Photo Editing Terms YOU Need to Know | A Comprehensive Guide

hi this is darlene with digital photo mentor in this video tutorial i'm going to explain some common photo editing terms that are often misunderstood or confused whether you're a beginner to photo editing or you've been doing it for a while stick around you might pick up a few tips i'm using lightroom for the purposes of this demonstration but any photo editing program should have similar or exactly the same terms so if you're not familiar with the ones that i'm using check inside the program that you're using if you're not sure just ask me a question in the comment area below and i'll try and help you out the first term i want to explain is metadata this is the information that is embedded within your file when you shoot it in the camera things such as the time you took it the exposure information the camera the lens that was used and so on if your camera has gps capabilities it will also record the location if you have that turned on so the metadata is really helpful later on for helping you to understand and even troubleshoot your images so for example you can see this one here was shot in an raf format which i'll cover in a moment that's a fuji raw file and you can see the exposure information was a third one 340th of a second at f 5.6 at 160 iso and you could see that the lens that was used was the 18 to 135 fuji lens at 18.5 millimeters all that's very helpful if you're trying to figure out later whether something went wrong with your shot you're trying to troubleshoot it or even if you just want to know what is the most popular lens that you have that you use most often most editing softwares will have some sort of way of reading or looking at that metadata in lightroom i am in the library module and you can see on the right hand side here there is a panel for metadata and there's a bunch of different options that you can choose from this list here but the exif data is the one that will show you you can see the dimensions of the file that's in pixels the date it was created so the timestamp the exposure information and all of the things that i mentioned including whether or not the flash fired what shooting mode i used on the camera what exposure mode what metering mode and so on if you're just beginning to do photography you're probably shooting in jpeg format so i want to talk a little bit about file formats in the camera and file formats that you may save your images to later raf or a cr2 or other types of dedicated camera raw files are ones that are unprocessed and uncompressed in the camera meaning that they carry the most amount of data i have an article on the website that explains the difference between raw and jpeg so i won't get into a lot of detail here look for the link to that article below the video just know that raw camera images carry a lot more data and information and you can process or push them a lot farther let me show you an example this image here was shot in vietnam and it has a lot of contrast you see that there's very dark areas in the bottom of the cave and under the cave and very bright areas on the other side let me just show you the before and after i did a little bit of processing on this image so that's what it looked like straight out of camera with a raw file the information in the file there's lots more data in the shadows and in the highlights than there is in a jpeg so i've processed this file to pull out some of those details i have the same image that i shot as a jpeg in the camera to show you the difference so i'm just going to copy these settings from lightroom that allows me to copy all the processing that i've done don't worry about these things right now this is specific to lightroom and paste it onto the same jpeg image now you'll notice that there's a lot of difference between the two okay so the color has been shifted there is a lot of detail that's been picked up in the cave but there's sort of this weird halo thing that started to happen there's a lot of noise or artifacts occurring that aren't occurring in the raw file you'll see that the raw file is much smoother and there's more data and more information there okay and that is just because of the larger file size and it is a 16-bit file which carries millions of more colors than a jpeg which is an 8-bit file okay so that's another sort of sub term of the camera formats or the file format jpeg is 8-bit which means that it carries 2 to the power of 8 colors in each of the rgb which is red green blue so there's another term that you might have heard but not sure what that means so you call your images are made up of three layers red green and blue layers and when you have an eight bit file there's two to the power of 8 so 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 2 to the power of 8 colors in each of those layers meaning 256 shades of red green and blue when you have a 16 bit file that's 2 to the power of 16 so it's not double it's literally millions of colors in each of the layers so that should give you some idea of how much more information is carried in a raw file now the catch 22 is that when you shoot a raw file you have to process it you can't share it on facebook you can't email it to somebody and most photo labs don't want you to send them a raw file either because it's unprocessed your camera processes a jpeg based on the picture or style that you have set in the camera so it applies three things color saturation contrast and sharpness so that a jpeg that comes out of camera is ready to be used a raw file is not and you must process it so if you're not currently doing a raw processing workflow you would have to make some adjustments to do the shift from jpeg to raw so a lot of times i recommend for beginners if this is where you're at shoot both for a while use the jpegs that you're used to and then shift gradually over into using raw so in the interim shoot both here's one more example of a raw file that i shot that had a lot of contrast the original out of camera the window or the data outside the window was very blown out or overexposed so i was able to pull a lot of that back using the raw file when i tried to do the same thing with the jpeg that the camera took you can see that it didn't pull quite the same amount of data it's kind of blocked up and you end up starting to get things that look like just gray so it's not really carrying the same amount of detail the other thing that you'll notice is if you go to adjust the white balance which i'll explain in a moment on the jpeg you can see the following options you can use the white balance as it was shot in the camera you can do auto or you can just dial the little dials of sliders up and down here if you look at the raw file these are the options that you have so all of the camera presets for white balance such as daylight cloudy or tungsten are still a choice here because the raw file has all that information included carrying on with that same theme the white balance you'll see here in lightroom it says wb so that's the same sort of thing that you would set in your camera and that controls the color tint of your image right does it lean towards yellow or blue or pink magenta or green and you'll notice there's two sliders down below here temp for temperature color temperature and tint which is the magenta green scale so when you adjust the temperature slider and i'm just going to take it to extremes on both sides so you can see what it does here when i go to the right and increase it it warms up the image or adds yellow and you can see by the slider by the scale here it shows you blue on one end and yellow on the other so this is the color temperature if you go all the way to the left you can see how blue it gets right now let me try the same thing with this jpeg okay you'll notice that now it doesn't have temperature it just has or doesn't have numbers like the kelvin scale it just has plus and minus so if i go all the way to the plus or all the way to the minus you can see that it's doing a lot more extreme it's much harder to correct a jpeg that has had the wrong color balance shot in camera the wrong white balance than it is a raw file raw files are much easier to correct a jpeg sometimes for example if you were indoor shooting and you had it on tungsten white balance and then you went outside and all your pictures are really blue that's really difficult if not impossible to correct and you might as well end up turning them to black and white i've had to do that myself in the past so that's one thing to keep in mind that if you're shooting jpeg you need to absolutely make sure your white balance is correct in camera so for the most part stick with auto white balance and it'll probably get you the closest if you're using the presets just make sure to change them and be conscious of that when you change from one scene to another something else that will affect the color of your image is a color profile so that could be a camera profile or it can be what's called an icc profile which is a little bit more advanced editing camera profile is something that you may have applied in the camera when you shot it so for example i use fuji in the fuji they're called film styles or film profiles so when i go into here in lightroom their profile is at the top of the basic panel if you look at these little four squares here these little thumbnails if you open it up you'll see that there's different ones available let me just close the histogram so these are all camera matching so there's some that come with adobe and the camera matching ones so these are fuji ones like astia pro via and velvia so velvia is vivid you'll notice that if i just hover the mouse over it gives me a much more vibrant uh color and saturation as well as contrast right so just by choosing the different camera profile you can totally change the color and tone of your image if you're beginning and new to photo editing one thing that you might want to consider doing is calibrating your monitor in order to do monitor calibration what that means is you have a device like this that plugs into your usb port and it runs a series of images and colors on your screen the desired outcome is that it's setting your screen to be as neutral as possible so that means that if it's gray it doesn't have a tint of pink or green or yellow or blue it's completely neutral and void of color if your screen for example is too warm or too yellow and you send your images to the lab to be printed they will come out the opposite or blue same goes for brightness levels or luminance of your monitor if your screen brightness is set too high then your prints are going to come out too dark so if you've ever had that experience where your prints come back and they don't look like what they do on your screen it's probably that your monitor is not neutral or calibrated i'll put a link to this device that i use it's called the i1 display x right it's the pro one that i use it will cost you a couple of hundred dollars but it's well worth it if you want to get consistent results with your printing the next term that you may have heard of before but not totally understand is color space color space is the amount of colors i mentioned earlier 8-bit versus 16-bit it's along those same lines so an 8-bit file is srgb and you'll see it written like this and a 16-bit file is usually adobe rgb or profoto rgb what that means is the amount of colors again that are inside of your image so the smallest one being srgb and the largest one being profoto profoto is a working color space you would never have that as your final image that you're saving adobe rgb can be printed by some labs but if you're in the united states most commonly most labs use srgb so the one thing you want to be careful of when you're saving your images and let me just open an export dialog box here so you could see under file settings here in lightroom color space is an option when i'm choosing jpeg okay so there you can see the various different ones that i've mentioned srgb they're in order from smallest to largest choose srgb when you are saving for online use or for email you also want to downsize your files when you're saving them for online i have a full article about that i'll link to that below the video as well if you are working on your files in photoshop you can work on them in profoto rgb but just remember to export in the appropriate file format whether you're printing or sending it to some source online okay so adobe rgb or srgb for printing depending on your lab srgb for online and for email for working files always use the largest possible so that's the same as when you're shooting in camera you want to use large jpegs you want to use large raw format anything that gives you a size option always choose the biggest and the highest quality because you can always downsize later you can't upsize because you can't create data that isn't there let's move along and address some more specific actual photo editing terms the first one i want to look at is cropping and aspect ratio again this is inside of lightroom but your photo editing program should have something similar so you can choose the cropping and that should be a fairly straightforward term cropping is literally just removing some of the pixels okay so if i don't like this bit at the bottom i can crop in but you'll notice that when i'm dragging the little arrows it's keeping the same proportions which is called the aspect ratio the aspect ratio original most cameras shoot is two by three okay so that means that it's the two on the short side three on the long side or four by six so if you want to keep it in that original format you can leave it set to original you can also choose custom and enter your own dimensions or you can unlock this in lightroom and crop however you want what that means is it's not going to maintain that same two by three ratio i may end up with a square or if i want something really narrow you may end up with something that's more tall vertical or if you're going the other way a long narrow panoramic and that's fine too for this image i'm going to just quickly correct the tilt because it's slightly crooked and i don't want to have all this foreground so i'm just going to crop like that for me i crop my image as it's appropriate for that image so i'm not so worried about keeping the aspect ratio in terms of the original if you're going to print something for example okay so if i try and print this as an 8 by 10 right now you can see if i choose 8 by 10 from this menu it's going to crop a little bit differently so if you've ever sent an image to the lab and got it cropped back in a weird way that's possibly why so if you're ordering an 8x10 use that aspect ratio and then you'll be able to get a preview and get exactly the crop that you want you'll notice that if i want to do a 5x7 it's different again so each of these is a different aspect ratio if you're working with instagram you're going to be wanting like a one by one so choose the aspect ratio according to print or where you are going to put it if you're using it as a facebook banner there's specific sizes and that's where you can go ahead and enter the custom size into here right so most programs will have this option and then you will get exactly the crop and the size that you need for the destination where you're sending this image for the next few terms i'm going to use this image of a grayscale so on the left is pure black and on the right is pure white and each of those is a step up between so in the basic panel in lightroom if you're using lightroom again these terms are similar in other programs as well they're pretty standard across most photo editing programs you're going to see some sliders that look like this okay so exposure contrast highlight shadow whites and blacks there's often a lot of confusion and i've explained this in a lot of my workshops and i see the light bulb go off with a lot of people as i explain this so what i'm going to do is i'm going to show you what each of these sliders affect i'm going to turn the histogram on with a purpose because when i hover over these sliders i want you to take notice that there's a different section of the histogram that gets highlighted because that's the part of the graph and the part of the image that is being affected by that slider so what you'll notice when i put it over blacks it's only affecting the very far left part of the graph okay so i'm going to drag this all the way to the right and then all the way to the left okay so all the way to the right really doesn't do anything because it's affecting it's lightening the blacks all the way to the left is adding more black okay so you see how it's what it's doing is it's grabbing the edge of the the image the data and dragging it to the left okay so if you have no black in your image watch this square here watch the third square in a rectangle those are all darkening as i go to the left so it's starting to pull the blacks off the chart and it's starting to affect the actual shadow areas but it's not affecting this half of the graph and this half of the gray scale let's try the same thing with whites when i go to the right i'm affecting that that right side of the graph now and the right side of the scale when i go the other way it's darkening but you'll notice that the left is not being affected that much a little bit but not as much let me turn on the clipping area so clipping is another term that you may have heard so what clipping is showing here in this uh instance is pure white that has no detail so that's indicated with the red highlight here in lightroom and pure black with no detail which is indicated with blue so when you look on the graph it's going off the chart on either end so when i drag these sliders now watch what happens you see that i'm getting more black clipping when i go that way and the same thing with the white i'm getting more white clipping when i go to the right so sliders in the basic panel to the right are lightening to the left are darkening now let's look at the next pair of sliders highlights and shadows okay so if i hover over the whites you'll notice the graph affecting the far right up the top of the histogram shadows now is not quite black it's just above the black so if we look at our grayscale which part do you think it's going to apply to it's going to apply to the ones next to the black let's try so to the right is lightning to the left is darkening so you could see that left of this rectangle here the right of this rectangle pardon me there's not much happening there's not much effect here watch from here to the right right there's not much change happening a little bit in this one but most of the changes are being affected in this area between a middle gray and black okay so that's where your shadows lie okay consequently the same thing applies to highlights if i drag that to the right they're going to lighten right so you see that they're becoming more white to the right they're darkening now you'll notice that look what happened when i dragged that down pure white disappeared so it's no longer clipping and up here you could see that there's nothing going off the edge of the chart as well right if i try the same thing with white it actually doesn't draw the white down below pure white or no detail so if you find that you have areas of your image that are clipping play with the highlight slider not the white slider make sure that the white isn't dragged up because you can still start to clip if the white slider is higher make sure that that one is at least set to zero but play with your highlights because that's going to affect those detail areas more so when i hover over highlights you can see that indeed it does affect the area just to the left of pure white on the histogram and that's what it's doing on the grayscale as well exposure okay so now this is a tricky one and often i will see people adjusting the exposure slider when their image is too dark and exposure slider really affects the mid tones of the image not the whole exposure so look at the histogram you'll see that it's affecting the middle part when i'm putting my mouse over the exposure slider and let's watch what happens when i drag it to the right okay so you see how it affected everything i'm not going to go quite so extreme okay so from there to about plus two you see that it's affecting all of those mid-tones everything between white and black and if i go the other way it's affecting all of the mid-tones that way to such severe degree that it's affecting the the whites if i go as far as the end and the blacks if i go as far as the other way so the exposure slider really affects the tones in the middle of your image another pair of terms that are often confused or confusing is the difference between contrast and clarity so let's take a look at those contrast is the difference between a light and dark when you use a contrast adjustment it's affecting the entire image so it's basically going to take your histogram and stretch it out from the middle so watch what happens to the grayscale image and the histogram when i drag the contrast slider to the right so it's going to increase contrast evenly on both sides okay so you could see that it basically stretched it out now i go the other way everything's coming together okay so there's more compression in the middle less on the ends that is not the case when we use clarity so clarity is looking for edge contrast and the difference between something that's touching something else one area that's lighter and darker so if i go higher on clarity see it doesn't do the same thing as contrast it's seeing these edges of these blogs and highlighting them if i go minus clarity it's going to start fuzzing those lines so plus clarity increases the edge contrast of things that already have a difference and minus clarity lowers that edge contrast you can also see if you watch the histogram now it changes it very differently as well okay so it's shifting the histogram differently than the contrast slider let's see how all of these things come into play on an actual image i've done some editing to this image already you can see that i've pulled down the highlights so let me just adjust some of these sliders and you can see in real time what happens when i'm doing it to an actual image see same thing happens here so watch the histogram it's affecting the far right when i pull the white sliders it's like it's grabbing the edge of the data and pulling it to the right so it's not affecting the mid tones or the shadows okay same thing applies when i do the blacks going to the left i notice that it includes a lot more contrast now and the color saturation increased okay and i'm going to come back to saturation and vibrance in a minute when i increase the blocks you'll notice that the image becomes sort of flat and lackluster and you can see that it actually doesn't touch the edge of the graph now so for me when i'm editing i always want to make sure that my blacks are touching the edge of the graph and there's a quick way to do that in lightroom is i hold shift and double click on the word blacks and it sets it to what's called a black end point so it's just touching the edge but not going over and if you add a little bit more black you can see how it enhances the contrast so oftentimes you'll notice that i haven't used the contrast slider at all if i want to affect my contrast i can do that with more control using the white and the black sliders affecting shadows darken lighten so just as it did on the grayscale and highlights as well okay so i use a highlight slider a lot to maintain detail in those bright areas if i wanted more detail in the top of that lion's head right here that's the highlight slider that i'm going to use if i turn my clipping on you can see that if i increase the highlight slider or increase the white slider i start to get clipping which means no detail and i can bring that back by adjusting these sliders if i adjust exposure watch the graph again so now you can really see what it's doing on the histogram it's literally pulling it from the middle from one side to the other so it's affecting the mid tones more than anything there's another way that you can also affect contrast in your image there's several ways but this is another common term that is confusing to a lot of beginners and that is curves okay there's a tone curve inside of lightroom and you'll also have a curves adjustment layer if you're using photoshop that's common in luminar and other software as well so what the tone curve is is it's literally drawing a line from the bottom left corner so imagine this this graph you can see that it kind of looks like the histogram so if i turn the histogram on see this sort of faded area in the background here these spikes it looks like the histogram in the background okay so this bottom axis is like your histogram the up and down axis is like your brightness so the left is black it's all the way at the bottom or darkest and the right is white now it starts off with a straight line meaning that it's drawing it directly from black to white if you want to affect your contrast if you just grab this line you could pull it down and it's going to affect the tones in the grayscale now notice if i pull it in the middle it's affecting the mid tones just like exposure if i go from the bottom and now i'm affecting the shadows but you can see that the the rest of the curve gets affected slightly as well which is very representative of what we were doing above with the sliders earlier so if i want to darken my shadows but i want to brighten the highlights you can now do what's called an s curve so if you've heard this term before i'm just going to go to extreme so you can really see it if you've heard the term s-curve before look at the shape of this line now it's gone from a straight line to an s shape and look at the contrast in the gray scale so if i turn the curves off and on you can see that has a lot more contrast okay so the steeper the s the more contrast in the image if i go the other way and make it sort of an inverted s you're reversing the contrast now look at the middle there's very little difference between a lot of these tones so you could do some really strange and bizarre and funky things with the curve you can even start to do things like it like this and inverting your highlights to become shadows okay this would be more in the experimental realm of photography next up we're going to talk a little bit more about color adjustments we already talked about white balance tint and temperature there's two more sliders in the basic panel in lightroom and these are common again throughout all softwares saturation and vibrance and there's often a confusion between the two of them and what they do so let's take a look in extreme this is a color wheel and i've chosen this one on purpose because the outer ring is fully saturated and the inner rings get a little bit more faded or desaturated or softer colors right because your image generally isn't going to be full of of highly saturated colors like this it's going to be a mixture so let's look at this on how it applies on this example and then on a real image so saturation is the intensity of color right so when we pull the saturation slider all the way to the right you can see that it's intensifying the color so what happens is you'll notice that it's applied differently to different colors so green yellow and red and the magenta it's applied full saturation to the entire spectrum but you'll notice in the cyan one here you notice a few of the colors haven't gone all the way so these ones are a little bit softer or muted and it hasn't applied to them so saturation really applies the most to colors that are already fairly heavily saturated or color intense if we go all the way to the other way of course you're going to end up with for pure black and white okay i don't recommend doing your black and white conversion this way because it doesn't give you any way to control the tones now let's look at vibrance so if we take vibrance all the way to the right it's going to be similar but different than 100 saturation okay now you'll notice that something very similar happened with these colors and these colors but it's not quite the same let's do a comparison so the image on the right which is highlighted by the white box has saturation to 100 the one on the left has vibrance you can see that they're very similar there's some differences in the red some differences in the pinks and some differences up here in these orange areas you also notice that there's more difference between the yellow and the green here than there is here as well as in the red tones okay so saturation slider tends to take things more extreme than the vibrant slider let's take a look at a real world example so in this one if i pull the vibrance all the way up to the right you'll notice that it's affecting the blues more than anything right and i do find that that's another sort of slight difference is that vibrance tends to affect cooler colors more so than it does warmer colors and saturation tends to affect the yellows and the oranges and the pinks as it does here in this sunset versus the other one you'll also notice that if you go vibrance all the way to the left you don't get pure black and white it's kind of close more of a muted color so often if you want to play with these two sliders i will do one up and one down or the opposite and see what happens but if you want to increase your saturation without sort of going over the top remember what i said about the black slider if we bring in more blacks look what happens when i introduce more black to the image it automatically brings in more contrast okay so when i increase the black and the white the color saturation goes up naturally so always do your adjustments up here first in the tones before you do your color adjustments so let's go back to our little color wheel and the tone curve now i only showed you adjusting the basic curve before which is set to this first one but you can also affect each individual color separately so let's see what happens when i do that in the curves if i just do the main one so it's going to affect density in the various different tones just like it did before but now we're increasing the contrast as well overall right if i go into one of the colors if i pull the slider down now photoshop has gotten smart and lightroom this is lightroom it's gotten smart and it's actually giving you a preview so it's showing me when i'm using the red curve if i pull it up i'm going to get more red if i pull it down i'm going to get the opposite color which is this cyan color so more cyan more red okay so that's really extreme but you could do some really fun types of things like you can make your highlights blue and your shadows red and so on and the similar effects happen when you're working with the green so it's green and magenta so if you're not sure which is opposite grab one of these color wheels there's lots of free ones available on the internet i can give you a link to one and then you have a better idea of opposite colors so blue and yellow are opposite on the color wheel so when you're playing with the curve that's how it works to adjust your colors there are a few more ways to alter the color of your image the next one i want to talk about is hsl so hsl stands for hue saturation and luminance or lightness so i'm going to start with l so luminance and or lightness allows you to adjust individual brightness of the various colors so what would you expect to happen if i grab the yellow slider for example and pull it up to the right you would expect that anything that is yellow or yellow has yellow in it is going to be affected by brightness so it's going to get brighter as i go to the right notice that the pure yellow is almost white now but it's also affected the colors right next to it if i go the other way we're going to see it darken the same is true of any of these color sliders so you could play around with them and really affect tones in your image based on color saturation we already talked about but now you have the ability in this tab to affect the saturation of individual colors i often will go in and ever so slightly lower the red saturation because i find that sometimes the saturation of reds it's too intense and it's overpowering so i might come in and lower it just a few like mine me minus five or minus ten if you have people in your picture i'll often increase the saturation of the orange and the yellow which gives them a bit warmer skin tone a little bit more sun tan type of look you can see what that's doing in here similar to luminance it's affecting all of the colors that have orange in them the last one is hue now this comes back to the tint of the color so you'll notice that each of these now has sort of a rainbow scale let's work on the blue one so if i shift the blue to the right it's going to shift it more towards purple so you can see the colors that are adjacent to blue on the wheel these are called analogous colors and they are side by side or next to each other on the color wheel ones that are opposite are called complementary so if you've heard that term before that's what that means so when i pull the blue slider to the right it's going to pull it more towards the purple when i pull it towards the left it's pulling those tones more towards the green so what does all this mean in the real world back to my image of the venice canal what it means is i can affect each of these colors separately so if i want to darken the sky i can affect blues you can see that it's not all blue there's maybe some aqua so nothing is a pure color you can see that that there's purple in the clouds and there's probably some magenta in the clouds as well i can increase the saturation of the blues or increase the saturation to give me more color here if i want more yellow in the buildings i can do that see it's more orange there's also some orange in the sky which is surprising so let's go back and affect the sky so it really allows you to do some specific color shifts if for example i don't like this man's hat or the color of his hat or maybe he has a red stripe on his shirt i could affect the tone the saturation and the tint using the sliders okay let's just see what color is in his hat i'm gonna guess it's magenta [Music] okay so there's a lot of purple in his hat so you can see that by changing purple i'm affecting the background and his hat i could lower the saturation if i want to make his hat sort of more gray and i actually like that or i can even shift it to a slightly different color okay so this is how you can affect colors like somebody's wearing a shirt that's a color you don't like or something in the background but do note do make note that if there was something else in the picture with the same tone it's going to be affected as well so you just have to pay attention to what else is going on in your image just a quick review go back into curves i'm going to apply some adjustments on the grayscale i'm going to apply red to the shadows and cyan to the highlights and you can literally see how that is affecting the image another way you can add color in various different ways or different areas of your image is in color grading now this may be known by a few different terms you may be using luminar and they call it they used to call it a lot now it's under the mood panel if you're using luminar ai if you're in luminar four it's called a lot or look up table if you are using an older version of lightroom you may see something called split toning i'm using the latest cloud version and it's now called color grading the difference is the split toning used to allow you to affect the shadows and the highlights and you could just pick a color and dial those up and down now you can also affect the mid tones as well so it's gotten a bit more uh complex and flexible so what i'm going to show you is kind of a split tone so you can do that in like in lightroom by using these sliders here or you can go in to choose the hue so i'm going to choose something on the yellow end and give it a little bit of saturation okay so you'll notice that i'm affecting that in the shadow area i'm on the shadow tab and then i can go into the highlight area pick something in the blue and give it blue then i could even go into the mid tones and do something different again if i wanted to add some red or something like that so you can really sort of create a tritone so try would be three three different colors if you want to make like an antique sepia tone or antique sort of like old time look what you want to do is choose something that's towards the orange you can see it's affecting there and i'm just going to make note of the number here so i'm at 48 and apply it to both the shadows and the highlights or just to the shadows okay so i want to have about 48 and maybe maybe a little bit less let's go 52 right and you can see that if i dial it up it applies to the highlights here and if i go to the shadows i can do the same here so that will give you that sort of antique brown sepia look to your image back in the days of film we had to actually use chemicals in the dark room to create such an effect on a black and white print which were quite hazardous to our health so i much prefer this method the last two things i want to cover are a bit more technical as opposed to aesthetic and that is chromatic aberration and noise chromatic aberration is caused generally by extreme wide-angle lenses and usually on the edges of your image what it means is that it's the inability of the lens to focus all of the colors the red green and blue at the same point so you end up with a color fringe you can see that this was shot with a 17 to 35 mil lens this was an old tamron lens that i was using on the canon camera so these are ones that are typically where you'll find chromatic aberration lower quality lenses kit lenses especially wide ones okay so you don't necessarily have to throw all your lenses away if you have this problem it's quite easily fixed what it looks like is a color fringe so you could see it here right here on the edge of the building you see sort of this purple outline and it's ever so subtle green outline over here to fix it we just have to go over to the lens corrections panel and again most software will have this in luminar it's called optics in luminar ai and literally just check this box off so watch what happens to this little purple fringe here when i check that off do it again so there's removed and it's literally that simple let's take a look at another spot as i mentioned it's usually going to be on the edges so you can see there's a lot of green happening on the bottom edge right just with a click it's removed on the bird you can see that there's green on one side and magenta or purple on the other side okay so those are those opposite colors again and that's just that failure of the lens to focus all the colors in exactly the same point and when you do chromatic aberration adjustments like this it actually will help the sharpness of your image because now it's registering those colors better noise is something that i actually just covered in another video i'll put a link to that one below as well but a quick example noise happens when a few things occur noise is caused by high iso this image for example was shot by accident at 25 600 iso which is extremely high but it's also caused by long exposures so often if you're doing starry skies or long exposures at night you're going to get some noise as well and also it's caused by under exposure in the camera and pushing the exposure up in processing so you may have shot a slow exposure at iso 100 or 200 and are wondering why you're still getting noise or grain in your image and what it looks like okay so i'm zooming into 300 again is this sort of speckly appearance so where you see all these little colored dots and so on this is what's called noise so the color noise is where you see all these little pink and green specks and i'm going to just turn on my noise reduction so you can see that lightroom has done a pretty good job and it's removed the color noise and it's removed the regular noise okay so you can see the difference so color noise is those color speckles and the regular noise is is all the other artifacts noise reduction is something that's a bit more complicated and as i mentioned i went into more detail in a previous video so if you want to know how to remove that from your images give a watch of that one if your head is spinning with all these new terms not to worry you will get it just keep practicing and keep learning save this as to your favorites and subscribe to the channel if you enjoyed this video until next time take care keep shooting and we'll see you soon

Channel: Digital Photo Mentor

Views: 2,144

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: photo editing, photo editing terms, photo processing, post processing, photo editing software, photoshop, lightroom, adobe photoshop, white balance, terms, raw, jpg, color space, monitor calibration, cropping, aspect ratio, tint, contrast, clarity, highlights, shadows, saturation, vibrance, tone curve, hsl, split toning, color grading, sepia toning, chromatic aberration, iso, noise, jpeg, photo file formats, tutorial, aperture, shutter speed, exposure, how to edit photos

Id: cI94ZOGeevk

Length: 45min 3sec (2703 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021