Transcripts
1. Introduction: You're out on a photo shoot, getting some great shots and you're so excited to get back to your computer to edit that shock. But that's a lot of Lightroom and import your photos, you find that they weren't captured exactly how you had envisioned that we're editing comes in to save the day. I've been in that position, spending hours out on the photo shoot only to find that the final shots from my camera don't exactly look like they did in person. I want to show you today how you can take any photo and taken to the next level. Welcome to my course, Adobe Lightroom, three steps. Tweet Better Edit. My name is Tom kinda, mini photographer and graphic designer for almost 12 years now. And I'm from the United States and I travel around shooting photos and designing for various clients and companies. But I specialize in fashion, lifestyle and commercial photography, as well as photoshop manipulation based graphic design. It's honestly the best job because I'm able to be creative every single day. You'll see a few examples of my work on the screen right now. But if you want to see more of it, you can check out my website at www dot the real Tom Chi.com or look me up on Instagram at the real Tom Chi, You can even leave a follow up to see what I'm up to. Have you ever felt overwhelmed with Lightroom? I know I have seen all those sliders, tab drop-down menus, not knowing which one of these will create the edit that you're wanting. It can be quite frustrating and can end up wasting a lot of time on editing your photos. Today I'll be showing you how you can take any photo. And by just applying a simple three-step editing process, you can take that photo from blend to next level, awesomeness. I'm going to walk you through every single step of the process from import to export and everything in-between, nothing will be cut out because I want you to see just how quickly and easily you can do this as well. Now, I value my time, but more importantly, I value your time. And that is why I want this to be the only course you'll ever need to get started with editing photos just like a professional and Adobe Lightroom. Whether you're a photographer as the hobby or you want to make a living doing photography, making money with it. This course is for you because having properly edited photos will make you stand out from the crowd. The creative field is very competitive, and if you don't manage to stand out, you won't last long. But my goal is to give you the edge you need to not just the last the competition, but to excel in it. So let's get started. In the next video, we will be diving right into Lightroom. And believe me, this will be a very information packed course. I really hope that you decide to enroll in this course. I'm going to share my knowledge and experience with these. So if you do decide to enroll, I'll be seeing you in the very next video.
2. Step 1: Global Adjustments: And we're now finally in Lightroom already. Did it get started? So if you haven't already make sure you download the image that we'll be working with today. It's included in the download section of the course to make sure you download that, extract the file and you will have your photo because we will be importing and getting ready to do our edit. So first of all, how are we going to import our image now you see I already have the image here. That's because I was just testing things out, but I'm gonna show you exactly how to import it. So when you have Lightroom hoping you'll probably be met with a screen like this. You might see other photos that you've imported in the past or he might have nothing at all if you're opening it up for the very first time. So let's just go ahead and let's click Import down here in the bottom-left. It's gonna take a quick second. And you're going to navigate to the folder where you have the image that's been downloaded. So for example, here we have images. Now since I already have the image imported, it's grayed out. But what you would do, you'd make sure it's clicked. And then you would click Import, Simple as a mixture, that image is checked. And then you click Import, okay? And once you do that, it's just going to shop here exactly like it is. And we're almost ready to get started with our edit. But before we do, I want to add this to a collection. Now Collection is a great way to keep yourself organized, keep all your photos organized. And we see all these collections over here on the left. To put click the drop-down, I have quite a few collections here on this particular computer, but how do we make our own? While if you have your image selected and you may have multiple or just one. In this case we have one, you have that one image selected. And we're going to click this plus button right here for collection. And you see if we hover over it, it says new collection. That's exactly what we want to do. So let's click that and let's click Create collection. Alright. Now here you have the option to name your collection. So I'm just going to call this, I'm going to call this three steps to a better Edit. Ok. You can name it whatever you would like, and I'm just naming that. And I can adjust where the location of this collection is going to be. I'm just gonna keep that unchecked because I just wanted to be generally in the collections drop-down over there. And now you have a few options. You can select it to include the subplot photos which I have selected because that's why I have it selected here because I wanted to include that photo in this new collection that I'm making. You can have it make a new virtual copies. So if I check this, it's gonna make a virtual copy of this photo. We don't want that want to work with the actual photo. And we can also set as target collection, but that is not going to be relevant to us right now. So let's just go ahead and click Create. And now we have another collection here, essentially to folder with that one photo inside it. Alright, so now we can close up this drop-down if we want to or we can keep it open. It's totally up to you. But let's get started with the very first step when it comes to editing a photo. So let's click on the photo that you want to edit. And let's go over here to the Develop tab. Very nice is a very nice photo. I actually really like it. But where on earth are we even going to get started? Now the three steps to a better edit that I've laid out covers global adjustments, going down to regional adjustments and then to local adjustments. I'm gonna touch on each of these as I go through it. But for this first step, we want to do global adjustments. Adjustments has going to be made to the whole image and nothing specific to the model here or to any color. This is to the whole image. Now, before we even get started, let me just close up. These drop-downs aren't gonna cover all of these drop-downs here on the right in just a second. We want to make sure we're working with the best possible image. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, we want to do some Lens Correction. Whenever you take a photo, your camera, your lens has a default calibration and effect that it might add to your photos. Certain lenses will create a distortion or a vignetting effect. And we want to get rid of that. We want to get the most raw and real unedited photos that we can, and that's going to be the best thing to work with. So under this lens correction tab, all we want to do is we want to remove chromatic aberration and we want to enable Profile Corrections. Look at that. We already have a difference in our image and you can see it's already detected what make, what model we see a Nikon camera was used to take this photo. So that is great, but we're not done yet. We can close up the lens correction for now, let's open up our basic editing panel. And this is generally where most people will start. But before we even start, we want to touch on the profile. Now by default, when you load up any outer We program, you'll be met with one of their color profiles. But if you know what camera you're using, you can use your cameras color profile. How are we going to do that? Well, let me show you. You can simply just click this drop down here and go to Browse. And now you have this section here for camera matching. So on your camera for shooting in a landscape and neutral, standard portrait or vivid color profile. You can choose those and apply those to this particular image. So you can see that the colors are slightly changing. So find one that you think will look good for your particular photo. For this one, I like how Camera Portrait looks. Let's click portrait one over here and we can close our profile browser. Alright, and we're essentially ready to get started with our adjustment. So like I said, where do you start with? You start with the basic adjustments panel. Now, for this particular image, I'm going to start from the top and work my way down. That's the easiest way to do things. So for this whole image onto bring the exposure up just a little bit, rate, a little bit. So let's go to our exposure slider here. And we can bring this up. I'll bring it up to about 0.26. Looks like a nice point. Now, before I do go on ahead, I do want to remind you that we have a histogram up here. Now what does the histogram you see as I hover over each of these areas, it gets highlighted. And not only that, the corresponding area down here gets highlighted. So let's look at our exposure K exposure lies on right in the middle. You can click and drag on the histogram. And bring your exposure up or down. So if you're more comfortable doing your edit to width the histogram, you can definitely do these adjustments up here. So I'm gonna keep this back to 0.26. Now, when it comes to contrast, I highly recommend that you never use the Contrast slider. Why? Because you can get a lot more refined contrasts are done using other sliders later on, if I do just your contrast, you see it's not gonna look too interesting. If I want it to be high contrast, I lose all the information over here and her jacket. However, if I wanted to be really less less contrasty, There's pretty much no information. Again, it's a very washed out. It's not a very good look. So I keep that at 0. We will be adjusting that manually. Now when it comes to the highlights globally, I want to bring the highlights down quite a significant amount ago was 69 for now. And for the shadows, I want to bring the shadows up. Why? Because I want to get a little bit more information and all the shadows in our image here. Okay, so let's bring our shadows of just to about 28. Alright? And for the whites, let's bring the whites of to about 49. Keep in mind of what is clipping up here. We'll fix any clipping issues later on. So don't worry about that too much right now. And the sign to get our main image exposed and contrasts that up properly. Now for the blacks, I wanted to actually bring the black level down a little bit excited, a little bit more contrast in the darker areas. So I'm not gonna go any lower than minus 11. Alright, so let's take a look at what we've done so far. If you want to see the before and after auger image, you can click down here where you have this, uh, why and why. It's going to cycle between the before and after views. But a really handy shortcut that you can do is that really going to be the backslash. So you click the backslash on your keyboard. It should be right underneath your backspace button. And it's going to go to a before and after. So you see, we're already doing quite a little bit of adjustment to our image. All right, so let's go down here to this presence section. Now don't do too much here. I don't go too crazy with these sliders because you can make your image look really, really bad. For example, if I were to just crank, crank the clarity up, it's looking really gritty and it's not looking very nice. Symbol D Hayes, a phone to turn D Hayes All the way up. It ruins the image or if I turned it all the way down, again, it ruins the MA is not a good look. So for texture, I'm not going to touch texture right now. We'll come back to texture later on in another way. But for clarity, let's bring the clarity down ever so slightly. This minus five. Now for the D Hayes, I do want to add a little bit of that. Maybe just ten. It gives more richness and back to the blessed in the image. And now when it comes to Vibrance and Saturation, these two are similar but different way if you do the saturation most of the time, it's also going to bring a saturation of, of all skin color. The good thing about vibrance. Is that it doesn't affect the skin colors, the skin tones, as much as you see. I cranked the vibrance up and it's preserved more of the color in her face. So be very mindful of that when you adjust both of these. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring the vibrance up just a little bit. We'll go with plus seven for now. And for the saturation, I'm actually going to bring the saturation down ever so slightly to about minus ten will adjust all the colors and everything later on in the HSL and color grading tabs here. But for now this is just a general place for us to have a good starting point. Alright, so again, let's look at our before and after. We have a lot more information to work with, a lot more detail and it's gonna make things a lot easier for us moving forward. So let's move down a little bit and touch on the Tone Curve. Tone curve is also going to be a global edit that we're going to do to this image. And what the tone curve is going to do is essentially going to allow us to adjust the various tones like the name implies in our image as well as all the shadows, the highlights, the whites, the blacks, everything. So everything, we're just here. If I drag this down, you can see on our histogram up top, everything is changing. Everything is going darker. We bring this midpoint, our exposure goes up. Alright, so let's undo what I just did. And there we go. And let's create a little bit of an S curve, s-curves, or one of my favorite things to do. And you definitely want to do that in your global Edit. Ok. So first thing I want to do is I actually want to bring up this point here up a little bit. I want to what we call crush the blacks. But that means is we want to bring the black level up to more of a gray tones, gonna give it a kind of a faded, almost a vintage film kind of look. So let's go ahead and click on this little point down here. And let's drag that up just a little bit. Not too much. All right? And now we can start doing our S squared. We're going to do four points. For our S curve. You can add more, but less is usually better. So I'm going to bring this point back down to our equilibrium line, which you saw going diagonally across here. I like to keep the midpoint close to where it was because I already adjusted the exposure to where I want it to be. I might want to bring this area up just a little bit. And same up here. There we go. And now if you want to toggle each of these sections individually, There's this little tab here and you see says turn off tone curve adjustment. So we can turn this off and on. Alright. So we have that off and on. And again, you can still do before and after with your backslash. Now one last thing that I wanted to touch on for our global adjustments is going to be the Detail panel. So let's go over here to a detail drop-down. And one thing I want to do is some noise reduction. Because if you look at this, this quite a bit of noise in this image. If you just click and zoom in, it's fairly noisy. So what I want to do is do a little bit of noise reduction. Let's start with a and noise reduction. That's done a little bit smooth that out. You don't want to go too far with noise reduction either. Because if you do, let's say I wanted to go for 100 and noise reduction. This starts looking like it's a painting and that's not what we want. Let's look at our face. Look at the plane here. It does not look good at all. If you want to go for that and have it be more of an artistic kind of look by all means go for it. But if we want it to be as realistic and as good of an edit as possible, we're going to want this to be at around, let's go. 1313 is going to be a really good point for us. And that is going to cover our global adjustments section. In the next video, we're gonna go over some regional adjustments. And when I say regional, I'm talking about regions of color as well as regions of space. So I'm going to be covering the region of this highlight area here, the region of this model over here, as well as a region of the plane itself. And not only that, within that we're going to cover the region of color. So we're gonna go over the HSL slider. We're gonna go over the color grading and we're going to touch upon that particular region, because region doesn't necessarily just refer to a specific area. It can be of color as well. So let's keep going. Let's go to regional adjustments.
3. Step 2: Regional Adjustments: Alright, we're ready to move on to the regional adjustments. So I'm going to start with adjusting some of our colors. So let's start with opening up our HSL tab over here. And what is HSL stands for hue, saturation and luminance. I'm gonna touch on every single tab here. So let's touch upon Hue first. We're not going to just all of the Hugh's here. We want to be very specific and very intentional. So this is a huge slider do and drags a hue. So one of the colors to either side of its respective slider. So for example, our green slider here, it's going to bring the greens closer to a yellow or closer to an aqua. Alright? This might be more noticeable here where the blue, if you want to bring the Blues closer to our Aqua, where if you want to bring it closer to a purple magenta color. Okay? So I wanted to be very careful with how we use this because it can ruin your photo, but it can also take it to the next level. So the first thing that I want to do is for the yellows, we have quite a bit of yellow in here. And what I want to do with the yellow zone and actually bring it closer to orange. Alright, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag the yellow slider slightly to the left. Let's go to minus 28 for that. And now for the green. Now, this might be a personal thing, but I do not like green end my photos. I generally try to meet them, make them cooler or warmer. I just I just try and get rid of green. So in this particular image, I'm going to bring the greens closer to yellow quite significantly. In fact, all the way to about here. Alright. And now for the UK was, I don't want any green in this image, like I said, so I'm gonna bring anything that's in the aqua color spectrum here and bring it closer to blue. Alright, so I'm gonna go to our aqua slider, ring. The, all the way up to about 85 will do for that. And for the blue, we can drag that ever so slightly to the left just so it meets up a little bit of the Akos that we've brought up, the kind of blends the two together a little bit. Okay, so let's look at the before and after of this. We can toggle this off and on. You can see very much down here in this strip of color. We're focusing on that color region with this particular area. And let's go on to saturation now. Okay? So saturation and like the name implies, is how saturated at a particular color is. To desaturated color. It's going to add a gray into that. And you can kind of see that on the slider here, and it goes down to a gray. So we're going to adjust all these colors except for purple and magenta because there are too much purple magenta colors in this image. So further read, we have read in our model space in her lips. So I want to bring that up ever so slightly. We'll bring that up to about 20. Now for the orange, we did bring orange into here, but it's a little bit in your face that can be a little bit distracting. So let's go ahead and let's D saturate that orange. Just a little bit. So I got down to about minus 35. And now for yellow, we have some yellow again in our model's face. Over here. We'll add in her hair. So let's bring that up just a little bit to about 22. Alright, so bringing the orange saturation down a little bit and we're bringing the yellow Saturation up. Okay, it's a little bit of a dichotomy there. Now, everything else we're going to essentially saturate. Like I said, I don't like green some Bringing the green saturation all the way down will go down to about minus 43. Now you rarely ever want to bring the saturation of something all the way down to 0 or all the way up to positive 100 or minus 100, I meant to say here, because it's going to look bad if I bring the orange down to minus 100 and it just ruins the color entirely. So be very mindful of that. So let's take our aqua slider and bring that down to about minus 15. And I think I'll bring the blue to about the same level. Minus 15, minus 16 will do just fine. So let's look at the before and after and L. Before, after, sort of slowly starting to adjust the colors to be a little bit more suitable to what we want it to be. Ok. Now our last tab over here is going to be the luminance tab. So what is illuminance? Luminance essentially adds a black or white to an image. So we can see, for example, let's look at our yellows over here. We can add black to it, or we can add white to it. Alright, that's all it is. It's adding black or white to the color, not necessarily to the lightness of that area, if that makes sense. So let's go ahead and all I'm going to do is I'm only going to adjust the luminance of UCLA End of blue. That's all I want to adjust that for. For ako, I want to bring the luminance up to about, let's go to about 38. And for blue, I actually want to make that a little bit dark. I want more black in the blue here. So let's bring the luminance of the blew down to about minus 25. So let's toggle before and after are HSL panel here. That's pretty cool. I'm pretty happy with that. Now let's go ahead and let's touch upon the color grading tab now this was added fairly recently to light room and I absolutely love it. You can now professionally colour grade your photos. You can adjust the close of the mid tones of highlights and shadows to keep things simple today, we're only going to touch upon the shadows and highlights. And we're not going to go too much into other details regarding that, but we will touch upon the very basics. So what is color grading? Well, what color grading you can add one color to the shadow. So for example, let's say I want to add this magenta to this pink magenta 2R shadows, and I want to add a green to our highlights. Now obviously this looks very bad, but you can see all the highlights here have that green in it. And the dark areas here have that magenta type of color. Now we want to get more suitable colors here. So let's try and find something that's going to be a little bit more suitable. Alright, so instead of this really bad magenta type of color here, let's drag this over here to be a cooler type of color. And let's go with something like that. Now this might be a little bit too saturated, so you can just click on this slider here or this little circle here, and then you'll be adjusting the saturation. So I'm probably going to run the saturation of this down quite a significant amount like so. And again, you see the HSL over where the shadows is here. When I go over colored says HSL, that's again hue, saturation and luminance. Alright, so you can adjust all of that. And you just illuminance with this slider over here, which I don't necessarily want to do. So if I can get that back to 0, I'll just do Control or Command Z to bring that back to 0. There we go, illuminance of 0. Now let's go ahead and let's adjust our highlights because I do not want this mint green highlight color here. I want something a little bit warmer for the highlights. So let's go ahead and let's bring the highlights over here. And let's find something that will be suitable. I'm thinking something along the lines of this unless orangey type of color. And again, this is way too saturated. 65 saturation. Do not want that. Let's go to just about 16 for that. And I'm going to leave the luminance at 0. I don't wanna adjust any of that here. All right, and now we have a few more things down here. We have blending and we have balance. Some blending is essentially what it implies. It's a blending between the different areas of image. So the blending between the shadows and the highlights and the mid tones. So I want us to blend fairly well actually. So I'm going to bring that up to 100. And balance, I'm going to keep that the way it is balanced, it's going to favor balancing either the shadows or the highlight. So if I wanted to favor the shadows and it's going to apply more of that blue to my image. If I wanted to favor the highlights, it's going to add more of that orange to my image. So I'm gonna keep that fairly neutral. And there we go. So let's see what this looks like before and after our color grading. Before and after. Heavyweights as kind of subtle, but you can definitely notice it. And it definitely adds a little bit more pop and interests to our image. Now, we're not done with the original adjustments. Like I said, I want to adjust certain physical regions of our photos, such as this area of highlights in front of the plane, of our model herself and of the plane itself. So let's close off our color grading tab and let's get to it. How are we going to do these regional edits? It's going to be fairly simple actually, we're going to use these adjustment brushes up here, so you can click that. And you'll be met with this dialog box here as well as a brush. So I'm going to first tackle this area in front of the plane. So if I start painting with my brush, I'm not exactly seeing anything. So how am I able to see where I'm painting? You can just press on your keyboard and you'll see this overlay. So think offer overlay and you'll see where you are painting. So I want to paint on every area that's in front of this plane. And if you go over and any of these places, it's totally fine. You can fix that and I'll and I'll show you just how you can do it. If you hold on alter option, your brush turns into a minus a turns into an eraser. And if you hold down Alt and option, you can adjust the size or bring the size of that down to about five. And I'm going to refine these edges just a little bit. So I don't want to just anything for the plane itself right now. We'll get to that part in a second. Let's just clear these edges up a little bit. Perfect. So if we press o, the area will be hidden. And now we can adjust everything here in this mask and it's going to apply it to the area. So for example, during the exposure all the way down, you see as being applied to the area that we painted. So that's essentially what we want to do. So let's go ahead and bring the lights down. Down to about minus 17. And as you see, we're no longer clipping up here. These are the shadows or the highlights, or rather the blacks or the highlights here. And that's essentially what we want. Might even bring the Highlight Section down a little bit about minus 20. So we've done this a little bit of an adjustment here. And you can toggle this on and off as wall down here. So off and on. So we're essentially is taking focus away from this area and we're going to drive it back to our model herself. Okay, that's what we want to do. So once you're good with your mask here, you can click done. Because if we start painting more, it's just going to add to what we already have. You see the node of our first brush, it's up here. So it's essentially just going to add to that. So we want to hit done and we're going to hit the adjustment brush again. Okay? And if you want to see what you're painting as you're painting, just press o. And then this way you'll see what you're painting. So let's go ahead and let's blood out or Moscow, this region, which is going to be our model here. And we're gonna go over a few judgments on her. Just take your time with these masks. Because a good mask is actually going to be seen, or rather a bad mask will be seen. And you do not want there to be a bad mask. And you can always adjust the feather and flow. I have it fully 100 feathered site. It's a nice soft edge. Hard edges never look good in these types of masks. There's very few situations where that would work. Alright, so now I have my selection, I'm going to hit o so I can actually see what I'm doing to that selection. And not I want to bring a little bit more detail to her. This is where I'm going to touch upon clarity and texture. So let's bring the clarity up. And as you see, as we start bringing that up, a little bit more information is coming out on her. Don't go too crazy with the clarity. I'll stop at around 34. And I'm also going to bring the texture of spring that up a little bit. So what's the difference between texture and clarity? Will clarity is going to apply a clarity style of effect as you see it's creating, creating more contrast, more grunge. And it's gonna apply to everything including her skin or hair, everything. When it comes to texture, Lightroom uses some AI powered. Technical stuff that applies, that only two textures in the image. So for fabric and that kind of stuff. So for her Jackie here, for her hat, for hair, and it's not going to apply any extra to her face. Alright? And now nothing. What I might do is I might bring a little bit of the whites up on her and go to about four. Now for the blacks, let's bring that down to minus four. So let's see before and after on her. There we go. We have a little bit more detail in the here and now the clarity is a little bit too much. So I'm gonna actually bring that down to about 20. Have that be a little bit softer? He I liked that a lot more. So or adding more interest in her and more focus on her was this added sharpness to her. We can see that she's more and focus and then this highlight area over here. And speaking of sharpness, recovering the sharpness up just a little bit. And every girl. Now one last region that I want to cover is going to be the entire plane here. So let's click the Done before we do anything else and we're gonna go ahead and do another Adjustment Brush. So I'll just click Adjustment Brush and you can make it bigger also with the brackets on your keyboard. So bracket up right bracket will make it bigger. Left bracket will make your brush smaller. So I'm going to get a fairly big brush here. Just like in cover a lot of area fast. And I'm just going to paint over here. And this I do not want to be applied to her at all. So we'll be able to mask her out as well. So you have a good amount of the plane here. So if we hold down alt option, we now have our eraser. And I'm just going to go around the edge of her. And this is especially important around her face. So I want to pay extra attention and care to that. And there we go. That's a good enough selection. Might do a little bit of clicking there just to get a little bit closer to her face here. Alright, so now we have a selection of the plane itself. So let's hit o, so we can actually see what we're going to be adjusting. And essentially I want to add just a little bit of clarity to the plane itself. No more than about six or so. Alright. And I'm going to do a similar thing that I did to her. I want to bring the shadows up slightly and I want to push the blacks and down just a little bit. All right, so these are very small edits. You don't wanna do big edits when it comes to photos because it can end up looking really bad. So let's look at the before and after of the plane itself, before and after. So you see we're bringing out a little bit more of the texture over here in the metal as well as in the bolt. So that's what we want to do. Alright? And now when we talk about this before and after, it's toggling it for all of the brushes. So keep that in mind as well. Alright, so there we go. We've essentially done our regional edits. Let's click done over here. That's looking very nice. Let's look at the before and after as we're standing right now. So we've gone from this image to this. That's a really nice progress so far. In the next video, we're going to go over some local adjustment. We're going to still use some adjustment brushes to do some very fine tune local adjustments to her eyes, to her teeth, et cetera, even to her face. And we're going to go over this last section here, the calibration section, one section that scared me for a long time and that scares a lot of other photographers who have tried to use it. So let's hop into the next video. We're going to cover some local adjustments.
4. Step 3: Local Adjustments: And we're down to our final step of editing here. And that's going to be dealing with local adjustments. As you see, we've gone from global adjustments down to regional adjustments, adjusting various colors and areas of photos, down to just local adjustments, which is going to do with the very fine details. So let's get started. Let's zoom in to our model space. So I'll just click and we're zoomed in here. And very nice. And I'm going to go ahead and get an adjustment brush. I want to bring a little bit more lightness into her eyes and her teeth, but I'm gonna do them separately. So let's go ahead and let's reduce the size of our brush. And let's hit o, so that will see what we paint. And I'm just going to paint a little bit there. And a little bit there. Okay, that's an o. And now for that section, I want to bring the whites up. Don't go too far and have them have glowing eyes. But little bit will do quite a lot for you. So let's bring that up to about 33. You can even bring the shadows up because area is very much in shadow. But like I said, you don't want to bring that up all the way because it's going to look fairly horrible. So just like that, we can talk about that before and after. Very nice. And now let's go ahead and hit and done. And I'm going to do similar thing for her teeth. So we have our Adjustment Brush. Make sure you click the adjustment brush. I click the radio filter backs and, and, but lets make sure you're an adjustment brush. And I'm going to paint right here for her teeth. You can hit o so that you see what you've painted. And I actually want to get a little bit finer detail here. So I'm going to bring a smaller brush here. And I'm going to paint away part of her lips. There we go. Alright, now let's hit o. And let's go ahead and bring the brightness of that up. So let's bring the shadows up. Just a little bit. About 37 going. We don't want her to have a glowing teeth. And I will reduce a saturation of that just a little bit minus 21. So let's hit done. Alright, so we've added a little bit of a local adjustment to her. Now we could get even more fine tuned and add a little bit more of a highlight to the side of her face. So let's go ahead and do that. I'm gonna make my brush a little bit bigger and come to paint just here. Like so you can hit o site, you see what you've painted. And I'm actually going to paint away part of her hood here are her hat. So I don't want that gonna don't want that being affected by what I'm going to be doing here. And now I'm going to make my racer brush him bigger. So I'm going to have a nice feather going on here. Is just going to be a little bit of a rim light. Just like that. Such a o. And you can do this a few ways that you can just bring the exposure up, which I might actually go ahead and do that ever so slightly bring the exposure of that up. If we toggle before and after ac writing a little bit of the edge light to the right of her face. Because if we hit done and zoom out, we see there's a lot of light coming in from the right side here, so we want to have that be reflected on her. You can go ahead and do that to the little buttons here to every bit of fabric. But for now, that's all we're going to do when it comes to local adjustments would be judgment brushes. I did mention one final tab that we're going to cover and that is actually going to be the calibration section that's over here. Now, what is a calibration section? For the longest time? I did not understand the calibration section. And I know that there are many photographers out there who do not really understand what this is when it comes to colors and digital colours in particular, they're made up of the RGB. And that's what we have here. We have red, green, blue, and now what the calibration does, it calibrates each of those colors to have more of the other colors in it. So for example, nothing is ever truly 100% read. There's always some green in it, some blue in it when it comes to digital colors making up a different color, same with green. There's always some amount of red in it, some amount of blue. So that's what we do here. We adjust the reds to have either more blue in it or to have more of the green. And we can adjust the saturation of each of these primaries. So what am I going to do here? Well, for the red primary, I went out a little bit of green into that. What does that do? It makes it a little bit more yellow. Okay, so we're going to go very subtly here. I'm gonna go just about ten. But at the same time, I want to D saturate my red primary Just a little bit. So I'm gonna go down about minus five, ok. Now for the green primary, I want to add read into my greens and this image, there isn't a lot of green left. We solve a little bit in her hat obviously, but I want to add a little bit of read into that. And we're gonna make that into yellow by adding right. So let's go ahead and bring this all the way over to the left. I'm going gonna go to about minus. Let's go minus 39. And we're also going to desaturate this a little bit slow minus nine. And like I've said before, little bit goes a long way. So don't go overly saturating this overly desaturating that. Just keep it literal adjustments at a time. All right, now for the blue primary, I want to bring that closer to the green. So it's going to make the blue's a little bit more cyan. So I'm going to bring that down to about minus, minus. Let's remind us 17. And so the saturation, I actually want to bring a little more saturation back to my blues here. Okay. Can we go to about plus ten? So what exactly that this calibration do? Let's go before and after, before and after. Pay attention to her face because calibration is used a lot when it comes to skin color correction. Ok. So if you pay attention to her face, you can definitely see changes there. And that's essentially what we were focusing on because we're doing localized adjustments to the color in her face. That's where it's going to be the most effective. Alright, and there we have our final edit. I think that came out really nicely. Now one last thing that we could do, this is completely up to you for your preference. And we can add a gradient to this image. So let's go ahead and let's go Graduated Filter. And I'm just going to drag up a little bit from the bottom here. And I'm going to bring exposure of that down just a little bit. Maybe by 0.4. And you can drag this up and down after the fact. And I'm going to keep that same setting. I'm not gonna click done here. And I'm going to have that same thing coming in from the top. I'll have this a little bit more stretched out and then I'll just drag it up. It's going to be more of a gradient. So let's hit, okay. And there we have our final edit. Let's look at the before and after. So we have our before as we see before and not a lot of information in her jacket here, colors were a little bit all over the place. Those some green, some purples in here. Exposure wasn't exactly the best. And now after we have an image that has quite a punch to it, the colors are nice, exposure is nice, that detail is nice. Everything is good about it and all it took was three steps, covering global adjustments, covering regional adjustments, and lastly, covering localized, local adjustments. How cool is that? It's very simple and you can apply this method to all of your other photos. The more you do this, a faster you're going to get at doing it. And eventually you'll be able to save certain edits that you make as presets. So for example, if I have this edit and I've more photos from this exact same shoot in this exact same location. I can go ahead and save this as a preset. You see over here we have presets. I can click the plus to add a new preset, and I create a preset using this edit, I have my presets over here. But let's say I want to call this, I'll call this three steps preset, okay? And it's going to apply all the settings that we did, everything here. And you can even have it apply all the filters if you want. I'm not going to have that. And I'm actually going to select lens correction for this particular one. And let's click Create. So we now have another preset for this. It's right over here, three steps preset. So if you have another photo, you can come in, just click that and have a good starting point to work with. Let me close up my presets panel here. So let's look at our final before and after, and there you have it. In the next video I'm going to go over how to export this, as well as your assignment for this course. So let's keep going.
5. How To Export & Your Assignment: And we finally finished our edit, but now we have to actually export our image. We have to save it because you probably want to show off to all your friends that you took a nice thoughtful, they've edited a nice photo. So how exactly are we going to do that? It's very simple actually. Let's go back to our library tab up here, just click Library. And with your final image selected, you're going to click export. And it's very simple. Now I'm gonna make this dialogue box a little bit bigger for you. There we go out and bring it to the middle. So I'm going to go over every single panel here, every single drop-down. Don't worry about the presets here. We're only going to focus on this right side here. So first one here is the export location. You can choose a specific folder. I already have mine selected, so I'll just click Choose and navigate to a specific folder that you want to save your image two and k. Now I can select to put that into a subfolder within that folder. So if that helps you for your organization, by all means, go for it. But I don't particularly US subfolders in that way site usually keep this uncheck. Now if there's already an existing file with the same name, you can have it, do a few things. You can have an ask you what to do if you want to delete it, overwrite it, or just do nothing, or you can have it by default always overwrite without warning you or choose a new name for the exported file or to just skip it entirely. So I haven't set to ask what to do because I like to have control over each specific file. Now, the next section we have here is the file naming. You might want to rename your images for organizations sink. So if I wanted to rename this, I can have it be custom text. So I'll call this three steps edit. There we go. So I have three steps, edit and start number. If you have multiple images from the same shoot, Let's say I have five images from this edit. I can have it start at one and each image I export will be going up incrementally from that. And you can have the extension be lowercase, uppercase, whatever suits your fancy. So I'm going to have that B3 subset it. Now, if we were dealing with video, this is where we would deal with that. But we're not going to be dealing with a video right now, but we will deal with the file settings. This is probably the most important part. So here you can choose from image formats. And here you can choose from a few different options. You can save it as a JPEG, PSD at tiff, PNG, a DNG, or an original. The original is the raw file and JPEG is a JPEG ever knows what that is. Psd is a Photoshop files. If you want to take this over into Photoshop, do anything there, you can have it already export as a Photoshop file. A TIF file is used very commonly when it comes to printing. So for example, if I wanted to print this out on a big canvas or send it off to a print shop. Most likely I would save it as a TIF file because many print companies are going to require you use a tiff format. Now the PNG file format that is used very much online. And that's the format I use when it comes to my Instagram photos, I find that PNG over jpegs keep more information when it comes to the sharpness, when it comes to the color. So my personal recommendation, if you want to upload this to your Instagram, anything like that, save it as a PNG, it's going to look far, far better. And DNG or not going to touch on DNG right now, it's not going be too important. So let's put PNG sound to save this for my Instagram. Okay? So colors face, you can choose different color spaces, area of SRGB, display P3, Adobe RGB in 1998, and pro photo RGB. Or others, if you have other color spaces are going to important news, you can select that here. I'm just going to keep it SRGB. And that depth, you can choose from eight bits or 16 bits. I'm gonna keep it eight bits just for now. And I can also choose to resize your image. Now, why would you want to resize it? Or depending where you post it, where you're going to use it, you might need to resize it. So let's say I need to resize it to fit a certain pixel ratio that tell me, I need to put it to a website and the ratio is 1920 by 1080 to ten ADP. Thanks, let's go dimensions. We'll go 1920 by 1080. So if I need to be resized as going to resize it down to that. And that's going to keep a certain resolution that you want to tap 300 pixels per inch. And if you're gonna make it bigger than it is, you can select it to not enlarge any other. Personally, I never use this. So let's just keep that unchecked for now. You can also choose to sharpen your image. So output sharpening, I prefer, and I recommend that you do all your sharpening within Lightroom under the Develop tab. If image is not sharp enough, over here, it's certainly not going to look much better. Once you do output sharpening. Make sure you get it looking as sharp as you want. And the Develop tab here, and then you don't need to sharpen it for anything. Alright. Now metadata, this is going to include things like location information, personal information, camera information, lens information, all kinds of stuff. So you can choose to include all metadata, copyright, copyright and contact info only. Well, just everything. I usually have everything be included with my photos. There's no harm in that. You can have it removed personal information. So if you want to do that, can you can have a removal location. So this comes down to your privacy. How much you want to keep, how much I don't want to keep private. So I just have it all metadata. Next we have the watermarking. So if you do want to put a watermark onto your images for whatever reason, this is where you can do that. You can select watermark and you can choose a simple copyright watermark, or you can edit watermarks and import your own. For the longest time I had my own personal watermark that I used on the images. I don't use watermarks anymore, but if that's something that you want to do, you can use PNGs or any file format that keeps transparency and use those image files as a watermark for your image. So I'm going to turn watermark off. And now the last section here is postprocessing. So after it processes is after US exports, what do you want it to do? Now? I have it set to do nothing, but we have a few options here. We can have it showed the exported images and annexin, the File Explorer. We can have it show the exported images, open them and Photoshop. Or you can have them open in another application that you then specify. I usually just have a do nothing. I'll go ahead and check my images out myself afterwards and do any other edits I need to on my own. And there we go. So if you do want it to open in another application, this is where you would choose it. So once you have all of this setup, it's a simplest clicking export. And you see there's a little progress bar up here. It's going to take a second for Lightroom to do its thing. Especially if you're working with raw photos, it's going to take a little bit longer. So let's just wait for that to really quickly save our image. And there we go. It's finished exporting. Lovely. So it lets me go ahead and let me just open up this really big here so we have something to look at. Before I go on to some final thoughts, I want to give you your assignment for this course. It's going to be very simple actually, I want you to either go out and take a photo by yourself or find a photo online that is free to use and go ahead and apply these three steps and edit them beginning to end. It would be very beneficial if you're able to use a raw photos, you're going to have the most detail, most information to work with. Mark, go ahead, get a photo, bring it into Lightroom, do these three steps and then upload your before and after of your edit to the students submitted project section of the course. Because I really want to see what you can do and how you manage to deal with this particular assignment, okay, I want to see you taking our photos to the next level. Alright? So in the next video I'm going to go over some final thoughts.
6. Final Thoughts: Guess what? You've made it through my course, Adobe Lightroom, three steps took Better Edit. Not only that, you've come out of it with their own edited photo, how cool is that? And like I mentioned in the previous video, I would love for you to do the assignment for this course. So if you want to know all the details of what you should do this refer back to the previous video. And as you do your assignment is watching this course again and apply those same techniques and principles to your own photos. I would like to mention that I'm summing Lightroom presets right now for a special price over on my website. So head over to www dot the real-time kind.com forward slash presets to get your presets today, these are perfect cubes in Lightroom to apply preset color grades to your photos and edit presets that I've already made and tested over many years of practice and use. And you know the best part, both precept packs are cheaper than a cup of coffee. I really want to give you the means to get great results in your edits and photos without breaking the bank. I really hope that you've learned a lot about how you can simply and easily edit your photos and Lightroom to take them to the next level using just three simple steps. If you've enjoyed this course, I encourage you to leave a review and rating because that helps me out and feel free to check out my teacher page to see other Lightroom and Photoshop courses that I've made, ranging from beginner courses all the way up to mastery level courses. Also, if you have any suggestions or requests for courses that you would like to see me cover, leave it in the comments for the course and I will try my best to cover any topic that you suggest. It's been a pleasure teaching you today and I hope to see you again in a future course. Take it easy.