The Lightroom Technique You're Not Using (And How It Will Change Your Editing Forever)

hey it's pat k and welcome back to another video in this video we're going to be talking about this one thing one technique this one setting in lightroom that is so so powerful but so many people aren't using it so many photographers aren't using this in their editing workflow and i think that's a shame so that's what we're going to be covering in this video now i don't really know why people don't use it maybe it's because it has a scary name or maybe because it takes a long time to master or it's kind of confusing at first i don't know but if you spend the time to learn it to understand it and then to really start mastering it i promise you that your photography game your editing game specifically will be changed forever like this is speaking from personal experience when i first learned this technique years and years and years ago it changed my workflow and i haven't looked back since i've always been incorporating it into my images so the technique that i'm talking about specifically is calibration so calibration is a little panel that sits at the very bottom of the sidebar of the develop module in lightroom and if you're serious about building a visual aesthetic starting to build a visual style getting really really good at understanding editing and photography in general then this little panel that belongs to the bottom of the sidebar you'll probably have to move it up near the top because you'll be using it that much because it'll change the game and the way that you edit that much that you know you'll need to use it all the time okay so let's just dive into what calibration actually is from a technical level right because you can just jump into lightroom and move the sliders around and see what happens all on your own right but to really understand and master this tool to get the best out of it we need to understand exactly what's going on under the hood right because just the effect of you moving the sliders isn't enough so the calibration tool can be explained with kind of like an analogy i guess so you know when people talk about color science like oh canon's skin tones are just amazing or ah syrians colors are so true to life or ah this fuji sky just pops so all of these comments are like the end result of color science right but it's way more beneficial for us to understand what is actually going on here you see color science is simply the interpretation of color by the manufacturer right it's a given set of values that the manufacturer the camera manufacturer decides on and then shows to you the viewer see every single pixel is made up of red green and blue now that's all well and good right red green and blue make up the colors but stop and think for just one second who decides what blue really looks like what shade of blue is really defined as blue right or when we're talking about red how red is red right is it more orangey red is it more magenta red who decides these things and what do they look like right how do we just simply call red green and blue three different colors and you know the exact mix of red green and blue that they might have and if one camera manufacturer calls blue x color whatever that might be and another cameo manufacturer calls blue x color are these two colors the same usually no they're not they're completely different right so when people say that they like x manufacturers skin tones or x manufacturers skies or the look from x camera whatever the case may be right and they're talking about like the colors what they're actually referring to is the mix of rgb for every single one of the registered colors right what it essentially is is like a package of you know colors that are presented to you as truth from that particular manufacturer that's what's happening every single time you press the shutter you are essentially baking the cameras manufacturers opinion on what their colors will be aka their color science the calibration tool then is something in lightroom a tool in lightroom that we can use to change the individual red green and blue values of the entire image so that we can start to shape and to mold something that's away from the manufacturer's recommendation something that you know could be a little bit more fitting towards like our lighting conditions or it could even be way more fitting towards our stylistic desires and the aesthetic that we're trying to go for so let's see this in action and let's jump into lightroom okay so here's a color wheel right and just to cement the point if you see over on the histogram here if i hover over every single one of these colors each of these has like a different mix of red green and blue within them so coming into the camera calibration panel right here which we have up here the first thing i wanted to cover is these three primary sliders right these red green and blue sliders so looking down here on the bottom left we have a red circle right we have three circles red green and blue now if i drag this first slider over to the right over to the more orange section of the image watch what happens to the circle it gets more orange right fancy that but the interesting thing here is not only did this orange circle turn orange the rest of the color wheel changed color as well now why is that so when we're pushing this slider right we're saying to lightroom hey red is now more like orange right and remember every single one of these colors has some mix of red green and blue within them and changing this is a global change right it changes every single pixel in the entire image but because red right is part of the red green and blue mix and every single pixel has red green and blue that means that every single color will change to some degree some more obvious than others but we'll go into that in a little bit more detail in a moment now just to further the example if we move this slider to the left towards the more magenta side we see that not only has the red circle changed but again the rest of the color wheel has changed as well and this is an interesting phenomenon right because by changing just the red mix within each pixel it gives us this like completely different look which is super super powerful right especially when we start to combine it with the other primaries here as well so let's see what happens right if we take the green primary slider and we slide it to more teal we see that the green moves a little bit more to the teal but also everything starts to look a little bit more flat which is interesting and even a little bit pastely moving it to the yellow everything gets a little bit more saturated and goes a little bit yellow as well which is also kind of interesting the next thing we'll do is the blue primary if we move this more towards the purple we see that the blue is completely changed into purple and the hues have also completely eradicated any blue out of the picture now a really common technique that people use calibration for is this like blue or teal and orange look and we can achieve this by moving the blue primary towards the more teal side such that we have you know a bigger range of tealy bluey colors and contrasted with a bigger range of you know warmer orange and red and yellow colors okay so just to reset now you might at this point say well can't you just do these changes in like the hue sliders right below it right well let's find out so if we take the orange slider and we move orange to yellow we see that it only affects this portion of the color wheel right conversely if we change the orange to more red again it only affects what was in the orange slices in the color wheel originally right and this is the same case with blue right green whatever the case may be and we can even try and like mimic the calibration settings that we had before but we'll never get to the same level as like what we originally had with you know the teal and the orange look for example you see the thing is hue and calibration are completely different things again calibration is global right it affects the entire image whereas hue even saturation and luminance they are somewhat local right they only affect the ranges that are laid out within them right so yellow only affects all the yellow specifically yellow portions of the image right and that's it so it's very important to learn the differences between these two things because once we we master these settings we can start to do some really creative and cool things with them okay so now that we have a good understanding of the differences between the calibration tool and the hue tool we can start to dig into what are the use cases that we might be using you know camera calibration for so in lightroom i've got three images up right now that are going to be examples that you might want to use camera calibration for so this first example now i've only just put some very basic exposure changes to this particular image just so that you don't have to look at a you know a bad image um but with this image right it's shot at night it's shot under all this artificial lighting and so there's a lot of like yellow color cast going on right so with this you might be tempted to say okay how can i get rid of the the yellow maybe i can just whack the saturation down a little bit and that might do the job and you know it might be okay maybe halfway but you see the thing is we start to lose detail of the things that are supposed to be orange or supposed to be yellow instead of actually correcting it to what it should be right the actual correction that it could be and so if we were to use calibration instead for this right what we could do here is stay the green primary we can shift that across to more green and instantly we've gotten rid of a lot of that color cast right but we can push it even further and say uh let's move this blue primary across just a little bit and then this red primary maybe just to the right a smidge right and you can see what effect this is having we can also turn down the two saturation values so that more of the green mix is in the the overall color palette and now we've got a really good correction and so now if we turn this on and off as an example we can see that we've gotten rid of this yellow color cast whilst also retaining the things that are supposed to be the correct colors so i could have actually done a lot less just to get rid of the color cast but in this example i just wanted to show you a little bit more tweaking just to see you know the power that you could actually have out of this tool but this is like the kind of first use case you might use calibration for because when you're shooting in different conditions and different lighting in different times there are going to be prevalent hues that are in the image that your camera just might not be able to pick up and you might want to have a different kind of cast over your image whether that's for stylistic reasons or aesthetic reasons or just trying to stay true to life right okay in this next example we've got a shot here from singapore it's the cloud forest and there's a whole bunch of greens here right so this can be a very interesting shot creatively to start to get you know the colors working right so what we could do hypothetically speaking this may or may not be the thing that you're trying to go for but you know this is a demonstration of what this tool could actually do right in this mountain we have a whole bunch of green we also have a whole bunch of yellows and that kind of hue of color right what if the goal was to align all these colors together such that the mountain is just one big green blob that might look cool for you you know it might not but let's just try and do it anyway right so again let's take this green primary and we can slide it to the right and immediately we can see that the the yellow is just it's it's just fading straight away right so again before and after straight away pretty neat huh okay that's good but let's push it just a little bit further right let's get a little bit more stylistic with uh the edit that we're trying to go for here so if we go down to the blue primary slider and we move it to the right shifting it to more purple tends to give kind of everything a little bit less luminance a little bit less brightness to the colors right so if we shift this across just like that we can start to see that not only are the colors getting more rich and lush right but the kind of yellow tones are getting dulled down and getting smooshed into a green now from there obviously the side effect of doing that is that all of these purple areas up the top in the sky are purple right and obviously the sky isn't purple so one thing we can do to counteract that is we can go into our hues and we can say hey purples are actually blue right and you know because purples are well the sky is blue in this instance right but suddenly what we have here is a image that is vastly different to how it started life out as we can even take this even further and like if you wanted to you know dull down the greens we could push the luminance down a little bit on both the yellows and on the greens take the saturation down to make it just a little bit more like natural and true to life and there you go it's just one big green mound now and again this might not be what you're going for but this is just expressing the the power of what calibration can do for you now one example i wanted to show you was this one so in this example i'm going to show you more of like how i've been styling my images for i don't know the past like three years or so where i try to go for not a teal and orange look but more of like a like a cobalt blue slash orangey kind of feel right so this shot is done in uh seoul uh it's a bookstore so all of these books we can see a whole bunch of different colors right so what i would typically do for my edits in this instance is to try and you know homogenize all of these colors together to either blue or to orange or yellowish whatever it might be so where i'll start with this is always blue primary to the left towards more teal right and i'll zoom out just to give you guys a little bit more of a look and then red primary towards more of an orange but not too much and then green primary usually towards more of a teal right so what's happening here is that the greens are moving more towards the blue right and then we're kind of reducing the amount of yellows in the scene all together and then even of the reds that are in that we're pushing that towards more of a orangey yellow hue right so that's what's going on right so in this instance we can just adjust the saturation to our taste because saturation is just literally just saturation how intense the colors might be in this instance i might move the green primary just down a little bit i might up the blues just a tad and then you know that's it if we zoom in here we can see that a lot of these colors are homogenized to orange and blue and if we turn off the calibration we can see we've got purples we've got greens uh we've got dark purples we've got like really bright yellows you know all of these different colors but turning on the calibration we've kind of homogenized all them together and for me that's the direction that i'm trying to go in because using the calibration tool to kind of unite colors together especially if you're doing contrasting colors is a really cool idea so whether that's like the classic teal and orange or it might be like dark blue and red or it might be like green and you know purpley pink you know whatever it might be that's a really cool technique you might want to start to inject into your editing aesthetic and that's it now camera calibration is one of those things that takes so so long to learn and so long to master that i would highly suggest that you start trying to learn it right now because you know using that in combination with hues over time and then learning what luminous does as well is a really really good way to start to really master color and mastering color is one of those things in lightroom that really really changes the way that your entire photography starts to look so i really highly recommend that you try and master this uh this calibration tool if you have any questions of course leave a comment down below and i'll do my best to to get to them but uh that's it for this video thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed it hit that like button subscribe to see some more also check me out on instagram on patreon and on discord to join the community i'll see you in the next video but until then go out there and make something that matters [Music] peace

Channel: Pat Kay

Views: 309,547

Keywords: patkay, pat kay, photographer, photography, travel photography, travel photographer, adobe lightroom, lightroom, lightroom classic, adobe lightroom photo editing, photo editing, lightroom tutorial, adobe lightroom tutorial, adobe lightroom tutorial for beginners, adobe lightroom advanced, calibration, lightroom calibration, lightroom calibration tool, the calibration tool, how to edit photos, lightroom tips, lightroom editing, lightroom color grading

Id: -joWxXm2Ks8

Length: 18min 53sec (1133 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021