Nikon Bird Photographers - Lightroom Overview

let me just welcome everybody to the first nikon herd photographers photography collaboration series as stephen and i've been talking about this for a while and i just decided to do it so we had a number of folks over the last year or so actually who asked a little bit about lightroom and so this is just like my basics this is an introduction to it and I use Lightroom myself for all of my photo editing and I think a bunch of other photographers because well there clearly are a lot of other products on the market so this is just one of them so we're going to jump in just a few little things here the goal of the the overall collaboration series is to help and encourage our group members to be better bird photographers right we were just all about that and we love bird photography and we know that you guys do too we're happy to make that all these sessions interactive so questions and comments are welcome so like I said you can unmute your mind and feel free to jump in in the conversation or put something in the chat window our goal is to make this fun and encouraging and believe me there are no tips on anybody's shoulders here I am always learning I'll make another note about that there's a lot to learn and there's always something new to learn so we're excited about that and excited about the series we welcome your views and opinions recording the session as I said for your future use just a little nut again if you've got a mic please mute it if you're not talking and that's it all right how do you get Lightroom just a note if you want to write this down you can obviously search for it as well but if you go to www.hsn the Adobe Creative Cloud service software for $9.99 a month which is what I do and the Creative Cloud it downloads a little creative cloud app it looks like this and I'll show it to you in a second when it loads and there's a cloud version and there's a desktop version and you can install the desktop version or use the cloud version whichever one you want and I use the hey Jeff quarry I see your video there so anyway so there's there's both a desktop version and a cloud version there's a version for Mac and a version for PC so I use the PC desktop version and that's what it can be showing today and here my little creative cloud is starting out so adobe has this little which you'll see if you download the product this little creative cloud app and if you it'll install that and then you go to apps and then it shows you all the different applications that adobe has so that you can you can open them install them run them and things like that so you would definitely this little creative app and then just come down to lightroom to quick install and it'll automatically install it on your on your computer so just to justin up there in terms of how you get it and how much it how much it costs so it's pretty reasonable pretty reasonable okay just a note law raw versus JPEG when we get into post editing which is what we're talking about here I sort of make a note just so you're aware cuz not everyone is your camera has a couple of different modes and it can shoot in either JPEG and there's multiple sort of there's fine basic and you know different qualities of JPEG or you can tell your camera to shoot raw and or you can do both right so but just a note if you're going to do post editing with a product like Lightroom Lightroom is able to edit the raw files from your camera and RAW files hold a lot more information so JPEG files which we eventually all share on Facebook have 16.8 million colors 12 bit raw which is what my flora does and some some folks cameras do more they'll do 14 bit raw but 12 bit raw and not just sixteen point eight million colors twelve it raw has 68 billion colors so when you pull when you pull your your files and stuff into lightroom you know that it is it's pulling in all 68 billion colors and you can use those colors to recover shadows and how much are the things that we'll talk about so I encourage you to shoot raw this is just me the files are bigger of course some people are fine with JPEG it's just my opinion I like shooting raw because I like to pull everything I can out of my images so just a note there someone says they can't hear me hang on a minute well someone says I had to start over and I can hear you no okay so can every anybody else cannot hear me Jeff I know you could hear me yeah yeah so okay Rob Robert so Ken Robert can you hear me if other other people can hear me so I must be getting through and can hear me now let's see Mary Anne do you guys have your speaker's turned up maybe alright so you can hear me now alright I'm going to keep talking again we're recording the session so the reason you can hear we work we are going to post it okay so but hopefully you can you can work it out either on your PC speakers or plug in your headphone and hopefully you'll be able to hear as we go forward all right let's keep let's keep going just real quick when you hear people talk about Lightroom you'll often hear the term work for hello the term workflow is when I first heard it I thought it was something really specific and then I learned that it's just kind of the way people use the software and how they use the software in what order did they use the different modules of the software and everybody kind of has their own way of doing things so I'm going to be showing you sort of my workflow but as I do that you'll see I'll try and demonstrate all the different pieces and parts of like form that I use and just a note our cameras have you know their own little internal JPEG options right there's there's vivid and that you can edit edit those actually you can edit your sharpening and your contrast and your brightness and your saturation your hue and you can go in there and tweak these kind of things and when your camera makes a JPEG image it'll use those settings if you will straight out of the camera when it stores the JPEG on your on your on your card but that those settings affect the JPEGs but they do not affect your raw file so the raw file is just the raw data coming from your camera and no matter what you set these things to it doesn't affect your raw image at all okay so it does affect your JPEG right so if you shoot a combination of JPEG and RAW then your JPEG image will have all these settings sort of baked in but your raw image would be just straight out of the camera all right so what we're going to do here instead of instead of what when I first got my cameras is what I did I just pulled I set a bunch of things in my camera sort a bunch of JPEGs and started posting to Facebook so we're talking about with Lightroom is we're going to take the files out of our camera we're going to import them into Lightroom and what's called the library module as RAW files and when we import those files into Lightroom Lightroom is going to grab them from the memory card it's going to pull them into your computer and store them on your computer and I use Windows so it'll be this PC pictures so it creates a catalog it pulls the raw file and categorizes all those raw files by date automatically on your computer then you go from the import module of Lightroom which you'll see and you go to the develop module and this is where you pick your shots to edit where you rank your best shots you edit your shots with all these different cool things that you can do and then you eventually export your best shots down back to another folder on your computer which then you can share to Facebook or print or whatever you want to do alright so what we're going to show in this workflow overview is just real quick we'll walk around Lightroom and I'll show you the different modules and then we'll we'll go from the import process over to the develop process and then we will show you a bunch of edits and then export a couple files alright so that's a that's just an overview this little picture of Lightroom which we're going to show you in a minute and this is just one little disclaimer there is a lot I don't know about Lightroom been using it for a couple of years now and I am always learning so if I'm in the middle of this and you've got some really great ideas it feel free to text them or tell me because I I'm always open to learning new things I do personally think that when I first started editing I pulled up both both Photoshop and Lightroom and in my opinion Lightroom's a lot easier to use in Photoshop so just my opinion a lot of people just do everything in Photoshop but Lightroom is great for me and it's what I use ok that's all for the preamble now we can jump into the jump into the demo here ok let me start Lightroom my little Carolina chickadee there it's starting I thought I hadn't already started up there we go okay when lightroom first starts up you'll see a little splash screen and you'll be greeted with this overall management the lightroom photo management program the little sections in it just so you're aware that when I said library and develop they're right here so right at the very top there's a library section and then there's a developed section so the library section is where you go to import your photos so what I have tried take a bunch of pictures will go to the library section then I will come over here and I as well here's all my pictures that I've imported but I could you click the import button in order to get the pictures into Lightroom and you come over and in usually in my case if I've got my camera my camera card in my computer it shows up right here and you just click on that and it'll load up you'll see all the pictures in fact one second we put in my little card here and that's already have that in there my apologies okay so you can see my Nikon d3300 shows up and there's the DCM folder and then there's this folder and then you can see a bunch of shots and when you go into the import section Lightroom is smart enough to know even if you had tons of other shots on your cart it's smart enough to know what pictures have already been imported and what ones have it okay so if you want you can actually go through your little list here and you can uncheck all and you can come down here and say you know I want this one import this one import don't import that one because I know I'm not going to even use that one because of the birds not even looking at the camera so you can come to here if you want and sort of pre select ones that you want normally it's a little hard for me to see ever all the details so sometimes a lot of times I'll just import all of them and then deal with that later in the develop module it's completely up to you from a workflow perspective but the idea here is that you pick all of the images that you want to import and work on from your card into Lightroom and when you've done all of that you just come over here to the right hand side and you click import and I'll grab this one here and you click import and then import will grab that file it'll kind of create a new little section for you to work on and and then you can start working on your newly imported images I'm not going to work on this image here because I got a bunch of other ones let's go back to my folder so there are a bunch you can you can move around different folders if you've got other folders different dates and things you can pick different dates of different settings and different images that you've imported but but basically what you want to do on the library side is you want to get all the images down here that that you want imported and have them available in your library and then when you're all set after your import you're going to go to your develop module and this is where we're going to start working on our images okay so let's talk now in the develop module and by the way this is this session here is designed to kind of give you an overview not super in-depth detailed training so there could be I'm sure that you may have a lot of questions but if you've got questions specifically I'll do my best to answer so in the develop module when you when you go there you can see all of your images down here along the bottom and you and slide those over and you can look at them and typically what I do in my workflow when I first pull my images in I will look at them to see which ones I really want to work on so I'll give you an example here here's an image I've got an image of this white-breasted nuthatch and I've got a couple of them actually this one's a little dark but and this one is it but they both look pretty good but what I'll typically do is in your little navigator here there's you can look at different kinds of views of your image so you can see when i zoom in i one-to-one on this particular image it's a little fuzzy you know it's not quite the quality that i normally like to use i mean it look good fullscreen but when i zoom in it's not quite as good as i might like so what I can do is I can right click and say you know let's set a rating a one-star not and it's just not just I'm not wowed by that a particular picture and then I'll go to the next one and then we'll zoom in and when I take a look at this particular image oh that's like a whole different world right we've got a lot of clarity this is a really nice shot I want to work on this one so I will right click and maybe set a rating of 4 or 5 I'll set it to 4 so as I want working through my images I will basically flip through all the images and pick the ones that I want and rate them right and when I'm done rating them you can come over here to the filter and you can say show me all of the rated images actually only show me everything 4 and better show me everything 3 and better 2 and better one and better 5 and better so you have this little filter here and if you import and sometimes I do I might import 200 shots right and I'll take a little bit of time and just blast through those shots obviously the shots that I don't like to pose the birds not even looking at me I don't even rate them right I'm only going to go through and rate the shots that I think I might be interested in and then what you can do is you can which I typically will do is I'll say hey show me all of the Unrated shots in this case I'm not going to pick any of these but but you can pick all of your unrated shots and say you know these shots there I didn't even rate them and then you can delete them you can come up here and say remove photo and remove from disk and what that'll do is so you started off with 200 shots and we've just sort of gone through and ranked all the ones we're interested in and let's say we had a hundred fifty shots that we know we don't care about right and when you delete them and delete them from disk they're gone right now they're still in your little memory card but they're gone from your computer and in my case that's part of my workflow because frankly I don't have space for 18 bazillion shots I really only care about the at the end of the day the five or ten that I really love right so I will continue to just weed down the shots to get the very best ones that I like and just get rid of the old ones so that's what I do it's just me so I work through and rank all of my shots that way and then I start working on the shots that I like so let's let's take a couple of shots here and kind of work through some of them the develop modules I'll kind of walk you through all the different features and functions that I normally use and how how I use them and kind of what they do and let's see somebody is a clicking either Oh Steve's on thanks Steve for joining man okay so let's look at now the develop module so now we've we've kind of gone through we've picked the shops that we want to we want to develop the ones we want to work on let's see all the different things that we can do so over here on the well just a note here if you highlight your picture in the upper left you can see up here in the upper right it gives you the ISO your meter your f-stop and your speed so you can see this right here you can see this shot was shot at ISO 1600 it was 600 millimeters on my crop sensor F 7.1 and a hundredth of a second and this particular shot as I said when I go through and look at these I typically zoom in one to one and make sure you know do I have the quality that I really like this is a very sharp shot I love it it's and this is just the raw the raw file so we now let's go in and decide what we can do so let's take a look at all the things that we've got first thing just to note and why Lightroom didn't kind of put this at the top I don't know but there is a section down here called lens Corrections and profiles and basically if you click this remove chromatic aberration box and enable profile Corrections Lightroom will look at your image figure out what camera and lens you were using and it has profiles for pretty much all cameras and lenses that are out there and it will automatically make profile and chromatic aberration adjustments based on your camera and lens so it's a good thing to do with the disco shot was shot with a sigma 150 to 600 see there's not a big pro profile correction that happens if you are using giffany is kind of a wider angle lens it will correct a whole bunch of stuff on your lens so that's always a good thing to do sort of right up front in order before you start before you kind of start editing and looking at your file alright so let's walk through all the things at the top and I'll go through all the elements that I typically use and then we'll come back and actually mess with them crop overlay um you have an image and you want to crop it let's talk about that particular idea so here's an image of a Hummer pretty decent quality I'm happy with it but gosh I got this Hummer feeder over here I really don't want that in the shop so you can click your crop tool and you can sort of drag it down until you get an image right maybe we want a little bit of how much can we do now I don't want that in the shot right there so but that's that's a pretty good pretty good view so there so now I've got a just with a crop tool I've got a way to look at that shot and work on and edit from this perspective without my little hummingbird feeder in the picture within the crop tool as well there's a whole bunch of things that you can do we'll go over all of them but you can you want to do a 16 by 9 crop there's your 16 by 9 crop right you go back to the crop tool you can I typically start off with the with a standard 4 by 3 crop or the a shot crop I mean and then over time I will once I get the shot kind of where I really want it I may come back and pick different crops for different purposes so I've got you know I've got cards 5 by 7 cards that I sell online so I'll come back and do a crop that's 5 by 7 right do a 5 by 7 crop for that if I'm if I'm producing a crop that I want to use as a background on a computer then I'll come back into a 16 by 9 crop but but again typically I'll use it basically the add shot or the original cropped format or aspect ratio to crop my shot I normally don't mess I'll mention these other ones and we'll come back to them this particular tool is called spot removal that's a little more advanced we'll wait on that this is red eye correction you won't need that with birds there's a graduated filter which is a way to horizontally start dragging in edits from different angles but it's horizontal you can Brett drag them in it any way that you want I like never use that there's a radial filter which is a way to select part of your image to apply adjustments in a circular fashion or an elliptical fashion I almost never use that and then there's something called an adjustment brush this is advanced we'll cover it at the end I use it quite a bit in certain circumstances and then in other circumstances that don't use it at all so we'll come back to that the adjustment brush tool but right now let's just go through this particular image that I have here and through a set of adjustments and talk about the different elements that are there and what you can do with them okay so let's go through them kind of top to top to bottom first one is exposure you will see this on pretty much any tool that you use but in this case I shot this shot I was a little off on my on my metering and so it was a little dark so you can bring up the shot recover that and again I would recommend raw if you shoot raw you've got the ability to recover more shades and pull stuff out of the picture then you do if you use JPEG so I will typically work with something I'll start with something where that allows me to you know see the see the details of the bird and then I will typically come in maybe 1.1 to 2 and start looking at the details of the bird and then come down to some of the other options here now the some of these other options it really depends on the bird and how much whether or not the the picture itself will actually benefit a whole lot from the adjustment so I'm going to going to show you here like the highlights and the shadows are a couple of adjustments I use these quite a bit they're not I don't know that they'll do a whole lot for this but on other pictures they're indispensable so but highlights basically so you can see kind of this the you'll see the shading of the of the white here on this on this hummingbird here and if I pull down the highlights just a bit and I want to make a note here and Stephen and I talked about this you can completely destroy your image with all these sliders and what we're after what I'm after is just tiny slight adjustments that if the light was maybe just a little better I would have picked up some of the highlights a little more than maybe what I did or because I didn't quite have the my exposure right it didn't quite turn out exactly the way that I wanted it so so I'm making tiny adjustments but you can see here just a little bit different and I want to make a note here you've got a couple of proofing options here and you've got you can compare one shot to another which is this one and this one is the before-and-after view so just this is this is helpful a lot of times you can kind of see right I brought up the exposure and I kind of lost a bit of detail so by driving down these highlights I can kind of pick that detail back up and that helps right that helps brighten up the image in the background and everything and then pull some of that detail back that I lost by over it pushing the exposure up and then on the shadows shadows generally I will try and play and see if there's you know some value in in increasing the shadows just because sometimes and like I said with this particular this particular hummingbird shot there's not a lot of super dark areas that need to be recovered so I don't really need a lot of shadow right it's just not doing a lot some other pictures it will I'll show you a couple of those in a minute on the on that will pick another pick another shot actually maybe because we're talking about highlights and shadows let's leave this picture here picture here let's jump to another shot where this can make a big big difference right and it happens a lot when you're dealing with like all of my black cat black cap chickadee shots my Carolina chickadee shots these guys have black eyes and have a black crown and if you don't get the you don't get your exposure Ches perfect or the light just perfect sometimes it's just it's just so dark it's just the dark eye and a dark so I'm going to show you here in this particular case what you can do with the highlights and the shadows sliders so we can maybe bring the exposure up just a bit and then I'm going to do so when I drop the highlights you'll see we get a little bit more detail back in the white here alright and again either small adjustments but this is you know this is right so I pull that back a little bit get a little more detail there and then the shadows when I raise the shadows I get just a little bit of definition now between the top of the head and the eye right again these are not mm I'm not sliding it necessarily all the way but I'm making these tiny adjustments just so I can get a little more definition between there the black cap and in the eye there and you can play around with us a little bit at some point if you push it too far right you've sorted destroyed it it's just not it's not natural but but you've got these this ability by picture here to come in and just make enough edits here to pick up some of those highlights now I want to make a note here that all these adjustments that I'm making are across the whole image alright we will come back and look at the adjustment brush where you can select just a part of the image and make adjustments to just that right so but with this image right here again you can see the highlights and the shadows and what that can do for for some of your shots right it's indispensable for for shots like this right okay let's go back and I'm going to I made you know pop back and forth to different shots as we work through some of these different sliders because again some of the sliders have you know basically you know some different have different capabilities based on the based on the shop okay so let's let's go back to the full shop here back to our ruby-throated hummingbird here and let's I'm just going to go that's the fit so you can kind of see this now it did somebody have a question okay I'm more than happy for you guys to interrupt hey Steven you can interrupt me anytime please do I know you use Lightroom use a lot so okay next one but highlights and shadows then you've got whites and blacks I don't use this a ton sometimes it kind of makes a bit of a difference if I've got some some whites that are just like completely blown out I might drop the whites just a hair right to that you can see you know if it's you can destroy your shot but I may I may take the whites and just did ever ever so slightly sometimes you know changing the the blacks can add a little bit but in this case I don't I'm not seeing much of that right by the way after I make a whole bunch as I go through all my adjustments I will typically revisit the final exposure and make any final adjustments on the on the bird itself or on the picture before I you know before I export it so this histogram up here will give you an idea of where your images color wise it does pick up everything that you're currently looking at an image so you know I have all this dark green and everything and so you can see it is a little bit to the left and we do have you know some whites here but the overall exposure you want to play with that some until you're happy with it I do say sometimes I will I'll do an edit and I'll export it and then I'll kind of look at look at it for a while and I'll come back and see you know it should have been a little brighter or maybe I made it too bright you can always come back and adjust it and make some changes and re-export your photo all of the edits that we're making in lightroom are non-destructive so then all of the information tied to this image is not affecting the raw file at all it's there's a whole metadata file that holds all of these adjustments and you can come back and put everything back the way it was from the very beginning and start all over if you want so you're not ever losing anything in terms of making these adjustments okay so that's whites and blacks texture is brand new I've never used it it just came out and I'm not even sure a whole lot about what it does so I'm not going to talk much about it it supposedly it adds a little bit of texture mean kind of see what it's doing here and and that may be that may be good you know for your shot but it looks so it starts looking a little fake if you do too much so again I would stress that for many of these sliders if you make these adjustments they're just going to be very slight just little tiny edits and things suggest bring out the quality of your of you of the bird so if I ever mention mess with this it would be really really slight then there's the clarity slider the clarity slider I do use it a little bit and it just adds I generally if I use it it's plus five plus ten you know maybe plus 14 we're close I wouldn't use it a whole lot but it's there and it adds just a little bit of edge to your picture and and can help you know bring a little bit of clarity to to your subject addy Hayes I never use it it's it's kind of a strange it does a lot of weird things and I would I think that's more for maybe portrait photography and stuff like that next on the list vibrance and saturation I never use these and I don't use them frankly because in my view whenever I've tried to use them in the past they just they alter the the quality of the picture of the of the bird they just do it changed the color of the bird too much I just you know you this is it's unnatural the vibrance is really unnatural and saturation is really unnatural I don't use them they're there but again I wouldn't I would recommend them they they alter and change the color from what year originally of the bird actually it's just not natural so that just those edits right there you can see just a little exposure because it was really dark I went up two stops dropped the highlights a little bit and proved the shadows ducked the whites just a little bit and just a touch of clarity and we can come back here and look at sort of the before and after right between the two shots now let's take a look at a few other things that we can do now Stephen and I talked about this and some people again these are opinions but I do this and I and Stephen mentioned it too so I wanted to show it and you have to be careful in in this case I'm not even sure I can do it much because I'm going to maybe jump to another picture where this would work better if you have a background color that is in a different whole different category than the bird you can come down here and overall change the change the saturation of the color of the background now in this case it's tough because this is a ruby throated hummingbird and there's green in the bird and there's Griffin in the background so this isn't going to work very well this whole idea so what I'm going to do is this is kind of a really cool thing that you can do and so what I want to do is pop over to another picture where I think this could make a little where we could use this let's see maybe you're not at shot Kelly yeah maybe my yeah the nuthatch because it's blue that's a good likeness good one let's go with that one alright so here's a some of this will be close but we'll see what we can mess with some of this actually you know what let's do it this way because I know this will this will be like totally obvious this is my Osprey shot I love this shot just barely got the wing in the frame but you can see I've got this blue this sort of bright blue background so what we can do and again I'll show you how this works I wouldn't necessarily use a lot of it in this shot but this is a great one because there's such a there's no blue and the in the bird so we can come down here to the to the color I usually do you I go to you with that Kelly yep I'm going to you so you go to the hue section and you say you know what I want to change I want to see what this is so you can you can either go right to the blue slider you can actually click this little this little guy right here and drag this over and just put it over your shot and click and mess with it and you can see that in this case it's the blue slider is the only one that's affected right there's no other colors in there so again you've got this ability to change the hue so if if you have a green you can make it more yellow if you have blue you can make it slightly more green or you could make it a little darker right so you have the ability to change the background a little bit without affecting your subject without affecting the bird but you have to be careful because it can become fantastical pretty fast totally yeah you wanna you want to use it um in a situation where like like for me most of you guys know I shoot warblers and Warblers are usually yellow or in the case of Blackburn Ian's Orange and so if you have a green background and a lot of times I'm shooting into dark backgrounds I may want to bring it up a little bit and if I'm not a blue bird like a cerulean or something like that I can then if I can then without really impacting the shot too much that one that you're on Kelly is perfect yeah let's go up with you I just said a blue bird I couldn't tell ya the blue bird that's a perfect example of what I would do and maybe you bring the you up like just two to three you know like two to five from zero and just that alone you'll notice a very nice difference yeah so when you're so on this shot you would take the green and pull it more to the yellow side or make it a little deeper I would pull it more to the right side in this case yeah and if I want more of a darker effect that's a lot of times what I'm trying to do because one thing if it's on a darker bird you're going to see it kind of contrast in a nice right now in this case I'd probably pull it a little more lighter just to a little bit so there you can kind of get a little bit of a pull on it so again it is how you get is really nice it tastes yep yeah but if you if you make a big you know again it becomes fantastical very fast and you don't want any you know you don't want your pictures to ever look like paintings so I think the wave and I kind of look at things is you just very very little but but that's definitely a hack that I learned from another guy that does really amazing work but I that I learned under and it was one of his tricks that he showed me and it's just something very easy very you know it all kind of live yep yep you can also which I do sometimes you can take the saturation like on the green and I won't do it all the way but you can especially I mean I've had some times where the green is just like so bright it is just taking over the shot and sometimes I will just you know not a lot just to pull it back just a hair in order to just make sure it's not overpowering overpowering the shot so you've got the hue the saturation luminance will make it lighter or darker too which again you got I'm not suggesting just to just show you that you have this ability if you've got the separation from your subject from the from the bird to the background you've got some ability to make some tiny adjustments just to kind of pull that background so it's not so far in the way right so it's helpful it's really helpful and those of us who you know use Lightroom will will touch that a little bit here and there right actually this is a good one to keep going on let me pull up my I'm going to kind of look at and quick Eddy here on this Bluebird and that because this is a good one I want to show a couple of other things on all right so this I mean this was a really sharp shot so there's not a whole lot I needed needed to needed to do now let's so that's the that's the color section now let's go to the detail section let's go to sharpening so this is a Lightroom when you import your shots Lightroom automatically set a sharpening of 40 they kind of already do some some basic sharpening for the image but you can change that if you want to I don't necessarily hardly ever change it I really do the sharpening of a just sort of the base setting of is great and if I come in one-to-one you can sort of see if you start pulling the pulling the slider too much again it's too fantastical it doesn't you know I just normally leave sharpening right at 40 but there's one important thing that I do do and that is a mask so we have all of this great blur in the background I don't need to sharpen that so I can come down here and hold the Alt key and click the masking slider and basically everything goes white that's being sharpened and as I slide it over you can see that the background is slowly slowly slowly now the background is it has no sharpening in it at all and so I'm asking in this case at 55 is telling Lightroom look only sharpen only apply the sharpening to you know this particular section and leave the battery run that with that one more time for us because that's a really really good yeah it's really important so again in the sharpening area you're in sharpening the masking section tells Lightroom what to sharpen and what not to sharpen but you need to be able to see it right so holding down the Alt key and clicking this little and then making your adjustment with the right if I don't hold the Alt key down I can't see what's going on but if I hold the Alt key down and then click on the masking slider it shows me everything in white that's being sharpened and I just slide slide slide slide slide slide slide until the background is black and then let go and now when you use zoom in right you don't see the the background is is it is natural right it's not accident you know it's not sharpening all of these little edges and stuff that might be might be in the background we want the background to be as blurry and out of the way as possible so really great important note and I do that on all of my shots all right so that's um that's sharpening now let's go down noise reduction I don't use it I really and Steven I don't know if you use noise reduction but in my in sort of the way I try to shoot I try and get the best possible quality out of the camera that I can and when I do that I just don't have a lot of noise in fact if I have to shoot a shot and it's really high ISO in my opinion trying to apply noise reduction just doesn't fix it it's the shot has noise and there's nothing I can really do about it except to make sure that I try not to crop it much right we're at and that that's accurate it's for a lot of my shooting it's just the reality especially with the kind of photography that I'm doing it's not going to be a perfect day in fact us for us here anybody's in the New York New Jersey area it's been a pretty rough spring in terms of weather so usually the way that I would shoot would be ideally our you know first hour of day golden light maybe kind of our into it but we've got a lot of days where the light has not cooperated and also you know you're shooting into darker areas so I want to be 500 so it's going to be a little bit better in terms of you know nor good ISO but I'm used usually without certain cases to you know over 2000 ISO what I'm doing so there is going to be a need for the slider and I will tell you this I don't ever go over the slider so if I'm at 40 or 35 with sharpening I never go over that with noise reduction and I don't know if there's any fact behind that or actual study or anything but I just have noticed that if I start to click the the luminance past the sharpening amount I do notice that it tends to really take away from the sharpening of the shot so I want to try to keep in generally I will I will rarely go over 20 on my luminance on it and then really with detail I will just tend to use that at lower again because my shot doesn't need you know a sharp if the shot is sharp really all you're trying to do is just take away the noise and the pixels off of off of a shot so from my own experience yeah I'm really just kind of doing that so I don't have that access noise but it is definitely a really good tool I've used a couple of other I tried a couple other ones the Google Nick package right right DxO on the air noise reduction and they're all great but I feel like built in Lightroom option is a really good tool and like I said I generally will not go over 20 is usually kind of where we're at I put on there and it seems to take care of on a d500 up to 2,000 I usually can clean it up pretty good but unfortunately you know Joyce is going to be part of of what we do especially if you're in darker weather you'd rather get the shot with noise then have a blurry shot cockatoo shot at all yep yep okay cool so I'm gonna talk me and I'm going to start playing with this then so I haven't reused it much but but there you go from Stephen he uses it so it can help it can help you know with a little bit of noise and if you've got a higher iso in this case I have an ISO 200 on this particular shot so but it can make a difference in this case I don't see a lot of difference because I'm already at ISO 200 so let me just check these two it's not going to make much of a difference again with my particular lens now let's go through a couple of now let's say we kind of have the shot we kind of we've made our basic adjustments in terms of exposure and our you know recovering the shadows and maybe make a little adjustment here we've adjusted sharpening now let's we've kind of done that the next thing that I've start to look at is what am I going to do with this particular shot I may come back and look at the crop and what I'm going to do here just for grins here is I'm going to make this a portrait shot all right so one of the things that you do notice and I'm back to the crop tool here is that the crop tool automatically puts your rule of thirds in there are a whole bunch of other ones and you can actually come to tools and do tool see ya crop guide overlay and you can switch this to other types of ones but for me pretty much the rule of thirds works and so I don't know necessarily pick some of these other ones but it'll it'll change the it'll give you a different sort of overlay if you want to you want to use that but anyway so I choose typically just use the the rule of thirds so I'm not going to overly do this here but basically I'm want to I'm going to pick some like that right so decided this that's kind of where I want to be now let's go down and let's talk about vignetting so vignetting is this idea that you can create a either a light or a dark vignette around the image and to show you sort of what that looks like if I push the vignette all the way over I can kind of shrink it down you can see look at that so I'm just pulling in the vignette in and around the bird obviously that looks terrible but by pushing the amount all the way and then just kind of adjusting the midpoint the midpoint you can sort of adjust feathering and some other things too you get an idea of where it's going to be affecting the image and then if you double click these all day all go back to zero then I'll typically just to try it I'll come back and just touch it and and one of the things I heard this some while back and I've always sort of adhered to it the best vignette is the one you don't see so when you don't notice right so if you've been getting it can just kind of draw your attention to this your subject right but it doesn't overly look fake right so you can play with that this is generally I'll adjust this just a little bit and it's just there to you get it just just a little bit it's not a lot just just a touch to try and draw your eye from sort of the darker more to the lighter parts of the latter parts of image so that's been yeti you can go darker or you can go lighter but again that's typically all I do just just enough to to draw your you know self into the into the image and so that is kind of a nearly finished image now I want to show you one more thing that I might do I don't always do this but this is more advanced before I run into the adjustment brush tool Stephen you have anything else you want to talk about up to now because I'm going to get ready to jump to the adjustment brush and and kind of talk through that and Nick it's a little bit of a deeper kind of a thing if you're not used to it so I want to spend a little bit of time on it but I think it could help some people well I am I am all with you the adjustment brush is one of my favorite tools so I'm looking forward to hearing what you're going to talk about okay so the adjustment brush we're going to come up here I'm going to click it and when I click the adjustment brush I get kind of like a whole nother set of adjustments here and these adjustments that I have here I'm gonna put all these back these adjustments are only going to affect what I select so one of the things that I do sometimes in my photos you guys going to look at my photos that go oh my gosh Kelly use the adjustment brush one of the things you let's talk about the different components of the shot I have the background I have this Eastern Bluebird and I've got the perch right the perch of the thing that he's hanging on right this piece of wood here one of the things that we've done up to this point is we've made adjustments to try and really bring out and highlight the bird and we've kind of made some slight adjustments to the background and a little bit of vignette inkless wood is a little boring I wonder if there's something I can do to kind of punch that perch up a little bit so I'm going to use this adjustment brush and I'm basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the the basically the wood and then I'm going to come over here and make some adjustments and see if I can kind of spruce it up a little bit this doesn't always work by the way but sometimes it does so let me just show you a little bit of how this works when you select the adjustment brush you have a size and you have a feather and there's also something called Auto mask so let's talk about each one besides if you've got a mouse you can scroll your little little scroll e scroll thing in the middle between your two buttons and you can make this larger or smaller and the feather says how hard am i picking right to it for example if I put this out here like this and I drag it over the wood I'm selecting part of the wood now I can't see it there's a couple of ways you can actually see what you're selecting and one is you come down here and say show selected mask overlay and you pick that and it's going to highlight in red basically everything I selected and you can see there's this feather right where it's kind of deep dark and then it's slowly fades but I'm trying to get a pretty hard line on this on this perk here and I don't want it to go overboard here so what I'm going to do is pull the feather way way back and I'm just going to select the Selective perch now you're going to say which is absolutely true gosh Kelly you went over the lines right we're going to talk about that in just a second so but I've got I've just kind of highlighted the the wood here but it's not it's not perfect right oh I just went way over there look at that I just ruined it I'm just kidding but I went over right so what you can do then once you've selected it kind of got your basic selection there you can come back to select your auto mask click erase and I'll use a little bit of feathering here but basically what I'm going to do is when I click Lightroom is going to say you're over green so I'm now erasing everything that's not green or erasing everything that's over green right so basically it's hard to do it on the bird here but up here right boom-boom-boom so I just clean that up now to clean up right where the bird is it's a little more difficult so you can always come in and come in here and clean up some of this it doesn't have to be again I want to say you know we're using using this particular idea here we're going to we're not doing some we're not going to do super drastic changes to this background you can make this a little smaller again it just takes it it'll just take you a couple minutes right to just select what it is you you want to select and we'll come over to make sure this is kind of clean it's not the end of the world if we're a little off we can always come back and clean it up you can go really small here if you want and kind of clean this little spot off okay that's pretty good that's pretty good we've got a decent selection now on this particular perch it's not perfect but it's enough for me to show you what to do now now that I've got that selected I can come up here and I can mess with things right and what I will typically do is I will come down here to clarity and boost the clarity sometimes I'll boost the sharpness a little bit and I will mess with the blacks just a little bit and maybe the exposure that's why I like not the exposure the highlights I'll pull the highlights down a little bit I might bring the highlights up a little bit sometimes I play different different things to see maybe pulling the shadows down with a little deeper you know it's a little little cooler a little more interesting and maybe just a little more of the black there all right so that let's let's let's now let's say done now let's take a look at the sort of the before and after see so just ah a little darker a little more texture a little cooler to look at thing and then there's the Edit there's sort of my final edit on that particular portrait shot all right any questions about that but that's the idea you can do all kinds of things with the adjustment brush let me let me go to I don't wanna you can also do things that I've done this from time to time and you got to be really careful with this but let me show you we can i let's go back here I'll show you another adjustment brush saying that in this particular case I wouldn't do this for this shot but I'm just going to use it as an example here's our Carolina chickadee here I'm going to take the adjustment brush and I'm going to feather it quite a lot here I'm going to shrink it and see this and again I wouldn't necessarily do this but it's there's this little kind of dark area I'm just going to show you the kind of the idea so I can come in here and just kind of it's just just a touch now I don't again when I would normally do this where I would normally use this is if you just the shot is there so much dark and you got to pull up something a little e specific in order to kind of even something out you can do that but again I would caution you we don't want to end up with anything that's unnatural but in this case just to show you an example so I could come over here and maybe just touch the exposure up right so I just adjusted and just lightened that little section up it was a very slight thing again on this pickup shot I wouldn't have done it but you get the idea of what you can use the adjustment brush for you can use it for anything you could you know you can come in here and say okay I'm done with that if you ever have a you know an eye of the bird again if it's just not quite where you need it to be you could potentially lighten up the I just the touch maybe but again definitely want it it's one of the things that I will carefully carefully do is just lightening up the eye a little bit because you don't want it to look fake and trust me people notice it by day when you when you have a darker eye especially if you have the light on the off like you do you know that the ring right there yep on the way I'll just generally carefully try to bring the rest of the lighter brown around again it's very very minimal and really like if it looks big you're gonna look you're not you know you're not going to like it and people will notice it but if you do just a smidge Lightroom is great with that and that's something that I would that I often do and before we move on Kelly I saw Mary Ann had a question about did you use contrast on the edit so I'm not quite sure what in which edit you were talking yeah I'm sorry about let's deal with that so my opinion so let's finish this thought because it's and then we'll Mary will come back to your to your question so what I just did there is I highlighted the eye and I just touched the exposure a little bit and then I hit the white just to bring out that Glenn just a tiny bit right and there you know and there you you know there you have in this particular situation again you know we might choose to do a slightly offset of image like that or we might say gosh this is we love we love this if you drag this vertical it'll turn into a portrait and we can you know maybe do a portrait on it so any number of ways that you might want to change that you can once you have your edits you can always come back and like I said I will come back and sometimes I'll make a portrait and exports portrait I'll come back and make a 4x3 export that I'll come back and do a 5x7 export that so and maybe a sixteen by nine if I want to do a screensaver just so that I've got all of those basic formats covered before I you know before I close up shop for that particular image so anyway just to note adjustment brush use it sparingly but it can be really cool in a couple of different ways and for me it's just pack a few tiny little pulling out some shadows maybe a little glint and then I mainly use it for purchase right just to try and make that purchase just a little cooler to look at Miriam back to your question do I mess with contrast effectively contrast is a big nerrac highlight shadow white black all in one slider and in the way I typically edit is I'm using all of these individual ones to get what I want and I don't typically mess with contrast it sometimes I will get to sort of get the bird exactly the way I want it and I might just play around with contrast to see if that helps right in this case you know it that may help a little bit you got to be careful with it but yes the short answer is I typically will use contrast at the very end after I've kind of done all of my adjustments I'll come back to contrast and then play with that to see if that makes a little bit different than I like that actually so it's a really good a really great question and I will typically use it at the end usually you use it at the very end of your workflow and I tend to use it in the beginning of my work now so there you happy yeah it's a very again I think I think the one thing that Kelly really kind of drilled down is that it's a very personal way that when you're doing a workflow so everybody's going to have their own workflow and for the most part I almost think it's a way that Lightroom kind of drills it down is it almost a good workflow I do a couple of things a little bit backwards from the way that it's laid out but I tend to always work exposure with contrast especially if I have a shot where it's a little bit you know like where there's less of like a clean background like this I think sometimes but you know you can you can kind of set the background apart from the bird and the subject when you lower so if you went to a - number I'll tend to do that with more of a noisy background I end with doing it you know Kelly's using the best pictures so yeah I come back from it being out in the field and and I've got so much work to do so next time we do this I'll be I'll be the guinea pig and I'll I'll show kind of what my own workflow is but a lot of the shots that I tend to do you know there's there's some editing that I'll end up doing to kind of almost separate the bird from the background just because of the environment you know Kelly's in a different environment where yeah the perfect shot obviously you know from your where you are to where the subject is to the background right like this I feel the work that Kelly's putting up you know what I would do in that case is I might try sliding the contract down just a smidge you know wanted to do too much because then you know it'll start to look a little fake but just a little bit there kind of almost creates a little bit more separation so that's that's one of the you know hacks that I can treat when I'm editing you know when you have a clean background there's very little like you know when you get that magical shot oh my gosh everything is green and you know you got that perfect distance but you know it's very few and far between especially with warblers the way that we to shoot them especially one when you want them low there's always going to be some amount of background so what you want to do is to try to create that distance without it looking like it's fake that I won't be you know you have to be the best judge for your own uh workflow and kind of looking at it and almost having I have a few friends that I tend to send my pictures to before just to kind of get a barometer of haze you know it's a good shot or not if I don't know especially when you're working on so that'll tell you tend to do this but with Lightroom I may come back to a shot something's not perfect until you get it right so I tend to have a couple of people that I will send shots to the curb to kind of to kind of use that and it could be anything from framing with shots for cropping right you look all the little nuances but for me to kind of you know run back to where we just started on this contrast for me and workflow is one of the first things so the one thing that I would just kind of convey to everybody is you know you're going to have your own workflow and kind of using some of these hints and working demand is really the key and in becoming an expert in in editing see like I think what you just what did you just do with the clarity slider well clarity was actually all the way up so I was I was pulling it throwing it back down because I yeah so I remember one where you brought it a little bit down kind of clean clean that background up I'm going to gave you a little bit and in a way it kind of does almost look a little fantastical in the sense where you know you have that perfect green background but to me I like that to the right of the perch having those branches there it kind of creates an environment right so you don't want to always lose you don't want to know how to have that in there to me in my own shots you don't want to just have always a clean green background you want to drive dry for having that background where you have some environment in there that's what's going to make and show you know that your yep you know not shooting from you know to zoo or so I could animate cuddly yeah give the bird character it shows you know the bird has an environment and I think that that in composition and that's a whole other you know time for us to kind of hop on another one of these is to talk about composition thunder you know the using Lightroom to set this all up I think and help set the table with your composition yep totally totally one thing that I learned that I'm also kind of pass along here and I found this out by I'm going to show you this to figure out what some of these sliders do I pulled up a just a color chart and see which oh this is one so I brought up this color chart and I came down here and I want to show you one thing why some of it sometimes you got to be careful the clarity slider if you look at what it's doing to the colors you can see that it is really accentuating the the purples of sort of the dark purples on this end there's a little bit of a above a bubble on the red and on the green and then another big hop here on the blues and so what's happening when you when you adjust clarity you got to be careful with it you're increasing the Blues and what that can do in your shot and sometimes I end up doing this or at least being careful of it I don't see it so much on this particular shot but I'll highlight it as an example depending on the the sky and a little bit of the reflections of what's going on you might have a bird that that has this is all supposed to be white and if you push clarity too much you're going to start so yeah blue right and and I'll show you where it's showing up here if I come to saturation you can see there's actually blue color in all these wings all these other wing spots right here so one of the things that I do watch if I use a little bit of clarity and I'm way over exaggerating here but it's just a note if I use a little bit of clarity if I've got white in the in the bird I'll come come down and sometimes occasionally I've had to come in to the saturation on the blue just duck the blue a little bit to make sure that I'm not drawing Blues into the picture where it doesn't belong so just a little note there with all these sliders are messing with colors and the goal here is to just tiny adjustments to improve the photograph and the view and you know the quality of your your shot so again this is a little note there on what clarity clarity's clarity is doing and that's that's Lightroom now when when we're done like let's so let's let's take this particular shot here we want to export it right because we want to share it on shared on Facebook so you come down and do and like I said there's a million things you can do with Lightroom these are the only ones that I pretty much touch file export and then it brings up this little export menu and I basically I've got a folder that I that I use in this case I'm saving it into my photography nikon bird photographers lightroom training shots folder and i'm saving the file as custom name - original file number so if i come in here and put downy downy woodpecker you can see that the actual file name it's going to save on my computer is Downey - 30 - 19 okay this 3219 is the Nikon number of the NEF file and you definitely want to keep that in the name of the file so that you can match these up later if you need to for any reason I will just in my workflow I will typically do a - L if I'm saving it as landscape I'll do a - P if I'm saving it as portrait and if I'm doing a sixteen by nine I will do it - W and if I'm doing a square I'll do a - s for square s q for square in this case it's a landscape shot so I'm saving it as downy - L 32 19 and one other thing that you want to make sure is that you're saving it as JPEG and the quality is all the way over to 103 right and then you click export and when you click export you'll there's a little slider up here and you can see it just filled in and it's alright so now that that is done if I come over I use Paint Shop Pro as a sort of a post-processing view of all of my my shots here you can see that this downy landscape shot is now in in this folder alright and you can I can you know zoom in and and it's it's all set now I don't have a watermark on here we can talk a little bit about watermarking Lightroom has its own little water marking option I personally don't use that because it kind of just sticks it in one corner or another and I tend to be very specific about where I want my watermarks and I want to make sure they're kind of hidden and not too big and not too small and so I actually add my water moves the watermarks using paint shop pro but I don't know Stephen how do you do you use the lettering watermarks I hear what I do and why I tend to like it is because I have some presets and you can do this with Lightroom on where you want it to go so generally for me I have left and pretty much left bottom left or bottom right so in a case like this I would probably put my watermark on the bottom right exactly where you're pointing right where I would pin there and it usually it defaults you can set how far you want it off I don't necessarily want to have it be too big in my case I just want it on there again if the photo gets shared you want to know that it's your shot all right had a couple of shots go viral you want that you want that on there it's it's there's no real you know we talked about watermarks until we're blue in the face you know some people are over it some people are against it that matter I ever seen like you think it is important to have a watermark on your shot for for just those reasons um for identification yeah yeah there was a one other thing I wanted to just touch on very briefly and I don't use it a lot but sometimes I do in this particular shot I think I had some add some spots on my sensor and they show up here they're just little things that are kind of annoying and you can use this little spot removal tool too it's not perfect but you can come down here and just basically do that alone today and it's gone all right not perfect necessarily but you you can use it right and you can sort of feather it a little bit depending on how big it is and Lightroom will do its best to try and find a place to blend in and hide those things so if you've got some hot the clone tool in a Lightroom for my own because I will be the first to admit I do use it very it's actually toward the top of my own so they'll workflow even like so so for me and I apologize I was stuck on the New Jersey Turnpike so I don't know if you got into this when when you guys started but for me I will actually clone and do that necessary editing for me first I will tend to try to use the heal option versus the clone because the clone really becomes then you're going to especially if you're using it in a background where a green background it's you're going to want to have everything match up and it's very difficult to do that so that your feathering it in and then you're kind of lessening it so it then becomes like you're spending a lot more time than you need to be but I would tend to go for the heal option first before using the clone option but very powerful yeah yeah in certain cases I'll use Photoshop if I really get into certain things and read the whole again a whole other perceptions yeah yeah right right well typically yeah I'll drop into Photoshop if I've got to like remove a whole branch or something but it's just really kind of annoying and it serves no purpose and Photoshop can sometimes do a little bit better but you know to kind of you utilize the cloning and the heal option on Lightroom it's very powerful and if you put the time in you can you can do some pretty you could do some pretty great stuff if it does become overwhelming and daunting then you bring it to photoshop and we get into layers and again that's that's a much that's another hour-and-a-half topic down the road yeah yes totally yep so that's um yeah and he's talking about you click the little spot removal tool and you've got healing and clone options here and they're just different algorithms for for fixing things so but I did I didn't hit that before and I just want to make sure that we we touched on it and it gets good to fix a little kind of little imperfections especially in the background things like that yeah I had a situation where just just little things like you know the background where for me I tend to kind of be over analytical with my shots time to you know to a negative faults but I will try to get everything as clean and so so literally like if there's something you know weird attracting like a spider web or a bug flying or you know god forbid I get the dust on the sensor you know issue like Kelly had I will I will literally just sit there and you know kind of stare but I think for those things it's a powerful powerful tool yeah yeah totally but you can see in this shot how these are kind of annoying just yeah they're there and they don't you know and so you can fix that that kind of stuff pretty easily so that's Lightroom that's what you get so I think um Kelly if you're kind of on the back end of this I just wanted to maybe open it up to anybody with any questions Richard thanks for participating if anybody has any questions for Kelly yep you've got any comments or anything please you know please type it in and would love to have Kelly answer all of your guys questions anyone at all right otherwise Kelly's going to be tap dancing and you don't want that you don't want to see me attempt that's right yeah so uh all right I'm just waiting here but just so you guys know we are plan as Steve and I have talked about this to run some more sessions we would love to hear from you what would you like to see we've got our ideas I mean clearly we heard you know let's talk about Lightroom let's talk about Lightroom a bunch and so I wanted to tackle that one depending on the nature of the topic you know we'll you know well either I'll do it or Steven or we'll get somebody else maybe to drive it ah the old Lightroom classic yeah that that's that's a Kelly question because there's no so many versions that you know yeah of Lightroom I'm actually I'm actually running Rutte Lightroom classic so like just to say you were aware adobe updates both Lightroom classic and Lightroom cc or Lightroom cloud they both do basically the same things they're slightly different one is just running through a browser I personally like running local on my local machine so I downloaded the electro classic and everything I've showed you today is Lightroom classic so just because it has the word classic doesn't mean it it's old or doesn't have the latest and greatest stuff in it it's just classic for them is the you know the on computer version which is the one I use actually a good question Thank You Marianne appreciate the nice works well good I'm glad you guys got something out of it all right oh yeah so so in closing on my end you know for me we definitely plan on doing more of these kind of things I'd like to bring in I have a couple of friends of mine that are ambassadors from other brands I myself am a part of the Sigma influencer team so I some friends from Sigma some things from Tamron actually know someone at Nikon I'd like to bring them on to do remember that but it's all a work in progress but for me I just wanted to thank Kelly this is a fantastic presentation really really grateful to have you put this together for us but Steven thanks so much for running the whole channel we're going to we're going to create a Google YouTube channel I think Steven what that's what I'd like to do for the nikon the work yeah so all these videos that we do you don't have one place to put them there then you can just go and watch them right if you're we've already had some folks in Europe who couldn't make this that would like to watch it so we appreciate your time and all of your encouragement and we want continue to make this a really just a great group on Facebook and you guys make it great and I'm thrilled just to even play a tiny little part with such amazing photographers so thank you all and we appreciate it you guys take care and we'll post this and I'll post a link at some point when soon as I get it all packaged up and uploaded into into YouTube alright thanks everybody everybody take care you guys bye

Channel: Nikon Bird Photographers

Views: 5,490

Keywords: nikon bird photographers, adobe lightroom, bird photography

Id: 2j8xci6FUVU

Length: 88min 21sec (5301 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 19 2019