Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom for Lunch™ - Creatively Relight an Image

1. ACR and Lightroom for Lunch™ - Relight an image - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom for lunch: relight and image. Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom for lunch is a series of classes, everyone of which teaches one or two techniques that you can apply using either Adobe Camera Raw or the developed module in Lightroom. You'll get an opportunity to practice your skills in the project that you'll create, and you can also follow along because then the class project area, you'll see that I've given you a link to download both the images that I'm working on as full raw images, so you can follow along as we work. What we're going to do today is to realize a couple of images shot in Tokyo. We're going to move the light around to create a more compelling image. Now, as you're working through these videos, you may see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things. Firstly, give the class a thumbs up recommendation, and write just a few words about what you're enjoying about the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too may enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments. I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started and we're going to start in Lightroom and the second image is going to be done in Adobe Camera Raw. 2. ACR and Lightroom for Lunch™ - Lightroom Edit: This is the image that we're going to work on in Lightroom, and I'm going to re-light the image so that we look more at what's happening in the foreground here and less at what is happening in the background. For this image, I'm going to start by cropping it because this advertisement over here is probably the lightest thing in the image and it's attracting my eye, and that's not a good thing because it's not going to be part of the final image. I have my Lock icon clicked here and I've got original set. This image is now going to be cropped to the aspect ratio that it was in camera. If I look at it with a whole heap of other images in a row, it's not going to change aspect ratio, so it's not going to actually even look like it's been cropped. So that's a secret between you and me. Let's look at the basic panel fixes. There are a few fixes we can do here. We're going to start by looking at exposure, I'm going to bring the exposure on the entire image down a little bit just to start on the sky because I can bring the exposure back up later on here. I'm also going to make it a little bit bluer as images shot after dark tend to have a blue tone to them. We'll bring a bit of color into the foreground later. Let's look at the white point, Alt or Option, click on the white point. Well, these specular highlights are going to be very difficult to get rid of if not impossible. You could bring your white stand in an attempt to minimize them, but it's not really going to help the image much, these are probably just blown out pixels. We'll look at the blacks again, Alt drag or Option drag on a Mac on the blacks. I want some blacks in the image because it's shot after dark. I am relatively happy with about that amount of black in the image. The other adjustment I'm going to do here before I leave here is vibrance, because by increasing vibrance, I can increase the saturation of under-saturated colors, so some of these lighter areas in the image, coming back a little bit more colorful than they were. The rest of the image I'm going to fix with a graduated filter, radial filter, and the adjustment brush. Let's start with the graduated filter. Click on it. In Adobe Camera Raw, you'll have to set some settings here. In Lightroom, you don't have to. If you want to reset this in Lightroom, just double-click the Effect button or the Effect word here, and that ray sets it. I'm going to add a bit of contrast. I'm going to decrease the exposure by about half a stock because I want to start darkening the sky a little bit. Let's just click and drag down, hold the Shift key as you do so that you constrain this to a straight line, a horizontal line. This is where the filter is applied at full strength and it transitions between these two bars to not being applied at all. If you want to add some areas to this, you can do so using the brush here, so we can click on the "Brush", and then we can just pined over areas of the image that we want to add to this effect. If you wanted something similar to also be happening around the front of this image or the bottom of the image, you could come in and brush this effect on. So you can make a graduated filter that also has Adjustment Brush added to it. Then I click "Done", and I'm going to bring in a second graduated filter exactly the same settings. Just drop this one on top because there is nothing to say that you cannot drop in multiple graduated filters. Now, in addition to brushing the filter on, you may want to erase the filter from certain areas, so I'm going to click on "Erase". I'm going to click on these lights here because I don't want them to be affected by this darkening filter. I could also come in perhaps into areas like this and remove them. We're effectively saying the background's going to be unlit. We're going to dock in the background, but we're going to make sure that these areas where there are lights and where the interesting things happen are not going to be impacted by this filter. I'm just running all the places where I'm interesting data that might be being affected by this filter that I don't want to have affected by the filter, and if I go too far, as I have done over here, I'm just going to go and get the brush again. I obey brush, they're exactly the same. It just gives you the ability to add different settings to them. As this brush down and I'm just going to pipe back in the filter in the areas that I wanted it to appear in, just making sure that it's applied there. Now, you can also go and edit the other filter, click on "Edit" and pick up the second filter which is behind here, and going through the same thing with your brush. You can erase these areas from the effect of the filter and you can add other areas if you wish to. Now, with this brush, you can adjust the flow as you work. So if you go too far, you can just paint the effect back on, I'm just going to adjust the flow down here. I think it's a little bit too intense up here, the minus effect, but let's go and erase the filter from these areas, just making sure that we're getting plenty of light where we want it in the image. You can continue to work with those graduated filters, adding in the darkness, and then removing it in the places that you want to remain fairly light in the image. Once you've done that, click "Done". Now, we're going to light the bottom part of this image using a radial filter. Click on the "Radial Filter". Again if you're in Adobe Camera Raw, you're going to have to make some settings to this before you can apply it. In Lightroom, it just doesn't matter, you can just go ahead and apply the filter, drag out the filter. We can possibly say that it is affecting the outside of the image, outside of this circle rather than inside it. You can see there what's happening. What I wanted to do is invert the mask because I want this filter to be affecting the foreground and these people who are walking across this busy intersection in Tokyo. Now, in addition to increasing exposure to compensate for the fact that I decreased exposure on the main image, I've also added a bit of contrast, I'm going to add some yellow too, again, add a bit of color, and warms into the front part of the image making this a more attractive place to look. I'm also going to throw some clarity at this and I could also add a bit of sharpness here too. Now, like the graduated filter, you can also brush on this clarity effects. I'm going to the Brush and I'm going to the Eye Brush. You can use eye or both paint on brushes. I can now paint that effect from that radial filter outside of the area where the radial filter was, I'm just adding to it. You may want to increase your feather amount when you do this just so you get a nice feathering effect and you're not painting it too strongly with strong edges. So this is bringing a little bit of additional lightness and brightness into the image here. Once you've got your effect painted on and you've got the radial filter in plates, you can obviously adjust any of these sliders here to fine tune the result, and click "Done" when you're happy with what you've got. Again, if you want to apply something more to the imagery, you can go to the adjustment brush. Here, I'm going to bring in a little bit of additional clarity and contrast, but no exposure. I'm going to double-click the word exposure to zero that out, add a bit of clarity, test my brush, I think it wants to have a pretty large feather, and I can use the square bracket, open and close square brackets to size my brush and I'm just gong to paint this on to the image, you can see where it is using the shadow mask overlay. Using these brushes allows you to paint on additional effects, and I suggest that you do this in little bits. Maybe hit everything with a brush, and then do Done, and then add some extra effect if you needed into the image with another brushstroke. Everyone of these brushstrokes can be edited, you just click on the appropriate tool to bring up the tool, and then go looking for the pin that you pin down to start the strokes, so here's the pin for this one here. Everyone that you add, if I click to add a new one, then it's going to have its own pin, and so you can edit them at any time by just locating the pin and click on it, this is this one, this is the one that I just added in, and you can add multiples of these brushes, you can add multiple radial filters, multiple graduated filters, and each of them can be adjusted by clicking on the type of filter and then go and pick up its pin. With the graduated filters, we've got a couple of those, there's one of them and here's just sitting behind it is the second one. Let's have a look at the before and after, which in Lightroom you can get to by pressing the Backslash key, so that's the before and this is the after. I've given you this image as a full day NG image, so you can follow along and you can also use it for your class project. To class project will be to adjust one or other of the images that I've given you in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw and post a copy of your processed image as your class project. Of course, if you have an image of your own that you want to re-light, you're welcome to use that. In the next video, I'm going to a similar image, shot same location in Tokyo, different things happening in the image, but in that case, we're going to look at the adjustments in Adobe Camera Raw. 3. ACR and Lightroom for Lunch™ - Adobe Camera Raw Edit: This is the image that we're going to work on in Adobe Camera Raw. It's shot in the exact same position as the image that we looked at in Lightroom. It's just a little bit differently framed and we have something a bit more exciting happening over on this side of the image, and not the pedestrians that we had before. I've given you this image so you can work on it yourself and just follow along. Of course, we can do this in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw because the alteration settings in Adobe Camera Raw and the develop module in Lightroom are the same. They're just positioned in different places. We're going to start out with this image, and I'm going to add a bit of blue to it, so it looks like it's shot in the evening, so a bit of blue light into that, by just dragging on the temperature. I'm going to check my whites and blacks, Alt or Option drag on the white slider. Well, we've got a lot of specular highlights here, and they're going to be really difficult to remove from the image. Possibly you might just say, "Look, I'm just going to live with this highlights and not even adjust for them." If you want to, you can bring the whites down a little bit, but these specular highlights are in these areas of the image. You'll be able to see them on the image, by clicking here on the highlight clipping warning. There, the red areas in through here, these are areas that are just blown out pixels caused by the fact that these are bright neon lights. I'm just going to turn that off, the highlight clipping warning. Let's make sure it goes off. Let's check the blacks, Alt or Option drag on the black slider. We want some blacks in the image. I'm just going to pull the blacks over quite a bit. Now again, if you click here on the "Shadow clip warning," you'll see blue markers where there is shadow clipping, and there's some shadow clipping here in the areas that we just made black. Not really worried about that at all, but that's what those little indicators do. That's how you turn them off if they're becoming really annoying. The only other adjustment I want to make at this stage here, is to vibrance, because that's an adjustment we don't get to make in the Graduated Filter or Radial Filter, later on. I'm just going to boost the vibrance a little bit, that's just going to add some color in under-saturated color areas. Let's go now to the Graduated Filter. I'm going to click on the "Graduated Filte"r here to launch it. In Adobe Camera Raw, you have to have something set here before you can use it. In Lightroom, that's fine, you can just go down and put a filter down without any settings, but Adobe Camera Raw, that's not going to work. I'm just going to drop the exposure down here, about half a stop, click and drag downwards, add the Shift key, it's is going to come in a straight line. I'm going to call that good. I'm going to add a couple of these. I'm just going to click on another tool, go back to the Graduated Filter, and let's add a new one. Click and drag downwards. Make sure it's in a straight line. That's looking pretty good. You can also just click on new, to add a new one and that just toggles it back into the new mode. I'm going to add another one here. Now, with any of these, you can remove areas from the application of the Graduated Filter by going through the brush tool. When you click on the brush tool, you have a plus and a minus. Plus allows you to add some areas to the effect of the filter, so I could add this building down here. Minus lets me remove areas, so I might want to not darken some of these areas in the image, and so what I'll do is just brush over them with the minus brush just to make sure that they're not being darkened with this exposure compensation. Probably, what you would do with this is to do this for every single one of this Graduated Filter. I've got this Graduated Filter fixed, let's go to Edit and let's pick up another one of these filters, that's this one here. Again, go to the brush, click "Minus" and just brush it out on the area affected by this filter, which is going to be slightly different to the area affected by the other one, and because these filters are applied cumulatively, every one of them is going to knock out these areas of the image. Really, if you want to bring data back in these areas of the image, bring the lightness back, you're going to have to remove this effect from all of these filters. Let's go to Edit and again click on the third one and do the exact same thing. Now I'm just going to do that quickly. You're going to take a little bit more care with it. You will be working with a fairly large brush, you don't want to be poking around this too much with a small brush, you want nice soft edges. Now that we're done with that, let's just click another tool to turn it off. Let's look at the Radial Filter. If you're working with a version of Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom, that does not have a Radial Filter, you can get pretty much the same effect using the adjustment brush. You just want to brush it in a circular direction. Now, I've just dragged out a shallow Ellipse here. Let's click on "Mask" to see what's being affected. Well, what's being affected is everything outside the area of this circle. We want it to be on the inside. Let's click on inside. You can see clearly this is the area we're going to be affecting with this filter. What we want to do is to counteract some of the blue that we added in, and let's add some yellow in there. The light and warmth that you might expect from car headlights, and streetlights and some of these neon lights. I'm going to increase the exposure here. I might increase the contrast to get a crisper area there. Looks like I took my highlights with me, I didn't mean to do that. You could also add in some clarity here, give this a crisper look. Your eyes are going to be taken to the lightest and most in focused areas of the image. This is the area that you want people to look at, then this is the area that you need to hit with things like clarity. Dehaze is a filter that also adds a bit clarity to the image, and it could do quite well here. I actually quite like the result of using dehaze here, so I'm going to use it. If you don't have it, just hit the image with plenty of contrast and clarity. If we're pretty good with that, we can brush in some extras here. You've got a brush tool here, and so you can brush in some extra of these filters effect into areas that fall outside the filter. I might just brush in a little bit on the truck. I really want to use the advertisement more than the truck itself. I could also make sure that because this mask has a soft edge on it, if I want this area to be really included in the fixed, I can add a little bit of the filter effect here. I might also want to make these stripes along the road a little bit lighter perhaps rather than dark blue. But you can see the effect that you can create here. Now, like with the graduated filter, you can apply multiple instances of the radial filter. If you don't have a radial filter, but also if you want to add some additional adjustments, the images got the adjustment brush. Here, let's look at perhaps backing the exposure off a little bit, adding a bit of contrast here. I don't want to do anything to the highlights, but I do want clarity and dehaze. This is working pretty much the same way as the Radial Filter was. You can use the square brackets to increase or decrease the brush size. You can also add a feather to the brush, you do want quite a bit of feather here. You can use this as an additional brush, so this brush's taking the effect that we applied with that Radial Filter, and we're adding it back into the image again. This is like doubling it if you like. Well, especially in the areas where the Radial Filter was, here, we're just adding a little bit of extra to the image. You can pump up some of the areas that you want to draw attention to here. Just lighten it and really bring your viewers eye into the area of the image that you're most interested in, which is this foreground detail here and all the cars, and the lights, and the action that's happening here. If I were doing this myself and trying to be a little bit more careful than I am rather than speedy, I would probably be applying this adjustment brush in a few stages. I might take the adjustment brush with a fairly strong fix and hit maybe some light areas, and then I might bring it down with a smaller size or less of a fixed, just wind back some of these settings, and then hit other areas with that. You can do that multiple times. Of course, with the single adjustment brush that I'm using right now, any adjustments I make to the sliders, are affecting everywhere where this brush is. That's all of these areas. If I want back clarity or dehaze right now, all of these are being hit with that wind back of clarity or dehaze. What you need to do, is to add a new brush and then you'll get a chance to add completely new settings. Which we're going to do that right now, I'm going to try and use dehaze a little bit. Wind up my brush size, pin it down and just run over a few of these places. Where I'm seeing perhaps a little bit of fuzziness in the image and I can hit that with dehaze. I've got too much dehaze now, because the only thing that I was doing was dehazing the image, I can wind that back. You can finish off this image with a vignette. We're going To the fx tab here, and here's our Post Crop Vignette. Even though we haven't cropped the image, it's always wise to use a Post Crop Vignette just in case you do edit the image later on cropping it. This will make sure that the vignette actually appears around what's left of the image after you've cropped it. The other vignette that's available in lens correction doesn't do the same thing. I'm just going to add a fair bit of highlight priority vignette to the image here. Let's go to snapshot. I'm going to just add a snapshot for the final, and let's go back to the import. This is what the image looked like when we imported it into Adobe Camera Raw, and just a few minutes later, we've managed to re-light the image to create something that is more of the feel of what I saw when I was in this location. Your project for this class is going to be to take one or other of the images that I've given you, their full raw images. Open them in either Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw, and edit the image to relight it. Post a copy of your relit image as your class project. Of course, you can also do this with an image of your choice. If you have an image that you want to use, go ahead and use it instead. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned something about relighting images in Adobe Camera Raw, and Lightroom. If you did enjoy the course and when you see a prompt to give it a thumbs up, please, do two things for me, if you're enjoying the course, give it a thumbs up and write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations are helpful for other skill share users. It helps some find and identify classes that they too might want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and your questions. I also look at and respond to all of your class project. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom for Lunch. I'll look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode of Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom for Lunch, soon.