How To Edit in Adobe Lightroom (An End-to-end Workflow From a Full-time Photographer)

so over on my instagram i always get questions about lightroom and photoshop and editing and post processing and so that's what we're going to be doing in this video today we're going to be walking through a workflow of my end-to-end process of how i think about and how i approach editing images in adobe lightroom so this particular video isn't going to be like a deep dive into any of the individual components or anything like that rather it's going to be like a skipping through of like what steps i take and what i think along the way so that you guys can potentially get some inspirations for your own workflows and hopefully it makes your editing better in the process so with that said let's jump into lightroom this is the image that we're going to be editing today this is an image that i took in hokkaido really quickly while i was crossing the road um and the first thing that i try and focus on when i'm editing an image is what's the objective what's the story that i want to tell here and what's so special about this particular image over you know the next frame over or something like that and once i have that in mind like what i want to do with the image and i have a goal and an objective then i can start to wrap all the editing process down the line around that idea and this will make more sense as we we go along but for me this particular image is you know i love the look of like the hazy feel and the kind of ambience that the snow gives in terms of how you know hokkaido feels when it's snowing it has this like really kind of romantic nostalgic feel and that's kind of what i want to emphasize in this particular image i also love like compositionally that it's a very central image you know this train is obviously the central focus point of this image with leading lines going towards it from the train tracks um and so it's very easy to understand there's not a lot going on in this image it's just straight bang in the middle so i want to try and wrap all my edits around that and so with that in mind the first thing that i typically do is what i call like restoring the image and by restoring you know i'm doing things like adding lens corrections i'm doing things like adding any transforms that need to happen or any crops that need to occur if i've like shot it badly or something like that and this is to get like a good foundation for for us to work on and so we'll do that now so i've added some lens corrections on here already what i can see is that like this particular image isn't exactly straight so in the transform panel i've got this little tool here and you can actually like grab a point supposed to be straight and another point that's supposed to be straight and then lightroom would try and like automatically fix that for you and that's a lot better that looks great um so i'm gonna keep that and then i'm gonna do just a quick center for cropping uh just so that we can make sure that the train and the subject is exactly in the middle so i think i'm okay with that so that was really quick and usually those steps are quite quick from there the next portion of the restore idea is to work out your exposure and try and get as many details back into the image as possible and so the first thing that i typically do here is start with exposure and we can see in the histogram like where the exposure is biased right and so it's a bit dark and what i want to do is just bring that up a bit maybe to about 75 that looks good i'm trying to just see you know how many shadows are available so that i have this detail of course like it was snowing like super heavily so it's kind of hard to see um exactly you know the razor sharp details that occur uh because that's a whole bunch of snow but the idea is to get as many you know details back as possible in the shadows um from there we can see that all of my highlights are now blown pretty much and so i'll lower these down so that we can get them back probably around that looks good to me and at this point i typically accentuate the white as well because my style is very contrasty uh and it's quite bright um when it comes to my visual aesthetic right now anyway and so i'll probably put that up to 24 it's good shadows i typically leave um if i've got enough detail so right now it looks like i do if you press this little thing at the top right here it actually shows you if your shadows are clipping and you have no detail on the shadows so for this particular image i've got plenty and they're not clipping so it's totally fine and so from here this is like the baseline of recovery that we need to do and most of the times if you're shooting this properly and you know you're exposing correctly and all these kind of things these couple of first steps you know they don't take very long but it is all about like trying to have a good foundation for the rest of the edit moving forward okay so the next step is contrast and with contrast the reason why i do contrast next is that after this is color but with contrast when you add contrast it usually gives you a lot of color additionally it usually emphasizes a lot of color that it that the image may or may not have initially when you first start the edit and so once that like you know contrast color has been added then we can adjust our proper colors after that and we can have a better bass line to work off and don't have to go back and forth and it's just a little bit more efficient that way and so contrast for me is always controlled by the tone curve the tone curve specifically is fantastic at contrast because you can have a really nice kind of curve like this and it's it's very organic when it comes to the balance between light and dark right so that's how i manage my contrast and then i'll basically just start with this this looks okay one thing that's a little bit more advanced is that i like to clip my blacks and my whites just because my visual aesthetic right now has a little bit of a like a nostalgic feel to it and so you know faking this like semi faded look um kind of gives it that nostalgic feel and so to do that what we do is drag this last anchor point up a little bit 23s around yeah for this image 23 is good and then i also drag the top anchor down as well usually about there and so on the histogram we can see like i've clipped both my whites and uh my blacks down a little bit that's a good place to start i think um from here i always run into so coming back to the whole like nostalgic feel um i'm always doing minus clarity and for some reason like this has been a staple in my visual aesthetic for you know the longest time and so i just do it straight up um it's usually about 20 to 30 and this for me gives the image like an ethereal feel this is something that i really really want to accentuate with this particular image especially in the highlights here where things start to glow and bloom out a lot i just really love that look it's like very in line with you know the things that inspire me like anime and all that kind of visual style and so that's why i do it in that way however when adding clarity um i like to add a little bit of texture just to get that detail back that we've lost through the clarity and then from there this is a good baseline for me so pressing the pipe key we can kind of see what the before and the after looks like before you know we work on the color for real but this is a good starting point i think so the next step is color and when it comes to color for me the very very first thing is always white balance because white balance you get color changes i'm going to say for free but that is a loaded term and there's a lot behind that but what i mean by that is that when you use white balance you aren't uh adding any artifacts you aren't damaging the image in any way that you can't like recover later on so sometimes when you mess around with like luminance or like too much hue or something like that the images start to degrade and break down but with white balance you get that all free and you're almost guaranteed in most cases that most files will be able to handle a change like that so for me i'm going to make this more blue because i like blue and it's kind of made everything a little bit purple so we'll have to deal with that a little bit later um but also at the same time i'm not that big a fan of this like green hue on the bottom of the image here uh so i might just jump this out to a little bit more magenta in terms of the tint just to get rid of the foreground green and then we can deal with the purple later so maybe something like that yeah that looks good now from here it's looking very saturated way more saturated that i want to but for me what i typically do right now is i want my file to have as much of this color information as possible and then i can turn it down later so with the vibrance tool i'm always sitting at about 20 ish or so and this is like lightroom's intelligent way of bringing up saturation without it looking too saturated right at the same time you know i'm always turning down that saturation value as well um because they the two sliders do different things and so you know that's my typical settings for for each one from here i work on calibration and i don't want to go too deep into this because it's like its own video essentially um there's so much to it but the thing with calibration is that it's saying to lightroom you know red looks like this like looks like this combination of of pixels that equals red right it's not like hue that's huge which is saying you know red take the red color and then turn it into orange right this calibration happens before that it's saying red looks like this blue looks like this etc etc and so there's so much into it but typically for me i set my calibration for red a little bit like this and i'm skipping through this really really quickly but basically what this does is it aligns more of the colors that i like to use which is more like blues and oranges and reds whilst getting rid of more of the greener tones in an image so i'll push that up here actually and we'll just do a quick before and after just to see what that looks like so that's not too bad so from there i'll go straight into the hsl and go deep into the color so with color what i'm trying to do is kind of like this idea of like uniting colors right so if there's a whole bunch of you know colors going on in the image like there is right now for me and my aesthetic style what i try and do is like move and shift those colors more towards one another so that they're either contrasting or like they're just clear enough that you have a clear division separation in the image and so for me right now the biggest thing that stands out is purple and i love blue and i love a lot of my visual aesthetic to be blue so blue and purple are right next to each other around the hue chart and that's great because we can like move purple into blues and start getting rid of that and we can start uniting all the colors and turning the purples into blues and then perhaps like the greens into yellows like this and then i do like to have a separation between yellow and orange but i like to make my oranges a little bit more pronounced and then my reds i like my reds deep and all of these like color preferences have the kind of things that you have to like do over a long period of time to kind of work out what you like and and what fits your style the best all right so that's enough for hues for now uh i'm gonna jump past saturation and i'm gonna go straight into luminance so luminance for me is really important when it comes to visual hierarchy and like visual language the things that are brighter in an image tend to have more visual attention like you look at them more right and so for me coming back to the idea of like uniting colors i'm always trying to push you know the warmer hues and the cool hues and having like the contrast between the two so that's just like the style that i like and so for me what i typically do is i give the warmer hues more of a boost in luminance and usually it's the oranges so we can see all the light in this particular images are are orange and so i want to you know up those a little bit maybe not too much that looks good to me and the blues are in you know the neon lights and the sky and all those kind of things so we're going to up those as well but remember we also changed our purples into blue so we're going to up those two that looks good and these are really subtle differences but you know it makes all the difference when you have messed with every single setting and you know exactly what's going into the image and you've actually made decisions for all those things as well for me right now my blue is a little bit too purple still and so i'm just going to gently nudge that back and you know like all other processes this is always a a process of experimentation right um typically color is the thing that i spend the most time in and you know that's not the same for everyone um but for me colors are really important so this is looking pretty good if we toggle like this switch here we can see the changes that we've made and so this is the difference that i'm talking about when it comes to like uniting colors right so this is the original and then this is the united version so you can see that there's a real strong emphasis here between like blues and oranges which is what i'm trying to go for so from here i just control saturation at the very end um it's not too bad and what i'm looking for is not like a global saturation change it's more just like locally you know our orange is too hot is yellow is too hot etc etc um for me right now this blue is a little bit too dull so i'm just going to up this a little bit and then maybe drop down the yellows as well because i think you know these signs over here on the left are a little bit hot i could local adjust them but i think global works best at the same time you know i'm noticing all these greens here i don't really like them so i'm just going to drop them out a bit and then drop some of the luminance out okay that looks good and so again uh just do some before and afters you can see how many before and afters i do all the time like throughout the entire process i'm always toggling these things on to make sure that the changes that i'm making are the right ones and they actually look better rather than look worse because that happens to me all the time uh okay so the next thing is split turning and split turning is a mixed bag because you can easily go too hard and it will look absolutely terrible so try and you know have a little bit of uh use it sparingly yeah so for me i go highlights blue and shadows blue because again my visual aesthetic right now is quite blue if you're dragging the slider and you hold on to the option key for mac i think that's alt for pc um you can actually see what colors you're injecting into the image so i'm going to go for a little bit of like a cobalt blue which is like 212 and only something super subtle like i don't know six something like that and then a darker blue for the shadows so 224 and then like uh yeah like a six or a seven or a twelve let's go with twelve total sounds good um and that's it so colors this is a like a really really quick run through i would normally spend you know at least 10 to 15 minutes on color alone just tweaking sliders and making sure everything looks really really good um but for the sake of the video we're just going to rush through it so the next thing i'll do is typically like effects and local adjustments so for the effects uh when we're talking about like grain and vignetting and stuff like that i'm super light on it really um typically i just have like a very subtle five and then you know very strong midpoint and then i the idea here for me is i always have these settings as like a baseline vignette but the idea is for it to just be like almost unnoticeable just added a little bit of mood but not so much that you can even see it really what i do a lot of though is local adjustments and my favorite is the radial so that's this one and typically what i'm trying to do at this point in time is coming back to the whole like objective idea you know what is the purpose of this image and you know what is the thing that i'm trying to accentuate and the story that i'm trying to tell and all those kind of things how can i make those things stand out more how can i you know shape the light to tell the story a little bit better so in this instance what i want to do initially anyway is to really try and pop this train out as much as i can so with that i'll add some clarity i'll probably up some exposure i'll up some whites as well don't want to go too hard on the shadows but just a little bit and then i'll just add a circle oh and make sure that your feather for me anyway i always have it on 100 so that you can never kind of tell where where it happens um and what i mean by that is if i do this you know you can't see the lines right of like where the actual filter is occurring so i always leave it on 100 just so that it's the smoothest that it could be and if you press o on the keyboard you can kind of see how severe the feathering is and so that's really useful tool if you are using this a lot so for the purposes of this particular image i think i want to up this just a little bit more uh probably half a stop yeah something like that but i don't want to go so hard as to make it look fake right i don't want to like i want to do it smoothly but subtly at the same time so i'll lower this down a little bit and what i'll actually do is i'll go closer into the image and i will grab the adjustment brush and then i'll actually just like paint in these changes at a super super local level just like that don't have to be super precise here i'm like all over the place but you know it doesn't it doesn't matter uh and that looks better oh no it doesn't so even i make mistakes too so i'm just gonna lower that white it just looks a little bit too fake to me um so i want to just adjust this take down the exposure yeah that's good that's fine the next thing i want to do for this particular image is try to accentuate the foreground a little bit because i really love the whole look of it being white right oh and my fan is kicking on because my macbook is really old so i'm sorry if you can hear that but anyway so with the graduated filter i'm just grabbing the foreground here and just reset that and i'm just going to up the shadows a bit and also up the exposure a bit just so that we can start to see a little bit more of that detail i might even like add a little bit of dehaze just to give it a white wash over the top so that it just starts to feel more like this is a winter picture right and so already that's like so much better in my opinion some other things we can do here is going back to the adjustment brush is to accentuate these lines that lead towards the subject so coming back to here usually i use presets for this but you know um it's probably more like that something to do with you know exposure something to do with upping the whites and clarity and those kind of settings will like enhance that locally and they tend to work really really nicely in a subtle way so just quick oh that was probably too much let's go back um something like that and something like that and again these changes are like almost imperceivable right uh but it's all the details that matter you know the more details that you can put into it the better in my opinion your your overall image ends up being so just going to zoom into here just check that everything's okay looks good that's nice okay so that's looking pretty good for a very quick edit from here what i'll typically do is get it ready for exporting so what that means for me is sharpening noise reduction cropping and then exporting so first thing is detail so i love really sharp images not like hyper hyper sharp but like sharp enough so for me what i do is go to the sharpening pane grab this masking slider and if you hold option again you can start to see exactly where the sharpening will go locally this is called the mask right and so what we want to try and do is accentuate the big lines whilst you know keeping everything else kind of like soft and so we'll uh set off with that it looks alright and then if we zoom in a little bit uh we can up the sharpness here so that we can see the detail of what's actually going on because it's hard to hard to really check out when you're sort of like zoomed out and then if i want to do noise reduction i will but for this image i think it's okay um this image i'm going to export to instagram just so that we can have a good example for that uh and noise reduction isn't too big of a deal on instagram because the images end up so small anyway so that's fine so that's it for sharpening i'm not gonna add any noise reduction uh all my other settings are okay for now i could pretty much export this as is uh for now i'll prop it so instagram takes a 4x5 crop so if i do that and then press x that's what the crop ends up looking like so i want to adjust this so that you know the distance between uh this line and the top of the train and then this bottom of the train and then the bottom box of the middle nine are the same and same with the outsides as well so that everything's like well proportioned right so from there i'm pretty happy with that and then i'll export that out to instagram and then that's kind of it okay so that's it that's my end-to-end workflow of how i think about and edit images in adobe lightroom if you like these type of videos let me know in the comments of what you want to see next time but for this video if you liked it give it a thumbs up subscribe if you haven't already and i will see you guys in the next one peace you

Channel: Pat Kay

Views: 282,248

Keywords: patkay, pat kay, photographer, photography, travel photography, travel photographer, edit photos, adobe lightroom, lightroom, editing, edit in lightroom, how to edit in lightroom, editing in lightroom, adobe lightroom editing tricks, adobe lightroom workflow, adobe lightroom editing, post processing, image editing, best image editing tips, how to use lightroom, photo editing tutorial, lightroom tutorial, photo editing, lightroom tips, how to edit in adobe lightroom

Id: fnsoELHaFo4

Length: 26min 19sec (1579 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020