This Will Change Your Editing Forever - Lightroom Calibration

hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to my channel hope you guys are having a fantastic week i know there was nothing important going on especially if you didn't go outside didn't turn the computer on and you don't have a tv but with that said what is important is what we're talking about today calibration now to continue on with my lightroom tutorials that i've been going over the last few weeks this one's going to build upon that you can use it to enhance your images and you can use it to style your images and i got quite a few examples i don't even think you've probably ever used the calibration tool i know that for me just a few years ago i never touched it either and the reason was the name i was always intimidated by the name why do i need to calibrate the images that are coming out of my camera if i do need to calibrate them how do i even do it so the truth is i still don't calibrate my images i don't take a color picker and match things up or anything like that but what i do do is i use it to add a little bit of magic to my images what do i mean by magic well you'll just have to keep watching to find out [Applause] all right so before we start editing images you need to understand one thing about the calibration tool and that is how it affects colors and your images differently than any other tool in lightroom and to do that we're going to jump in the lightroom right now all right so now that we're in lightroom i'm going to use this color wheel as an example to show you exactly how the calibration tool works and functions different than the other tools in lightroom so if i were to just take my saturation slider on my corrections panel here you can see that the text just completely disappears in the red area and also all of the colors just become more saturated that's to be expected furthermore if i go down here to the hsl panel and i select let's say the blue and i just want to change the saturation of the blue notice how it is only affecting the blue color on our color wheel also to be expected now the color calibration panel how does that work so if i increase the blue saturation here you can tell the blue saturation is increasing but also pay close attention to the purple or the cyan sorry magenta as the official name and or the yellows or the greens and it is happening ever so slightly it might be hard to see on youtube let's try to see if we can do it with the red you can see the green changing a lot here when i'm moving the red slider the reason that's happening is if you take a look at my histogram when i'm hovering over the images you you can or over the colors rather you can see the values in the histogram i want to hover over blue right now it is 41 18 and 93 or if i hover over red it's 75 34 and 13. so the reason this is happening is because each of these colors is made up of all three colors obviously red having the most red blue have the most blue and as you guessed it green having the most green but when we're using the calibration tool we're pulling up all the colors now obviously if i'm increasing the blue saturation it's going to prioritize and make that one the most but you're going to pull everything else with it what that does is give you a nice roll off on your images so it's a very subtle way to increase the saturation but also increase you'll notice when we get into the first image slightly the brightness of some colors and it really creates a subtle effect that in my opinion is one of the best ways to add a little bit of pop to your image so let's start with our first image all right so our first image we're going to start completely fresh there are no edits on this image whatsoever haven't even changed the white balance and i'm going to show you one of the first things i do and this is what i do in a standard edit is i will typically change the white balance i might make a few basic adjustments one of the very first things i do to almost all of my images is scroll all the way to the bottom and increase my blue saturation to 100 now you might notice a very subtle difference here so i'm actually going to zoom in let's zoom in a little bit more here by holding shift and using the scroll zoom and i'm going to just turn this off and on and you can see the difference immediately and the things you really want to pay attention to let's get the before and after here things you really want to pay attention to are how the how the colors are glowing on this grass the other things you can pay attention to are let's take a look at the shadows area so over here this is kind of a dull shadowy area and and the after effect of adding 100 to my blue saturation is this nice more lively green in my image and it just makes everything pop just a little bit more but it's it's so subtle you can barely notice it but it just gives a little bit of life to my image now you might be asking why i'm not using the blue or the red slider so let me show you that really quick i'm going to turn off the blue here i'm going to zoom into the sun and if i increase my red slider all the way to 100 you can see this kind of crunchy almost too oversaturated of that color and i can do the same with the green and i already know how it'll affect the image it's a little bit less but it's still a little bit too much now let me show you the blue and it's just such a nice increase of color throughout that range you can tell all the way at 100 it does not make this look unnatural now what you could do is instead of increasing these two by a hundred you can increase them by let's say half and you might get the desired result but standard i typically always like just increasing my blue slider to 100. the one downside is and the one thing you might have to do in some of your edits is it may increase the blue and your whatever blue is in your image too much the way i combat this typically is i come back up to my hsl tab and i will simply decrease the blue slider which apparently had already done and i forgot to reset that is my bad but as you can tell when i go down just a little bit here if i look at our before and after image this is with both edits increasing the blue saturation and the color calibration and decreasing in hsl and this is our original image it gives me just a slight bit more blue now if i turn this off and on you can see that it's maybe a bit too blue and it's not going to look very strong here but once i do my final edit of this image the blues in the sky might be a little bit too much and you might want to decrease them a little bit it's going to be left up to you you can decrease and increase that however you want but that's how you do it so with that said let's jump into another image let's go down here and zoom back out now this is an image i've already edited so it has all my edits to it the only things that are turned off are my color calibration and you can kind of tell that there's definitely some dynamics in this image there's some brights in the houses down here the sky looks okay but it's not exactly it it doesn't have that pop that i really want and watch what happens when i simply just increase the blue saturation to 100 now you can tell that the sky is far too blue but what i really want you to focus on here is this patch of land right here so i'm going to turn this off and on and look what happens to that area it's almost as if i'm not necessarily adding saturation it just kind of brightens up that spot really well and that's the reason i like using the blue saturation slider is because it has a it has such a powerful effect on golden light or light that is hitting objects so if i turn this off and we increase the red it kind of changes the tonality of the houses just a little bit too much or if i increase the green once again changes the channel just a little bit too much however that might be the desired effect that you want for me i typically stick with the blue slider and i just really love the way it looks now again we're having that problem where the sky is too blue so all i would do scroll up come to the blue in my hsl and just get it back to a point that looks natural so basically we're correcting too much blue but all of those other colors in my image are now where i want them to be so with that said let's jump into even another image and i'm going to continue showing you how powerful this tool is let's zoom back out this is another image i've already edited it has my full edits on it i've gone through and done a few things let's scroll down here to do color calibration and this time instead of using the blue saturation we're going to use the green so one thing i like to do is sometimes my greens just look a little bit too yellow they're a little bit too golden or too yellow and i really want them to be a more muted green and the way i can do that is simply by adjusting the hue saturation or the sorry the hue slider of the green and it gives us a very muted green in our image here i'll do the before and after here so that was the before which you can see the yellows you can see that vibrance that slight bright hint of yellow in the in the greens there when i slide it gives us a more muted and more blue green now this image is still lacking a slight pop to it so really quickly i can just adjust the green saturation and notice specifically how much it's affecting the green in the grass here i'll turn it off it's so subtle right it's just barely adding back any of that brightness back in but what it is doing is notice the red house in our image or the red hut how much it's making that pop when i'm adjusting the green slider so this is something you're going to have to play around with this is something you're going to have to learn how do these actually affect the colors in my image after a few years of experience i've definitely gotten better at it but it's something you'll have to do so with that said let's keep pushing the tool even further i'm going to reset these now something else you can do with this is you can actually stylize your image i wrote an article a long time ago about posting an image to instagram every day for a month you can find it here probably in the description i can't link up here yet but i posted a picture to instagram every day for a month even though i feel a little bit different about instagram nowadays still a good article and i used a very specific style in those images and i used the camera calibration tool to make that style i'm going to show it to you really quick so super easy if you've ever watched a movie it's known as the blue and teal style and it's really easy to do using the calibration tool so if i just go here and shift that hue all the way to the left and i pop the saturation all the way up and then i probably come up here if i was trying to make this actually look okay and decrease my blue saturation by a decent amount my aqua now i have that orange and teal look and it was as simple as changing a few settings now i'm not saying to go out and do this to all of your images this is a very specific style and it gives a kind of infrared look to your images it might be for you it might not but it is something you can do with the calibration settings now let's look at our final image so for the last image i just want to bring home how strong this tool is and i'm going to take a photo that has no sun it has barely any light and doesn't have any blues in it or anything like that i've already done my edits to this photo and what we're going to do really quick is i'm simply just going to zoom in probably not that much and i'm going to turn up again the blue saturation slider to 100 and you can see how much the colors pop in this image let me zoom back out and i will show you the before and after there's the before and the after and it just adds this subtle almost amount of light that are hitting those spots and it doesn't affect your shadows nearly and it just it just it has like i said in the beginning it adds a little bit of magic to your images and i can't exactly describe in perfect words what it is doing and it's something you'll have to see for yourself but i cannot recommend trying it enough i'm just going to keep showing you really quick before and after you can see how much it's it's not necessarily saturating those colors it's it's bringing up slightly their exposure but it's also popping them just just a little bit more even though we're only using the blue slider and it doesn't affect the rest of our image in a negative way and to me that's super powerful that is the power of this tool is how subtle it is when you're using it and how easy it is to use again i edit almost every single of one of my photos that i publish online that you see in my articles that you see in my videos by scrolling down and turning my blue saturation to 100 it's not simple all right so i know that was a lot of images and a lot of information all at once but realistically i just showed you how you can use the tool in different imaging situations i showed you photos that have the sun in them i showed you photos that have no sun no blues i showed you photos that have light being cast on ground different types of white balance everything and how it can affect each type of photo the best thing for you to do is go and take some of your photos and try to use this now i fully recommend that when you get into your editing flow your workflow that you edit the calibration settings as one of the first things you do however it can be fun and it is perfectly reasonable to go to back to some of your images that you've already edited and try using this tool one thing i will note though is that these calibration settings will be slightly different camera to camera so as you've heard probably in a ton of other videos you watched whether the video or photography related the color science behind a manufacturer such as canon or sony or fuji is going to be slightly different so when you increase the saturation of your blues on your fuji or on your sony it might be different than what happens when i do it on my canon and with that said thank you guys for watching if you're still here still listening to me hit that like button and i would love for you to subscribe no pressure but it does help me out and again i really enjoy making these videos and i love hearing from you guys so leave a comment down below and let me know what you think with that said i'll see you guys again very soon thanks again ah come on stay down

Channel: Alex Armitage

Views: 442,669

Keywords: landscape photography, education, lightroom, tutorial, color calibration, tones, editing, workflow

Id: FnFQfyFSqRw

Length: 14min 35sec (875 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 07 2020