Processing with Lightroom | Huangshan

hello hello everybody I hope you're all doing really well first of all I'd like to thank all of you for your nice comments and the thumbs up on my last video from Quang Shan in China I really appreciate it the video was a lot of fun to make and of course the trip was excellent so that really does help the video production when you come away with half decent images and and half decent video as well but I really appreciate it so thank you very much this coming Saturday hopefully I'll have a second video out from from that trip but in the meantime I thought I would throw in a quick video about some of my processing now I do most of my processing in Photoshop but I know a lot of you probably just use Lightroom so I'll process this image in Lightroom because you can more or less get the same effects Lightroom is a little bit more intuitive whereas Photoshop you can really dig deep into some of the more detailed parts of an image so I'm going to process an image that it didn't have in the video the other reason why I'm making this video is that I have another announcement to make but I didn't want to just make the video about the announcement alright why don't we get right to the processing then alright okay so this is the photograph that I've picked out to process some of you may recognize this from my video or a similar facsimile of this this image here is more or less the same area but I've cropped it to bring more attention to these Peaks at the back here and the and the clouds that are kind of enveloping this whole area here you'll notice that in this image there's some quite nice light but it all seems to be over here and that was one of the reasons why I cropped it to a square to bring more attention to this location rather than over here but what I'm going to do in this photograph is I'm going to process it normally and I'm gonna try and brighten up this area to get the attention more over into the center here than this area here so how do we go ahead and do that okay the first thing that I do with any photograph that I bring into Lightroom is I go into the lens Corrections over on the right here the right panel and I will click both of these boxes here now if you've enabled lens Corrections in camera then you probably don't need to click this one here the chromatic aberration I always click especially with this lens this is a 24 to 120 kit lens I love the focal length but as far as lenses goes it's not my best lens at the 24 to 70 2.8 is a much better lens but I like the focal length there's a number of reasons why I still use that lens first of all when I bought it it was quite a bit cheaper than the 24 to 70 about a third of the price the second reason being is that it's lighter so whenever I go backpacking it's a great lens for that now it's not as sharp as say some of the the other lenses out there but to be honest with you you know for what I use it for which is 99% just posting images online with the odd print nobody is gonna really notice the difference and even with large prints the people that I sell my prints to are generally not photographers and they're not pixel peeking at my my prints so does it really matter well if it's a personal thing yes but it honestly you're really not going to notice a huge difference in the final products chromatic aberration it does have some of that and sometimes it's worse than others so if i zoom in say two to one here and unclick the box here you'll notice that there's a little bit of fringing around the edge here there's some green there and this probably pink and purple on the other side here yes you right here but again you know this is that 200% it's it's minimal but anyway I'll click it and I'll click the enable profile Corrections as well okay the next step is sharpening now generally speaking I don't do an awful lot of sharpening on my RAW files I wait until I figure out what the output is so say I'm making a sixteen by twenty print then I will sharpen it then for that for that medium or if I'm using it to post online then I'll sharpen it according to whatever I'm posting it to so I generally just leave it on the default occasionally I might fiddle with it a little bit more but as you can see the sharpness is is pretty half decent even with even with that 24 to 120 if you go to the corners here way down here you starts to get a little bit soft but honestly you people are really not going to notice that so Gavin you got any great troops planned this year yeah yeah I'm really excited about that Faroe Islands workshop yeah oh god I'd love to go there would you know yeah well why don't you just join me and being like a co-leader on this workshop [Music] all types of things are gonna be sure or we've got dramatic waterfalls off of cliffs directly into the ocean we've got epic seascapes beautiful islands cultural historical landmarks and lots and lots of green I love green that sounds brilliant you know what we can make it really exclusive by invite maybe I don't know 10 people 10 people and what kinds of things would we include in that well let's include accomodation yeah transportation and of course instruction from two very attractive instructors well one there me registration for this workshop opens on March 27th and it's only open for one week so if you want to get on this it closes April 3rd jump on it hope to see you there all right okay so the next step I'm just gonna jump to the basic panel here and just do some overall kind of adjustments to the image so the first adjustment I'm going to do is I'm gonna warm it up a little bit so it looks a little bit cool to me so I'm just gonna pull the yellow over a little bit a word about tint here I hardly ever use the tint occasionally I'll use it for forest photography but I don't I don't fiddle with it because every time I pull over into the magenta it always looks to read to me and the same with the green so I try to leave it at zero or plus one so I just don't touch that exposure so what I want to do here is open up these shadows obviously the shadows are very dark the highlights are exposed almost perfectly so for this image I actually exposed for the clouds the brightest areas so of course as soon as you do that then any of the shadows or the dark areas are going to be extremely dark so if you look down here you can actually see the blacks are starting to get a little bit clogged up here and actually if I pull the black slider down you can see that where on the verge of of getting no detail whatsoever so the first thing I'm going to do is is give this a little bit more exposure and open up the shadows a bit more and you'll notice it's improved drastically already the black side I generally don't touch if we just zoom in here okay we'll just pull them back a little bit the thing is is that as soon as we start fiddling with the sliders with with the shadows and the highlights say I bring the whites down it starts to really flatten out the image and that's not a bad thing if I was bringing this into Photoshop then I can adjust you from there I kind of like starting off with a flat image but if I'm just working at it in Lightroom then I don't really want to flatten it now I don't want it to look HD Irish so we'll leave the whites for now we're just gonna try and fiddle with this so that we get what we want more or less on the rocks and the frosted trees down here we're gonna warm it up just a little bit the vibrance bring up a little bit and of course we keep adjusting to taste as we as we go along here the clarity I'm not going to touch at all all the d haze the vibrance I've definitely brought it up just a bit too much okay all right that looks pretty good overall but you'll notice as soon as you look at this photograph we look at this cliff here which isn't a bad thing but I want the viewers attention to go over it over to here so how are we going to do that okay so I've more or less got the image at a kind of a base exposure of where I want it so the next thing I'm going to do is just go up to this little box here and this is one over sixteen I'm just gonna reduce the size of this all the way down I'm gonna grab the radial tool here and just make a really big radial I'm just going to turn it just slightly here so what I want to do is I want to reduce the exposure of the sky but maintain the exposure of the mountain side here so how can we do that okay so just adjust you know what I'm going to do now is go over to the range mask and just go to the luminance now Thomas Heaton did a video of this a few weeks ago which was really good so I'll just I'll just run over it really quickly what I want to do is I want to affect the exposure of the sky but not necessarily the mountain so this range mask will allow you to do that so if you look over here is his range and on the left side that's your shadows so when you bring it up to the center it doesn't affect the shadows so much and if you go over to the right here and bring that down then anything that you do to the image won't affect the highlights so much so what we want to do here now first of all I've I've got the selected mask on just so I can see which areas in general my adjustments are going to affect which is the sky here but we're trying to keep this area bright so something like that I'm just going to turn the mask off and I'm just gonna bring the exposure down just a little bit and the shadows increase the contrast the highlights bring down a little bit and the whites not too much I want to feather it a bit more [Music] okay that looks half-decent now I'm just gonna go down to the mascara clicked on the show luminance mask and I'm just gonna bring the slider up for the shadows area you'll notice that all of sudden the mask is starting to disappear from the mountainside which is what which is what I want something like that the highlights will leave and then the smoothness because we want it to be more of a gradual thing we don't want it to be too abrupt okay let's see what that looks like yeah I think that looks okay okay now I'm just gonna go over to where it says new here and I'm gonna make another radial mask this time quite a bit smaller and actually we could probably make this a little bit larger so we could see what we're doing so with this radial mask what I'm going to do is brighten up this area so I'm going to feather it and just bring the exposure up just slightly oops so you'll notice that it actually increased the exposure around the radio tool and not inside because I forgot to click on this little box here invert and you'll notice that now it's just affecting the area inside the circle here so we'll just play with that until we get somewhat of an effect that we want we we don't but we don't want it to look too too obvious it's just a matter of playing around with it until it gets the point where it looks right to you you'll notice that if I go too far then the highlights start to get blown out so I want to bring them just below that point just keep sliding the whites down down down until there's no red left something like that just zoom out here we go to 1/8 and if I click on this little box here you can kind of see the effect that we've had on this area so you'll notice that all of a sudden whereas our eyes looking at this column of rock here now if I click on this the effect that we've made with the radial tool it's brightened up this area here and now we're looking at this area a little bit more than this one but we could still improve this we could probably darken this area a little bit and perhaps bright in this area just a little bit more so I'm just going to turn off the radial tool here ok now this image is still looking a little bit flat and even though the outside of the frame is really interesting the most interesting part for me is this central portion here these jagged peaks coming up and this lit area here so what I do in a lot of my photographs is I actually add a vignette just kind of dark on the edges so that your attention is brought more to this central area and you'll notice that in this photograph here which was in my video the the bottom is very dark and you can see a bit of a vignette in the and the clouds here and the central portion is quite bright and I'm gonna do the same thing here so I'm going over to the radio tool again and I'm just going to whoops just going to make a general radial I'll probably extend it out to the edges a little bit here and then I'm just going to start bringing the exposure down to a point where I like it no I don't want it so dark that you know this is black white black that looks pretty good there you notice that now all of a sudden your attention is brought to this area because it's just so dark round here now the blacks are getting a little bit dark so what I'm going to do is is brighten them up just a tad I'll flatten them out okay that looks pretty good and this area let's just try and further that a little bit and see what that does see I don't want to break this up too much because I want the attention on on this section here more than here so something like that actually might look better we can always brighten these up afterwards if they're too dark [Music] just turn that a little bit as you can see there's no right or wrong way to do this is all by feel and and and what looks good to you see I quite like that too but then this is getting a little bit too dark so we extend it to about there [Music] all right then we're just gonna bring up the blacks just a little bit more okay let's see what that looks like so if you Chris so if you press F on your keyboard it'll make a black background and you can get a better idea of what you're looking at okay so we're almost done here there's just a couple of things that I wanted to do I think I'm going to darken this slope just a little bit here bring more attention to this I quite like these little pinnacles here so I'm gonna brighten those up just a just a little bit and the way I can do that is I'll just go over to the brush tool here and I'll just generally paint over here I don't know why my computer's acting up so slow today okay and I'll just unclick that now I'm going to brighten that up so probably the easiest way just increase the exposures slightly it doesn't have to be a lot now that looks pretty good now if we zoom in on that if I'm concerned about the adjustments that I just made on the shadow areas I can always go down to the range mask here again to the luminance area and just bring the shadows slider to the center a little bit so it doesn't affect the shadows as much so I could actually increase the exposure slightly so let's brighten it up quite a bit and then just keep bringing up the shadow slider and then I'll actually bring the shadows back down to what they they were originally so if you click on this little tab here you can see the effect that we've had on that little area okay now I'm going to do the same with this section here I'm just gonna bring the exposure up slightly now have to be a little bit careful with this one because I don't want to bring the mask over to the sky here because the range mask might have a hard time with that we'll go to a new brush so we're not affecting this area here shows selected mask overlay and then we'll just paint this okay and we'll just turn that off and I'm just gonna bring the exposure up not too much just that's way too much it's about there and again I'm gonna go down to range mask here luminance and just adjust that slider and let's see the effect we made on that there we go just zoom out here okay and then lastly two more things to do I'm just gonna darken this slightly and brighten this up as much as I can without blowing out the highlights so I think the first thing I'll do is just dark on this a little bit so we'll go for a new brush again and this time I'm going to feather it just a little bit more turn the mask on again so I can see what I'm doing here now if I didn't want to go over the edges I could turn on the auto mask and actually maybe I'll do that so just turn on the auto mask and this is the area that I want darkened this area here so let's just start painting in there I said I'm not sure why my computer is acting up today but for you to have too many things running on in the background as usual alright that's pretty good we'll just turn that off and then I'm just going to adjust the exposure so maybe I'll just bring the shadows down we could try the exposure but we don't want those blacks to get too clogged up there so let's have a look at that it's pretty good might be a bit too much all right so we'll have a look at the pinnacles here and again we'll just turn the mask on this time I'm not gonna feather it so much so we'll go over get a new brush and just reduce the feathering just a bit and we're just gonna brighten up this area here we don't have to point out very much because it's already getting quite bright as it is returning of the auto mask is already on so those computers drive me nuts okay and I should do it okay so we'll just brighten up the bring up the exposure just a little bit that's way too much [Music] we could bring up the whites a little bit that might as you know has affected that area [Music] okay we just zoom out here and you can see now that your attention definitely goes over to this area now more van than this so I think overall I mean I might tweak a few sections like the clouds here are quite a bit brighter than over here so you know I might brighten this section up here a little bit maybe I don't know sometimes I have to sit on these images for a little while and you know keep going back to them every now and then okay now lastly I'm just gonna add a little bit more saturation to the image not too much because I don't want it to be over the top with with color and I'm also gonna crop this a little bit down you'll notice that down here this is a little bit distracting but I think I might crop this to a pan oh the more I look at it the more I think it'll lend itself to a panel so we go into the crop tool here we'll crop out that corner section there I'll just undo this lock here I'm going to crop out these trees up here [Music] bring this down and start to bring this up [Music] something like that and there we go there's the the finished product alright everybody I hope you enjoyed this video please if you have any comments about the way that I've processed this image what you liked or what you disliked my cropping anything that you want to talk about be sure to leave in the comments below all right so this coming Saturday hopefully I'll have a video out for you from my recent trip to China and until then please be sure to give me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video and as always if you enjoy the content on my channel be sure to subscribe alright everybody thanks ever so much for watching and until saturday happy shooting [Music]

Channel: Adam Gibbs

Views: 19,971

Keywords: adam gibbs, post processing tutorial, huangshan, china, lightroom tutorial, lightroom tips, gavin hardcastle, fototripper, adamgibbs photography, faroe island workshop, lightroom tips and tricks, adobe lightroom cc tutorial, how to process a photograph, post processing in lightroom, how to use the range mask in lightroom, using the range mask, range mask tips, Faroe Island Photography Workshop

Id: A8EuC7-PdGI

Length: 26min 28sec (1588 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2019