Mastering Lightroom Classic CC - 7: Basic Tab

hey guys this is Anthony Morgan T from online photography training.com welcome to my video series and mastering Lightroom classic CC in this video we're going to finally begin the process an image we're gonna talk about the basic tab that is in the right-hand panel of the develop module of Lightroom classic CC now to begin with my screens kind of busy and it could be distracting when it's busy so I'm gonna close down some of these panels for example this bottom filmstrip priority determined I'm going to process this image so I don't need this film strip down here to close it down you'll notice at the very bottom there's this little triangle click on that and we've closed down that filmstrip if I want to bring it back just click on that triangle again similarly this left-hand panel I don't think I'm gonna be using any of the functions over here on the left-hand panel and there's a little triangle there I'll click on that and we close that down even this top panel we could close that down as well and we could open them all back up by clicking on their respective triangles now as far as your processing workflow there's really no right or wrong way to do it and there's no specific order you have to go and you don't have to begin with the basic tab you could start anywhere you like you get to open a tool up and use a tool first too if you prefer but if you're just beginning I do recommend that you begin with the basic tab that will get you your image looking pretty good right away and then you could it would probably help you determine what else it needs after that so start with the basic tab if your beginning and we're going to do that we're gonna start right at the top of the tab and you can see where it says treatment color and black and white if you want this image to be processed as black and white just click on black and white simple as that you can see we have a monochrome image I'm going to process this in color now below that you'll see it says profile Lightroom uses what they call profiles to interpret the color and contrast in an image and there's a number of different profiles you could choose from by default usually when you import a color image you'll have the Adobe color profile automatically picked if you change it to black and white or import black and white you would have the Adobe monochrome profile picked but I mentioned there's a number of different profiles you could choose from to open up what they call the profile browser to look at all the different profiles you could click this little drop down and go to browse or to the right of that you'll see these four I call them bricks if you click on those you opened up the profile browser and you'll see that there's a number of different categories of profiles and i mentioned that lightroom comes with a number of them if we look right here where it says adobe raw there's a little triangle there and if i click on that little triangle it is opens it up and we could see that there's seven different adobe raw profiles and by default it picked this one Adobe color if I just hover over the other ones you'll get a sample of it in the main screen so you can see there's Adobe neutral Adobe landscape Adobe portrait Adobe standard Adobe vivid and you can see how the color and contrast is slightly different from one to another now the idea profiles it's supposed to be your base you pick the profile rather early in your processing workflow then process from that point on unlike a preset over here on the Left panel we have presets presets are meant to get you in and out of Lightroom relatively quickly you pick a preset and it adjusts everything hopefully and gives you a finished image or an image that is very nearly finished so choose a preset if you're in a hurry and you want to get in and out of Lightroom or pick a profile at the beginning of your workflow to give you a base to work off of now I mentioned there's a number that come with Lightroom we talked or I'm showing you there's the Adobe raw I'm going to skip the next two for a second and then we have artistic these all come with Lightroom black and white 17 different black and white profiles there's modern they call modern ten different modern profiles vintage ten different vintage profiles I think those are meant to give you kind of a film look now I skipped a couple here your camera has profiles as well and they're going to be specific to your make and model camera this image was shot with a fuji film xt-1 and my fuji film xt-1 has what they call film simulation profiles and those are available in post in lightroom there's a Steve soft that's asteya as a type of fuji film classic chrome pro- standard and high Pro BIA Velvia so again I could pick any of these profiles either in my camera when I took the shot or here in post in the profile browser below that is legacy profiles that are again specific to my model camera so if you shoot Canon you're gonna see different stuff here if you should Nikon you're gonna be see different stuff here even if you shoot a different model Fujifilm camera you may see different stuff here so keep that in mind now below that our profiles that you obtain from a third party I sell a number of profile as you can see there's my morgue ante alternate reality profiles black Android profiles and so on so any profiles you either create yourself using Photoshop obtained on the internet for free or by purchase would get put here so for this demonstration I think I'm going to stick with the Adobe color default profile that we're using one thing I should add though before we leave the profile browser is you could view all of them just the color ones just the black and white ones and you could change how big the grid is so when you pick grid they're kind of small if you pick large you get a large preview if you pick a list you don't get a preview at all you just have a list I prefer personally I prefer grid so we're going to close the profile browser by clicking on close and that's it I've determined I want to use this Adobe color profile now the next part is white balance white balance is very important and those of you that shoot raw will have a little more flexibility with your white balance then someone who shoots JPEG and will explain as we go there's three different ways you could adjust white balance in Lightroom the first way is obvious you could just come in here with these sliders and move them around it's up to you just move them you know if though image was too cool you'd move the temp slider to the right if it was too warm you'd move it to the left you'd move the tint slider to compensate for any tinting the temp slider did to the highlights and shadows meaning if you came in here and you moved your temp slider to the right but you noticed the highlights got kind of a yellow tinge to them your clouds became yellow and you don't like that you would use the tint slider to negate that a bit so you'd move the tint slider to the right you can see how the slider throw line here shows you kind of a color a representation of what the slider will do if you move it to the right it gets these cooler tones the tint slider to the right if I move it to the left the tint slider gets warmer tones and it's backwards for the temp slider if I move the temp slider to the right I get the warmer tones and to the left the cooler tones so you could come in here and just adjust these two sliders until it looks good to you now if I want to reset any slider in Lightroom doesn't matter not just the temp or the temp and tint slider any slider at all just double click on the name of the slider and it will reset that slider to its default position and there so I reset those to their default position now another way you could adjust white balance is with this drop-down here you can see at the very top it's a shot most of us probably shoot with an automatic white balance setting in our camera so that gets recorded to the raw file and or JPEG hopefully your shooting raw again and when you import the image into Lightroom that's what is going to be as default as shot you could change that to auto that's where Lightroom determines what the correct white balance should be and applies it to the image and then if you're shooting raw you'll have the capability of doing all these others daylight that won't be available again in a JPEG only in a raw file daylight it's as though you had the white balance setting in your camera set to daylight cloudy shade tungsten fluorescent and flash so again that's why it generally is considered better to shoot raw one of the many reasons why it's generally considered better to shoot raw is because your white balance capabilities are more versatile in post you could come in here and really adjust it very easily with this drop-down now if I'm just gonna leave it a shot I could just go with a shot but there is a third way to adjust white balance in an image and that's with this eyedropper to use the eyedropper simply click on it and when you click on it your cursor becomes the eyedropper and you notice there's a square below the eyedropper there and it says pick a target neutral what that means is you're going to look for something that doesn't have color in it something grey that's neutral and then simply click on that neutral thing with the left mouse button now you would move around just try to find some gray and you could see that you get kind of a preview or a magnification in that box of what that cursor is over so you can see right now I'm over blue sky and you can see now I'm over the trees so you can hopefully find something that is gray and then you would click on it and that hopefully gives you a perfect white balance now one little tip if you look at those numbers that are at the very bottom you'll see RG and B and there's percentages if you want to try to get the best white balance possible move this I drop her around until you have RG and B all as close to 75 as possible it's gonna be really impossible to have all three right around 75 but you want just get it as close as possible and you can see probably right you know in there I got two of them at sixty four point three and one at sixty three point nine if I click there that theoretically should give me a pretty good white balance so move around till you see seventy five seventy five seventy five and then click away and that should give you a good white balance so I like that so we're done with the eyedropper to put it away just click back where you got it from and it kind of returned it back to its holder so those are the three different ways to adjust white balance now the next adjustments are your tone adjustments and there's six sliders for that now hopefully your image is exposed properly and you don't have to adjust the exposure slider but there are times you do you might have under exposed the image or overexposed the image so you would adjust it here you add exposure by moving that slider to the right or take away exposure by moving it to the left again could reset that slider by double clicking on the word exposure and I actually got a little bit ahead of myself if we look over here to the right you could see auto if I click on auto Lightroom interprets the scene and auto adjust these tone sliders and the presence sliders which is color and clarity to what it thinks is a proper adjustment I almost never have found auto to work well at least for me for my taste so I don't use it so I'm gonna undo this now I mentioned we could just double click on the word like exposure and we reset that exposure slider but actually there's a faster way to reset a number of sliders especially these ones that are divided up into groups if you hold the alt or option key in alt if you have a PC option if you have a Mac you can see that where it says tone turns into reset tone just click on that with that alt or option key click held in and you'll reset those sliders hold that alt or option key in again and you'll see it says reset presence and click there and we reset that one slider so that's a faster way to reset a group of sliders so exposures fine on this the shadows are kind of dark but I could take care of those with the shadow slider which we will in a minute now what I strongly recommend you do is not to adjust contrast yet adjust highlights shadows whites and blacks first now I did say there's really no right or wrong way to do this you could adjust these sliders in any order that works for you but especially if you're just beginning I think it's easier to adjust contrast after you've adjusted highlights shadows whites and blacks so usually what most photographers do when they take especially a landscape image their camera will tend to make the highlights a little brighter and the shadows a little darker than it actually was so what you need to do is come in with the highlights shadow or highlight slider and pull it down because your camera made the highlights a little bit brighter than they really were the way I do it is I tend to zoom in at the brightest part of my image which is over here and to zoom in simply click on the image and then you could drag it around by just clicking and dragging with your mouse and I look at the brighter part and I'll take this highlight slider and move it to the left until I think I'm seeing detail that might have been lost because the highlights were too bright when I'm satisfied I'll just click on the image again to zoom back out then what I'll do is I might zoom in on a shadows area which are these trees are pretty dark and then I'll go to my shadow slider and I want to open those up so I'm going to move the shadow slider to the right to make the shadows brighter and I'll keep moving it to the right till I'm satisfied I'm seeing all the detail I could see in the shadows and I'm being careful that I'm not starting to overexpose the mid-tones in this case it looks like shadows have to be at plus 100 to get it to something I like so that looks pretty good now if you want to see a before and after view of your image as you're progressing with your processing there's two different ways to do that the one the first way is hit the Y key on your keyboard Y as in yellow and you'll see the before on the left and the after on the right hit the Y key again and you'll go back to your processed image another way is to hit the backslash key now some European keyboards don't have a backslash key if that's the case I'm not sure what key it would be but if you do have a backslash key you would hit it once and you'll get the before image hit it again and you'll revert back to your processed image so it toggles it from non processed to process so just like that so now we've adjusted our highlights and shadows to our liking next our whites and blacks you of course could just come in here and move the white slider in the black slider - you like the look but there's other ways you could do this I'm going to reset those by clicking on each of the names to reset them the first way is you know how we clicked Auto up here and it gave us these auto adjustments well you could get an auto adjustment for just one slider to do that hold the shift key in and double click on the word whites and it will give must the auto adjustment for whites hold the shift key in and double click on the word blacks and it gave us the auto adjustment for blacks so this is an auto adjustment but it's only for those two sliders sometimes that works whereas when you clicked Auto it didn't work adjusting all of them personally I don't care for this so I'm gonna undo that by double clicking on each of the sliders names now another way you could get a good white or black point and that's what it's called when you're adjusting your whites and blacks you're adjusting your white and black point another way to do it is to hold the alt or option key and it's alt if you have a PC option if you have a Mac and then click on we're doing whites first click on the whites slider and you'll see when I do that the screen turns black move the white slider to the right until you see something start to come through and you'll see over there on the far left middle of the screen I'm getting colors come through you're going to get red as I move it to the right you're gonna get red green and blue and then you're gonna get shades of gray and then eventually white what that means is you're beginning to clip those color channels so when you see green starting to bleed through there and a little blue starting to bleed through I'm clipping the red Channel or the blue channel in the green Channel clipping means that you're making that color so bright or dark that you're losing any detail that it could have had usually we don't like a lot in our image to clip think about it if you turn your brightness up of by making the highlights really bright your whites really bright maybe turn exposure really bright you're gonna make all those white parts of your scenes so bright in your image when you print it there won't be any detail there to print and conversely if you turn shadows and blacks down and you're making the darker parts of the image so dark that there's no detail left when you print it you're just going to have a big blob of ink so there's no detail to print so you personally usually and I personally like to preserve as much detail as possible so what you would do is you would hold that ultra option key and again it's alt if you have a PC option if you have a Mac click on the white slider and you'd usually have to move the white slider to the right usually until you see stuff start to come through then then back it off until it is either totally gone or maybe there's just a little there and right about there is probably where I would like it similarly you would hold that alt or option key in and click on the blacks slider now this time the screen turned totally white usually you would move it to the left and you'll see you're starting to clip the black you can see there's greens coming through blues and when you're clipping all three channels that's all three red green and blue channels you'll get black come through now personally everyone has their own kind of style of doing this personally I like to clip blacks a little bit I think it adds a little more depth to my image so I don't like to clip whites usually but I like to clip blacks that's for landscape images for portraits I don't like to clip either usually and even for an animal portrait I usually don't like to clip either so in this case already with blacks at 0 I am clipping the green channel a tiny bit in there and I'm just gonna move it down a little more so I'm clipping even a little more like that now that's my personal taste now my whites as I look at the image just don't look bright enough to me so I'm gonna come in here and take this white slider and move it just a little bit more to the right just to brighten up the whites a little more so usually what I do is I use that alt option method to get me close to where it needs to be and then I adjust the sliders by eye to get it to what I really like so that's how I adjust the whites and blacks usually to get a white and black point so experiment with it if you've downloaded the raw files that I have and you're adjusting this image experiment different ways and see where you could make it look good for you now below that we have the last part of the basic tab and that is the clarity D haze vibrance and saturation sliders usually I do this next and then I come back and do contrast last it doesn't matter again you could do it any order you like but I found for me that makes my images seem to pop a little better so I would come down here if you move clarity slider to the left you're gonna make the image kind of give this ethereal like blur to it if you move it to the right you're gonna be making the image look sharper and what you're doing is you're adding actually mid-tone contrast so it makes the image look a bit sharper so we'll start out at zero and as I move it to the right you can see how it's starting to make the image look sharper now you have to be careful with clarity on this image I could go pretty high with it but if you move clarity up a little bit too high you'll tend to enhance noise any noise in the image will get enhanced and be harder to get rid of so keep that in mind also if you have a very bright sky and a very dark object going up into that sky if you move clarity up too high you'll tend to make that dark object bleed into the sky you've probably seen that in some photographers images where they'll have like a black tree going up into a very bright sky and the black tree looks like it's smudged into the sky it also happens if you have a very dark background and a very bright object in front of that background the white object would kind of smudge out into the sky so that happens with clarity and a little bit with contrast you have to be careful those two sliders so what I found is most landscape images that I shoot clarity in the 30s usually is fine much higher than that then you're starting to make it look a little too sharp and or gonna cause issues with noise or that kind of smudging problem I mentioned now the dije slider is a slider that you don't Oh have to use often with especially landscape images you'll get haze in the background haze in the sky you could get rid of that by taking the ste high D hay slider and move it to the right and you can see as I move it to the right it's kind of increasing contrast and enriching the colors a little bit so from a creative point of view you may want to use this just to you know make your image look better and make a pop if I move this slider to the left I could add haze to the image so there may be a creative reason why you want to do that now for this image I think I want to move the dije slider just very slightly to the right like +8 I think that looks pretty cool now next are vibrance and saturation these really affect the color of the image vibrance will increase the saturation of every color in the image unless that color is already saturated and it will not over saturate any color so it will increase the saturation to the point of saturation and then it won't go any further on the other hand saturation increases the saturation of every color even if that color is already saturated and even if you're moving it to the right and you're starting to saturate colors it will just keep going and it will over saturate colors so saturation is a little bit more heavy-handed than vibrance also if you have an image with a person in it with skintone saturation will tend to increase the saturation of every color including their skin tone that usually doesn't look good vibrance on the other hand will increase the saturation of most colors but it tends to not increase the saturation of skin tones as much so vibrance might be a better choice when you're adjusting a portrait and you want to make the person's clothing and eyes pop but you don't want their skin to look like they were caught in the Sun you know so usually you know it's up to you I'll move vibrance to the right a little bit see what it does sometimes I'll move saturation see what it does landscape image it usually doesn't matter but I think vibrance up to 22 looks good so let's get up before and after I'm gonna hit the backslash key there is before and there is after so you could see just adjusting the basic panel really made the image pop so I'm sorry this video took so long but there's really a lot to talk about in the basic panel and a lot of different things you could do now once you're done with the basic panel if you want to bring the other panels back that we put away like this filmstrip we could click on these triangles again and bring everything back to the way it was when we started so there is our image so far now in the next episode we're gonna do a different image and we're gonna learn something else about processing in that image if I remember right off the top of my head I could be wrong I think we're gonna be cropping in that image and the crop tool is right here so we're gonna be doing a lot of different things that you could do with an image with the crop tool so look for that in the next video thank you everyone that watches my videos I truly do appreciate it I'll talk to you guys soon you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 46,425

Keywords: photography, photographer, post processing, adobe, lightroom, photoshop

Id: YHQ7dGCYO-s

Length: 27min 40sec (1660 seconds)

Published: Fri May 25 2018