Revealing How I Edit, Photoshop Tutorial | Brandon Woelfel

hey guys welcome back today i'll be showing you guys how i edit a photo from start to finish let's get into it now i've offered a few color grading tips and tricks here in my channel but nothing to the extent of what we're gonna get into here today because i'm gonna be walking you through a bit more about my overall process and workflow and kind of what i think about when i look at a raw photo and the changes that i make right off the bat where i actually have done something similar to this and actually a bit more detailed is on skillshare who's actually sponsoring today's video so a huge thank you to them if you're not familiar with what skillshare is they are a online learning community for anyone looking to learn a new craft or hone in on something that you've been looking to try out aside from the hundreds and hundreds of photo and editing classes they have on their platform they also offer classes on graphic design illustration animation and more i actually have my own 70 minute class on there where i show you how i prepare for a shoot so i talk about things like what gear i'm gonna bring how i'm connecting with the model that we're gonna shoot and then scouting out a location and then i bring you guys out on the actual shoot and then we go back to the studio and i edit two photos one shot during the day and one shot at night from start to finish but i wanted to quickly talk about a bonus lesson that i'll be doing with skillshare and how you guys can actually be a part of it as well so once a class goes live on skillshare and you decide to take it you can actually submit projects of what you've learned so what i'm going to be doing is actually looking through those submitted projects in the gallery and choosing a few of my favorites to critique review and give some feedback on i'll be choosing photos 10 days after this video goes up so on march 25th so be sure to take my class get out there submit your photos because i can't wait to see them i've never actually done anything like this where i critique your photos so i'm super excited if you don't already have a skillshare account be sure to check the link in my description from there you'll get a free trial to skillshare premium and then after that it's only around 10 a month my bonus lesson will drop sometime in may so be sure to be on the lookout the link in the description will be illegible for the first 1000 people so be sure to act fast but now let's jump into the edit so like the title says we'll be editing a photo today from start to finish and the program we'll be doing this in is adobe photoshop but more importantly adobe camera raw because i personally shoot in raw and when you go to open a raw file specifically in adobe photoshop it will open you up to adobe camera raw if you're not familiar with it uh camera is a plugin included in adobe photoshop that pops up when you open a raw file into the program from there you can make super powerful non-destructive edits with it you can change around things like your exposure contrast white balance things you would change maybe on your shoot within your camera but after the fact and then after you've made all your desired tweaks you can open that photo right into photoshop and that's where it will be on your actual canvas and from there you can play around with layers and more specific tools but let's not get too ahead i want to first just open the photo and see what we're working with it's a photo of my friend joanne this was shot with my nikon z7 and then my 35 millimeter f 1.4 lens right in my living room we used a few different kind of led lights and neon lights to light her uh we have one from the back lighting her with this kind of cool cyan giving her this nice like face light right off the side we have another light off to the right side of her that's giving her the super warm hair light and then of course this like overall pink tone that's lighting up her skin uh from the table that she's leaning on this image was definitely shot a bit underexposed but uh that was intentional and that's mainly just because i like to preserve my highlights a lot of the time i'm shooting with really bright light sources as you can see here there's like three different ones in the photo and to counteract that it's usually at night time too so i'm dealing with a lot of contrast within my images even if i shoot underexposed later in the edit i can always brighten that up so that's exactly what we're gonna do here all right so let's start making some tweaks i'll be dealing with this right side panel right here this includes everything from our exposure contrast highlights shadows there's lots of different things we can change up and that's what i love about using camera raw a lot of the time i actually just like pressing auto to see what it gives me and see kind of the potential behind the image because i shoot underexposed a lot of my images are just super dark and sometimes i can't even see like what we're actually working with here so with auto it just lets me know what's underneath all of that um i'm not really loving what auto did it definitely evened out the skin tone and the highlights and shadows but i just feel like i could do a lot more on my own so we're gonna manually tweak each thing kind of just upping our exposure i play around with almost each and every slider within camera raw i just want to be sure that we're getting everything we can out of this raw image before we open it up into actual photoshop i like making really small subtle tweaks i don't want to do anything too drastic right off the bat going over to luminance and just playing with the key colors in our image there's a lot of pinks and blues if we play around with other colors like the yellows and green it won't do too much because of course we don't have a lot of yellow and green in our actual image but i always like to play around with them just in case because sometimes it'll pick up a color that you don't actually think is in the image just going in and boosting our shadows and dropping our highlights to make the image just more even hue saturation and luminance is a big part of my process because i love to work with colors so usually those adjustments can make drastic changes within my image once i move on from these basic adjustments i always also come back and forth to them because once you make one change it changes up something else so i just always find myself going back and almost find myself like never satisfied with what i'm creating but we'll get there because this image was also shot at night with fairly low lighting i like to go into the detail adjustments and play around with the sharpening and the luminance to be sure that this image doesn't give off a super grainy vibe unintentionally i like using grain in my images very subtly but i don't want the image to look like it was shot unintentionally with green zooming in and out is huge for my process i come from definitely an art background and i know with my own drawings and paintings it was always recommended to take a step back and actually see what you're working with because you can get really close up in there and start playing around with super detailed parts of your image but once you take a step back you can really see what changes you've made moving on now to the next panel which is split toning this separates your highlights and shadows and allows you to add in a color for each of those so a lot of the time i am shooting and editing with really bright colors so i use like my knowledge of complementary colors to counteract whichever color is being cast onto the model so in this case we have a lot of pink on joanne's face so i'm trying to reel it back with other colors like greens and yellows that will give her a more even and natural skin tone of course we're you know playing with bright neon colors but there can still be a natural looking skin tone even if you're shooting with super bright pigmented colors which i've learned i know a lot of people don't really find split toning necessary and sometimes in my own images it doesn't come into play in this case it is really helping a lot depending on what lens you're shooting with a lot of portrait lenses tend to warp faces if um they're too close so in this case i'm just bringing the distortion up to two because it seems to just even out her face and her proportions to what it would look like naturally and then because of that you can kind of see a little bit of the actual uh canvas behind her so we just go in and scale that up just a little bit it's just these subtle changes that make all the difference and vignetting for me is one of them i really notice a dramatic pop in my images when i vignette them and i don't want to be too intense with it but even just a little bit helps and then again i'm going all the way back to our basics panel and changing up some more stuff i did skip over the curves layer just because that's something i add in a little bit later but that's also something you could change in before you open the file if you want to i also really like within this adjustment how you can see your photo before and after side by side or split down the middle it helps me gauge how many changes i've made and if i went too far because that happens sometimes you're just having the best time making all these changes and then you look at the before photo and you realize you did too much i'm really satisfied with the changes i've made if we do look at it side by side you could see that the overall image is just way more bright i also evened out the shadows versus the highlights now that this photo is brightened it also looks a little bit busy to me so i'm glad i started to vignette it but there's some little things in here that i definitely want to edit out when we're actually in photoshop so we'll go down to this link right here and check open in photoshop as a smart object so now what we can do after opening up this image is click on the layer and come back to all of these changes we've made and make any tweaks we're not stuck in this kind of destructive flat layer and because i'm so particular when i'm editing camera raw a lot of the time i don't have to go back but it's always nice to have it there if you know you need it and of course we can still make super drastic changes within photoshop itself by using selective color and gradient maps and stuff but you'll see that within the speed edit before we get into that be sure to thumbs up this video if uh you want to see something similar to this or more of a walk through with what i'm actually doing in photoshop because i'd definitely be down you know i take a while to edit i take sometimes over an hour sometimes up to two hours to edit a photo so you know voicing through all of it can be a lot so um it's definitely something that i would need to prepare myself for and also you but either way let's get into the speed edit [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so there you have it that is the end result photo i hope you guys enjoyed seeing a little bit more into my process and if you want to see me edit even more photos be sure to head to my class on skillshare i'll have a link in the description where you guys can get a free trial if you don't already have an account don't forget to submit photos to my upcoming bonus lesson i'm super excited to see what you guys are going to create that link will be eligible again for the first 1 000 people who use it with all of that i will see you guys very soon bye [Music]

Channel: Brandon Woelfel

Views: 61,490

Keywords: how to edit, adobe photoshop, brandon woelfel, editing tutorial, skillshare, speed edit, camera raw, presets, photography hacks, photoshoot, tutorial for beginners, 2021 tutorial, how to edit like

Id: Mm4Y_qxDVFc

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021