The Ultimate Guide For How To Edit In Adobe Lightroom (End-To-End)

hi I'm Pat K A Travel Photographer and Sony digital imaging Ambassador based in Tokyo Japan and in this video I'm going to take you through an endtoend workflow of how I think about and approach my editing in Adobe Lightroom so this is actually a updated version of a video that I did about 3 years ago but since then a lot of things have changed like my Lightroom editing masterclass being released and thousands of students really getting value out of it so what I'm going to do in this video is teach you the exact workflow steps that I teach in my Lightroom editing master class and if you enjoy the video and you want even more then I'll have a link to that in the description below if you really want to pick it up and level up your editing with over 11 hours of content five of those being real world portfolio level end to-end editing sessions over a wide variety of Photography categories all right so this is the image that we are going to be working on today it is a image of the very famous Cho pagod and I shot it during the Sakura season this year it was shot on my Sony a7r Mark 5 with the 1635 G Master 2 these are the settings up here in the top left that I used and I shot this image purposefully under under exposed so that I could retain the maximum amount of highlight detail as possible now before we get into any of the serious Lightroom stuff an edit always starts with the shot itself first and what I mean by that is what you shoot and how you shot it so I always think back to you know the intention why did I take this shot why was it compelling enough in the field for me to want to compose it like this you know what was the main focus or the main purpose of this shot in this case I took hundreds of shots this morning but I chose this Frame specifically because I really like the way the light is falling on you know this part of the Sakura in the foreground but not all of the Sakura I really enjoy how the shadow falls off as well on the the side of the pagota here too you know there's a nice contrast between light and dark now my objective here is really about how I can bring out this this field of flowers here in the foreground and make it balanced amongst you know the Mount Fuji in the background and the pagoto and make them work harmoniously now the first thing that I'm going to do is what I call restoring and exposure and pretty much the idea here is to reset the image to a good Baseline to then start the edit from so for me here the first thing that I'm seeing is I actually shot this in a little bit of a rush and so it's not level so that's the first thing we're going to do here we're going to bring up the crop tool and we're just going to change the rotation just slightly just so that Mount Fuji seems more level than it seems right now uh something like that look looks good to me May bit too much yep that looks okay the next thing we are going to do is lens Corrections so over here on the right in the develop module you'll actually notice that lens Corrections and then transforms come before the basic tone panel and that's because I've reorganized all of the panels based on the order of operations that I edit in and you can do this for yourself if you just right click on any one of these titles here and you go customize develop panel and then you can go and grab these handles here and then shift them around to your liking so for me the very first thing is lens Corrections always do lens Corrections just to reset the image and get what it's supposed to be from there I will do transforms here this image doesn't require a whole lot of transforming especially since the way that I shot it was quite flat but if I had shut it like you know just a little bit higher up or a little bit further down then ideally we would be using this transform uh vertical uh slider here so if we press R for crop we can actually bring up the crops ahead of time and then we can go and change and have a look and compare and see how straight what I'm looking at here is this the top part of the pagota how straight that is versus this line here in this instance I'm going to try and straighten this out as much as I can uh something around here looks good to me not too much and then we'll press enter and we'll also constrain the crop and tick that just because this next step is what I typically do to landscape shots to make things feel a little bit more exciting than they perhaps might be in real life so what I'm going to do is use the aspect slider here and what you can see is when I slide this to the right it kind of gets squished in and when I slide this to the left it kind of flattens out right so what I'll do here reset this back to zero is actually go right and squeeze it a little bit and this has the effect of making Mount Fuji just seem a little bit taller and a little more Grand than it might actually be to the naked eye in real life but I like the exaggeration and especially for a tutorial like this being able to show you these tools is most certainly uh my objective okay so from here we are going to be doing exposure so remember this is all about having a good basine to start the edit from so what we're doing here is we are looking at the histogram in the top right and what we're first trying to see is is there any clipped portions of the histogram is any portion too far in the bottom here or too far in the top here and if that's the case then we would actually grab those portions and then drag them out kind of like this and in this instance you know it's actually pretty good I shot this underexposed on purpose so that I could save as much detail as possible but what we're going to do in this instance we're going to drag the blacks up just a little bit and then the Shadows up just a little bit as well just so that we have a little bit more visible foreground work with and the the Shadows are a little bit more easier to work with later on when we eventually go and do contrast so the next thing I typically do is look out for highlights so if there's any highlights that aren't blown or are blown I will go and adjust those here what I tend to do in most of my images regardless of if the image has blown out scenes or not is I typically actually go down in highlights just a smidge just to retain some of the Highlight detail especially if you're looking at you know Mount Fuji here and then I bring up the whites to balance that so that I can have both the detail of the highlights and some really bright whites so I generally like a a kind of contrasty image but as a baseline setting you know I'm trying to get it to the point where like this is a good start this is a good base to tone to start with so now we've got a good base tone to start with and we've got all of our image corrected in terms of the orientation and some of the transforms uh and even some of the aspects as well now the next step we're going to do is contrast so why contrast next why contrast after doing you know your reset or your basic tone well contrast and adding contrast I'd like to do first because contrast introduces increased saturation and perceived sharpness so darker luminance values in color typically invoke a look of richness and depth to a color and that is achieved by increasing contrast most of the time and then on the sharpness side of things the differences between dark pixels and light pixels right next to each other create a perceived sense of sharpness in our eyes it is this this lightness and darkness that looks like a line that makes our eyes or tricks our eyes into perceiving it as more sharp so when we're increasing the contrast we're also increasing the perceived sharpness as well even if that isn't necessarily true now contrast is controlled most commonly by the tone curve down here you might have seen this one before and the tone curve has a few different options this is my favorite this is called the point curve and then it also has this one which is more of a on Rails experience and then the red green and blue point curves respectively I like this one because it controls all three of these parameters at once and it provides me with the most amount of flexibility I go into much more detail in tone curve in the master classes that I teach as well as some uh videos that I've done in the past on the turn curve as well here on YouTube so I'll leave a link to those in the description down below but basically what I do is I try to create what's called an S curve so I do that by first starting out with three dots here like so and then this kind of region is your shadows and your blacks region this kind of region here is your highlight and your white region and it's basically just as simple as going Boop and lowering that down and then Boop and then raising that up that introduces contrast in this instance I feel that the Shadows are just a little bit too dark um so I'm actually going to slide this over just a little bit and raise this up a little bit and then I'm going to add another Point here kind of following this kind of area and then just bringing that down just a smidge very fine kind of detail and then in terms of the highlights I think I'm going to crank the highlights a little bit higher just in general just to add a little bit more brightness to the image because I like really bright brights on my edits we can also press this I here and that shows us the before and the after in terms of contrast so whereas the before when we were resetting and restoring the image it actually ended up looking quite flat now it has a lot more punch to it and of course this kind of punch and color changes will look different from Monitor to Monitor so as you're watching this YouTube video you know if you are watching it on your phone uh that may look different to if you were watching it on your desktop for example and obviously it is again different to what I'm seeing on my monitor as well all right so now that we've done contrast we are up to color so due to our contrast we were able to inject just a little bit of saturation especially around these red kind of edges of the pagota here through contrast alone so now we are doing specifically color so with color we are looking at five main controls we are looking at white balance we're looking at Global Vibrance and saturation we are looking at calibration if you're using Lightroom classic which this one is the we then have the hsl and then we have color grading I typically do that in that order and we will start with white balance first because white balance is one of those things where especially if you are shooting raw the changes that you get to white balance in terms of color are effectively what's called well I call it free which is to say that the changes that you make don't degrade the image you can push white balance back and forth without things falling apart without banding without most of the time things looking a bit weird so I tend to start with white balance first and then I move into calibration so we will go and do white balance just to see if there's any kind of changes or moods we can look at first and in this instance I can you know go for a little bit more of a a warm look so Slide the slider to the right here and this uh kind of gives it a more morning Vibe or I can slide it to the left and this gives it a more you know blue cooler perhaps earlier morning kind of vibe like when the sun just gets up kind of thing and then we have the tint for more magenta or more green in this instance I mean this is all to taste right color is completely subjective uh and completely up to you for me we're going to go with a little bit more of a warm feeling image just to you know it's a sunrise shot so I want to accentuate that just a little bit so a little bit of warmth on the temperature up here and a little bit of magenta as well just to bring a little bit of that purple in and that will also have the effect of coloring our Sakura down here in the foreground a little bit as well The Next Step that I typically do is calibration on Lightroom if the image calls for it so calibration is quite complex and I use it in a very I would say creative way and and not the way that's originally intended by Lightroom for it to be used um I've done a gigantic video on the calibration tool specifically in the past so I will refer you to to that but typically I use calibration for color Harmony basically combining certain colors together so that an image only has a few colors instead of many many different colors this is a technique that I use in in my own like visual aesthetic and in this image it doesn't really require any calibration as far as I can tell I mean or at least as far as I want to do you know it looks pretty harmonious we've got some purples we've got some Reds some yellows some oranges no greens really typically and that's kind of what I'm looking for when it comes to color Harmony and harmonizing all of the palette and then we've got a very pale kind of blue here so I don't think this particular image requires calibration so in this instance we will skip it what we have next is the color mixer or the hsl slider so we can actually go into each one of these uh sliders here and we can start changing things up for me I like my Red's really deep red so I typically leave my Reds in the middle and then I'll actually go and bring down the luminance on that a little bit just so that the Reds feel more Lush for me the oranges here are okay I think we're going to just slide them slightly to the right to make them a little bit more yellow and then the yellows we're just playing around we're seeing where the yellows occur in the image and I think a little bit more towards the orange will turn the yellows from there the greens uh not a lot of greens going on here which is great which is why we don't need to use the calibration so we'll leave that and then Aquas typically found in some portions of the early sky but in this instance not a lot either so we'll leave that and then Blues which will be the sky which has a lot of changes and in this instance I'm going to go for a little bit more of a greenish kind of look so I'm going to add a slight bit of a aqua to the blues here we're going to go into the purples which should be a little bit of the background yes it is so we're going to align this instead of making it more purple because you can see it's actually affecting a lot of Mount Fuji here we're going to push it up towards more Blues so that we can harmonize the purple and the blue together as one color grouping so rather than having it like very purple and it stands out from the sky we're going to have it as more blue and it kind of melds into the sky and gives us a easier color palette to digest from here we'll check out what the magenta does and in this case it's not a lot we do have a little bit of the detail here in the the Sakura for the magenta but it's not enough to make a huge difference and in later sections we will actually Target that specifically so that we can then bring it out and pop that out from here what I typically do is I I play around with the saturation I like a kind of neutral saturation I like to push it as far as I can whilst remaining neutral that's just my preference some people like to really go ham on on the saturation and some people like a really subdued kind of look again personal preference for me there's not a lot of work here to do the Reds are pretty good again this is a a sunrise kind of shot so I'm going to make it a little bit more saturated because during the sunrise a lot of colors are very saturated orange I feel is actually just a little bit too saturated so I'm going to pull that back just a little bit and then yellows uh yellows is okay going to pull that a smidge back I remember there not being much green so I'm going to actually just reduce that down just so that we can get rid of all the green all together and then I remember they're not being in much Aqua either so I'm going to do the same in terms of saturation I kind of like the saturation values here but what I'm going to do in instead is actually use the luminance so with the luminance I'm going to bring it down and that's going to darken the blue color and make it look more saturated make it look more Rich so in this case this is what it does as we can see here so if we go all the way you know obviously that's way too much uh but if we go you know just a little bit of the way now we can kind of get saturation for free effectively even though it's not free there is a little bit of degration when you go really far down starting to fall apart just a little bit uh but we're going to go about here and I think that's that looks nice to me yep that's good in terms of saturation uh purples so that's going to control Fuji in the back and to me we are going to just deset that just a little bit so that we can have it more gray and so it looks more like a mountain to me to me mountains are black and white or like Shades of Gray and and not specifically colors so that's what I'm going to do uh magenta we are probably going to leave that we can see if we crank this up all the way there are magenta highlights in all of the soccer in the bottom so H it looks a little bit weird to me so I am going to just leave this for now and then we're going to locally adjust this after now the next one is color grading and color grading is super super easy to go overboard with color grading effectively think of it like it adding colors on top of your initial colors that you've set so this is really to give it a a very stylized look very specific look so if you have something in my by all means do it um in this instance what I'm going to do is actually put a little bit of highlights in terms of warmth into this slider here then we can kind of drag it up and down to see the effect definitely don't want that much uh just something subtle something like a three cool and then try and cool this down and see what that looks like in the shadows again not too much we want more of a blue here and then maybe a six so very or five very small kind of increments here what I'm doing is I'm introducing a little bit more blue and a little bit more orange into the scene and those two are contrasting colors so in my opinion that makes the image and the general color palette look a lot more interesting because complimentary colors are typically very visually appealing and Visually attractive so that's why I do it in this way you don't have to do it if you don't want to you know again it's all it's all preference from there we go back up to to the basic panel and we are looking at Vibrance and saturation Vibrance is like a kind of quote unquote smart way of pushing more saturation values into the image without it breaking down so it is an intelligent slider Lightroom actually picks the portions of the image that it thinks are the most pertinent to that particular image and then increases that rather than the saturation slider just increasing saturation values across the board globally so in this instance we're going to have a play around and see if I can crank this Vibrance just a little bit and see what happens that's definitely way too much so maybe something around here that looks good to me and then saturation back forth back forth I think we're good around maybe a plus two or something like that something very strong you know all right so now that we've got our pretty much our basee grade done so we've got the colors we've got the contrast you know we've got the exposure we've got all the transforms now it's time to do presents and effects so presents and effects are really about making the image or the subjects pop and presence is specifically around you know it's changing the perceived sharpness of your image and I use it as an attempt to to draw attention to things that are important in the image or I use it as an effect to make the image look softer or harder you know depending on what I'm trying to go for in the image so what I will typically use is the presentence slider and so I will always start with Clarity um I know a lot of people go ham on the clarity slider nowadays either going way to the right and really like popping things out and making things super contrasty super sharp or they're going really Ham on the left and then making things look really dreamy losing all that detail uh and making things look soft and glowy for me I like to lean more on the soft side but not so much that you can tell I want things to be natural and I want things to again I want to push it as far as I can whilst still making it look organic and natural so usually I'm at about 20 to maybe 30 depending on the image for this image I'm going to go for a 23 and this is enough for me to like soften up the details here and soften up the details here and make things start to look a little dreamy but I can also see that some of the texture and the detail is lost so what I typically do is when I go minus Clarity I'll go positive texture so little bit of positive texture here and honestly you won't be able to see this on the YouTube compression because YouTube will just destroy any of the fine details but what I can see here and what I'm doing here is if I zoom into the socer here is you know right here the texture slider is at zero if I increase this you can kind of see all of the super fine details start to pop out that is what texture slider does so in order to balance the loss of detail from the clarity from the negative Clarity I'll drag the texture slider just up a wee bit and then we can get a soft glowy look whilst retaining all of that detail at this point sharpening is also pretty important as well uh this is usually the stage that I do it at or the detail and so what I typically do to start with is I go to the masking slider here and then I hold alt or control and that will show you exactly where the sharpening values are going to occur and so typically you want to do this on you know your your hard subjects in the image so I'm going to go all the way up until the end until just the outlines of my main subjects are white like so and then I'm going to increase the sharpening values of up here we can use this little preview box to kind of see what it looks like so I'm going to focus in on Mount Fuji here and then just increase that just a little bit get some of that detail that fine detail back as well and I think that should be all good okay up next is masking so masking is uh probably my favorite part of the process and masking is using all of these tools up here in the top right to do what's called well what I call shaping light so effectively you want to shape portions of the image what we used to call dodging and burning back in the day to really pop out the details where you want them to pop out so in this instance what I'm going to do is I'm going to set up a linear gradient and I want to try and Target a lot of the Shadow portions here and bring those up so that the foreground really starts to sing so I will grab this like that I'll make sure that it's got a long feather on it so you can see this this portion here is quite long and that means that the the overall effect when it Trails off will be a lot smoother if you go really close like this that means you'll be able to see the lines where it starts to stop and so this is about like Feathering it off so for me I'm going to go you know something like this and I'm going to increase the Shadows specifically on this portion so if I crank this all the way up you can see everything and this looks to me a little bit funny cuz this is not how light behaves in the real world so we're going to di this back uh and then we're just going to up this just a little bit more importantly what I'm trying to do is Target the Sakura here and the Sakura are going to be on the Highlight portion of the sliders so I'm going to grab those push those up a little bit and then off those highlights those parts that are white I'm also going to increase too and so now we've got a little bit more of a accentuated uh foreground here it looks kind of nice and then we're going to go down to the effects portion here and then we're going to increase the clarity on that just a little bit so I know that before we used minus Clarity globally so that globally we can have some kind of like you know softish image but where it matters where the foreground is I'm going to you know accentuate it just a a little bit more with positive Clarity so I think that looks pretty good what I'm going to do is this portion here in the bottom right is not that important to the overall image so I'm going to add another linear gradient with a very high kind of feather drag this down here like that and then I'm going to decrease the Shadows here and this has the effect of not drawing so much attention to itself which is extremely important this is what I'm trying to achieve I'm trying to make you as the viewer look at this image and be like wow this is a fantastic foreground field of flowers and then the Pagoda and Mount Fuji in the background what a visually stunning thing this bottom right section does nothing to enhance that feeling and so removing it well not removing it but making it darker in terms of Shadows kind of removes it from the attention that someone might be you know when they're looking at the image now from there what I'm going to do is grab a brush so I'm going to go create new mask and then brush and I want to accentuate all of these really warm portions of light where the sun has touched it and and I can be pretty rough here um you can also Target this specifically with luminance but I'm going to do it the old school way and what I'm going to do is up the whites just a little bit give it a little bit of warmth on the white balance and then a little bit of saturation as well and then we're going to give it a pretty high feather and a pretty high flow as well and I'm going to effectively just brush it in so this is again very subtle and I don't know whether the YouTube compression will uh will show this or not but basically wherever is touched by the sun is where I am targeting specifically now again this is a a portion where you don't want to go overboard on this because if you say do you know plus two exposure you can you can tell straight away so this is what it looks like yeah so just make sure that you are not having such a a drastic change on your tonal values because you'll be able to see them and it will stand out in a bad way so just a little bit of restraint on that is is super super important all right now what I typically like to do next and this is a very stylistic choice but I do this for the majority of my my images is I I like to do what what I call a contrast sandwich so I've already done this with the bottom right here but what I'm going to do is grab another linear gradient and drag down from the very very top again very strong feather here I'll uh put this all the way up to the top here and then I'm going to drag the exposure down a little bit and then the highlights down to just a wee bit and then actually might drag this yep cool something like that very subtle but what this does is it kind of creates a custom vignette and that focuses your attention to the middle of this image so instead of it being just like a blank kind of Sky it's it's dark which means visually when a viewer looks at it it's not important and other parts of the image are important so it's a very subtle thing but I I like to do that as well and then the final thing we'll do is we will try and bring out Mount Fuji just a little bit so we'll have it in the center and we'll bring up our brush again or we can just press K on the keyboard and in the settings we will add some clarity and a little bit of texture and we'll start to paint in Mount Fuji so do something like this again this is so difficult to tell on YouTube compression but I can see it on my screen here and again it should be subtle because again if I you know if I do this you can see exactly where it is uh but the intention is to just bring it out just a little bit more so in this example we'll just crank it just a little bit more something like that and that starts to give Mount Fuji a little bit more shape and then we can even whack some dehaze in here because uh that is what it is haze so we had dehazing the image and that just brings a little bit more contrast and a little bit more Darkness to Mount Fuji and makes it look a little bit like it stands out more so I'm just going to brush some of that out here as well something like that and now it looks like it really stands out so we've got three elements here that all stand out the pagota I mean it just does the job on its own it's it's perfect as it is but we've got the Sakura and that really stands out we've got Mount Fuji in the back you know we've got the pagot everything's kind of luring you into the middle of the frame you know we've got the contrast sandwich going on here as well and that's pretty much it so this is the after and this is the before after before after before now from there it's about exporting the image to wherever you want and if you want to export the image to say Instagram then I've got an entire video on the best Instagram export settings available for Adobe Lightroom which I will also leave a link to in the description as well all right what did you think honestly this IM image doesn't need that much work done to it so I actually pushed it more than perhaps I typically would because I like going for a little bit more of a natural look but hey I hope it was interesting to you to see what my workflow is as a professional photographer now if you really enjoyed that video and you want to really level up your editing check out my Lightroom editing masterclass over pk.com Lightroom otherwise I'll see you in the next video but until in get out there and make something that matters peace

Channel: Pat Kay

Views: 25,638

Keywords: patkay, pat kay, photographer, photography, travel photography, travel photographer, edit photos, adobe lightroom, lightroom, editing, edit in lightroom, how to edit in lightroom, editing in lightroom, adobe lightroom editing tricks, adobe lightroom workflow, adobe lightroom editing, post processing, image editing, best image editing tips, how to use lightroom, photo editing tutorial, lightroom tutorial, photo editing, lightroom tips, how to edit in adobe lightroom

Id: 4Sq3CVopsPY

Length: 37min 11sec (2231 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 17 2024