Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: If your Lightroom catalog
feels chaotic and messy or you spend way too
much time editing, this is the class for you. I'll show you how
to organize, edit, and export your photos quickly
with satisfying results. My name is Scott Lou, a YouTuber and photographer with over five years of experience
using Lightroom Classic. I've edited way too many
photos to count at this point, and in this class, I'm going to share with you my
personal system. I'll walk you through
my workflow using Lightroom classic by editing
example photos that I took. Let's go over what you'll learn. Import and organize your
photos efficiently, so it's easy to find the
photos you're looking for. Number two, what
the best philosophy is when it comes to what
you should edit first. Number three, understanding
and knowing how to use the basic settings for
changing the tone controls. Number four, how to use and manipulate masks in combination. Number five, how to edit and
fix crooked photos in one click and also how to use the AI denoising
and removal tools. Number six, understanding
the color tools at your disposal and
how to use them. Number seven, how
to use presets to finish your edits
very, very quickly. And finally, number eight, how to export your work in
the formats that you need. Whether you're new to
light room or just tired of having an
inefficient workflow, this class will help you build a faster, smarter editing process. The class project will
simply be to follow along the lessons and do the
action steps afterwards. This way, you practice
what you learned immediately and internalize it. Download the class worksheet, which has a summary of each
lesson and the action steps. By the end of this
course, you'll be confident editing your
photos in less time, so you can spend
more time shooting and sharing your
favorite photos. So if you're ready
to get started, I'll see you in
the first lesson.
2. Importing & Organizing: Okay, so let's go ahead and first open Adobe
Lightroom classic. Once the application opens up, you're going to see something
that looks like this. If you haven't
imported anything yet, you won't see any
images whatsoever. But let's go ahead and start
off with the first step, which is importing footage. And I have an example
folder I usually import using folders, basically, insert it into my laptop, and then I bring those
into the computer, and then from there, I
import it into Lightroom. Just drag and drop it.
And once you do that, you'll see that all the photos are checked right
here to be imported. You can at this step, look through the
photos and decide which ones you want to import
and which ones you don't. But personally, for me, I think it's a bit too clunky to do that process here,
and I do it a little later. So I'm just going to go ahead
and import all of these. And from there, you will see that all the photos
have been imported. And the first thing I do
immediately, actually, is I highlight all
of the photos, and then I just
go ahead and tone control Auto. I'm going
to do that later. Anyways, obviously,
I will adjust these accordingly,
depending on the image. But for now, that is the starting point for
every image that I edit. So that's why I just
highlight all of them and hit tone Control Auto. And as you can see here, it's
fetching initial previews. So I have a tendency
to just wait a little bit before
going in to edit. Sort them. But while
that's going on, I can go ahead and show
you a couple of things. Right here, you'll
see that there are file paths and file locations. This is the McIntosh HD. I
don't really use that one. I actually use a
separate hard drive or separate solid state drive, which is the extreme
SSD with 4 terabytes. And as you can see, there are some things that are
missing from here. They are either
completed projects that I have since deleted or I just change the
file location and will maybe later relink them. For now, I've been just
working on some photos that I recently took in Singapore,
Bali and Taiwan. So I thought this would
be a good opportunity to show you guys how I work with Light room and essentially edit my photos from beginning to end. So I think that's
been enough time. Even though it's still
going, we can go ahead and just do some sorting. I'm going to go ahead
and click here, so then we have more
space and then click right here and make
sure I'm still in library view instead
of Develop mode. The reason for this is
because if I'm in develop, it takes significantly longer to scroll through the photos compared to if I were to be in library where it's a lot faster. So this is when I decide whether or not a photo is
actually worth editing. I sort of have a principle or philosophy that I go
by for photo editing, since if you do this
for a very long time, you start to find that the
more photos that you take, the sort of less of a good time you're having because
you're just spending so much time taking a lot of photos and looking through
a lot of photos every time, like, you go on a trip or
you go somewhere nice. And in the end like, if you continue to do it and you continue to have so many photos
to edit and look through, you will somewhat burn out, or at least I found that
that's the case for myself. So lately, what I've been
trying to do is take less photos but try to make
them all as good as possible. And even after that, I try to edit less photos. So I pick the ones I want to consider editing by either
marking them three, four or five stars. Essentially I just
go through them, and then, say for this
image, it's okay. So maybe I'll give
this one, two stars. If I were to crop it, it could potentially
look a lot better. But let me go ahead and just
show you really quickly. Right now, for me, I have my lens correction
set up automatically. Lightroom has done
this automatically. This is an automatic setting, so I don't have to enable
profile corrections, and it'll look
like this instead. But just know that for the version of
Lightroom that I have, it doesn't automatically just in case you're wondering
about lens correction. I do think that's a pretty
important for Develop, you might not find lens
correction at the very top. I changed it to be
at the very top. I'll show you guys
how to do that later. But for now, you might find it somewhere on this
panel in develop mode. Let's go back to library, and make sure that I have the autoton correction
setup first. That way, it doesn't look
like this versus this. So it's like a before and after. I do think the after
one looks better, and that's why I judge off of the tone control like
auto for the images instead of just
looking at it raw. All of these are raw images. I always take in raw. I always shoot in raw,
and I always edit raw. That is the preferred method since there is more
room to work with. Okay, continuing on
with the process. So two stars, and then
I just keep going. I don't sometimes I don't
even have to mark the stars. If it's just not that good of an image, like, for
instance, this one, then I just move on, like anything to speed up
the process, essentially. And if you see that an
image has potential, I usually mark it as
three or four stars. In my opinion, this
one has potential. It needs a good
amount of editing, but it does have potential. As you can sort of see after I increase or setting is.
But we'll do that later. Continuing on three stars. I do like this image,
three stars, three stars. And as you're doing this, if you have a certain type of image or photo
that is a pattern, like, for instance, let's
say buildings right here. I'm just going to jump around. Usually, I would just go through all of this at once and do it. But let's say this
is like buildings. Then, I like this image, and I also want to
mark it as let's say, a color, so I can
set color label. And all buildings will
be red, for instance. So now I will have this sort of red hue or highlight
on this image, and let's say that I like this image as well,
and I made it red. And as you can see, now we
have multiple red images. And this will come
into play later once we go ahead and
just do this a bit more. Also, just to note,
the color labels, you can use shortcuts instead
of right clicking and doing thing for the
one to five stars. I'm using one, two,
three, four, five, to set the stars and zero
to reset it to zero. And then you can also set
the color labels red as six, yellow as seven, green as eight, nine as blue. Okay,
let's continue. But as you can see,
this is the process. I'll go ahead and make
indoor as yellow. As you can see, this
is just a very, very simple process that you
just have to go through. At a certain point when you're good at it or, like,
you're used to it, then you can just sort of tell when you like
an image or not, and you just instantly market four stars, three
stars, and so on. But of course, you want to
take your time and make sure that you're not leaving
behind good images. You have to keep in mind that some things might look
crooked right now, but if you were to
edit it, let's say, go to Develop and I went ahead
and did some alignments, this image right here
looks a lot better now. So just keep in mind that
the image itself, like, judge it based on the potential versus what it looks
like at the moment. And remember that just because you're marking them with stars, it doesn't necessarily mean
that you have to edit it. That's why there's,
like, a ranking system. Like if on first
impression, like, you really like the image,
and it's a five star, and most likely
you will edit it. However, if it's part of
the lower, like, three, two stars, four stars, then that's just like a maybe. But I'm going to go
ahead and just mark some random stars here and there just so that you guys have an idea of what
happens afterward. But just note that this
is not going to be a real sort of representation of what I would mark
these photos as. Okay. So after you go ahead and go through
that process of marking whichever
one you think is the best and which ones you
actually want to edit, that's when you basically have deleted the ones that you would have not imported, essentially. You didn't quite delete them, but more so you just sorted it. So now you can go
ahead and just use attribute right
here and then look at the number of
stars right here. And you can undo that and change the filtering system
to colors instead. Like say, you had
patterns where it was buildings and you
mark them all as red. That way, like, for instance, I think one of the
best use cases for this one that I use
for is, like, people. So if I have, like, a lot of photos
with people in it, then I mark them. I usually like to mark
them as a certain color. That way, it's a lot easier to look through
and sort through. And usually, whenever I send
images or photos to people, market them as a color
makes it easier to export. So, for instance, go ahead
and go to Attribute again, we'll go to red, and you
can highlight all of it, and then Command Shift
E, I'm on a Mac. And basically, now
you can export it, but we'll go through
that process later. But just note that this is another benefit of sorting
your photos this way. So the star system as
well as the color system, basically from here,
you just need to edit the ones that you
consider the best. Usually, I don't even
use one or two stars because that's just
not good enough. So anything three and above, that's how I filter
my star system. And then from here,
what you can do is start off by editing
the five stars. That way, you're spending
the most time on what you believe has the most potential or had the best
first impression. And you're spending the
time on good images, like images on good photos, photos that you are
proud of having taken and are basically
already really good. Okay, so that's basically how I import my photos
and organize them. The action step for this lesson is to go out and take photos, then import them and
practice organizing them quickly using the star and
color system. Good luck.
3. Tone Controls: Alright, so now
that we have all of the four stars and higher or three stars
and higher photos, we know what we want to edit. And I'm going to go
ahead and start off with some of the five star ones. And from there, basically, I'll show you how I
edit photos by example. Let's actually start
off with this one. I like this image in particular. And there are like four different ones that are similar. Let's
go with this one. Okay, so we started off with
Auto toon control already, and this is the before and
then this is the after. It's already done a good job in lifting up the shadows and making the super dark parts essentially brighter
so that we can see it. You can sort of see what
Auto did right here. So it brought
exposure up by 1.47, increased the contrast,
decrease the highlights, and increase the
shadows and so on. Actually start off
right here and explain what each of these does. In fact, it's probably better that you just see what it does. So exposure increases the
lighting, as you can see. It just increases overall,
like, everything. So these are the different
aspects of the light, as you can see in this
histogram right here, which is what I sort of use as how I understand
what each of these are. So as you can see right here, this segment right
here are blacks. So if you increase the blacks, you're essentially increasing the darkest parts of the image. Let's reset that. And then the whites are the brightest
part of the image. And as you can see,
if you lift it up, it is increasing the sun, which is definitely
the brightest part, and decreasing it decreases
the brightness of the sun. Then shadows is not
as dark as black, but the darker parts of the image. So let's
go ahead and do that. As you can see, it is
kind of the majority of the darker parts
of the image. So that's why at
least most people whenever they refer to the
darkest parts of the image, they say the shadows
versus the blacks, basically because
the majority of the darker parts are shadows. Then same thing with
the highlights. So that is the
opposite, essentially. Say a large part of
what makes a photo look good is your tone
control editing. Luckily, for us, Auto actually
does a pretty good job. I would say that right
now the shadows need to be lifted up a bit more
on the outer edges. But again, a lot of this
is going to be subjective, and for some, this might actually be pretty good
lighting right here. But for me, I will go ahead and increase the shadows
slightly just because I prefer to see a bit more
of the details and be sure that screen brightness
is at the very highest. The way, just in case
you're wondering, if you want to reorder these panels, like
I mentioned before, you can go ahead and click
Control on a Mac and click again where the panel is and customize
developed panel. From here, you can move
these around if you like, and this is the particular
order that I have it in. If you don't have some
of these windows, you can go ahead
and go to Window, and from here, you can go to panels and add
whatever you want to. Ways, four lens correction, sometimes I actually
don't really like having 100 on vignetting. I actually prefer to have a
little bit of vignetting. You can't really
see it that much for this photo in particular, but that's just
something to note. And then for most images,
I like to increase the vibrance by a bit and
also the saturation by a bit. Another way of manipulating the tone in the image
is to add masks. And I think masks
are probably one of the most powerful
tools in light room. So let's go ahead and
select radio gradient. And right here, the light
is primarily in the center. So what I'm going to do is actually change around
some of the setting. Me right now, what I have
in mind is trying to make the center glow as much as possible while not
being overblown. You can see how the
mask has affected your image by toggling
it on and off. And as you can see,
there's, like, a much brighter glow with
the mask than without it. And another thing that
I really like to do is actually change the
colors and calibration. So right now, the primary
colors are green, a little bit of orange, and a little bit of
hazy blue right here. So my preference is to head
towards teal as a color. So if you change
the calibration, it kind of changes
the image completely, actually, in terms of the color. And it really depends on
your taste, how you like it. So, for instance, this is, like, a more yellowish green
versus a greener green. And then there are
too many reds here, but if you want to really make these flower pieces pop out,
that's what you can do. You can also just decrease and increase
saturation, as well. But for me, I like adding just a little bit of
that teal flavor, and for me, I prefer the
greener look of the leaves. I'm going to pull
back on the teal. But as you can see, this is a before, and this is an after. Isn't a huge difference, but that is just like a little subtle touch to change the colors if
you want to use these. And then HSL color right here
is even more fine tuning, depending on which hue or saturation or
luminance you want. So, for instance, if you're
working with the hues, anything that's
near these colors will shift towards the
direction that you pull it in. So the oranges, let's try to shift them
towards yellow instead. So as you can see, it's
changing all of the oranges in the image to whichever the slider is going
towards the hue, that is. And then right here, the blues, let's shift it towards
more aqua compared to I have a tendency of not
changing these too too much. I have a preference
towards, like, natural colors, so that's why I don't change
these too much. But if you have a
photography style that's a bit more fantastic, then this is definitely a
very useful tool right here. But here's a little
before and after. And honestly, for this
image, for this photo, there isn't too much
else that I would do, so let's go ahead and
move on to another. Action step for this lesson
is to practice using the tone control settings to get a sense of how they
work intuitively. Change the black,
shadows, highlights, and whites while paying attention to the
photo and histogram. Do it for many
different types of photos to really understand
the different tones.
4. Masks & Some Color: Alright, let's look
through some of the photos to get
another example going. So for the first
photo, it wasn't amazing at showing
certain types of edits. Different photos will require sort of different
types of editing. So the edits I did
for that photo were kind of quick and
really easy to do. Let's go ahead and do
something that's a bit more interesting like this
five star one right here. It involves the
sun again and has a lot more other
things in the image. And I like this
image in particular because there's just a
lot to showcase in it. Okay, once again, we
go to develop mode, and we can see that we have already done auto for
the tone control. And I think for this one, there is a lot of lighting
that I want to fix. I want this part to
be a bit brighter. I want it to look a lot
less gloomy as well. There's a lot of
tones here that I feel I prefer they be warmer
tones versus cooler tones. So let's go ahead and
change that first. You can see temperature
right here. I want to go to warmer tones so I can move
towards yellow a bit. And we don't want to go
too far into yellow. Otherwise, that's what happens. And you can double
click to go back to, like, the normal setting. Going into really cool tones actually does look kind of cool, but I felt the warmer tones. So let's just do it
by a little bit. And for Tints, I have a
tendency to just, like, move towards magenta because
I don't really like greens. So that's just, like,
again, my bias. A lot of this is
very subjective, so I'm going to move towards
magenta just a little bit. And, okay, now let's go
ahead and fix up the light. So right here on the histogram, if you go past
certain points, like, for instance, past a certain white point,
things will start to clip. Clipping just means that
once you export your image, that data is just
completely lost. Either just way too bright
so that it's just, like, pure white or it's way too dark to the point
where it's pure black. And we for the most part, don't really want that unless, that's what you're going for. So try your best to not have
anything on the histogram, like, too past the Blacks or
too much past the whites. And for this image,
in particular, masks are going to
come in really, really handy because
when I adjust exposure, I'm sort of adjusting
for the whole image, and that's not really
what I want to do. So let's go ahead and see what happens when
I select the sky. Yep. Light room does
a really great job at pinpointing where the sky is. So now I can just use this mask to edit everything
that's in the sky. And there's still a lot
of blue tones in the sky. So let's see if we
can shift it towards, sorry, select the
mask. Yellow again. We can even change the hue of the sky a little bit
or the hue of the sun, but I don't want to
do that too much. There's something called dehaze that's very useful if
you have, like, very, very cloudy skies
and you want to show more of, like,
behind the clouds, essentially, but
be careful with it because it can definitely
mess up your image sometimes. This case, I'm not
going to use Dehaze. I'm just going to change up how I do feel like I want
the sky to be brighter. I'm just doing a little
before and after just to see how the image
looked like beforehand. And I'm thinking maybe sometimes this happens whenever
you do an edit, you sort of see something else, and I'm thinking
maybe that the sky is actually way too warm. So I'm going to backtrack
a little bit and see what happens if we make
it a little bit bluer. I do like that blue
orange contrast. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to delete what the mask was because that
mask includes the sun. I want the sun to be super warm. So let's actually do
a linear gradient and start the linear
gradentR about here, I'm going to move it
up so that it doesn't touch the sun then I'm going
to subtract from the mask. I'm going to go ahead and
select the sky again. I know this doesn't
really make sense, but I'm going to invert the sky. So now the trees are
not being selected in the mask because I didn't want to turn the trees like
bluer, essentially. I just want to turn
just the clouds bluer. So that's sort of how
you intersect masks. What I did was I
subtracted I had the mask, which was the linear
gradent only. So that was like
everything above the sun. And then I added I
subtracted the sky, which made only
the trees visible. Then I went ahead and inverted that so that
it's just the clouds, since inverting the sky is essentially choosing
everything that's not the sky. And then now we can go ahead and make just the
clouds a bit bluer, to me, that makes it
more interesting to look at versus making it all warm. De hazing is not that
great in this case. I do prefer a brighter look
for the clouds as well. Okay. And in my
opinion, this one does look better than
what it was before. And I do want to work with
the sun a little bit, so I'm going to go ahead and
do a little radio gradient. Once again, I'll show you guys how to intersect
some masks. So I don't want this hut or this tree to be a
part of this mask, so I'm going to subtract it
by selecting the sky again. So this is the sky right here, and I'm going to go ahead
and just invert it. So now you can see that it's just in the back versus, like,
on the hut and the tree. A little technique right there
if you're trying to just affect the sky and not like
things in front of it. Okay, in this case, I want the temperature
to be very orange. And I like messing around with highlights
whenever we're working with bright objects just
to see how it looks, and decreasing
highlights for the sun, like, too much looks pretty
unnatural sometimes. So that's just something
you got to be careful. Okay. I think so far, the upper part
looks really good. Now I want the water
to really pop out. So let's make another mask. I'm actually going
to go ahead and just use a linear gradient, since most of the water is on the bottom
part of the image. We can easily brush out like
this tree, for example. So let's subtract and
we can use a brush and just start brushing out
the parts that we don't want. And I'm using my scroll wheel on my mouse to increase
the brush size. Definitely a slower
way of doing things, but sometimes you
just want to do the more meticulous
way when you're editing images or photos that
you really, really like. And this one for me
is like a five star, so I am putting in the
extra work for it. So I'm holding
Option in order to bring back certain things
that I erased by accident. And now that I'm
thinking about it, another way that
we could have done it is actually
probably color range. Let's see. Nope,
nope, definitely not. Color range there's just
too much blue, okay. So let's go and
delete that mask. Let's go ahead and
work with this. I know it's not a perfect
mask right now, but I don't want to spend too
much time changing it up. I do want this to be
bluer and brighter. Decrease the amount just little, and I'm going to increase the saturation by a good amount. Okay. And let's
go ahead and just observe some of
these masks overall. Like, here's without
any of the masks, and here here's the image or here's the photo
with the masks. And then now we're just
going to remove the sun. Sorry, now we're going to remove the mask on the pool, so
we're gonna hide that. That's how it looks.
Kind of dull. And then I'm going to undo that. Now the mask is added back
and it looks a lot better. Yeah, that is essentially
just how to work with masks. And right now, I
don't think this is like a fully completed image. I do think there are some spots that I would still
like to change. But hopefully, you get an idea of how to
work with masks and, like, just the exposure contrast all of these
tone control settings. And I think just to
finish this off, I'll go ahead and change
the calibration just a bit again because after
the tone settings, I usually just go to color. And this is when you really make the image look like
poppy sometimes, depending on what
you're going for. Going for more of
a natural look, so I'll go ahead and keep
it towards the oranges. But if you really want that
teal orange look, like, this is what you can do is head towards the teal on
the blue primary, and then on the red primary, just head towards the orange. But that is a little
bit too much for me, so I'm going to tone it back and maybe just add a
little bit more teal. And for me, the greens look a little bit decrease the saturation of the
pool by a little bit. I feel like it was a
little oversaturated. And also decrease
the temperature of the sky just by a
little bit as well. That's something about color or editing photos in general. Like, sometimes if you have a certain setting
a certain way, and then you change
something else, like with the calibration
or the colors elsewhere, you might need to
go back to adjust certain edits that you
did in the beginning. And for me, we could
make this image a bit more focused on the
sun by cropping it. Just make it perfectly centered. M. Something about this, to me, looks better just
with the umbrella, as well as the sun being a little bit off center
and this facing outwards. Like, it just works with
the sun being, like, a bit off center
towards the right, since the image itself isn't
very, like, symmetrical. Alright, let's go
back to Library. Let's go ahead and make this a color label of green just
to indicate that it's done. So if we wanted to, we
can just hit green. And now we know,
these are the images. These are the photos that
we've already edited. Action step for this lesson
is to practice using masks. Use the simple masks first
and try changing the effects. From there, try using masks in combination
for finer control.
5. Transform & Denoising: Okay, here is another
example of me editing a photo that uses different
sort of settings. So first off, we are on
Transform in developed mode, and right now you can
see how the building is slightly curved and
not really straight. You can fix that
by actually going to hit Auto right
here in Transform. And as you can see, it
looks significantly better compared to when it is not on. And one thing to note,
while you're taking photos, might be a good idea to be
somewhat of a distance away compared to being super close for this one,
I was a lot closer. Let's go ahead and
turn it off. I was actually on a boat while
taking this photo. So I was moving slightly. But you can see that one of them is just slightly
closer than the other. And I think I had an
even closer image or an even closer photo
that I took that I didn't rank as a star because
it was just too close. So sometimes zooming
out can just help with easier
cropping later on. So that's just something
to pay attention to. Same thing for these
images right here, you can tell that this
isn't quite straight. Auto does actually
pretty good job already. Like, you don't really
need to crop that. But let's go ahead and
go back to these two. Which one was I
editing? Let's see. I actually like this
one a little bit better because this
in the front and this right here gives it that sort of very geometric squares and rectangular shapes.
Looks very nice. Right here, it doesn't
quite feel as even or, like, nice as this one. So let's go ahead
and edit this one, even though I'm pretty sure I
was on the other one first. These are some things
that you notice when you compare, similar photos. So one thing that you can
notice if you zoom in is that it's dark because I
took this photo at night. But Lightroom has a great tool. If you go to detail, you
can use D noise right here. This is something that's new. It reduces the noise using AI. And right here, as
you can see, it says, enhance Enhance uses AI
to improve image quality. The result will be saved as a new DNG which is essentially
just another file, but it does take a good amount
of time for it to work. And I like having the
amount somewhat 40-60. I obviously depends
on your image, but if you have it
too low, you're not going to notice too
much of a difference. So let's just go ahead and
set it to 45 and hit enhance. Okay, now with the
new enhancement, you can see that this
is completely new file. So you can actually delete this and it'll go back
to the original image. So this is how it looks
now compared to before. I can just show a previous
clip of the same area. It looks a lot better,
basically, less noise. And that is essentially
how you use one of the coolest tools when you
are doing night photography. Well as using the transform
tool just to make it look straighter and more even
versus crooked and warped. And for this image,
I'm also going to change the color calibration
by just a little bit. There aren't too many greens, so I'm going to leave green out, and I'm going to head towards
the pink for this one, just to give it
that sort of color that is a bit unrealistic, but also just to me, I enjoy seeing the
teal color a lot, so that's why I like adding it. But that is pretty much good. The action step for this
lesson is to practice using the transform
and denoising tools. Try using the different settings
for the transform to see what it does to your photos and do the same with
the denoising tool.
6. Color Tools: Okay, so here is another photo
that we are going to edit. And this one, I'm
going to showcase just how to change certain
colors and whatnot. Let's try color range, and let's do this purple here. And you can adjust
the refinement. I prefer it to just be that, and we can go ahead and
just make sure it's that by changing
the exposure a bit. You can see that it grabbed some of these parts right here, but we can easily
fix that by just subtracting go
ahead and just make a radio gradient right here, since this is our focus area, and we're going to invert
the radio gradient. So this will be the only part we're working with right now and only the purple parts
in this radio gradient. Okay? So that was us
adjusting exposure. I'm actually going to change the exposure of this
whole image real quick, make it a bit more realistic
or true to reality. Okay, now we can
adjust what we want. And I will increase
the exposure. And as you can see here, if you wanted to change a
particular color, which right now, we
have purple, right? We can change it by adjusting
a color right here. So I can effectively change
it to any color using hue. So that's just a trick that I
think some people will find useful if they want to change a certain color
into another color. Like, for instance, I really
like blue as a color. Let's make it really notable. Okay. Let's actually increase highlights a bit for this image. Expose it just a little bit. Sky is definitely way brighter
than everything else, so I'm just going to select
the sky and bring it down just to even it out
with everything else. So I changed the purple
light into a blue light. I'm not necessarily going
to keep it like that, but that was just an
example of what you can do. Let's go ahead and select
some yellow lights. So I'm going to do
color range again. This time, I'm going to go for the yellow color right here. And I'm going to increase
the exposure just to see I'm hitting
the right spot. That's pretty good.
Let's go ahead and do another huge shift. And another way if you
are changing it to, like, let's say, blue, you could always just
increase the temperature or, like, change the temperature
towards that direction. It's probably way
too overexposed. Anyways, I definitely am
making it slightly worse. I prefer the different colors, but these are just
tools just in case you want to change a certain
color into a different one. Or if you want to work with a particular color in general, and you don't have to
necessarily change it. So, for instance,
the purple one, let's change it back to
purple at the very least, we go ahead and increase
the exposure so that it's more notable versus
before where we barely see it. And I do think it's
better that way. I think in general,
for this image, where it's heading towards is
a very contrasty look where the highlights are
very bright and where the shadows are darker. But here is the original image, and here is well, here is the after.
So regular after. And I'd say the sky is
definitely still really, really bright. Give
it more color. So this photo in
particular is actually a good example of
how the hues shift. So if you can see
the reds right here, you can shift them to orange
or you can shift them to even more of a sort of
like a pinkish look. Same with the oranges. You can shift them to red, or you can shift them to yellow. This is where you can really, really see those
differences versus before for the other image,
it was kind of hard to see. But blues, we can
shift them a bit to aqua if you wanted to, but that definitely shifts the sky, so you
have to be careful. It'd be easier to do
it the other way, basically with the masks
so you can avoid the sky. But we could have
easily done what we wanted to do earlier by shifting this purple
slider to blue. But let's head towards magenta for that one. I do like that. I think for oranges, let's head towards red
just a little bit. And you can see saturation here. Saturation is just for
that specific color. So if you wanted red
to be more saturated, like, as you can see right
there, that's what happens. That's quite unrealistic,
so I won't do that, but that is essentially
what it does. And if you desaturate it, it begins to turn into, like, there's, like, no
color, essentially. So blue just turns into gray. That's just the way to
increase saturation of a singular color instead
of the whole image. The luminance is
basically the brightness. So instead of increasing
highlights across the board, what we were doing
earlier right here, like, increasing highlights, actually, we're on
a mask right now. So instead of
increasing highlights, for all of it right here, we could undo that because
we were increasing the highlight of the sky as well and just do it right here. So essentially, the
reds will brighten up, oranges the oranges
will brighten up, the yellows will brighten up. And we're heading
towards the sky. So once I brighten this blue, it's also going
to brighten that. But let's not do that and just increase everything
but the blues. So you can see how it's almost like increasing
the exposures, but just for that color. And I do want this blue to
be popping out a bit more. So let's go ahead
and just show you how to do what I
described earlier. So I'm going to select the
color going to be blue, and it actually did pretty well. Actually, wait. Let's see. It selected some of the sky, but not all of the sky, which is quite interesting. But let's go ahead and
subtract the sky out. We can just subtract,
select sky, and then now the sky won't
be part of this mask. And we can increase
the exposure a bit, increase the highlights a bit, just to make this
blue part pop out, also increase the saturation, and maybe make it a bit
more teal instead of blue. And there you go.
I definitely do think the sky should be
just slightly brighter. I decreased it a bunch
because of this mask, so I'm going to go ahead
and just bring it back up, make it look a bit more natural. And there you go. This is
quite the moody image. But that's just how to work
with different colors, how to really
pinpoint those colors and work on them exclusively versus editing the entire image at once with the tone controls. That's a big part of editing
is just being able to edit certain parts and knowing
how to do that quickly. So those are some
options, the masking, the HSL color controls, and, yeah, that's basically it. Action step for this
lesson is to practice manipulating individual color
settings in your image. Experiment around
with the calibration, HSL, and color picker tool.
7. Healing Tools: Another tool that I
actually find very, very useful is the
healing tool right here. So I'm going to
increase the size. And for this, in particular, I just don't really want
this to be in the way. Let's see how well it does because this is going
to be a big brush. As you can see, it
did not do that well. Et's try it one more time. A little bit better, but it's
still a little weird here. Sometimes I just like
doing it over and over again to see if it fixes itself. It's probably not the
most reliable method, but it works sometimes.
Okay, let's see. How does it look now?
I think it looks okay. I think this part right here
looks a little strange, but the water from this
point on looks okay. So let's try to fix
that a little bit. I'm gonna decrease
the size of this. Okay. Now, if I were to just have looked at
this image like fresh, I probably would
not have noticed that because all of
these lights are like, what's drawing my eyes. So that big thing
that was in the way earlier right there is now gone. And yes, there's definitely some differences
that you can see if you look at it
before and after. Like, it's not like a huge deal, and it actually might
be easier and more effective to have
done it in Photoshop, but I do think it's sometimes just faster and more convenient
to do it in light room. Another big use case for
the healing brush tool, let's actually head towards a photo example
of somebody Okay, so another good use case
for the healing tool. Let's say for this
image right here, I'm actually cast it or you can see there's,
like, a lot of shadow. I'm away from the sun,
so you can't really see too much unless you
really, really zoom in. But let's say, like, you had an issue or
I had an issue with, like, oh, I had, like, acne or something like this or something on my face
that I didn't want, then I could just use this
healing brush tool in a smaller way and just
click it right there. And you can essentially
see that it smooths out, like, that part of my face. So that's just something
that you can do. Obviously, for this image, it isn't a great example because, like, my face is in shadows
and all that stuff. I actually don't have too
many photos of myself, like, because I'm usually
the one holding the camera. But yeah, that's just
one tool or one way of using it that you might be interested in because sometimes, like, it's just nice
to be able to remove, like, a pimple or something
because it's annoying. But that is just an
extra tool that I personally use on occasion
that I find very, very useful. Action step for
this lesson is to practice using the healing tool. This tool is constantly
being improved right now to add more and
more AI features into it and can be
pretty helpful in removing things that you
don't want in the background.
8. Presets: Alright, so let's say that you are editing a lot of photos and you just don't have enough time to really edit all of them, but you still want it to
have a certain, look to it. Here is the way to use presets. So in Adobe Lightroom classic, there are some
presets that you can find where the
navigator used to be. So in library mode, you
won't really see it. You'll just see your
files and whatnot. But once you hit Develop, you will then see the presets
on the left hand side. So there are things
right here that are more so for people
like adaptive portrait, so it'll enhance your face, eyes, smooth it out. Your eyes will pop out more, your teeth will be
whiter, stuff like that. And there's, like, other
things like if you have, sky images and so on. For this one right here, you can actually preview it by
just hovering over. And I think this SP 03
actually looks really cool. But it does change a lot
from the original image. Can change the
amount right here. So this is how it
looks without it. This is how it starts to look
with it and even beyond. But it's definitely very stylish and moving on to other ones, I actually really
like this SP 05. It has more teal colors to it. You can just sort of
see the differences. Like, some are warmer,
some are cooler, some add more green, some add more yellow, magenta, different
colors, basically. And some are, like,
more contrasty while others are
more sort of, like, give that vintage look with the blacks being
whiter or light. Can achieve that on your
own if you really want to. So, for instance,
let's just go to zero. By increasing Blacks, you sort of get that vintage look again. But let's go ahead
and go to Also note if you apply the preset, and then you start
changing things here, changing things very, very significantly, you have
basically lost the preset. So you're no longer using it because you changed
it so drastically, it's no longer
really the preset. You still keep, like, you know, all the other things that
the preset has changed. And you can see what the
preset has changed right here. So if you like certain looks, you can favorite them by right clicking and
adding to favorites. You can see that I have
favorites right here. They don't work for every
single image or photo, but most of the time,
they work pretty well. But as you can see, I have changed it from SP 05
into something else. And I do like the look of it, to be honest, right now. It's a very blue just
going to keep it as is. That's just a really, really
fast way of editing, like, just applying a
preset and then just adjusting certain things
because these presets are already very stylish
and most of the time they look very good and have a certain look that
you might want. So that's just
something to note. That's how you apply presets, and really really like edit
fast fast because I can't imagine any faster
way of editing than just clicking this
preset and calling it a day. But of course, it
really is up to you, like what you're aiming for. Obviously, if you have a very, very specific look
that you want, then you might not want
to use these presets. But if you're okay with speed
editing and just, like, having something that looks
cool right off the bat, then you can use these presets. The action step for
this lesson is to look through the
presets and try them. Favorite some of
them for later use.
9. Exporting: Okay, so let's go ahead and
show you guys how to export. Right now, I haven't
finished everything, but we're going to just click on Green and go to the ones
we've already finished. And I'm starting on this image. I'm clicking it once
and holding Shift, and then clicking
the last image. From here, I click
Command Shift E. You can also just go
to File and Export, but Command Shift
D is just faster, so that's what I
and the settings for exporting are as follows. You can put it on a subfolder, which is usually what I do. I put IG for these ones just because I'm going to
post them onto Instagram, and I like renaming it to the date and file name
just because having the date there makes it a little bit easier
to track in case, like, I'm uploading these somewhere or storing
it somewhere, and it's just better that way. You can do whatever you want, but that is essentially what
I do date and file name. And then here are the
more important settings. Right here, I just keep these
to the default settings, and quality is basically one of the most important percent
is pretty good already, but the more you increase, the larger the file size. So that's why I don't go
all the way up to 100. But sometimes for
certain images with, like, skis and things
that are really, really getting close
to photos that really, really need the dynamic range, it's better to upload
it with 100% quality. So for now, I'm going
to go ahead and go up to 90 just because I don't want to deal
with huge file sizes. And for the most part,
quality 80 or above, in my opinion, looks
really, really good. If you want to or if you have to and you're doing this
for, say, a website, and limit the file
sizes to something like under 1,000 kilobytes, which is the suggested
recommended amount for web images or
even below that. But for now, I'm not
going to do that. Resolution you don't have
to worry about unless you are printing
it out physically. And then I like to
include all metadata, and that is about it. You can also resize your
photo if you need to, but I don't really do that. All right? That's about
it. Click Export. And as you can see right here, the files are now exporting. Can run multiple exports at
the same time, by the way, just in case it'll just show up as another bar
or progress bar. And for my computer, it does take a while to export. So sometimes you can just export and work on other images
at the same time, but probably not a good
idea to do that since you are using the same
resources on your computer. Anyways, that is essentially
how you export your photos. The action step for this
lesson is to adjust your export settings to your liking and then
export your best photos. And that will complete
the class project.
10. Class Conclusion: Congratulations on making it
to the end of this class. Here's a summary of
everything you learned. One, importing quickly and
then using the star system and color system to organize the best photos and types
of photos you want. Two, prioritizing the best
photos first and even letting auto settings or presets be the edits for the photos that are not up to your standards. Three, understanding how
to manipulate blacks, shadows, highlights, and whites. Four, stacking masks for
finer editing controls. Five, using the transform
tool to fix crooked photos. Six, using the Denis tool to
clean up nighttime photos. Seven, using the color tools
to fine tune your edits. And lastly, exporting with
the best settings for you. Be sure to finish
the class project by practicing each of these steps after watching the lessons, and feel free to post
a photo you edited during this class in the
class project section. I hope that you guys
learned some useful editing techniques for
light room classic. If you did, please
consider giving this class a review. It
definitely helps out. And also, if you're
curious, I have some other places where you
can check out my content. Ways, thanks for
taking this class, and I hope you guys
have a great day. I'll see you guys
in the next one.
Scott Luu, Video Creator
