The ULTIMATE GUIDE to STREET PHOTOGRAPHY

we're back for part two the ultimate guide to street photography after the unexpected success of our last video which garnered over one million views professor heinz and i are back in new york city to bring you guys a full-blown full process video to street photography from the gear to the pov shoot right down to the editing nothing held back and this is the ultimate guide to street photography professor hines 55 can be a worthy choice every now and then now as you can probably tell from the length of this video that it is incredibly long but it is also incredibly detailed not only do we follow the professor into the streets but will also get to hear his thought process when it comes to getting the shot while being both on the feud and in a separate interview i do not utilize burst it's just a matter of timing it correctly and we'll also be addressing a lot of the frequently asked questions from the previous video including his settings his lens choices and his overall approach to lighting and composition we'll even be answering the most asked question in every single street photography video is it okay to take photos of strangers and publish them on social media now because this video is so long i definitely utilize the time codes and the chapters available only here on youtube and feel free to come back to this video anytime you want because this is going to be here online for free for all of youtube's entire lifetime and this tutorial is made possible by our friends over at zeiss camera lenses america's adobe and artless so if you guys enjoy this video be sure to let them know so we can make more like this in the future so without further ado let's get into the streets chapter one composition when it comes to street photography there will be a lot of walking involved and more often than not you'll come across crickets for miles but when you find a spot that's gold and trust us you'll know when it's good you will be rewarded we're right outside the oculus world trade center transportation hub right now i'm going to take the a1 and start with the 85. so what i'm gonna do first is put my earbuds in because i like listening to music for the professor a gold mine for him is a bustling crowd and when he sees it he'll crouch down and camp out for a while so what i'm doing now is capturing these people as they photograph oculus and i like getting the buildings because that's that's why i shoot as low as i do i want the buildings so that way people kind of they don't look too short as you're shooting them you know if i shoot eye level into the ground it doesn't work as well for framing my photos i am someone who likes more distant shots if you notice a lot of my images aren't really close up to the people there's always a foreground i have my subject and then there's something in the background why do i do that because it sort of messes with your eyes when you view the image to where you notice the subject but then you're also looking at everything else around so what i like to do is capture individuals along oculus and then just take these solo shots sometimes i take people just sitting or i'll take people as they're walking and it's just so perfect so look at this guy he's walking up i love it i love it so we're gonna just track them keep tracking them get them in the location that i want and then i'll take the picture until as he does that so that's kind of what i would get now yeah it's okay will i use it or will i not use it that's to be determined it's an okay photo what don't i like about it he's a little too close to the building so like like this now i like this because they're actually kind of far away enough from the building to have that depth and that's more what i want so here i would kind of fluctuate as far as where i'm positioned to get certain compositions i'm always aperture priority these cameras are so smart i don't mind having it in an automatic feature i trust my gear and i think it does a really good job so i don't mind that you know i'm just concerned about depth of field so this is nice we're actually gonna get a horizontal of this this is good in terms of photographing vertically or horizontally the professor tries to get the same shot in both orientations after all with how many people are viewing everything on their phones now the vertical orientation just looks much better on mobile devices taking a horizontal shot and performing a vertical crop is just not the same and we would be sacrificing a lot of megapixels resulting in a lower resolution photo okay i like those so i might get another and do it horizontal and you'll kind of see why i'm doing the horizontal here the professor rarely crops and even when he does it's a small enough crop to remove any distracting elements on the outer edge of the frame so let's see what else can we get now when it comes to getting the shot the professor has shared with me that the way that he does street photography is actually very uncomfortable as he crouches down to get the shot we would be in this position for an hour at each location however i think we got it we do it for a good reason oh look at this [Music] so that's them up close now let's pull back that's the shot the thing is i'm trying not to have to worry about cropping because if i crop it makes that frame so much smaller and i don't want to do that so that's why i need it as clear as i possibly can so now i can quickly get a vertical does i have time okay got the shot so this is what i wanted so this is the horizontal and i wanted it as wide as i could so to eliminate that guy on the side i'm not losing as much so it's okay whereas before i still had too many people in the shot but i think that's okay i think we're good there i know i'm gonna have this is gonna affect me at old age for how i shoot but i i just like the lower shots i don't like shooting from up here i don't like shooting from the hip so from here if i were to take the same shot i'm gonna show you the difference of why i don't shoot this high okay so here's the difference see it's a little high and i'm not catching as much as the of the building whereas in this it's a little lower so you don't see as much of the ground see how it's just below that last third whereas here i'm actually coming more on that third line and i don't necessarily want that much space i want to be high enough to where you can tell that this is the ground but still be low enough to where that's not taking up a significant amount of the of the frame oh there's a lady taking a picture i'm getting down to goodness and i missed her i got down here for no reason but at least it wasn't that long okay i hope the camera picked that up jason vong has just said lie that he hates me i like photographing up towards people and framing people in the the lower thirds lower thirds and aim upward you know jason and i's knees are now damaged for life because we squat it so much all right let's go ahead and move on to the next chapter chapter 2 lighting lighting is key in odd genres of photography and street photography is no exception especially since this particular genre relies only on natural lighting for the professor overcast and rainy days are his favorite types of weather to do street photography the reason being we get nice and even lighting at every location so see the light change that's the difference so just looking at the light on me look at how harsh it is like i'm kind of having a squint just to look in the camera the ideal lighting scenario for me is overcast because that's when the light is softer so i would not catch anybody on this corner because this is just too harsh and i lose my colors so too much light i lose those colors and that's what i'm not trying to have happen gotta keep those colors [Music] while most people would do anything to avoid the rain this particular element can turn any scene into a whole different playground for the professor which we'll show you later in this video for now we want to show you the difference between shooting in harsh lighting and soft lighting and how both can affect your photos very differently if it's a day like now where you know it's more so overcast with a little bit of sun oh that's perfect that is perfect here in new york though because there are so many tall buildings and many narrow streets you can actually photograph during the middle of the day and not have to really worry too much about the harsh sunlight the light hitting certain buildings would create like a soft box whereas other times you just have such harsh light that it's like no i'm not going to photograph anybody here because look at how the light is hitting their faces that harsh light minimizes your colors now if you don't have the luxury of tall buildings being your natural light soft boxes sunset golden hour is almost always a guaranteed the best time to do street photography our first evening of filming the sunlight oh gosh it was it was rich we kind of treated that as a little bit of a warm up that's the shot a common question we get asked is does the professor listen to music during his street sessions and the answer is yes music is a strong source of inspiration for him unfortunately as much as he would have liked this to we didn't have the budget to license seven rings by ariana grande but luckily we have many amazing music alternatives from one of our sponsors art list [Music] it was so gold there was even one where i saw the lady coming into the frame and she had the longest ponytail reminded me of ariana [Music] i actually ran over to a spot that i wanted to frame that because i wanted the length of the railing with the light post and then you just had this nice golden hue oh that was so beautiful the tricky thing with that though is that you have a limited window because shortly after that we had no more sun that's why i love those times sunrise and sunset and overcast days ideal times to get the best shots if you've been enjoying some of the tracks throughout this guide and you produce your own videos you should consider signing up for artless a go-to music platform with unlimited licenses that's even cleared for commercial work usage they have over 22 000 quality songs 27 000 sound effects updated on a daily basis they have two types of licenses a personal one that covers only social media usage and the unlimited plan where you can use any of their music for commercial work as well to learn more about this check out our link in the description box below chapter 3 trains low light and motion if you've been following the professor on social media then you know he has a strong passion for trains i love photographing the subway because i'm a big advocate for transit well take the train i utilize transit in any city that has transit that i may go to [Music] but then i love the underground because i grew up with trains thomas the tank engine was was my guy he's very passionate about the transit system and i think that passion truly shines through in a lot of his photos [Music] so that's a shot zoom in there so i like doing that because it's just a different perspective you know shooting people if i'm on the train i like shooting people off the train and then vice versa and then i like transfer stops like this so look at this i like this curve and throughout all this you will notice a professor sets up his shots first or at least get an idea of what he wants first after determining the lens choice he then adjusts his settings accordingly frames up his shots and just wait till the moment happens it's that simple folks [Music] [Music] and we would be riding the trains back and forth just to get to different stations to photograph at each spot and during those rides the professor would photograph inside the train and then when it stops he would step up for a brief moment to grab a couple of passengers entering and exiting before boarding back on [Music] man just watching this guy work he's just so fluid at it so kind of like what i look for with shooting subway stuff i like using the handlebars that's one where i capture those in like the foreground and then frame people in between them if i can and you know like i'll shoot through the window like this because i like this guy standing up that actually makes a good shot oh that's great so i'll look for stuff like that so how does the professor goes about capturing the subway stations given the minimal lighting we have underground while most photographers would say just use a faster aperture lens f 1.8 f 1.4 f 1.2 but you know there's another way too a handy little trick called long exposure man just look at those light twinkles on the train now you'll notice at times there isn't a particular person or train in focus and that's because the professor is more focused on the motion the train arriving and leaving the passengers boarding and exiting long exposure is not just a technique that simply allows in more light into the sensor of the camera but also a way to create the feeling of motion or should i say e-motion you got what i think [Music] so that's how you catch the motion that there that's it i'm glad the train went slower so you can actually see it makes a difference on the speed so i was at just a little bit under a third of a second but because the speed of the train was so slow it's harder to capture that because for it to have enough distance you need to be longer on how long that exposure is so that's how come you can do this handheld [Music] and so if we look so see how this is so see how the post and all of that is in focus that's what we want we want this to because this is not moving but if we look at the train the train is moving and this is handheld it's easier to do this with wider lenses so the wider you go the easier it is to do that that's all it is not much to it and that just shows you don't need a tripod to do long exposure [Music] now the passengers the conductors are also incredibly important to the professor so let's see how he goes about capturing the subjects individually [Music] we'll take this car coming up later in this video we'll show you how the professor edits this particular shot of the man on the train [Music] so don't you move i like where you are so don't pay any mind to me [Music] [Music] okay [Music] i love it look at that manual focusing manual and if you guys love the results that you're seeing on the screen don't forget we also have a whole editing portion in the later half of this video [Music] smoking on the subway you never know what you're going to see on the new york city subway that's why i love the underground chapter four legalities of street photography it's gotta be against a lot of looks just [Music] so the question that we got asked the most from the first street video was surrounding the legalities of street photography is it okay to take photos of strangers including miners without their consent and publishing them on social media well we actually caught in an expert on this subject matter he's a lawyer for social media content creators as well as a content creator himself ian corzine ian take it away hey jason thanks so much for having me on the answer to your question is yes yes yes at least in america it is totally legal for photographers to take pictures of strangers so long as they're in a public space actually it is totally legal to take pictures of children without their permission or their parents permission now these photographers can use these photographs in social media and they could make prints and then sell them and make money for themselves they could even do what i would advise them to do create nfts out of these photos hopefully we laid that question to rest now while it is legal to take photos of strangers out in public professor hein still advises to practice common sense i feel that you shouldn't do something that you wouldn't appreciate somebody doing to you he never publishes a bad photo of anyone and he's never invasive of anyone's personal space for the people that do find the images of themselves the professor will actually send over the raw file and even give them a print so if you recognize someone or even yourself in his photos be sure to reach out to him and let him know you can find him on instagram professor hines so the golden rule is don't be creepy about it just be respectful but if you have any further legal questions be sure to check out ian's channel chapter 5 lens choices so now that we've seen the professor in action let's shift gear and talk about his wow his gear the gear that i'm using in terms of just for cameras is like this camera that i have here which is the sony alpha one and i also use the sony alpha nine but don't feel like you're missing out if you have an aps-c camera or any other crop body if you want to go out and do street with those cameras they are perfectly fine cameras to do so you'll be surprised on just how good those cameras are when you put the right glass to it on a typical street session the professor would bring around two to three lenses with him at least one wide and one tight right now for street on the manual side i'm using the zeiss loxia 2.8 21 millimeter i have the loxia f2 35 on the autofocus side i have the bodice f2 25 millimeter the 40 millimeter f2 close focus the bodice 1.8 85 and then also the sonar 1.85 as we've seen throughout the video most of the individual shots of people are photographed with a tighter lens typically with a 55 millimeter or an 85 millimeter and one of the things that we believe we've done in the previous video was that we inspired a lot of people to do street photography with an 85 millimeter lens it really challenges the conventional norm of street photography where commenters would often say 85 is not a street lens and that street photography must be done with a 35 millimeter and getting close to your subject that's real street photography right there however the professor does not believe in labeling lenses nor does he like to do what everyone else is doing when you walk into a store like b h when you look at the box doesn't matter who makes the lens on that box it says aperture it has the focal length nowhere on that lens does it say landscape lens wedding lens portrait lens people have given these classifications just because you know an 85 millimeter people see it as a portrait lens why not try it for street why not try it for landscapes if you see everybody using a particular lens for everything but this this and this do that that people aren't doing that's how you get different photos from everybody else you can utilize whatever lens you want to for any application the 85 millimeter allows the professor to never be invasive of anyone's personal space it allows them to stay at a comfortable distance and not only that but the 85 millimeter provides a very unique look it hones into the specific individual while using the environment around him as a beautiful backdrop as to who he chooses to focus on he looks out for interesting people whether it's the action that they do such as taking a photo with their phones or their fashion choice someone with an amazing outfit or even colors that stick out like a bright yellow cap these are just some of the driving elements that he will focus on later when he edits his photos on the other hand wider lenses like the 21 millimeter or the 35 millimeter while not exclusively allows the professor to focus more on the environment as we've seen from the train stations and this photo from times square the people the cars and anything else become accessories to elevate the shots and often in these wider shots they're all just a blur and don't forget they are the zeiss bodice and loxia lenses hey do me a favor will ya give zeiss some love check out their lenses for your specific camera system and follow them on social media and let them know that you enjoy this video and you want them to support more future projects like this but really quickly the bodice line of lenses are specifically designed for the sony full-frame e-mount cameras and these are a unique line of lenses that have auto focusing capabilities on the other hand the loxia lenses are also designed for the sony full-frame e-mount cameras but the key difference from the bodice is that the loxia lenses are manual focus only lenses despite being incredibly tiny lenses they have a very responsive manual focus control and actually using the loxia manual lenses is an artistic choice for the professor chapter 6 manual lenses the benefit to me for using a manual lens as opposed to autofocus is that it allows me to actually take my time it makes me understand patience a little bit more to where i'm not rushing through things i'm taking the time to actually be a part of the scene regaining my love for why i do this my love for photography and i feel that i am producing work that has i guess more of a story to it than before there's a little bit more thought process behind it it's just a way where i can really connect with where i am i'm doing photography but at the same time i want to enjoy where i am when it comes to using manual lenses here are a couple tips for you to help you nail focus use focus peaking and focus magnification focus peaking enables a clutter of dots on the screen that tells you what's in focus and magnification enlarges a part of the screen that you want to concentrate the focus on something that comes up often is that people ask well you could just take your autofocus lens and switch it to manual that does not work the same manual lenses specifically the loxia have very fine linear response manual control giving you the exact positions needed to nail focus once you set the focus you don't have to worry about the camera resetting it whereas autofocus lenses most won't give you as fine of a control as the focus is measured electronically with the camera and oftentimes the camera might reset the focus distance when it's powered off when it comes to getting the shot you want the least amount of obstacles getting in the way and in this case having the focus distance dialed in on the manual lenses would just allow you to focus on the moment so now i'm going to switch from 85 back to 35 and this is what i'm going to do now so now with the 35 what i want i want sort of a long exposure in here so with the 35 we're going to change our aperture so this is how i set up for a manual lens so i'm going to go to f8 maybe go to nine let's go to nine so now what i know is once i set my aperture everything in between these notches you see eight on both sides so that lets me know whatever distance fits within that window as long as the subject is within that distance so in this case if it was a little bit between two and a half feet to four feet if someone's in that window it's gonna be in focus at that aperture as you go down if you stop down in aperture that window closes so now it's more of a within a three feet margin and so we're going to frame so i might have to move a bit because i want where there are people there's no one walking right now so let's go up one [Music] so we'll do a vertical [Music] set my focus there drop the iso [Music] and then boom there you go that's what we want so that's how i differentiate the focal lens so if we zoom in on the back wall there see how moynihan's shark back there we want that i just want the movement of the people so that's that's how you get that no tripod is necessary so what you do is say if you run into an instance where you do have some camera shake just either adjust your iso by increasing it so that way you can hand hold that so like we're gonna get this so see because my focus is set now so i don't i don't need to touch it so you know i have it i want moynihan back there [Music] so see so this is another example see how there's a little motion in the text so now i need to fix that so all i do is we'll increase about two-thirds of a stop here comes the one in view [Music] look at that and that the text is perfect perfect text so we were at a fifth of a second f9 iso 200 so that's that's my sweet spot so if i had a little motion i know i have to go faster than that that's my base i cannot go lower than that because then i have where the sign back there is out of focus that's all you do so once you have your focus set just a matter of pointing and shooting that's the difference of how i shoot a manual as opposed to an autofocus lens but that doesn't mean the professor has given up on autofocus lenses someone get between you they do have their time and place professor heinz foreground i'll put that as my lower third now okay well maybe not this time in place but perhaps something a little more chaotic chapter 7 autofocus and the chaos of times square times square the belly of the beast the kind of place that attracts only tourists from all walks of life while most new yorkers would avoid times square like a plague we gravitate towards it welcome to times square the land of opportunity remember how he said the professor's goldmine is a bustling crowd well times square is the best spot to go dig it because you never know what's going to happen so this is a corner that i've come to quite often a lot of you have seen the shot that i took where it's a wide intersection shot like this this is where this is done and i don't use a tripod for it i don't know some of those shots i'm gonna forever remember because you know we almost got manhandled by minnie mouse and things like that that you don't see in the picture are why i remember certain moments leading up to an image because that's important to that story for me [Music] now this section is all about having anticipation be ready for the moment and always have your camera on so see look at how good the tracking is very small margin of error there we punch in look at how sharp that is look at that that's that's fantastic that is fantastic look at that the autofocus settings that i use for my cameras is primarily flex spot or expand flexible spot it's like a center focus point but you can actually move it anywhere on the screen when you're shooting with any lens really especially on the street there's a lot of different elements going on and so if you were to use a wider focus area you might have something in focus that you did not want get the yellow cab now the reason why i use the expand flex spot as well is because the regular flex spot it's just pinpointed on one area but expand sort of hunts around that small little focus area as well so it kind of helps improve where the focus is landing so that way you can nail the shots so now we lost the sun which is perfect because now it just gives us more opportunity to get any shot that i want and i'll have my colors so i'm happy about that let's see what we can see here look at that catching the expression that awesome there is an instance in times square there is a lady with her daughter on her back and i just had to act quickly but this is why i have a peak design strap on my wrist to tether my camera i had very short of a window to react to that so that's how come i keep my camera on i never turn it off for that very reason so we still haven't moved yet i'm just finding stuff that you know is catching my eye times square has so many people you can just literally walk a couple blocks and just stay in this vicinity and knock off shot after shot because you're going to see a multitude of people different backgrounds different cultures oh look at this look at this look at this a bride isn't that awesome look at that [Music] situations like this i'll have my music going and i'm just i'm just sitting here i don't have anywhere to go we're just oh look at her coming with the white she's on her phone love it love it love it love it love it got it punch in look look at that just beautiful and so knock off a series there that's perfect let's start walking a bit sure jason would like to at least you i didn't have you kneeling this time so give me that oh i got i got my thing you see this gopro he needs he needs to kneel i'm just going to be down here like this jason has just initiated the cheat code despite the chaos in times square it is important to note that the professor does not shoot in burst it's all a matter of timing of course having a high speed camera can certainly be advantageous but any modern day camera with autofocus especially face and eye autofocus will be good enough to capture the people in your frames i do not utilize burst because the reason i don't do bursts is because i don't want to have 50 100 photos of the same thing and now i have to go through all of that i actually feel happier when i just get one shot because i'm gonna appreciate that i may have a shot it's not clean i just try to time it and take the shot can you get into a better position if there's no time take the shot i say take the shot take the bloody shot [Music] wow how are you guys enjoying this video so far if you guys are loving it be sure to share that love in the comment section down below and don't forget to hit that like button [Music] now throughout this video we have shown you guys that street photography is a matter of finding your gold spot and focus on digging around that spot at each section of the video we stayed at that particular spot for at least 45 minutes to an hour here's the thing when it comes to street photography there is no time limit for the professor he sets his own time limit in fact the professor on record have once said he stayed inside the grand central terminal for over four hours just doing street photography so uh let's see you top that our comment section is open down below chapter 8 rain [Music] all right so it wasn't that crazy of a rain but we promised you guys we're gonna show you some cloudy some murky some moisty rainy street photography and the professor couldn't be any happier this is his game now we have entered his territory today i'm happy about shooting because these are my conditions so i'm excited i'm excited i feel more i feel more into it today and that's that's a positive how i feel really determines what the photos are gonna ultimately look like [Music] oh that could be something creative though zoomed in look at that i like this corner it's one of my favorites come up here [Music] we'll go down this way we came back to the fulton area so we can show you guys how the same location can be drastically different the next day especially with the rain and the puddles we were getting different types of shots with all kinds of different moods oh it looks so good [Music] so we were out here yesterday notice the difference [Music] so i'm opting for the bodice 25 and now we're gonna get some reflections even in these wet conditions the professor will still get low to stake out for his shot and you already know what we're busting our knees to maximize that reflection look at that because we don't have the sunlight i can now get slower so what i want to do the next light take the same reflection but then i want to have a little bit of motion blur with the people crossing the street and remember when we said to always be ready for the moment while that man running across would have made a great photo the professor mentioned that he's okay with letting some shots go not every great moment has to be captured on camera some you just have to appreciate while you're there but when your skills and luck coincide you will always end up with something quite magical so i was gonna slow the shutter but i just kept it normal for that because i really wanted that lady with her colorful umbrella that was nice i like that before we move on i just want to quickly once again thank our friends over at zeiss camera lenses america's adobe and artless for helping us for supporting us for sponsoring this video it is through their generosity that allows us to make this long form tutorial video for free on youtube what'd i tell you in the beginning nothing held back right it's all for free so if you guys appreciate the amount of work that went into it the best thing that you can do for us is to simply like and comment down below and if you guys want to go above and beyond be sure to share this video to anyone who has an interest in photography as well as the photo editing process that would mean the world to us [Music] i get lucky someone's gonna come up the steps so because of that i've switched to zone focus so that way it can just hit on whoever comes up i'm gonna be ready for it whenever that is knew it the moment you stood up eh it's not worth waiting i'm over it wow it has been documented that the professor [Music] is [Music] in situations like this i like to capture cars coming down where people are across from the sidewalk at the intersection the only way you can get that perfectly you have to focus and switch it to manual focus because as the cars are coming by you know the camera is going to be changing focus because your subject is hidden entirely so you have to keep that in mind so that's something you have to switch between af and manual focus we might cross back over here [Music] [Music] just finding who i want that's a good couple shot [Music] okay let's review look at that that's a good shot perfect so we got him perfect and look at that got the fog back there got the cars i like that look at this look at that oh this is so much action okay so switch the manual [Music] so i need to be further over let's see if i can quickly do it no so for those that say i don't make mistakes i do make mistakes you just don't see them now jason vong might make mistakes but i don't make mistakes the song is never wrong that should be a t-shirt yeah it's like if it ain't zeiss it ain't nice [Music] so with the wrap of the shoot it is now time to edit chapter 9 lightroom we're cooking with grease so pull out that don king chia pet it's time to get cooking folks in this section of the video you'll see a couple of full edits by professor heinz from scratch the professor will guide you through his editing process what he focuses on how colors drive his edits as well as showing you some powerful tools in lightroom to make your life a lot easier and actually you can even see the full editing to some of these curated photos in the adobe lightroom discover tab so if you're a subscriber to adobe lightroom right now or sign up through a free trial you can actually edit some of professor heinz photos you'll have a chance to follow along or do your own edit as well or even see the full edits from the professor himself or anyone else who choose to remix their own edit for the same photos all that is available in adobe lightroom right now through the discover tab in the remix section so definitely go check that out go and try some of the images that i have for yourself maybe you have an edit that i probably haven't thought about but it's a great way to where you can really get involved in the community and share some of your creative processes with other people and this portion of the editing process is brought to you by adobe thank you adobe for your support so without further ado grab your computer a nice refreshing drink and let's get cozy with kenny so let's get right into it with our first photo now this is one that i absolutely loved we captured it on one of the older subway cars here in new york city when i go to edit a photo i always look for what are the dominating colors it's pretty obvious here you have orange you have your red and you have yellow so that's where we're going to focus those three colors red yellow and orange now let's open up our edit panel here now the first thing that i like to do is change my profile i usually like starting with adobe standard but we're going to change this anyways because i actually want to use a color profile now if you've never used the color profiles what they are is basically like what you experience when using an instagram filter so let's go in here and browse our selection now there are various profiles available we're going to use the artistic three and once we select it we can actually adjust how extensive that profile makes our photo as far as the adjustment or we can actually take it back and kind of minimize the effect for this i actually want to go about the 70 range once we come out of that we're going to start going through our panels here let's just start an order with our light our exposure is pretty spot on in terms of our highlights though i do want to make an adjustment here i will typically decrease my highlights because what that will do is give me the detail back in certain areas that may appear as if they're overexposed but really they're not look up here in the light area you see a little bit here where we're seeing some of the detail that may have been lost here and that just gives us that detail back so we can see some of those defining edges to kind of get that brightness back i'll use the white level i also want to adjust a little bit in the shadows when i do that if i come up in shadows typically i'll come down in blacks because i want to see the detail in the shadow areas but i still want to have that nice contrast that's a big signature to my actual style and work so let's decrease that a little bit we don't have to go too far the next part is our point curve i like to start off by dropping some anchors left to right you have your black point shadows midtones highlights and then your white point and i just like dropping these three anchors so let's start that off here once we've done that i want to bring up my black point i'm just adding a little smidge what this does is it sort of gives us that sort of faded look if you go up really far you see how that really changes the dynamics of the image makes it look like it's very faded kind of washed out a bit so let's come back down off of that because we don't want it to be too faded there now let's adjust our shadows and we're going to bring this point over a little bit towards our black point get it about in there let's bring that down a bit i'm okay with that next let's adjust our mid-tones here and then next our highlights they're actually pretty good we don't have to do anything in our highlights and we don't have to do anything in the white point now once i've done that we're going to come out of that from our point curve adjustment select it to where you get back to your tone curve and we're going to make these adjustments here on our graph now i want to bring that to 15 bring this to 60. that looks good let's go down to our color let's start manipulating a few things now because i've already called out what colors are the dominating factor here that's going to be my focus we want to be adjusting those now for our color adjustment here i don't think i want to really change anything everything looks pretty spot-on now if you wanted to pull out a little bit of the purple you could so now watch what happens if we did that you see we sort of take out that sort of purplish hue and you get a little bit more of a warmer look to the overall color here because we took some of that purple out so it just warmed it up a little bit but in this case i actually like the way that it was so we're going to just reset that next we're going to come down to our color mixer and we're going to adjust those dominating colors so let's start with our orange i want to change my hue and we'll just bring this over to our right a bit to where you're starting going towards the greenish yellow colors there and we want to actually make this a little brighter so we'll increase the luminance and then we'll also go to our yellow color channel and we'll go more towards the green spectrum here and now we're really going to pump up our luminance here that's that's good about 50 looks pretty good i don't think there's anything i want to do with my red color channel let's maybe just do 15 now once we've done that we'll come down to my new favorite feature of lightroom which was color grading this has been such a great new addition to lightroom split toning was already great but color grading just gives you so much more control over what you can do now what i want for this is we're going to do all of our adjustments we're going to do shadows midtones highlights and a global adjustment so let's select our shadows here and what i want is sort of a greenish hue in our shadows so let's go to where that would be about 110 or so and now let's crank up the saturation for that look at that starting to get that green in those those darker areas and next we'll go to our mid tones and we want to have a warmer color tone for the mid tones so we'll go between 40 and 50 add the saturation boom look at that highlights we're going to just bump up the luminance here we won't change any of the color tones just adjust the luminance and that looks pretty good and then we'll go to our global now watch this one thing you notice about the subway car look at that aluminum-ness on the background has no color to it right now it's very metallic-like but watch what happens i i want to really make this look like a rich vintage image so that's why we're doing a global adjustment and i'm going to use sort of a greenish color tint watch what happens when we do this we'll go to about 120 round in that range and let's add about 15 20 in our saturation look at that look at that absolutely beautiful totally changed the whole dynamics of the image by just using color grading if you've not used it you're really missing out on the color grading such a useful feature the next thing we'll do is we'll do some effect adjustments and you all know i'm a fan of my vignettes it just adds a nice little softness to it because right now look at how bright the image is you know it's a very bright busy photo but we want to kind of calm that down a bit because again i want my focus to be this guy that's in the photo everything else at that point is sort of like an accessory like how vivian is in the foreground she's an accessory the other people that are in the subway car they're an accessory to that single guy that's in the photo so we want to have a little bit of fall off for everything else and make sure the attention stays on him so let's go ahead and add some vignetting here we'll go to about 30 percent we'll bring our midpoint all the way down now watch what happens with this look at how dark that got now to fix that we're just going to change the feathering so it's on 50 let's bring it to 100 it opens up that vignette a bit and then we'll bring up our adjustment for our highlights because any regions where we have that vignette and our highlights are also being affected by our vignette it'll actually eliminate that so that way it puts the highlights back to sort of the brightness that it was so let's bring those highlights back now once we've done that i'll come down and run a little sharpening don't necessarily have to i mean if we zoom in look at how sharp the photo is but it's just something that i i always do i say this all the time i just do it because i i just like doing it now once we've done that we'll come down to our optics run our lens correction we're going to select our lens here which is a zeiss e mount now what i typically do is i will run the lens correction just to correct any kind of distortion that there may be but with lin's vignetting correction i actually will turn that back off because again i want the light fall off having vignetting for me is not a negative you know some of the lenses that i have may have a stronger vignette than others and i'm okay with that because it's something that i typically will add to my photo anyway so if the lens can do it for me why not just keep it so in that case we're gonna keep it now i don't think we have to straighten this but let's see if there's any adjustment we need to do with the geometry here so we'll select auto and as you can see it needed to be a little straightened that worked well now finally we're going to come into my other favorite which is the masking because we want our subject this guy to stand out a little bit more so what i want to do is do select subject now let's see if the program will actually select him sometimes it works sometimes it may not so in this case it did but it also caught this sort of couple that's over here on the left and we don't want to adjust them so then in that case what do we do well you just come right on in click on the subtract and we're just going to do a brush adjustment here now let's change the size this can be significantly larger and we're just going to subtract our mask away from them once we've done that let's make our adjustments i want to increase the shadows a bit and then i want to increase my white level boom that's it look at that and that beautiful i think we have a final image there folks that looks very very good so look at where we started the original wasn't bad i say this all the time editing for me is not about fixing an image it's about adding my unique creative style but as you can see lightroom is very powerful it's a very powerful tool to where you can really change the whole dynamics of your photo [Music] now our second image is one that was this this was one of the cutest photos and i was in the middle of talking into the camera with jason in times square and we were getting ready to finish up and start moving along and i turned around and i saw this lady with her daughter on her back and i thought it was the cutest photo ever thank goodness i had my camera set up to where all i had to do was hold the camera and take the photo this was a cute adorable photo that i i was happy that i captured what i'm gonna do with this one is i i like what we have i mean no edits yet and the picture it looks perfectly fine but we're just gonna emphasize a few things that's all we're doing we're gonna emphasize a few things now the first thing that i want to do is i don't want to change the profile we're already in adobe standard i think that looks good i want to start with a more flatter look that's why i'm using the adobe standard the default is the adobe color i'll go in here and show you what that would look like has a little bit more contrast to it but for any contrast that i add i'm going to bring that in later on so let's just start with the flatter profile with the adobe standard now first thing i want to do is bring down those highlights just bring it down about 20 or so percent we want to increase our shadows go about 40 or so percent on that and then also bring up our white level now because we brought up those shadows we're gonna bring down the black level so it's always an inverse effect highlights came down whites went up shadows went up black levels came down for our tone curve this time we're actually going to use a preset come back to our top select preset and this preset is strictly adjusting our tone curve look at what the difference is and when we have that here's without here it is width just wait it's all going to come together i promise you that once we have that we're going to close our presets and we're just going to keep it moving there's nothing else that i need to do in my tone curve adjustment you know our tint that we have vibrance all of that is spot on there's nothing that i need to change here either we're going to come to our color mixer now there's a lot of color elements here you have some red you got yellow you have like magenta a little bit of green and aqua we got a multitude of colors going on so let's start with the red luminance let's bring it up we're going to add a little bit of adjustment go a little bit more warmer in our orange color channel we're going to drop the saturation though next we'll do yellow and we want to go more orange and yellow so we're going to significantly change this to about 50 or so after that we're going to come over to our aqua channel and we're going to go a little bit more towards the blue side and then we'll increase the luminance here and then for our blue go a little bit more on the purple side now drop the saturation here maybe about 50 or so percent and increase the luminance now color grading and for this we're going to be adjusting everything our shadows our mid-tones highlights are global now you don't always have to do this but i just love it now with our shadows we want to just add a smidge of red just a smidge so increase the saturation we don't have to change our hue it's already where we want it but we just want to add a little bit now watch what happens if i add quite a bit of saturation you see how it sort of adds this sort of i guess maroon type color tone to the entire image you kind of have the standout colors being your purple sort of magenta colors so i want to add that because it sort of complements that again i'm looking at what colors stand out to me in this case because of our subjects those sort of tones stand out to me we want to exaggerate those now let's bring that down and just just keep a little smidge that's it next we'll come to our midtones and i want sort of like a greenish bluish type color hue here add a little bit of saturation okay and then we'll also increase our luminance about 40 percent that looks good next we'll do our highlights and we want to do a little bit in the warm color tones here and let's add our saturation okay that looks good bring up the luminance that's good lastly global again we'll do a little bit of a warm touch here in the 40 50 range add just a little smidge of saturation and then we'll also bring up luminance here as well all right now again we're going to add a vignette we're always going to add a vignette with that let's bring in about 30 or so i think that works really well for our midpoint we're going to take that all the way to zero now for some of these adjustments here let's add a little bit of texture and clarity too make sure you don't go too far because you don't want it looking too grungy on someone's face and so we're just gonna add just a little bit and then we'll also adjust our roundness feather and highlight of our vignette so let's take a roundness to 100 open up the vignette by changing the feather to 100 and then bring in our highlight adjustment there next for our detail just adding a little sharpness i just love it and then we'll run our lens correction again we have the zeiss 85 here it's selected there and remember what i said with the last photo i love the vignetting so we're going to take the correction off for that i just love having that we might have a little bit on there let's only go to about 10 and once we've done that let's go into masking and i just want to go a little bit warmer on our subjects here because the color is a smidge kind of washed out so let's just do a select subject with our masking let the program do its thing it's gonna select our people here there we go and we're going to change our temperature and let's just go to the warmer side look at that and it's okay if you know if we just wanted to do their faces we could but it doesn't matter if i have the entire body selected it's okay here we'll come out of that and there we go i think that's a pretty photo right there's our before there is our after just being creative that's all it is [Music] now our last image here we've already gone through all of the bulk of our adjustments except one thing and that's color grading because i want you to really see just how powerful this one tool is on its own now to show you what the unedited look like there's the before no edits done that's with our adjustments with the exception of color grading i saw this photo when it was our first day of filming and we were just out kind of testing things out gorgeous golden sunset oh it was just beautiful and i saw this woman who was running who had the longest ponytail reminded me of ariana grande you know that's where my camera over here got its name ariana and she was running and so i came running because i i knew where i wanted to be to catch the framing and there were these railings and you had all these light posts in a line and i just knew that she was going to run along that path close to the bars and so i got in position because i wanted to get as close as i could to get that railing so that way it's kind of like it's leading the viewer into where my subject is so even though she's out in the distance as you follow that line you'll see where she is in that image and i just love this photo so because of the great sunset that it was boom that's my initial thought we need to focus on the colors that is around a sunset what is that red orange and yellow that is it let's open up our edit adjustment panel again and let's go straight to color grading shadows mid tones highlights global it's a little addictive as you can see kind of go a little overboard with the color grading but it's so fun now what we want to do here add the warmness that's where we're going so we're in a 30 40 range add a little saturation we're going to bring down our luminance here and that sort of kind of gives me a little bit of contrast back next we're going to do our mid tones again go into the warmer region now we're going to increase the saturation here a lot watch what happens with this you see how we're starting to get those mid tones you're starting to see that this image warming up right now let's bring up that luminance too we really want this image to be kind of punchy next we'll go into our highlights again same region for our hue saturation let's bump that up about 30 or so percent and then next we'll have our global now watch what happens when i adjust for the global let's set our hue and then we're gonna bring up the saturation a lot here look at that nice beautiful golden photo once we've done that let's um come back over to our sort of three-sided view where we see all of our shadows midtones and highlights and i want to change my balance a bit so that way it's not as intense of all of our adjustments and then we have a final image so here's our before and look at the colors you see the gold was standing out the buildings have a few shades of colors on there but they're not really that saturated so that's a com you don't have to worry about it but look at that after rich golden goodness unfortunately we've come to the conclusion of our editing but if you want to learn more you can always find me online at professorhotties.com or you can visit my youtube channel that has even more tutorials available at professor heinz's choice so until next time i look forward to seeing you in the next video before you guys go if you guys enjoyed this tutorial be sure to let zeiss and adobe know so we can make more of these tutorials in the future and don't forget to tag us on instagram and professor heinz at jasonv media all your future street photos thanks for watching everyone and we'll see you guys in the next video peace the ultimate guide to street i photography we covered a lot of stuff i think we covered a lot all right and we're gonna cut that you

Channel: Jason Vong

Views: 960,928

Keywords: jason vong, sony alpha, photography, cameras, camera lens, digital camera

Id: Fh6PIafC8wU

Length: 68min 28sec (4108 seconds)

Published: Sun May 15 2022