Top 10 Tips For Optimizing Photos in Lightroom

i know i'm going to have fun today and i hope you have a little bit of fun as well so top 10 tips for optimizing your photos in lightroom how many of you are already using lightroom and already feel that all your photos are just totally perfect you're just here for the free candy so i'm gonna talk about you know sort of broadly 10 tips how do i you know narrow things down to just 10 tips it's easy you make 10 tips and then you put all sorts of mini tips sprinkled in between so there'll be lots of kind of random things we'll talk about if you're just getting started with lightroom then i encourage you to take a look at my gray learning website you can learn about the videos that i've got available it goes into a lot more detail than i could possibly cover in just a couple hours here at the b h photo event space so let's dive right in simple enough start with the basics and in the context of the develop module what i really mean when it comes to the basics is literally the basic adjustments and what i find that a lot of photographers have a tendency of doing is sort of getting the cart before the horse says it were to just they want to dive in and add film grain to their photos no not really not so far anybody film grain no yeah it's so like 1982 right adding a vignette adding creative effects split toning going right to black and white and i actually encourage even if you have a pretty good feeling that you might take a photo to black and white we'll talk more about that a little bit later that you really start with the basic adjustments and to me this sort of falls into two basic categories no pun intended one is the color adjustments and the other is the tonal adjustments the overall exposure brightness contrast these sorts of things and the color i think is where most photographers struggle the first thing i'll point out how many of you are shooting raw just about all the time how many actually let's reverse that how many of you never shoot raw not a oh wait one two hands only shooting jpeg so a couple of two out of this whole crowded room of people when you're shooting raw you don't have to worry about the color temperature i think of the color temperature setting in the camera really as just a convenience setting it might save you a little bit of work in post-processing at least in theory for me personally it won't save me any bit of effort at all really because i'm going to touch the temperature and tint sliders regardless i'm that much of a control freak so whether i have to move a slider just a little bit or a lot it's really not that much of a difference and so i leave my camera almost always there's a few exceptions but i leave my camera almost always set to the automatic white balance i find that my camera does a reasonably good job under most circumstances mixed lighting can be a little bit of a challenge but even still with the raw capture there's no penalty for making that change in lightroom's develop module when we're talking about those temperature and tint adjustments if you're shooting jpeg or tiff or some other file format where everything is kind of baked in now you do need to be concerned about color temperature so you'll want to be a little bit more careful in the capture but when we're talking about raw captures in the context of lightroom's develop module we don't have to worry about the accuracy of that color again other than just the convenience of having it as close to perfect as possible right out of the camera and so you'll notice that i have an option here i can choose one of those presets so if i neglected to set the color temperature preset to something that might work really well in the camera i can essentially accomplish the exact same thing after the capture so here's what it would have looked like if i had the camera set to in this case fluorescent or tungsten or cloudy oh there's some tomatoes yeah and so we've got all sorts of options but i leave this set always to as shot a quick little side note this doesn't count as one of the 10 tips or even the bonus tips this is just bonus bonus the auto option here does not relate to the auto setting in your camera it's not the same as setting the camera to auto so it's not like oh let me pretend like i had the camera set to auto this is lightroom auto if you choose as shot then it's whatever the camera had established if you choose auto here it's lightroom evaluating the image and trying to decide what those settings ought to be and i'd say about half the time it does pretty good and the other half the time i find it does pretty awful and so i don't usually bother with that so when it comes to color adjustment one of the concepts you might be a little bit familiar with or at least you are familiar with even though you might not necessarily know it by name that is memory colors we just intuitively know the colors of certain things not necessarily everything and some of us might know certain things better than other things but there's this concept of memory colors where we know what the red of a ripe red tomato is and we know what the yellow is of a ripe banana and the green of a not ripe banana and as long as we're within sort of a narrow range of tolerance we've got a little bit of flexibility but when it comes to memory colors objects that sort of have a correct color you might say then we need to be a little bit more accurate and so if for example i say you know it was you know late afternoon light it was really beautiful and uh you know the light was just really glowing with heat you might say very incandescent that light was this is really what it looked like how many of you are going to believe that i figured there would be one just like on a lark but no nobody's going to believe that because it's way beyond what might be possible for what we believe tomatoes to look like so when we have an object in this case tomatoes where we pretty much all know what the color is of a red tomato and the green foliage even then it's i would say relatively easy to adjust the temperature and tint so temperature is taking us between yellow and blue so essentially you might say adding yellow light versus adding blue light or compensating for light of a given color however you want to look at it and then the tint slider is going to allow us to shift between green and magenta so kind of green and purple essentially you might think of it and what i the way i generally describe this is that the temperature is both corrective and creative because within a certain degree of poetic license artistic license we can push things just a little bit you slept until noon but you shift the temperature a little bit more toward yellow to make people think you actually got up early enough for the sunrise right i mean i would never do that of course but hypothetically speaking uh but you know we can't go way out over here so we've got a little bit more artistic license when it comes to the temperature slider the tint slider i really think of as being purely corrective most photographers i talk to are not interested in a magenta cast or a green cast but they might want to add a nice kind of golden yellow cast where they might even want a nice cool cast like a winter shot so generally we're going to make very small adjustments with tint and possibly a little bit stronger adjustment with temperature but to me the best approach is to grab those sliders and play with them now how many of you feel that you don't have a good eye for color only a few how many of you don't have a good eye for color but you don't want to say so in front of everybody else okay most of the so i find a lot of photographers feel they don't have a lot of confidence in their ability to analyze the color in a photo and to make adjustments to correct the color in the photo and so to them i say swing wildly back and forth if you've ever done macro photography the most frustrating type of photography ever i think you probably are familiar with you know very narrow depth of field and having a hard time getting that focus exactly where you want it and so you're you know adjusting in and out trying to get that focus just right eventually your eye starts like falling asleep and you can't tell what's in focus versus what isn't so you throw it way out of focus and start to bring it back into focus and the least blurry position that's sharp right we've all had that experience well it's the same sort of concept with the color adjustments if i swing this way out over here we know that looks just really ridiculous it's way too yellow and over here it looks arguably more natural certainly than going all the way over toward the yellow but you can still see that there's just a little bit of kind of muddiness in some of the reds especially the highlights and the greens don't look quite right they don't look very healthy so somewhere over in here so by swinging through those extremes then we can kind of start to zero in on the more natural appearing color but again that's kind of easy when we're talking about memory colors objects for which we just sort of intuitively know the color what about then we got into the real world and maybe you're photographing flowers that you're not familiar with these happen to be well we call them canola it's not not actually canola in this case but these canola fields is in the palouse region of eastern washington state and the sky well we all know what a blue sky looks like except there's like a billion different possible shades of blue even for a blue sky right how cyan versus cobalt was it and so as you're trying to make this adjustment it could be a little bit more tricky and there again swinging through those extremes moonlit night versus sunset we'll call it and then trying to find that balance in between and really i think paying careful attention first and foremost to the neutral areas of the image by which i mean the stuff that ought to be gray some shade of gray but be careful not to be tricked this is one of the biggest mistakes i think photographers make at least in concept they'll say well why don't you just use a gray card i wish that were truly possible because if a gray card was a good solution to getting accurate color with outdoor photography i could do all of my photography at high noon on a clear sunny day none of that golden hour stuff right because with a gray card we're essentially stripping out all of the color of the light trying to make the scene look like it were illuminated with pure white light at least in theory and that's not what we're usually or even often trying to accomplish so here for example do i want the clouds the bases of the clouds at least are pretty gray do i want them to be perfectly absolutely neutral gray or might i want just a little bit of color it depends in this case i might want to have a little bit of a yellowish tint or even a little bit of a bluish tint or whatever the case might be so i'll want to think about what theoretically is neutral in the scene and do i actually want it neutral in that scene all right and very often we don't we want it to be just a little bit golden or you know cooler or whatever the case may be now usually all i've got in my color reasonably close mostly because if the color's off it's going to annoy me and if i'm annoyed about the color i can't really focus on the tonality in the image but then i get to move on to the tonality so let's take a look first and foremost at the histogram in this case and you can see that i was being apparently extremely cautious actually i was being um more like in this case these clouds were moving really fast it was very windy the clouds are moving quick we were so excited because we get these shadows being cast across the landscape it was really pretty magical and it was happening fast and so i was using a manual exposure trying to lock in an exposure that would ensure that i was not clipping the highlights the problem is every now and then it would get so dark because there would be you know cloud overhead that my exposure was a little bit off so it wasn't necessarily the best strategy but it wasn't the worst strategy either it worked pretty well now normally i don't even touch the exposure slider don't even touch the exposure slider mostly because right out of the camera all my exposures are perfect i had to go digging and digging to try to find this picture just to have an example of one that wasn't just spot on right out of the camera no that's not true but i would love it if you would believe it i don't touch the contrast slider because i pretty much never need it not because the picture was good out of the camera necessarily but because i'm going to use different techniques but in this case the exposure was a little bit off i would say and by off i don't mean that i clipped anything you can see from the histogram nothing is clipped in terms of highlights or shadows but rather it's a little bit overall dark i think overall the exposure should be a little bit brighter not by very much but because i'm talking about just a general brightening of the frame i'm going to take that exposure slider and drag it upward just a little bit and you'll notice that the value there is essentially fractional that's actually ev values so plus one represents a one-stop increase in exposure and plus two represents a two-stop increase etc in this case i've taken it up to 0.4 and that looks pretty good to my eyes so i think we're okay there a little under a half stop increase in that exposure value but that's again it's something that i won't do unless i feel that the image just overall had an exposure that was slightly off in other words i wish i had had the camera set slightly differently in order to produce a better exposure instead i'll focus my attention on the whites blacks highlights and shadows sliders i wish they'd put these in my order they didn't adobe didn't they put them in somebody else's order so i have to go out of order here but i'm used to doing that so i'm going to hold the alt key on windows or the option key on macintosh that i can get the clipping preview which is a fancy way of saying i want to be able to somewhat carefully set the white point so that the brightest pixel in the image is about white and then i'll increase the value for whites you notice that histogram jumping way over but notice also the histogram is stretching a bit we're affecting the highlights the bright areas of the image more than we're affecting the darker shadows once i start to see pixels appear that indicates that i am losing detail in one or more channels within the photo how much detail do i want to sacrifice in the highlights pretty much none maybe a tiny little bit sometimes but generally not very much and possibly none so a sort of typical approach for me would be to again holding the alt or option key on the keyboard drag that white slider over to the right till i start to see pixels appearing and then go back to the left just to the point that the last of those pixels disappear or maybe where there's just a few of those pixels in the image then comes the most important part the reality check i let go of the alter option key and i want to evaluate the result what have we done to the image is that good or bad well it's sort of hard to make a determination just yet because we still have some other sliders that we want to take a look at and part of this process is stretching out our tonal information so that we have whites and blacks full contrast range etc which usually is a good goal for an image but it's not always the right approach for an image so we'll want to check the image once we're finished with this basic process so i'm going to go now to the black slider once again holding the alt key on windows option key on macintosh and then i'll drag that slider over toward the left until i start to see pixels appearing in other words until i'm starting to lose detail in the photo in this case at the darkest values in the image and then i'll bring that slider back over toward the right until those pixels generally speaking disappear i might be willing to sacrifice shadow detail maybe but i'm almost never willing to sacrifice highlight detail and if it's a specular highlight you know bright reflections off of shiny objects sure that's okay but generally speaking the highlights i want to preserve shadows you know silhouette dark shadows i'm not so worried about that so it just depends on what the image calls for essentially then i get to move on to probably my favorite tonal adjustments of all in lightroom's develop module and that is highlights and shadows and here we can brighten or darken the highlights or the shadows in the image and that's a lot of control so much control that i virtually never use the tone curve and i virtually never use the contrast slider because these sliders let me take care of my needs there so highlights let's start with that have we lost detail in the clouds no we have not even lost detail in a single pixel in the image and i know that for a fact because i use the clipping preview in conjunction with that white slider so i know that all of the information is there so if i make a print of this image and hang it up on the wall and someone says oh the detail in the clouds has been lost i can tell them scientifically that that information is really there that probably won't help very much though if they can't really make out that detail and so what we want to do is both enhance contrast and tone down the tonal values for those bright highlights so that we can perceive more information there it's there it's just that the differences in tonal values are so subtle that our eyes aren't able to make them out very well and so if i drag that highlight slider over toward the left i can darken up those highlights so i don't know how well you can see it up there reasonably well yeah probably better over on the screens over here you can see there's brightening the highlights and there's darkening those highlights and so you see that we're just enhancing the detail in the highlights i'll leave that up set down to its minimum value of minus 100 right now and then the shadows same basic concept mostly the shadow slider really is the philosophical slider because this depends on your philosophy as a photographer do you want lots of detail in every nook and cranny or are you more interested in having a little bit more contrast and drama i like the drama and so more often than not i'm going to darken down the shadows but some photographers might want to open up the shadows and look at how cool is that is that amazing i just sit here and do this all day that won't make the recording on youtube all that interesting will it so i might tone down those shadows just a little bit maybe make it more dramatic here obviously kind of overemphasize that a little bit but you get the idea here is that we're able to really control this contrast not just global contrast in the image but contrast in the context of highlight detail and shadow detail or highlight brightness and shadow brightness with the ability to both brighten and darken independently so what about those highlights even with the values set to minus 100 i would say that's still a little too much kind of blown out looking in the highlights well that's because i was a bit aggressive with those whites so while generally i do want to set the black and white values so that i'm stretching my histogram out and i'm maximizing my tonal range that doesn't always work for the final image in this case i don't feel that it works and so i would back off those highlights just a little bit using the whites control so again setting that end point inward a little bit so that the brightest value in my image is not a pure white but in this case i think that works perfectly fine we've got this sort of side lighting the lights coming from way over to my side and so although we do have really strong light all things considered i don't need a pure white in the image for those clouds all right so that covers what i would consider most of the basics in theory the basic section here also includes the presence set of controls but those ones are so important that they get their own tip and that is to embrace presence if you have never messed with the presence controls in lightroom you need to to play with these and same adjustments i should point out that all of these adjustments are also available in the latest version of adobe camera raw if you're a photoshop user you can think of the two as basically being interchangeable but these presence controls are phenomenal so let's take a look at an example speaking of presents i didn't really want to show you a picture of me i mean you know because of my humility um but i wanted to point out first and foremost before we turn off turn our attention to a real picture actually this picture is very real because a good friend of mine took it but um vibrance i can crank up the vibrance and we're cranking up the saturation but we're doing so with some built-in self-control let's go ahead and take a look at what saturation does saturation and people not such a good combination it's like i forgot my sunscreen for a very long time and was uh very sick apparently a little jaundiced whereas with vibrance even taking it all the way to its maximum notice that the skin tones of course they're getting more saturated but they don't look ridiculous the way they do when i crank up the saturation and that's because the vibrance control actually protects skin tones it actually analyzes the color values in the photos and if they fall within a range of typical skin tone values it will not exaggerate the adjustment for those colors in the photo that is huge also beyond that it just has self-control it's not really self-control it's just that the algorithm behind it is pretty sophisticated in essence the way you can think of this is that the vibrance adjustment it is a saturation adjustment but it's having a stronger effect when we increase vibrance we're having a stronger effect on the colors that are not very saturated and we're having a more subtle effect on the colors that are saturated and so it's sort of like a saturation equalizer we're boosting the saturation of the colors that need it because they weren't very saturated to begin with without making the colors that were saturated look completely ridiculous so we're sort of equalizing the level of saturation or focusing it where it's most needed it's wonderful did i mention that i love the vibrant slider and so i'll use the vibrant slider pretty you know generously i don't mind cranking it up just a little bit to equalize saturation but at that point we might have saturation that's a little bit too high so we need to lower the overall level so a very common thing that i will do a little bonus tip here is to increase vibrance until the not so saturated colors look good or maybe a little too saturated and then reduce the value for saturation to kind of tone things down overall so we're equalling saturate equalizing saturation and then toning it down a little bit so it doesn't get out of hand great little way to approach using vibrance plus saturation together let's talk about clarity clarity is actually probably one of the best named controls in lightroom because it increases clarity and that pretty well explains what it's doing it's enhancing contrast but on a local level you can sort of think of the clarity slider as being like sharpening but sharpening across a larger distance in your image instead of sharpening increasing contrast at the very fine detail edges in your photo we're spreading that out a little bit more the result can be pretty dramatic i think of it as the haze buster essentially so if i crank up that clarity value there's the before back there and there's the after and especially look at i mean the background certainly but look at the foreground all the little houses and buildings in the foreground it almost goes from this kind of hazy foggy appearance to this really crisp lots of detail kind of appearance and then the detail in the duomo here you can see we go from yeah there's it's sharp there's good detail but now we're really giving it some nice impact we can also use a negative clarity if we're so inclined and that will instead of reducing haze it'll essentially increase haze you might say so something like this and we get that kind of dreamlike hazy ethereal type of a look usually works nicely for portraits for flower photography for abstracts certain subjects it'll work pretty nicely for for me personally i tend to crank up the clarity a little bit and try and boost the detail in the image and certainly a little bit of vibrance never hurt did it so those presence adjustments i they're just they're so simple and once you understand them they're really easy to use it's kind of difficult to get carried away with them because they do a pretty good job of protecting your image all things considered i mean obviously it's possible to get carried away but by and large they do a pretty good job where even if you're a little heavy-handed you're not going to create problems for the image and it can really increase the impact of a photo all right tip number three isolate colors isolate colors now we've already talked about basic color adjustments and i'm sure you're familiar with some of the targeted adjustment capabilities that are built into lightroom but we actually have the ability to control individual colors and i think this is one of the most overlooked capabilities in terms of color adjustments sure we want to make sure that the color overall is accurate with our temperature and tint sliders for example but let's really focus our attention on specific colors within the photo and more importantly problematic colors within the photo so in this case the color came out pretty nicely very minor adjustments to temperature and tint and things are looking pretty good as far as the accuracy of the color i thought but i'm really really easily annoyed for those of you who have gotten to know me a little bit and when i notice something in a picture it drives me totally crazy and i cannot let go of it until i fixed it in theory that's a good thing because then i really make sure my pictures look great except then i never feel like i actually finished a picture there's always something else that catches my eye and one of the things i'm not sure how easily you'll be able to see it right off the bat but these cliffs way off in the distance this horseshoe bend i'm sure most of you are familiar with just outside of page arizona where you get to perch about a thousand feet above the colorado river and decide how close you're going to get to the edge to take that picture and so back in the background you can see a little bit of haze there's an overcast day a lot of moisture in the sky and we've got a lot of moisture looking across the long distance some of that scatter of the light from that haze and the particulate matter in the air etc we usually get a little bit of a magenta color in the image and so even after i've gotten the color to be pretty accurate i'm not really happy with the kind of purplish pinkish kind of tones way back in this distance in the foreground i think the rocks look pretty accurate as far as their color but in the background i think not so much i'm going to emphasize so that you can see exactly what i'm talking about back there there is the kind of pink purple magenta sort of colors that are going on in the background that i don't think are good how many of you saw that color before i cranked up the saturation just a few how many do you see it now and how many think i'm totally crazy for zeroing in on these kind of time just a few of you thank you so by cranking up the saturation so what i've done here is gone into the hsl section of adjustments on the right panel in the develop module in lightroom that stands for hue saturation and luminance or lightness or luminosity depending on your preference you could even say hsb which is another color model where we just replace luminance with brightness same basic concept hue is degrees around the color wheel saturation is the purity or intensity of the color and luminance luminosity brightness lightness obviously is just the degree of white versus black the amount of light you might say well i've gone into the saturation set of controls here and i've picked purple and magenta because that was pretty obvious to me i could play with all of these if i wanted to or just crank up the overall saturation that we saw up above in the presence set of controls to get a feel for what sorts of colors might be causing problems in the image and just as i can exaggerate these colors so that you can better see them i can also de-emphasize the colors i'll go ahead and take these all the way down to their minimum value and you can see was the magenta in the background completely bad no because it was completely natural really all things considered it was just bothering my eye a little bit so i don't want to get rid of it all together so if you see some kind of magenta in the haze off in the distance which is very common of landscape photos for example it doesn't mean that you just want to completely desaturate anything that gets even close to magenta but you probably want to desaturate it a little bit and so you've got to be careful not to strip out colors that are good in the image we just want to tone down the colors that are kind of bothering us so i'd probably go right about there which is not too dramatic a change i'll go ahead and turn off the adjustment and turn it back on again there's off and on and you see just a little bit of a shift from kind of pinkish to a little bit more neutral it still has those earth tones that kind of orangish color that uh we'll find in the rocks here of course but we've gotten rid of the magenta that was bothering me and we can do the same thing for any of the other colors but just by way of example i'll grab the green slider here and we'll kind of crank that up and down and you can see the river down below there's a lot of green kind of algae and plants and whatnot and so you can probably see that shifting from in the water the greens going kind of neutral to the greens being very saturated or if i grab the yellows here then we'll see a little bit more of an effect and the orange is especially in the rocks there we go now it looks nice and orange late afternoon light this was at sunset oh wait no sunrise and you can see you know obviously we could get creative in terms of finding specific colors that we might want to take out of the image but the point being is to actually focus on individual colors in the image now for me personally that usually means saturation that usually means boosting certain colors or toning down certain colors but it also might mean shifting certain colors so maybe i decide that the yellows here were a little too kind of yellowish to green and i want to shift them more toward a kind of rusty orange or if i go up here there we go it is red rock country right no so you can fine tune the individual colors based on their original color value which can be tremendously helpful so again i usually take advantage of this capability in terms of saturation but with minor adjustments it can be very helpful for the hue as well and also very minor adjustments for the luminance values but it's one that it's definitely worth playing around with just be careful you might get focused on a specific area of the image you've got to remember that the color that you're trying to fix in one area might exist somewhere else and it might not be a problem there so be sure to evaluate the overall image as you make those fine tuning adjustments but the result can be a tremendous degree of control i'll go ahead and show you the luminance value here and you can see the risk if we reduce luminance for a single color we tend to get this kind of very muddy washed out sort of a look and you know kind of this blown highlights kind of weird hdr type of effect so again you'd have to be very very modest with those adjustments but if we just want to kind of brighten up only the rocks without brightening up the entire image for example that's one possibility but that would sort of be a last resort for me personally i would tend to use other approaches but when it comes to saturation i use this approach a lot for those of you that feel like there's just way too many sliders here i mean i think it's cool because if anybody ever looks over my shoulder like if i'm at a cafe working on an image and they see all this i mean it looks like i'm getting ready to launch a space shuttle or something and so to me it's really cool but if you find it intimidating you can also choose which sliders are currently visible so you'll notice above i've got a link for hue so i see only the hue sliders for each of the color values saturation and luminance or i can go to all if i want to see all of them there's also a color option don't be fooled they're the same sliders this is just another way of organizing them do i do i want to see hue for every color then saturation for every color then luminance for every color or do i want to see hsl for the reds and hsl for the oranges etcetera same sliders different presentation but you know again i wish we could have all of these all at the same time because then it's like twice like you're launching two space shuttles at one time all right number four this is a big one for well for several reasons first i don't like noise and second i think i feel like i could be wrong about this but i think a lot of photographers dismiss noise is no longer being a problem in digital photography i hope you're not among those has it gotten a lot better to where we don't have to worry so much and we can crank up our isos higher than we ever could of course and that's a wonderful thing but don't ignore noise it's a really important factor when it comes to overall image quality can make a tremendous difference you don't necessarily have to crank up your iso to get a lot of noise you can get a lot of noise when the camera is getting really hot you can get a lot of noise with long exposures so there's all sorts of possibilities there the other thing it's not a bad thing it's just something to be aware of lightroom by default applies some noise reduction to your image so you might take an image here this image happens to have been captured at 6400 iso and i won't tell you which camera but it's a camera that i don't think is really all that great when it comes to noise performance but 6400 iso still that's that's pretty significant uh in terms of iso setting how many stops is that compared to one six stops see how fast i can do that math in my head that's six stops of under exposure and then having the camera amplify the signal to pretend like it wasn't six stops underexposed that's pretty significant then we zoom in on the photo and what's our reaction it's really not bad right who thinks it's horrible who thinks is horrible in terms of color noise your eyes are too good no but you know in fairness this doesn't look really really horrible and if i told you it was 6400 iso with a camera that doesn't have all that great a uh performance when it comes to noise then you might say oh it seems not i would have thought it would have been worse at least can we agree on that okay good only because we're friends all right but i'm going to turn off the details section and now we're going to have a completely different attitude in fact i'm going to zoom in a little bit more we're going to go to a four to one zoom just so we really can get a close look at all those beautifully colored pixels in the image so once again i'm going to turn on my detail adjustments and turn them back off and hopefully now you can appreciate what i was referring to here lightroom is basically tricking you into thinking your camera is better than it is it's probably a good thing because it's helping make sure that you've got a little bit of noise reduction applied to the image but we can do better so number one don't ignore noise and don't forget that there's a little bit of color noise reduction being applied by default in lightroom so i'll go ahead and just slide that color value all the way down to its minimum you can see the noise once again and i'll start to increase it but the problem is that lightroom is still making things look not as bad as they really are because as soon as i have any value at all for the color slider it starts at a value of 25 the smoothness slider is helping things out as well so i'm going to take that down to its minimum value and then start to increase the value for color and i'm not going to take it up too high there's a value of 14 which is below the default setting in lightroom and especially on the displays over here you can probably see now we've transitioned away from pixels so i'll turn off this adjustment there's what i call pixels of noise individual tiny pixels that are really really saturated and those have now transitioned into blobs of noise very technical term we've kind of blurred each individual colored pixel of noise to blend it in with the surrounding area so now instead of being a little spot of color it's an area it's a smear of color in the image in a way that's almost worse i would say and neither of them are very good but if we increase the value for color we can start to get to a point where we're getting rid of that now those smears have gotten a lot bigger and more faint but they're still there well the problem is that with noise reduction we're really compromising in terms of image quality with color it's not super drastic but it's still a compromise we're reducing saturation we're blending colors together we might create some kind of blooming effects where the color in one area blends out into another area of the photo so we don't want to get too carried away well right up somewhere around here i start to say well gee those blobs are still there but they've gotten a lot more faint that's where the smoothness slider comes in this is a relatively new addition to lightroom i couldn't quote you exactly which version number off thought my head but watch this as i increase the value for smoothness the rest of the noise just disappears color noise i should say disappears pretty significant and tremendously helpful so i don't have to be quite as aggressive with that color value which is the strength of the noise reduction because smoothness helps me blend the result a little more effectively into the rest of the image so there's for those of you that are able to see those color blobs smoothness down at its minimum value then up to its maximum value but notice again if you take a look at the corner of the colosseum that's visible there take a look at the color there as we increase smoothness see how we're blending the color of the colosseum up into the sky and we're reducing saturation so we still need to be careful here we don't want to get too carried away with our noise reduction and at the moment we're only looking at color noise reduction but again it's a compromise then we turn our attention to luminance noise reduction which is even scarier color noise reduction actually works pretty well and lightroom in more recent versions i believe this change at about version number four give or take where they made some significant changes to noise reduction and it really made a huge huge difference and i would say lightroom now is among the best in terms of noise reduction for your photos luminance noise reduction though no matter how good the noise reduction software is you cannot get away from the fact that luminance noise reduction causes a reduction in detail in your photos you can see here i've cranked up luminance for noise reduction all the way to its maximum value of 100 and i defy you to find any noise in the photo or to find any detail in the photo so that really underscores that degree of compromise especially when it comes to luminance noise reduction obviously so even here you know still a fairly strong value we can still see a little bit of the noise it kind of looks more like film grain now but we still do have that noise but look at the degree of loss of detail and texture in the photo so when it comes to luminance noise reduction we really have to compromise a lot more i'll usually only go up to maybe somewhere between 10 and 15 as a value for luminance before i just say well next time i'm gonna take a more expensive camera or i'm going to leave it set to 100 iso you know or whatever it takes to try to minimize that noise obviously with night photography this can be a particular challenge because it's either high iso or it's long exposure both of which lead to noise so uh always a compromise when it comes to noise but fortunately cameras are getting better and better over time in terms of performance on the noise front even at high iso settings but the most important thing i think is just to pay attention and really take a close look at the image turn off the detail section so that we're getting a look at the image without noise reduction and then take a look at what the photo really looks like and continue from there probably fine tune those settings for noise reduction at least a little bit and again focusing primarily on color noise because that's where you're able to have the most impact and then being a little bit more careful when it comes to luminance noise reduction all right chromatic aberrations this one mostly you want to learn about chromatic aberrations um for when you're at a cocktail party or some other social event and i mean it's it's hard not to sound really smart when you say chromatic aberrations just talk about you know i was doing some knife photography and the images were really spectacular of course as you might have expected uh but the chromatic aberrations from that lens they were just oh you've probably dealt with that haven't shim this this is how i have fun so chromatic aberrations people tell you well that you if you get chromatic aberrations people i don't know who these people are i've never actually heard them but apparently they say these things if you're getting chromatic aberrations it's because you're using cheap lenses i promise you that's not really true the lens actually yes okay the lens for this picture i'm not going to tell you what it was but this is the rating that it got and the graphic shows four it's actually 4.7 stars out of 5 after how many is that 816 reviews an overwhelmingly positive review it's a great lens but it's a wide angle lens as you can tell by the photo here the perspective of the photo so chromatic aberrations common with yes cheap lenses for sure but also wide-angle lenses in particular not exclusively but it's more predominant with wide-angle lenses what is a chromatic aberration besides a fancy word that you'll want to use at cocktail parties the simple way i think of explaining it is the more common cause of chromatic aberration it's just color fringing but i generally describe it as one of the primary causes of chromatic aberrations it's when certain wavelengths of light are out of focus when the rest of the wavelengths of light were in focus what happens when something's out of focus it gets fuzzy if it's only a specific wavelength or range of wavelengths of light that's out of focus or fuzzy then that wavelength is going to represent fuzziness in the image there's other causes but that's sort of one way to think about chromatic aberration most importantly it's really not very attractive and the problem is when you're working on your image if you're not zooming in periodically to check specific details and quality factors etc it looks fine and this if anybody has ever struggled with self-esteem issues i've got years of experience here i can help you as a photographer when it comes to improving your self-esteem one of the worst things you can ever do is zoom in on a picture the best thing you could do is zoom out sometimes i'll even take off my glasses and if it looks out of focus i just figure it's because i'm not wearing my glasses and the picture actually looks way better but if you want the picture to look its best you gotta you know get over the self-esteem thing maybe some therapy or something i don't know it's i've been trying but um still low self-esteem as you can tell but now we've got these color fringes this is a problem and if you don't zoom in and check the detail in the picture you're not going to see this stuff until when oh man yeah until it's too late i mean fortunately printing an image is super cheap right i mean the inks they practically give them away um and how big you know i mean a picture like this how big are you gonna print it big big oh man we have 20 by 30 up on the wall and then what's going to happen you're going to be crying for three days because you're going to see this and think of how much money an ink you just wasted and now every time you walk past this image you can't help but stare at the chromatic aberration it will drive you crazy so you must check now especially when you're using a lens that you know is going to have a little bit higher risk so wide angle lenses a little bit less expensive lenses and also when you're dealing with a backlit high contrast subject that's not to say that's the only time you'll run into chromatic aberrations but it's when they'll be most likely to occur and it's also when they're going to be most visible they just stand out a little bit better as you can see here so then what do we do well we're going to come down here to lens corrections we'll take a closer look at this for a couple different images in a moment we're just going to focus our attention on the color tab as it were of the lens corrections section here on the right panel in the develop module and have a look here remove chromatic aberration what could be easier we just turn on a checkbox and i mean come on now there should be like cheers look at that before after before after you're not impressed tough tough crowd i was so excited when the room was filled to overflowing and now a complete lack of enthusiasm all right fine but i do find that about half the time checking that checkbox turning that checkbox on is all i need about half the time that's not bad one click that's pretty good odds in this case what percent improvement would you say it gave us 90 90 improvement of a real big problem and i don't even get any round of applause no rose is being thrown up on yeah so we need to fix it well fortunately we have some more controls at our disposal these defringe controls and you'll see that we have an amount slider for purple and for green and you'll see that we've got you know kind of a cyanish looking color a little bit greenish up here for the side the chromatic aberration up on the top of the tower there and then a little kind of reddish almost magenta-ish so probably we're going to need to use both of these sliders right so i'll go ahead and increase the value for defringe for the magentas and i'll increase it for the greens oh now we're getting a little happier aren't we we're almost there except it didn't quite give us all the correction we need now we're 98.4 for percent well we can adjust the color range for each of those sliders so for example the purples it helped a lot but i still see little bits of kind of cyan color in there so let me expand this range of colors these two sliders everything in between is what's being targeted so if i spread those out a little bit there we go now we have corrected the chromatic aberration by 227 percent now we should be really happy so we've taken things a little bit too far and here's where it starts to get a little bit tricky we either need to reduce the amount the intensity of the correction or we need to fine-tune the range of colors now probably it's fairly obvious here you can see that slider i'm moving toward the cyans what color is the sky basically cyan kind of a cyan shade of blue so i have to fine tune to try to improve my results here take this down and we'll take this back over etc so maybe somewhere around there we can continue playing with that to make sure that we're getting a great result we also want to be sure that we're checking multiple areas of the photo so just because we corrected it in one spot doesn't mean we've got everything corrected perfectly everywhere and sometimes you'll find that we have one color in one area and an opposite color in another area and fixing it in one place actually makes it a little bit worse in the other place sometimes there's going to be some compromise involved but i would definitely want to go check out various areas of the photo this looks pretty good over here so we can kind of zoom in and out on different portions of the photo here we've got a little bit of the green still for example so i'll go ahead and crank that up and maybe shift this over toward the left etc you get the idea we're adjusting both the intensity of the correction and the specific color range being targeted you'll have to kind of go back and forth between those sets of adjustments until you get it absolutely perfect or as close to perfect as you are able to and it will vary depending on the strength of the chromatic aberration um and you know the specific colors etc as to how good a result you're able to accomplish but by and large you'll be able to get a very very good result worthy of hanging on the wall and not annoying you as you walk by so taking this one step further correcting for the lens well this is a little bit of a misnomer actually in fairness sometimes anyway but correcting for the lens the reason i call this correcting for the lens uh is two things number one not wanting to take responsibility uh and number two because it's in the lens corrections section so i was just following lightroom's protocol there uh but we'll start with an image where we're not actually correcting for the lens we're correcting for me i'll admit it i should have brought a ladder or a helicopter or a tight uh tight wire tightrope what do you call the walk there were a couple buildings on either side of me i could have strung it across the top and walked and balanced with my tripod uh because this really is not the lens fault right this is my fault for being too low i'm not orthogonal to my subject and so the building kind of goes away from me you might say it's like it's leaning away or it's pinched in up at the top and i didn't have a ladder with me and so now i've got to try and you know fix this another way i'm going to go to the basic section here and we've got these upright controls this too is relatively new in lightroom we also have the manual controls so in older versions of lightroom the manual controls were essentially all we had and so we could oops wrong way oh too much there we go something around about there right i mean sort of but you get the idea but now we have these upright set of controls now i could apply a profile correction we'll talk more about that in just a moment that's good we'll talk about that in just a moment but for now let's focus our attention on the set of upright controls and this essentially just lets lightroom do all the work for me that's my favorite way to work one click and call it good hopefully so we've got auto level vertical and full we'll start off with level pretty straightforward it's really just a horizon straightener so literally rotate the image so that the horizon is straight obviously sometimes it's not a horizon maybe it's a building that's vertical some other horizontal line whatever it may be lightroom analyzes the image and tries to figure out how much it needs to rotate the image to make it straight as far as for lack of a better word a straight horizon vertical takes that level adjustment and adds a vertical perspective correction to the image hopefully making all the lines straight as they should be so you know making the building look like we were up on a ladder to get a nice straight orthogonal shot and then full adds horizontal which in this case is a really minor adjustment because i had been pretty careful to stand at the exact center of the building it's just that the lens mount on my camera is not totally centered on the camera um and so it was off just a tiny little bit that's why had to try so you can see just a tiny again only because of the position of the lens mount on my camera not that i didn't pick the exact center point of the building when i was standing so a little bit of a horizontal correction you can kind of think of it as you know leaning the building back and forth almost if you're holding a print in your hand kind of a thing and then auto a lot of photographers think that or not think but just assume that auto must mean that lightroom will automatically choose which one of those three buttons ought to have been clicked actually it's much more complicated than that it does this whole three-dimensional transformation thing look at that why even mess with all these other buttons when i can just one click and done which is why i picked this image to show you this technique it doesn't always work sometimes i don't know what it is looking at in the picture but it must not have found a straight line anywhere because it just gets it all sorts of out of whack but by and large it does a pretty darn good job and so this is a really good place to start even if you just click on each of these four buttons or turn it off altogether if you decide it's not working well but it usually provides you with a really good starting point for adjusting for camera distortion to a certain extent i find at least for me that that's usually personal distortion you know i wasn't high enough or in quite the right position to get orthogonal to that subject meaning head on to the subject in this case wanting to be a little bit higher so that i'm not shooting upward at the the church the cathedral in this case that i'd be shooting straight on at it all right and we can still if it's not quite perfect in this case i've got a little bit of that you know barrel versus pin cushion distortion and so i might want to come in here and fine tune so i'll grab that distortion slider and i can stretch and pinch the image paying attention notice those grid lines so that i can try to make it just absolutely perfect and maybe rotate a little bit more in the vertical orientation etc etc now before we depart this image hopefully you can appreciate just how great this could be potentially it underscores a few other things relative to applying these sorts of corrections number two you might notice that i'm bowing in the edge of the photo so in order to make that you know the top of the building in the right position in other words not leaning away from me but kind of make it lean toward me until it's straight kind of a thing notice how i'm having to essentially tilt the photo as it were and that causes the bottom of the image to pinch in while the top of the photo spreads out if i have to apply too strong a correction you can probably imagine that my cropping will start to infringe upon the very thing that i'm trying to straighten which means when i'm out there shooting a subject like this where i know this is a possible issue i need to shoot a little bit wider than i otherwise would so that i've got that room to crop so i didn't really want this building in the frame over on the left hand side i wanted just the cathedral but i needed to shoot it a little bit wide so that after i apply that distortion correction i can crop and still retain all image the other thing if you pay attention i'd rather you didn't but if you pay attention to the bottom center of the photo let's get this pretty close right about there without scrutinizing too close it looks like i've got the cathedral reasonably squared up now take a look at the bottom center of the photo and we've got this line in the road and then if anybody asks about that you just say well you know it's a circular driveway that leads up to the cathedral i don't know you've never been there i guess but then they ask you where it's at and you might have to like make up your own city name or you know invent a different name of the cathedral so that they can't go google it or something uh but that becomes a little bit of problem now if i crop in from the bottom that would certainly help because we get away from the area that needed to be adjusted a lot and into where it's not as much of an adjustment so it's not as obvious where you know how much do you want to crop etc so there is the potential for a lot of compromise here which you know the lesson learned obviously is bring a ladder seems reasonable i don't know getting a ladder on a flight might be a little bit of a challenge but so let's take a look at what i think of is a little bit more realistic example it's a much more subtle example but as you've probably picked up on by now i'm usually a very subtle person and so the subtle thing actually works really well for me um but subtle i really i scrutinized my picture so much it probably accounts for most of my self-esteem issues i'm really looking for every little possible thing that i can fix every little thing that i could fix and trying to take that image as far toward perfection as i possibly can and so often that means looking for problems that aren't glaring or where the problem is a really really tiny problem that you might not even call a problem if you hadn't paid attention to it and i would say that that's the case for this image i love this image i'm very happy with this image it took a long time to coordinate for these clouds to be there it's very expensive no i i have to go back and look i actually think this is in the palouse region of eastern washington state many of you might be where i basically go there every year and lead photo workshops and absolutely love it i've been going for something like 10 years now i have to go count how many pictures i have taken of this specific house i must have visited this house uh more than a hundred times because every time i'm there i make multiple visits etc and this i'm almost certain i have to double check this but since you can't double check it you'll just assume that i'm right i hope i'm pretty sure this is the very first time i visited this house and the sky was amazing and it's never looked that good since but don't tell anybody who attends my workshop that because they have to think this is possible no uh wonderful sky i mean really to me this guy makes the photo yes of course it's an old abandoned farmhouse and that's cool and it's a wheat field and that's cool but the sky really kind of makes it because otherwise there's the potential for it to be a little bit of a drab scene and so you know you get excited the clouds and trying to enhance the detail in the clouds and make sure the colors look good etc and so you might not pay attention to lens distortion issues the shot was captured at a focal length of 16 millimeters it's pretty wide angle lens we're gonna have some degree of distortion and so if i enable profile correction i might not expect to see much but actually if you pay careful attention so there's before and there's after well what's actually happening two basic things you might say correcting for the distortion in terms of the bending of the light as it were kind of barrel versus pin cushion etc you notice that horizon kind of straightens out a little bit even though you know it's rolling hills so it's hard to discern a horizon there but you see how it straightens things out but we're also correcting for the vignetting which of course is very common with a wide angle lens we're taking all this light from this really wide viewpoint and bending it to make it go to the film plane or the image sensor in the camera and there's going to be some natural fall off of the light out toward those edges and so we get a vignetting around the corners well this profile correction is literally compensating for the behavior of the lens this time it's not my fault for once it's the behavior of the lens itself a little bit of distortion sometimes that distortion is a wonderful thing a fisheye lens for example you don't want to get rid of the distortion there but more often than not you'll find the distortion is at least a little bit problematic so i can enable profile correction this is on that profile tab underneath lens corrections and then i can configure my settings in other words really just choose a profile in other words tell lightroom which lens was used but the thing is lightroom can figure it out for me if i choose auto it should go find the values in metadata in this case i probably stripped out the metadata or something it should go find those values out of metadata and set it but if not you can go establish the camera make the specific lens that was used i'll go ahead and click this pop-up list and you can see i've got quite a few lenses to choose from not every lens that's out there but pretty good number of lenses you'll find and we've got all these different manufacturers here so if it had been shot with a tamron lens for example here's a set of tamron lenses a pretty exhaustive list all things considered but in this case it was indeed that canon 10 to 22 on a crop sensor so that gives you an effective focal length of 16 millimeters and you can see more importantly perhaps the specific profile this is an adobe profile for this specific lens and that's what allows me to apply that automatic correction for the behavior of the lens well from uh from the perspective of distortion i would say that's a good adjustment i'm happy with that from the standpoint of vignetting actually that's sometimes part of the reason that i like a wide angle lens is that kind of natural subtle light fall off toward the edges you get kind of a natural framing for the scene i actually think it's kind of cool or at least most of the time i sort of like it so i wish that it had corrected the distortion but that it left alone or at least didn't have such a strong effect on the vignetting well have a look down here we've got distortion and vignetting sliders if i feel that the distortion correction was too strong or not strong enough i can fine tune notice as i dramatically swing all the way between the maximum values that i'm not really having a huge impact on the photo and that's because this is just compensating you'll remember with those manual adjustments we could have a really dramatic effect on the image here we're just mitigating one way or the other the effect of the distortion correction so much more subtle so i can just kind of fine tune that if i feel it's necessary i don't think in this case that it's necessary so i'll just double click the slider handle to get it back to its default value but what about vignetting do i want even more correction for the vignetting in other words i want to kind of lighten up the edges of the photo a little bit or do i want to leave some of that darkening of the edges and personally i would like to leave some of that natural vignetting well we have to think about do we really want to introduce you might say or not remove vignetting in this context when i'm looking at the uncropped photo maybe maybe not if i want vignetting as a creative effect and i might crop the photo later then i might want to neutralize the vignetting from the lens and apply my own creative vignetting later i'll show you that approach and demonstrate why that's helpful in a moment but in this case i'm not going to crop the photo anyway so it's not really an issue i can adjust the degree of vignetting based on the lens correction any way i'd like but again if i'm happy with the result i can leave it at that neutral value and presumably this will give me a result that has no visible vignetting at all i'm going to tone it down a little bit though i like vignette but that leads us right into our next topic our next little tip for optimizing photos crop almost always always always or almost always almost sometimes the framing just works why does the framing just work for this photo in my opinion there's a bunch of reasons being you know the balance yeah subject over to the side you know the whole rule of thirds thing there's all sorts of reasons emphasizing the sky a little bit there's reasons that you might like the framing why in my mind hopefully none of you can figure this out but why in my mind does this framing work so well that's good that's a relief actually in my mind this framing works well really because it's habit how long have i been shooting at this exact aspect ratio nearly my whole life so when i learned about composition when i learned about subject placement within the frame when i learned about balance within the frame and detail and all these different things that i use to sort of adjust the perception of whatever it is i'm photographing i was looking through a viewfinder that gave me that aspect ratio so it's just inherent for me personally out of practice years decades even of using this aspect ratio it's not that there's anything necessarily magical about that aspect ratio it's that it's what i'm accustomed to and what i find is that very often cropping a photo and being a little bit more creative about the cropping of the photo can have a dramatic impact so there's a few things we want to think about when we're cropping and most of this is just attention to detail but i will almost always at least explore cropping for a photo what sorts of things am i looking at when i'm cropping a photo well we talk about cropping but really what goes hand in hand with cropping is rotation and so when i'm cropping the photo i'm also going to be thinking about rotation i'm going to click on the crop tool it's found just below the histogram display i've got that hidden at the moment but below the histogram display at the top of the right panel we've got a little mini toolbar there i'll click the crop tool and you can see now i'm in the crop view and i can adjust the rotation of the image and there's a variety of ways i can do that i've got an angle slider over here so i can adjust the angle of the image i can click on this little bubble level and drag across the horizon right there no not really so i can click across and it will rotate the image based on the line that i dragged or i can just go hands-on put my mouse outside the image and click and drag notice i get that double-headed curved arrow and i'm actually rotating the image itself it's sort of like the crop box becomes my frame and i'm rotating the print within the frame until i've got it just the way i want it which is the right approach i don't know whatever works for you i usually rotate manually like this unless i have a very clear horizon line that i want to make sure it's perfectly straight and i'll show you an example of that in a moment i can also move the image around so i can just click and drag on the image to move the position of the image and of course i can adjust the size of the crop box notice that no matter which direction i drag my crop box it's always sticking to that original aspect ratio and that's because the aspect ratio is currently locked over here on the right side you see a little lock icon i am locked in to my original cropping or my original aspect ratio i could make this a square crop for example and now no matter how hard i drag the mouse in any direction i cannot turn this into a rectangle it will only be a square but i can also turn on or i can turn off the lock i can disable that lock and now i can crop any way that i would like i can tell everybody that i shot a panorama of the balloons tell them it was like 16 shots done vertically you know or something all right so i've got more flexibility than in terms of how i'm defining that crop really i was using a 600 millimeter lens you know i would never deceive the viewers of my images like that obviously right but the point is that we right no really i wouldn't except for you guys right here yeah um so i'm able to define that crop now my personal philosophy when it comes to cropping is that it's up to the image basically is the way i kind of look at that and what i mean by that is that i'm not cropping based on the size of a frame that i bought at the frame shop and i need to print an image that fits exactly into that eight by ten frame i'm cropping based on the photo itself and so i'm going to think about both rotation and cropping try to make sure things are straight that it looks natural etc i'm going to think about the edges first and foremost and this is one of my biggest pet peeves is having cropping that doesn't suit the image that doesn't take into account distractions which is the way i kind of look at it um just subtle mistakes basically i want everything about my photo to look intentional i want everything that you like about my image to be something that you think i thought about and that was very intentional very deliberate what i want to avoid at all costs is something that looks like a mistake so i don't want to have a balloon in this case that's just barely out of the frame i either want it to be cut off in a kind of comfortable way or i want it to be in the frame with a little bit of space at least around there i don't want you to say oh you were so close to getting the whole balloon in the frame too bad you just barely missed it that's like the worst and so i'm going to be very deliberate and especially looking around all the edges and especially in the context of that rotation so let's assume that i was rotating trying to get the balloons to be vertical very important to note that it was just a little bit of a breezy day so some of the balloons were kind of tilted by the wind it wasn't my camera that was crooked trying um but if you if you believe that one then maybe what so let's assume that this is a good rotation that you know the balloons were a little crooked and i need to straighten things out except now take a look at that bottom kind of you know the right third boy that's close and i need either to have kind of a comfortable cropping of that subject or to have space around it i want it in or out basically and not necessarily completely and i'm sure many of you are probably familiar with some of the guidelines when it comes to photographing people you don't cut people off at the knees or at the ankles you know you don't make these awkward croppings of people same thing for all sorts of stuff out there and so pay careful attention when you're cropping and i'll oftentimes kind of play around with well okay so that's too much so maybe i need to bring it in no that's a little weird with just like the top half of the balloon in the frame that's not quite right so let's crop it out all together oh great now i got this other balloon that's kind of far maybe i am going with the panorama story after all you know so trying to make sure and sometimes there's going to be some compromises sometimes you might resort to cleaning up elements in the frame that you know you can't quite get all the way in the frame but you don't want just a little bit out of the frame so you get rid of them all together i'll leave that to you know you and whoever tells you what's okay to do to your pictures um but the point is to be really critical it's to me cropping is one of the areas where the biggest or most obvious mistakes are made or sort of the biggest omissions you might say are made where i'll see a little tiny branch just barely sticking into the frame or you know whatever random little blemish or distraction it might be so taking a look at an example there's also the palouse of a horizon shot so here we've got it's real hazy obviously but you can see we've got a reasonably clear horizon back there and this is where that angle tool works really nicely and so i'll just grab that bubble level little angle tool and click and drag across the image i recommend dragging nice big long lines so now you have a little bit more leeway it's a little more comfortable where a little bit of movement isn't going to make such a huge difference so something like that click and drag across the line that should be perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical as the case may be and release after you've clicked and dragged that line the image gets rotated automatically i have the lock unlocked for the aspect ratio and so i can continue then to drag as i see fit so maybe i want to tighten up on the background because it's kind of hazy and not so pretty back there anyway and maybe i want to tighten up behind the subject you know kind of rule a third style or you know whatever it might be but again paying careful attention to exactly where you're cropping and so in this case what really bothers me is bottom right i'm going to click done here just so we can see the final cropped image which will give us a little bit better sense here a couple things along the bottom edge bottom center this little speck of light that bugs me it might not bug you and that's okay but i would pay careful attention these sorts of things i might be tempted either to adjust my crop so there's more or less of that light depending on what's going to work for the image or even to clean that up with some of the image cleanup tools and then over here at the bottom right this bothers me a little bit as well because kind of an eye-catching anything that grabs your eye but not in a good way i probably want to fine-tune and when it comes to cropping what i'm really paying attention to first and foremost i would say are the edges of the image so kind of going around all of the perimeter the entire edge of that photo and look is there anything that just kind of it's barely sticking in or just a tiny bit of something is sticking out of the frame or you know whatever the case may be so going back into the crop tool once again here if i had the sail just barely out of the frame or even right up against the edge of the frame it just doesn't look right now if i crop it in even tighter that would actually probably work okay at least in terms of sale it gets to be a little bit close for the glider here the pilot but the point is i don't want to be right on the edge of something i usually i want to give it a little bit of space or i want to kind of make it a deliberate cropping of that subject all right and i really do pay attention like i'd pay attention this shadow line where it ends down here at the bottom left corner i would look at individual trees along the edge i know it seems a little bit silly but paying careful attention to those details can really make a big difference in the final image my buddy george lep used to always talk about how the difference between a pro photographer and an amateur photographer was the size of their trash can this was back in the days of slide film so he's on about throwing away a bunch of slides and what he meant is that pro photographers you see all these amazing great images they just take a lot of pictures so of course at some point you know hopefully with all that practice they're going to end up with some better pictures and i today i would sort of change that because i think we're all taking countless pictures at least i am and so it really comes down to more of that attention to detail so when it comes cropping i think is one of the most important obviously there's other things we can do besides cropping to get rid of certain blemishes and whatnot but i want to pay careful careful attention and really scrutinize the image not just in cropping but cropping certainly is one of the big ones that i see all right so go virtually black and white i you know i'm a big fan of black and white imagery i don't convert too many images to black and white um i guess you could say i've kind of transitioned into color finally at some point and obviously a lot i'm sure for many of you same sort of thing i love black and white photography in part because that's where i got my start in the wet dark room sliding the piece of paper into the developer solution and seeing that latent image magically show up there's just nothing like it but i still like to convert some of my color photos to black and white and for that i usually go virtual now i mean this in a couple of ways actually lightroom is always non-destructive when it comes to adjusting your images what that means is we're not adjusting your original raw captures or whatever other file types we might be talking about we're not adjusting the actual pixels in the actual file on your hard drive inside of lightroom you can think of lightroom as being like one big adjustment layer if you're familiar with that concept in photoshop it's all non-destructive it's just metadata it's just information so in the develop module sometimes you notice it might take a little bit of time sometimes for the preview to update because lightroom has to say oh you want to make that change okay hold on i've got to go look at the raw capture and then i've got to do the math to apply that change to that raw capture data it can take a little bit of effort and so if you don't have a fast computer maybe it's going to take a little bit of extra time in some cases but it's always non-destructive you don't have to worry about your original raw captures all right but also we have the ability to work virtually and what i mean by that is virtual copies so this image i think is perfectly fine in color and so i might go through my basic adjustments for the color image maybe i'll add a little drama by darkening up the shadows and i'll bring in a little bit of extra highlight detail and of course we need some clarity because every picture gets clarity and some vibrance to boost those colors and you know maybe crop and rotate just a hair and you know whatever needs to be done to the image but the textures here are kind of cool it might be fun in black and white and you don't know until you give it a try so let's give it a try but there's the rub what if you don't know now sometimes this picture needs to be black and white from the moment i clicked the shutter release i knew this was going to be a black and white photo great dive right in but if you're not sure we can have two versions of the photo and so this is kind of two tips in one both in terms of working with black and white in lightroom but also working with virtual copies so remember that when we're working in lightroom it's non-destructive all of our adjustments are really just metadata values about our original raw capture well why not have two sets of data one for the color image one for the black and white or three sets of data another one for sepia tone or you get the idea so the way we do that is to create a virtual copy so i'll right click on the image in this case just down on the film strip i'll choose create virtual copy and you will see that i now have two copies of my image if i mouse over it's probably a little small for you to see there but below the image in this black bar area you can see that there when i hover over this image with the mouse you see the dot cr2 that raw capture and when i mouse over the other version of the image you see that it has copy one appended to it meaning this is a virtual copy we also have a little upturned page you know the corner of the page is dog-eared to indicate that this is a virtual copy you can also see the indication that the two images are stacked together image one of two and two of two for example but the point is that this is a second copy of my photo without being a second copy of my photo it's just a second copy of my adjustments so i haven't made another copy of my original raw capture i just have another set of adjustments takes almost no space on the hard drive not literally none but not very much space at all and all this information by default anyhow is stored within the lightroom catalog in any event so really it's just affecting the size of your catalog so then we can say okay i'm working on my virtual copy let's take a look at black and white let's see what might work as a black and white interpretation of this photo whether or not i like it you can see that up here under basic there's a treatment option color versus black and white that's one way to get started with our black and white adjustments i could just click black and white right there but instead i'm going to scroll down and remember our friend hsl color well we also have b and w for black and white i'll go ahead and click that and now we've simplified that set of sliders instead of sliders for hue and saturation and luminance for all of our individual colors we actually have individual sliders for those colors and it's just our black and white mix this to me is wonderful because now we can adjust the luminance for specific areas but the build up for that bad joke was intended to get us to this little tiny target thing here so you see up in the top left corner where we have the black and white mixed sliders we've got this little target this little button for this what i refer to as the on image adjustment i'm going to click on that to activate it and it'll be a little hard to see because the mouse pointer gets a little bit small in this case but i'm going to come out over the image in fact let's see where is it easier to see over here in the shadows i'm going to put it right in there just so you can see it for a moment that becomes kind of a handle or a finger to point at the image and say lightroom here's what i want you to do or this is the area i want you to affect basically what i'm saying is lightroom i don't remember what color the boat is thankfully i've got a bunch of people here to help me out but if i were at home with nobody to help me then i would need you to help me and what i'm saying is lightroom i don't remember what color this is but can you help me out now when i mouse over the boat so it might be a little bit difficult to see the mouse pointer there it's kind of small but when i mouse over the boat if you take a look over at my set of sliders notice that blue is highlighted including both the numeric value kind of gets a lighter box around it and blue is now white instead of gray that's telling me that that's the slider i need to touch that i need to adjust in order to adjust that area of the photo in other words if i drag the blue slider to the right the blues get brighter if i drag it to the left the blues get darker the thing is i'm way too lazy to go all the way back over there and grab the slider i just want to stay right here and tell lightroom what to do and they don't have voice recognition yet so instead what i'm going to do is click on the image remember i clicked on what we think might be a blue area we clicked on the boat it's a blue area and so now if i drag upward i'll be brightening the blues and if i drag downward i'll be darkening the blues so i can not even have to worry about what color stuff is in the image now i realize that this is wildly hilarious in the context of not remembering whether the blue the boat was blue or not and that you know you're gonna go home wow tim was so funny you can tweet that on the twitters but actually there are times where this is really helpful beyond just working on the image which is helpful in its own right and i don't mean literally not remembering what color something was but a better example would be those bricks what color were they oh that's easy red except remember the red didn't have that strong an impact on the luminosity values in the image actually orange worked better and you'll find very often for foliage yellows have a very strong impact whereas greens have a very minimal impact and so as much as you know i like to joke about these things because i have nothing better to do to entertain myself up here it's also really helpful in the context of i don't know if it's going to consider that yellow versus green or red versus orange and orange versus yellow i just know that that's the general area or that's the general color value that i want to adjust so i don't remember what this was over here i can see now that i'm moving my mouse over it that that area is considered yellow and as i drag up versus down i'm lightening and darkening the yellows as well as having a lesser effect on the orange you can see both the yellows and oranges moving in this case we can go there's probably not that much else in the way of colors in this photo uh we got a little bit of greenish that's blue mouse around here there's some aqua you know so not much in the way of variations and colors is mostly a blue boat and the red to orange brick wall and the reflections of all that stuff but the point is that yeah sometimes you're going to forget the color of the boat and you're going to forget that you got the color version of the image down there and you might not have an audience people to help you remember what color the boat was but you're also going to run to a situation maybe where there's some subtlety where it could be one or the other they're all sort of in a big range and just clicking in the image and dragging up or down to brighten or darken then you have to think so much about what color was stuff originally and more importantly is that you're just kind of focused on the image and isn't that where you want to be focusing your attention in any event it is for me all right but thank you so much for your willingness to remind me what color the boat was all right number nine clean up and more in photoshop now i don't want to disparage lightroom in any way and suggest that you can't perform image cleanup work in lightroom you certainly can it's just that photoshop has some more powerful tools for image cleanup and more importantly perhaps photoshop has some very powerful tools for all sorts of other things we'll take a look at a couple of examples but first i actually want to show you that lightroom actually does a pretty good job of cleaning up little dust spots and blemishes and you know various issues within the photo first i you know i should know better than to make another effort at humor after what just happened a few moments ago but i was going to point out i will do it with a non-humorous voice this time how hard i had to dig and search and search and search and search i've spent the last three weeks searching for an image that contained dust spots so that i could demonstrate to you how to clean up dust spots and i could not find that every they're all impeccably clean it was kind of frustrating i gotta admit fortunately after weeks of searching i found one how many spots do you see number one that's not polite lots and number two it's not that many six or seven that's that seems reasonable six or seven and you know they're all up here one two three four this little line of a one maybe it's a little hair or something i don't know yeah about six or seven i'm going to click the spot healing of the spy on it's like i'm in photoshop the spot removal tool and then we can get rid of them so see that little spot right there it's going to click and it magically disappears that's awesome taking a look at the settings over here i've got the spot edit set to heal rather than clone and i would say that always i want it on heal maybe there's an exception you know in random little moments but pretty much i always want it on heal which causes the pixels that are copied from one area to another to cover up a blemish will blend into the surrounding area so it works out very nicely uh but more importantly now of course i could zoom in to get a closer look at all these dust blemishes but first i want to show you visualize spots how many did you say there were 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 plus the one i deleted 15. can't see the ones in the what thank goodness for that yeah you cannot see the ones in the water now we also have this little slider and this is kind of this you know wild embossed kind of a wait maybe i shouldn't have done that because now there's even more we gotta start over with our count there are a lot of them here you see the outline of the rock in the background starting to pick up through the fog but all of these little blemishes these little spots probably i'm guessing water droplets little water spots that accumulated when um probably somebody else i let them borrow my camera and they changed lenses without my permission or something like that but i can actually with this visualize spots option enabled i can actually click in the image so click to get rid of that dust spot you'll notice that with my mouse over the image you're seeing the little buttons that indicate the source and destination so it's kind of going to look for the moment like there are still a bunch of spots out there what i'll do in a moment here after i click on oh maybe you know half dozen or so of these is move my mouse out away from the image and that's because i have my tool overlay option here down at the bottom of the toolbar far left of the toolbar set to auto as opposed to always or never etc i like auto because then when i move out over the image with my mouse i can see the spots where i've cleaned up etc and then when i move my mouse off the image those spots go away and i can see just the image itself so in this way i can adjust the size as needed with the left and right square bracket key so left square bracket key will make that spot removal a little larger the right square bracket key will make it a little larger did i say larger for both less square bracket will make it smaller right square bracket will make it bigger nice little keyboard shortcut you do also have a size slider over there on the right panel here in the develop module so obviously i could continue clicking and clicking and clicking on what turned out to be way more dust spots than i had counted on or again i think these are really just water droplets but i can also click and drag so i'm going to turn off the visualized spots just because that'll make it a little bit easier and i'm going to zoom in so that we can see this a little bit better and go find there it is that little i don't know what that is like some sort of little piece of fuzz or it's a it's a spot that moved or something but anyhow we've got this little area well i could make a really big brush except i don't want to clean up areas that i don't have to well i'm not limited to just circles i mean the brush is a circle but i can use a smaller brush and then click and drag so instead of just clicking to add a spot to clean up i can click and drag to paint over the area that i need to clean up and then when i release you see that cleanup the source and destination of course will be the exact same shape notice that lightroom has tried to find a good source i could change it i'll bring it down into the water just to you know be silly um so now we've got a little bit of water texture up in the sky but if lightroom for some reason every now and then you'll see that it'll it'll come up with some weird analysis of the photo and decide oh we need some water up here um and so then you can just click and drag that source into a different position just make sure not to put it into a position where there's another dust spot because then you're just duplicating that spot but again notice because of that heal option that we get a pretty good healing a pretty good blending in there it looks like i needed it to be a little bit larger over here but i could just paint another little area as well to clean up that spot etc but you get the idea there so lightroom actually gives us some pretty good capabilities boy we got to straighten the horizon on this one also this image is just a mess probably should just delete it but we've got some basic capabilities in terms of image cleanup in lightroom and again that visualize spots option to me is just fantastic and do make sure to drag that slider don't just assume that because you've got really good contrast at one position that you shouldn't drag through different values just to make sure usually i find that the higher the value the easier it is to see spots but that's mostly just because those spots are going to be visible in the brighter areas of the photo so kind of don't take it for granted that whatever the value is set to by default or whatever you left it at last time is going to be a good value kind of drag through and check for those spots in the photo but what about when you've got a situation where lightroom is just not doing a very good job you need a little bit more sophisticated work that to me is when photoshop comes into play now this image obviously there's no dust spots you know more typical scenario however wide angle lens oh man the problem with a wide-angle lens is that it's wide and the problem with being a photographer is you kind of have this natural inclination to put the sun behind you and then sometimes the wide angle lens and the sun behind you you end up with the shadow of your head in the frame as you can see right down here at the bottom center now if i hadn't pointed that out to you would you have noticed good okay cool note the self i don't have to clean up everything uh but you know in a case like this could lightroom accomplish that cleanup work no not no i mean could it it's possible in this case you'd have to use the clone option rather than the heal option because the healing is going to cause this blending of those pixels which are going to cause kind of a ghosting effect in the grass but you know what honestly i would just prefer to take it to photoshop once i've gotten to that point in the image and there's a bunch of other stuff that i might want to do in photoshop you've probably noticed if you've been using lightroom for a while with each new release of lightroom there's more and more and more that we can do in lightroom and so there's less and less and less that we need to send an image out to photoshop for but there's still a few things uh creating composite images for example and for me well actually we're going to create a composite in this case you might say um but also for some image cleanup and most of it just comes down to there's some more powerful tools in photoshop plus i've been using photoshop a lot longer than i've been using lightroom it feels just like second nature i you know not that lightroom is difficult by any stretch but lightroom has been around what anybody know six seven eight years something like that i don't remember and photoshop's been around it's probably going on about 25 years now give or take i'm not old enough to have been using photoshop since day one but so i've selected an image that i would like to send to photoshop thank you for not laughing too loudly at that one by the way uh then i'm gonna go to the photo menu and choose edit in and then in this case i want to use photoshop so i'll choose photoshop you can see i've got photoshop elements installed i have a variety of plugins i can send this image to all sorts of different software that kind of plugs in you might say to lightroom so i'll go ahead and choose photoshop photoshop was not already running so photoshop will launch providing me with the opportunity for a quick sip of coffee and then the image will be opened and i'll just do a real kind of quick correction in this case i'm going to make a selection i'll just use the lasso tool here and i'm going to make a selection this is not intended by the way to teach you everything you need to know about layer masking this is just a little quick overview but i make a selection that's bigger than the object i need to clean up and then i'm going to move it somewhere else and because i'm set to the create new selection option up at the far left of the options bar we have new selection add to selection subtract from selection and intersect with selection because i'm set to the new selection option it means if i were to start clicking and dragging through the image somewhere else i would get rid of this selection and create a brand new selection but if i point my mouse inside the selection i can now click and drag and move the selection i'm going to move it over to here because i think somewhere over in here is probably a good source of pixels to get rid of the shadow of my head at least i hope so so i have my background image layer selected on the layers panel it's actually the only layer that's available at the moment because i haven't done anything in photoshop just yet and so then i'll go up onto the menu bar and choose layer new layer via copy you can also press ctrl j on windows or command j on macintosh to accomplish the same thing that will copy the current layer to a new layer except because i have a selection active only the selected pixels will be copied to that new layer it's called layer one i'm gonna call this shadow fix so i'll just double click on the name type a new name press enter or return and now i have a shadow fix layer i'm going to turn off my background image layer just so you can see there is my shadow fix layer it's not fixing the shadow yet but it is poised and ready i'll grab my move tool letter v on the keyboard is the shortcut key for the move tool here is my shadow fixer i can move it around into the right position within the photo let's call it oh right there yes i know i got these up here that i need to clean up but we're not going to worry about that right now i'm then going to add a layer mask so i'll click on the circle inside of a square icon down at the bottom of the layers panel that'll add a layer mask to my shadow fix layer and then if you notice the edge of my shadow fix layer has a crisp edge i'll zoom in just a little bit so we can get a better sense of that we've got this crisp edge because i made a very crisp selection well if i just grab my brush tool and set my foreground color to black letter d on the keyboard will give you the default colors of white and black in the case of the layer mask you can press the letter x to invert those or exchange foreground and background i'll make sure that i'm using a soft edge brush i've got the hardness set down to zero percent using the control up here on the options bar i'll make the brush a little bit bigger and then i'll just click and drag i'm actually painting on the layer mask in black and on a layer mask black blocks and white reveals and that gives me a nice blending well is it the right blending i don't know because we got rid of the rest of the image i'll go ahead and turn on the visibility of the background image layer that looks pretty good i can kind of clean up and kind of bob and weave around the blades of grass and try and you know make sure that i'm not creating any kind of weirdness thank goodness that grass kind of has the chaos all its own so it hides you know little mistakes here and there what not but in any event obviously i could spend some more time trying to get that absolutely perfect and obviously i just re revealed part of the shadow so we'll do something like that etc but you get the idea kind of a quick and dirty quick and dirty job there but it gives you the concept and that's something that simply would be impossible to do in this way within lightroom not with the degree of control that we have in photoshop could you possibly get a really good result with the clone feature with that spot removal brush quite possibly it might take a little more work and frankly i'm just a little bit more comfortable with some of this layer based stuff working in photoshop and it's not intended to say that this is something that you absolutely could only accomplish in photoshop but rather it's an example of one of the things that you might want to do in photoshop and it's pretty straightforward to send an image from lightroom over to photoshop so how do we get it back very simple do not try to over complicate this it's save and close that's all not save as not i'd like to give this a completely different file name just for fun or save it on a different hard drive because why not why you're going to confuse lightroom so just save so you can go to the file menu and choose file save or you can just press ctrl s on windows command s on macintosh save that image and then once it's finished saving we can close that image so we can choose file close or keyboard shortcut control w command w and then we go right back into lightroom and as if by magic look at that so here's our original raw capture and here's the psd file in your preferences you can choose whether you want lightroom to make a tiff file versus a psd file when you send it over to photoshop so that is an option you can establish so with the shadow without the shot i mean really with the shadow makes it feel more personal doesn't it that's what i was going for artistically i don't know if it quite worked thank you for not laughing too loud all right finally get targeted now this takes on a few different things and i'm not going to go really super in depth my point here is really just to emphasize that these capabilities exist and to encourage you to explore those capabilities and so just looking at a couple of quick examples real common situation graduated split neutral density filter type of effect except for the part what a little brief side story i was gonna get rich and then it didn't happen um i was gonna sell a series of graduated split neutral density filters and so there would be like the monument valley set you know with shapes of buttes instead of just a gradient it would actually have outlines so you would just line up and the beauty of it was that it would be great because you didn't have you know the butte getting darker toward the top or you know the building getting taller a darker toward the top or the tree or whatever the thing that stuck into the frame that would always bother you when you're using a graduated filter plus you'd have to buy like so many of these we have like the natural landscapes collection and the city skylines collection i mean you'd be buying hundreds of filters each of you and pretty soon we're talking real money um but unfortunately digital came along so i had to change course and start teaching photoshop and lightroom but there is still value in the graduated filter you can see it kind of looks like a graduated neutral density filter on that same little toolbar where we picked the crop tool for example and my typical approach here is just start off with an exaggerated adjustment just because it makes it a little easier for me to see exactly what's going on there's a couple of ways you could approach this but i just make an exaggerated adjustment notice that we only have a subset of our adjustments we don't have the entire develop module available to apply in a gradient fashion but we have i would say the most important adjustments here in this case i've just cranked down the exposure and now i'm just going to click and drag in the image and the direction that i drag determines the direction that the gradient transitions across and then the distance of course that i drag determines the the distance of transition you might call it the size of that gradient effect i can also grab that button in the middle and drag it up or down as i see fit i can point to the center line and click and drag to rotate if i need to apply a correction there i can grab the top or bottom line if i need to make it a shorter transition or a longer transition so let's just assume that that's a good transition in this case avoiding the awkward issue of darkening the top of the butte kind of a thing right which is the real problem with the neutral density filter graduated neutral density filter but then i can fine tune so you know maybe darken up the sky versus you know enhancing contrast in the sky maybe darkening down the highlights in the sky of course we're going to increase saturation in the sky uh increased clarity whatever the case may be the point is i have these variety of adjustments available that are applying in a gradient effect and i can still go back and forth i say well i sure love the effect that i've just applied to the sky but i want it to come down a little bit further or i want it to transition over a longer distance you know whatever the case may be point being is that we have that capability we also we have the same basic capability i'm going to go ahead and just reset that adjustment for a quick moment we have the same basic concept in an elliptical shape so it's exactly the same thing you can see we kind of have the same gradient that's just instead of a linear gradient you might think of this as an elliptical gradient i basically think of this as the vignette tool with a lot more flexibility so not only can we adjust the exposure to kind of create a vignette type of effect but we could also you know increase contrast or decrease contrast out toward those edges or maybe taper off the saturation out toward those edges and of course i can adjust the feather so i'm going to reduce saturation just because that's kind of a dramatic effect and then i'll reduce the feathering versus increase the feathering so you know all sorts of potential possibilities i would say by and large with this radial effect we're really probably going for more of a traditional gradient but i'm sorry for a traditional vignette but you do have more flexibility than that but more importantly perhaps is that we can exercise even greater control with the adjustment brush now with the adjustment brush we're able to paint a specific adjustment into a specific area of the photo it's amazing so what i want to do is make the image black and white except for the car this is pretty easy except i got to paint very carefully along this edge around the car my basic guideline here is you got to be careful for the border of the area and then we can not be so careful after that we'll go ahead and start off once again with that real drastic exposure adjustment just that i can see what i'm doing and then i'll come back and fine-tune things but you're going to need to be really quiet i'm going to reduce the feathering here a little bit and i think that size will be okay so you should be able to see the effect while i'm painting but this requires a tremendous amount of concentration so you're going to have to be really quiet as i paint along the edge trying to define very perfectly exactly the transition between the car and the rest of the picture i appreciate that somebody thought about saying something okay i'm going to undo we'll try this again this time i'm going to turn on the auto mask button because then i don't have to hardly think at all oops then i mess it up again the joke doesn't work as well when you spoil it so auto mask turned on look at that look now all i have to do it's actually a little more difficult than it looks i'm going to make this brush bigger to make it easier on myself all i have to do is keep the cross hair see a little plus symbol the cross hair inside my brush i just have to keep that outside the car and i need to keep the border between the outside of the car and the car in other words the edge of the car i need to keep that inside the car so notice how my circle overlaps with the edge of the car but i'm keeping the crosshair outside the car and it's automatically defined in the car you didn't have to be quiet at all see how that was funny now in retrospect yes we all do now notice a couple of things number one that really was most effective for the edge of the car because there was a clear boundary there but it didn't quite get everything those you can see a few areas where the stripes on the road didn't quite get picked up properly so for that i need to turn off auto mask and i'll reduce my brush size more and come into these areas this one i think is okay yep that's good and i'll paint over this little area etc being careful not to paint over the car obviously but now that i've got that sort of boundary area defined now it's it really starts to get easy again auto mask is turned off at this point and now just using a large brush come out over here oops let me get a little smaller in here just so i don't mess up where the stripe is then i can make it bigger and eventually i can be using a big huge brush so now i've got that area really well defined and i'll just come in here and finish up the effect now what i'm realizing now the what's the huge mistake that i made well i should have said i just wanted to change the car instead of everything else because that would have been so much easier yes it would have all right but that's the extra mile i go for you guys because you're so great remember the blue boat thing that was really helpful and so so now presumably i've defined the area that i want to adjust i can reset that exposure adjustment because i really didn't want to change the exposure what i wanted to do perhaps was make the background you know most of the photo black and white with a red car driving through a black and white scene for example or i mean of course everything wants clarity so let's add some more clarity back there whatever the case may be the point being is with that adjustment brush now i can really focus adjustments on specific areas with auto mask i'm able to real clearly define objects that have some clear definition to them and then for more nebulous stuff then i can just use a relatively soft edge brush and paint directly anywhere in the image so i'll go ahead and as much as i hate to undo all that hard work i'm going to actually we'll just reset this adjustment brush if i let's say i just wanted to make the sky black and white ignoring this power pole that goes up into the sky because i have a slightly kind of fuzzy edge if i reduce my value for feather and just kind of paint across this line right now i'm reducing exposure obviously and i'm not very good at following the lines but you know if you kind of use a lot of imagination right now you can imagine that i was following right along that line really well you can see how difficult it can be or how bad i really am at it uh but the point is that we could in some cases we don't have to worry so much about defining a perfect line and we'll illustrate that point in just a moment here now we got that sky defined not very well i might add reset my exposure adjustment what if i just wanted to crank up the clarity to really get those sky the clouds in the sky to pop well now is it so important that i was painting perfectly along the horizon no not really i was doing a really bad job because you guys are making me nervous but the point is that if we're having a relatively subtle effect on a targeted area of the photo and there's a relatively gradual transition from one area to the next and the horizon very often is because there will be a little bit of haze at the horizon for example under those circumstances relatively gradual transition and a relatively modest adjustment you don't need that precision that comes with auto mask for example you can even use a feathered brush increase the value for feather a little bit and just paint the effect into various areas of the photo so don't think that you always have to be painstakingly careful in the areas that you're painting sometimes it's not really getting away with anything you just don't need the degree of precision if you're using a relatively modest adjustment even the people outside are clapping already all right so there you have it now how many tips could i have come up with for optimizing your photos in lightroom probably a thousand but then we'd be here all week not that that's necessarily a bad idea um but anything i hope that all proves very helpful for you guys thank you very much for joining me i appreciate it whether you're a hobbyist or a professional b h has the answers to your questions experience a world of technology at our new york city superstore connect with us online or give us a call our staff of experts is happy to help

Channel: B&H Photo Video

Views: 1,104,568

Keywords: top 10 tips, bhvideos, B & H Photo Video (Business Operation), photos, pro audio, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (Software), B&H, video, Photograph (Media Genre), Tim grey, top 10, BH Photo Video, photography, bh photo, BH Photo

Id: PhOF_L0eesw

Length: 114min 11sec (6851 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 06 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/altitudearts]

TL;DR: Use the sliders in the develop module to make your pictures nice.

[u/schultzz88]

Came for the interesting topic, left b/c good lord two-hour YouTube video.

[u/trikster2]

Almost 2 hour long B and H talk by Tim Grey.

A lot of basic stuff; basically a walk through the develop sliders.

[u/SOHC4]

Dang, Lightroom 10 is out already?

[u/[deleted]]

shoot raw, do stuff with lightroom.

[u/ngmcs8203]

10 tips, 2 hrs. Holy crap.

[u/nitro41992]

Oh my god its that guy from Chuck.

[u/UserM16]

Watched it. Learned a few new things. Not really advanced material if you've been playing with LR for a couple of months.

[u/shall1313]

Not the most helpful, but would be a great starter course for some. Also interesting to see what Matt Damon's older brother has been up to