Step-by-step from RAW to FINISHED image using Lightroom, Photoshop, and Topaz DeNoise AI

hey everyone welcome back to the channel so i thought today i'm in my basement i've set up kind of a nice workspace down here i've got my desk my imac um and it's about 81 degrees but it's you know reasonably comfortable and i thought i'd inaugurate this space with walking through a little tutorial maybe more like a behind the scenes of how i go from a photo to a finished product and going through lightroom photoshop and adobe ai there's actually not a lot of editing that i need to do on these photos today so it's a pretty quick uh little behind the scenes but i thought you might enjoy it so the back story is i have been waking up pretty early i have a toddler he's been waking up at like 4 30 4 45 with the time change and any parents out there with young kids i'm sure you're going through the same thing it's brutal daylight savings time is terrible on children but anyway i've been waking up at 4 30 in the morning and that gives me a lot of time to get out and about and see the sun rise i also find that just walking on warnings like that when i'm exhausted like like today frankly um getting outside and doing something physically active is just a nice way to reset and start the day and try to have a normal day so anyway on this occasion earlier this week i woke up before 30 was at mount auburn cemetery which is a cemetery near harvard square near harvard university in cambridge massachusetts and i was there for sunrise and i had the place basically all to myself and it was just awesome like i walked around with my telephoto looking for birds seeing what i could find stretching my legs and watching the sun come up it was a cool morning and the birds were really active and i came across a red-tailed hawk and it turned out it was a juvenile red-tailed hawk so probably about one year old and i was bouncing from tree to tree not really bouncing but moving from tree to tree and i got to kind of track it throughout the the cemetery which was a really fun experience oh and by the way i should say anyone who's not familiar with this location it's a cemetery yes but most of the grave sites are from the 1800s and so it's kind of like a park as well it really functions as both and so a lot of people go there it's a nice place to walk without cars it's a great space so definitely worth checking out if you're in the boston area so anyway so i went around taking photos of this red-tailed hawk and i got a couple captures that i absolutely love it's a concept i've been going for for a while fall foliage in the background hawk in the foreground sun coming up lighting the background and just making that fall foliage pop perfect framing for a fall photo so here's the shot that i took that i thought we'd edit today it's kind of a fun photo because he's got this very goofy face and what was happening here is a um a wild turkey so in in massachusetts we have a lot of wild turkeys that are walking around and um it's pretty cool actually anyway so wild turkey was walking around me and kind of going up a hill away from me and and he was actually looking at that wild turkey and probably a bit perplexed as to what what was this animal so anyway so he's got this kind of kooky face which i think is awesome and makes it a fun photo so the first thing i would do is edit and crop this photo so i go to crop and i'm going to edit with crop it with a 4x5 vertical crop and that's because my intended medium here is instagram and four by five is the best way to um post a photo on instagram you take up the most amount of the space on the screen so this is about right you know i'm gonna move it a little bit so um so he's centered and um you know not taking up the entire frame but looking pretty good i might bring it down just a little bit like that break it in a little bit tighter but you know enough to get the fall foliage in the background and the hawk and the foreground and one thing you'll notice is i've got this this twig this stick here that's that's kind of in my frame and rather than edit that out in a crop what i'm going to do is edit that in in photoshop and that'll be the next phase of of stuff that we'll do so okay first thing that i'm going to do is i'm going to work on the color a little bit globally so i'm going to switch it to landscape which just pops a little bit more bring up the vibrance a little bit here um i don't want to overdo it but but frankly i like that it's got a bluish cast obviously what's happening here is the shadows where the sun had not been up yet are are lighting this with kind of a bluish shadow as opposed to the back now i could do a two-tone color edit here with color grading so the shadows we can bring the shadows up a little bit here so you can see the shadows are that's not that's kind of more like what we're looking for sort of an orangey shadow but i'm not crazy about that um because i think it's now giving it a purple issue and it's just kind of cumbersome so what i'm going to do is rather than that i'm just going to drop the saturation of blue in this image we don't really need blue in this in this shot i'm also going to drop the luminance a little bit so that's i think pretty good now he doesn't look great and so i think he needs to be a little bit brighter uh we probably need a little bit of a yellowy cast to it um to compensate for the blue and the color we just removed so what i'm going to do is i'm going to create a mask and this is the new masking function in lightroom so if you click mask you can select subject and it does a remarkable job at capturing the subject so let's see what we end up with you can see what's been highlighted here now it's got the it's got the hawk perfectly i mean just perfectly and then it's also picked up on a little bit of on the foreground as well with the stick that the hawk is sitting on but i don't mind that actually because i think that that's sort of appropriate to edit with the hawk um for a continuity of of space and depth of field that makes sense so first i'm going to do is add a little bit of color back into um the hawk uh he's not yeah there we go it's just lagging a little bit for me so uh i'm gonna brighten him up a little bit uh maybe like compensation of exposure like that i don't want the highlights to be too blown out like right here so i'm going to drop the highlights a little bit maybe drop the clarity just a little bit and increase the saturation uh the sharpness of the image just to make sure that he pops really well with the background um i also think we need a little bit of contrast edit here still lacking in color so i'm just going to boost that a lot i guess and compensate yeah so that's starting to look a little bit more if we look at the before and after you can see that's what it looked like unedited and here's where we are now that's a little bit more authentic in terms of the coloring of of the bird it's still a little dark to me so i'm going to brighten it up a little bit more with whites and with exposure something like that all right good so one thing with this image in general so i'm now out of the mask i think it's just looking a little cool so i'm gonna warm up the entire image uh we're looking at here something around 4700 kelvin and that's looking a lot more um ballistic comparison to what it was originally okay now one other feature i'm really into with with the masking feature here is the ability to do an inverted mask so here we've got the subject selected but i'm going to select the subject again it's going to should do exactly the same thing as it did the first time but now i'm going to invert that mask and what that's going to do is just select the background you can see the entire background is now selected we have selected this foreground so i'm actually going to subtract with a brush this part of the log that is has been picked up because for this particular what i'm going to do is darken the background a little bit and reduce the clarity to give it a little bit more blur this is a feature i've been really into lately but in order to do that i need to deselect it looks like i i'm i'm pretty good there so i'm going to go ahead and select that mask again so this is the foreground and now we have the background so then what i'm going to do is drop the clarity and i think this is a pretty neat effect because it's going to blur that background a little bit and i'm also going to make it a little bit darker just to add a little bit more contrast with the hawk so we're starting to look pretty different starting to glow a little bit it's looking good i think we can probably brighten it up even more in terms of color warm it up a little bit more so i'm going to go push it all the way up to 55 kelvin and now i'm going to go ahead and come into that mask and drop that a little bit cooler because we've now kind of overdone it with with contrast in the background with the with the global edits that i've implemented so that is that's starting to look a little bit better now i'm going to still continue to edit that a little bit just to make it pop a little bit more dropping those blacks working on those highlights it's a low blown out here which i don't love but i think that that looks pretty faithful to the scene that i saw in real life okay that's looking pretty good so we're going to leave that there we've now edited this in lightroom pretty happy with the result it looks it looks pretty good but clearly there's this this twig here and so the next phase is to edit that out and so to do that it's actually extremely easy to do with content aware in fill in in photoshop so to do that i'm going to right click on here and open this photo up in photoshop and what this is going to do is create a tiff a lossless version of this photo and it's going to open that up into photoshop i'm going to edit it in photoshop i'm going to save it and it's going to automatically save and open that photo up that new copy of it that's been added in photoshop it's going to open that back up into lightroom so that's the integration with lightroom and photoshop that's pretty nice that you have because they're both adobe products all right so photoshop has opened this photo uh we have it here this is exactly what we just added in lightroom first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to create a duplicate of this layer so i'm going to duplicate the layer i'm going to call it just background copy so first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to zoom in i'm going to zoom in on the the twig because i want to make sure that i am able to see it all right good all right so here's what we're going to be capturing with the lasso so i'm going to go over here to lasso tool i'm going to just do a rough selection of the twig okay we've got the selection probably do a little bit more so if you push the option command you can subtract so i'm just going to subtract just to try to get as accurate as possible just because the less you subtract the less you select the less it will fill okay so we've got that selected now we're going to go over here to edit we're going to go to fill and then leave it on content aware fill color adaptation and everything stays the same and what this is going to do is this is going to select pixels that are right next to the pixel that's in this it's going to go through that for all the pixels and it's going to replace them with nearby pixels and to do what it's doing is it's filling in this section here with information from here so we're going to click class okay it does its magic can you see where it filled because i can't isn't that amazing it's pretty incredible right i mean you can kind of see the outline here when you're zoomed in all the way but certainly when you zoom to fit screen i mean nobody nobody's gonna know right that there was a tweak here and that's pretty neat so that's all we're doing in photoshop so i'm gonna save this oh i'm gonna save this here i'm going to close and look what we got now we have the photo in lightroom that has been edited to remove that aberration of the stick that i wasn't able to get when i was when i was photographing originally now one other thing that i'm not crazy about with this is there's clearly a lot of noise and that's because i shot this photo at iso 3200 which is incredible because it was daylight and the sun was coming up and i still needed iso 3200 which is nuts so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go into topaz ai and so to do that we're going to again edit this photo now we're editing the version that came out of photoshop and i'm going to edit in topaz ai denoise ai though so here we go here's the photo it defaults to um auto settings so i'm just going to use the auto settings for now let's see what it does i think that looks great it's doing a really good job adding a lot of blur with that noise reduction it's it's getting rid of noise here it's kind of an interesting i mean there are some issues there uh so i think what i might do is use the mass feature here and this is a kind of extra step which is a little bit annoying to be honest but i'm not going to make you sit here and do it with me but what i do is i select the um the hawk in this case using the masking tool within topaz ai all right so what i've done is i've masked the um the hawk and i've inverted that mask it does a pretty good job of of sensing kind of the boundaries of the hawk and i've only applied noise reduction to the background so you can see it's a nice blur we've gotten rid of a lot of noise there i think that looks really good all right so i'm going to apply that mask i'm going to apply the noise reduction it's going to process that and i'll put a photo back into lightroom and that will be our finished product all right and there you have it so we went from this photo here which was our original photo to this edit photo right here it's brighter we've dealt with the noise it looks pretty nice and sharp here i mean he looks great we got the nice blurry background one thing we could do here at this level is just add a little bit of noise reduction in which is going to be reducing noise further on here but it's just going to deal with a little bit of the residual noise on the red-tailed hawk but i am um i'm quite happy with this i think it's a that's a nice photo nice and sharp looks really good and that's that's what i would export and export that right now and share that photo all right well that's what i've got for you this week that's the process going from taking that photo lightroom photoshop and topaz ai to remove the noise i don't typically use photoshop to remove twigs and things like that but you know in this particular photo i couldn't avoid it in the in the situation in situ and so i had to take that photo with the twig in it and remove it in post but i hope you enjoyed this tutorial um if you enjoy this type of content please subscribe to our channel please like this video it helps um i actually really enjoy making these types of things so hopefully you enjoy watching them as well and with that even though today's episode was mainly spent sitting inside in my basement in 82 degree temperatures i hope you get outside i hope you enjoy wildlife in nature take some bird photos edit them and tell me how it goes anyway be well take care and get outside

Channel: Matthew Raifman

Views: 300

Keywords: bird photography, photography work flow, lightroom, photoshop, topaz denoise, editing

Id: ga-tqcJSYjw

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 14 2021