LIGHTROOM TUTORIAL FOR BEGINNERS // EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW!

adobe's lightroom is actually quite a simple piece of photo editing software despite its best efforts to suggest otherwise in amongst all those big menus and tons of options for editing your photos it's actually quite easy you just need someone to help you cut through all the noise and i'm going to do that for you right now [Music] stuart carroll here and welcome to another video in our photo editing series now when i started out using lightroom many years ago i found it quite complicated and unintuitive if i'm honest and in some respects not a lot has changed but one thing that is important to point out is that as a beginner photo editor if you don't know what you're trying to achieve then your software is not really going to help you get there even if you know what all those buttons do you need to have some kind of strategy and some kind of workflow for editing that photo otherwise you're just going to get lost in amongst all the various hsl curves saturation adjustments clarity texture vignettes etc etc so the strategy i'm going to give you is as follows first up crop resize and rotate your image if required adjust your composition make it look nice on the screen do that first second up color correct we're talking about exposure contrast white balance and saturation adjustments thereby giving us a good baseline and foundation upon which to build the third step of the process which is colour grading this is when we get into our curves adjustments our hue saturation and luminance adjustments hsl and some other modifications like that after this we can proceed to the fourth step of the process which is making stylistic adjustments such as sharpness clarity and texture we can add a post-production vignette and so on and so forth fifth and finally we'll clean up the image using a clone tool or a heal tool removing any unwanted imperfections i'm not saying this is the only workflow and you might find yourself moving between the steps you could have finished all your stylistic adjustments and decide you want to change the color temperature so you go all the way back to step two color correction and adjust the white balance but as a starting point i think it's a useful framework and it helps us at least break down all these various adjustments that we have at our disposal in lightroom and give us some kind of strategy for figuring out why we are at any point in time in that given adjustment before we jump into the software itself one issue that people have with adobe lightroom is the only way to access it is to pay 10 a month or 10 pounds a month for the lightroom photoshop combination and that runs into perpetuity so you're talking about 120 pounds 120 per year which is quite expensive and added to that most of us will never scratch the surface of the photoshop functionality incredible though it is so as an alternative one of the partners that we have here on the channel is a piece of software called luminar at the time of filming luminar 4 is still the current software they have luminar ai artificial intelligence coming out either way great piece of software one-time payment for lifetime access not that expensive and has a lot of great tricks up its sleeve like ai sky replacement some great portrait tools in there as well i strongly recommend it user feedback from people we've recommended it to has been extremely positive and it is definitely a credible alternative to this lightroom photoshop combination so do check it out link in the description below [Music] when you open lightroom for the first time you'll be asked to create a catalog this is where all your files are located within the software i would advise that you learn from my mistake on this one and be prepared to create more than one catalogue maybe if you're doing photos from a family perspective you do it one catalogue per year or maybe you have one catalog per camera if you're a professional or one catalog per project even but in one way shape or form find a way of breaking it down into manageable chunks that suits your pursuits within the library module go ahead and click import work your way through the file structure and find the folder in which your photos are located here we have the nine photos in the import browser window and you can check or uncheck those photos as you wish depending on which ones you want to import now if you look at the top of the import window there we have add selected which simply means that the checked photos will be added to the catalog that we have just created for us this is a good workflow it leaves the files in place in the existing folder structure elsewhere on the computer but you have some options if you want to manage your file workflow within lightroom you can move files you can create copies and you can create copies as dng raw format as well in this instance however we're fairly confident with our file management so we don't need lightroom to modify the position of all the files create copies etc etc so we're just going to add them go ahead and click import [Music] the ability to create composite panoramas and hdr photos is one of the strongest reasons to buy lightroom over some of the competitors and it's very very simple to do so i'll show you now here we are still inside the library module we simply select the nine photos which in this case are panoramic photos deliberately taken with overlap to create a panorama image right click go down to photo merge and you'll see the two options hdr and panorama now obviously if you've selected five auto exposure bracketed photos for hdr you click hdr but in this case we're going to select panorama up comes the preview and in this instance it's already automatically cropped and it looks fantastic you can uncheck that however and try the boundary warp option which can be very good for maintaining the size of the panorama if there's nothing at the periphery of the frame that's going to look distorted when the software does indeed distort the image in this instance however we will go with autocrop and click merge and there we have it the 10th photo in our catalogue a lovely panorama that we will use to demonstrate the photo editing functions of lightroom [Music] here we are inside the develop module of lightroom which is where you will spend most of your time now looks a little bit intimidating but remember we're going to work through it with our photo editing framework that we discussed in the introduction and it will all seem pretty simple i promise you that first things first in terms of navigating our way around the photo if you hover over the photo you'll see the cursor turns to magnifying glass which you can click and it will zoom in you can adjust the zoom in parameters up there in the top left and you can get super close and pixel peep if you wish you can also drag around to access different parts of the photo press i and it will give you some information about the photograph in this case we can see we've got a panoramic photograph it shows you the file name the date it was taken and the size of that photo in pixels press i again and we get some further information in terms of the settings at the time of capture if you want to look at your photo without the distraction of the lightroom interface then press l and it will go to this semi-opacity version of lightroom but press it again and it will make it all black and it's a very good way of seeing your photo on a standalone basis [Music] as per the photo editing framework let's crop and rotate our image as required now you can go up to that box there under the histogram and click on it or you can just do what i do by default which is press r and this brings in the various range tools play around manually with the various compositions and aspect ratios or you can use one of the presets if you're creating a youtube thumbnail for example then you know the aspect ratio is 16x9 so select that and move the photo underneath that grid to figure out the best composition for your thumbnail if you want to rotate the image to straighten out horizon for example then grab outside the grid and move your cursor up or down to rotate that image [Music] step two in the process is your color correction and this is where we make exposure adjustments and contrast adjustments white balance adjustments and saturation adjustments now with reference to the histogram we can see here that we have a lot of shadows down in the far left of the image and not a whole lot else quite frankly in that image we've got quite a lot of highlights in the sky and not a huge amount in the mid tones we want to even that out a little bit and you can see it there with your eye we have a silhouetted ground and we have a fairly bright sky keeping an eye on the histogram if we grab the exposure slider and pull it to the right we increase the brightness of the entire image now that might sort out our problems with the ground but it just adds to our problems with that blown out sky so we're going to have to be a little bit more nuanced about this all that ground landscape of course it's within the shadows it's the dark part of that image so go to the shadow slider and pull it to the right keeping an eye on the histogram you see that the shadow section of the histogram slides out further into the middle of the image so we're getting some midtones out of those shadows and we increase the brightness of the bottom half of that image because we're working with a raw file here we're able to get a tremendous improvement without damaging that image and introducing unwanted artifacts and noise as for the highlights let's pull the slider down to the left and see if we can recover some detail in that sky by darkening the highlights again because it's a raw image we get a tremendous result here and recover a whole amount of detail in the sky press the forward slash key to toggle between before and after and you can see the incredible difference that we've already made here just by going straight to those highlights and shadows sliders if you look at the histogram before and after you can see how we've been able to stretch out the histogram to get a much more balanced exposure the image does however look a little bit too dark to me overall and histogram does indicate that everything is just a little bit off to the left so we can fix that let's go back to the exposure slider and increase the exposure of the image as a whole looks a bit better an alternative way to do that is to go up to the histogram itself grab the middle of the histogram and just pull it to the right it helps you work with that visual depiction in the form of the histogram and make your exposure adjustments accordingly if required you can make some white balance adjustments here you can see that i've warmed up the image it looks quite nice or stylistically you might choose to cool it down in this instance the white balance looks good as it is as for vibrance and saturation vibrance increases the intensity of the muted colors leaving the already saturated ones alone where saturation will increase the intensity of all the colors so i tend to use vibrance with caution just to add a little bit of pop to the colors pretty spectacular what can be achieved with some simple exposure adjustments here in the basic panel with reference to the histogram getting those shadows and highlights in the right place and just making those other color correction adjustments like white balance saturation and vibrance and now you know how and why we are doing that especially with reference to the histogram now in the basic panel we have a couple more adjustments here to talk about in the presence section we have texture clarity and dehaze in my opinion these are stylistic adjustments that don't belong in the basic panel but since they're here we'll talk about them anyway texture and clarity are fantastic ways of adding pop to an image but they need to be used with extreme discretion if we turn texture all the way up to the top you can get a demonstration there of how it looks for the purposes of this example we'll leave it at zero same for clarity if we turn it all the way up to the top if you're ever wondering how people get these really dramatic looking landscape photos it's normally by turning clarity all the way up to the top but we're wise to that now and it does look a little bit naff if i'm honest so you need to use it with great discretion i personally love using clarity for car photos or shots of drones here on the channel for example it makes them look really jazzy and dynamic but it's only for a certain stylized look so be careful with those sliders d-hez as the name suggests was originally designed to help remove his in landscape images add a little bit of contrast to those washed out areas so as a fun quick way of adding some contrast and saturation and generally speaking i think it works very effectively so for the purposes of this exercise we'll just add a little bit just to make the image pop that little bit more [Music] in a nutshell the tone curve is another way of adding or removing contrast from your image now contrast is the relationship between the blacks and the whites in the image the highlights and the shadows i need you to understand a point here within the gray scale we have white at one end black at the other end we can set our image and calibrate it with black and white so we want the blacks to be black and we want the whites to be white and that's what we're doing here for the purposes of this demonstration we want a fairly accurate real-life representation of the real world with our photo now if we look at the histogram we can use that as a guide to make sure that our white point is set accurately and our black point is set accurately press j to show clipping on your image that will depict in blue crushed blacks what that means is that you have sections of the image that are underexposed thereby leading dark shades of gray to show as black in the image you've crushed those blacks now for the purposes of this exercise we don't want to do that similarly at the other end of the spectrum if we have overexposed our highlights that's going to push bright shades of gray up into the white point and they're going to be depicted as white now generally speaking we don't want to do that we want all that nice dynamic range to be depicted within our white points and our black points now we have an accurate representation of the black point and the white point in our image not impacted by our eyesight or the brightness of our monitor or any other external factors it's objectively set courtesy of the histogram and peaking within the lightroom software you'll remember the whole point of this color correction exercise is to set a perfect baseline upon which we can build our look our grade and we're still at that point of setting the foundation which we have pretty much now finished that we have a perfectly calibrated black and white point how does this relate to the tone curve i hear you ask the white point that we've gone to that trouble of setting so accurately is depicted on the tone curve in the upper right corner with a little circle on the line the black point that we also went to the trouble of setting is depicted by the dot on the lower left corner of that diagonal line if we don't touch those two dots then we can make contrast adjustments within those black and white points so look at this if i create a little s curve here to add some contrast look at the histogram you can see the histogram stretching out but it's within those black and white points we're not crushing any blacks or blowing out any highlights so the first way i might look to use the tone curve is to add some contrast within those predefined black and white points by way of this s-curve you can toggle the adjustments off and on by clicking the little switch in the top left-hand corner of the tone curve in this instance i don't think it's an improvement i prefer it without that adjustment but look at the histogram you see the way the histogram stretches out without blowing out the highlights or crushing those blacks all the adjustments are made within the black and white points that we have already set if we do lift the black point you can see that we've moved the baseline of where the black should be there's no black in this image just a dark gray and it gives that faded shadow look now i really like this look in certain circumstances it can be very very stylish if done tastefully look at the histogram again you can see we've shifted the entire black point up into grays and we can do the same with the white point as well we can pull that down and bring that into the light grays for more advanced color grading you can also play around with the red green and blue channels separately on the tone curve it's not something i personally tend to do i don't really find it adds a huge amount of value to my workflow but you'll find that if you buy some presets or such like there's probably been a bit of tampering in the rgb channels of the tone curve [Music] hsl stands for hue saturation and luminance and now we are firmly into the third step of our photo editing process which is color grading we are adding a look to proceedings now that would have started up in the tone curve if you made any adjustments there but i recommend you probably come to hsl instead personally i find the rgb channels of the tone curve quite hard to control they can have some very dramatic impacts very quickly whereas hsl is a little bit more subtle on the assumption of course that we're going for a fairly realistic look with our photo editing so hue the color of any color saturation the intensity of that color and luminance the brightness of that color we can adjust all of these colors individually red orange yellow green aqua blue purple and magenta let's take the grass as an example i think it's a little bit rich it's a little bit greeny it's a little bit blue it's not very in keeping or natural looking so in this instance let's go to the green slider and slide it down to the left as a little bit of red to that hue and i think it looks a lot more natural if you're not sure what slider to adjust for any given color then click on that little icon to the left of the word hue go across to the image just click anywhere on the image and pull the slider up or down and see what adjustment it makes you can then look at the sliders and you'll see that in the case of the grass we have a yellow adjustment and a green adjustment you can follow this exact same process for the saturation or the luminance as for what color adjustments you should make the sky is the limit it's really down to your creativity to get you started i would recommend that if you find your grass being a little bit vivid then do exactly what i've just shown you there make the adjustment accordingly tone it down a bit i think it looks a lot more natural another adjustment that people do a lot is just to strip a little bit of blue out of the sky and move things into the aqua range gives you that tealish look it's quite stylish you don't want to go too far because it looks really corny and it's not good at all but it can look quite nice and something i quite like to do sometimes is if the sky is really vivid blue is just to desaturate it a little bit as well the color grading panel is lightroom's new version of its former split toning panel now it's not something i use i think it's used for very strong kind of cross processing looks and i just don't really bother with it but in a nutshell it allows you to add some color to the shadows add some color to the mid tones and add some color to the highlights individually the example is always given is adding some blue to the shadows and you can click on the shadows and adjust the slider to take it into the blue range of that little color wheel and then on the highlights you want to bring in some complementary yellow basically the color that's on the other side of the color wheel which in this case is yellow it gives some color contrast and it's certainly a good way of creating a stylized look but if you're looking for something that's somewhat realistic which is kind of what we're going for here then i'd give it a miss you don't really need to bother with this panel in the detail panel we can add some sharpness and noise reduction not a huge amount to talk about here if i'm honest raw photos don't have digital sharpening applied so it's definitely desirable to add a little bit of sharpening especially if you're shooting raw by default in our experience at least lightroom adds sharpness of about 40 to each image as for noise reduction it can be a lifesaver if you have loads of undesirable grain in your image because you had to shoot on a very high iso just be careful however because it can create a bit of a watercolor effect when it starts blending and merging all those pixels to get rid of all of that noise it can make faces in particular look a bit plasticky and you don't really want that [Music] the last thing worth mentioning all the way down here is lens corrections this can be pretty good for taking away the natural fisheye that could be present on a wider angle lens for example lightroom also has a bunch of presets in there for various lenses and various cameras so they can be quite effective at taking off the fisheye effect we have some gopro presets for example which will help you edit raw photos here in lightroom [Music] so let's recap we've cropped with color corrected with color graded we considered some stylistic adjustments like texture and clarity but we gave those a miss is there anything else we can do here within a lightroom all the way back up the top we have some more options next to that range tool that allowed us to crop and rotate our image way back at the first step of this process i want to show you the graduated filter you're going to use this quite a lot especially if you're doing landscapes or drone photography it allows us a nice quick and easy way of modifying parameters within a certain part of the image click on the graduated filter icon and you'll see the numerous color adjustments that you can make specific to that filter now let's say we wanted to brighten up the landscape let's just put in an approximate exposure increase of one stop it's a good starting point and then we go across to the image and drag on that filter and boom there you can see the adjustments been made now it's a little bit too strong in this case so we can now adjust it and we can make all manner of adjustments after that that you can see only affect the bottom half of that image and they fade out nice and smoothly so it's a graduated adjustment it's not a hard stop between those changes and the previous image for a visual depiction of the mask you've just created press o and you will see that the mask appears in red a really cool tip is if you want to add or subtract from that predefined graduated filter mask click on the brush option and you'll be able to add to that mask or you'll also be able to erase from that mask so you're not stuck with that straight line you can make any adjustments you wish in this instance we don't need any of that so we'll undo it and let's create a graduated adjustment for the sky click on new and i think what we'll do is we'll just add a little bit of purple to the sky so we'll drag the slider up into the purple and we'll add the mask and again it's far too much so we'll just slide it all the way down to the point at which we're comfortable and here we have a nice big roll off between that mask and the image underlying it underneath [Music] if you want to make some more localized adjustments then you can use the brush tool and the principle is exactly the same we set the parameters that we want within the various color options that we're going to use to paint on with the brush tool we can adjust the size of the brush the feather so the roll-off around the circumference of that brush and there we go we'll set the exposure to one here and let's just paint a little bit over the castle itself obviously it's a little bit too much but you get the idea it's a very very powerful way of just making some specific adjustments to your image [Music] wrapping up this edit let's look at the fifth stage of the process which is cleaning up any unwanted elements within the frame now lightroom has a couple of fairly effective tools here the clone and heel brushes if we zoom really close into this image we can see some little imperfections that we might want to get rid of for the purposes of this demonstration let's use the clone tool in this instance we click on the part of the image we want to remove and lightroom will take a guess at what we want to replace it with and it will do an exact replica of in this instance that grass and it does a pretty effective job you can adjust the feather so it smoothens things out a bit if you wish but either way you can go around and clone various parts of the image alternatively you can use the heel tool which does pretty much exactly the same thing but rather than directly cloning the exact pixels lightroom takes an estimation of it what it thinks it should put in place of the subject matter that you are trying to get rid of finally if you want to export those images then you just go to file export pick your settings for your quality and your destination folder for the file and you are good to go so there you have it lightroom is actually not that complicated after all at the end of the day it's giving us a whole bunch of tools to edit the photos if we don't know how to use those tools then i suppose that's our fault not lightroom so we can't really shoot the messenger in that respect but maybe the layout can be a little bit more intuitive anyway that really doesn't matter now you know how to use it and most importantly you know how to edit photos now as you know we recommend the luminar software here on photo editing i do like lightroom and photoshop but at the end of the day it's quite expensive especially if you don't need all that photoshop functionality luminar in my opinion is a lot more intuitive to use it's a lot more accessible it's got some great tricks in there like the ai sky replacement and it's got some more powerful clone and stamp object removal tools which i think is very good for image manipulation it's it's it's it's a good piece of software do check out the link in the description to that we are a partner and we will earn some commission should you purchase it but that of course does not impact our recommendation anyway i hope you found that useful many of you will have been using lightroom a lot longer than me so leave your comments and your feedback below help people out who are starting off this journey especially if you have years and years experience under your belt look forward to hearing from you and we will see you next time

Channel: Stewart and Alina

Views: 31,620

Keywords: lightroom tutorial for beginners, lightroom tutorial for beginners 2020, lightroom tutorial for landscape, lightroom tutorial for photographers, lightroom editing, how to use lightroom, how to edit in lightroom, beginner lightroom tutorial, lightroom color grading, lightroom classic tutorial, lightroom classic tutorial 2020, lightroom classic tutorial for beginners, lightroom classic tutorials youtube, drone film guide, how to edit photos in lightroom, lightroom editing tutorial

Id: DB902y1IqWw

Length: 26min 28sec (1588 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 27 2020