How to Edit Like ANY Photographer

what's up guys and welcome back to the channel my name is Sean Dalton I am a travel and lifestyle photographer and I teach you how to become the best photographer than you can be today we're gonna be talking about and I'm gonna be showing you how you can edit exactly like your favorite photographer and that really could be anybody that could be somebody that you've been following on Instagram for really a long time that somebody that you've always looked up to it could be a photographer from your town that you've always really liked it could be me who knows whoever that photographer is I'm going to teach you how you can edit like them today Before we jump into the content guys this is bromine Jim giving away a free orange and teal preset pack for mobile and desktop so you guys can use those wherever you want whatever is suitable for you I also have install guides so I'll show you guys how they install those super super simple and those are for you to enjoy so please head to the website download those and I really hope you like them all so if you guys are new here please consider subscribing or we're dropping new videos every Friday and all of which are gonna help you become a better photographer so please consider subscribing if you're new here but alright so how do you edit like your favorite photographers say there's a photographer you just loved forever and you just really want to edit like the photos and you've tried in the past but you no matter what you do you just can't get the tones right or you can't get the colors right or something is just not right how can you edit like them so I figured out a process and a framework that you guys can use to kind of break down every photographers images break down what they're doing and just try to deconstruct their edit so you can get a similar look and it's actually pretty simple so let's dive into it I'm gonna show you guys how I would do it with a photographer that I've always really liked so the first step is just to find that photographer figure out who they are figure out who you want to edit like you know go through your inspiration file find that photographer and then just start looking at their photos one thing to know is when you're looking for a photographer you have to make sure your content is similar to theirs in some way for example if you're trying to edit like Benjamin Hardman who shoots in the polar icecaps in Iceland but all your photos are from the jungle it's gonna be pretty hard to make your photos look similar to theirs simply because the subject matter is so different so it's really gonna help if your photos are similar to the photographer that you look up to in some way so once we've found a photographer and we found some photos that we really like step two is to download those photos now before you do that I just want to hammer in this point that these are not your photos these don't belong to us we're just using them we're gonna be uploading them into Lightroom so we can look at them next to our work but we are in no way going to be posting this work we're not going to be sharing this work it doesn't belong to us it belongs to the photographer and it would be immoral for us to do that and illegal in some situations so we're downloading the photos but we're not going to be sharing these anywhere so I'm going to show you guys how you can do that and I'm gonna be showing you how to do it from Instagram so photographer that I've always looked up to a photographer that I just really love his work is Jack Harding shoots a lot of adventure a lot of travel watches cars portraits just some really cool stuff and just somebody that I've always really loved their work so I'm gonna be trying to mimic Jack's editing style today because I think Jack settings style is is really cool he's got some really golden skin tones nice nice blues it's crispy but it's soft at the same time a high contrast but nice soft tones really natural warm colors it just looks really good so once you're kind of scrolling their Instagram he found the photos that you really like what you're gonna do is you're gonna go up here you're gonna open that photo and you're gonna click copy link now you're gonna have the link copied and you're gonna go to this website called download Graham calm there are other websites that pretty much do the same thing but essentially it's just allowing you to download a photographer's photo and you're gonna hit download and then you're gonna actually download the image sometimes an ad will pop up just ignore it then you're gonna right-click save the image and then you're just gonna save it to wherever place you're gonna keep these photos I keep them in a in a folder called editing inspiration and then I have a few photographers that I like here so I'm just gonna save it under Jack Hardy so once you have four photos that you really like we're gonna basically turn those into a grid we're gonna put them for next to each other just so we can see a few different examples of this photographers work and then once we have those examples we're actually gonna import that into Lightroom and then put it right up against our photo that we're going to edit so we can just reference it instantly and just make sure the tones are really matching up so in order to make something like this it's pretty simple you open up Photoshop and you can use an app for this too like there's so many ways to do this but Photoshop is the easiest for me you're going to go up to file you're going to hit new you will just make a canvas that is 8 by 10 make sure it's 300 pixels per inch it create now we have this here and then all we're going to basically do is go into the folder where we save those photos and drag and drop them in and then we're going to hold shift and drag it and just make sure it's 4 by 5 4 by 5 right there boom hit enter and then we can just drag and drop the other photos in as well and this doesn't have to be exact like we're just using it as a reference so it really doesn't have to be perfect it doesn't matter at all but you can see with the photos that I've selected here I've selected a bunch of photos from the beach I'm gonna be editing a beach photo and I just really like how Jack and it's his his beach photo they just look really nice so I found four of Jack's photos that he took at the beach in different parts of the world I think these are from Portugal they might all be from Portugal I'm not really sure but they all kind of have a similar color scheme here the Blues kind of match the oranges the skin tones everything looks really nice so I'm gonna be trying to mimic this editing style once we create this all we're going to do is go here file export quick export as PNG and we're going to save it to that same folder where we had it I'm going to save it under Jack Harding here and I'll say Jack Harding inspo it save boom now that we've created this grid we're going to be basically importing this photo into Lightroom and once you import it a really easy way to keep track of these photos is to color code it and then color code the photo that you're gonna be editing as well so I color coded this image of Jack's images as purple so I went to set color label I hit purple and then I did that as well for the image that I'm gonna be editing and then I went to all photographs and I just filtered by purple down here so then only those photos will show up now that we have got these photos in Lightroom it's time to put them next to each other and we can do that by clicking our a right here and then just dragging Jack's photos up next to us so now we have a visual representation over there right next to ours we can see exactly how the tones are lining up if it looks similar or what not and at this point it's time to basically deconstruct the Edit and really figure out what the photographer is doing to make the photo look that way and there's really three things that you need to be focusing on and we're gonna take these down one by one those three things are lighting color and then details the texture of the photo so lighting refers to essentially how bright or how dark the photo is as well as the tones is it soft is it hard as high contrast as at low contrast so everything kind of related to that color is basically the colors in the image is it warm is it cold is it saturated is it D saturated are there certain colors that are dehydrated and others that are very saturated and then the last part is detail and that's kind of like the texture is there sharpening is there clarity is there grained did the photographer add any texture to kind of make it more interesting and basically what we do when we're making these edits is we just break them down one by one and we start at the top and then we move on to color lighting color and detail and then after that would kind of make some fine touches and I promise you your photo will look very similar to the photographer that you look up to as long as you're kind of following this framework and taking it step by step now before we do this one thing to note is if you're not super well-versed in Lightroom that's totally okay I mean you're going to learn over time and this is a great exercise for kind of learning to understand how certain things are gonna affect your photo within Lightroom so you're gonna learn you know how the basic adjustments are gonna affect your image you're gonna learn how the color adjustments affect your image and we're gonna be kind of using everything here today so I'm gonna start at the top here and we're going to work down one by one all right so starting at the top we're gonna start looking at the way Jack uses lighting so something to note is all of these photos were shown at sunset maybe maybe not this one down here but these are definitely sunset and they're they're absolutely beautiful I mean that the colors are nice and warm they look really nice but in terms of lighting they're dark and moody but they're also bright so they're you know nice and evenly exposed so we're gonna try to get a nice even exposure we're gonna do that by just bringing up our order here making sure everything is nice and exposed and then we're going to start adding back in that contrast with the basic adjustments here now with lighting there's two ways to adjust it in the basic adjustments and the tone curve and we're gonna be basically moving between these two as we edit this I'm gonna go in I'm going to reduce the highlights and if you leave the shadows there maybe go down a little bit increase the whites to make sure we have some nice contrast and then I'm actually going to go down on the blacks to really enhance that contrast so that's just kind of the basic lighting adjustments here but what's really gonna make your photo look similar to the photographer's is right here in the tone curve now Jack has some really deep dark tones down here and it's very clear that he used a selective filter which we're gonna do later but we do want to make sure our blocks are nice and deep and we can do that by kind of making a basic s-curve here and just dragging down those dark areas really enhancing those dark areas but then softening them out by raising this tail right here so I'm just softening those blacks off and then I'm gonna bring back in some of the highlights by just kind of making this into an s-curve not too much where do too much here and the thing with the tone curve is it's pretty tricky we're basically moving back and forth between the tone curve and the basic adjustments because they affect they both affect each other and it's kind of a fine-tuning thing you kind I just have to keep moving between the two and trying to get the tones to look similar and we might come back to this but for the most part that looks pretty good maybe it's a little bit dark not bad we couldn't probably spend more time on this but I think it looks it looks pretty good so now that we've got the lighting now it's time to move on to color and Jack's colors are very warm now in terms of adjusting color there's um there's a few ways to do it in Lightroom but the three main ones are the white balance the HSL sliders hue saturation luminance the split toning or we can add colors into the images and then also down here in color calibration we don't need to use all of those and in fact we can just kind of take it one by one so starting at the top with white balance Jack's images are warm his skin is nice and orange so the first thing I'm going to do is just raise that color temperature up to a pretty pretty far level and honestly that already looks pretty similar to to Jack's photo share once we've done that we're gonna go down to the HSL sliders and now I just want to look at the the major colors in the images and make sure they kind of match Jack's here so first thing I noticed is that our Blues our Blues our all our blues here kind of purply a jax-ur a little bit green so how I can adjust that as I can go to hue hue is essentially the tone of the color I can click this here I can click on a blue area and then I can drag up or down if I drag up it's gonna go purple if I drag down its gonna turn kind of into a sky light blue which I think matches Jack's colors a little bit more here you can see that there as well as in this image but something to note is Jack's blues are pretty desaturated so what I'm gonna do is actually go into saturation blue and I'm just gonna drag those down just because I think this kind of a lighter blue less overpowering blue matches the the Blues that we see in these photos here I can also kind of mess with the skin tones here so I can zoom in on Jack here it's a good-looking chap and then I can just kind of feel out his skin tones by doing the same kind of thing dragging and kind of moving that around trying to get similar skin tones and I think that looks pretty good maybe a little bit less there and then also maybe increasing the saturation of the orange a little bit not too much don't want to overdo it but for the most part that looks pretty good Jack's seen is a little bit higher contrast here than ours but and I'm just gonna keep going back and adjusting adjusting our lighting here I just really want to make sure our lighting is on point that looks pretty good I'm pretty happy with the lighting and the colors so far but one thing Jack does really well is he uses split toning and split toning is where we basically add colors into the scene and to me it looks like he has some blues and the highlighted areas and then maybe some some oranges and the shadows here so what we can do can start in the shadows go down here hold option and that will show us a hundred percent saturation saturation and then we'll just kind of drag and that looks good and then we'll just slowly increase the warmth here and that just adds so much color depth to our image I mean it looks awesome and then we'll do the same thing but we'll do maybe some lighter blues something like that and we'll just drag a little bit into there and already that really makes it look pretty similar to this photo here and then once again we're just kind of moving back and adjusting the tones that we have like I think maybe she's a little oversaturated so and we could also play with the luminance so luminance is gonna affect the brightness of the color so you can see what this does to her skin leave it there this will affect her hair a little bit this will affect the background so we can bring that down make it darker so for the most part I think this looks pretty good this looks like it could fit within Jack's feed the edited the Edit looks pretty similar and yes we can spend more time on it but it looks it looks pretty good at this point so now that we've done the lighting in the color it's time to move on to the editing some of the details as well as some of the Selective adjustments and just kind of fine-tuning it a little bit so detail wise doesn't look like jack adds any any noise grain or anything crazy like that so we're not gonna be doing that but his images are nice and sharp and they're a little bit crispy and when I say crispy I mean that he's using a hint of clarity to kind of make them a little bit sharper a little bit crispier and we can do that by easily just dragging up the clarity even just like even just +5 this this can really be overdone here you can you can just take this to the extreme and go crazy with it be careful with clarity you can overdo it very easily and I think a lot of photographers do that we could also go here and sharpen so you can sharpen I like to stay around like 40 or 50 and then I'll hold option and just mask it in and then I'll just make sure that it's really only kind of sharpening her maybe the surfboard a little bit if I go to a 100 it's not going to do much but maybe around like 60 and that's just going to really kind of sharpen her up make her nice and sharp and from a detail perspective that looks pretty good to me now let's do some fine tuning I'm gonna add a gradient over the bottom here because it looks like Jack has darkened these bottom areas of the image just to make sure our eyes kind of really pulled to the center here so what I'm gonna do is just drag a gradient filter over the bottom and then I'm going to basically just drag the shadows down a little bit just to darken that area maybe the exposure and maybe even just desaturate it because our arm is pretty orange there don't want to do too much make it look unnatural but for the most part that looks pretty good light enter there yeah I'm pretty happy with the way this turned out we can just make sure going back going through all the steps making sure the colors look good desaturate the skin tones a little bit but for the most part that looks pretty good I'm super happy with how this photo turns out and I think it really does look good next to Jack's editing style the cool part about this is once you do this enough you'll actually have enough of your own photos to turn it into a grid and why that's so great is because it allows you to have a super super consistent editing style which is really important for something like Instagram where it shows a bunch of photos on a grid all right next to each other making sure that you have the similar tones and similar edits among all of those photos and making them look consistent is really important for the general aesthetic of your feed so once you have enough images you can create collages of your own photos and then edit more of your own photos based off of previous images that you've edited and just to reiterate guys if you aren't sure really how to use Lightroom this is an awesome opportunity to learn how to use it just start at the top focus on lighting for a while make sure the tones get to where they are then move on to color and mess with the colors a little bit and then move on to the detail and the detail is it's kind of it's pretty simple I wouldn't spend too much time on that the majority of your time is going to be spent editing editing the lighting and the color and once you nail those I promise your photo will look similar to the photographer that you look up to but that's it guys thank you so much for watching if this was helpful for you please give the video a like and leave a comment down below let me know what you think and also if you're new here please consider subscribing we would love to have you here once again new videos every single Friday all of which are going to be helping you become a better for and lastly don't forget to come on a website and download my free orange and teal preset pack I think you guys will like that but enough for me guys I really hope you enjoyed this video and I will see you next week

Channel: Sean Dalton

Views: 330,353

Keywords: how to edit like any photographer, how to edit any photo like a pro, adobe lightroom tutorials for beginners, adobe lightroom tutorial, how to edit in adobe lightroom, how to edit like a pro, photo editing tips, lightroom tutorial, adobe lightroom photo editing, lightroom tutorial presets free, free lightroom presets, lightroom presets for free, photography tutorial, photography tutorial for beginners, photography for beginners, photography tips, photography course, photography

Id: o_l6UxUsLOg

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 12 2020