start uh pushing a little bit my contrast not too much in this first stage and I'm happy with those uh settings now what I do that may look a bit a bit funny you may say but I will use the contrast setting and bringing down to minus 50 somewhere like that to have a very clean and neutral starting Point um because I want to use especially the tone curve to to Really D the contrast as I like and not r on the slider which gives you way less freedom because it's just um a Lightroom interpretation of of what plus contrast or minus contrast should be before starting messing with the tone curve I like to reduce the clarity a bit I like that it remov this digital Edge this over sharpness I used to to go quite crazy on the minus crate Clarity sometimes at minus 30 but recently I I prefer to park it somewhere around minus5 um I guess you can already have a little bit of soft Nest without going overboard and and creating something that may look cool uh with current hype but will look terrible uh in one or two years time so now our basic settings are okay so I will close the panel and start with my tone curve first I will go on the RGB channels and do the exact same curve for the three channels I like to do so uh but being very gentle uh making a very smooth and gentle SC curve um on all three channels to start creating contrast and what I found is that when you bring a little bit of S curve in these RGB channels yes you have some contrast but more so it brings a bit more depth in the the colors uh which I like moving on to the main curve and I like sometimes to use this uh pin tool to create points on the curve uh somewhere for example here I know that I want to um Crush that down a little bit so I can create a point here here I like the level brightness of uh what we have here so I can create a point and this one maybe I will not move it but it creates like some sort of an anchor so I can move things around it and um it will uh not uh it will keep the same brightness level let's say and here we can start messing around with the Curve and I like to hold the option key when moving my my points because you have to move your mouse lot more to make adjustments so it is easier to uh yeah easier to to adjust creting a point here in the midtones to bring those a little bit uh higher actually I move this uh this very bright points slightly higher too and what I like is having a little bit of a fate in the darker areas and also in the brighter area I like to reduce a little bit the overall um dynamic range in a sense because when you have these very white Parts it really CES digitals uh I think so I like to reduce that a little bit so we have a a little bit more of a matte finish so I will try to um adjust a little bit further my tone curve I don't want to push it too much because I know that I will make localized adjustment later that's something uh you acquire with experience like um you are moving your tone curves your basic settings already thinking uh about um the the mask you will uh you will apply later so it's important not to go too far with those settings so you can still have a little bit of uh Freedom when I'm applying the mask last step is this parametric curve the one that is the most on the left and I usually use this one only to um adjust my highlights I like to um move this uncor point more towards um towards the end and then reduce my highlight to further increase this matte finish you can bring it down to minus 40 up to minus 60 I think it uh can look quite good I'm happy with my toone curve adjustment uh that's what we did and we can now move on to uh the colors and I like to start with the color calibration um the color calibration is different from the hsl it affects the red green and blue pixels and I like to move the blue a little bit towards the left um not too much because then you have too much of a teal and orange a very cheap kind of look so around minus 10 is a is a good place to be then if you increase the saturation of the blue I think it creates a lot more depth in the color so I like to bring it up a touch then for my green primary depending on what I go for I may do something differently but my green I like when they look actually green and not uh yellowish so I move my green primary to to the right more to this um green Aqua side as for the red I will keep it in the center but but I will move my saturation a touch um plus 10 I think is a right place to be and then I will add a little bit of green in the shadows um here I like the the adjustment it makes it's different from the color grading it's a bit more uh refined I think so minus 6 somewhere like that minus five is um is nice I think we are good with the calibration and now we can start messing around with the hsl so I'll start with the Hue and My Philosophy with colors is that when you have two maximum three main colors in an image then um it simplify the scene and it can deliver good result so I use my Hue sliders to move and blend colors a bit better together like the red I like to move it a little bit to the orange um so it Blends better with the red and orange my yellow goes slightly to um to the green here we see there's plenty of yellow in the in the trees don't want to go too far because then here it looks very very unnatural so just a bit my greens I think they look good um maybe a bit more toward the green Aqua side will keep my aquine blue almost untouched maybe my blue a little bit towards the left um I don't see any purple and magenta in this um in this photo so I will keep them untouched and now where I do most of a de adjustment is in the saturation um I don't really like Blues in my uh in some of my picture like in my style you would always see quite desaturated Skies um and of course the sky the saturated I think it looks good but what we see here is that all this um foreground in the shadow all the road is actually blue so we when we bring that down the road uh turns gray this is too much this is just for demonstration but um here clearly I don't see any point of uh keeping this um the road and the foreground uh blue so I decrease the blue saturation quite a bit around minus 35 and I make sure to adjust a little bit the aqua so it's again more Blended together because sometimes you have nuances of aqua and blue and if one is very high and the other one is very low you can have some artifacts and um uh not smooth transitions to have darker and deeper greens I like to reduce also the saturation of the greens um I check what the yellow um I will keep a decent amount of saturation in the yellow and probably keep the red and orange untouched I think there is some chromatic aberration here that was not removed um and it's very magenta purple um so I will use the saturation slider of the hsl to try mitigate that I think it can go a little bit further minus 50 for both as for the luminance now that I removed some saturation in the blue I can move down the luminance a bit so we can have a little bit more contrast in the in the sky area without bringing too much of saturation back only playing with the luminance that color that blue color we use the luminance of the orange touch same for the Reds you can also play with the luminance to create more color density I think it's a mix of of luminance saturation and the calibration that we uh that we play with before to create a lot more um color density if I reduce the liins of the purple and magenta because we had this chromatic operation think it works well to to um bring back some of these uh some of the contrast here here so I can reduce that touch and I think I'm happy with the color mixer we've reduced um the blue which was one of the main and the most important changes uh with the hsl we can move on to the color grading but I close my panel first when it comes to the color grading I like to play with complementary colors um if I want to incorporate some um some blue uh teal in the shadows or anywhere else then I will play with something contrasty on the other side of the of the color wheel somewhere in the orange uh yellow area because those are complimentary colors and I think they usually work well together for this photo I want to add a little bit of teal in the shadow um I like to go quite strong first to have a visual representation and then Dil down my uh my saturation I find that somewhere around five up to to 20 um are the good place to be when it comes to the color grading um adjustments um here I think 12 13 looked great I want to play with the contrasty the opposite color but I will use the midtones to do so um somewhere like yellow orang um I think it's good and it's really bring more warmth uh from this uh sunlight that we have here of course 46 is uh way too strong so maybe we can dial down around 20 something 20 yeah 20 look good um highlights maybe contrast that with a touch of Teel again but very minimal like plus five and when it comes to the global I like my photos to feel a bit warm so I use the global to reshift everything to towards the yellow orang area not too much the global are pretty strong usually so I go n over five or 10 in some scenarios I think around seven we are good and this is the effect of the color grading maybe I will adjust further my M tones more towards yellow um a bit less saturation in the teal in the shadows and I think it looks quite good maybe a bit more saturation the global adjustments so let's do a quick before and after to see what we've done so far it looks natural but it is stylized which is really the the goal um of uh of my editing process I want my photos to have a style to have a an identity without making them look completely unnatural and now we can move on to the font part which is the mask and clearly I will use the mask to reshape my uh my exposure bring a lot more attention here to the to the subject removing a lot of the attention and removing exposure here in the foreground keeping the sky where it is approximately and if we look at the light we see the shadow is going from right to left so we can assume that um the sun was coming from from the right here so we can uh accentuate that with uh with the masks there are plenty of ways you can play with the with the mask because now we can add we can substract things and it is very powerful here to um adjust my foreground I will use a linear mask and I don't mind covering um our subject because here I can use the high feather and then subtract for example a radial gradient again with a high feather to um really make the adjustment As Natural as possible here is the affected sections and I can start removing some exposure removing some of the Shadow and try to see what blacks are doing we are getting quite contrasty I kind of like that may sound counter and because there's not a lot of white here anyway but reducing the white make sure that you remove um The Edge remove that that brightness on some element of the foreground to really um really catch the viewer's attention and redirect it to um to your subject so I'm pretty happy with these adjustments now I'll create a radial gradient coming from the right side as we said the sun was was on the right something like this and we can maybe just increase a touch the exposure and the white really not too much and we can even maybe mess around with the temperature like bring it up maybe at plus five and you see here my um mask is covering also that little building on the right side which was not hit by the Light so what I can do is substract a a linear gradient something like that so we make sure that the building is not affected then yeah could even play further with my subject maybe with a brush or something increase the clarity and maybe the saturation just a touch and if we look at the before and after the mask we have reape the light coming from here removed a lot of the distraction and the exposure in the forground ground we kept the sky where it is and I think it looks good and if we do a global before and after that's the result last step depends on what you want to go for but I want to add a little bit of grain something not too harsh so I will bring it to plus 25 my size to 35 something like that and I like this kind of setting for a more fine grain it's not too obvious but it looks it looks nice and now if I want to copy paste or create a preset out of these settings this is what I would do um keep the profile in take away the white balance and exposure because they are very individual to each photos then I keep all the remaining settings the curves color mixer color grading detail I didn't do any um detail sharpening adjustments so I leave that out lens correction is also a photo to photo um adjustment because I want this to be appliable to photos taken with another camera with another lens so I leave that out transform to is is very individual um to each photo then effects we had some grain so I can keep that in sometimes for my presets I don't want to have grain uh in them so I leave that out and then add grain um if I want calibration of course I keep that in HDR mode is something new in Lightroom I've never edited hdr photos but I keep it like that have no problem and the masking also is a very individual photo to photo setting so I leave that out and then I can copy my settings and now we can try to apply those settings to another photo uh but when I do so I start just like before with the lens correction um here I think I I will not keep all the viting maybe leave it somewhere at 60 check my lens correction here we have straight lines um let's keep it the auto but here I'll crop a little bit because you see there is a little gap between the building and the sky so I cop Just a Touch so we don't have this weird little Gap here we are white balance looks okay here if I try auto brings a little bit more warms which look good but yeah I will D it down to uh 5,750 tint I think somewhere at 14 looks good the overall exposure again it's is is looking good so I leave it there and then use maybe your localized adjustments and here I can paste my my settings first thing I notice is that it's a bit too warm and my highlights are too crushed so I will move my highlights up again but what we see is that the color grading was a bit too strong it worked well on that previous photo but uh not in this one so that's what you have to go through to create good presets good starting points because um not everything is working on all pictures and and good presets for me um they are good starting point for almost any pictures so I can dial my color grading a bit better I went a bit too far maybe in the global adjustment and in the midtones maybe a bit too orange so I will move that back towards yellow I think now it looks good so maybe it's more like the overall temperature that was to um boost the exposure touch so now I can move on to the mask and I will use a brush to reduce a bit the exposure on this fence here very simple just the exposure setting and I'll show you something with the again with the brush if you have a very small brush like this you can create one point at the corner for example then you make your brush very large and you go to the other corner of the frame and you maintain the shift key and click again and you see it creates this cone shaped uh yeah adjustment uh going from that first that first little point to that big Point actually you can do the same just to create a straight line here and not without changing the size uh when you you when you maintain shift and you click new points you can make those adjustment and have very straight lines but as uh we've seen you can also um adjust the size in between and it will create these cone things I think it's very powerful to accentuate a source of light um here I will slightly increase the exposure and maybe the white maybe decrease a touch the clarity it looks good and now I can right click here and duplicate and invert the mask uh so I have the opposite selection don't want this to be applied to um the sky so what I can do here substract the sky and I can crush this further to really reshape the light really create a lot of contrast see if we do if we do before and after the masks we have something that looks very cool and here here I just noticed that um this first mask is completely spilling on the on the fence and clearly it doesn't look good so what I can do is subtract um a brush for example and paint that away so we don't have this weird line anymore and now we have pretty decent result here I can just use the correction tool to make my photo a bit cleaner I don't really like this white thing maybe I can try to remove that if we do this for a very difficult thing of course Photoshop will work better but here we have very good result so whenever I can um do the correction without uh switching software uh I like it can further clean like these little things like that maybe here can always clean further but here we have removed a few of the distract ructions I think it looks better now here again Tech and yeah let's do a before and after pretty happy with the results and now that we've fine tuned a little bit our adjustment I can copy again and apply that to another picture same process yeah here will keep the the viting correction Auto Works well I'll crop it to remove the little Gap here just like that paste my settings it's a bit too dark so I can move my exposure up I don't want my sky to be brighter so I keep it like that and then I can select the sky invert the selection and move the exposure and the whites a touch maybe also the Shadows but to keep a decent amount of contrast I move the contrast up it looks great like this I can always play with maybe a Ral gradient make my source of light a bit stronger I know that the sun is coming from the left we have the we have the shadow uh going from left to right so I can just boost the exposure touch like that make it a bit more directional let's do a before and after looks good now if I want to export these photos um I don't do anything crazy actually keep my format to jpeg Quality quality to 100 I don't do any resize to fit um sharpen I sharpen for screen standard I think that's the default option in um in Lightroom and that's pretty much it even if I were to post any of this on Instagram the landscape rotation I would would keep uh this crop but for the vertical one I would crop to 4x5 which is the which is the format for Instagram 4x5 then when exporting again I don't touch any of these quality to the maximum sharpening uh standard I don't do uh any image resizing and I think it works well thanks a lot for watching I hope you could get a lot of value out of this video um there will be a link in the description to download the preset I created throughout this session it's totally free and you can have a taste of how my other presets look like and yeah let's catch them in the next one bye

Channel: Adrien Sanguinetti

Views: 127,023

Keywords: Streetphotography, Sony, Sony a7IV, Lo-fi, Sonyalpha, Alpha 7IV, a7IV, Ricoh, Ricoh GRIII, GRIII, 28mm, Hiroshima, GR3, GR3X, GRiii x, street photography, pov, gopro, street photography tips, tips and tricks, techniques, uninspired, motivation, best street camera, best beginner camera, street photography basics, best film simulation, composition tips, get better at exposing, exposure tips, street photographers, how to shoot street, streetphotography, japan, 85mm, Sigma, a7iii, x100valternative

Id: -ScyjlpyZnU

Length: 30min 47sec (1847 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2024