Lightroom Classic 2022 Including the New Masking

hey it's ben from digital mastery and masters academy and i'm going to show you how i captured an architectural image and made a rather dramatic black and white out of it so let's dive in and get started so first off here is the situation here i'm in google maps and street view and this is the building that caught my eye now i am a little bit into brutalist architecture just because in photographs it can make for an interesting image and in this case most of the time when i have a building that is of this height i would want to shoot it from maybe about this far away and by doing so i might be able to capture an image and not have to tilt my camera up if i have to tilt my camera up then these verticals that are here are going to end up starting to converge at the top where it looks uh smaller at the top bigger at the bottom then i usually want to avoid that uh so in this case though there's all sorts of stuff in front of the building and the building itself from a distance just doesn't do that much for me so i decided to go for something much more dramatic than a standard architectural shot and so i got up close now when you get up close you'll see that you can only get up in this area here where there's a little railing and that really forces you really close to the architecture so let's see what happened and what we ended up with so over here in lightroom here is the first shot that i got and this is when you're backed up near the railing that was there and you can see that you really have to tilt the camera rather extremely and so at this point it's kind of doesn't make sense to try to maintain straight vertical lines instead you're going to get that converging at the top kind of feeling and so you might as well go with it and notice we did have some other things in the scene now one of the issues i had to think about here is the sun the sun is right about up here in the upper left of the image and anytime it's some kind of noonday sun pointing straight into the lens i'm going to get an awful lot of lens flare which is what all this is if i want to avoid that i would usually use my hand and i would cast a shadow from my hand on the lens of the camera so if the light is not hitting the front element of my lens directly then i would avoid this lens flare but i was just trying to figure out an okay composition and so here's another one but i really didn't like the street post that's in there and i'm still getting some lens flare over in here and you can see a few dots of it over there so i took a few pictures of my wife in this case i was shooting with if i look at the lens over here on the right let's see this was a 12 to 24 millimeter which is an extreme wide angle and so when shooting with an extreme wide angle anything near the edge of your frame can get distorted quite a bit especially when you're tilting up on architecture so my wife looks extremely skinny and tall she is skinny but she ain't that tall so uh anyway this is what i did i did do a few uh yoga pictures for her and what i did to accomplish those is i just got a little closer to the ground and here's just a sequence of those but when i was done shooting her doing her your little fun i decided to take a shot of the building itself and once i really started tilting up so it's not a slight tilt where i'm trying to minimize it but i'm going with it i'm really embracing the fact that i'm tilting up then i go for extremes i get a little closer to the building but in this case there's a lot of busy stuff down here at the bottom that can distract my eye so i decided to minimize this stuff at the bottom and frame it up a little bit differently and in this case i'm starting to get a relatively clean image what i don't like about this image is the building on the right which could easily be retouched out and i think i'm just not quite even if you look on this side you see this curved area coming in and hitting this piece of concrete whereas on the other side i don't have the space for that i can't see the same intersection so i tried to clean that up a little bit more and ended up with this so now i can see both of the terminuses of that part of concrete the other thing i did if i back up one shot is if you look at the sun i started trying to deal with the lens flare and in this case the sun is positioned right in here and i thought that that would get rid of the lens flare because the sun wouldn't be directly hitting the front element of my lens but then i when i was recomposing this to really clean it up i also was very careful with where the sun was i tried to get just enough of it to show through here that i would get a starburst now most of the time i need to stop down my lens to like f22 to get a good starburst but if i remember correctly in this case i was shooting at only f8 uh and i still got a bit of a starburst so in this image this is the one i'm actually going to process i don't like the building in the upper right so i might need to retouch that out i have that street light right up here but that's easy to retouch out and it's hard to say i might retouch out some of this greenery it all depends if it distracts my eye in the end so now let's dive in i'm going to use lightroom for this but anything i do in lightroom you can do an adobe camera raw so i'm going to go to the develop module and the first thing i want to deal with is getting the image cropped and straightened and i can tell i wasn't perfectly straight here and that will make it so this image will never be perfectly geometrically perfect but i have a two options the first one is i can go to my crop tool in in the crop tool here is a little angle tool and if i click on that i could drag across the image to tell it what i would like to be level and what i might do in this case is go to where this concrete here matches the other piece of concrete right where the two touch i'd click there and i drag to the exact same spot on the other side and by doing so it'll make that straight line and it'll make that nice and straight then i could drag this in and maybe i want to bring this up so i get rid of a lot of that stuff at the bottom bring this out if it doesn't allow me to bring it out i just need to grab it by the corner up here and see what i can end up with and maybe bring that down a bit so that's one option and let's say i'm not sure if i want to go with that or not because i have one other option i'd like to try so what i'm going to do is in the upper left up here i'm going to create a snapshot and i'm just going to call it crop 1. i'll hit create and then since the only thing i've done to this image is crop it i'm just going to go to the lower right and choose reset so i can start over again and i'm going to now try my second choice on how to crop the image and that would be to try to kind of undistort the image a little bit more than just simply rotating the angle it was captured from and i'm going to do that in this area here that's called transform so there we have many different choices that are here but when you're shooting at an extreme angle like this most of these choices won't be useful except for this one called guided with guided i can move my mouse on top of the image and just like when i tried to level something i could click in that same spot over here right where one piece of concrete meets another and i can drag to the same area on the other side but it's not going to do anything with just one line defined i need to define a second line that should also be at the same angle as that and so i'm going to pick another area now i could pick up here near the top of the building but that's pretty close by this other line if i were to work further down like down here or down here it would be more effective so down here i can see these little concrete uh squares that are on both sides and so if i go to the corner of where those end right here and i drag to the opposite corner of where they end right there that's pretty far away from that other line and therefore it will be able to do the best correction but that didn't end up getting this to be just right because i can tell that this portion is not really centered and that's due to the angle i shot it at so what i'm going to do there is here i can see the center of this and i'm going to go right to where that seam is right about there and i'm going to drag way up here and right about there i can also see that same seam right there it's not the same seam but it's one that would be centered and i can just eyeball it all the way up the building to make sure it visually looks to be centered right about there and then i'll let go and so that was a different way of having it straighten the building now there are other things you can do in here i'm going to put back this little guided feature by clicking back in this little circle and i would like to do a few things the first thing is lightroom is incapable of changing the dimensions of my picture other than cropping it it can't add space to the width and height it can't add more pixels when it comes to using these features so once it's done this correction there's part of the image that's going beyond the bounds of this document and it's just trying to create the largest rectangular area that's usable but i can manipulate that and i can see what's beyond the edges using the other sliders that are found right down in here if you want to see everything just grab the scale slider and move it down and you can see what kind of a kind of correction that it made and sometimes i turn that scale way down while i'm adjusting the other sliders because if we're cropped in tight on this and i move some of the other sliders it's going to start pushing more of the information beyond the edge of my screen so let's take a look at what the other sliders do first we have x and y offset and all that does is move the picture so if i move the x offset you see it moving to the left or to the right and the y offset would move it either down or up and so if once you're done cropping you have just a little bit of the image cut off from one side sometimes that's useful uh then these choices called vertical and horizontal they will attempt to get rid of the keystoning if i wanted to tilt it one direction or the opposite to try to fix it but in this case i'm kind of embracing the fact that we have that that converging lines although i might adjust a little bit and then horizontal is useful if you shot at an off angle you're a little bit to the left a little bit to the right of center then it would swing it a bit for you but in this case i'm going to leave those then we have rotate which is pretty obvious it just rotates to your picture but this one called aspect is one i really like when i have an image like this it's going to stretch the picture in one dimension either horizontally or vertically in this case i think i want this image to look a bit more like almost a panorama where it's exaggerated so i'm going to take the aspect and if i moved it to the right it would squish the image and if i move it to the left it will expand it i think i like it when i'm moving it to the left like that so i'm going to have that all right now i don't want to crop this because if i crop this the width and height of my image in pixels will go down if on the other hand i crop this by scaling and moving it within the framing we already have then i'm going to maintain the full original size of the picture so i'm going to start bringing this up with scale and i notice it's a little bit off-centered so that's when i'll go down here to the x-offset and i'm just going to move it over until it's approximately centered then i can come back up to scale and continue with it and i'm going to get this i'm looking in the far left and far right i'm going to move this just a little bit more off to the side to get that centered all right and then we'll bring up scale some more until the left and right are close to what i want for cropping and i would say somewhere around there once i have one of the widths defined the height or the the width then i can go up here and crop because i've defined the maximum i'm going to use in one dimension now i just need to define the maximum i'm going to use in the opposite direction we'll bring that down and bring this one up and i think i want to get rid of as much of this part down here at the bottom as is practical because it's just kind of distracting it doesn't really give me the shapes that it really attracted me to this building in the first place so i might bring this up to approximately there now i do have this area on the side that i could try to fill in in photoshop but i'm not going to be able to do anything really about it here in lightroom so i'm going to make it so that that's not visible and to do so i think i'm just going to bring in my cropping and decide probably about there if i want it cropped any less i'd have to pull this up a little closer let's get it really close to that curved part at the bottom then we can max this out if you want to prevent it from being able to go beyond the edge there then there is an option right here called constrain to image and if i click on that now it won't let me pull it out beyond and now i'm just going to make it even on the other side about there and maybe see if i can pull down all right about like that now let's make another snapshot i'll just go over here to the left side of my screen and i'm going to call it crop 2. hit create and i'm not sure which of those two i'm going to like better because i was just experimenting and so let's compare the two to compare the two let's get out of the crop tool so we can see the finished cropped image and then down here at the bottom there are some choices and one of them has two y's next to each other if i click on that we can see two images side by side thought of as the before and the after and if you either click more than once you can change your view or this little menu to the right of it where you can choose between these views and i'm making mine top and bottom so we can easily fit them then there are some icons we can use here right here where it says before and after i'm going to take it and take this particular image and i could push it up here and i do that with this little arrow pointing up and therefore i'd have one of my end results up there at the top right now these two images are identical because i pushed a copy of this up to the top but then i can come over here to my snapshots and i can apply the other snapshot to the what's considered the after version of the image which is the image at the bottom and now we have that and unfortunately changed them both i didn't want it to so i got to figure out why well that doesn't make sense to me that it is trying to apply the snapshot to both the top and the bottom at the same time but it's not fully doing it i think i found a bug in photoshop because this is not what our original image looked like at the time i made that snapshot i think i had it cropped in tighter than that and we had just some rotation applied so i'm going to have to do this a different way how am i going to do it differently i'll go back to the library module and i'm going to make it so we have two versions of this picture i'll right click on this version i'm going to choose create virtual copy and then we'll have two versions of our picture and with that second version selected i'll go to my develop module and i don't need before and after so i'll just click on this icon on the lower left to get back to a single view and let's apply crop 2 to that one then let's go back to the library module and i should have two images they're cropped differently i could select both i have one selected already i'll hold shift and get the other and then down here i can compare them side by side and therefore i can get a sense for the difference in looking at the difference it's a little bit of a toss-up depending on what you're into but i'm kind of liking the wide version of the image so i think i'm going to go for that one and that's the one i'm going to process and so let's go back to our grid i just typed the letter g to get back to the grid and we're going to go for the image on the right which is our virtual copy i'll click on that so it's the only one i'm working on and then let's head back into develop and let's process this image now if you look at the image and just look at where your eye gets pulled to most of the time i find my eye goes to the area of greatest contrast that's where there's really bright and really dark next to each other and that would be somewhere near the sun because there's dark things and bright things there or the edge of the building here also my eye is drawn to color so the blue up here pulls me in and the little hint of green in this corner pulls me in so let's deal with those corners the first thing i want to know is might it be worth trying to get the left side of the sky to look like the right side and have blue over there to find out i'm going to come up here to my basic adjustments and i'm just going to lower the exposure way down to see does anything show up and something shows up but not really where the sun was you can see that i just had my exposure too bright to capture detail in that area sure if i went to photoshop i'd be able to go in and retouch something in but i'm thinking i'm not going to end up trying to do that because i want to finish this image off just using lightroom so instead i want this area here to turn white so it looks like the other side of the image well to do so i'm going to just come in here and go to this area called hsl i'll expand it and there i'm going to find various colors listed and we have headings of hue saturation and luminance i'll head for luminance because that just means brightness and we'll go for blues and just bring it up until i don't see any detail there so now i don't mind that side of the image next let's deal with what's in the upper left now when it comes to retouching lightroom can do okay retouching things that are in the corner edge of your picture but you got to be careful when you've cropped your image because it's going to be thinking about what's outside the cropping rectangle as well so i'm going to click on my crop tool just to see what's out there and since this is a white sky i think i can just copy some information from over here and move it over there to cover that up but if i was going to use something like the healing setting then it would attempt to blend in with what's out here and it wouldn't quite look right so let's go to our retouching tool in my retouching tool what i'm going to do is come over here and just paint over the area go a little bit beyond the edge case i ever adjust my uh crop and then i'm going to tell it to copy from the middle of the photo and i don't know that my sky is perfectly white yet because i could see the tiniest difference so i'll just make sure this is set to clone clone means copy directly without trying to blend in with the surroundings whereas heel i think is going to leave a hint of green up there in the corner that has to do with that they're still green beyond the edge that it would try to blend with and then i'll bring up my feathering just a little bit so that if it's not exactly the same of its surroundings at least there won't be a crisp edge there and so now we got that corner clean now at this point if you look at the color that's in the image we have a hint of brown in the building we have a hint of blue in the windows that you could barely see that are here but i don't think they're really adding anything to the image so i'm going to go under my basic tab and i'm going to click on black and white and also when i'm in black and white is when i'm going to notice a few issues like over here my retouching no longer blends in so i might need to return to that tool we used previously come on up here and click and see if i need to reposition this or need to make a different kind of a change so to fix that instead of trying to redo my retouching and all that this is a black and white image we've suspended reality already so let's just get the entire right side of the sky to be white i've come down here to the area called bmw and it reset this when i ended up converting because it it kind of ignored the brightening of the sky that i used and so here under bmw that's what replaced the old one that had hue saturation and luminosity i'm just going to bring the blues back up and therefore that whole right side of the sky is going to get bright again that's also going to make it so the area it was copying from here is brighter so it matches what's over there so it was just it resetting when i went to black and white all right then let's process the image and i don't think it needs all that much what i'm going to do is probably bring up clarity a bit clarity is going to make these shapes become more defined so they're going to stand out a little bit more and with black and white you can get rid of or you can get away with much higher clarity settings than you can with color images because you're already suspending reality then i look at this image and i want to make the bottom portion of the image down here in the corners to be darker because my eye gets drawn to the detail that's down there but that's really not where i want your eye to be i want your eye to be up in here so let's go to our adjustment tool and they've changed this in the newest version of lightroom which was just released at the end of october 2021 we used to have multiple tools up here for doing masking and now we just have one icon and once you click on that icon here you have some masking choices and there's our old brush tool so i'm going to use it i'm going to make sure auto mask is turned off just so i can free formally paint and i'll make sure both flow and density are at a hundred that means wherever i paint give the full effect of whatever adjustment i'm going to put in and then i'm going to make my feathering kind of a medium amount so it fades out a bit on the edge i'm going to come down here to the lower bright and i'm just going to click and drag like this it's putting a colored overlay in because i haven't dialed in any kind of an adjustment yet so i'm just kind of previewing the area that i might be applying this there we go then that overlay will likely go away when i start adjusting these sliders but it really depends uh this little show overlay checkbox is turned on so it might not let's find out i'll grab my white slider good it did in the old version it wouldn't i would have had to type the letter o but in this new version it does so i'm going to bring down the whites whites works on the brightest part of the picture and therefore we can get that to be darkened up i'll also bring my highlights down because that'll concentrate on bright areas and then if that's not enough i'll bring my exposure a bit until i don't want it to feel like it's black because that won't look natural but i'm going to just make it so it's you have to spend a bit of energy in order to see that detail that's in there i'd say that's good enough then i'd like your eye to explore this middle central portion of the image a little bit more than some of the other spots so over here where we talk about our brushes this brand new panel for this version of photoshop first i'm going to name the area we've already adjusted here's the mask for it if i hover over it you'll see it's in the corners here's the name for the mask i'll just double click and i'm going to call this corners dark click ok and then i'm going to click this plus button when i do it'll ask me what kind of a adjustment i'd like to put in like how i want to isolate an area and i'm going to go for my brush and this time i'm going to make sure my feathering is turned all the way up so i get a really soft brush and i'm going to paint kind of in this central portion right in here because this is part of where i want your eye to be drawn and i'm going to do that by making sure that that area has some brighter areas within it but when i did that notice that a little bit of my paint got on top of the sky i don't think that's going to matter in the end but let's just say it did let's say we had a blue sky in there and i didn't want to brighten that blue sky well what i can do is come up here to our mask and usually you'll see some features below the mask if you don't just click on its little icon this thumbnail and it'll cause this stuff to show up click again it'll go away then i'm going to say i want to take away from our mask and i can now say i want to take away the sky and so let's do that take it just a moment and now notice that the green does not overlay the sky and therefore any change that i make to this area shouldn't affect the sky which is great let's double click on this name of the mask and we'll just call this bright and center just so i remember why it's there and then we haven't actually made a change yet so let's come over here and dial in a change i want the area to be slightly brighter so i'm going to go with my whites and bring it up slightly that works on the brightest area of the image it makes it even brighter and i'm not going to do it dramatically just a little hint to pull your eye to that spot then another area that i'd like to work on is where the sun is over here i want the sun to pop a little bit more so you notice the starburst that's around it a little more since that's a different area of the picture i'll come up here to the top of the mask panel say i want a new mask and i want to use my brush to do so and i'll get a smaller brush i'm just using two fingers on my trackpad and dragging down to get a smaller brush you could have also used the scrolla wheel and a mouse to do that and i'll just paint on top of that and over here on the right i have a few options i could use but i think i'm going to go for clarity clarity is going to add some contrast to that area i'll just bring it up until my eye gets drawn to it enough all right i think that's good for my selective adjustments so i'm going to click on the masking icon to get out of that and get back to adjusting our picture now i want to make sure the sky is white and i'm not sure if it is yet or not i'll hover over it and up here just below the histogram i can see some numbers and if they don't read out 100 then it's not white it's really close to white in that area and it gets to be white about here well i don't want like half the sky white in half just a little bit darker i want the whole sky white so i could do that with my adjustment brush if i wanted to um so let's go back to our masking i'll just click on the masking icon once again let's say i want a new mask and let's tell it to select the sky for me that's a new feature and there we got our sky but notice part of the building is also highlighted and i don't want to change that part of the building so let's get the other options for this mask remember though you could toggle those options by clicking on this and i'm going to say subtract from the mask we currently have and i don't feel like painting over the building to get rid of it so when i choose subtract i'm going to tell it to subtract the subject of the photograph and therefore lightroom will try to figure out what the subject is and we'll remove it from this mask take it just a second and it got rid of most of it there's just the tiniest part right at the very top if i hover over the mask that i see so i might say again let's subtract but this time let's subtract using a brush and i'll grab my brush with my brush i don't want to have to be careful up there so i'm going to turn on auto mask and therefore it's going to look at what's in the center of my brush and it's going to try to only remove stuff that's similar to what's in the center i'll get it down to the little darker part of that top of the building i'll click and let's see maybe one more click near the left side if you try to come in here and go over an area and you find that it's highlighting something and it's because there's an icon overlaying the image just type the letter h h means hide those icons if you type it again they'll come back so if i type h then i can't accidentally click on that icon and i might be able to come in here a little closer click and get rid of that other portion so now i think i got a pretty good mask of my sky and it didn't take all that much work because of the new masking features that were in here i'm going to come up here and name my mask by double clicking on the name and i'll just call this sky to white click ok and then i'm going to bring up the white slider that controls the brightest portion of the image and makes it even brighter now i can usually tell when i've gotten the sky to be white and i can tell by looking at the histogram in the histogram this tells us what brightness ranges are used within our picture and with that black is on the left white is on the right and so you notice that there's really tall parts in the histogram just before it hits the far right the far right would be white that tells me we have large areas of 99 gray 98 97 and 96 but watch what happens when i bring whites up you see that starting to go and once it goes to a single line a single pixel thickness i know my entire sky is likely to be white because there is not a large area that is just a little bit darker but we can confirm it just move your mouse on top of the sky and i see it says 100 right below the histogram and if i go all the way across my sky it's consistent all the way across and therefore we have a nice white sky you can hover over the mass to see which portion of the image you're affecting and double check that it looked pretty good and i think it does so let's get out of that mask the other thing i want to make sure is that we have at least a small area of solid black if you don't have solid black in your image then if your image is displayed next to somebody else's and theirs does have solid black then your image is going to look kind of hazy it's going to look dull it's and so i want my images to look more consistent when they're next to each other and i almost always try to make it so i have a very small area of solid black in the image i don't need that for every image but unless the image is supposed to look hazy then i'm usually going to do it the same is not true for white but let's work with this so i'm going to go to my black slider and there's a hidden feature within this if you hold down the option key alt in windows which i have held down right now and you click on the black slider it will show you where within the image you have black and notice there's a couple little specks on the right side of the screen if i let go of my mouse but not much i usually try to bring it down until it's not just a speck it's a tiny blob and so on the left side of my image about three quarters of the way over i'm starting to see a blob i don't want it to be all that big but i want it to be more than just one pixel or two sitting next to each other so maybe about there is a good amount so now i know that i have the darkest area being solid black and at this point i'm liking the image as a whole and i just want to have a little bit more personality this is kind of brutalist architecture which has got really got a cold feeling and so i want the image to feel rather cold to do so i'm going to come down here to an area called color grading and this is where i can push some color into our image and now what i think i'm going to do in this case is i'm going to go for the dark portion of the image and i'm going to push a little blue into it so this is labeled shadows for the dark area of the image and i'm just going to drag this little circle towards blue usually i draw it quite a distance just to get a sense for am i getting purple am i getting blue am i getting cyan and see what i like and once i find what i like maybe somewhere right about there i let go and then when i grab this again it's going to try to not move away from that color it's going to try to let me just go towards the middle or towards the outer edge and it's only if i move a radical amount that'll let me swing to those other colors so now i'm going to drag towards the middle and back to the outside and usually i go for less than i think i need otherwise you usually end up overdoing it so maybe about there i don't want it to be necessarily noticeable but it is going to influence the overall feeling of the image if you want to see what it looks like without it there's this little light switch up here next to the word color grading and if i turn that off you can see just the straight black and white and if i click it again we'll turn it on and you can see just that little hint of coolness so that should give you an idea for how i ran into a scene you saw the building from a distance you saw how i walked up to it and general thought process and how i ended up testing multiple crops and processing the image now i didn't cover the details and how i think about too many of the sliders if you want me to get into that then you'd have to check out my other website which is mastersacademy.com i'm ben wilmore i'll see you next time

Channel: Digital Mastery

Views: 1,887

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Id: uioaPWNCjog

Length: 35min 23sec (2123 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 01 2021