Learn Lightroom 6 / CC - Episode 1: Quickstart

hey guys this is Anthony Morgan T from anthem organic on this is Episode one of learned Lightroom six also known as Lightroom cc if you purchase the program outright is called Lightroom six if you happen to subscribe to the Creative Cloud from Adobe they refer to it as Lightroom CC 2015 please be aware that throughout the video series I may refer to it as Lightroom six I may refer to it as Lightroom cc as far as we're concerned I'm talking about the same thing in whichever version you own whatever I do in the video you'll be able to do in your version now this video series comes on the heels of my very popular learn Lightroom 5 video series which are available on my website and on YouTube I'm going to do this video series very similarly all the videos will be for free on YouTube and on my website you could stream them any time one thing I'm going to do different and I'm very surprised by this is I received a lot of emails from folks saying they wanted to purchase the videos they either wanted to download them or they wanted to purchase a DVD so when the video series is done I hope in a couple weeks I will have the videos available for purchase and I will include in that purchase all the raw files that I use throughout the video so you could work along as I work on the images now this video is a quick start video so I make loss over some things in this video but be aware we're going to be covering it in depth in a later video so let's real quick just take a look at the workspace in Lightroom you see the image that I have selected is in the middle and on either side are panels and this is cleverly called the Left panel and this is called the right panel along the bottom they call this the film strip these are all the images that I happen to have in whatever folder I have active at the moment along the top this is called the module picker now in this video series we're going to be talking about the library module in the develop module and in this video we're going to import some images into the library and I'm going to develop one of those images and then I'm going to export that image to show you how that's done so let's import an image right now now as soon as you plug in your memory card white room very well might begin the import process for you and if it doesn't all you have to do is go up to file import photos and video and what happens is the import dialog pops up and as I mentioned this might have happened already as soon as you plugged in your memory card this box might have popped up you can see I have an SD card in here and I only have I think seven images or so just for demonstration purposes so we're going to import these images now if for any reason Lightroom didn't find the images you could navigate to them along this left panel so as you can see this is the SD card I'm using it's an XT one that's a Fuji camera and these are the images right here and it will find the images for you after you highlight the folder that the images are in now along the right panel we have some things smart previews allow you to work on the image if you do not if you have your images on an external hard drive and you don't always have that external hard drive plugged into the computer if you click this box Lightroom will create what they call smart images so you could actually work on the image process the image without the hard drive being plugged in the downside of that is they take up a lot of space so I do not have that checked don't import suspected duplicates which I like Chuck that's up to you you can make a second copy if you want to copy the raw file from your SD card to a backup location that's usually a good idea in this case I have software that does that automatically so I do not do not have that checked and this is add to a collection we're going to talk about collections in a later video now we could rename the files I don't do any of that we could apply during the import some develop settings so you could actually add some processing as you're importing I choose not to you could do metadata here if you had any you know untitled presets whatever you could give it a name one thing I do suggest you do though is put some keywords for the images this is a cityscape right here of these images here and separate them by a comma this happens to be Buffalo now I'm just going to do the two all right now just for the sake of time it is recommended that in most instances you put around six or more keywords in there and this will help you later if you're trying to find an image you could search by keyword and you could find the image so a cityscape Buffalo now I'm going to put it into a subfolder but before I jump into this you can see here this is my area where the pictures are this isn't actually where I store my images it's it's going to my hard drive on my computer and I don't want it there I want it on my Lightroom hard drive which is an external hard drive so I have it called Lightroom RAW images so I don't want it up here I'm going to click here and I want it here and you can see these are all my folders that have all my images in them so I want it and Lightroom RAW images and I'm going to give it a name in a subfolder and I'm going to call it city scapes like that okay so now if we look down here at the Lightroom RAW files and we come down here you can see that it's very dim but it's cityscapes that means that Lightroom will create this folder and you can see it's in my Lightroom RAW files folder this is where I choose to put it where you choose to put yours probably will be different now I did the keywords I have it chosen where I want it to go and I gave a name to the subfolder that I want it to be in and I'm going to click import now it will take up depending on how many images you have and how fast your computer is and how fast your SD card is it may take any from 10 seconds like this or it may take several minutes until it imports all the images now we're still in the library module and we have the images here we have our film strip along the bottom I could use the right arrow keys and the left arrow keys to navigate through the images I choose now to go to the develop module right away so I met the develop module and I could see the images in this larger screen now one thing I want to do though is I want more screen for the image so I could close these panels down in the left panel here there's nothing here I need right now so I'm going to close this down for now I'm going to close this I could get my toolbar to go away close that one down and I'm even going to close the module picker up here down so I have more room to see my image now I need my right panel open because these are all the adjustments I'm going to do now even though the filmstrip isn't showing I still can navigate through each image by hitting my arrow keys so I'm just going to page through them as we see as you can see I was actually creating a panorama right here I was going left to right now actually this image is probably the better image but I'm going to use this image because it's crooked and I want to show you how to straighten it so we're going to process this image now this is a raw file and I encourage you if you don't shoot RAW and your camera is capable of shooting raw that you shoot RAW and there is going to be an article there is an article on my website that explains all the advantages of shooting raw you have watch way more dynamic range we have a lot more colors you have a lot more information in a raw file than you would in a JPEG and I encourage you to shoot raw possible the downside is when you look at it right out of the camera it looks like crap it doesn't look good but that's why Lightroom is here we're going to develop this image now the cool thing about Lightroom everything you do is non-destructive so all these adjustments we do here are not touching the raw file at all Lightroom is going to do one of two things depending on how you set up have it set up it's actually going to create another file they call it a sidecar file with all your adjustments go in the sidecar file and Lightroom never writes or even touches anything in the raw file itself it just reads it so they're like the raw files never modified and that's cool if your computer ever crashed in the middle of an operation it would corrupt the raw file and if it was an important file like you were shooting a wedding or something that could be devastating well to get around that Lightroom never touches the raw file everything is non-destructive it's either put in that sidecar file as I mentioned or it's written into the Lightroom library by default it writes it to the Lightroom library now we're going to process this image as I mentioned along this right panel here you can see these are called tabs we have basic tone curve HSL split toning and so on all the way down you could do them in order you can jump around between the different sections it's really up to you there's no set way to do it now I typically start in the basic panel and you can see we have all these adjustments exposure contrast and all this now right now as I look at the image the white balance is fine so I do not have to do any adjustments for white balance that means the temperature in tint look okay to me so I'm not going to adjust any of those in a letter video we will do a white balance adjustment so we will be doing that now the main adjustments in the basic panel though are right in here and these are exposure contrast highlight shadows whites and blacks and this can be confusing to folks so I'm going to show you a relatively easy way that you could adjust these and I don't often do it this way but for a beginner if you are a beginner with Lightroom try it out this way and you'll find that this will work very well now you could of course right here where it says auto you can click on auto and it will automatically adjust all these as you can see here and you know it's got a decent picture I guess but you know the whole idea of using Lightroom is so you could adjust it to your taste into what you like to do so we're not going to do auto so I want to undo these well just down here reset if you ever make a mistake you ever have it you went through and you adjusted about 400 things and you don't like what it is you could click reset down here one other thing I want to make you aware of if we go over and open this left panel again if you go in history right here you can see it keeps track of every step watch I'm going to move contrast I want to move this white so I'm just moving these arbitrarily I'm not really messing around you can see every step was taken a note in here and if I didn't like this highlights adjustment I could just go one step before it and it will go before I adjusted that highlights slider the white clipping see I just so and you can see the picture changes so all the steps you do are kept track over here now if I want to start from the beginning again as I mentioned I could hit this reset button down here or I could just click at the very first thing here which was import and we're right back where we started you can see all the sliders are right in their default positions so we're going to close that down now we're going to adjust this shot now the first thing I'd like to do is I like to do the highlights and the shadows first what I'm going to give you now is a quick way to do it as your beginning and as we get through the videos you're going to see that there's other ways you could adjust these so highlights what I often do is you can see the picture is relatively underexposed that's because I exposed for the highlights that means I underexposed on purpose so I had detail in the clouds in the sky so when you under expose a shot on purpose in this case exposing for the highlights what I would often suggest you do is then go into Lightroom and I would take highlights all the way down even further and open the shadows all the way up now you can see it's got kind of a blah flat look to it but it did open up a lot of the shadows in the darkness that was down here in the buildings now the next thing I like to do is I skip whites and blacks for now and I add clarity to the shot clarity is called mid-tone or mid-tone contrast so what it does is you can see if I go way far to the right it's really making it look sharper it really isn't a sharpness control but it kind of gives that effect see now if I turn clarity all the way down how it made it look less sharp so we're going to turn clarity up pretty high I'd say around 40 now be aware that as you turn clarity higher you will often get noise in the image you know so that's a downside of it also if you have people in the shot portraits or just a group of people turning clarity really high will really make their skin tone look look bad so you don't always want to turn clarity way up so after I adjusted clarity what I normally do now is jump back to the whites and blacks and I'm going to show you two different ways to adjust the whites and blacks one is to get a technical adjustment well to get a technical white point that's what this is called adjusting the white point hold the shift key in and double click on where it says whites and you can see it automatically adjusted the whites so that our histogram is not being clipped it's right to the edge now we're going to get a technical adjustment for the blacks so we're going to hold that shift key in again and we're going to double click right on the word blacks and it did it slightly to minus seven now it has a perfect technical adjustment now you may not want to do a technical adjustment you may want to adjust it to your taste now another way to do it is I'm going to reset these sliders and if you ever want to reset one slider right where it says the name of the slider in this case whites now I do not have any key pressed I'm just going to double click on what where it says whites and it put the slider back in the middle I'm going to double click on blacks and it put that right back in the middle so we reset these sliders now another way to adjust these if you so choose is hold the alt or option key and now it's alt if you have a PC option if you have a Mac and then click on the slider with your mouse left button and you can see the width click on the white slider the screen turn black keep moving the slider to the right until you see stuff bleed through the image you see it's coming through and you could get used to this and get out get it adjusted to your taste typically for whites I prefer to have it backed off so that just nothing is showing like right there now for blacks you would do the same thing it would hold that alt or option key in click on the black slider and this time we are going to have to move it to the left and you can see almost immediately stuff is bleeding through now I like my black sliders adjusted a little stronger than the whites so and the whites how I adjusted it so that everything that was bleeding through just disappeared I like adjusting the black so I have considerably more bleeding through like right about there okay so now this basic panel is pretty much done now if I wanted to add some vibrance to the shot or saturation to the shot I would adjust these sliders now vibrance will adjust every single color that isn't already saturated that's what it does now saturation though will adjust every color whether it's saturated or not so in this case I don't really want it more saturated like that so I'm going to reset that but I would like maybe a little more vibrance so I'll bring that up a little and you can see that's a more subtle adjustment and I usually prefer to adjust vibrance over saturation some people adjust both maybe you would too so if you do you know feel free so really as far as I'm concerned right now the basic panel is done now if I wanted to see the before and after you could hit the Y key on your keyboard and you can see here's the before shot and here's the after shot hit the Y key again and we come back to the after shot now if you have an American keyboard or a North American keyboard you can hit the backslash key in the backslash key now we'll revert back and show us the before you can see right up here it says before let the backslash key again and we go back to the afterimage now some european keyboards do not have a backslash key and it's different depending on what country you in I think in France if you hit shift s I believe um I might be wrong on that that will have the same effect as having the backslash key so if anyone knows the shortcut key in for a European keyboard post it in the comments below so everyone else could know it that would help everyone out thank you very much for that now the basic part of this adjustment as far as I'm concerned is done as you can see so we're going to close that down now there's a lot of blue in here and I think I want to enhance the Blues a little bit so I'm going to go to this HSL color B&W panel I'm going to open that up and you can see under HSL there's three different tabs there's you saturation and luminance I'm not going to adjust the hue of any of the colors but I am going to adjust the saturation of the Blues a little bit I'm going to increase it now you can see if I increase it greatly you can see what it does now I'm just going to increase it very little +15 all right then I'm going to go to the luminance section of this HSL panel and I'm going to go to the Blues again and you can see now if I move it right luminance is making it brighter if I move it left it's making it darker and I want to make it just slightly darker so I'm bringing the Blues I'm making the Blues a little more saturated and a little darker as you can see so we're going to close that done we're done with that now we're going to jump to the detail panel this confuses a lot of people this is sharpening and noise reduction and I will have a video that will cover sharpening and noise reduction fully you're going to know everything about sharpening and noise reduction but believe me when I say this if you're in a hurry and you just want to adjust sharpening and noise reduction so that they're pretty much perfect I mean 80% to 90% perfect adjust the sharpening amount to around 70 somewhere in 7071 spine adjust nose reduction so it's around 40 somewhere in the 40s and you're done that will do a good job in most images trust me on that one all right now I mentioned this image is crooked so we're going to go to lens Corrections now in this case here this specific lens and camera that I used has a built-in lens profile in probably the next video if not video 3 I will actually cover what to do if your lens profile isn't built-in so we're going to talk about that in a future video but right now we want to just straighten this and the easiest way to straighten the image is you go to lens Corrections under the basic tab we go here to auto and as soon as I click Auto you can see it's straighten the image now there's nothing to say that once you adjust stuff you can't go back and readjust now as I'm looking at it it looks like it's still a tiny bit dark in here to me so I'm just going to bring my whites to the right a little well I'm sorry the blacks to the right a little bit now I'm not holding the alt or option key and like I did before I'm not holding the shift key in and double-clicking on it I'm just adjusting it by eye and don't be afraid to do that this is your image and it's you know you're the artist of your own image so adjust it till you like it and again I'm going to hit the backslash key there's before there's after we hit the Y key it's always a nice way where you can see it side by side before and after and then I think I'm going to do one more thing I'm going to go down here to effects and I'm going to go to post crop in getting and what you can do is you could put go to the right needle white vignette or go to the left and add a black one I'm just going to add a very very slight black then yet minus twelve and what that does it helps pull everyone's vision towards the middle of the frame so a very I guess slight black vignette is being applied to the image and that's it I think this image is adjusted just fine the way it is so I'm done again this is before and this is after there's the side by side view okay now I'm done how do you save it well you don't have to I could close Lightroom down I could open it up a year later and this image will be saved automatically it'll look just like this so you don't have to worry about saving the image what you might want to do though is you might want a JPEG to put on Facebook or put a Instagram or put it somewhere online or you might want to send it to a printer to get printed if that's the case you want to export the image and to do that we're going to go up to file and we're going to go down to export right here and we have all these different choices we have here and we will cover these more in depth in a future video but right now we're going to go relatively quickly I'm going to export it to a specific folder and right now it's my desktop that's fine okay I don't want to add it to this Cal catalog I'm not going to add my JPEG to the catalog because I already have the raw file here I don't have to add the JPEG now one thing I should note a lot of people email me asking me if they should delete the RAW files after they created their JPEGs and absolutely not your RAW files are your digital negatives they're valuable hold on to those always keep your RAW files you could make a JPEG anytime I could I could make a JPEG here and decide to delete the JPEG and then come back to this five years from now and make another JPEG and it will be exactly like that JPEG I made five years earlier so the JPEGs are expendable your RAW files are the stuff you always keep so I'm sending it to the desktop I'm not going to add it back into the catalogue if there's an existing name it's going to choose a new name I'm going to give it a name I'm going to call it Buffalo simple as that and we're going to jump down now we're it's not a video so we're skipping that we have different image formats as I mentioned we're going to do a JPEG you could do PSD which is a Photoshop file a tip file DNG which are those RAW files that are proprietary of Adobe so we're going to leave it there I want 100% quality sRGB color space we're going to talk more about color space in a future video we're not going to limit the file size at all I'm not going to resize this image I'm not going to make it smaller or anything like that resolution if you're going to print it if you're going to export this JPEG because you're going to send it to a printer to get made into a print put your resolution at 300 if you're just 300 pixels per inch if you're just creating this to put on Facebook put on 500 px or put it somewhere online put your resolution at 72 alright that will work fine I want all the metadata saved with the file that means all the lenses I used of the camera I used all those keywords I put in it stuff like that I want all that to be included I'm not going to put any water milk on it and I after I'm done post-processing it's just going to do nothing you could have this Lightroom actually close down if you wanted to and whatnot but I don't so we're going to export right like this and you can see there's a little status bar up here in the top left-hand corner and as Lightroom prom is creating this JPEG that status bar would go across and it dings relatively loudly loudly when the JPEG is created now we're going to just minimize this for a minute and you can see right here Buffalo - one there's my JPEG that I just created and there's the image as you can see so that is that and how you would export an image and we're open this back up now one quick thing I just want to show you we're going to talk about shortcut keys a lot throughout this video series and I encourage you to learn shortcut keys I mentioned that I closed panels down and open them up what you could do once I'm done now and I want these panels back I could open them up individually but that takes a little time the quickest way to do it is hit shift tab twice you hit shift tab once and then hit it twice sorry shift tab there we go once then hit it twice and there's all my side panels now if I want to get rid of all the panels at once I get hit shift tab see it toggles them on and off so that is one quick way to open and close the panel's all at once so that's it for this quick start video I hope that made a lot of sense and as I mentioned I glossed over a lot of things but we will be covering them more in depth in future videos in episode 2 we're going to process another image and we're going to use some of the tools that are available in Lightroom the brush tool the spot removal tool and so on so be looking for that in episode 2 I'd like to thank everyone that subscribes to my videos thank you very much and I'd really appreciate it if you haven't already to go to youtube and subscribe to my youtube channel that's it for now I'll talk to you guys soon

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 1,212,973

Keywords: photography, photographer, photoshop, lightroom, post, processing”, post processing, lightroom 6, lightroom cc, lightroom cc2015, lightroom cc 2015, adobe, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (Software), lightroom presets, lightroom 5

Id: bECi0ZQAB34

Length: 27min 55sec (1675 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2015