Learn Lightroom 6 / CC - Episode 2: Tools & Lens Corrections

hey guys this is Anthony Morgan T from anthem Morgan T calm this is episode two of learned Lightroom six also known as Lightroom cc in this episode we're going to process this image I like to call this the obligatory sunset photo and we're going to do it very similarly to how we did the image in episode one except in this episode we're going to introduce some tools in Lightroom and we're also going to introduce some lens Corrections that I did not cover in Episode one so each video in this series I'll be introducing more and more and I'll be getting more in depth with the things that I previously introduced so without further ado let's get started now I want to maximize my workspace so I want to get rid of all these panels and you may remember that in the last episode I mentioned you could hit shift tab and it will close them all then I could just go and open the one that I want open which is this one on the right for developing the image so again this is similar to that image from episode 1 in that if this image is underexposed I under I under exposed it on purpose because I exposed for the highlights I didn't want to lose any detail in the sky so because the dynamic range of a camera sensor is not as great as the dynamic range of a person's eyes we have to sometimes cheat a little so what I did was is I skewed the exposure toward the sky so everything else came out dark but the good thing is because I shot and used shot as a raw file all that info is in there and I could really tease out all this detail with Lightroom so we're going to go to the basic tab first and the white balance is fine in this image and I will have an episode in the future where I cover white balance in depth I will have episodes one solely on white balance one solely on the tone curve one solely on split toning one solely on solely on detail that would be sharpening and noise reduction and the other ones I'll have episodes that really cover those more heavily that would be the HSL color B&W tab and the other things you'll see as we go along so as I mentioned the white balance is fine in this image so I'm not going to do anything there because the image is underexposed I'm going to use that little trick I taught you in episode 1 where as I'm going to go to the highlight slider first and I'm going to bring that down even further because I want to even tease out more detail in the bright areas of the scene which happens to be the sky the shadows now are pretty dark so we're going to open those up we're going to go all the way to the right you can see how we brought out a lot of detail in the rocks here and the brass now I'm going to skip the whites and blacks first because that's just the way I do it you could do the whites and blacks next if you want you could go in any order you want there's no thing that says you have to do these in a specific order for the image to come out proper so you can do it any way you want but I like to use the clarity slider next and in this case I'm going to turn clarity up I almost always turn it up there are some cases where I will turn it down to soften an image and clarity makes it look real sharp and it's really not a sharpness control it's a mid-tone contrast control really it increases the contrast in the mid-tones and it does the effect of making the image look sharper so I'm going to turn it up fairly a lot around 35 be aware that if you go up considerably high with clarity you introduce more noise in the image so you always want to be careful okay I'm not going to do anything with vibrance or saturation at least right now I could always come back and adjust those later I'm going to do the whites and blacks now now remember I showed you two different ways in the previous episode to adjust whites and blacks the first was a real technical adjustment which will technically adjust the whites and blacks so nothing is clipping so you're just on the edge of clipping but not quite the way to do that is I mentioned in that video as you hold the shift key in and you double click on the name so double click on whites while holding the shift key in and you can see it didn't move it means that we're pretty much right where we need to be so nothing needed to be adjusted as far as whites are concerned blacks I'm going to hold the shift key and I'm going to double click and I this will probably just move a tiny bit and you can see it moved to plus nine now that's a technical adjustment but you know photography is really your interpretation of the scene and you could really use some of your artistic intuition to adjust the image as you see fit so you don't have to hold that shift key in to adjust it you could just adjust them and look at the image and you know see adjust it very slowly each slider and see if you like the effect and leave it where you find you know that you like it another way the way I like to do it is I like to hold the alt or option key in its alt if you have a PC option if you have a Mac I'm going to do the whites first when I click down with the left mouse button on whites you can see the screen turns black now if I increase whites you can see there's a lot of the scene behind that black leading through my personal preference is I like to adjust it so that the white that is blue are the colors that are bleeding through just disappear I mean just disappear right around there and to me that's a proper white balance adjustment now the blacks I said white balance I apologize that's a proper proper white slider adjustment okay now blacks I'll do the same thing I'm going to hold the alt or option key in when I click on that this time the screen turns white now my personal preference is I like to have a little bit of the blacks pleading through I believe it adds some depth to the image so I'm going to bring that so there's considerably more bleeding through and that to me now is a properly adjusted white and black point for my taste and I encourage you to experiment with your images and get it to be you know something you feel comfortable with that you like the way it looks so I have the highlights shadows whites and blacks and clarity adjusted a exposure and contrast exposures fine I'm not going to mess with that there will be some images where we're going to play with exposure now contrast I didn't talk about in the first video and contrast just makes kind of the blacks blacker and the whites whiter is for lack of a better way to put it and you can just add some contrast sometimes it adds some little bit of depth to the image also so I'm going to just tweak contrast up a little bit I'm not doing any tricks with this I'm just eyeballing the image and moving the slider until I think it looks nice alright now as far as I'm concerned for now the basic panel is done now I can come back to it later if I you know feel that something needs to be readjusted but for now I'm going to leave it alone now I want to make one quick note I get a lot of emails as you can see here there's tabs basic tone curve HSL split toning and so on a lot of times you'll find that you'll be missing one of these and all you have to do is right-click on any of them right now I'm going to right click on the basic panel and you can see this little menu pops up and you can see we have all these little tabs or here with checkmarks next one now I'm going to uncheck basic and you can see the basic tab disappeared and sometimes you might have accidentally right clicked and unchecked one of these so you'll be missing it so if you are just right-click on any of them and then check the one you're missing and in this case it was basic so I just wanted to you know take a segue to mention that now we have the basic panel adjusted I want to enhance the sky some more so and I also want to enhance these rocks when I was here these rocks were very very bright white and you can see the in root production here this image it seemed to have lost some of their glow so I want to bring that back so I'm going to use the brush tool now right here this is called the tool strip and it has a number of tools in and we're going to cover a couple of them today we're going to go to the brush tool first it's the far right tool and you can see when click on it this little panel opens up and it has a lot of similar controls that the basic panel had and right now none of them are adjusted but sometimes you might open it and some of them will be adjusted all over the place maybe and you'll want to reset it and there's two different ways to reset these well there's three technically you could double click on the names of each individual slider and you can see it will adjust it back to its zero position but a quicker way is if right where it says effect here you can double click on effect and it will put them all back to their zero position a third way is if you hold that alt or option key alt if you have a PC option if you have a Mac you can see effect turns into reset and you just click on it then and it will reset them but I find it easier to just double click on effect now what I wanted to do is I mentioned I want to brighten these rocks up first so I'm going to turn exposure up and just so I could show you what it's doing I'm going to turn exposure all the way up to 4 and as you can see there's a brush here now and you can make the brush larger and smaller with the bracket keys the right bracket key makes it bigger and the left bracket key makes it smaller at the bottom there's also a slider here that you could use to make it bigger or smaller I don't ever use that there's another way if you have a mouse with a center wheel you can just spin that Center wheel and you can make the brush larger or smaller by spinning that Center wheel the other thing is feathering there's a slider here for feathering and you can see that the brush consists of a circle with a plus in the middle it's just indicating that's the center of the brush then there's a circle that's in the middle and that's the actual brush that's going to be like the solid part of the brush then there's an outer circle and that's the point where you're starting to feather so you're softening the effect of the brush from that middle circle to that outside circle and you could increase or decrease the feathering by adjusting this slider here I'm going to keep it relatively high now these two controls flow and density get a lot of people confused the best way to think of flow is if you have it turned all the way up your you're going to be painting the maximum amount of virtual paint that the brush can supply with flow at 100 if you turn flow down you're just limiting the maximum amount of this virtual paint or virtual ink that is coming out of the brush density on the other hand the best way to think of that imagine if you went to the store and you bought a magic marker a felt-tip pen it's brand new and you get a perfectly white piece of paper and you take that black magic marker and you paint on the paper you'll get this really solid deeply black line that's as though density was at 100 now let's say that you actually leave that tip off that marker the cover I should say the cap off the marker for a couple hours maybe overnight now let's turn density down to 50 that would be like you had a partially dried out marker no matter how hard you press on that marker it's not going to get as dark as it did when it was brand new so you can just you know it's just never going to get let's say darker than medium gray so that's what density does so flow you could build up on so if you have flow at let's say 30 and you make a stroke if you make another stroke you're kind of doubling it kind of like 60 and then making another stroke and you're like 90 but if your density is only at 50 you're never going to get darker than 50% of the maximum darkness that was available when that magic marker was brand new I hope that made sense and I do have a video which I'll reference below that explains this better it is of course used in were in Lightroom 5 but the brush tool is pretty much the same in Lightroom 6 so you could watch that so back to these rocks I want feathering feather fairly high and I want flow fairly high to keep it right at 100 that's fine and I want a brush that is just around the size of these rocks now is you remember I turned exposure all the way up Auto mask is checked that means that any thing that is distinctly different in contrast like the edge of these rocks in that water the brush will tend not to over spill on to the other area so will stay on the rocks it doesn't always work real well but I keep it checked and if it seems to be not working well I'll uncheck it so we're going to paint across these rocks and it's going to look absolutely ridiculous because I have that exposure turned all the way up all right so we're going to get a smaller brush you come down in here okay you can see now it looks really silly but we could go back to this exposure adjustment and we're going to just pull it down just a little bit I'd say right around 0.8 - that's good now there's a little on/off switch right here will turn whatever you did with the brush on and off and you can see there's before and there's after you can see it's just a subtle effect but I like it it just brightened up those rocks a little bit now you can see right here this little circle they call that the button and if you hover over that it will show an overlay aware you painted that brush if you paint it on a part that you don't want to paint on let's say right here okay you can see now I'll hover over that you can see the overlay is coming over here now while I didn't want that brush there well you could use the eraser and all you have to do is hold that alt or option key in and you can see the brush turns into them in the middle the plus that is in the middle of that brush turned into a minus and that will erase wherever you just painted and that's where I want to erase it all right so we have this first brush right here I want to put a second brush on these rocks here you can put the same brush if you want but I'm going to put a brand new one so to do that we're going to double click right here where it says new and again exposure popped all the way up I'm going to keep this size or I'm going to keep the feather flow and density the same and I'm going to adjust the size just to get these rocks right here and again again this looks crazy but we're going to turn now exposure down and maybe around 0.55 is good there so I'm going to turn that switch off turn it on you can see the effect that that had it's very subtle but that's what I wanted I just wanted to brighten those rocks up because when I was there those lot those rocks were considerably brighter to my eyes now I'm going to do a third brush I want to enhance the actual colors of the sunset so we're going to double click where it says new we're going to double click where it says effect to reset the sliders and what I want to do is warm it up so I'm going to go to the temp slider and I'm going to push that to the right a little bit I'm going to leave tint alone right now I'm going to get a brush I'll leave the settings the same down here and I'm just going to paint right across the sky down here and you can see it just added this kind of warmth effect down here now I could come up here and readjust it I can make it cool like whatever I want but I like it just a little warm so I'm going to do that I think that looks fine I'm going to leave tent alone I'm not going to mess with any of the other sliders so we added three brushes and again you could hover over it and you could see the overlay you could then hover over that one and hover over that one if I want to come back and to adjust any of them to make it active just click on it and then I could really say or click on this one and I could really so it's as simple as that so we're done with the brush tool let's close that down next thing I want to do is add a graduated filter all years ago when I shot film before the age of digital everyone every professional photographer had graduated filters in their camera bag kind of a mainstay but they're really not needed anymore because programs like Lightroom have a graduated filter tool in the program so you could add your grad a graduated filter in post and the graduated filter is here in the tool strip that is the third one from the right I'm going to click on that that will open up the graduated filter controls which are very similar to the brush controls and we're going to do is we're going to pull the filter down from the top in this case and I could just you know go somewhere towards the top click with the left mouse button and drag down and you can see I'm adding this graduated filter and I could tilt it if I want different ways like that like that whatever and if I want to make it perfectly straight so I not tilting it at all hold the shift key in and you can see it will snap perfectly straight and I can't skew it any more so anyways I'm going to pull it down to about there and the temp is already kind of warmed up a little bit and I like that I do want to add some clarity I like in this case the clouds to have a lot of distinction in them I like the clouds to stand out a little more so I'm going to add some clarity and now one thing I'm going to do I'm just going to show you this I'm going to go to the exposure and I'm going to turn it down it's a graduated filter so it adds the where you began the graduated filter is going to be a heavier effect than where you've finished because it's going to be gradual so we're going to reset that exposure back to where it was okay we have the temple tent warmed up we have clarity turned up I'm going to increase saturation a little bit and go here with these turn the highlights down a touch the shadows are okay reset those okay so that's fine with the graduated filter so we did two tools we did the brush and the graduated filter whether or not this image actually needed those is beside the point I just wanted to demo it to you now the other thing I want to show you is the spot removal tool it's right here and it's awesome to use for a lot of reasons but most notably to remove censor spots and dust spots from your image and the way you could really inspect your image for dust spots or kind of two different ways the first way is to just zoom in and look and if you notice when no tools are open over here we have a little plus sign magnifying glass on the cursor well if I just click once you can see it zoomed in and then week it's a little hand and we could just click down with the left mouse button and drag around and look very carefully and see if we see any sensor spots or dust spots and right here is looks like a dust spot right there so we're going to get rid of that we're going to open up the spot removal tool it's the second tool from the left and there's two different brushes in here there's a clone brush and a heel brush and I will be covering these in more depth in a letter that I video but right now I'm going to use the heel tool of the brush and there's again a size adjustment and this is the same way as the regular brush you can use the right bracket key to make it bigger left right key to make it smaller or the center wheel of your mouse feathering I like to feather usually a little bit when I'm going to remove spots it seems to make it blend a little better in opacity when I'm removing spots I usually help opacity at 100 now again we'll be covering this more in depth in a future video but do you remove this spot I want to make the spot removal tool just that center circle just slightly bigger than what the spot is you can see there's an outside circle there that's for the feathering that helps it blend a little better so we're going to go over the spot and make the circle just that center circle just slightly larger than the spot and then click with the left mouse button and you can see it sampled an area that it thinks is similar and if we move off the pitcher we can look and you can see that that spot is gone now one thing I want to show you down here is what they call the toolbar and if you don't see this right here hit the T key on your keyboard it will toggle that toolbar on and off and you can see tool overlay it's right now on Auto what that means is when my cursor is over the image the tulle overlay is being displayed and when I come off the image the tulle overlay disappears I like that mode because that helps me see that the spot is actually gone there are two other modes or four technically you could have it always so it's always there so even if you're moving off the image you still see it I don't care for that one because it's in the way I can't tell if it actually did its job the other one is selected that means it's only when it's selected if you have a bunch of these you'll only see the one that is selected the other one is never and that means it will never be there you'll never see it and so I don't see much use for that I prefer Auto that's what I use the other one is visualize box now I'm going to zoom back out for a minute I'm going to close the spot removal tool by clicking on it now I have my hand back where I could drag around but if I just click once it'll zoom back out now I'm going to open the spot removal tool again and we're going to click this little checkbox visualize spots you can see we get this kind of negative look now in this image we're not seeing much but in the future you may get some images where you have a lot of expanse of sky and you click on this and you'll see the sensor spots a lot more readily by clicking this box and you could adjust the intensity of the the process by sliding this slider left or right so you can see the spots a little more readily on this image it's not helping us much but I wanted to show you that so the spot removal tool is done I removed that spot so we covered a few of the tools up here we're going to cover them as I mentioned in depth more in depth in a future episode and I'm going to cover the other tools that we didn't touch today in future episodes so alright I enhanced the sky with the brush I enhanced these rocks with a brush I enhance the sky with the graduated filter I removed the spot I adjusted the image to begin with in the basic panel now I want to go down to the detail and again as I mentioned many times now I'm going to have an episode that solely is devoted to sharpening and noise reduction for now I like it around 70 somebody posted in the comments of the last video they liked it slightly different and I encourage you to be like that person and get it you know adjust these a little bit to your liking see how you like it now it's not one-size-fits-all thing some images will have more noise than others so you may need more noise reduction some images may need more sharpening but generally speaking I found that around 70 and around 40 and I really don't touch any of the other sliders those seem to work out for the images that I should very well so for a quick if you're in a hurry 70 and 40 and really close it don't worry about it now what we're going to cover in this video that wasn't covered in the last one is lens Corrections that last image that I did in video 1 was shot with the Fuji film camera and the Fuji film has the lens Corrections built into the raw file so there's no need to do any lens Corrections this image was shot with a Nikon camera and Nikon lens and there they don't have the lens Corrections built into the raw file so we're going to go to the lens Corrections tab and we're going to click on enable profile Corrections but before I do that go to the profile tab you can better see what's going on you can see that same checkbox is under the profile tab as it is under the basic tab so go there and you can watch the image I'm going to click this enable profile Corrections and you can see that the image kind of adjusted itself there was it looked like some barrel distortion in the image and it took it away and you can see the lens profile has an icon as I shot with my Nikon d7000 so it's a crop sensor camera so it had a DX lens on it now you may click this box and your lens profile mine may not appear if that happens you would have to go through the drop-down and then manually put it in and I do have episodes previous episodes where I talked about this and you could seek those out if you're having issues with this but what that did now it is you can see it took out that distortion that was in the image and you know did a really nice job so that's under the profile we're going to go back to basic for a minute and you can see there's remove chromatic aberration a lot of times with some lenses shion vertical or horizontal like sticks and poles and things if you zoomed in real close I don't see anyone we till clears up here there it goes I don't see any on this image but a lot of times with some lenses particularly some cheaper lenses you may get some purple fringe or a green magenta fringe on the just very slight on the edges of like these darker high contrast areas and if you do you could remove chromatic aberration by clicking this checkbox and that will usually minimize it now I always check the box anyway it doesn't hurt it doesn't make the image any less sharp or anything by checking that checkbox so the image is level so I'm not really worried about that I could click Auto though and see it probably will just slightly yeah just slightly you can see so that's fine so that's lens Corrections in a nutshell now is again sorry I keep repeating myself as we get through the videos those of you that watch my Lightroom 5 videos you know we get more in depth with each video we cover things a little deeper so lens Corrections is done now we're going to go to effects again I do of almost always like to put on my landscape images a dark vignette not heavy not heavy at all just very slight and I like that because it tends to pull everyone's attention towards the middle of the frame so I put a small vignette usually less than 15 in this case it's minus 10 so that's that we're done with the vignette and that's it I feel that this image is done I'm going to hit the Y key on the keyboard you can see here's before and here's after it the Y key again to bring it back now we're going to hit that backslash key on the North American keyboard and there's before you can see it says before up here hit that backslash key again and there's after now um somebody posted in comments that in Germany and I thank this person for doing this for sharing this information you hit a shift v as in victor and that will do the same thing as the back /ki so if your keyboard does not have a backslash key tri shift v as in victor and see if you get this before and after.look alright so that's it for episode 2 I'd like to thank everyone for watching in the next video in episode 3 I'm going to process a little image into black and white just show you the different ways that you could do that with Lightroom and in doing that we're going to cover some more things in Lightroom specifically the HSL color B&W tab alright we're going to be doing a lot more in that tab so be ready for that in episode 3 hopefully you'll be out very soon I'd like to thank everyone for your kind support for watching my videos for clicking like and for sharing them and for subscribing to my youtube channel I really truly appreciate it thank you very much ok guys I'll talk to you soon

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 362,051

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: WDMEhSpigX0

Length: 29min 58sec (1798 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2015