Transcripts
1. Course Introduction: When it comes to finding your unique photographic style or what you might call your visual signature. A lot of that is going to occur when you're out and about and you're shooting and the thought processes that are going through your mind when you're shooting and how you're going to shoot your subject, and what kind of light you're going to choose and what you're going to put in the scene. All of that is going to occur in the shooting phase. But there's one last step that really solidifies here, aesthetic look, and that is the editing phase. My name is Sean Dalton. I am a professional travel and lifestyle photographer from San Francisco, California, currently traveling throughout Asia. I've been a photographer for quite some time now and I can tell you that it's taken me quite a while to find my own unique photographic style, and especially when it comes to my editing style. But I finally feel like I have a style that I love and a style that I can keep coming back to, and that I'm excited to post about, I'm excited to edit these photos, style that I love. When it comes to finding that visual signature, that unique visual signature, a lot of people will tell you that you can't teach it, that you can't teach style. That is something that is organic and it's just something that kind of grows over time and develops on its own, and when I believe that to some extent, I also think that's super limiting because if you don't understand the more objective sides of styling, the physical things that you see in the photograph and why those things make that photograph unique. If you can't fully understand those things, that is going to be very difficult for you to translate that artistic vision that you have in your mind into a physical photograph. That's why today in this course, we're not only going to be talking about how to find your own unique editing style and what that looks like and what that process looks like. But we're also going talk about how effectively use Adobe Lightroom as an effective tool that will allow you to properly bring the artistic vision that inspiration that you have in your head to life. This course is for anybody that's just struggling to find your own unique editing style. Maybe you've been using Lightroom for a while and you're just not sure how to make your look unique or maybe you're somebody that's has never even use Lightroom before and you just want to learn how to use the software, and the idea of finding your own style is just completely out of field. That's okay. This course is basically for anybody that either A wants to improve their Lightroom skills, or B wants to find their own unique editing style. Yeah, style is a tricky thing and it's kind of daunting and it's hard to understand. But that's why I made this course, I want to make it easy to understand. I want to talk about it from not only an aesthetic and artistic lens, but also a more objective and physical lens. What are the things that actually comprise style? That understanding is really important as well. So we're going to talk about both those things in this course. But with that said guys, I'm super excited to teach this course and I really hope you take the time to enroll, and if you do then I will see you in the very first lesson. Let's get after it.
2. Overview: What's up, and welcome to the course. We have a lot of awesome content coming up, but I just wanted to take a quick second to go over everything and keep it nice and organized so you know what you're getting into, and you know everything that's coming up and in what order. Starting things off, we're going to dive into what style is in accordance to editing. The different things that actually comprise style, the things that we can define and we can talk about from an objective lens. After that, once we have that understanding, we're going to talk about how to find your style. The steps that you can take to finding your own unique style, and what that process looks like, and some tips for you as well. Lastly, we're going to dive into Adobe Lightroom where we're going to cover everything you need to know about Adobe Lightroom, so that you can take that vision that you have in your mind, and use Adobe Lightroom to bring it to life. Not only that, I'm going to show you how to edit various popular editing styles right now. We have orange and teal, a dark and moody look, and then the last one is a vintage portrait. These are really popular editing styles right now, and I think they will really help you understand the software and they will also give you a better understanding of the editing style that you like. After that, we're going to close things out. With that said, let's dive into the content.
3. What Makes a Photo Unique?: When it comes to what makes a photo unique, there's several different factors that play here. Of course, a lot of these factors are going to occur in the shooting phase. The subject matter that you decided to shoot, like the actual thing that you're shooting, whether it's a person or a landscape, or a car, or some food, etc, that's going to play a big role in the style. Other things are going to play a role when you're shooting as well. Like just the thought processes that you're going through when you're going out and shooting that photo and just basically your world view. But editing also plays a huge role in your overall style. In the editing phase, you can really shape your photo to elicit a very specific emotions and tell a very specific story. In order for us to better understand the role that editing actually plays in our style, we need to understand the digital anatomy of a photograph. The reason for that is because all of the things that digitally comprise a photo, we can actually edit. The digital anatomy of photo is comprised into three different parts. The lighting or the contrast, the color, and the detail. Light is the actual exposure in your photo. Is it dark, is it bright or is it high contrast, is at low contrast? Basically the light in your photo, colors is basically just the colors in your photo is vivid, is it muted, is it black and white? Basically the actual colors in your image, all of the different hues in your image of how saturated they are. The last thing is detail. The focus of your shot, the overall texture of your shot, do you have noise grain in your photo? Yes, some of these things are going to occur in the shooting phase, just like light and color but we also have a turn of control over editing the detail of our photos in Adobe layer. The uniqueness of a photo and the uniqueness of a style comes when you use these three things not only harmoniously in a way that they all work together, but in a way that's unique and in a way that other people aren't doing. Not only that, it's when you consistently use these things and that's what style is, is when you find your own creative, harmonious combination of lighting, color, and detail. Then you consistently create photos based on that look, that is going to be your defining style. I think a good way to understand this is to look at a few different photos. Take this photo, for example, it's black and white. It has very dark blacks, but also has very bright highlights, which gives us a very high contrast look. But it's also very soft. Blacks are really flat, the whites are really flat. Then there's also a lot of texture, a lot of noise grain, and that really helps add to the emotion of the photo. On the other hand, we have this photo which is much more modern-looking. It's more vivid, there's a lot more colors going on. I'm you can see her skin color. It's just a very different photo. The emotions of these give off are also a bit different. I think these two photos are really good examples of how you can edit one photo and multiple different styles using a different combination of lighting color, in detail, and using a different combination of those three things can result in not only different aesthetic style so a photo that looks differently, but a photo that elicits very different emotions than the other one. You might edit a photo that's very bright and it might be very happy, but then you might also edit the same photo and really dropped down the exposure and make it really dark and high-contrast. Then it could be scary or sad. This example that I showed you isn't that dramatic. The emotions are similar, a little bit different, but similar. But if you did want to use a crazy different combination, you can edit one photo and get a completely different look. I think that really shows the power of editing. These two things are very important because when we get into the editing section, we're actually going to be editing all three. I'm going to show you how to edit all three of these things to elicit the emotion that you want to elicit. We're talk about light and contrast. How to get a bright photo but still very soft, maybe low in contrast. Then we're also going to talk about how to get a dark photo that has really high contrast and really vivid colors. I'm going to show you how to do all of these different things so that you can go in and edit your photo in the style that you see best-fit. But now that we have a general understanding of the actual physical digital aspects of a photograph, now I want to dive into actually finding your own style and what that process looks like.
4. Finding Your Editing Style: Now that we have a good idea of the physical side of a photo, the digital anatomy of a photo. It's time to talk about how to find your own unique style. Like I said in the introduction of this course, a lot of people say that you can't teach style, that you just find it on your own. But I think that there's a few different tips that I can give you to help you find your style and help you head in the right direction. So when it comes to finding your style, you need to know what makes your heartbeat, what inspires you, what inspires you from not only an aesthetic standpoint like, I love the way this photo looks visually, but also what inspires you from an emotional standpoint. So when you look at a photo, what things do you like to feel? What emotions do you want to experience? What story do you want that photo to tell? These things are very important because that is your inner self expressing itself. Once you recognize those things, once you understand what you like visually and what you like you emotionally, it's a matter of taking those things and implementing them in the editing phase. I've broken down finding your style into four different steps. These are steps that I think you can take to find your own unique editing style. These are things that I've used. These are things that I still use because they not only helped me become a better editor, but they still helped me hone in my style and perfect the style that I want to have. So first things first, I all ready mentioned this, but the first thing is to find your inspiration. Find other people's photos that make your heartbeat, things that you just love. When you're scrolling through Instagram and you see a photo and you just look at it and you instantly love it. That is a photo that can inspire you, that's a photo that you can save and add it to some type of collection where you have a bunch of different photos that inspire you. I think it's important to have several places for inspiration. At the top of the list for me is Instagram. That's why I mentioned it first. Instagram is a great platform for visual inspiration. There so many different creative, talented people on Instagram that are sharing things every day, every second and it's just this giant pool of awesome content that you can pull from. One of the things I do for inspiration on Instagram is to browse hashtags. So if I want inspiration for landscape photography, I can just search landscapes and the hashtags. I can scroll through those and find photos that I love and save them on Instagram or you can just find accounts you really like, and you can just get lost on Instagram and find accounts that really stand out to you and really inspire you and you can actually write down different accounts, different photographers that you aspire to be like. That's why on Instagram, my saved section where I save all these photos that inspire me is so important to me because these photos have helped me dictate my style and they help me continue to grow as a photographer. So for me inspiration always starts at Instagram, but that's not where it ends. Another place I recommend for inspiration is books. There's this really cool artist cafe near my house. They just have all of these awesome photography books and not only photography books, but interior design books and art books and architecture books and all of these different books that I can pull inspiration from. Sometimes I'll just head down there and I'll sit down for an hour or so and I'll just browse through these books, not only is it meditative, but I'm just learning so much about different art styles happening around the world. It just helps me open my mind to different art styles that exist. The last form of inspiration I recommend is other forms of art. When photography first started out, it was very closely tied with the painting community and this strive for realism. Photographers were trying to get to the next level of depicting a scene as realistically as possible. That shows the connection between photography and art. I think art is a fantastic place to pull inspiration from. Especially, when you look at old school painters like Caravaggio and the way that they use light, it's absolutely fascinating and it's actually a really good way to understand how light hits the face and works across a room or something like that. It's a really good way to not only be inspired, but also learn some of the more technical sides or photography as well. But this is certainly not an exhaustive list. There's so many different places where you can put inspiration, from anywhere, you walked on the street and get inspiration. So I just want you to be thinking about things that you love. What do you love to look at? When you see a photo of something, what is it just gets your heart beating. Take note of those things because that's very important to know. So the second step in finding your own unique editing style is to critically look at those photographs that you've saved as your inspiration. When I say it critically, look at those photos, I mean critically look at them in two different ways. First, look at them from an aesthetic standpoint. So the digital anatomy of the photograph, all the things going on in there, and then also look at them from a emotional standpoint. So starting things off with the emotional side of things, what emotions are you feeling when you see that image? Write those down and make note of those things because that is something that you can elicit in your own photos when you go into editing. If you see a photo and it makes you feel really happy and really bright, you can do that in editing. You can make your work really happy and really bright in the editing phase. So take note of those emotions that you're feeling. With that, I want to head into the aesthetic standpoint. Take a look at those photos and really break them down from an objective standpoint. So look at the lighting, look at the color, look at the detail, and see how the photographer is utilizing light in the photo, how they're implementing color, and how much detail is in the photo. Are they using noise grain? Is it really shallow? Depth of field. Take note of all of these things. Once you get a good collection of inspiration and you really break them down. You might start to see patterns of things that you really like. Maybe you're really drawn to low contrast images or maybe you're really drawn to really muted colors or maybe you're the opposite. You like high contrast with a lot of different colors. Take note of those visual aspects that you like. This is a really important activity because it teaches you how to look at a photo with a critical eye. Some of the greatest photographers of all time, they're very detail oriented. Good photographers, they can look at a photo and they can pick out the smallest things and they pay attention to all those little details. Photography is attention to detail. If you can look at a photo and identify the things that you really like in that photo then it's going to be much easier for you to implement those things when you go into editing your own work later on. This leads me into the third step, which is copy and adapt. When I say copy and adapt, I mean to actually take one of those photos that inspires you and go out and try to capture it exactly the same way. A lot of photographers will tell you, don't copy, you're not going to improve. You're not going to get better if you're just copying somebody else. But I am a strong believer that copying somebody else work in the beginning teaches you so much about editing and it allows you to grow over time. That's why this second aspect of this is is adapt, its copy and adapt. So go out, take that inspiration and try to copy it, not only with taking the photo, but also getting a very similar edit. If they have high contrast, try to get high contrast. If they have really soft tones, the blacks are really soft and faded look, try to get that. This is going to teach you how to get those effects. Over time this knowledge is going to compile and then you'll know how to do all of these things on your own. I think this is where you're going to see some of your biggest growth, is in this phase, where you're copying other people's works and then you're adapting it. But you don't want to copy work forever. So I always say do a few photos that inspire you and then do your own take on it. So capture a photo that might be similar and maybe the subject matter is similar. But it's your own photograph, it's your own style and your own thought processes behind that photo and then also, maybe you're doing a similar edit, but you're making a smaller change. Maybe you're changing the contrast or you're changing the colors around. So yes, you're copying the style, but you're doing it on your own and you are learning and you're slowly adapting that. When I first became a photographer, I was really interested in cafe and food and things like that. I came to Thailand and I met all of these amazing Thai photographers who had this very distinct style. I learned so much from them, shooting with them and seeing the angles that they were taking and then also looking at their edits and asking them how they edit their photos. I learned so much and over time my style became unique. It became different from theirs, I was doing different things in light room and it just became much more unique and distinct. That leads me into the last step which is evolve. So you're going to be copying your going to be adapting, and then you're going to be evolving. When I say evolve, I mean grow with time. Yes, you're going to be copying and adapting people in the beginning, but you're not going to be doing that forever. You need to evolve into your own style. That is just going to come with time and practice and trial and error. So when you're copying photos, you're learning so much about how to navigate the software and how to get that look that you want and then you're also pulling an inspiration. But then after you learn those things and you implemented into your own work and your own subject matter and you step away from the inspiration and you just focus on you. Your style is going to evolve so much over time. That's the thing, it takes time to do this. It's going to take time. It's going to take effort, but that's okay. It's part of the process and it's so cool to look back a year or two years or three years, even, even a short time, like two to six months and see how far you've come. My style changes all the time. It's fairly consistent now, but back then it was changing all the time. It was evolving and I found what I liked. I picked the different aspects of edits that I liked. I knew that I liked lower contrast photos. I knew that I liked muted tones and I learn these things about me. I started to recognize them and I started to implement those aspects in my work going forward. So it's important to evolve. The biggest tip I can give you for this is to just stay consistent with it. Shoot as much as you can and edit as much as you can. Because this is going to allow you to really grow your style into something that's unique and something that will stand out among the millions of other photographers in this world.
5. Class Project (Get Featured!): For the class project, I want you guys to edit one photo in three different ways. When I say three different ways, I mean three very different ways. Maybe in the first photo you going for a very vivid, bright look and then the next photo you're going for more darker, somber look. Then in the third photo you doing something completely different. Experiment with the colors, experiment with the lighting, experiment with a detail, and get three very different edits. If you're not really actively taking photos right now, don't worry about that. You can go to this website called wesaturate.com and download one of those raw files and then you can edit that. They're free to use. It's a really awesome website and I actually pull photos from there when I want to improve my editing and experiment with other people's photos. I download those photos and edit them on my own just to see what I can come up with. Take that photo, edit it in three different ways and post it in the course project. I will check that out and I will comment on that. I'm even going to be featuring some of my favorite student projects on my Instagram. When you post your project and make sure you leave your Instagram handle so I can tag you in that post and then keep an eye out on my Instagram page because you might be featured. This is a super good activity because it teaches you those aspects that you like and you're going to be able to identify the things that you like in each photo. Sometimes when I'm posting on Instagram, I take one photo and edit it like eight different ways because I'm still not totally sure which looks best for that photo. I learned so much every time I do that. One photo, three different ways. I can't wait to check it out and please take the time to do this. With that said, let's move onto the next section.
6. Overview of Lightroom and Editing Process: Now that we've talked about the objective aspects of style, lighting, color, and detail. We've also talked about how to find your style. Now we want to dive into Lightroom itself and show you guys how you can actually implement some of those stylistic things that you love in a photograph into your own work. In this video, I'm just going to overview Lightroom real quick. I'm going to go over just the essential things you need to know. Then in the coming sections, we're going to really dive into each aspect. We're going to cover the basic sliders and how to edit things like light. Then we're going go into color and the various ways you can edit color. We're also going to go over detail, and then some of the other things that are super useful for Lightroom that I think you should know. I want to jump on my computer so you guys can see my screen and we're going to go over everything in detail. Let's do it. All right guys, what's up, and welcome to Adobe Lightroom. This is what I'm seeing just after I opened the program. This is the main page that you see when you first open Adobe Lightroom. But before I jump into over viewing the platform, I want to make a note about editing. I'm actually sitting in a dark room. I didn't turn on any of my lights. That's important because when you're editing on a digital screen, it's important to edit in a dark environment. That's just a quick tip I wanted to give you. Edit in a dark room because that's going to give you the best, most accurate lighting and color representation in your photo. That's the best thing to do, dark rooms. With that tip aside, now let's jump into Adobe Lightroom. Adobe Lightroom is organized into different tabs, which you see here in the top right hand corner. We have Library, Develop, Map, Book, Slideshow, Print and web. If I'm being completely honest, 99.9 percent of the time you're only going to be using Library and Develop, and you're going to be doing all of your editing in the Develop tab. So that is the most important thing about this course. But the Library tab is really good for one thing and that thing is sorting your photos. When it comes to sorting and organizing your photos, I cannot highlight the importance of this enough. Yes, this is a course on style, but I think it's so important to organize your photos. Reason being, in 2016, I took a trip to China and I hiked the abandoned section of the Great Wall of China and it was incredible and it was insane. But I didn't have a good photo organization process yet. I lost all of those photos and that was one of the most incredible days of my life. I have regret. So make sure you have a good photo organization system and that's all going to exist here in the Library tab. One of the things you do when you first open Lightroom, you want to import your photos. You can tap "Import" here in the bottom left-hand corner. You can select your SD card, which is usually titled "Untitled". Then once you select that, it'll automatically find the photos in that SD card and then import them. I don't have any on the SD card right now. That's why it says no photos found, but they will show up. Then what I like to do is build standard previews. That's just going to make it easier for you to navigate between the photos when you're editing in Lightroom. Now, the top here, top left is showing you where you importing from. This will be usually your SD card. Here to the right it says my catalog. Usually what I'll do is I'll import the photos, in Lightroom from a SD card to my external hard drive. My external hard drive will be here. When I import it through Lightroom, all of those photos will automatically be added to the Lightroom catalogs simply because you're importing through Lightroom. Make sure this is either your local hard drive that's actually on your computer, or if you have a lot of files, you can use an external hard drive to do that just so you can stay more organized. I keep all my photos on external hard drives. I don't keep any of them on my computer just because they take up a lot of space. Once you've imported the photos, they're going to be imported into the file location on your computer wherever they are, and then they'll show up in Adobe Lightroom. These are all my folders that are showing up in Adobe Lightroom because I imported all of these photos onto my external hard drive through Adobe Lightroom. That's why it says Sean Dalton, four terabyte number 2, that's my external hard drive. All the folders here are within it. I like to organize my photos based on the year, the month, and then the date. I also give a little bit of context as to what I was doing that day. So it says, you know, 8:13, 2018 Bangkok Day 1 and 2, Bangkok day 2 and 3, Estelle Bangkok. That was a portrait shoot I did. That's just how I organize it. That aside, once you click on the photos you just imported, you're going to have them all right here on this bottom timeline and this is going to show all of your photos. The Library tab is great because say you click on a photo here and you just tap the right arrow, it's just going to sort between all of the different photos that you took that day. Then this is great because you can sort those photos. Say you like this photo, I hit "Five" on my keyboard, it sets the rating to five, or you can do four, three, two depending on where you tap on the numbers on your keyboard. Personally, I just do five and then I sort them that way. Once I have those photos that I like, I just go ahead and filter by five-stars here and it shows all the photos that I gave five stars. Then when you jump into Develop tab or you're going to be editing your photos, you have them all right here. Once you enter the Develop tab, you're going to see a different layout. On the left, you're going to see presets, snapshots, history collections, and on the right you're going see basic Tone Curve, etc. All of these features that you're going to be using to actually edit your photos. This is where the bulk of this course is going to focus on because this is where you really get into it. This is where you really edit the photos. Presets are basically saved edits that you can click and your photo. We're going to do a short lesson on this later on in this course. But I don't want to focus on that too much because I want you guys to learn Lightroom and you're not going to learn Lightroom if you just apply a preset right away. You can, but it's much better to start from the ground up. Now I've reset this photo to its original state. Now I want go over these editing features a little bit just to overview them before we really dive into them in the next video. But the focus of this lesson, I want to go over the editing progression. The editing progression is really important because it allows you to stay consistent with your editing process. You can always follow similar steps with all of your photos and you make sure you don't miss anything that might be really important for editing that photo. One of the first things you're going to do is when you open this photo is you're going to hit, "R", you gotta make sure you're in the Develop tab here where you're going to hit, "R" and that's going to bring up this crop feature here. The crop feature is great if you need to crop your photo, you could just drag the corners in. Then you can also just rotate it a little bit. I'm just going to crop it just a tiny bit and hit "Enter". Yeah, that looks pretty good. Sometimes your photos are going to be lopsided or they're not going to be straight. Transform is a great feature that allows you to straighten things. You can click, "Auto" and it'll automatically detect all of the lines in your photo and it will automatically make your photos straight and balance it out. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but overall, I find that it's a really cool feature. You can even play with these a little bit more if you want to distort it even more, these can really do a lot to your photos, so you got to be careful here, but super cool features. I didn't want to mention that. Usually you're going to be doing this before you get into the other edits. That's why I mentioned transform first. The other thing I want to mention is lens correction. This is also a good step to do before you get into the other edits, like editing a light color in detail. You can click, "Remove chromatic aberration". What that's going to do is basically remove the fringing that you might see on high contrast areas. This photo is not a good example, but I always make sure I have that clicked. You can also enable Profile Corrections and then this will detect the lens on your camera, and it will automatically remove any lens distortion and or vignetting that you have in your photo. The issue with that is sometimes you want that vignetting and your photo. So sometimes I don't click this because I like having my corners dark and gives it more flavor. It's more interesting or dynamic lighting. After you've adjusted the crop and you make sure there's no chromatic aberration, Now it's time to do the real edits, the light, the color, and the detail, and all of these things here, basic tone curve, HSL color split toning in detail. We're going to use all of these features to edit those three things. That's what we're going to be focusing it next section, I just wanted to go over the process here. We do edit in order of light color in detail, but in the basic corrections, we're editing all of them. There's a lot of overlap here. It's not like you can just edit light and then just Edit Color and then just edit detail and you're good to go. But I want you to keep those three things in your mind moving on into this next section, because we are editing light color and detail and it might not be in a one-to-one to one order, but they all affect each other and it does fall into that progression. We do start with light and we do Edit Color and then we do edit detail, but they all affect each other. We often go back and edit things here and there. But that's the gist of Adobe Lightroom. This is just the layout. This is just understanding what the program is about. I just wanted to touch on it briefly. Now in this next section, I really want to dive into it, dive into the photo editing aspect of it, and show you guys what all of these little sliders mean, what they do and how they affect your overall photo. Let's go do that now.
7. Diving into Lightroom - Most Important Features!: All right guys, now it's time to jump into the real edits. I have a new photo opened. This is a photo I took in Taipei, Taiwan. It's this really awesome street where the street leads up to Taipei 101, which is one of the tallest towers in all of Asia. Super cool place, really cool shot. I backed up a little bit and I got this interesting natural framing here. Composition is not perfect, but we can fix it and I think it's really cool. A lot of interests going on here and your eye navigates around the frame. I want to edit this into a style that's darker, moody, but soft, and not too crazy of an edited photo. Just a photo that really emphasizes the beauty of this image. So of course, we're going to start with the transformation and make sure it's where we want it, so I clicked auto here because I like how it brings everything upfront, and then we can crop it a little bit. So I think that looks pretty good. I going to hit "Enter", lens correction, once again we're going to do that, I enabled the chromatic aberration but I didn't enable the lens correction because I like the vignetting we have here. I think it looks pretty cool. But with those two things aside, now it's time to jump into the basic adjustments tab and the basic adjustments tab is where you're going to start with every single photo. You're going to see a few different things here. Everything in this tab is related to light, color, and detail. The first thing you're going to see here is the treatment. You can do color or you can do black and white and you can instantly change it to black and white. We're not going do that. We want this photo in colors, so we're going to keep it on color. Now you have different color profiles here. So Adobe Color, Adobe landscape, Adobe portrait, Adobe standard, et cetera. I'm going to stay with Adobe color. You can actually download different profiles online, but I find that the ones that come with Adobe are all ready really good. Moving down you have the white balance with a photo and this is going to dictate the overall white balance in your photo, you want to make sure your white balance is as accurate as possible unless you're going for some type of different stylistic technique. That's simply because it just looks more realistic. It looks better and it's easier on the eyes when the colors are correct. A good tip I have for you in finding the proper white balance is if you have an area in your frame that is true white or true gray, you can click this little tool here, go over that white area, and click that and then it'll give you a more accurate white balance. This is not accurate because this is not an accurate white. So I'm going to go back because I think the white balance here looks pretty good. But once you get the white balance set, one of the first things you're going to do. Now you're going to move on to this section here, the tone, and this is where you're really going to start editing light. You have exposure, you have contrast highlights, shadows, whites and blacks. The Exposure slider is just going to adjust the overall exposure of your image. Pretty simple contrast is going to increase the differences between the white areas and the black areas of your image. It's going to make it bolder a lot stronger. Highlights are going to affect the brightest areas of your images. So if I go up, we're going to lose all that detail on the bright areas. If I go down, we just have insane amounts of detail. Shadow is going to do the same thing as highlights, but for the darkest areas of the image. Whites are going to affect the whites of the image, and blacks are going to affect the blacks of the image. So I'm going to edit this photo for you guys here. So one of the things I'm going to do, I'm going to leave the exposure, I'm going to leave the contrast. But I'm going to drag down the highlights and that is really going to pull out a lot of detail in this area because we lost some detail here around the building and lowering the highlights is going to increase that detail. Same thing with the shadows. I'm going to increase the shadows and that's going to pull details out into the dark areas of the photo. So we just see more of what's going on. Now when it comes to whites and blacks, a lot of photographers will tell you that you should always make sure that you're maintaining as much detail on the photo as possible. You don't want to lose any areas of the photo to clipping. When I say clipping, I mean, when you're whites are to white, you actually lose detail in the highlights, if your blacks are too black, you lose detail in the shadows. But one of the most famous photographers of all time, Hansel Adams, he said that you need a true white and black point in your photo. So I've always followed that rule. I like to have a little bit of my photo clipped of whites and clipped of blacks. What you can do is you can click and hold on the white and then if you hold option with your thumb, you can start dragging the white up and you drag until you see these blue and white areas pop up. That means that area is clipped of detail, which means there's true white there. So we are losing detail here. But once again, that's okay because it's going to give us a really good high-contrast look. It looks really cool. Now with the black, we can drag that down. Same thing. We can clip it. That's okay. We're losing detail down here. No worries because we're still not done editing light. We're still going to be editing in the tone curve here. The presence here is basically clarity which increases the contrast on the micro level. So you can see what a cool effect that does. I like to drag this up a little bit, but not too much because it can have a really strong effect on your photo. Some people go way overboard with it. I would say, keep it calm. Don't go crazy. It's a cool feature, but don't ramp it up to a 100. Dehaze is going to dehaze your photo. It's a really awesome feature. You can go left to add more haze. But I find there's a better way to add haze which we're going to be talking about. So if you want to make a faded photo, don't do it with this feature. I'm going to actually bring out the vibrance a little bit. I'm going to go up to seven, not too much there. Now the vibrance and saturation are just global color editing. Usually, what I like to do is just lower the saturation just a tad because I like my photos deeper, moodier, more interesting. So we're going to lower the saturation there. Once you've done that, once you've done the basic adjustments, you're at a great starting point, but we're not done. This is just the basic adjustments where we get everything set up. But we're going to be coming back to this section after we edit some of the other things. So we've done basic edits on light, we've done basic edits on color and detail. Now it's time to jump into the tone curve. The tone curve is hands down what is going to make your photo unique. The tone curve is editing all of the different tones in your photo, as well as all the different color profiles where we can see here in the red, green, and blue channels. So in the RGB one, we're editing the tones, the highlights and shadows and you can see what happens to the image when I just drag this up and down, it's pretty profound. I'm going to teach you guys a basic S curve. Probably 90 percent of your photographers are using something similar to this just because it's simply looks really good. So I'm going to put three points there on the diagonal line and then I'm going to drag this bottom point down a little bit. What that's going to do is darken the shadows a little bit. But then when I drag this bottom left up, it's going to soften it out and look how beautiful that is. It just really softens out our tones, gives it a really nice look, pulls some of that detail back. It's just gorgeous. I'm going to leave it right about there. You can do the same thing with the highlights, but you don't want to go too overboard with the highlights because it just looks a little bit too white here when we do that. So I'm going to leave that one there, but then you can drag this one down and that's going to soften out those highlights. So that looks pretty cool. Now we can come back up here, maybe increase the shadows a little bit, make sure everything is looking good. But overall, that is most of the light editing done for now. But once we've done that now we can move on to color. Once we've done the RGB now we can go into the specific color channels to edit the color of the image. Now this can have a really dramatic effect on your photo. Look what happens when I go into the red channel and I drag this up and down. Does a lot to our photo, right? What I like to do is a very simple edit. I like to add three points just like we did in the RGB. Make sure they're all right in the original place. Then I just very subtly drag that bottom point down a little tiny bit. What this does is it adds blue into the shadow areas. This is very much my style. This is the thing that I like to do in my photos to add a little bit of deep blues. You can see the difference before and after of what the tone curve does. It's pretty crazy. But you can really go overboard with this. So be careful here and don't go too much. It looks like it's a completely straight line., it's not. There's a lot of blue being added into those shadows. It's hard to get right on the first time. I'm just going to keep playing with it. I think that looks pretty good. But once you've done that, once you've edited the tone curve and got the basic colors down. Now I want to bring you over here to the color calibration tab. This is going to be the place where you really impact the colors of your image. You have the red primary, green primary, and blue primary here. You can come up with some really interesting color combinations here, like the orange in teal and some of the other looks, which we'll get into later. But making subtle changes to these can really fine tune your colors and give them a really cool look. So you can really come down here and experiment and drag these hues in different areas. And that's really going to give your photo a really crazy colorful look for this photo. I want to keep it somewhat realistic, so I'm not going to adjust these primaries too much, but just know that these are adjusting the overall primary colors of your image. Every pixel is comprised of red, green, and blue colors. This is editing the overall pixel. So you can come up with some really cool color combinations there, but I'm not going do that. I'm going to skip that and I'm going to move straight to the HSL color slide. What this allows you to do is edit all three aspects of a color which are hue, which is the overall color of the color. So what we see as red, orange, yellow, green, those are all different hues and then there's even hues within those hues. So you can really adjust the different colors. Saturation, which is how pure that hue is. If we drag red all the way up, you can see it's just gets really saturated here and then luminance, which is the brightness of the color. So with this image, I'm finding a few things distracting. I'm finding the green to be distracting. So I'm going to go in here, I'm going to drag the saturation down on the green. Bring that down a little bit, actually, I'm going to bring that down all the way. I think that looks cool. Then I want more orange and yellow here. So I'm going to see if I can drag that orange up and what that's going to do. Doesn't do a whole lot. Yellow is affecting the greens in the image, aqua Mainly just on this tower here. Blue. We got a lot of blues in the image here. You can see what happens when I mess with that saturation. Purple in magenta, we don't have too many of those colors. One of the cool features about this is you can click this little thing here and then you can click on a part of the image and it will automatically sample the colors from that part of the image. When I click on this tower, it's mostly blue with a little bit aqua. If I click here, it's mostly green and yellow. You can do this for a saturation hue or luminance. Luminance is not something I usually adjust too much. I do when I'm editing skin tones to make sure the skin tones are good. We'll get to that later on when we edit this photo down here. Now, once we've got the colors to where we need them, it's okay to come back up here to the basic adjustments and make changes here. I'm going do that. I'm going to mess with the color balance a little bit and make sure it's where I want to. Then I want to actually increase the blocks here, make it darker, make those blocks stronger, and then we can even try to soften it up a little bit here in the RGB. Not too much, actually I think it's okay. I like the way it is. Now there is another way to edit color, and that is with the split toning. This can have a really strong effect on your image. What it's doing it's just basically adding an overlay color over the photo. For the highlight, it's adding color into the highlights and with the shadows adding color into the shadows. If I slide this here and I hold Option, it'll show us what a 100 percent saturation looks like when I drag throughout these different colors here. It's pretty crazy. It has some pretty strong effects. If we wanted to, we could add some blue here, and then we can slowly drag the saturation up and that'll just add blue into those highlighted areas. This isn't a feature that I like to use too much, I think it has a very strong effect, but I did want to highlight it. I think it's really good for vintage photos if you want to make them look really warm. I'll show you how to do that later with a vintage portrait here but I did want to highlight that because that is a way to edit color. Now once we've edited the color, and we're good with that, we can move on to editing some of the detail. If we're going to detail, this is just going to be sharpening and noise reduction and honestly, this is something I don't usually mess with too much because images are usually sharp. You don't need to adjust the sharpness but when I say detail, I mean the texture of the image. A lot of that is going to be with the grain here. If you didn't want to get a vintage look, you can add your own noise grain. That's something that I recommend doing when you make your photo soft, you really soften out those blocks, is to add noise grain because traditionally, cameras, when there was blocks that were this soft, they had noise grain. It looked vintage. That's a classic look. It doesn't necessarily look bad. For me, I'm not going to add it in this photo, I don't think it works but I did want to highlight this grain here because that is a really good way to add a lot of texture to your photo, especially when you're editing things like portraits. Here in the effects tab you can also add some vignetting, but we already have natural vignetting, so I'm not going to add it. But now that we've got that out of the way, we've done most of our editing with lights, most of our editing with color and detail, now, I want to do what's called fine-tuning. This is where you use different filters to edit very selected areas of your image. This is what's going to bring your image to the next level because you're going to be able to isolate different parts of your image and really pull out details that you like. When I see this photo now, there's a few things I notice. It's a little bit too blue and I want to add some warmth to really bring out the complimentary colors to match this blue tower. I can do that by using this brush here. This is an actual brush and I can paint over different parts of the image to edit only that part. I'm going to reset it here and I'm going to drag the temperature over to 15. Now once I do that, I can come down here and adjust the overall size of the brush, the feather and make sure it's where we want it. You can also adjust the size of the brush using the bracket keys on your keyboard. That's what I usually do. I think the feather looks pretty good there. Now that we've done that, we've got it where we want it. We can start painting over different parts of our image and you can see it's red here, so we know where we're painting over. I am going to make these houses on the side more warm. I'm doing that because I want to have them complementing this blue tower here. We can even do it up here. We can even do this whole area because this is a pretty blue pillar here and it might look better if it's warmer. Now we've got that we can hit O again and it'll hide it. Now we can see where we're editing and that's adding a lot of a warmth to that area. You don't want to go too crazy because you can really make it look funky, or we're going to just drag it up to 15 or so. Then what we're also going to do is increase the clarity. That's going to just pull out a lot of that detail, add a lot of interests. We can also edit the contrast. We are just isolating a different part of the frame here, and it can give you a really interesting look in your photo. When you're doing this, you got to look out for areas where there's a big divide. Sometimes if you're editing here, you might have weird colors around here. You've got to be careful, especially in high contrast areas. I think that looks pretty good. We can also use this gradient filter here to edit this bottom corner and to fade up. Now what I'm going to do here is I'm going to desaturate it a little bit. Then I'm going to darken it a little bit. That's just going to make sure that our eyes aren't distracted by the details down here and that they're being pulled into all of this interest here in the middle of the frame. Hit enter. There you go. There's the before and there's the after. Here we are with our after photo and there's certainly more things we can do with this but I think it's had a really good place. I think it looks pretty cool. I might drop those blocks a little bit and increase even more clarity just to make it stand out a little bit more. For the most part, that looks pretty good and that is the photo that I'd be comfortable with posting on Instagram. Before I post it on Instagram, I would crop it to 4x5 because that is the Instagram format. Boom, there you go. I think that's a pretty cool photo. I hope this lesson outlines with the crucial features of Lightroom but I also hope that it reminded you guys that this is all so subjective. You might edit this photo in a completely different way by using different colors, by editing the tones differently, by editing the detail differently, and there's so many things you can do with this software. This is just my editing progression. I don't want you to think that my editing progression is correct. It's just the way I do it. I hope this was helpful in that regard but now that we've gone over the software, we've gone through everything, now I just want to edit some very specific photos just to go through nonstop. I'm not going to explain anything too much. I just want to show you how to edit a photo from start to finish. All the things I would do and I'm going to do that based on several different styles. So we're going to start. We're going to edit an orange and teal style photo, a dark and moody style photo, and then we're going to do a vintage portrait and actually, these are the photos down here. Here's the orange and teal, here is the dark and moody, and then here is the vintage portrait. We're going to dive into these photos. I'm going to show you how I edit them and let's go do that now.
8. Creating and Effectively Using Presets : Guys, before we jump into the edits, I forgot. I have one more lesson I want to share with you guys. That is regarding presets. Lightroom presets are essentially saved edits that you can use on your photos and it just streamlines your process. One of the things I recommend people do is make their own presets. Making your own presets is great because it allows you to save those edits that you'd like, those stylistic components of an edit that you really like. You can add them to other photos later on. Say you edit this photo and you get it to where you want it to be, and everything looks really good. You can go up here to the top of the screen and click develop, and then you can hit new presets. You can title that preset, anything you want, maybe warm afternoon or something like that. Then you can just go ahead and save that. This will save all of these things. One of the things I recommend is depending on if the white balance is playing a significant role in the style of that image, like if you want the image to be overly warm, you can leave this. But usually I uncheck that and then I also uncheck the graduated filters, radio filters. Then oftentimes the transform as well. The reason for that is because these are really dependent on every image that you have. It's like very unique for every image. I don't click those, but once you've done with that, you can click Create. That will create it depending on where you want to save it. I'm not going to create a preset because I already have plenty of presets. I just wanted to show you what presets can do, if you get a good presets. This is my wonder less travel preset pack. I have 32 of my favorite presets here. If I just hover over each one, it'll actually edit the photo and give me a preview of what the edit looks like. There's a lot of really cool ones here. This is what I use for pretty much all of my photos on Instagram. There's ones I like more, like I love San Francisco for example. I also really love Shirakawago, which is this orange and teal look. There's a lot of really cool ones here. One of the things I want to note though, is when I use these, I use them as a starting point. I'll add the presets and then I'll come over here. Then I'll fine tune it, because every photo is different. When you first put a preset on a photo, it's not going to look awesome right away. Sometimes it might, sometimes it's just like perfect if the lighting is just right and everything. But oftentimes it's not going to be 100 percent perfect so you can fine tune it. Usually all you really have to do, just mess with the basic controls here. Then maybe if you want to find tune the colors, you can, but usually they're colors are in a good spot. That's what I would pretty much do for this photo. I don't think I would do much more to it because I think it looks really good. Most of my photos on Instagram, I always use my presets as a starting point. Then I also have a food and cafe preset back when I was shooting a lot of food and cafe photos. I used those for everything. Then I also have a portrait precept pack here. These are all really cool presets. They work for a lot of different types of photos. If you guys are interested in checking these out, you can check them out at my website. But I also recommend that you try to make some of your own presets because that's a great way to learn and understand the power of presets. It also helps you keep your style more consistent, because you have a consistent look and all of your images. Just wanted to go over presets real quick and show you guys how you can make them. Also show you how you can utilize them to have a more consistent style. But with that said, now we jump into those example edits. Let's go do that now.
9. Orange and Teal Editing Style: All right guys. Now it's time to edit some photos from start to finish. This is a photo that I took in Takayama, Japan. It's part of the Takayama Matsuri, which is this awesome Fall Festival in Japan. It's one of the biggest festivals in Japan. It's a really cool photo. I think it's a perfect photo to show you guys what an orange and teal edit looks like. I think this photo looks really good with an orange and teal style edit. When I say orange and teal, I mean just basically manipulating the colors to be more orange and blue, or orange and teal. Teal is just a different shade of blue, kind of a light blue. These two colors look really good together. I'm going to show you guys how to do that here. But first, we're going to do some basic edits with this photo. We're going to start with a crop here. I'm going to crop it, maybe right about here. I like having this, our main subject here, in the third of the frame so, it is following the rule of thirds here. Next thing I'm going to do is, I'm going to increase the Exposure a little bit, but not too much, because I like these dark areas. We'll go up a little bit and then I'm going to increase the Highlights a little bit, and that's because it is a very dark photo, and I want to make sure that this is in a really good Exposure. Shadows, we can increase the Shadows are a little bit. Then we'll go and increase the Lights a little bit. I'm going to hold "Option" here and make sure we have areas that are turning white there. Okay, that looks good. We're going to do the same thing with the Black here. Not going to go too far with the Black, because we already have a lot of really dark areas. Here we are ready, after just some basic adjustments. There's the before, there's the after, a lot more contrast. I think the white balance is at a good place. With Clarity, we can go up like 10, not too much. Then I'll leave these things here. Now of course, we're going to head into the Tone Curve, and we're going to do these three dots here. I'm going to drag this down, do an S curve here, soften out those blacks. Not too much, a little bit, that looks good. Then I'm actually just going to soften out the Highlights a little bit, because they're pretty bright up here. Once the Tone Curve's done, now we're going to move on to the color calibration. This is where you're really going to get that cool orange and teal look here. It's quite simple, all you need to do is take the Red Primary Hue and drag it all the way to the right, and then you take the Blue Primary Hue and drag it all the way to the left. You can just see like how crazy that is already, the colors are completely different. There's the before, there's the after. If I just reset this here back to normal and then, boom, really cool colors. Now of course, these colors are pretty saturated, they're pretty crazy. We can try to adjust them here. Maybe desaturate them a little bit so they're not like totally overboard. I like the colors that we have here. These colors are a bit extreme, but we can fix that later and then so are these colors here, but we can fix that with some fine tuning later on. Maybe just decrease the saturation here a little bit. This looks pretty cool, I really like this. This is where your orange and teal look is going to come from, this color calibration down here. All you got to do is drag that to the right, and drag that to the left and you got it. After that, when you want to fine tune these colors, you can come into the HSL and you can just play around with the individual colors here. If I wanted to make this blue a little bit different, I can click and hold, and I can drag it to the left to get even a more greenish look or to the right to get a more purple look. I like it where it was to begin with. I might just drag the blue a little bit this way, just to really make sure that our blue is more of a cyan color or a teal color. Also, I am going to go into saturation and I'm actually going to desaturate it just a tad, because I think it's a little bit extreme. We have blues, believe it or not, in these dark areas, and even though you can't see it, they are there. When we can clearly see the orange, but we can't clearly see the blue in these dark areas, we can still see it. It just doesn't jump out to us like the orange does here. But overall, I think this photo is looking pretty good and I actually really like where the colors are. But there's a few things that are really bothering me, like these things up here. This is where the fine tuning comes into play. I can get this brush here and the brush is great to isolate different areas. Because this area is very blue, and same with these lights, they are very blue, I can use the opposite of blue, the complimentary color of blue, to bring them back to a normal tone. These are very blue, the color balance is very inaccurate here. I can grab a brush, increase the warmth, and then just simply paint over these areas to bring the color balance back to a normal white, what we would see as white, and I can just paint over these areas. That already looks a lot better so, now the blue is less intense. Hit "Enter" there and that's good. There's the before, there's the after. I think it's looking pretty good. But now, these things once again are bugging me. I'm going to do same thing, and I'm just going to go the other way, because these are orange. We want to make them more of a natural color. They're a little bit too jumpy. Then I'm also going to decrease the highlights a little bit, and then I'm simply just going to paint over each one of these little things. I think the fine tuning is such a crucial piece of editing. Some of the best editors of all time really spend a lot of time with this phase here. They do a lot of burning and dodging, which basically means emphasizing the highlighted areas and the dark areas of the photo. We can actually do that here with this lantern. We can do another brush and just increase the Highlights here a little bit. Make our brush a little bit bigger, and then just paint over this main subject here just to make it stand out a little bit more. You can do this with the Highlights. You can increase the Whites here if you want to do that, or you can just increase the Exposure. I like doing it with the Highlights, because then it leaves our shadows here intact. That looks pretty good, and we've got that really cool teal and orange look. I love this look, and it's an edit that I do a lot. But one of the biggest mistakes that I see with this style of edit is, it's totally overdone. When we first made this photo orange and teal by messing with the color calibration, you guys could see, it was very strong with colors there, and I think it was a little bit too much. The tasteful orange and teal edits are done very subtly, like this photo, the edit is subtle. Most people wouldn't look at it and be like, "Oh, that's orange and teal." But it is, because we desaturated the colors where they needed to be desaturated, and we balanced everything out. I think it looks really, really cool. But that's the orange and teal look. It's a great look for Instagram, for any kind of social media, it's really popular right now. That's just because, like I said, the colors are complimentary. This is a color combination that you can play around with. I urge you to play around with these in other ways as well. Drag them the opposite way and see what that comes up with. It's more of a steampunk, cyberpunk kind of look. It's really, really cool. Play around with it, I think you can come up with some really cool combinations. But I just wanted to show you this, because I think it's a good example of how you can use color in a unique way. But now that we've talked about this, let's move on to the next photo, where I'm going to show you guys how you can use light in a unique way to really change the mood of the photo. We're going to be editing this photo here. Let's go do that now.
10. Dark and Moody Editing Style: Now that we've edited a photo with some unique color, now I want to edit a photo with some unique lights. This is going to be a darker, moody or style photo, but also with some deep and really earthy greens. It's a really cool look that I've always really liked. This is a photo I took in the Shire in Hobbiton New Zealand. This is where Lord of the Rings was filmed, as well as the Hobbit movies and it was incredible. I highly recommend you guys to check to splice out. It was one of the best cuteness places I've ever seen in my life. But we got a pretty cool photo here, with this bright sky and then this lovely green down here. But I really like to make my photos dark and moody. That is one of my things on Instagram is dark and moody style. I like underexposing, I like a darker moody or look. First thing I'm going to do is hit R, and we're going to do our basic crop here. I'm just going to straighten it because I think that's all we really needed to do. Hit "Enter." Boom, we're good with that. Now we're going to move on to the basic adjustments here. I think the color balance is good where it's at. Then I'm just going to lower the exposure just a tad, maybe like 0.15 just to get us in that dark and moody mindset. Next thing I'm going to do is go down here to the highlights. I want going to reduce the highlights because we have this huge bright area in the sky here, so I'm going to bring them down like 56 right about there. Then I'm going to go up with the shadows. I'm going up with the shadows because we're really going to drop these blocks and I want to make sure that we still have some detail in those dark areas. For the whites, I'm going to go up a little bit. Maybe go up not too high, maybe just 25. Then I'm really going to take these blocks and I want to go way down. I'm going to go down to 75. Now this looks crazy, this looks like way too high of contrasts, the greens are just horrible. But wait, don't worry, we're not done yet. I'm going to go out with the clarity here and then I'm going to go down with the vibrant minus five. But this is where we're going to bring it back to normal somewhat with our basic S-curve here. We're going to make it darker and then we're going to soften out those blocks. We really crushed them before, but now we're going to soften them out with this beautiful S-curve here. Bring it down a little bit more. I really want this area nice and dark. This photo looks terrible right now I know. But once we edit the color here, it's going to turn back to normal. There's one adjustment that I'm going to make that's really going to bring this photo into a really good state. That is just desaturating the green here. The green is just standing out so much. But if I take this slider here and just drag that down, look what that does, that's amazing. It completely transforms our photo. Now this is a photo that I really like, and it's a style that I think is really cool. We've got some really natural nice colors here with the orange and the yellow and the bushes and this blue door here, and then the green is really mysterious, dark, and then we have these lovely white flowers. I just balanced everything out. I just really love this composition and it's amazing how just desaturating the greens can completely change the photo. This is something that I've talked about in YouTube tutorials. How to get these deepen earthy greens. It's just a matter of desaturating them. But once we've done that, we pretty much have most of our look. It's already a really cool photo. We can just go through and do different things to make sure that it's where we want it. I'm going to add a gradient filter here, and I'm actually going to make this area down here, darker. I'm going to do that by just dragging the exposure down. That's just going to enhance that dark mood a little bit more. We can even go here to the Dehaze slider and just drag that up a little bit. That'll actually dark in that area as well. If we want, we can continue to extend this and soften it out, but I don't want to do too much. I'm just going to maybe finger right there. That looks pretty good. Hit "Enter" there, and that's just going to make sure that our eyes are not getting dragged too far down here, but they're mostly staying in this area. We can do the other thing on the other side as well. Just add a one here, and that's same thing. It's just going to keep our eyes where we want them. Then you can continue to add different filters. We can add a radial filter here, which is just a circular area. Make sure we invert that. In inverting it, we'll make sure we're only editing this area here. Then we can do the opposite. We made these areas dark, or we can make these areas bright here. We could just drag that exposure of a little bit, just a tiny bit. Maybe increase the clarity a little bit. Then our eyes are just going up here into this little house, up the frame, etc. This is a photo I love and that is how I would get the dark and moody look. We're just really bringing down those blocks, lowering the exposure, and then softening everything out with this small adjustment here in the tone curve. Then finally, we're just going into the HSL sliders, the color to tone down those colors that are really standing out above the others. In this case, it's green. That's about it. This is a really cool edit. This is a really cool photo and I hope it was helpful for you guys. But now that we've done our image that really reflects a unique color combination and now we've done an image that reflects a really cool lighting combination. Now I want to move on to the last photo here, which is a vintage style portrait that has a lot of texture, you can see it here. Let's go edit this photo now.
11. Vintage Portrait Editing Style: This is a photo I took in Bangkok with my good friend from France and it's a really nice photo, just a nice portrait. This is shown on the cannon to the colors are a little bit different than the last two images that we edited, but it's a great photo. When I see this photo and I see her look in her expression and everything, I just want to edit it in a vintage look. That's just the feeling I get, and I'm really drawn to vintage style portraits. I think they look really cool, so I'm going to edit this photo in that style, and it's actually pretty simple to do that. The first thing I'm going to do here is adjust the exposure. Just go up a tiny, tiny bit, moving down into the highlights, I'm going to increase them a little bit and that's because we're working with skin here. When we're working with skin, we really need to make sure that our skin looks good. We can do that by ensuring that our highlights are at a good level. If we bring down the highlights, the skin gets flat. If we increase the highlights, it really brings out her skin and it looks really good. With the shadows, I'm going to bring them up just a tiny bit, maybe +10. We can bring the whites up a little bit, but we don't want to go overboard because it really just affects your skin in a negative way. I'm just going to go up to maybe 20, then I'm going to go down with these blacks here just to increase our contrast there. The contrast is pretty high here and vintage photos traditionally didn't have a high contrast look, but we're going to flatten out that contrast and the tone curve. But before we do that, I'm going to go into this global slider here and just bring down the vibrance. The reason for that is because vintage photos aren't vibrant. They have softer colors. The sensors are old school but not vibrant like images are today. Going into the RGB channel here in the tone curve, I'm going to add our famous three points. I'm going to drag down the shadows here and then I'm going to soften everything out, and once again, this softness is what's going to make the photo of vintage look. The reason for that is because back in the days of film, film has very high dynamic range. When I say dynamic range, I mean it keeps a lot of detail in the highlighted areas and in the shadowed areas. We can kind of mimic that film look by really flattening out the images. Even though we have a high contrast look, we can really flatten out the blacks and flatten out the whites here in the tone curve and that's going to give us that vintage style look. We're going to have a pretty heavy S-curve here and that's going to make sure everything is nice and flat. But here I think the whites are a little bit strong, so I'm going to go back up here. I'm going to lower the whites a little bit, and I'm going to increase the exposure because I feel like the photo is a little bit dark. Just going back and forth between the tone curve and the basic adjustments here because that's how we can get the exposure and the light, everything where we want it. But I think that looks pretty good. Let's see the before here to the after, before, after we have like a high-contrast look, but it's really flat. I think it looks really good. Now, one of the things I want to do is add a color overlay to this image, and the reason for that is because depending on the film that you'd be shooting with on a film camera, each film has its own kind of tone, its own kind of color. Some films are warmer, some films are cooler, and where cameras have white balance built-in to them now in the censors, each film was different. You used a different film if you're shooting indoors it's different film, if you're shooting outdoors on a sunny day, etc. We can actually do split toning to add a color overlay here and I'm going to do it with the highlighted areas because we have a lot of highlights and our skin is highlighted, and I'm just going to drag this hue over while holding "Option", and that's going to show us 100 percent saturation of whatever color will sampling. I'm dragging over here, I want to go for a warm look. I'm going to find something orangeish, yellowish, and then I'm going to release "Option" with my left hand, and I'm just going to drag up this saturation slider here until we get that warm look that I want. That looks pretty good. I think that's pretty cool. You can see the difference here before and after. Before, after. It just adds so much more color, and it gives us that kind of a warm summer vibes. I just really, really like it. You can also do this with the temperature slider. You can just increase the warmth there, but that's increasing the warmth of the whole image and the reason why I like the split toning, because it's leaving these areas, the dark areas out of the equation. It's not adding this color to those areas, it's only adding this color to the highlighted areas. Split toning is a really cool feature if you want to get this vintage look. But the reason I chose to edit a venture style photo is not to show you how to use split toning or anything like that. It's to show you how you can implement digital noise grain into your photo to give it texture and give it detail that just makes it more tasteful. Once again, we're going back to the film look, film cameras, especially if you're shooting with a film that had a higher ISO of 800 or 1600, those films looked really, really grainy. If you come to the effects here and you can just take this grain and just bring it up. We can highlight a dark area here to truly see the level of that grain. We can drag it up maybe to about 50, and then we can actually increase the size. Some people, they don't like film grain, they're against it. and that's because as photography has developed over time, it's always been eliminated as much noise as possible, eliminated as much grain as possible to keep the images sharp as possible and as most saturated. But there's something beautiful about these old photos that have texture and emotion in them and they look really good. I don't think there's any problem with adding some digital grain here. You can play around with the roughness as well and that'll just increase the dramaticness of that phone grain, and I just think that that's such a better looking photo than soft with no grain. It just adds so much texture and I think it just looks a lot cooler. That's why I chose this photo is to show you guys how you can add grain to give it a really cool look, but this is a photo that I love and I actually had a lot of my portraits in this vintage style look. It's a look I really like, and a lot of my presets in my portrait pack have this look as well, very soft, and warm, and grainy as well. I think it's a cool look. I hope this was helpful and I hope it was a good example of how you can use detail to add a little bit of emotion to your photos. But with that said, I hope one of these styles appeal to you, whether it be the origin teal look, the dark and moody or this vintage portrait. These are all styles that I liked, but you don't necessarily need to like them. I just hope that it was helpful for you in some way. But with that said guys, let's move on to the next section.
12. Summing Things Up: Hi guys. We talked about a lot of different things in this course, and I hope it's been helpful for you this far. Before you go, I want to give you a few tips that you can take home with you, and chew on a little bit. Think about, that'll help you grow going forward. The first one is to stay open-minded when it comes to finding your unique editing style. It is going to take time, it is going to take effort, and you're not going to get it right away. But every time you edit a photo, does it come out the way you want it to or whatever. You're learning something. You're learning how to better navigate the software, which allows you to edit your photos in the future and it's also teaching you, what things that you like in your photos it. Both of those things are very important. That's what I mentioned earlier on in this course, is yes, you need to have the understanding that style is organic and that it does take time to grow and adapt, but you also need to have the understanding that there are practical sides of editing in the forms of light, color, and detail. If you can fully understand those more objective sides, those physical sides of a photograph, that is going to help you find your style in the future. Keep both of those things in mind moving forward and just be open with it. Don't worry about getting it right, right away. The more often you edit, the better you're going to become. I'm still learning things about editing, even though I've been a photographer for so long, and every time I look at a photographer's work and I think that their style is unique, and I pull something from that. Inspiration and I look at those photos and I look at those digital aspects, I say, "Oh, they're using contrast really interestingly here or I really like the colors here", I take note of those things. Then when I go to edit my own work, I'm implementing them as well and it's changing, etc. Your style is going to change over time. It's going to grow, it's going to adapt, and it's going to become something awesome that you can be proud of and that you can be excited to share with others and that's all I want. I want you to feel comfortable with your style and I want you to be excited about things that you're creating. But with that said guys, that's all I got for you today. I really hope this course was helpful for you. If it is, please leave a review because that's very helpful for me. Also complete the course project, because I love seeing your work and I want to comment on it and I want to check it out. This stuff is really interesting to me so, please take the time to do that. Also if you guys want to check me out on Instagram, you can do that at Sean Dolt. I'm really active there and I'm going to respond to you dm's. We're going chat a little bit, so reach out to me and let's talk. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a question in the discussion of this course, that will give me the opportunity to respond as well as other students in the class to respond as well. There's a lot of really talented people that take these courses so, that's what's so cool about posting your class projects. There's a lot of other talented photographers who are going to see it. I'm not the best photographer in the world. There's a lot of awesome photographers that take my courses too, so please take the time to do that. I can't wait to chat with you. I can't wait to see your projects. With that said guys, I will definitely see you in my next course. I hope you have an awesome day.
Sean Dalton, Travel Photographer
