Transcripts
1. Processing Images with the color Red in Lightroom and ACR Intro: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, enhancing red in your photos in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. In addition to teaching Illustrator and Photoshop, the Graphic Design for Lunch series of classes also includes some photo editing and photo management classes. These are taught for both Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw as both applications share the same base code. This means that within one class, you'll simply focus on whichever application you prefer to use. Today we're looking at working with the color red. I'm going to show you a blog post that I found recently that I think you'll find really interesting, and then we're going to go ahead and process two images that have red in them. We're going to start with Lightroom and then go on to Adobe Camera Raw. 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 for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, write just a few words about why you are enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to find my classes and to ascertain whether they might be the class that they too wanted to view. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started processing images focusing on the color red.
2. ACR and Lightroom for Lunch™ - Pt 1 - Lightroom: Before we get started processing an image, this is the blog post that prompted today's video. It's all about why the color red is so important when you're photographing. There are some really good images and some really good conversation here about why red is so important. I got my inspiration for this video from this. Although we're going to be working with monochrome images and red. But I'm going to give you the link in the class description so that you can go and read that blog posts should you wish to. This is the image that we're going to work with in light room. We've got a different one coming up for Adobe Camera Raw. Of course, everything that you're doing in light room, you can do in Adobe Camera Raw because the processing engine is the same in both applications. This is shot obviously in London, and London is a good place to shoot images that have red in them because the buses are red, and so too are the underground signs. The telephone boxes are also red. To start with this image, I'm going to crop it. I think the Instagram one-to-one crop is a really interesting crop, and it's good for these artsy images. So I'm going to click on crop overlay from the original drop-down list, choose one-to-one. Then in Lightroom, I need to move the image, not the crop rectangle. So I'm just going to place that where I want it to be, maybe trim it in a little bit, and then click "Done". So there's our starting crop. Next up, we need to deal with exposure because this image is grossly underexposed. So I'm going to start moving the exposure up. Now the image was shot in late afternoon, and it was shot at 1600 ISO. So there's noise everywhere in this image. So we'll probably want to get rid of that as well as we go along. But just be aware if you're working with the image that I've given you, that at this point you probably going to see a lot of noise. Now there were some interesting things happening in the sky that we just lost when we increase the exposure. So I'm going to bring down the highlights to bring back just a little bit of the color and detail in the sky. Highlight all the way back. If I wanted to get detail out of the shadow areas, I could adjust the shadows. But really there's nothing here that is shadow detail that I particularly want to say very much off. So I'm going to lay shadows pretty much as where they are. We'll check out white and black points or hold Alt or Option and just adjust the whites. You can see that the initial white is coming from the very top of the image. So I'm just going to back that off a little bit. If the exposure is too high as a result of that, I can just back the exposure off a little bit as well. So the blacks, I'm going to hold Alt or Option and let's just check the blacks. Well, there is some black in this area here. Think on to a little bit more black. So I'm just going to wind that down a little bit. Because that sign is clearly black, and there's no detail here that we want to recover. Clarity is a midtone contrast enhancement. So by adjusting clarity, we're going to add a little bit of grit to the image. That's actually going to help this image because this building here is actually a little bit on the fuzzy side. It's a little bit lost as far as detail is concerned, and increase clarity will help bring it to our attention a little bit more. Vibrance can be used to saturate under saturated the colors. So we could perhaps add a little bit of vibrancy to the red, this way. Saturation will saturate all colors. But what we're going to do with this image is actually convert everything but the red to black and white. So we don't really need to worry too much about the other colors. We probably do need to deal with the noise. If I Zoom in here, you can see that there are multi-colored pixels here. That's called color noise. You can get rid of that from the Detail panel. You'll see that there's a noise reduction option here, and the color one is already set to 25. That's the default for handling raw images in Lighroom. It's obviously not enough here because we've got a lot of color noise still there. So I'm just going to increase the color noise value until the color noise just turns into regular noise. Then I'm going to adjust luminance. Because this will help reduce the luminance noise. Now there's always a price to be paid for noise reduction. As soon as you start reducing noise, you're smoothing the image, so you're losing detail in the image. In an artistic image like this, the kind of effect, what we're creating is a Artsy effect. It probably doesn't matter, but certainly you want to be careful with other images that you don't take your noise reduction as high as it'll go or think that more will be better because in actual fact, you're going to be smoothing the image as you work. You can also adjust detail, obviously in an image that you cared a lot about. You would not be removing the detail and letting it smooth it out. In this image, we can probably wear that. Now we can sharpen the image to try and get some of the detail that we just lost in cleaning up the noise back into the image. So I'm going to go and increase the sharpening to quite a high amount. Say about 110. I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key as I just adjust the radius. What I want to do here is just start to see haloing around the edges of the buildings in the image. I'm setting this to about 0.7. For detail, what I'm concerned about is that I see detail in the edges. So I really want to see the edges in this image, but I don't want to see a lot of noisy things happening, for example, in the building here. So I'm just going to be a little bit light on detail here, bring that back. Then with the masking, let's just Zoom all the way out. With the masking, I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key again, and just drag on the masking slider. Here what we're doing with the black areas, we're removing any sharpening from the black area, and with the white area, that's where we're applying the sharpening. So we would wind this back so that we're only applying sharping to the edges that we really want to keep. Not applying sharpening to noise, which will just bring it all back again. So I'm thinking that this is probably a reasonable value here for a sharpening mask. We've got sharpening around the edges but not in the sky, and not excessively elsewhere in the image. Now that we've done this, let's look at the color red, and there are a few things that we can do with the reds in this image. We're going to do it using HSL panel. HSL and color panels are identical. It's just that they're arranged differently. For this particular process, I'm going to use the HSL area and I'm going to use saturation. We can increase or decrease the saturation in the reds by dragging on the saturation slider. With luminance, we can make it lighter or darker. Increasing the luminance can help bring out the detail in the red areas. In hue, what we can do is to adjust what red really means. We can take it towards orange, or we can take it back towards magenta. So somewhere in between these two values is our ideal red. I think our ideal red is a little bit more towards magenta than towards orange. So if that dealt with the red areas of the image, what happens if we want to remove the color from the other areas of the image? If we want to have an image that basically is monochromatic, but just with red. While using this hue saturation luminance slider, if we go to the saturation selection here, we can start taking the saturation, add up the other color areas, leaving only the red behind. So I'm just dragging on each of the sliders and taking the saturation to minus 100. What that does is it's removing the saturation from every color in the image except for red. Now that may be the look that you want. But if you want partial saturation, you can get that too. So you could take those sliders, perhaps not quite all the way. Of course you don't have to take all those sliders the same amount. You can be a little more judicious about which colors you want to bring back into the image. But here we've partially removed a saturation, all the colors except for red, and we've increased the saturation in red. To finish this image off, I think it needs a vignette. The Instagram look invites you to put a vignette around the edges of the image. So we're going to effects, and we're going to add a post crop vignette. To make it darker, we're going to drag the amount slider across to a negative direction. There are three kinds of post crop vignettes, higher light priority, color priority, and pined overlay. You can determine which of these is going to work best for your image. Typically, I'll be using highlight priority. I just think that gives us a better effect. Now before we totally finish with this image, there is one other optional thing that we can do. We spend a lot of time a few minutes ago removing noise from the image. But one of the looks that you can give an image like this that again reinforces its arty feel, is to add grain to it. There's a grain option here in the Lightroom. So we can add some grain back into the image, and we can control the size of the grain. So we can add really, really large grain or smaller grain into the image, and we can adjust the roughness of the grain. Sometimes from an image like this where you're going for an artistic look, adding grain back into the image actually really helps it. It just reinforces the look that you're going for. So there's the first of our images edited to enhance the color red in the image. We'll go next to Adobe Camera Raw and edit a different image there.
3. Pt 2 - Adobe Camera Raw Processing: We have our second image open here now in Adobe Camera Raw. The first thing I'm going to do with this image is to straighten it because it doesn't look quite straight to me. I'm going to the straighten tool. I'm just going to drag across this roofline here, which should be perfectly horizontal. Once I drag across it, I'm just going to let go of the mouse and you can see it's out by one or two degrees. While we're here, we're also going to crop the image. Now, the area of the image that I'm most interested in is the area that has plenty of red in it. This signage over here is really not helping, so I'm going to crop that out. I'm also concerned about there's people's heads down here because not only are they a little bit distracting, but this person's head has been cut off across the middle. It's actually going to look better if I remove their heads from the image entirely. Having cropped and straightened the image, I'm now going to click on the zoom tool just to confirm that crop. The image itself is underexposed. We don't have a lot of really light pixels here, so I'm just going to increase the exposure on this image just to lighten it. You can see that this is flattening the color a little bit. There's a little bit of lack of detail, almost fog in the buildings here. To counteract that, we can add some contrast that's going to improve the tonal range in the image and crisp it up a little bit. Another tool that will work in a similar way is clarity. Clarity is a mid-tone contrast enhancement tool. It's going to enhance mid-tones such as these areas here and these areas over here. You won't want to throw a lot of clarity at this image, but a little bit will certainly help crisp it up. So far as highlights are concerned, we can either increase or decrease them or leave them where they are. Decreasing the highlights may potentially bring a little bit of detail back into these areas that are fairly consistently white. I'm thinking perhaps decreasing highlight a little bit might help this image. Shadows will bring detail out of the shadow areas or I'll send them back to dark. For this, I think I want to increase the shadows just a little bit. I want to lighten the shadow areas to get a more even lightness across the rest of the image. For whites and blacks, we can at least investigate our white point even if we don't choose to set it using this tool. I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key and just click on the image. You can see here that this little element in the image is blown out. If I hold the Alt or Option key as I drag on the white slider, there's nothing I can do to get it back without compromising the whole of the rest of the image. Since I can't recover those pixels, I'm just going to set the white slider back to zero because there's nothing I can do that's going to get those pixels back anyway. With the black slider, I can add some blacks into the image if I wish, but I'm a little bit concerned about these red elements which are tending to blow out in the magenta channel. I might actually be better advised to increase the blacks or lighten the blacks a little bit to try and avoid getting black pixels in this red area. Now that we've made an adjustment pretty much across the board for this image, we can look at the reds. To identify and edit the red so that we can isolate them from other colors, we're going to the hue saturation, lightness, grayscale panel. Here we have a hue and saturation and luminance options. We don't want to convert this to grayscale, but we do want to look at our color options. If we want to work in a similar way to the way that we worked in the previous image in Lightroom, we can take all the colors in this image with the exception of red down to minus 100. That will remove the saturation from those colors. That will give us a red and monochromatic effect. That's what we've got here. We've only got red areas of the image. Again here with the saturation slider, we can increase the saturation in the reds if we want to boast them just a little bit more. Using the hue slider, we can adjust the redness of the red. We can take it towards orange or we can take it back a little bit towards magenta. Don't think it needs much movement at all. In terms of luminance, we can make the reds lighter or darker, increase the luminance or decrease the luminance. I'm not actually going to adjust luminous at all here. Similarly to what we did with the image in Lightroom, we also don't need to remove saturation entirely. We can back off the saturation adjustment just a little bit to bring some colors back into the image, but not all of them. We can also discriminate between which colors we bring back. If you don't want to bring back in yellows, you don't have to, you could leave those at minus 100. But perhaps bring back some greens or some aquifers or some of these other colors. Now, I'm going to take all these other colors back to minus 100 because there's another thing that I want to address in this image. When we go to create a monochromatic image that just has red highlights. What I'm a little bit concerned about is that there's some red bleeding through here. What I'd be most interested in is seeing the reds that are in the image, but not traces of red which might attract my eye in a not-so-good way. Well, to deal with those, I'm going to the adjustment brush. With the adjustment brush, I'm going to set saturation to minus 100. I'm going to turn off color because I have color set here. I'm just going to take the saturation to zero and that will effectively turn off color. Now, I'm just going to paint over the image. Now, I don't want Auto Mask turned on, but I'm just going to paint over these areas of the image where there's a little bit of red seeping back into the image in these frames that are over the street. You can adjust the brush in Lightroom using the open and close square bracket key as much as you can in Photoshop. You can just go over these areas and remove the red color. Now, anywhere else that you want to remove the red color from, you can do so as well. If you don't want some of this signage to be showing red, even though there was red in the underlying image, you can just remove it by painting over with this brush, which is effectively removing saturation from anywhere that you hit with the brush. When you're done, you can just click away from that tool. If you say is a result of using the adjustment brush set that you've removed color from an area which you shouldn't have removed color from, go back to the adjustment brush, go and view your pin. Here's the pins. I'm going to click on it to select it. Now, I can just erase from it and that will bring the color back into the area that I remove the color from. These adjustments that you make with the adjustment brush are fully editable. All you need to do is to go and locate where the pin is and then edit it. Now, as with the image that we had in Lightroom, you will want to sharpen this image. Let's go to the detail panel and we'll apply some sharpening. I'm going to wind the sharpening up quite high because then I'm going to adjust radius detail and masking to suit. I'll hold the Alt or Option key as I drag on the radius. Now, this image is in pretty good focus, so we don't need a very large value for radius. I've got it set to about 0.7, and that's a pretty good value for this image. For detail, again, the Alt or Option key. Again, you don't want a lot of detail adjustment here. Let's just take that to 18. Now, for the masking, because this is a really crucial part of applying sharpening to an image. I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key and drag the masking slider to the right. What I'm looking for here is sharpening around the areas of the image where sharpening should be applied; all the lines in the building and even the rooftop in the building in the center of the image. But I don't want to sharpen areas that are of flatter color, I'm going to avoid sharpening those. The beauty of using a masking here is that I can increase the amount of my sharpening because it's only being applied to the edges in the image. Now, we can finish off here as we did in Lightroom with a post-crop vignette. I'm going to effect and here's our post-crop vignetting. We're going to drag the slider to the left to add a slight darkening to the edges of the image. There is our image processed to enhance the color red in the image, and we've done it here in Adobe Camera Raw. Your project for this class is to find an image in your own collection or use one of mine and process it in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw and process it to enhance the color red. Whether you choose to go monochromatic as I have here, or add back just a little bit of color or leave all the colors in the image and just enhance the red, it's up to you. Post an image of your processed photo in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and you've learned something about processing images for a particular color in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. If you did enjoy the class and when you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please do two things for me: give it a thumbs up and write just a few words about why you've enjoyed the class. These recommendations help others find my classes and as the time whether the class might be of interest to them. 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. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
