Improve your Lightroom processing - IMMEDIATELY

hi welcome back to Express a photography I'm Alistair Ben in today's video I want to spend some time looking again at transitions I believe transitions are one of the most important things in the way we make our photographs and today I want to look at two or three examples to illustrate the types of transitions that we can put into our photographs how to implement them how to control them and the implications of them so again we're back at the compositional consequences of everything that we do in our processing now I'm going to add on a special little section at the end of this this weekend's video on what I call Lightroom secrets later so make sure you stay tuned to watch the end of the video where I'll be covering that as usual if you find this useful please hit the subscribe button delectation and all that jazz let's have a look at some compositions and transitions [Music] [Music] now here we are back in the Gobi Desert and this image is the raw file so this is straight out of the camera and as you can see we have this beautiful kind of heart-shaped June in the foreground receding to this patch of light and then we have more distant dunes in the distance the scale here is insane that's probably 15 miles away or something like that there's an awful lot of sand out there in that desert now what I want to do is say right it's clear here in the foreground that there is more texture and detail than there is in there and certainly at the back so instantly the camera has captured a transition of detail we have more detail in the front less of the back the second transition that is in evidence here is contrast we have more contrast in the front we have the brighter section and the darker section there's just a little bit more dynamic range between those two areas by the time we get through to the back there that contrast is reduced we also have more luminosity in the foreground so there's three different transitions and well there's actually four because there is color in here there's richer colors in the foreground than there is in the background this is also warmer and the back is colder and because this is more detail than contrasty and the back is less so we have a final transition where we can call that atmosphere as things diffuse into the frame so an actual fact there are five different transitions already being exhibited in this raw file detail luminosity color atmosphere and contrast so that's quite a lot to handle as soon as we start looking at a photograph now I want to just i'm not going to process this exactly but i just want to show how we can emphasize these transitions with some very simple adjustments in lightroom i am going to start off by this is my mood getting into this I like moody images and it's just the way I work it's easier to start with a dark file and add light than it is to start with a light file and darken and this is just my preference now if I don't touch this basic panel at all so all I've done is I've dropped the exposure and I'm gonna come in and create two gradients one for the foreground and I'm gonna start off just by adding luminosity back into my foreground and then I'm gonna make a second gradient for the back and I am going to just cool that one so instantly we have a different version of this file it's darker overall so it's a bit moodier which makes it a little bit more mysterious and less explicit the foreground is has luminosity brought back into it and what that's done is by darkening the exposure and opening up the white has created more contrast it's created more saturation we haven't affected the detail yet but I'm going to and by cooling the background what we've done is if you cool something it has a tendency to recede into the frame so just with two very simple gradients we've already changed the the feel of the image and the way that transitions are implied and received now all I have on here is two gradients so if I come in and just add clarity to the foreground that is adding more contrast we're making the detail more apparent the luminosity seems to be a little bit more vibrant if you add luminosity look back on the other videos we did a couple of weeks ago you add luminosity and become alive our brain follows light if I just do that and so that I can add a little bit of texture as well and you know a lot the clarity a little bit further just to on the screen that's easier to see if I overdo it slightly now in the background to find out click that gradient in the bag if I take away clarity by reducing clarity in the background I'm making it feel even further away I'm reducing its impact I'm reducing the importance of the details in the background I'm reducing contrast and the thing just becomes less demanding on the eye I talked about this a lot in terms of how parts of the frame are seeing look at me while others are saying they're just you can ignore this bit because you can't stick a post-it note on a photograph very quickly we've got to stage with this photograph where the front is the photograph the front is the subject that beautiful heart-shaped sunlight on the dunes they're receiving through into the background and if we look in the basic panel we haven't made a single adjustment to the basic adjustments I haven't done anything to this photograph in terms of changing the global contrast I'm dealing just in two local adjustments and very quickly we've changed the feel of this photograph now very quickly before we move on to the next photograph I want to just be a little bit sneaky here I'm gonna go and make a history state or a snapshot rather and just gonna call it normal and what that's doing is saying this would be a normal way to look at the world warmer more country for contrast e4 grounds receding to cool our backgrounds if I go in and change the these gradients and if I instead of cooling the back warm up the back you see how we've lost that feeling of transition now that the overall image is now one color space we've lost the coolness in the background we've taken away a transition and as you take away a transition in this case color it loses that sense of a journey through the frame because if I put the coolness back in creating differences and I think that's one of the most powerful things in image processing is creating differences one thing to something else in this case it's all sand so we haven't got the same sort of emotional journey that we would have working from a rock to a mountain or through a river to a forest we're dealing with one element and that's why I chose this I'm going to go to the next image here now this is a very different type of photograph it couldn't be more different but I want to demonstrate that the same conditions apply in the foreground rocks we have detail and texture these are beautiful rocks on the north coast of Spain and area I love we have water here we have similar rocks in the background but because they're further away there instantly less demanding even though they're Jaggi shapes and then we've got a very bright sky and what I want to do with this photograph is working a little bit more fully to try and emphasize these different areas within the frame work it so that each individual part of the frame is believable in its own right and that somehow we can create something that's more harmonious and more kind of concise and articulate as a photograph out of this very washed out and overexposed raw file it's not overexposed it's just exposed so I am going to work this one a little bit more consciously than perhaps I would all I'm going to do here is hit my chromatic aberration and profile Corrections and I'm going to make sure it is level because I'm a bit of a sticker for that and I'm also going to crop it into a four by five because that's how I saw it now the first thing that needs to be done here is we need to re-establish the the kind of believability of the sky in the foreground the sky is really washed out and I want to just do a simple adjustment of reducing the exposure quite a bit just so I can see the highlight detail now you can see we've actually got some nice sunrise color in there but it was hidden so it's always good to explore I will need to increase the blacks a little bit and the shadows a little bit because you see that the the sea stacks at the back the rocks at the back we got too dark with that gradient but now we can very easily fix that to make it look quite natural and believable so that's just the first and I'm going to cool the top so those warm colors are still coming through but I'm cooling the clouds and that's a very typical look for this area it's that kind of heavy cool clouds with some nice light in there so this this feels like the north coast of Spain to me I'm going to bring in a second gradient and I'm going to increase the shadows because I want to open up all of this beautiful rich warm tones and I am going to increase the clarity and a little bit of texture and I'm going to use a range mask to get the water out of it so I'm just going to pull down a little bit from the right hand side there and that's going to restrict the adjustment layer if I hit the Alt key there it's just taking the water somewhat out of it and I can make it a little bit more than that there we go so that's taking the water right out and it's not taking the the the adjustment off the rocks which is really where I want it I don't want the water to get crunchy if you add clarity to water it doesn't make sense to me what is a fluid ethereal thing so I'll turn off the walkie again and now we have an image that compared to where we started already exhibits some quite noticeable changes we've reestablished the kind of harmony between the foreground and the background and you can see if I turn off this comparison turn off the lights to make it less demanding on the eye let's look at transitions again luminosity we have the brightest waters in the foreground receding into the frame where we have more luminosity with the bright clouds but that feeling of foreground interest is certainly important we have contrast the foreground is more contrasty than the background on the account of it's much closer yeah so it's natural for us to see more contrast in the foreground so we have a luminosity gradient we have a contrast gradient we have a detail gradient in terms of front to back and we also have color gradients we have this beautiful warmth in these rocks here these ones on the left are a different type of rock and are actually slightly blue so we've got a color left-to-right shift and then we have a transition from warm through into cooler clouds but we have also transitioned from cooler rocks through into warmer clothes so this is like a cross it's like a an X where we've got different transitions working in different areas and that's why I stuck the mountain right in the middle of the frame not the mountain this tallest C stack I cropped it so it's right in the middle of the frame so everything is kind of going to that it's almost like a perspective shift right through the middle there so we're now in a position where we've established the overall kind of transitions in this frame and now it's just a case of refining that with a little bit more dodging and burning I'm gonna bring in a vignette just to pull in some of the the corners I really want this center section to be the absolute focus of the frame and I think I might just pull in another vignette sorry yeah vignette but invert this one and just gently increase the exposure that's gonna be a subtle one that might not be terribly obvious on the frame there but I can see it now what else do I want to do here I think I can use the brush to slightly emphasize the coolness and these rocks so I've just taken my temperature slider and pulled it down a little bit and you can keep pulling it down until they look the way you want them to look equally I can take another brush and warm that brush and pull in some more warmth into those rocks on the right-hand side and everything I'm doing is really just to highlight the the transitions the more difference I create from point A to point B creates a stronger transition I'm just gonna look at that gradient that we had for the sky that's the foreground click on that one and I'm just gonna pull down my highlight it's a little bit more to me that the way I wanted to look and I'm gonna cool the overall sky just a tiny bit more so I'm getting to a point now where I'm starting to get quite happy with the distribution of tones in this image so that I now have a transition covering all these different parts so we've looked at two different photographs here one in the desert where everything is just sand and we've looked at a second example here where we have water rocks clothes you know far more complexity of different things and we've used exactly the same techniques we've talked about detail contrast luminosity color atmosphere and the transitions from the foreground to the background all we've done is basically used the same techniques on both photographs but the outcome looks very very different but at the same time we're allowing these transitions to become more evident and the more evident they are the better is going to be in terms of a little bonus something that's in a few of my videos is the secret slider it's the the part of Lightroom that no one really ever goes to and I don't know whether that's because people don't understand what it does or it's just you're not allowed to go there for some reason and what I want to do is look at both the photographs that we've made plus a third example and look at the impact that this secret slider can have on the photographs so sticking with this one for the moment I want to open the camera calibration palette this is available also in Adobe Camera Raw and has exactly the same adjustments they are open to you what this is is looking at the red green and blue components of the color space so your sensor has red green and blue pockets or buckets that get filled with light and what the camera calibration slider does is allow you to change the properties of that RGB now if I hover over these warm tones if you look up underneath the histogram it says 32.5 red 29.5 green and 18.2 blue now as far as i'm aware that doesn't add up to a hundred but maybe that's for some other reason that someone can point out but basically every color in the RGB color space is made up of red green and blue unless it's a primary color in which cases a hundred percent red zero green zero blue or a hundred percent blue zero red 0 green etc so any color that's being represented in your photographs 99.99% of them have a red green and a blue component even if they're a warm color so what the camera calibration palette allows you to do is to increase the saturation of the red the green and the blue I tend not to play around with hue too much because that tends to make some fairly funky results but if I increase and I'll just add this to 100% just for now if I up the blue saturation by a hundred percent I've saturated the blue part of the RGB color space and what that's allowing me to do is add vibrance and richness to my warmer tones without the risk of clipping them if you increase the saturation of a warm color it can quite easily clip the red channel and what I want to do is avoid clipping so by increasing the saturation and if I take that down again we already had some nice colors but if I increase the saturation and I'll dial it a little bit back from a hundred here because I think 100 was too much now it's also saturating the blues and the greens as well it's saturating all the different colors but it's most evident in the warmer tones the Blues have saturated a little bit more it wasn't a terribly blue image if I went into here and cooled the photograph you would see that the Blues have got quite saturated and it's quite easy to come in with the HSL then and target the Blues and just pull down the saturation of those a little bit the the blue saturation slider in the camera calibration is the secret slider in Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw if I go back in to this photograph which is the the one we did in the Gobi Desert there we go it's taken a moment to load up there this is my old iMac which is struggling a little bit these days there's a new one on the way so I'm going to hit the develop module again if I just go into the camera calibration now this is quite a warm image generally but if I do the same thing you will see the luminosity and the the power of those foreground tones they just come alive the power in the camera calibration slider cannot be understated like most sliders and Lightroom it has to be used with care because it's very easy to get out of control I will finish with one final image and this was taken just at the bottom of the garden a few days ago just as we were coming back from our walk and I'm just going to do a very very quick process of this file so in terms of transitions we have red beautiful red maple leaves juxtaposed against the green and white of the flowers and the bush behind I'll just pull down my highlights there and pull the whites back down a little bit maybe from the shadows there we go so if I increase the blue saturation see how quickly those reds and the maple just really burst into life now they're also it's also having an impact on the yellowy green leaves so if I wanted to make the red to the most powerful part of this frame I can quite easily go into the HSL later hits the saturation of the yellow leaves and just pull them down slightly and as soon as I pull down the saturation of those I'm creating a transition from saturated to D saturated any any attribute any feature any slider in Adobe Lightroom can create a transition you can have a transition from high amounts of it to low amounts of it and these transitions allow the brain to separate to simplify and to basically organize our world around us so I could carry on but this image doing any number of things if I come in with that and if I change the hue of those leaves and the background so that they have lost their greenness the whole color palette is now reddish we've taken away a transition from red to green and we've made it red to sort of orange and it's not such a powerful transition if I bring back in the greenness we have reestablished a transition I could go on about this for an awful long time I'm looking forward to my new e-book coming out which is the color of meaning where I'm looking at some of this stuff in really great detail so look out for that when it comes but for now I'm going to leave it here today because I think I've been going on quite long enough hopefully you find this stuff useful I'm trying to look at Lightroom and processing from a far more intuitive and innate sense where as how we appreciate the world influences how we process our images and I think we just need to look at the world a little bit more closely than perhaps we do because I think when we look through the camera we get a very bullying Kurt and I spend a lot of time just out looking in the world because it fascinates me and I notice this type of thing so thanks for watching tune in on Wednesday when in the vision and light series I am talking with Paul Sisca incredibly inspiring guy who lives in Banff National Park in Canada Paul and I had a really fascinating conversation and he really showed his heart and passion for the landscape so tune in on Wednesday for vision and light we'll be back next weekend with some more compositional consequences and I wish you all well wherever you are in the world please be safe and look after your family and loved ones and anybody else who you know who might need a bit of care right now so thank you very much for watching see you again on Wednesday bye-bye [Music]

Channel: Expressive Photography

Views: 12,257

Keywords: Lightroom, Photography, Alister Benn, Landscape photography, how to, tutorials, compose, composition, education, educate, expressive photography, barriers, vision, experience, tutorial, lesson, teach, professional, be better, at, happy, motivation, inspiration, inspire, colour, Luminosity, Processing, Understanding light, Light, engagement, better photographs, landscape, mountains, autumn, fall, process, meaning, emotion, personal development, contrast, Transitions, Blue Saturation, Camera Calibration, Adobe, desert

Id: zJJuD02kqqA

Length: 26min 29sec (1589 seconds)

Published: Sun May 03 2020