Lightroom Calibration – The SECRET to AMAZING edits

all right today i have a really exciting video for you it's going to go over the calibration tool in lightroom in the editing panel it's one that i've been wanting to do a video that i've been wanting to do for a little bit but i wanted to make sure that i understood enough of the tool to be able to share vital and useful mainly useful information to you so without further ado let's get started will simpson here and welcome to exploring photography first i want to thank each and every one of you who are here every single week at 7 00 p.m on monday i i see you i see you and i and i truly appreciate you guys being here every week and supporting this channel so thank you so much for coming and thank you so much for watching all of these videos and so you guys who are new my name is will simpson i do videos like this every monday at 7 00 p.m it'd be great to have you along so don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already otherwise today we are going to get into camera calibration so what does calibration mean well calibration means to adjust or change in order to make standard or to compare with something else so in this case we're doing photos so camera calibration in lightroom would be adjusting the colors and the way the colors behave in order to work to your style or work to the colors that you see here's an example if you had 25 different colors of blue that someone said these are my 25 closest to blue colors and you gave these 25 colors individually to 10 different people and you said pick what color blue you think is the bluest well most likely each person would pick a slightly different shade of blue because we all see slightly different shades or colors and stuff like that we could probably pick fairly close and they'd all be very very similar but each one would probably be slightly different so that's kind of your example of cameras you have a sony you have a nikon you have a fuji you have a canon you have all of these different cameras and you have people deciding well this is true blue this is true red and this is true green but then you have someone over at maybe fuji and says well this is true blue this is true red and this is true green and so on so forth for all the other cameras they might be slightly different so when a camera takes a picture then the colors recorded are slightly different to each one and that's where the camera calibration in lightroom comes in handy it allows you to adjust the colors so they're more to what you yourself picture or you yourself want to see now before we get into lightroom let's take a quick example if you're sitting in your car and you're listening to music you know how you can adjust the bass the treble and the mid the eq of the sound well that's kind of the same thing you're adjusting your bass your treble and your mid your reds your greens your blues to get exactly what you want now you can adjust your your car stereo to the style of the music so it's it fits what you think it should sound like or you can adjust it to a particular style for example if you're listening to some some type of music and you want that bass really pumping just really really pumping you crank that bass up to plus 10 well that might not be what the music was designed for but hey if that's your style then go for it i used to do that oh my god i would crank that bass up we're past that time now but i used to but that's the same thing with calibration you can calibrate your photos to be naturally colored or you can use the calibration to create a really cool style to your photos and we'll get into that a little bit later i just wanted to show you the differences there that you have two different options here so let's go ahead and jump into lightroom and see what this tool is all about now the first thing to understand is colors every single color that your camera records contains red greens and blues these are your main colors that compose every single pixel so in a blue you're going to have a little bit of red a little bit of green a little bit of blue in a magenta you're going to have a little bit of red a little bit of green a little bit of blue and so on and so forth every single pixel every single color will contain rgb red greens and blues so on the right side here you have your panel you have basic tone curve hsl so on so forth and then at the bottom you have calibration now if you don't see calibration go ahead and right click on one of them and you'll see customize develop panel click that and then you can customize it you can also move so if you click these three lines you can slide it up here you can move it down if you don't want a certain panel like let's say you don't want to use effects then just uncheck it and press save however if you don't see calibration if it's unchecked just check it and press save and it should appear right there now go ahead and hit the arrow and what this is going to give you is very simple seven sliders i mean super simple it's amazing that these seven sliders affect so much but again you see reds greens blues we'll start with the top slider and this is shadows this simply adjusts the tint of your photos you notice when you take a picture and sometimes it's kind of shaded green or shaded red this is your tent and this is where you can color correct that simply sliding it left to the green or right to the magenta adjust that now as it's you'll notice it's not adjusting anything in this image because there's no real shadows there but if we were to go but but if we were to go to say this image here this image here looks green would you agree yeah i mean it's mainly green so it looks green so if we were to slide this slider all the way to the right you see how it tints magenta in primarily the shadows if we go all the way to the left it tends green primarily in the shadows but this is for color correcting so you can go again you can do it for color correcting or you can do it for massive stylistic look so in this case i would just want to shade it a little bit to the right to add a little bit of more magenta and kind of calm down the colors a little make it a little bit more natural it also increases a little bit of contrast as well that's a simple slider that's all there is to it so let's go back to our color wheel and let's start with the red primary slider now you'll notice you have hue and saturation for each one one thing that you need to understand about the difference here the difference between this the calibration and your hsl the difference between these is this let's say you go to hue or saturation of reds greens and blues these are adjusting the reds period the greens period and the blues period remember the calibration adjusts the rgb the whole hole of reds greens and blues the saturation adjusts red so if i take the saturation out of red what happens to the color wheel all the red disappears but if i take the saturation out of the reds in the red primary in the calibration notice how the reds almost the entire image fades in saturation that's because remember each pixel contains reds each pixel contains greens and blues so when you're adjusting the rgb the calibration you're actually adjusting every single pixel in the image now this is the that is super important to understand when you're adjusting this so let's go ahead and reset that by double clicking on the slider now make sure red's there okay good let's give you another example if i adjust the red slider in the hsl to red it becomes really red right doesn't adjust anything else let's reset that but if i adjust the red slider in the calibration it adjusts everything else notice how everything kind of changed tones a little bit so back to the red primary hue slider if you go to the left you're pushing every red pixel more red if you push it to the right you're pushing every red pixel more orange now remember i'm going to say red green and blue pixels remember i'm referring to all of the color in the entire image that contains the red green blue just make it simpler so it's easier for me to say so if i slide this this slider right everything gets a little bit more orange notice how the reds become pure orange and then the magentas over here become kind of purpley the yellows become kind of orange yellow the greens kind of dull down so let's do the green so the green hue if you slide it left goes more towards the yellowy brown look yellowy and if you go to the right it turns more green more pure green so i go left everything kind of gets a little bit yellowier see the greens get more yellow more more vibrant green and or sorry a more vibrant greenish yellow rather than just a clear-cut green if we go right everything gets very very green and notice it kind of becomes a little bit of a pasteli color so that's something to remember when you're doing your editing it's a really good really good style there and then we're going to go down the blue primary if we go left we're going to go towards the teals and oranges again a great style and if we go right we're going to get to the purples we're going to add so much blue that everything's going to become purple and honestly just starting from the beginning of this video i have never gone to the right on the blue hue slider anyways that gives you a look of what the sliders do so now let's go into our other color wheel example my file could not be found well that's rude why can't it be found where did it go okay let me find it first okay so that photo for some reason isn't working so we're gonna do the examples here so if you go here to the yy we're gonna go cycle through these here okay we have so we have before on the left and we have after on the right now if you go up to the histogram and you kind of scroll over these colors notice in the histogram it says your reds greens and blues but there's a slash in between them this shows your reds on the left your before and your reds on the right the after so you can see the changes so let's go down here to the red slider and slide it over notice how things become kind of pinkish kind of magenta-y and let's hover over the red in this spot on the before the reds contain 75 green's 34 and blues 30 13. but on the after there are no greens the reds are the same and there's more blue so that means it pulled all the greens out and it added blue to the red so it became more of a magenta-y color now if we go ahead and reset that let's do the other way let's highlight it over now we've made everything more orange so if you look the reds are the same but it's added more greens and it's taken all the blues out so now you've taken red and green you've created more of an orange color and this happens throughout the entire image so if we go over here to the blues the teals you'll see that the reds are the same 70.2 both ways the the greens it's taken a little bit of green out and it's added a little bit of blue so not much of a difference but it's changed it a little bit come over here to the green here and it's added a little bit of red it's taken away a little bit of green and it's taken out a lot of blue so you can see it's affecting the entire image let's go ahead and reset that come down to the blue primary slide it over to the left that teal orange look and you notice a big difference so the reds it's taken it's added a little bit of red it's removed some of the green and it's kept the blue the same so that kind of shows you what is occurring when you're adjusting these images you're adjusting all of the colors as a whole so now that we understand what it is doing and how it's affecting and that it's affecting your entire image let's go here to our first example we're going to go into this sunset here the sunset beach photo and just so you know i've done lens correction and i've done basic color edits here's the before here's the before and here's the after so i've just brightened it up a little i've kind of touched it up so we're going to see what we can do to fix it the first thing i want to do is i want to warm the image up a little because it was really nice and i there's a little bit of a green cast so we're going to up the magenta just to shade not much just a shade then let's go into the calibration now again like i said there's a little bit of a green shade so let's go ahead and up the magenta here if we up at really hardcore it actually kind of works so we're just going to up it though to plus 20. now with this image it's very blue and orange so what does that immediately make you think teal and orange it is a very very common one of the most popular if not the most popular stylistic ways to edit your photos and videos movies use it all the time photos i mean it's just some people just take this slider and crank it all the way to the left boom done photo done but that is quite a bit of an overkill for me so in this case we could lower the saturation right but that's still then now it looks kind of dull you could come up here now to hsl and adjust the saturation of those individual colors so take out some of the orange but then again it looks a little dull we're just gonna simply adjust this so it's not as much so we're gonna adjust it until i like it that's not bad that i can work with a few more edits and it'll look good now a little tip you can adjust the other sliders and kind of balance it out and you just kind of have to play with them and really see what they're going to do this doesn't look good this doesn't look good this doesn't look good and this doesn't look good so i don't actually like any of that so i'm not going to adjust any of those and i'm going to be done with this on the calibration so just with that before after before after just a simple quick tweaks and we have a little bit more of a stylistic edit obviously i'm not done with this photo and i would edit it more to kind of balance everything just showing you where i would start all right next image again this is all i've done is the basic edit here's the before here's the after just to kind of bring back some life to it and with this one again it has a green cast so we're going to move this over to the magenta until we kind of touch base and see where i like it let's see all the way in we're going to go to about 50. and then what i want to do is adjust the skin tones now a super great way to adjust skin tones and make them look really good is in the calibration and here's a little tip that i learned if you take the green saturation and all the way up and then lower the red saturation just a little bit and then the blue saturation about halfway you get really nice skin tones this isn't a blanket edit but it is a place to start and it could be a good place for you to get those skin tones balanced so let's zoom in here and let's look at the before very kind of faded washed out and after a much much nicer smoother look so that just by doing that i fixed the skin tones and then you can then go and edit the rest of the photo but you're starting off with good skin tones so that's important so let's go to the next image here again basic edit before after with this one i think we're going to make this a stylistic edit we're going to make it green so we're going to crank the greens up and notice how this is really important notice how the greens really pop the greens and yellows just really stand out so this is before it's kind of faded and the yellows are kind of dull this is after the yellows have a lot of a lot of punch and the greens stand out beside and they just look really good together so that alone was great it made all these leaves stand out and the green stand out just by adding one change so then what we're going to do is make this a little bit more of a muted color kind of faded color so we're going to turn the red slider this way kind of turn the greens into real really green and then we're going to lower the red saturation dull them down actually not that much because again we have skin tone so we want to adjust those and then the blue saturation we're just going to raise it a little as well and then we're gonna drop this down just a shade to get that blue and teal added not too much though okay good so that just doing those adjustments got my colors where i wanted them i'm a little red but i could adjust that in the hsl alone but before after notice there's just more vibrance there's more pop to the image the one thing to note is your calibration again you can do it as a style edit or you can do it as your base edit where you start with the calibration get your color set how you want and then edit the photo or you can edit the photo and then adjust your calibration to put a style on it it's totally up to you where you adjust the calibration i kind of jump around i'll do the calibration the beginning at the end the middle make little tweaks here and there but it does get me uh to that style that i really really like okay let's go on to the next image here and we're gonna go on to this really pretty image with the background and again this one has very yellow you see the yellow it's it's it's no good so we're going to adjust that here so if it's yellow what do we need to do we need to change the the skin tone so we're going to up the greens saturation all the way that looks terrible just awful so we're going to fix that by lowering the saturation in the reds just a little bit and the blues quite a bit and that is looking better okay not quite there oops so we got before and after so that looks a little bit better but we're still not there we're gonna up the greens hue a little bit yeah that looks nicer and then we're going to lower the blue a little bit there we go get that auburn that little fiery color there that looks so much better so let's look at the before and the after it just takes away that little bit of yellow tint and makes the image pop like even right there the subject is popping off the screen just a little bit more it's not much but the calibration is not meant to make large changes unless again you do you slam the slider to the left or right you're not gonna get big changes but that's not what you want what you want is to make subtle tweaks to make the image stand out more and be colored the way you want more so in the end the calibration tool is super super powerful and can really make huge changes and differences to your images you can really make them stand out and really really make them glow but it requires practice it requires playing with them pushing it too far pushing it too little and just really figuring out what it does and how it affects images again every image is different and every camera that sees color sees it slightly different so your edits your changes might be slightly different than what i'm doing but it's just a matter of learning what they do however i highly recommend learning to use the calibration tool whether in the beginning or in the end it doesn't matter learn to use it because it will make your photos that much punchier and that much stronger it makes a huge difference so with that we wrap up this video i hope you learned some things and if you have any questions i know it was a lot of information feel free to comment below and let me know otherwise subscribe if you haven't already i do videos like this every monday at 7pm go ahead and like the video if you liked it and that's it i feel calibrated i hope you feel calibrated i'll see you guys next monday i want to thank all of you guys coming back every single week to watch my videos i see you i see you and i really really truly really truly really really truly really really truly appreciate

Channel: Will Simpson - Exploring Photography

Views: 6,594

Keywords: lightroom calibration tool, the secret, to amazing edits, will simpson, exploring photography, willsbeenhere, will simpson tutorial, thewillsimpson, calibration, landscape photography, lightroom, tutorial, color calibration, tones, editing, lightroom calibration panel, camera calibration lightroom, lightroom tutorial, adobe lightroom, photo editing, get better colors in photos, fix weird colors in lightroom, lightroom color, lightroom classic, photography tutorial, photo colors

Id: 7HzZt1acg1k

Length: 20min 1sec (1201 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021