Adobe Lightroom Classic CC For Beginners

1. Introduction To The Course: In recent years, photography has become very popular and a necessity in our daily lives. And I'm not exaggerating. A great example of this is that we all have a camera in our pockets. Now all smartphones are taking amazing pictures, very good quality. Now they said that everything is in the eye of the photographer, which is u, but this is just 50 per cent of the photo. The other 50% is in the editing. I'm not saying that you can take photos without editing them. It is possible, but editing adds a special touch to photography. It allows you to be creative, allows you to stand out from the rest. With editing, you can create your own style and be different. Lightroom Classic CC is one of the most used softwares by professional photographers. It is not difficult at all in this course for beginners, we will talk about the basic tools that Lightroom has. We're going to edit together so that you can see my workflow and I will explain you everything in detail. It should be noted that in this course we will not use advanced tools, since the idea of this course is to be very simple and fast so that you can start editing right away. We will start by learning how to import our photos to Lightroom and how to organize them by folders. Then we will talk about the basic tools, stone curbs, color grading and more. And the best of all is that all of these will be, while we're editing together, Practice makes perfection. Are you ready to start creating amazing photos? I'll see you in class. 2. Important Information Before We Start: First I want to let you know that I am using the last version of Lightroom at the time of filming this course. But if Lightroom updates the program, I would also be updating the course. So don't worry about it if it's needed, I will be doing it all the time. Another thing I want to tell you is that Lightroom doesn't save your photos in the program. Lightroom stores only the edits that you've made. So if you move the photo, you put it in another folder or you delete it from your computer. Lightroom will not find it and you will lose all your edits. That is why it's always good to be organized as an editor. Lastly, if you have any questions or suggestions, please let me know in the discussion box. I will get back to you as soon as possible. Now it's time to open Lightroom and start this one. 3. Project For This Course: The project of this course, I would like you to share with me and edited photo using everything you have learned in this course. During the project section, you can upload your photo and I promise I will give you a feedback. And you can actually also comment on the projects of others. So like this, we can help each other. Good luck. 4. Importing Your Pictures: Okay guys, this is basically what it opens when you open Lightroom for the first time, it looks a little overwhelming, but don't worry, this is very easy to use class we're going to learn by doing. We're going to start editing. Check this on the top. It says Library. This is basically where we have to start. We're going to import our pictures here and then we're gonna go to develop where we're going to start editing. So if we go to the left side, you will see navigator. You click here in the R0 is going to open. There's nothing here because we didn't import any pictures yet. If we will have pictures here, then the picture will appear here. So we'll see it in a second when we start to import. Now we have the catalog. You have all photographs here. You will see the pictures that you imported, not just today, tomorrow, day after tomorrow, even the ones from yesterday, you will see everything. Of course, for the purpose of this course, I cleared all the pictures that I used from before so that I can show you everything, everything from zero, okay? You can see also here quick collection. This is basically the way that you are going to organize yourself. And as an editor, you have to organize always yourself. Collections will be like folders. You have folders here and in folders is basically that you can look for the folders in your desktop or in your computer. Collections is basically where it's going to appear. All the collections that you're creating that I like folders, like e.g. you go to New York, you take a lot of pictures. You import the pictures here and then you can create a collection called New York, and then you add all those pictures there. And then maybe tomorrow you will go to Chicago or I don't know, Slovenia, Sweden. So you just create collections and this is the way to be organized. Let's import our pictures, as you can see here on the bottom says import. So if you click here, this is what it's going to open basically here you have the local disk C where you can actually look in your computer and then put the pictures that you find over here. But I think I see it as this is the most difficult way to import. Let's do it fast. So we're gonna cancel this. The fastest way is if you know where your pictures are and I will suggest you that we organize always. So if you know where your pictures are, you just go to the folder where you have the pictures, you select them all, and then you just pull them to Lightroom and then you just really, um, boiler. Now you have here your pictures. What I'm going to do is I'm gonna go here to the right side and you see Add to collection. I'm going to do that, Add to collection, but because I don't have any collection yet is nothing appearing here, just quick collection. This is not what I want. So I'm gonna come here in the plus sign and I'm going to click it and I'm going to create these collection. Let's put light room, one-on-one course and create. Now we come here down on the bottom and we put in port. And as easy as that, we already have our pictures here. You can see here it says lighter than one-to-one. We created this collection now that we have our pictures here in Lightroom waiting for us to edit them. What do you think we're going to do? Let's go to the next lesson to start editing them. 5. Let's Start Editing / Basic Corrections : Okay, Now we go to the develop section. This is the part where the magic happens. This is where we're going to edit everything. As you can see on the left side. We also have the navigator section. Look what's going to happen if we just come here and select one of the pictures immediately the picture appear on the screen to edit and also in the navigator. Now you have here the presets and presets are basically things that are going to help you to edit. Remember that presets are not like final when you use a preset, e.g. I'm going here and I'm trying to use other presets that I have. And this is a park that I actually gave away in my YouTube channel. But you can see the presets are really helping you get you select it. So now we are using the preset and here where you see a mount, you can actually go to put more of the preset or take the present completely out or add just a little. You will see in basic corrections that all corrections are already made. Now, hearing history now, this is going to be nothing. Every time you do something in this side, in the right side, they're going to appear in history. So history you will be able to see, oh, I did this, I did that collections. Remember, we just have this collection that is Lightroom one-on-one course. If you have more collections are gonna be here so you don't need to go to library to select the collection to start editing. Now we're going to come to the right side and we're going to do the basic corrections. The first thing I always do when I start to edit is to crop the picture. You can see here this icon, it says crop overlay or you can press R as well. And he's going to come to crop in. Now, if you come here where it says original, you can choose how do you want your picture to v? And I think I want four by 54 by five is good for Instagram, but because the picture is in landscape mode, then it goes like this. But if you press X is going to go for Instagram, you know what? Let's make this picture for Instagram. So let's just arrange a little bit in the center, and I think that's okay. Now what you do is you just press Enter. Now we're going to start with the basic correction. Now, the first thing that you will see here is the white balance here you see on the top the temperature and the tint. What you can do is you can do it manually. If you go to the left side, you'll see that it's getting colder. If you go to the right side is getting warmer. And also you have here the white balance selector that you can also press W and you are going to have it. You see now the cursor is not an arrow anymore, is that selector. So you can come into picture and look for the part that you think is the white part. This is how white supposed to be. So light room can understand what is white and as you can see it did the white balance out automatically and now it's time to go to the tone exposure. I will not suggest you to use it until the end. Sometimes I use it a little bit like here, e.g. I think I could use, I will try to add just a little bit, not much. When you start to make all these tweaks and all these editings, the pictures can become a little darker. So it's better to do it later or to fix it later. I'm going to add a little bit of contrast. This picture was taken in row, which makes it easier to edit. Now in the highlights, when you take out the highlights, you can see how the sky and start to have more details. You'll see. And I'm going to exaggerate. This is like to edit. Moody style is very typical. You take out the highlights and you can paint the highlights with the shadows. And this is where we're going to do now. We're going to add shadows to lie the image buck. But when you move the shadows, this guy is not going to be affected and this is what we want. And still we're going to fix this guy later. Don't worry, because yes, this guy is like very highlighted. White's my suggestion. Every time you edit, the best way for you to play with this, you see you go back, you go forward, you try to look for the best. And I think that adding a little bit of white, it would be fine. And the blocks, you also do the same thing. And I think I'm going to take out a little bit of blocks and it's going to make it nicer in texture. I like to add texture when I have buildings and when I have trees, and this is what we have here. So I'm going to add a little bit of texture. And the good thing of editing is that when you finish it, you can still come back and do little tweaks. So it doesn't matter. Let's go with a little bit of clarity. Sometimes I use the haze, sometimes I don't use the case, but in this case, if you add the haze, you can see that a little bit more of contrast. So I'm going to add a little bit of the haze. Now, look up here, vibrance and saturation. Vibrance is a more intelligent way to give color to the image. Vibrance understands all the colors while saturation, you will take all the picture and make it more saturated. So I'm gonna do like this just around there. And then in saturation just a little bit. And this is everything we're going to do in the basic corrections. Now let's go to the next lesson and we're going to talk about the tone curve. 6. The tone Curves: Okay, Let's come here to basic where you can see on the top this little arrow and let's close it. These were more organized. You see this is the best of Lightroom that you can manipulate everything on the screen, e.g. if we come to the left side, we're not using these areas. So we can actually click this little arrow here. We can close it and now the image is bigger at the same on the bottom, we're not using these three pictures, so we can come on the bottom and just close it. Also, if you come to the right side, you can actually see that if you come here to the edge, you can actually make it bigger in case you want to play with this lighter so it gives you longer slider, so it's easy to play for me. It's okay the sides here, but you have this option. That's what I was saying. You have a lot of flexibility here. So now let's go to the tone curves. Let's start with the things around where it says, uh, just that it says parametric curve. If we click at here, is they kinda halfway is Manuel and also it's helping you, you see when you move the cursor around, he's going to tell you what area is going to be affected. And you can also do it here, manipulating these slides. Now, let's do it on purpose. This light over here, you see it in 40. If you come with the cursor on the top and you double-click, it goes back to zero. Everything in Lightroom is gonna be the same. If you did it wrong or if you want to change it, you just go into the slide, go into cursor and double-click and it goes to zero. But I don't use much these curves. I use more than wide one that I will show you now. So let's go here like I was showing you, double-click goes to zero, double-click goes to zero. Let's go to the white one. Now, with the white ones selected, whatever we do here, it's going to affect the whole picture. If we go to the red one or the green or the blue, they're going to affect, of course, these callers. But we want to affect the whole picture for now before we start to make the points here also, I want to show you that on the bottom you have point curve and it says linear because we have a line, We didn't do anything. If we move something here is going to be your custom because we did it. But if we click here, we will see that they have presets, medium contracts than strong contrast. So if you wanna do a medium contrast, you just go here and click it, and that's it. As you can see, the curve is already done the same with the strong contrast. And actually I liked this contrast, but for the purpose of the course, I will come back to linear and I will show you how it works normally and it's the most famous curve is gonna be the S curve. Of course, there are certain images that you will need to do something different, but normally is the S curve and I'm going to do it now. To start with the S curve, you're gonna do three points. And how it works is that this area over here gonna be the highlights. In the middle you have the mid tones, and on the bottom you will have the shadows. All this area here that is basically below the line is going to be the dark areas in the picture. And above the line is going to be the clear areas are the highlights. Which means that if I take these little cursor and I put it in this point and I go a little bit down here, I'm actually making the image darker as you can see. And now I'm going to come on the top and I'll do the opposite. I'm gonna go a little bit higher and I'm creating the S curve, as you can see, which makes it very smooth contrast, It's just beautiful every time you have a very nice contrast in the picture. Still I see that is a little contrasty. So what we can do, and I said from the beginning, we can always come back to our editings. So we will come back to basic. Remember that we did the contrast here, so we can take out the contrast from here, double-click, Done, it came back to zero. Now we can close basic and come back to the curb. And you can see now that the curves are very nice. If you want to mute the dark colors, like mute the shadows. It's a very nice trick. Actually, you come here and you go a little bit high over here and it's muting, I'm going to exaggerate so you can see what's going to happen. You see it's muting the shadows and making the picture very, very weird. So let's don't exaggerate. I think there is going to be okay. And if you want to do the same with the highlights, you can mute them. Also, come in here a little bit, and I think this is okay. Now let's go to the next lesson and we're going to talk about the HSL. 7. HSL: Okay, Were they just sell? We're going to play with the colors. We're going to start with the hue here. Whatever you do, you will change the hue, not the saturation, but the hue of the colors. E.g. if you see here on the buildings, we have a lot of orange. If we go completely towards the other side in the hue of the orange, they're gonna become a yellowish, as you can see in the picture. If we exaggerate to the orange and the other side, they become reddish. But I do want to add a little bit of extra oranges because it makes it nicer. Let's add a little bit, e.g. in the trees, these trees are like greenish, yellowish. Let's exaggerate here. Okay, so we can see we go all the way to the greenish here is like an alien tree. You see the green is not natural. So let's go a little bit like here still. I know I'm giving a lot of color, but don't worry, in the saturation, we will take it out, the yellows, Let's make them a little bit orangey. Now, here in the blue, if we move it up and down, you can see how the sky is changing the colors. I don't want that, so I'm not gonna do anything with the blue. I will try to leave it like that. Now in aqua, I'm going to try to see what is going to happen if I move it, e.g. if I move upward to the left side, the sky becomes a little lighter. I like that. So I'm gonna go here. Okay, Remember that I like the color of aqua, so we're going to give saturation to this color later. I don t think we have purple and magenta, so we're gonna just leave it there. Let's go to saturation now. Now in saturation, whatever we did in hue, we can take it out or we can add it. Remember that these greens were like alien rings. So what are we going to do is we're going to take all the saturation. Now. It's more yellowish, orange, the leaves in the trees. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take out a little bit because he's very strong. I want the center of the image, the buildings and the sky to be clear than the surrounding trees. Now in oranges, I will add saturation because I want these buildings to pop up. And let's see the aqua. Remember, let's go all the way and let's move it a little bit to see how it works. Yeah, it's not changing much, but it is giving these light blue color. So I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go all the way here. It's okay. It looks nice. Now in luminance is basically giving light to the colors, e.g. the trees, the greens. If I go all the way, it's gonna give light like you see here, there's no much greens because I change the hue is more yellowish but still is lighting them up. I don't want that. I can take out actually the light here. You see that if I take it out, it's going to be like shadowy. I go to the other side, is all lined up. So I will take it out because remember, I want to focus in the center, the same with the yellows. So I will just take out a little bit of light, not much, because like I said, I want the center to be the point of attraction. Now in the oranges, I don't want to move anything here because it's a lot of highlights already. So either want to add more highlights, but like I told you from the beginning, always move the slides to check so we can check. We don't lose anything. If we check, you see it's a lot of highlights and if we take them out, it looks horrible. I will go to zero, double-click, we go to zero. In aqua is not much of a coin this guy. But still, if I take out the luminance, the color is going to change a little bit. We can go here and I think it's changing all ready if you want to see what we eat, not with everything, just with the HSL. You see here in this corner, we can click it and we can turn it on. Let's turn it off. You see how it was the picture and when we turn it on, this is how it is now. So most of the changes we did, where in the plants here, but still there are some changes in the middle. And this guy, and I'll remember this backslash is going to tell you how the picture was and you released the backslash and you can see how it is now, the picture is much better. Come on, come on, It's much better. Let's go to the next lesson for the color grading. 8. Color Grading and More: Okay, color grading is actually very self-explanatory. As you can see here, you have the color wheel and it says mid-tone shadows and highlights. This is like the color temperature and I will show you if I exaggerate, you can see that all the dark areas are becoming like bluish, which makes the picture very nice. It's actually like a cinematic color, but we don't want that. We want to be subtle. So let's go just a little bit to the blue. Now, the highlights, we're gonna go the opposite to the warm area. I will suggest you to try everything because like this you will find your own style, the mid-tones. I will maybe go a little bit also to the warm area, not exaggerated. And you can see that the changes are very, very subtle. But you know, little tweaks and little things makes a big difference at the end in the whole picture. Now everything we did here, we can blend them to make them more natural. So we can go a little bit here. I always give like just a little bit also to balance the colors and what we did, we can go a little bit here, I like it. Now, let's go to the next one that is detailed in detail. You can see here on this little screen all the noise that the picture has. Of course, this is like a super zoom. You're looking at some of the buildings in the middle of the picture. So of course it's going to have a little bit of noise, but you can fix it. You can sharpen the image. Now it's in 40. You can even give it a little bit more, but every time you sharpen, it's going to bring also noise. So I will suggest you to come to the noise reduction here and take out the noise. And I will suggest you not go more than 25, 26. So we'll leave it just there. Don't exaggerate because then it doesn't look natural. I always leave it around there if it's necessary. Sometimes I don't even use it. I stay in 1510 or zero. I don't like to touch much this area of details, so I will leave it there in lens correction as well. It depends on the camera you're using or if you are using your phone. Sometimes Lightroom is not going to understand the lens or the camera you're using. In this case, I was using a Panasonic Lumix five. So it recognize it and it recognized the lens that I was using as well. And you can put then remove chromatic aberration and enable the profile corrections. And it's going to understand it. Lightroom has a really big collection of lenses and cameras and it's recognizing basically everything. So just go with it, transform. We're going to use it with another picture. I want to show you exactly what to do with transform effects. We can give a little bit of vignetting. I want to add a little bit, I wouldn't say exaggerate so you can see what he's going to happen. I will add just a little bit of vignetting. It makes your eyes go more to the center. And I'll calibration is more like an advanced technique, but I will explain you more or less how it works. This is primary colors, so if you change the saturation or whatever you change in here, you will not change just the reds, but you will change all the picture because most of the colors have read, remember that these are the three primary colors and they are all over. And now will show you e.g. if I move the hue of the red to the right, you can see that there are certain changes in the picture. If I go to the other side, there's also some changes tending into blue. Now the picture is not, not too dull, but there are some effects that are pretty cool that you can use like e.g. with the blue. I remember back in the day there was very popular these orange colors in the pictures and this is what they were using. You can see the orange field when you go to the left side of the blue. So you have to be very careful with these, play with them because it's pretty cool to create your own style, to create different styles you can play with this. Whatever you do here is going to change the complete picture. Let's go to the next lesson. To finish our picture, I will give you a bonus and we're going to fix this guy and a little bit here with a couple of masks. 9. Masks & Transform: Okay, We're going to try to fix this guy and the new Lightroom comes with artificial intelligence so we can come to masking and you will have these options. And here it says subject, it says the sky and background. And I think we can try to select this guy. Let's see what happened. Now, Lightroom is going to try to detect this guy, and as you can see, it did a pretty good job. So what do we need this to make it bluish. So now it's red, but don't worry, this is just the overlay so that we know which is the mask, but it's not red. Okay, so now we will come here. This is basically what the mask is about. We're going to add this temperature. This is a trick that I always use. We just go to the left side and you see this guy, if I exaggerate, look, it's gonna be completely blue. But if we add just a little bit of blue, it makes a difference. The sky now it's more light blue, It's a little stronger. Other thing that we can use to give more details in the clouds and in the sky is to take out the highlights. So if we take completely the highlights, you can see it gets darker. I don't want it to be a not too dull. So I'm going to take out a little bit, but not too much. And I think this is it. That's all I wanted to do with this guy. Now, if we want to add another mask, we just press here, Create Mask and we're going to add now brush. And I want to brush the city because I want to make it more vivid. Okay, Let's just brush it up and I think it's okay, we're not going to exaggerate because I don't want it to look unnatural. It's just a little bit okay, highlights. You can see that the city is very highlighted, so we're going to take out highlights. I can see that it's not such a big difference, but there is a little different. Now, shadows, we're going to go up and you see that the city is lighting up a little bit. I remember that I told you that at the end we can do a little bit of exposure. Here. We can add a little bit of exposure, and that's it. And now we can actually come here down. We're still in the mosque. This is the mask. And we can add sharpness because it's a CT, their buildings and everything. So let's just add a little bit of sharpness. And remember what I mentioned in the last lesson that when you add sharpness, it comes with a little bit of noise. So we have to denoise. So we're going to add these like around here. And I think that is okay. I don't want to exaggerate. I don't want to go too much with this picture. And now I'm gonna show you a trick that I always use. Let's just click Enter. So we're done with the masks. Let's finish this picture. Coming back to basic, remember we can always come back to the editing Always. And let's finish it, fixing the exposure. Now we can do it. And let's put 0.50, 0.50. And as you can see, the picture looks nice. It's lighter, is nice. If we press the backslash, we started with this and we end up with these amazing, another tip. If you press L, you will see that the picture is gonna be like half isolated. If you press L again, completely isolated so you can see it properly with no distractions. You press elegant and you come back. Now let's close the basic here. Let's go here on the arrow below, and then let's choose another picture. Now you can see the picture. It's a little twisted, leaning down. So now we're going to use Transform. So what we're going to do is you can see in transform There's a lot of tools to use here, but we're going to come here. It says guided upright tool. So you press this and you're going to have this like a plus. And it's like assume what we're going to do. We're going to come here, look at the zoom here. The plus has to be exactly on the line. There you go. You're going to click it and then you're going to pull it all the way down and try to again exactly on the edge. There you go. Now we're going to come here, we're going to create another one. And then we're gonna go all the way down and put the other one exactly there. And as you can see now, the image is straight. But oh my God, look at this which is broke the picture. What are we going to do? We come here and we're going to press Constrain Crop and enter. And as you can see, it helped and now the picture is a straight. Now let's go to the next lesson. I will show you another trick. 10. Presets and Export: Now I want to show you the last thing. Last thing. Let's go to this other picture here. Remember what I always do when I'm going to start editing is I cropped the picture, we're going to crop it for Instagram. I'm before we click Enter, I think that the picture is a little twisted to one site so we can play with the angle here or we can press outdoor and it's going to fix it. It was just a little bit but the auto dealer proper job, I like it like this. And now we just press enter. Now what I want to show you is here, let's use the preset. Okay? This is a pack of presets that I gave away in my YouTube channel. And actually there's another pack of presence here that I also gave away. So I think we can use some of these ones. And in this case I want to use the moody landscapes three. But of course, remember that every time you add a preset, Preset is not final. The preset is to start. It helps you to start the editing and it helps you to do it faster, but it's not final. We're going to come now to basic corrections. We're going to add a little bit of exposure because the picture is underexposed. I think there is going to be fine. Now. The picture is very muted, as you can see here, is very muted. So what I'm gonna do is remember that when we pull this up, it mutes the dark colors. I'm gonna go a little bit down, so we don't do that and the same, I'm going to do it here. Now, another trick that I want to do with this picture is to come here to the masks and remember that we did something very cool with this guy. I think this is what we're going to do. Again, We're gonna select this guy. There you go. And then we're going to add the temperature to make it bluish. There is pretty cool. Let's take the highlights out and it gives these like more details into the clouds. I love it. Now we're going to create another mask. Or what we can do actually is come here where it says mosque, the one that we just did, and we're going to duplicate an invert the mask. You see the option here. So it means it's going to duplicate it. So select the sky and then he's gonna invert it. So select whatever is not this guy. Let's do this. And as you can see, it's selected everything but this guy, I love it. So now what we're gonna do here is we're going to add shadows. So we're going to light it up more. As you can see, there's more light now in the buildings and because they are building, so we're gonna do also a little bit more of sharpness. And remember that when we add sharpness, we have to add a little bit of noise and maybe texture. And I think that's pretty cool. And then we press Enter and we have our picture, and I will press L so you can see the picture by itself, pretty cooler. This is Stockholm in Sweden by the way. Okay guys know to finish, we are going to export our picture and there's few ways to do it. One of the ways is to come here on the corner where it says File and Export, As you can see here. But as you can see also here, it is control plus shift plus e, which means that if you press control plus shift plus E is going to open the same window. And I think this is the best way to edit. Tried to look for all the shortcuts possible so that you can save time editing. Now, let's export the picture. This is what it's going to open. On the top it says Export Location. Of course you're going to look for the place to save it. As you can see here in export tool, you have few options, but I always choose in a specific folder for my photos that are edited. And this is the way I do it. I like to be organized and I can suggest you that every editor has to be organized. And then here where it says folder, you can choose the folder that you want. I already did, as you can see here. So I know exactly where the picture is going to go. The rest, I will leave it like that. Now here in file naming, of course you can put the name on the file. If you already named your files, That's no problem. You can leave it like it is. But I didn't name them. When you take a picture with your camera. I normally as you can see here, it says example, that's the name that the camera adds to the picture. Yes, I want to change the name. So renamed to in here I'm going to type, I don't know, Sweden, we go to File Settings and image format. I will leave it as JPG. This is the most common file format so that you can upload and put the picture in Instagram or social media or wherever you want. Quality, I always put it at 100%. If you asked me why anybody will put it in less when it's just for the size of the file. Now, image, image sizing here, I will leave it like it is. I don't want Lightroom to change the size of my image, all the pixels, everything that the camera captured, I want it to stay exactly the same. So I will leave it the same, then the rest I will suggest you to just leave it how it is, It's okay, There's nothing crazy about this anymore. So just export the picture. So we come here on the bottom and we press export. And that's it. As simple as that. 11. Conclusion: Editing photos is really easy and like everything in life with practice, you will get better and better. Thank you very much for choosing me as your teacher. And this is very important. I would like to ask you to give me a review. It is very simple. You just go here on the bottom where the menu area is. You will see the reviews option and you can do it there. You have no idea how important this is for me. You're not only helping me, but you're helping also other students to choose the best option for them. Also, don't forget to follow me in this platform and see my other courses. And if you want to get deep into editing, I invite you to follow me as well in YouTube, where I do tutorials every week. Thanks a lot again. And until next time.