How to Edit ANY Genre of Photo in Photoshop

hello Blake Rudess here and today I'm gonna do something that I don't only do on YouTube I'm gonna put up a live event replay from an event that I had last month now this event I think was very important for the subscribers of f/64 Academy and f/64 elite and if you got on youtube you're like how did I not get this so the way these work is that I put out to my subscribers my email list of f64 Academy and f64 leave the opportunity to meet me live once per month now if you get on my email list you'll get notifications when I'm having these live events now these live events are usually once they're recorded only available for f64 elite members and they're archived on the f64 elite website so if you go to f64 elite comm to become a member you can see all of the live events that I've ever done for the f64 elite members but today I'm gonna share this live event with you in its entirety from the very beginning all the way through the Q&A at the very end and I'm doing that because this topic is something that I get a lot of questions on it's a called the genre box and I want to help you if you're stuck in a genre box get out of that genre box today with this video it's pretty cool so it's enough out of me right now let's jump into this genre box concept okay so this live event is strongly focused on this term genre box now it's a term that I kind of created to help myself understand why people say the things that they do after I create a tutorial for them and what I found is that a lot of times people are stuck in a genre box so what's the genre box well though the genre box is basically this mentality focus that you have of I edit landscape photos so I need to know how to do this for a landscape photo or I edit portraits so how would I use your landscape technique for a portrait or I only do architectural photos how am I supposed to use this technique in my architectural images I actually get those questions quite a bit and I'm gonna be quite honest with you is my number one absolute pet peeve when it comes to being a photo educator I'm trying to say this as kindly as possible but imagine this okay so you're in college okay your teacher says I need you guys to do a report using the MLA style yada yada yada they introduce you to the MLA style and what MLA style is and then someone raises her hand says okay that's great thank you can you write my paper for me I'm doing my paper on this so this genre box is kind of the same concept create a tutorial and at the end of the tutorial someone in YouTube will say that's great but how would I use this on a portrait and I kind of want to say well that's great why don't you use it on a portrait okay my frustration is seeping out of me I know I know I'm sorry I'm trying to tone it down the thing is what makes me most happy is actually when someone leaves a comment that says I see that you use this on a landscape photo however I'm a portrait photographer and this thing is awesome it works great because of X Y Z so what I'm gonna do today is I've got four different types of images I've got a landscape photo I've got a portrait photograph that I got from Adobe stock of a beautiful woman here I've got a architectural photo from inside a church in our Kashan France and I also have a wildlife photo of a bald eagle so I feel like I'm covering for very strong genres that a lot of my subscribers to YouTube nf 64 elite tend to process so what I'm gonna do today is I've never done this before but I'm gonna use five things and every one of those five things I'm gonna use on a different photo okay so if I use a tone curve on this photo I'm gonna use a tone curve on another photo now I'm not necessarily gonna show you how I'm doing what I'm doing I'm gonna tell you why I'm doing what I'm doing and what I'm focusing on when I'm doing that okay because I have this strong feeling that the work flow of tone color and artistic effects is all you need to know in order to process a photograph and when I say that I there are certain things that happen in your tones there are certain things that happen in your colors and there's certain things that happen in your effects but what I know of all photos all photos have pixels and all those pixels need tonal adjustments all of them need color adjustments and that photo needs your artistic rendering or your artistic effects to make the viewer feel which you felt so I'm gonna dive right into this I'm again I'm not gonna be tutorial focused here about I do this and this is how I do it step by step more importantly I want you to see how I'm gonna use the same thing it's a common thread throughout all of them even though that thread changes its shape a little bit I'm gonna use those common threads throughout the entire thing ready so the first thing I want to do with this is I'm gonna put a tone curve on here so with this tone curve these all these images right out of Adobe Camera Raw are just your basic I basically pressed Otto on them and pulled them into Photoshop here so I'm gonna press so I'm looking at this tone curve I'm gonna make my darks a little bit darker and give it that s-curve type of look make my whites a little bit whiter or a little bit brighter might even bring those darks up just a little bit more now because I brought the highlights up I'm gonna double click on this and I'm going to protect the lightest light areas especially of that cloud because I don't want it to blow out as I work on my photo okay so now I'm gonna hop over to this photo now I'm gonna use a tone curve on this photo okay so for this curve I'm really just gonna kind of feel my way through it I like what happens when I shape her face a little bit by darkening this down a little bit and then let's see what happens when we bring the mid-tones up here into the highlights and I think that looks really good there okay it's just a little pop it shapes her face a little bit more and I'm gonna do some other things to shape her face a little bit more too but I'm using this tone curve to just heighten and accentuate things that I want to push forward now what do I do here I'm letting this photo have communication with me okay it's telling me like this is what it needs so as I make these adjustments on all these images I'm looking at it it's looking at me it's telling me what it needs and I'm obliging okay so this tone curve compared to this tone curve are two different things right I couldn't use this same tone curve settings on both photos but I did use a tone curve on both images alright so I'm starting out basic and I'll work my way up to some advanced stuff okay track me so with this photo I'm gonna put a tone curve on here no surprises okay I'm gonna make it a little bit brighter here in the mid-tones make it a little bit brighter my highlights I am actually not afraid of my highlights blowing out here at all whatsoever why because they're already blown out so I'm gonna use those highlight blow outs as basically a tool okay so I'll close down some of these settings in here with another tonal adjustment but really what I'm doing here is I'm elevating those whites because I love what's happening here with this beam of light that's coming across here and the one that's coming across at the top and I'm kind of evening out the mid-tones and the shadows a little bit there as I bring that up again this tone curve used on the other ones with these exact settings wouldn't be what I need to use I can't use that on those other it might not look that great but what is doing here it works out really well for this photo okay let's go into this one now I'm gonna put a tone curve on here okay just gonna brighten this up a little bit I like what happens when I'm getting a little bit more brightness there and then I might press alt or option and look at my darks here and see where I start to do some clipping on those areas there and then brighten this up a little bit and see where I'm gonna do some clipping now because this is a wildlife photo and I'm focused on this bald eagles face if I press alt or option here I do not want that to blow out because the bald eagle the thing that makes it so beautiful is its beautiful white head there okay so if I were to do something like this well it makes the rest of the photo look good or decent look what it's doing to the the feathers on that bald eagle it is blowing them out like crazy or clipping them okay so I don't want to clip in that far so I'll press alt or option to kind of give me an idea of how far that's going in now again this photo has different tonal variations than the other three photos this all of these tone curves look very different however they are all making this image look better okay so now I'm gonna move on to another thing and I'm gonna do a Dodge and burn now with this is kind of crazy I've never done something like this before it balance them between four images using the same thing it's actually kind of fun so what I'm going to do this I'm gonna put the Dodge and burn tool up this is my Dodge and burn pro panel I'm gonna go into method 3 which is just the simplest method for dodging and burning it's basically just a overlay layer of basically a middle gray and then it sets my brush to automatically dodge now with dodging and burning what many people have seen me do before dodging and burning is I like to draw the eye in two things I want them the viewer to see with highlights and I push certain things away from the viewer with shadows it's sculpting the image sculpting the image with light so I'm gonna sculpt in this area here I'm gonna make my brush a little bit bigger here and just sculpt in this area right here really leave that viewer in through the bottom of this image beautiful oh man that is looking great already okay so I'm gonna lighten up the side of El Cap here alt or option and then burn down this portion of El Cap over here and then maybe even burn this side over here while just adding a little bit of highlight over so I'm drawing the viewer into that main highlight that I made right here in the center and then alt or option to burn away the things I don't want the viewer to focus that much attention on and then I'm probably gonna bring the conversation over here a little bit by brightening up that waterfall there bridal veil fall and then I'm gonna make my brush a little bit bigger and kind of scoop in with some highlight here and then alt or option and push that away back here now I'm also unscripted here at this point all right the only thing I've written down is that I need to do a tone curve I need to dodge and burn and then do my other enhancements so what I'm doing here is I'm literally letting this photo just speak to me as I'm recording this right now again so all tore up ssin to darken this down a little bit now always take a look at what happens with your dodge and burn look at that see this this RI is like it's bouncing over here it's over here it's over here it's over here it's it's it's not really down here but here it's like nope I want you to come in from the bottom into this image and I don't want your eyes to rest on things that I don't want you to look at pop over here dodge and burn pro put on that four pen alright cuz I'm using a pen right now okay so now I'm going to use my extra special brush here and I'm gonna start shaping the face with light so I'm just gonna brush in here with these highlights on areas that I want the viewer to go to first I kind of want that to be the front of her face a little bit there you see that and then I'll press alt or option and kind of darken some areas down here maybe down here brighten this area up really like the way that the light is sculpting not just her face but also her neck those features are really nice and then I'll brighten up this area here maybe brighten up inside these eyes just a little bit to make them glow just a little bit more okay and then add some highlight here to her hair she's got some beautiful hair going on I really like that look and then alt or option and then dodge and burn this image out now I'll probably even come down here alt or option and burn this area here because I don't want the viewers eyes to be going down I want them to be focused on her face and might even create almost like my own little vignette right here with the dodging and burning there so let's see what that looks like before after we're just sculpting out the areas that we want the viewer to look okay it's different it's a different dodging burn that I used over here isn't it much different dodging burn than what I used over here and actually if you look at this one this dodging burn has a lot more very deliberate pen adjustments to it whereas the other one where they were just very big and splotchy okay so that looks better already I like it okay I'm gonna come over to this image dodge and burn pro I'm gonna put on the four pen and I'm gonna talk you through it all right what am I gonna do I'm going to alt or option I'm gonna burn in down here through this area here I'm gonna brighten this up cuz look at how beautiful that is is that light comes in and cross I'm gonna be heavy over here and then just slowly push it over there okay so I'm sculpting out that light right there and barely pushing over on this side but really pushing pretty hard over here again I'm gonna brighten this up with my with my Dodge and just really brighten that up a little bit there okay and then bring this down now I was a traditional Dodger and burner back in the old school days in the darkroom and if you weren't dodging and dodging if you weren't ah judging and burning your images I'd say you're wrong okay because it's so much easier now and it wasn't the best alter option I'm gonna burn under these areas I don't want the eye to go underneath these areas I want the eye to follow the area that I want the eye to follow so I'm gonna have it come across here I'm gonna have it come across here look it's a beautiful gold that's coming across there along this edge here probably coming in from another one of those windows on the other side beautiful alt or option burn this area in okay and it's looking good alter option burn this area in back here and then brighten up the walkway here and then even some of these pews kind of give this someone an idea of where they want to sit okay so I'll darken this area down because I want them to sit on one of those edges and that's just where the eyes gonna go okay I might darken this area down a little bit back here but then brighten up right there where that light is beaming in you see I'm not afraid of a blowout okay I'm not afraid of my highlights clipping I'm not afraid of my I'm more afraid of my shadows clipping that I am of my highlights clipping but if my highlights are blowing out just use it to your advantage look at this dodging burn much more deliberate strokes that are happening with this dodging burn then the other dodging burn from before big big big splotches but what am i doing bringing the eye in I'm telling you what I want the viewer to look at while I'm doing it okay let's go to the next one dodging and burning on this one this one I'm probably not gonna do a whole lot of be dodging and burning on the entire photo cuz I don't think it really needs it but I will come in here and make sure that I go right under this bald eagle and start sculpting out the light as it's hitting the bald eagle okay I'm gonna dodge on the side where the lights already hitting I'm just gonna make it more pronounced I'm gonna dodge in his face where that light is hitting to make it more pronounced and along the beak I'll make my brush a little bit smaller here okay looks great look at that you are looking good there bald eagle buddy and I'm gonna brighten up the feet because I want the eye to look at how gnarly those claws are alt or option to burn in a little bit underneath here and sculpt out some of this chest and that looks good very sculpted bird there and if we look at this I'm gonna zoom out let's look at the before and the after you see that sculpting out the light sculpting out the light that's all we're doing here I might go really big with this dodging burn really big and then I might yeah just go really big with this dodging burn and then I might just brighten up some of these clouds in the background here and then make my brush a little bit smaller and then burn because burning is gonna bring out the color of those blues burn around here okay burn around here run around here and that looks good okay so over here we did four very distinctly different dodging and burning okay all I'm doing here is teaching you why I'm doing what I'm doing and what it is that I'm trying to accent so that tone curve is tone dodging and burning is tone I kind of put those into the same category so now we can move on to color okay so what I'm gonna do with color is something that I haven't really done recently with color I haven't really done many videos on this but I'm gonna use the color balance tool and this color balance tool the reason why I'm use it using it is because this color balance tool can be used to both make artistic expression but also be used for color correction so when I use it for color correction you're gonna see how I'm gonna do that here this image is awfully magenta it's got a very strong magenta cast so I need to offset that so what I would do here to offset that magenta cast is I'm gonna add some green to those mid-tones okay and then as I look at this it looks like the mid-tones need a little bit of red them and those mid-tones might need a little bit of yellow in them as well okay very small adjustment but look at what it did especially just to those mid-tone areas then I can further refine this go into the shadows and say okay shadows let's make you a little bit more on the green side that's looking good and then a little bit more on the red side to offset the amount of green that I'm adding in there that looks good now we'll go to highlights again I have preserve luminosity checked here highlights I want them to be a little bit more on the blue side my highlights here can be a little bit more on the magenta side see that and a little bit more on the cyan side maybe a little more on the yellow side too okay look at that I use this for color correction okay use the color balance for color correction to offset that magenta now that magenta cast you might say looks great and I like it too okay cuz it was a blue our image but I'm gonna offset that now because it looks like it's washing the whole image with magenta and later when I get into the effects stage of things then I'll work on the actual color grading of this to get some of that much into back okay so this this color step here I'm typically going to be using for color correction rather than color effects okay but you can actually use it for either or if you wanted to come over to this photo it looks to me like there's a little bit of green that's happening in those highlights so again I'm gonna go to my color balance and then if we look at our highlights I'm gonna move over the magenta and I want to move it to green because it's gonna get more green so I had some magenta to those highlights maybe add a little bit of hint of red to those highlights and then a hint of yellow to those highlights we don't want to go blue because it's gonna cool the whole image down if anything we want to warm it up a little bit by adding a little bit of yellow to those highlights and you can barely tell the difference but I'm telling you it makes a huge difference as these things build up let's go to our mid-tones okay there's some green it's coming across in our mid-tones for some reason so we'll make that a little bit more magenta and then we'll make that a little bit more yellow okay a little bit more magenta a little bit negative - ish and then this you don't want to go too far with these okay you definitely want to keep these just going up just a little bit on each one especially because everything I do is a very slow build-up process shadows here we want want to add a little bit of blue to those shadows maybe a slight tinge of green to those shadows and then a little tinge of red to those shadows and here's the difference here okay very big difference but doesn't look like but if I were to take these settings here let's just do it I'm gonna grab these settings I'm gonna press ctrl and move it over to this image and see what that would look like you see the thing is here I'm using the technique of using color balance to alter the image but I'm not using the exact settings of that color balance to offset this image I'm just using my knowledge of color balance and what it does it offsets the tint and temperature essentially of your highlights individually your shadows individually or your mid-tones individually which is a very powerful way to do that so I'm gonna delete this because it looks like junk now looks better let's come over to this photo on top of this one I'm gonna add a color balance what do I want to do here well I definitely wanna make this more red because I really want to bring out the red that's happening in the sky and the ceiling up there okay but adding a little bit of green to this looks pretty good I just let the image speak to me remember what I said I let the image speak to me let it speak to you and tell you what it needs alright so I add a little bit of blue to those mid-tones let's go to our shadows their shadows let's bring up those Reds okay let's delicious with those reds brought up in the shadows and then we'll go over to the magenta look how rich those colors are getting in those shadowy areas there okay and then we need to offset this with a little bit of blue because it's getting a little too yellow when we do that and then I'll go to the highlights I'm speeding through this I'm doing that for a reason I'm trying to show you that you can use all of these different tools on different images even though it's the same tool same tool same technique go in there highlights mid-tones shadows what do we need to do to them offset the colours and highlights mid-tones and shadows to get it more color correct okay then we'll go over to this image we're gonna pop on that color balance I'm gonna go into the mid-tones see what the mid-tones need if they need anything might be a little bit more blue look boom that looks good with a little bit more blue in that mid-tone area maybe a little bit of green and then a little bit of cyan ok then I'll go to the highlights blue in the highlights looks pretty good a little offset here and a little bit of cyan to the highlights shadows what do you need shadows tell me what you got ok if I go too far into one of these it's not gonna look good so let's just go a little bit of the blue a slight tinge of magenta maybe negative 4 and then a little bit of red and then BOOM I like that let's zoom into our birdie here because he's our yeah I like it I like it a lot ok looks good so now we got tone done we got color done let's go into effects so what I'm gonna do to make this easy I'm gonna pop into my zone some express because I have this button here called radiance 2.0 which I use on almost all my photographs but I use it in very different ways so I'm gonna use radiance 2.0 in this image I'm gonna show you how I use it on all four of these photos okay so the radiance 2.0 is essentially if you've ever seen that Orton style effect it's kind of like that it just gives a radiating glow but it does it in a way that is completely out of the ordinary ok so it's gonna do this Gaussian blur then it's gonna stop right here and it's gonna give me a shadows and highlights adjustment for this image so let's go ahead and we'll bring up the amount all the way okay i'ma bring down the radius is here and then that allows me to use the tone slider in the middle to really refine where I want this glow to be okay so my highlight glow looks good there I might drop the color here because I don't really like the color cast it's coming along with this and then drop the mid-tones here just a little bit and what this is doing is it's just taking all the stuff that I've already done and it's adding this artistically glowing effect to the image and we'll press ok now if I if I were to turn the Selective color layer off look what happens here okay if we just put that radiance 2.0 on top of this stuff without that color balance layer there look what happens it's too much alright we needed that color balance layer there to bring out the yellow and the red in the grand in the background okay and that looks pretty good now with this radiance 2.0 you also have a curbs offset here so I'm going to brighten up those dark areas a little bit and then maybe even bring that up in the mid-tones just a slight bit and then bring it down a little bit in the highlights and that looks that looks good I'll stick with that I like that okay pop over here I'm gonna pop on the radiance 2.0 again I'm going faster this stuff because I want you to understand that it's not about the tool necessarily or the technique really it's about the application to what it is that you need it to do for you so you can hop out of your Chandra box okay I'm gonna press okay on this one that looks pretty good there imma press Continue here now this does not look very good right now so let's bring that radius down bring the amount up up and the radius down bring this mid-tone down quite a bit and bring the color all the way down and then let's take a look at these tones I like what's happening here with these highlights brought way down again and then with these tones brought up I like this refine look that we're getting to her face so here's what that looks like that looks pretty good there we go we'll dial that in right there and press okay now with this one I like the enrichment of color that it's giving me but what I don't like is just how much color it's giving me okay so I have a couple options here and here we have the HSL adjustment I can click on that color and I can drop the saturation of that red that's getting very intense because of this and then maybe even brighten it up a little bit I'm basically using the colors that are in this radiance 2.0 to shape the color and the image as well knocking out two steps at once it's basically a tonal and color adjustment type step happening in the affects face alright that looks good what I'm gonna do here though is I'm gonna take the opacity and just drop this down a slight bit okay so it's not so strong so it just makes her glow a little bit more we already have that light coming in I'm using that light that's coming across her face as the inspiration for everything in this here's the before here's the after so far it's looking really good looking really good I'm going to come over to this image I can't wait to see what the what the radiance to does to this one radiance to on architecture look awesome so press Continue here and then I'm gonna bring this up just a little bit more bring it down bring it up yeah I'll bring it up I like that glowing effect there alright press Continue see what we get here what's the how we gonna shape this one out okay oh wow look at that that looks good good bring that radius down let's bring our mid-tone down here so it's not quite so potent that mid-tone slider there will make the deeper dark areas much more rich and will bring the color down too because I don't like the color cast that's happening here and then these highlight areas look what happens with these glowing highlights oh my gosh this is how you create mood look at that we are sculpting this image out with this radiance 2.0 man oh man that is gorgeous okay I like that but it's a little too strong in the shadows so what do I do well I could just say well I don't really like it and delete it or I could say well you know what I have blend def I'll double click this and I'll say blend if let's protect some of those shadow areas I'll even do a color overlay on this so you can see when I'm protecting to protect those shadowy areas there and we'll transition them all the way through the shadow to about 5 and then in do the mid-tones just about there I don't want to go too far up here with that I want to still see some magenta up there because that is where a lot of that love is happening up there to make that beautiful light happen I'll turn the color overlay off and look at that my gosh man you could that's a hamburger you could eat it's gorgeous alright so now I'll go over to this one what am I gonna do here well I'm gonna pop on the zone system Express I'm gonna hit the radiance 2.0 okay continue and look at how this is shaping up he's lookin nice press okay and then I'll press this is the radiance 2.0 honestly is basically like a refinement of dodging and burning it's basically a very intense dodge and burn that also brings about some color along with it and just refines everything your tones and your colors at the same time with this dodging and burning style effect if we want to call it that okay and that is looking great I like it when that mid-tone is little bit higher well you will notice here though especially with this radiance 2.0 is that if you have areas that are transitioning from high contrast to low contrast like this tree branch into the cloud in the background you may get some hay lowing around those edges so what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna double click on this and then in those highlight areas I'm gonna move this over and I'm gonna protect those highlight areas from receiving this radiance 2.0 and that will help shape out the where this is actually going it's going in my darkest dark areas and into my mid-tones while leaving my highlight highest highlights completely alone that way we don't have that nasty transition so you don't have to use this as an intense adjustment like we saw here incredibly intense here okay you could almost double this let's press command ctrl J see what that looks like you can almost double it here and still have a good look but if we try to double it here press commander control day to double that it's not gonna look that great so what you want to pay attention to her the principles of editing tone color and effects but just know that in each one of those categories you're gonna have to do something different so let's wrap this up let's land the plane I'll talk about color grading now so color grading this image out okay I'm gonna go into pallet effects I'm gonna use the same color grade for every photo let's see what happens okay so I'm gonna on top of the radiance 2.0 I'll warm this up a little bit add a little bit of warmth to that and then let's go ahead and refine that with a little bit of magenta and column number four let's say I'll use the same columns on every image but I won't use the same colors okay cuz the whole color grading is different I need to let the image speak to me okay so looking at this I like it in the darkest dark areas don't necessarily like it in the highlights so I'll say no lights and it won't happen in those highlights let me look at the warming color here I like what's happening in those mid-tones so maybe I'll say only mid-tones and there's my color grade okay so I'll press alt or option and there we go there's the before in the after really intense here on this warming and also on this adjustment here so I'm also probably going to drop this color burn down to about thirty percent opacity and maybe ten percent fill that looks a lot better so let's pop over here so I used a 4 and a 3 so I can use a four and A three of anything on here so looking at this photo I would say a warming effect could help will do a warming and we'll say only on the highlights okay and then let's see what color would help bring this out there's some magenta here so maybe some cyan some cyan on number four and let's watch how this that's basically going to burn this image with color okay so it's color burn is what this is set to so it's going to make all the darker darks darker but also do it with a little bit of color so that looks great and that looks great I think that that actually looks really good on this I might drop the opacity down to 10% and then this one I might drop that down to 40% opacity and maybe 10% fill okay just because it's very strong and we already have a lot of nice color built up on here okay so I can use a 4 and a 3 here mmm okay let me do a for red oh it's too much let me do a for cyan mm-hmm look at that that is really enriching those Reds without having to make it red it's making this area more red without actually physically having to make it more red doing this is just way too much red but here we're going into those shadowy areas burning them with a little bit of cyan which will bring out the red somewhere else okay so now let me do a 3 maybe a 3 not blue maybe a 3 warming and look at that this feels like that church in Arkansas now oh my gosh if I showed Tony this he'd be flipping out there's the before there's the after tone color effects let's see what's doing a too strong work here my traditional dodge and burn here is a little bit too much now so I'm gonna drop that down to about 70 percent opacity okay and then let's look at that radiance 2.0 might be a little too strong let's drop that down to about 80% okay and now I think we're finding this okay pop over here I can use a four and A three okay let's do a warming three nope let's do a warming three and out of cooling three and let's do that maybe only on the lights and let's do a cooling four and maybe a cooling maybe cyan for warming four magenta for mm-hmm now let's do a I like this one I like this one but I don't like how it's hitting my dark sauce saying no darks so it doesn't hit my darkest dark areas okay this one's only on the lights this one's only on the darks so let's talk through what I did here on all of these all right so let's really land this plane let's talk this through first thing I did tone in tone I did a tone curve and then I did a traditional dodge and burn what did I do with that dodging and burning have brought the I to where I wanted you to look it definitely is different if we don't have that there that's why this is a slow build up process everything here is a slow build up process okay then we worked on color which was our color balance which again really helped us out now I really kind of like this too now so this what I'm gonna do because I did offset these with these colors I'm gonna come in here this and I'm gonna drop this down to about 50% okay Wow beautiful Yosemite you're looking gorgeous then I put that radiance 2.0 on there to really tighten up all of the tones and colors in this image and bring them all together in that effect and then out of my color grade here which again really brought this image forward now on this photo I did all the exact same thing I did tone I did color I did effects but my dodging and burning here was a little bit different but still the same it brought the viewer in to where I wanted them to see I let the image speak to me and tell me where I needed that dodging and burning to be okay and then we went into our color balance to really this time further make this image a little bit more warm than what it was so not like this where we did a offset of the color here we made the image a little bit more warm with those colors because it needed it there then we did the radiance 2.0 to get that nice beautiful glowing look and then we did our color grade to tie the whole image together so what you'll notice here there's a pattern I do tone for for tonal refinements brightness refining fineman's then I do color to get the colors beautiful where they should be then and only then do I hop over into my effects to get my artistic effects implanted into this photo so that you'll see what I see okay and that's the same all throughout so in jumping out of your genre box what you should be thinking about here is how can I use some of these in the the photos that I edit not necessarily what did Blake do to a portrait but why and but why did Blake do that to that portrait not necessarily what did Blake do to that architectural image but why did Blake do that to his architectural photo using tone color and artistic effects okay it's it's critical and it will help me out a ton if I stop getting comments that say how would I use this on XYZ because you know what I'm gonna start saying from now on experiment with it on XYZ and then you report back to me and tell me how it worked on XYZ okay so I don't want you to think about the what what is this person doing and this isn't just for me this is for any of my friends Mac Laskowski Jim Lansky any of my friends that are teaching how to do something on line don't think about the what they're doing think about why they're doing it and how it can help you try to avoid that what would I do with a portrait with this technique I don't know do it and tell me how it worked out okay because you saw here that we use the same five techniques on all four of these images we use them slightly different and even the color grades on all of these were different choices based on the decisions that I wanted to make for those individual photos I can't stress and how important it is to experiment and have deliberate practice time deliberate practice time means that you take the thing that you just learned and you apply it you can't have your English teacher write your paper for you just because they showed you a technique or a writing style all right so I'm gonna open this up for questions please let me know if you have any questions about this and I will gladly help you okay I'm not gonna tell you to go away all right I'm not a mean person all right but I have two pet peeves in this world number one people tune with their mouths open and number two people asking me how to do something with a portrait when I'm working on a landscape image or whatever that might be all right ask away all right so I'm back so really what I wanted you to gather from this you know I'm not a mean person I'll never yell at somebody it's just not in my nature it's not who I am but it is really frustrating when you know you're you're you give away a phenomenal tip and then someone says well how would I do this on this so what what I really want people to take away from this is the number one most important thing you can ever do is called deliberate practice period okay so here's here's what deliberate practice is just so you know so let's say I play basketball okay and I want to practice getting better at my free throws I actually have to practice getting better at my free throws that doesn't necessarily mean that I go out there and I play basketball with people who aren't very good at basketball okay that means that I go out there and I shoot free throws all day long until I can't shoot another free throw because my arms don't work and the same thing happens with me in Photoshop so people wonder how do you know so much about Photoshop it's called deliberate practice it's called I took the curves adjustment there and I beat the crap out of it for at least fifteen weeks straight until I really understood the curves adjustment layer so I really just want to empower people to get better at their process but what I find is a lot of people want me to make their process better I can't make somebody's process better I can give you all the tools in the industry that you could possibly imagine but I can't make your process better I need people to have deliberate practice I need people to set aside time for experimentation that is a huge importance okay so don't just sit down just to edit a photo because deliberate practice with a certain trick doesn't necessarily mean you sit there once you try it say Oh Blake said that's crap it doesn't work so someone said chewing gum with their mouths open that's it that's another pet peeve so sue also said I never gave a thought to your workflow being limited to a specific genre this is interesting so a lot of where this comes from too is that I put out these things like there's own system Express and palette effects and then the the immediate first thing I get is well I'm a wedding photographer this doesn't pertain to me well it does I just so happened to not do a whole lot of wedding stuff but if I did I could still use these tools so that's one of the frustrations I get I that's easy to get over I've got a lot of candy mails that I just send out that automatic they have all this stuff that I want written in them anyway so you know it many people might not find themselves in this genre box and if you're watching this and you're saying none of this applied to me then awesome you are exactly where I want you to be that's perfect if you are watching this and you feel a little convicted by that I meant no harm no foul to this okay I really just want to tweak some things in your brain as I told you I've been doing a lot of studying on the brain and neuroplasticity and neuroscience and all these things that happen to do with the brain a lot of things that I'm coming up with on this I'm finding out that not many people it's a very small percentage of people in this world that hear something and apply it to their life a lot of times they just hear it and they let it be an external source that moves them rather than being an internal person that says I heard that and this is what I'm gonna do with it so a lot of times people will see a strategy or a tip that they learn in Photoshop but they externally just let it be there instead of internally saying ah how would I apply that okay so that's all I'm trying to do here I'm trying to get into your brain tweak some wires reconnect them push them all around and you know mess around with your head a little bit someone's Robert says it helps to see the results on the action you make in the workflow I should more dare yeah definitely I mean here I've never done this before and actually when I recorded this video I recorded it yesterday I opened up four photos and I just said I'm gonna record this and I didn't really I didn't make any plot or structure to it whatsoever I just went and I let those images speak to me and that's critical you know a lot of times when you ask someone a question about their process they I will guarantee that most photo educators are coming up with an answer because they feel the need to come up with an answer for you when a lot of times that answer is I let that image tell me what it needs and I do it and a lot of times that's how I edit my photos too it's like I can't tell you what I would do with the portrait photo unless I see that portrait photo I can't tell you what I would do to this unless I see that because I let that mood that I have come into the photo I let the connection that I have with the photo and the photo of how its speaking to me and what I want to get out of it I let that be a conversation that we have together so I'm work down here in my office by myself maybe I've worked down here myself by myself for a little bit too long because I'm having conversations with photos but when you think about a photograph having a conversation with somebody it's really critical because I could show you my piece of work and I can tell you all day long about it and you can be like oh wow that's great or I could not be in the room and I could have that photo in front of you and you can still have the same conversation about it that's because I am - those thoughts those feelings those world words and and emotions into that piece so much so that when you saw it you could feel it all right and you had that conversation with the piece so a lot of times I just let it be a conversational thing so I cuz in the end it comes down to finding a set of tools that always work for me and then it and then it need Blake to do a video and say try this trick - yeah so I know I'm always gonna I'm always gonna be mixing this thing up and I know that a lot of people have a hard time following my process and the things that I do and that's because I'm always innovating on things but the things that I learned five years ago it's not that I'm not using them anymore I'm just using them in a different way because I've allowed my process of my work flow to get more refined based on the things that I've learned and the deliberate practice and experimentation with those things into my workflow so that's a great point I guess so I love the process of tone color and effects as Paula but a little confused as to the order of applying other things example with portraits that typically will use frequency separation on the face want to clarify and we'll practice when I would do that in relation to tone color and effects so that I would consider to be it depends okay so with frequency separation a lot of times you're doing frequency separation as you're taking the tones and the colors that are in the image and you're sometimes smudging them to make them disappear in other places what I would say for frequency separation is do that first or try to do it as first as possible before doing your work on the top it's kind of like a composite I consider frequency separation kind of like a sky replacement I'm not gonna do all this work on a photo and then at the very end of it replace this guy I'm gonna replace this guy first because that sets the mood and the feeling of the image so I know I've got like a little pimple mark right here on my face I would remove that in Adobe Camera Raw before I went into Photoshop to edit frequency separation could also remove this for me before I would go to edit so I would consider frequency separation as being one of those things that you do first because it's not really tonal based thing it's not really a color based thing it's an image manipulation thing so those image manipulation things I'd probably push those to the beginning so that when you do your tone color and effects it's a smooth transition along the face instead of having parts of it being done on top or underneath or in-between so I bet he loses Thank You Blake for all your education I'm a photographer of pets horses and wildlife and I already learned a ton from you and my work is really growing so yes it does apply to all genres yes see I just started photographing wildlife I guess so you can call it that I just went and photographed some bald eagles and they are pretty wild and it was a lot of fun and they were out in the wild but I appreciate that because you know I didn't really edit any wildlife photos of my own until just this month so and I was using all my strategies too and the thing is when you understand that you have a set of principles that you live by like I live by a certain set of principles I call them foundations there are many foundational things that I've collected over my life that make me who I am ok so I'll give you a couple of those for instance and how this plays into workflow so I'm a firm Christian okay so my church has four guidelines that we that we go off of I have it up here somewhere just so I always have it in front of me but that is to love God love others to serve and to be a generous person so those are four foundational things that I have that make me who I am so I'm also in the Air Force in the Air Force we have three foundational core values which are integrity first service before self and excellence and all we do so if I combine those four things from my church and these three things from my Air Force career combine them together man that makes a pretty good person doesn't it so if I make my life a foundation if that that's the bedrock that I build things up on then everything in my life I feel is gonna be successful there's a couple foundational things in my marriage there are things that I will not do or situations I will not put myself in because I've already had conversations with my wife when we're 75 years old looking at our grandchildren now she doesn't know that but we've had these conversations in my head because I future paced myself to that point with these foundational bedrock things so I you know the same thing happens with your photos and your workflow I'm giving you a little personal information here but maybe combine that with the principles that you that you go into with photo post-production there's nothing that can come at you that's gonna be difficult okay if you if you really think about tone color and artistic effects knowing that every pixel in your image has a brightness value which is tone every one of them has some type of combination of red green and blue in it which is color and those pixels would love for you to impart your artistic vision on that photo all right those are the principles so now it doesn't matter what photo you throw at me all I got to think about is tone what do these pixels brightness need to be color does the color look good and then effects do I want tonal effects like the radiance 2.0 don't color effects like color grading all those things kind of come together to create that photograph but it's that bedrock set of foundations and principles that I go into my editing process with that help make my images the way they are okay so these are you know take that personal spin on life mix it in with your new foundations are critical there's a reason why almost all the courses on f64 elite arc are called Photoshop foundations it builds up a foundation for you that's the when you get that foundational stuff right now I'm in my basement office surrounded by the foundation of my house now could you imagine if the person who built this built the foundation of this house out of cardboard okay this house wouldn't last very long I don't care how strong or how sturdy you think cardboard is if it's smashed together into you know three billion pieces it would fall apart eventually especially with the rain and the snow that we're getting now so the foundation of everything whether it's in your life or it's in your work flow those are things that are gonna build up the success and the future of the work that you create okay so the foundational things all the things that we learn in those foundational steps really critical all right I haven't gotten any more questions here let's see I did have a couple questions I wanted to touch base on like I said fixing ratings 2.0 and shadows so basically the radiance 2.0 is gonna make your shadows crazy it's a really intense dodging burn so there's two ways you can fix it when you put ratings 2.0 on something number one is after you do the radiance 2.0 you can go in with your blend if and you can blend that stuff so that it doesn't hit your shadows quite as hard or you can make sure that you don't go too intense on your shadows to begin with as you go in so that you don't end up getting the radience 2.0 being too strong on your shadowy areas so either you protect those shadows going into it knowing that your shadows are gonna get boosted up with Raiden's 2.0 or after the radiance 2.0 you protect them later so those are two ways that you can fix that let's see here do I have any more questions I'm wondering if maybe the questions got broken here because I'm not seeing anything here let me move to something else it's like the last thing I got was thanks makes sense we have 41 people here that are live but it looks like the chat is not working that would be very interesting okay so the other question that I received was do I always dodge and burn the answer that question is not necessarily do I I don't always dodge and burn okay if I see that the photo needs dodging and burning I'll do it but the Oh someone said you scared us what happened Paula oh it didn't break no one just said anything that's great uh-huh so because of the shadows so let's go back there because now the chat thing is working Hika Hika says because of the shadows she never really dodges and burns before the radiance 2.0 she lets the Dodge and the radiance 2.0 kind of act as that dodging and burning which is great because as we are talking about dodging and burning right now I might not always deliberately dodge and burn with my dodging burn tool or with dodge and burn techniques but I do very routinely almost always use the radiance 2.0 I know that that didn't make any sense I do very routinely almost always I use the readings 2.0 a lot a lot a lot a lot I don't know if there's a single portfolio image that I have on Instagram or Facebook or wherever that might be that doesn't have the radiance 2.0 on it and it is a very strong form of dodging and burning so I would say that if I'm not actually Dilbert that deliberately dodging and burning with my hand I am doing some type of dodging and burning techniques that are going to make my darks darker my lights lighter or transition the eye somewhere into my photo another version of that is kind of like using the spotlight if you've ever used the spotlight that that comes over the top of a photograph that the zones to express it's called the radial spotlight that Reno spotlight is kind of like a burn in a very distinct spot so I I do dodging and burning a lot just maybe not the deliberate form of dodging and burning with the hand like you saw me doing today so it's obviously you love color grading I noticed you have color graded your basement room magenta the basement room is just a light so I can actually color grade this any color I want because I have a remote here that can change those lights so now it's like a cyan is color it just it the magenta looks good on video it looks good on YouTube okay so that doesn't really mean much it's just a little remote and I can change the colors if I want to of the lights that you see around my office they're hidden all over the place see they're hiding I don't really color grade my office magenta it's just the light bulbs I like the blue I like the cyan whatever works it all works so sue says never use radiance 2.0 must give it a go definitely definitely use a spotlight yeah so these are all great things that are coming through here off topic could you tell me what pen you use again yeah I use this thing called an XP pen star G 640 I'll type that in here there's also a video on youtube about it I did not get paid by them to do this I just really think it's a phenomenal pen and it's cheap it's like 30 bucks star G 640 it's hard to talk and type at the same time but the XP pen star G 640 it's a very inexpensive pen and it does one thing for me it makes pen movements that's all I needed to do I don't need buttons I don't need whistles I don't need to set a timer I don't need it to make my food for me so there's no sense but in my opinion $300 on a pen and tablet Blake when I try to use the radio spot I can't seem to see where exactly it is hitting any suggestions on how to see it better yeah so Mary the the spotlight it's a gradient so in order to move it you're gonna have to double click on that gradient to get in the gradient editor thing that's there and then you can click on your image and move it around that's how you move the radial spotlight so you just move it to where you want the eye to go where you want the eye to be drawn to that pen doesn't work so well with a Mac I had to send it back on it stinks well I guess I've had it Mac users use it and they say it works fine but you know I guess we're getting rapport there from a Mac user that that pen doesn't work very well with the Mac's so take that for a grain of what it's worth you know it's only 30 bucks in in the photography world $30 is nothing it's like a drop in that so yeah it's about 251 here I'm gonna go ahead and stop this I'll go ahead and sandwich all this stuff together and I'll get this up online on f/64 elite if you need anything let me know I have any questions about anything shoot me an email to Blake at f/64 Academy if you are and f/64 leet member this will be up on f/64 elite very shortly so that you can watch it whenever it is that you would like to it will be there for you alright I want to thank you all for taking the time out of your day to join me I really appreciate it it's kind of soggy out here so you guys lifted my spirits all right all right no more genre box you guys got this all right bye Paula bye everybody you guys have a great day alright so as I said the very beginning of this video these live events are typically for f/64 elite members if you're interested in becoming an f/64 remember you can click on the card above that'll take you to a website where you can be common f/64 elite member and jump in on these live events and see all the archived ones that i've done over the last four years that I've done on f/64 elite there's also gonna be a description below thank you very much for taking the time to watch this I sincerely hope it helped you understand and break out of this idea of being stuck in a certain genre box because every image has pixels every image needs your artistic vision on them and guess what you can use this same techniques in portrait as you can in everything else in landscape and everything in between so I hope that helped open your mind to a different way of editing your photos [Music] [Music]

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 14,214

Keywords: Blake Rudis, f64 academy, f.64, How To, Tutorial, Photoshop, Adobe, how to edit portrait photo, how to edit landscape photo, how to edit wildlife photo, how to edit any photo in Photoshop, Photoshop workflow walkthrough, photoshop photo edit, photoshop photo editing tutorial

Id: c9KA5YvyR4M

Length: 52min 47sec (3167 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 06 2020