How to Improve Your Photo Composition

Bonjour Madame same issue in this episode I'm going to show different composition techniques Bonjour my name's Monsieur my name is Sarah Marie I am a French photographer living in the beautiful city of theis house and I make 1 to 2 tutorial per week click here if you want to get the war file of this photographic adventure all you have to do is sign up on my website put in your email address and then you can access the free lessons for each free lessons you will get all the source files alright so I'm here I'm back in Paris today is a very wide sky day it's raining but it's a great opportunity to do black-and-white photography in this episode I want to show you the process that I take to find the right composition of my photography you know what mistakes do i do first before I come to the right photo that's a bit the idea of this tutorial so common with me follow me in Paris and let's make some photos I'm singing in the rain okay so we arrived on the Pompeii km a beautiful beautiful Ridge that was created by mr. Gustave Eiffel the man behind the Eiffel Tower in this for the world I'm going to try to do is a framing the frame we have a very natural frame here of the BI Cambridge benefit bridge and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take by hand because it's daylight I'm not gonna do a long exposure because there is no reason to because we don't have clouds we don't have water but I'm just going to try to do a frame in a frame and I'm going to try to go low to go low so that we get the whole frame and VFL towel so I'm a 1635 I'm at like 18 a meter very wide and I'm going to try alright so if you stand up very high the problem is that the Eiffel towel almost touches the arch if you go a little bit lower then I don't have that problem it's actually cool framing we could make a nice black and white photo where I have two archers and here phille towel I love to do framing of em I think it simplifies the composition and it's really interesting I'm going to even try a panel I took four photos and I see if I can stitch them together and make a panel could be interesting but I love this frame Yoona frame okay let's find something else one thing that is very interesting about this bridge is that it's got amazing leading lines with all these arches so I'm going to try to play one with that because it gives three dimension to your photo it gives depth so let's play around with that a bit okay I'm going to try to go in the middle because we will get even more leading lines there so this is an interesting framing but it only works if you are a cat very wide at 16 where you can have all the leading lines of the bridge plus VFL Tower okay so now we have different framing mostly from inner frame let's go to Lightroom and Photoshop and retouch it to be able to follow this tutorial you need a Lightroom and eventually Photoshop I just want to let you know that if you go on my website photo search comm and you click on my gear I have a special partnership with Adobe called the affinity partner and if you click on it it's going to detect what country you're in and it's going to give you a great deal on the what they call the Creative Cloud photography that is Lightroom and Photoshop for now for example in the u.s. it's 7.99 instead of nine dollars 99 two dollars yet less per month it's not a huge deal but for the price you have to copy you have to coffee you can have Lightroom and Photoshop I think that's pretty amazing of course you can buy probably on B&H a standalone version of Lightroom you cannot buy a standard version of Photoshop but I really advise you to work with a clear the Creative Cloud because you get a lot of free apps you get you can make websites you can have a lot of things because your Creative Cloud member so honestly it's an amazing deal for 7.99 Lightroom and let's look at the four we got from Pelle so let's I'm more gonna talk into composition of course we're going to do some retouching the first one is actually pretty good we have the FL towel which is completely you know not cut here because that's when I was done this is when I was standing up you see the top of the Eiffel towel is there so it doesn't work but I like the framing the frame composition let's see what else we have this one's not good because there is a car this is just a row file this one is not good because there's a man walking out and it's a rule of thumb that when you have somebody walking especially in a certain direction that it's not close to your frame so if you would be here in the middle maybe that would work but in this case I'm not going to pick that photo this one same thing I have a person walking but for this composition because we have the Eiffel Tower I may be you rather want to have only one person so and I think I had then I try to do the panorama you know one photo to photo three photo for photo actually was one two three four and so I stitch them together using Lightroom and that's what it give and I don't like so much that composition I don't like it so much because it's just you know there's too much things going on so at the end of the day I think I'm going to be using either this one this composition or that composition let's see which one is the best I think I'm going to be using this one because we have even more space between you see and if you if you're agitating between two photos or three photos I shoot a trick that I use a lot in light in Lightroom so I take this photo I'm going to take for example this photo and this one and you can press n on your keyboard and you got you go into what they call the survey mode and it's going to put all photos together and you can see okay which one you like the most I think I like you see I'm this one definitely not it's too crooked so I'm going to take this one out and I've got this two left which one am I going to take I think I mean this one has got a natural better framing so I think I'm going to go for this one but not look there is people there that's distracting there there is nobody so I think I'm going to go for this one which actually actually I already gave two stars you so to go out of the serene mode you can just click here on this little square okay so let's retouch this photo first thing I'm going to reframe it because the framing is really off but lucky for me this is and I'm going to give this file this is a forty two million pixels five so seven almost eight thousand pixels wide so we can crop it and still give have a great resolution so I'm going to take the crop tool I'm going to take the angle tool I'm going to make sure my angle is straight and then I don't need so much foreground I think something like this would be cool okay I want to make a distance here between this part of the of the framing of frame and the other part something like this okay maybe a little wider because I might do some little correction on it so I'm going to go wider for now so that's not so bad and it's actually not so bad I'm going to go to a manual to the lens correction and I'm going to go on about profiles correction and I'm going to go to manual or sorry I'm going to go to upright and click on Auto see what it gives me oh it took out my framing so I have to redo it again I forgot that okay yes it's not bad because what upright is going to do is is solve some of the lens distortion issues with the fact that your you know your lens is going up so it's going to make distortion on the side it's going to correct that I'm going to cut after the white line that's here because I find it distracting okay now I like the composition and often I work on the composition first before doing the retouching because I don't want to retouch a photo when I don't like the composition composition is everything I think in photography and that's that's I think what I want to try to share with you more in in this tutorial is really the composition okay so now I'm ready to retouch so I'm going to go my regular workflow and this I'm going to bring down the highlights Lou look it brings all the details in the sky I'm going to open up the shadows and then I'm going to do my black point on this one I want this to be very dramatic you know I have this rule that if the colors are boring I go black and white or I go very close to black and white so I think this one I'm going to go close to black and white I'm going to hold down the Alt key move my black slider I really want this one to crush the blacks have some nice crushed blacks and I'm going to do the white okay maybe it's a bit too much bring it down bring it down okay something like this I really want this to be dramatic I'm going to desaturate the photo but not completely about halfway so it's kind of like not black and white but not color I think it's kind of cool and I find that this foreground is very distracting so I'm going to take the gradient tool and make a little gradient here okay and I am going to lower the exposure on this and not the clarity just exposure something like that so you can see before after so you know the eyes goes to the brightest part of the photo so you know that's important I don't want the eyes to go here I want the eyes to go there so we need to help the eyes to go by the FL towel and there's two ways I'm going to help undo that the first one I'm going to take a little radial filter that I'm going to put here because this is I want the people to look here actually maybe here so what you want the people to look you can just make it a little bit brighter oh I have to invert the mask and do the feathering and I'm just going to add a bit of light here just like if there was a Sun behind it so just like people would look in this place okay usually what I usually do is and I'm going to duplicate this and I'm going to put it here because you see how this is led in a complete uniform way - same lighting everywhere I want to break that so and I also want to add more clarity in this so I'm going to boost the clarity in a circle and I'm going to add a bit of exposure but very light what I'm trying to do is break the gradient so and but you should do it I know I say that every week you should do it in a way that people cannot watch you for I say oh you put some light there okay you don't want that so it's going to be present enough to be visible and subtle enough to not so that people don't notice it right away I know it might seem to be a bit silly what I'm saying but you have to find the balance you must find the balance look actually not from Star Wars is for me okay cool so this is the gradient so now the question of the day is clarity or no clarity if add clarity everywhere it's kind of a cool effect but I don't like what it does in the background it creative like a little a halo there so usually what I do is I actually do a - clarity on the entire photo and then I just take a brush take a little brush I take the clarity and I'm going to add some clarity just here in the foreground I think clarity should only be used in the framing the frame here okay and some clarity and voila maybe add some contrast on the overall photo to give some punch play around with exposure maybe I'm going to expose this one a little bit more on their exposed I mean at this point it's like you know it's like making a good pancake recipe you know you let it rest a little bit and you come back to it so I'm gonna let it rest and we're going to go on the next photo so the next photo is the the leading line that I was playing along with the Pompeii camp I love this bridge this bridge as I said interview was built by Gustav FL same architect that is EFL tall it's just an amazing looking bridge so this one I'm not going to take this as a car but you see it was raining and I love when it rains because black and white and rains are very good friends they make awesome photography so this is not going to go this one a lot of people here other the car over there this one is the one I think I'm gluing there's a little truck there there's one person but it's less crowded so first thing first let's work again on the composition and Composition compensation composition so I'm going to go to upright in lens correction click on auto see what it does it makes it more straight I think I want to go to manual again and play with the vertical maybe two to make it and I'm going to contain the crop to make this very straight okay I wanted this to be straight now that's cool I kind of like the composition I'm going to crop it a little bit because I think going like 69 like more you know movie type of photography I think it works better on this type of things okay now that's a very bad idea to have a lamp here that is so close to your to the border so I'm going to go over it you should not have an element that's too close to the border it's called police border you know you go around it and you know what I'm going to do because I'm a lazy person I'm going to take this photo and we're going to press command shift C and take whatever I did there except a crop factor I'm going to copy it and I'm going to paste it on this photo that I just retouched a little bit okay well it did something with the cropping that I don't like so let's go back to upright again I'm sorry about that buh-bah upright so when something is weird is your part can just click on reanalyze and it's going to realize and redo the cropping of the photo okay now there is a few thing that's wrong first on this one I think I'm going to go pure black and white so I'm going to go saturation all the way all the way down and I think I want to make this one darker okay let's check out my black slider pretty good maybe a bit too much yeah now I want black slider and the white slider okay okay this way now I want to see if I can get some details back in the sky so for this I'm going to take the gradient tool I'm going to make a nice gradient over the sky and maybe not so much not so much clarity but just take about clarity take out the clarity no clarity in the skies it's forbidden do not put clarity in your clouds totally forbidden okay something like this and I like some time to do what I call the double filter and that is I'm going to click on new and I'm going to make it second one and I'm going to lower the exposure on the second one make it a bit more feathered and bring it back it's a bit too much just to you know two is better for the price of one okay now on this one I'm going to go back to my regular to remember we copied the radial filter so you ever we have a radial filter here which I want people to look in the middle well there is a little bug in Lightroom I've seen this up it's going to disappear this one I think I'm going to make it thinner I'm going to put it here and I'm going to rotate it make it a little bit bigger just to bring back some more details and I don't like to have like super dark shadows that's something I don't like so I'm going to do that maybe even add a bit more exposure on this one okay just to make to make the bridge more metallic I'm going to duplicate it I'm going to put it here make it much smaller I'm just gonna it's going to add to to make this bridge more metallic it's you know dodging burning good old Dodge and burnings being around photography for over 100 years okay and there's this one here I think I'm going to put here I'm sorry something something went wrong this one here I'm going but here boom and I think here like I'm always looking at okay what is boring I like that leading line I'm going to help that leading line even more so I'm going to take the circle I'm going to make a big thin circle I'm going to rotate it okay put it on the road boom boom boom make it a bit wider a little bit wider okay and some lights here so that it just you know it helps the eyes go over here and because you can and because red jewel filters are free you can duplicate this one and put one here where there is a reflection because adding some light on a refraction always helps it always does a little refraction here I'm going to duplicate this and maybe add some here maybe not what the person is but you see it you add a bit of reflection let's see if it's too much you can just you know bring it down individually you know like you I find this one too much I can click on it and bring it down and it's pretty much the effect I want to go for ok then I'm going to close this and then I'm gonna I am going to add some contrast I want this to be really dramatic ok contrast something like this I really like this one so you know what I'm going to press 3 on my keyboard I'm going to give it a 3 star that is my first version of it I already worked on it that's my first version on it pretty similar oh I went much more ok I'm gonna do something I actually crop the photo you know every time I retouch the photo I actually retouch it completely differently I change all the time I try new things all the time I never retouch the photos the same way twice this the lightning never strikes twice in my photos ok yeah that's probably better and look how sharp this photo is you know I mean the Sony a7r 2 is pretty crazy but you know what I'm going to add maybe a little bit more sharpness to this photo but not too much because this is metal so I think I'm going to just going to add like something like 64 and even so that's a little bit too much I'm going to apply the masking I only want the sharpening to be on small details very small details and I think even that's too much I mean the photo is already so sharp it's unbelievable okay that's kind of cool just v-69 sharpening the other one I didn't sharpen but you know you get the idea so that's the second shot from this thing I like to show you the process let's go for the last one it's going to be a similar story that's this photo I like the leading lines I like the idea of having one just one person so being because I'm lazy I'm going to press command shift C and I'm going to copy everything that I did here and I'm going to paste it here except a cropping okay and woo right away I get something cool the first thing I'm going to correct is the upright that I'm going to reanalyze okay now it's better I think on this one I'm gonna for the cropping make something I wanna I don't like this idea so I think this little white thing in the middle here so I'm gonna cut this and voila okay now the the radial filters are really way off here so you just correct this I'm going to rotate this radial filter I don't like the idea of having no details whatsoever under the bridge as an experience so maybe just use that to bring back some details this one which is where I want the people to look at I'm going to put in the middle here okay and this one maybe a little a little bit here a bit too much if not okay and this one is a bit too much I kind of like what this one does it's just too much so I'm going to bring it down bring it out I like what it does here makes these things a bit more shiny and this one I want to add on this maybe this and like this I just want to make this metal shine here actually I'm going to do something I'm gonna invert this make it's much smaller here smaller smaller and voila boom tak tak alright okay maybe a little bit malicious I want to make these two things shine a bit more because that's the star the star is this metalic bridge alright so now that I'm happy I'm going to give it a three star and I'm going to press shift command see to copy what I did and let's look at the last photo this is the last photo I only two two one is like this and then the other one is like that this one has got two cars and this one's got no car so I'm going to use this one and I'm going to press command V to copy what I did so I get the same mood and now I have to adjust everything the first thing that I do is to re click on unreal analyze to make this straight perfect and sometimes what I also do is I reevaluate my basic four slider which is high light shadows white and black so I'm going to click on black maybe it's a bit too much let's click on white okay it maybe add a bit more white and of course you know we have a bit a big radial filter here which is not nice but we're going to take care of that so I'm going to click on this and I'm going to take this one and I'm going to turn it around I want to get some details back in the shadows here so maybe one here duplicate one here okay and it shines a little bit the the thing actually a little bit too much so I'm going to make this shorter and this a little bit shorter also I just want to bring back some details on the bridge same thing maybe I'm going to take this and move it here so you just play around with the circle the purpose of the circle is ready to to you know just give better lights you know photograph is writing with the light so if you get a bit light now this is the one I usually use for where I want people to watch on this one I want people to watch the Eiffel Tower but I don't want it to be so bright so I'm going to make it a bit less I'm going to put it all over the the tower there okay here this one maybe here so we have to you know that can be cool and okay let's move this one around this one I want to put on the reflection of the FL towel which must be here there is a reflection of the FL tell that I want to make a bit more visible by adding a bit of exposure a bit of clarity maybe it's a bit too much I have the tendency to go a bit too crazy on these circles oh here's a little you know you just move around the circle but the ideas you you move them so that you direct the viewer the viewer I that's really what I want and you know just play around move them around and see what what you like the best I like that I like to make this very bright this I think is too much and then sometime what you can do is go and look at some other photos and come back to it and see okay this let's see we have radial filters here yes I do have radial filter sorry this is let me see if I take this one out I'm gonna make this one a bit yeah this one a bit bigger that's that was the UM the graded filter that I had here I have another one here I think that's way too strong so I'm gonna back it down yeah that's much better it was much too dark okay that's kind of cool so you just you know just replace the radius and what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you my basic black and white retouching appreciate if you subscribe to my daily newsletter plus I'm going to give you about half of these war files pure quality sony a7r - so you can play around with it in case you don't have beautiful photo of the eiffel tower in your bag up sorry so you raise this one I think it was nicer to have it so command Z to put it back I think it just gives more you know interesting things to the sky so it's really playing around with this - filter you know the graded filter and the radial filter to dodge and burn your photo until you you control where the view your eyes is going to go like I made this a bit darker I made this a bit darker I made this a bit brighter so it forces the people to look here look wherever it they're going to look here and they're going to look here they're going to look here because the eyes is going to be drawn to that okay here we have a little thing that's kind of ugly so I can take the erase tool here make it a bit bigger let's see if I can erase that okay let's see if it worked now sometimes I just okay you know what I'll do that in Photoshop but that's not the purpose job but in Photoshop I would you raise that I even think I would crop it so that I don't see this little building here I think that's really ugly okay let's see if we can do it again I'm just going to make my thing bigger well uh let's see if that works and I don't want this here I want this here sometimes when when Lightroom has something that is yeah it doesn't work it doesn't work I have to go to photoshop for that that's why it's good to have the Creative Cloud so you have Lightroom and Photoshop because you know in this in Photoshop is not an issue I cannot do it in Lightroom but trick I'm going to show you so you can see what I mean hold on let me just take this one is ready to write like I'm looking and I'm like saying this is way too bright okay I really like that photo so I'm just going to take this out in Photoshop so for this I'm going to right click Edit in Adobe Photoshop Photoshop CC 2015 yeah the open anyway the this tool the the Spot Healing Brush tool works so much better in Photoshop you'll see the difference because the problem is is when you have an element that is very close to another contrasty element it's kind of hard for Lightroom to erase a spot but in Photoshop it's not an issue but this this piece of metal really bothers me I don't know you call it in English in French it is a group it is a nice group so you go here spotting brush tool and check this out make it a bit the size I can just paint over here spreading brush tool and boom it's gone it's gone and voila I'm done with this photo I press a command W to close and it's going to react in to Lightroom with the glue taken out okay and I'm going to put this one a value of three setting a free and now let's review all our photos so I'm going to filter by only three photos I'm going to click shift tab to put it in full screen mode press L one time ello second time to make my screen completely black and now let's admire the result so this one I kind of like you know framing the frame this one is kind of cool I like the drama but you know and that's the good thing about when it's reading it it's not a nice that you can always do this up a photo I think it's really cool I like the leading line I like the Lydia maybe I would add some more white in the sky later on I don't know this one is kind of cool with just one person walking so when you go into Lightroom sometimes it's blurry because it has to recalculate all the row processing boom here it is sharp okay the next one is the FL Taiwan which is the last one which I really enjoy I think my favorite one is probably this one yeah and the first one the one of the frame in the frame is probably this one okay anyways I hope you like this I hope you come and join me in Paris I am in Paris and I can tell you people are in the street Paris is doing very well I feel very safe in Paris again and I'm doing this workshop it's almost fully booked come and join me in Paris and let's have fun in May and June with the Paris in spring here's a little video presentation about it Bonjour my name's Emma my name is Sergio Marie I'm a French photographer living in the beautiful city of Paris France and I'm happy to announce that my Paris in spring third edition third year in a row 2016 is open this Paris in spring 2016 edition is going to be from the 29 of May a Sunday to the 4th of June that's the first week for maximum 15 people and then there will be another week from the fifth of June to the 11th of June for a maximum of 15 people so you have two choices basically May and June is the best moment to come into Paris it's beautiful you have flowers everywhere trees look amazing I'm in Paris for photographic purposes is amazing in that period of time I'm gonna bring you every day to the most amazing locations we will do of course the classic tourist places but I will also bring you to secret places and different angles that I have found over the last 11 years that I've been cheating the city we're going to go to the top of notre dam we are going to go also spending a full day at the Mont saint-michel in normally one of the most bizarre amazing of this beautiful castle and middle of the island we will do CFL towel we'll do the sin river we're going to do all the secret places in momot you're going to come out in one week full of photos you're going to be able to create an amazing puzzle you of Paris in a week like you won't believe you're going to take hundreds even thousands of photos and we will retouch them together the price includes a beautiful 4-star boutique hotel where you can really enjoy the Paris experience and includes also dinner in some very fine French restaurants it's gonna be an amazing week so please come and join me in Paris here is what some of the people last year had to say about it so happy that I did it because it was about the other highlight of the trip besides his fabulous instruction was meeting fabulous people absolutely loved the week and what I got out of this week was first my first time in Paris and I've caught surges enthusiasm for photography great pleasure of having done Sara's workshop for the second year and it just gets better and I you know now I have a lot of work to do when I get home so I may be coming back next year

Channel: Serge Ramelli Photography

Views: 427,966

Rating: 4.8158102 out of 5

Keywords: How to Improve Your Photo Composition, Photography Composition Tutorial, Photography Composition, Photography Tutorial, Paris Photography, Paris, France, How-to, Lightroom Tutorial, Black and White Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Tutorial, Photo tutorial, Black and White photo, Black and white tutorial, Urban landscape photography, Black and white retouching, Photo Retouching, serge ramelli

Id: 3zo4AAkK6SE

Length: 30min 54sec (1854 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 01 2016