Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Tabitha. In this photography class, we're going to be creating an eye-catching, colorful flat lay. This type of photo is super shareable for Instagram and it's really easy to create because you probably have all this stuff around your house to make it. This class is great because it gives you an excuse to run around and find a bunch of objects that are all the same color, put them together in a shot, take a picture and share it, and it is a really satisfying quick project for a weekend or an afternoon. I started creating these photos as an excuse to get used to using the light in my new space. This is my new office here in Portland, I moved earlier this year, and it's been a little bit tricky for me to figure out how to use this space like I used to use my previous space. So creating all these different colorful flat lays, one for every color, was a really great exercise and it gave me an excuse to figure out, how does the light work on a cloudy day or a sunny day or the morning or evening, summer, or fall? It's a really fun flex, you can tune in your lighting, you can fine-tune your composition skills in this class. So wherever you are, whether you're a beginner or more of an intermediate level photographer, I think that this class is going to be helpful because it's going to force you to use those muscles and keep sharp with your photography. For the class project, we are going to be creating a colorful flat lay. I'm really excited to see the class project section after we get a few projects in there because it's going to be really, really vibrant and full of color and really, really fun. With all that being said, my name is Tabitha, I am a lifestyle, product, and food photographer, and also a teacher here on Skillshare. I'm really excited to dive into this class project with you, so let's get started.
2. You Will Need: Thanks so much for joining me. For the class project, we are going to be creating a color focused flatly. You can stick with the classic monochrome where everything is the same color. You can play around with the duochrome where you have two colors. You could do prismatic where you have a full rainbow, or you can kind of play with somewhere in-between and maybe get a slow gradient. Whatever you decide, I have a ton of Pinterest ideas in a Pinterest board for you. You can go ahead and go there if you're looking for extra ideas. To get started, we're going to need a camera. I'm gonna be using a mirror-less camera and my phone. Feel free to use whatever camera that you are comfortable with. If you have a choice in lenses, I would recommend something with a focal length between 28 - 85 millimeters. This is just going to give us the least amount of distortion and we'll talk about that later. You will need a plain white backdrop. You could use other colors if you want. You could use a homemade backdrop with a little bit of texture if you want, but I like to keep it really clean and really simple so that the objects in the shot are our main focus. I recommend a piece of white foam core. It's going to be really clean, really affordable. You can pick it up from the grocery store in the office supply crayon aisle typically for only a few dollars. I love using these, they are technically disposable, but I try and use them as long as I can, and then I retire them into reflectors. If you don't already have a reflector, I recommend getting two pieces of foam core so that you can use one as a reflector, and that's just going to make our pictures look a little bit better if you do not like to hand-hold your camera when you're taking a picture, this one is going to be an overhead shot. If you want to use a tripod, I recommend a tripod with an extension arm that you can position and aim down at your scene so that you don't have to hold onto your camera. Up until a month ago, I have just shot everything handheld but either works just fine. Like I said, I've been shooting handheld for a really long time and it totally is effective and works as long as you hold very still. Then the last thing you will need is your objects in color, whatever colorway you decide. We will go ahead and start collecting our objects in the next section.
3. Collecting Objects: Let's go ahead and start collecting our items. I recommend grabbing a box to keep everything in because making a pile in one space can sometimes be a little chaotic, especially if you've got things rolling off the table so a box is great. Any kind of box you want. We're going to go around and try and collect a bunch of things from around the house. Some ideas to get your mind going. Crayons, markers, art supplies, office supplies, those are some easy wins, typically those things. The important part about them is the fact that they are colorful and so they're a great choice for this. Same with paint tubes or nail polish. I like to grab stuff like that. Then sometimes you'll find random things like guitar picks, playing cards, anything like that. Keep in mind you don't want anything too big. I would avoid anything larger than a grapefruit just because it tends to dominate the scene. Unless of course, you want to do something, here's all the types of soccer and footballs we have in the garage, that type of scene where larger objects make sense. But for the most part, I like to stick with things that are grapefruit-sized or smaller and don't forget about teeny tiny things. I have little Perler beads or buttons, just anything that's going to be really tiny in your shop. Maybe little teeny tiny Legos, raiding your kid's toy box is a really good idea. You could even have them help you. I recommend that, make them do the work. Get all these colorful items for you so that you can just lay it out beautifully. You want to go ahead and gather more items than you think that you'll need. Because you're going to get to the point where you're all styled and you have one hole in your scene that's like, I wish I had one more object to fill in this scene, and it's annoying to have to stop what you're doing and run around your house to try and find the perfect thing in the right color. Definitely collect tons and tons of things because it's better to have options when you're styling than to have to chase stuff later. If you want to incorporate a specific theme like office supplies or makeup supplies or children's toys, that's awesome, and that's going to be a really clear story. But also remember you don't have to, your items don't have to be related at all because they're already related by color. Because color is the emphasis, that's enough of a story and it's okay if some things are a little bit random. If you need inspiration, I have a whole Pinterest board that's organized by color and it shows a bunch of different ideas. Maybe if you're like, "I don't know what I could possibly collect." You can take a glance in there and see what pops out to you and what seems like it might be a fun thing to tackle. Once you have gone through and collected all of your items that fit your colorway, we are going to go ahead and start setting up our lighting so that we can take our photo.
4. Lighting: Welcome to my studio, which happens to be my kitchen in my new space here in Portland. It's been a little tricky to figure out exactly how to set up, but I think I have honed it in. We have these big windows that are east-facing, so we have some east-facing light. It's about 11:30 AM in the winter time. The sun was shining in, I had a little beam of light right here earlier this morning but I had to wait for it to go away. If you're dealing with direct light coming through your window, I recommend trying to defuse it. The best, most simplest way to diffuse it is to get a roll of tracing paper and use it to block those direct hot beams of light. Because I don't have any right now, we're not going to use the tracing paper. I have my plain, white piece of foam core set up. I have it set up here. The light is coming down this way, and I'm going to be shooting from this direction. What we want is for the light to fall down across our scene. This is the bottom of the scene and this is the top of the scene. This is going to give the shot a right-side-up feel. If you're shooting this direction and the shadows are going up in the shot, it's going to feel a little bit upside down, and so we want to make sure we set up right here. Since I'm going to be taking pictures for Instagram, I want to do a tall shot, so I'm going to be planning on standing here. I also have my tripod with a tripod arm over my scenes so that it can take pictures from directly above as well. The next part I want to show you is my second piece of foam core, which I will be using as a reflector. I'm going to be positioning it right here, directly opposite the light so that the light can bounce off of it and fill in my shadows. This is also going to help even out the backdrop because obviously, the part of the backdrop that's closer to the window is going to be brighter than the one that's further away, and so this will help make it look like all-one-tone, hopefully. If you cannot shoot with natural light, if you can't see with windows during the day and you want an artificial lighting solution, my best suggestion is to get as big of a diffuse light as possible. You're basically wanting to replicate the look of a natural window light, so a big light source from an angle. I wouldn't use overhead lighting because you're going to be shooting down, so the overhead light will cast your arms' shadow on your scene and that's just not going to be very effective. So avoid using overhead lighting. Get a lamp, position it sideways, diffuse it with piece of tracing paper and you should be good to go. Now that we've dialed in our lighting for this shot, I have my bucket of colorful objects, and I am going to start setting them up in the next section.
5. Styling and Composition: I have my box of red items and I'm going to be organizing them here on my scene. Remember I mentioned pre-planning in the previous section so thinking about, where's this photo going to end up? Mine's going to be on Instagram. I want to keep my scene to a four by five or square. I'm going to give myself a little bit of space around the edges, maybe two inches so that I have a little bit of flexibility and cropping. Thinking about that before I start setting up all my items and having them be too close and having to scoot everything, it's just going to be a little simpler, so trying to keep it here. I want to start with some of the bigger, clunkier items. They're really good to start with because they're harder to put big stuff in at the end. So starting with large stuff and then moving to smaller stuff to fill in those spaces. This Game Boy is a really good option for a starting piece because it's square so it's going to give me a really sharp edge on this bottom of my frame. Keep in mind, I'm going to be shooting this direction, so the shadows are going to come down this way. This is the natural bottom of my shot. You can also see I've got a little bit of a heavy shadow, so I'm hoping that I can fill that in with a reflector when we get to shooting. I'm going to just start here and I'm just going to go ahead and place the items down and fill in my scene as makes sense. Again, starting with some of these bigger things. These two hug into each other because they both have some gentle curves, I think that's a really effective thing there. I think I want to stop here. I'm visualizing my shape to be about like this. Let's do some pencils. I've got five different shades of red pencils here. If I set them up in my scene like this and I get them really close to each other, they're each casting a shadow. They look a little bit bigger. If you do it this way, you're going to want to give them a little bit of space and if you just don't love the shadow that the pencils are casting, you can always just rotate them so that now their shadow cast down and they stand up a little bit better. Another option for this is, if you are working with your lighting in your scene, you can always move your board a little bit and play with the shadow direction that way. But I'm going to keep these tall just so we have a nice, clean look. I'm not going to worry about making them perfect right now because I'm still adding stuff to my scene and it's a pain to try and make it perfect and then have to move it later so that's good enough for now. I'm just going to keep filling in objects here. It's a good idea to keep families together. All these pencils are the same, keeping them together rather than spreading them around, it makes them their own unit. That can be really effective in the shot. The scene doesn't have necessarily a specific idea, it's mostly just random things that are red that I found. I have a little bit of a video game aspect going with different cards and players. That ended up being cool. I also have a bag of perler beads which I'm intending to add at the very end for texture and to fill in some of these bigger gaps that I can't put a full object in. I'm going to save this. It's some random stuff here. I like keeping things on the parallel and perpendicular lines. Keeping it parallel and perpendicular to my crop lines, I think it ends up being a really effective looking shot rather than getting things diagonally. I feel like that introduces lines that maybe don't go with the whole scene. If you wanted to commit to a diagonal, I would say you can start putting things on the same diagonal, but it's a little trickier to get all the angles to match up. I like to just stick with parallel and perpendicular lines. It's helpful to take into account the visual weight of some of these items. If you have something like a grape fruit that's quite large, it's going to cast a very prominent shadow and it's going to have a lot more visual weight. It's going to be heavier, it's going to be more substantial than things that are a lot smaller. This has a very light visual weight It's small, it's fine, it is primarily open space, negative space here. This has a completely different weight overall than something like this, which is a solid red. Adding both of these types of objects gives you a little bit more visual contrasts. You have things that are very red or things that have a little bit more texture, more white space. When I'm doing a monochrome scene like this, I try to avoid anything that has a lot of other colors. I wouldn't put this perler bag in here because it's got a big patch of blue and green, but somehow this little box of matches doesn't offend me as much because it only has a tiny stripe of blue and if I was really concerned about that, I could always turn it out and post. Since I have this box of matches, I thought it would be fun to include the actual matches because then, that ties in that way. Maybe we find a little spot for these little matches, line them all up and then we include something like that. I've got a second nail polish, like the first nail polish, now I have the second nail polish. Now that item doesn't seem as odd. I try not to put things upside down if it has text on it. I'm going to see if I can find a better spot for this nail polish maybe it fits in, a little better. Yeah, maybe somewhere like that. This is a little Christmas tree ornament that the cat likes to chew on. It has a fun shape, so I thought it might be interesting to include tied stuff in, but we'll see if it stays. That got it. Will you give it back? Well, I guess the birds are not going to make it in the pic. She's chasing it around now. Well, let's now have this one. This sharpie is an awesome tool to use for this area because, I feel like where the pencils end, this spot is very empty, but I can move those tabs up or down. Because the sharpie is only read on one side, I feel like it balances really well because you have this strong, significant corner point and then the gray part of the sharpie doesn't draw your eye as much, but it's still continues that line and then it's caught back up with these little matches. I love the way that looks. My bird is back. Let's put the bird back in here and then I need to fill in. My scissors are a little too close to this crop edge so I'm going to try and bring them in a little closer. Then the bird has a fun shape, so I can move around it. Let's get a little thumb tack in here. Maybe right in here. That might roll. If things are rolling, if you have a lot of rolling objects, you can always put down a little bit of salt, like really fine salt. Just a little bit to add some grit to keep your objects from rolling all over the place. This typically happens if you're on a little bit of a slope and it can be super frustrating, especially if you're working with a lot of rolling objects. Just a little bit of salt, not too much because it can cast shadows if you're not careful and it can show up in the final image, but you should be fine. Oh, my gosh. Just kidding. We're not going to use the bird, it's too tempting [inaudible]. Always collect a few more items than you think you'll need because your cat might take off with something and then you have to fill it in later. She's making so much noise. How about some playing cards? Maybe we can fill this space with playing card. I like to keep shapes together. Circle, circle, circle and putting those near each other in the shot. All my pencils are the same shape and they're together. You're going to have to take that away from her. I like this pen, but it's just too huge. I think I'm just going to take the cap and just use that to fill in this weird gap caused by the scissors. Inch those in. This is a little bit of a puzzle trying to figure out exactly how it fits in. I've practiced this scene a few times and it always comes out differently. If you're not loving the way it's looking, you can always just put it all back and start over because sometimes, giving yourself a fresh scene to work with it makes your brain go okay, it unlocks some new ideas in different shapes and looks. If it's not turning out how you like, you can always just start over and see if maybe the next iteration is better than the first one. Now, that I've gotten a lot of my big items put away, before I add my little fill, my Perler beads, I'm just going to go through and get these as straight as possible. With pencils, I like to see the logo, but it's tricky to get it to show the logo on all of them. So you can commit and really just get them all perfect or you can just say, "You know what, people know these are Prismacolor pencils. This is not a brand deal." I don't have to show the logo in every single one. I do like to put them in a gradient order though, so I will rearrange to make sure that the dark is on one end then it goes to lighter as best I can. They're all the same color. Then one other quick thing that I want to show you. If I take another playing card, I can use it to shape things up. If I come in, I can just push gently and it will line things up very nicely without disturbing a lot of my scene. I do this a lot with really small objects because once I get my fingers in there, it's really, really easy to accidentally bump stuff that you don't want to bump. Going in with a credit card, or a playing card, or anything like that, that's got a nice straight edge that's quite thin, it's really helpful in just getting everything nice and straight. Now that we're pretty close, I'm going to go ahead and start filling in with these Perler beads. I spilled the rest in my box. I have one little spot here in this corner that's not perfect. It's not giving me that sharp angle that's as intentional as the other three. I'm going to try just to swap it out maybe with a different object. I like that more. That's just like, hello, this is the edge here. I can even tuck this guy in here because it's just the perfect shape. Then now, I think I've got a little bit of a chip right here that I could fill in. I'm just going to take my little Perler beads. I like to put them in a line. This gives your scene a little bit of texture because it's creating a lot of information in one little small spot. It helps these not feel random like confetti, they're not confetti. They are a little family of perfect, little, tiny Perler beads. I tend to go with a grid. I think about pixels and I put right here two by three, it works really well. If I add a little red Lego, that would be the perfect thing for this tiny little corner. Raid your toy box, your kid's toy box, or your office supply drawer for paperclips. There's always something that fits in perfectly. Like I grabbed this guitar pick because I was like, oh, I think there's a red guitar pick in the dryer, and there was. That looks good. That fills in nicely. Let's see if I have any other spaces that feel like they might need a little something. I have one more drink tab, but I don't want him to be separate from his little family. I don't like the look of a two row unless it's like a grid. I probably won't include that just because its already existing here in the shot. I have a heavy shadow from this Game Boy. Sometimes I like to come in with my reflector and fill in some things, just so I can see exactly what is going to be a heavy shadow and what's going to just go away with my reflector. Here it is with my reflector in here. I think that it looks really effective. I'm not going to worry about filling in that space below the Game Boy because we do want there to be shadow there and I don't want whatever ends up there to just disappear completely. I'm going to do that. You can see the shadow underneath the match boxes a little bit heavy because the Game Boy's blocking this light that's hitting it. I might try and just scoot it up just a little bit, so that he's got separation between those two things. We want to make sure nothing is exactly touching because that's going to create a tangent and make your eye draw right toward it. Once you feel like you're pretty happy with how your scene is, I recommend looking at it through the lens of your camera, the one you're going to be shooting with. If it's your phone, hold your phone up over the scene and make sure that your edges are straight. Make sure that it looks good on your camera. Because a lot of times, you go to shoot and you're like, "Why is this a little bit off? I need to move this." Because what your eyes are seeing is a little different than what your camera will see. I definitely recommend look at your seen through the lens when you're getting close to finishing up, because there's going to be a few things that you want to shim this way or that way just to make it as clean as possible when you get to shooting. For this shot, for example, I have my overhead camera shooting down, filming right now, but eventually shooting. I can see with my little flip up screen where my lines are. I can look down at the scene and I can be like, okay that pen is a little bit too far out. This one needs to scoot this way or that way. I've got a visual eye while I'm working. If you don't have a little flip-out screen, you can always plug your camera in with a laptop. You can tether and show it on a different screen so you don't have to climb up and down, and all around. I have to set up on my table. If you can set up on the floor, that's always a good option because it means you can stand while you're shooting instead of having to climb up on top of stuff. But because my windows don't go all the way to the floor like they used to, I am setting up on the table. Therefore, my tripod is on the table as well. I'm going to look at it through this. That would be fun. Okay, one more quick thing to point out. I have this pencil sharpener right next to this little Perler ornament. They are technically lined up. But because the pencil sharpener is taller, it's casting a longer shadow. It helps to make them not lined up. If you have shadows that you want to like having it scooched up just a little bit makes these feel more in line because of that shadow. Knowing that if you shim up perfectly all of the edges and then it doesn't quite look right keep in mind that the shadows have their own way and they're going to affect how that looks. I think we are pretty much there. The Game Boy is producing a very heavy shadow, so I'm going to scoot it up just a smidge. I'm pretty happy with that. Once you have your scene exactly how you want it, we can start setting up our camera and shooting in the next section.
6. Overhead Shooting: Now it's time to get the shot. I have a camera set up on a tripod. This is a tripod, it's new to me, so I'm a little clumsy with it, but I think I've set it up okay. This is my new tripod with a tripod arm so that I can do overhead shooting, hands-free. Before I use a tripod, I did most of my shooting just hand-holding. If you're hand-holding, which is totally I still handled most of the time because I don't like fussing with tripods. But either way, if you're hand-holding just make sure that you have a really steady grip. If I was set up on the floor, I would tuck my elbows in nice and tight and I would make sure that I have a very stable stance to separate your feet a little bit so that you're really strong when you're aiming using up your little, viewfinder is a great option as well. Just making sure that you're not all over the place because then you can introduce some camera shake that's making your picture not super sharp, and we want really sharp pictures. Whether you're hand-holding or you have a tripod, I recommend setting up the grid view. So you can set up your camera's grid view in the settings. I don't know how to do it on every specific camera, but if you just quickly Google the name of your camera and then grid on, you should be able to find a step-by-step on how to get your grid on. If you're shooting with your phone, it's in the settings, it'll be on the same camera settings section. I always have grids on when I'm shooting because I want to make sure that my lines are really straight, especially for a shot like this. When you're positioning your camera, you want to make sure that your lens is hitting the very center of your frame. If your lens is aiming the center bottom, it's going to add some distortion to the top of the scene that makes it really tricky to edit. Just try and line it up as best you can right over the center of your scene, and then focus on something in the middle too. That way, you know that you're going to get the best sharpest looking image possible. If you are working with a DSLR or mirrorless and you have a choice of a lens focal distance, I recommend anywhere between 28 millimeters and 85 millimeters. If you go any wider, like 14 or 18, you're going to get some distortion in the picture, that's going to be less effective. It just means that your shots are not going to be perfectly straight unless you are fixing that in the editing section, which I will show you how to do if you only have one type of lens to work with. On the other end, if you're shooting with 120, you're going to have get so far away from your scene that it makes it a little bit frustrating to work with. I recommend somewhere in that mid range to work with 50 millimeter, 35 millimeter. All of that will be awesome. When you are setting up your crops, right now in my camera I flip the screen up so I can see what I'm looking at and I'm cropping pretty liberally. I've got the table in the shot. I've got the tripod legs in the shot. I want to make sure I have as much of this white background as possible, because when I'm cropping in later, I'm going to give myself a lot of flexibility because I've set it up to be a four by five, but what if I wanted a square instead? Now I just need to make sure I have enough space on either side to give myself room to work with, room to have flexible cropping later. I know that I'm going to crop this in, so I don't mind that the edges of my frame include the table and the tripod legs and all that stuff. Make sure that you don't have any objects nearby that are casting weird colors. If I had a big blue vase right here, it might show some blue light into my scene that's going to be a little bit annoying to edit out later. Make sure that you're wearing really neutral clothes. I don't have very neutral hair. I probably could pull it up if the light was hitting me and it was adding red into my red scene, but it should be fine. As far as camera's settings go, I have focused on the scene. Most of my objects are less than an inch high, so I can get away with a really narrow depth of field. My aperture currently is set to f/4, and that's going to be awesome. I could probably go down to f/2.8, f/1.8 maybe, because the things are really close to each other. If you get too narrow though and imagine if you had a grapefruit next to a bunch of jelly beans, you have to decide, do I focus on the top of the grapefruit or the jelly beans? Because one or the other is going to be out of focus with a really narrow aperture. If you have a lot of varying heights of objects, I would recommend shooting closer to f/8, just making sure that everything in the scene is in focus. Flat lays are nice because you have a really flat scene to work with. You don't have to worry about incorporating a lot of visual depth, but just keep that in mind. You don't want to go back later and find out that the tallest thing in your scene is perfectly in focus and everything else is blurry. That would be a big bummer. Making sure that you're choosing an aperture that's going to be appropriate for your scene, I'm going to stick with f/4 for mine. My shutter speed is set to 1/160th of a second. I'm on a tripod so I could get away with a pretty slow shutter speed like 1 over 60. I could get away with having it really slow. If you're hand-holding, I wouldn't go any slower than 1 over 125th just because it's a lot easier to get camera shake in those scenes, especially if you're holding it with your hands and you're not super steady and it's hard to get just perfectly over it. Give yourself a little bit of wiggle room, maybe even step it up to 1 over 160th or 1 over 200 just to make sure that you are not introducing any camera shake in your shot. Then lastly, ISO, I always save the ISO for the end because it's the one that's making usually the least amount of change in your shot. We set the ISO to compensate for the aperture and the shutter speed that we picked. So mine is currently is set to 800, but it's a pretty bright day, 800 isn't bad for this camera. If you're using a really, really old camera, bigger ISOs are going to introduce a lot of noise, but I'm going to show you how to reduce that noise in the editing section. Don't be afraid to increase your ISO to 1,600 or 3,200 if it means you're going to get the most effective exposure with your aperture and shutter speed settings. Don't be afraid to be a little bit flexible with your settings. Try out a few things. If your picture comes out a little dark, or a little too bright, we can fix a little bit of that impulse, but try and get as close of a proper exposure as you can. The other thing to keep in mind when we are shooting on a white backdrop, your camera is going to naturally want to make that white gray. If you're shooting on auto and your pictures are coming out dark and you're like, "Why is it coming out dark?" It's because your camera is trying to do the work for you and it's trying to make this not be too bright. You might have to tell your camera, "No, I'm shooting on white and this is what I want" and so overriding that using the manual settings is something that you'll have to do. Now that we've talked all about our camera's settings, we can go ahead and get shootings. Let me show you what my scene looks like currently. I have set it to manually focus, so I autofocus on something here and then I switched my lens to manual, just so it's not going to be panning around as my hands move. I'm going to go ahead and take a picture here so you can see what we've got. I have a really proper exposure, but the one thing that my eye is drawn to is this really heavy shadow that my Gameboy is spilling onto my scene. Like I mentioned before, we are going to be using this reflector, so I'm going to bring this in and it's going to fill in those heavy shadows. You can play around with it, see if it needs to be tall or if you can get away with having it wide. I'm actually going to take this little clamp and see if that'll set up nicely for me. It's a little bit off-center. I'm going to put the clamp on the other side just so it's not in my scene. Once I have this in position, I'm going to bring you a little closer because you probably can't see what I'm working on. Let's get in a little closer. I'm going to snap a few with my phone while I have it. What we want to do is again, give ourselves room around the edges to crop. This is doing a lot for adding in light in my shadow areas, which is great, and then I'm probably going to also help it out a little bit in the editing section. If it's not perfect on your end, just keep in mind there's a lot we can do to just really make the picture great in the next section. Let's go ahead and take a few pictures. I'm just making sure that I am positioned exactly over my scene, giving myself space to work with and tapping to focus. If you're using your phone or if you've used your lens a lot and you haven't cleaned it, make sure you clean off your lens because it's going to look really smudgy and cloudy looking if you don't clean off your lens. It's a great idea to use a little lens cleaning cloth and just get that as clean as possible before you start shooting. I'm just going to come in and get a few different crops, making sure that I also get the pictures with my big camera. I'm even going to zoom in a little bit here to get all of the table out of the shot. Get myself a few options to work with as we edit later. I'm going to switch back into autofocus. Make sure I'm nicely lined up. I definitely think we've got a few angles to work with. Keep in mind this top part of your frame. If you're looking a lot down here and you're like, "Oh, this is properly exposed." You might be overexposing some of these objects that are a lot closer to your light, so just make sure that you're not doing that and that everything is properly exposed. Everything looks good through the camera, and we got a lot of very clean. You don't need to take a ton of the same shot, just make sure that you have one that's really good. I recommend looking through your camera and making sure that you're good to go before you clean up the scene. Then another thing to do while you already have the setup is to try and find other little hidden stories. Try out different crops, maybe on an angle or coming in using backlighting to make everything stand out. You can get a lot of fine alternate shots this way. Maybe utilizing this sharp corner. This is good, just texture shots. They're great to fill in Instagram feed aside from your main shots. See if you can find other shots within the main shot. That's something that I like to do. It's also nice because if I have to do a cover image, I need something that's not this shape. I need something that's long. That'll be a good cover shot, so I always try to get my cover shot. When you're working with a phone, if you've got the grid mode set on. This is an iPhone X and it has a little plus sign. Well, you can see that there's a little plus sign on the screen when you're hovering over your scene. It's golden and when it matches up perfectly it just locks in, so you know that your camera is perfectly parallel to your scene. This helps not get distorted shots that are taken from an angle. It just makes it, so it's a really sharp, a perfect overhead flatly shot. I'm really happy with that, and I've gotten a few little close-up shots here. I'm probably actually going to take my camera down and get a few more with this guy. Making sure that I'm really utilizing and taking advantage of the time that I spent putting this scene together. Now, once you have the shot, a fun thing that I like to do just as a little bonus, is I like to take a video of me messing up the whole scene and then playing it backward. This makes it look like you put it together super quick and easy and so it's a really fun last-minute horor to do. The easiest, quickest way to reverse a video is to take the video into Snapchat, has to be less than 15 seconds. I keep that in mind when I do this thing so that I can easily reverse it into Snapchat. Otherwise, you can always pull it into Premiere or iMovie or whatever video editing software that you happen to have on your computer. That's just something to keep in mind as you go. So I'm going to go ahead and start taking a video. We'll start at the same time. Are you ready? Good, go. Here is how that video turned out the red one, I think it's super fun to see. Then I wanted to show you a really quick one I did it with a rainbow setup that I love so much. That's why I thought, okay, maybe this is going to be a fun thing for you guys to do as well. It's just really satisfying to make it look like it didn't take several minutes to set up your scene, but actually, it just took a few seconds. Anyway, now that we have that scene. Our scene is basically cleaned up at this point, so we can go ahead and take our memory cards to the computer and get editing to make them picture perfect and ready to share on Instagram.
7. Desktop Editing: Lightroom and Photoshop: Hi, I have my memory card, I'm going to go ahead and plug it in and we are going to start looking through our photos and picking the best one to edit. I am in Adobe Lightroom Classic. That's the Lightroom with the C, not the regular Lightroom. I am using version 10.1, and I am already selected into my album. I've imported these photos and I have picked my favorite, which is this one. I wanted to show you an example of an image that's not good. This one, if you zoom all the way in, the image, is out-of-focus. I don't want anything out of focus, so make sure you pick an image that is nicely parallel with your background and that your items are sharply in focus, which is this image for me, it's a little bit crooked, but that's an easy fix. If I scroll all the way in, I can see my details are nice and sharp. To get started, I want to apply a lens correction. If I scroll all the way down in this Lightroom menu to the Lens Correction section, make sure that it's highlighted to profile. I'm going to check this box, Enable Profile Corrections. It usually shifts the photo, but because I'm using a newer camera, I have to go in and manually select it. Awesome. I went in and selected my camera and lens. Let me show you this is before, and this is after. What it did, it's very subtle, it removed a dark vignette around the edge and it flatten the image so that it wasn't puckered or distorted. Let's say that you wanted to do this manually. Let's tap into the manual section. Let's say your lens, you did like a fish island. You got really close and used a fisheye and your photo looks bubbled like this. If you want to take that out, you can just play with this distortion slider until your image appears flat. Same goes for the opposite end. If your image feels puckered, you can drag the distortion to make it feel nicely, even dull. Then if you decide you don't want to do this distortion slider, you can double-click on the name-amount. This works for any of the sliders. If you're excellent, pull a slider, you can double-click and it will reset it back to zero if you click on the name. We're going to hit this little crop box right underneath the histogram and it's going to bring up our crop menu. I'm going to click on the word Original and change it to 4x5/8x10. This is the tall Instagram crop. You can also do a 1x1 crop in here. But we're going to go with the tall crop. I have my tall crop. I want to adjust it to give myself a little bit of breathing room around the edges. Once I feel happy with that and I've checked the angle, so see how this line on the bottom tilts down. If you click outside the crop box, you'll get a little angle adjuster and you can tweak the angle till it feels nice and perfect. It also gives you a secondary grid so that it's easier to line up those angles for you. I'm really happy with that. I'm going to click the crop box to accept and then we can tackle the exposure. One thing I want to point out is I'm editing on white, so I have a white scene and I'm editing on this white background in Lightroom. If you right-click on the background, you can change the color, you can change it to be black, you can change it to be middle gray. I like to change it to white when I'm editing on white so that I can make sure that the colors are right and that it's as bright as I want it to be. Because if you're editing on this dark gray, you're looking at this and you're thinking, "Oh, the background is white." Of course, because your eyes like to trick you. Let's change that to white just so we know what we're doing. Already I can see that my background is slightly bluish, so I'm going to sit and pull up the temperature slider. If you grab the little pin, sometimes it edits way too fast because it's hard to just do a fine-tune. What I actually like to do is hover over the number and it gives you a little finger-cursor with two arrows, you can click and drag, and it does a slightly finer tune, edit on that just so that you have a little bit more control. Somewhere around here feels right to me. It's hard to tell those subtle differences. Let's say you're down here and it's really cool if you're not sure what to do with this image, you can grab this little white balance selector and you can pick a target neutral. If you're shooting on white, your background should be pretty neutral. I'm going to click on that and it edits the entire photo to neutralize it based on this point that we selected. The image seems a little warm to me after we did that adjustment. I'm just going to bring that temperature slider down, just a hair, just to neutralize that background. It also feels slightly pink to me. I'm just going to bring my tint down just a little to the green side. Tint adjustments are very subtle. We don't want to do too much, but that's just enough to make it super neutral for me. Now that we've adjusted our light balance, let's tackle the exposure. I think it can go up just a hair, but we may adjust that again later. I'm going to bring the contrast up just so we have nice balance of brights and darks. I'm going to bring the shadow slider up. This is going to increase the light in a lot of these bigger bolder subjects. It's also going to wash out the image. I want to make sure I bring back that juicy as that contrast by sliding the black slider down. For this kind of image, I will crank the whites up just a little bit because I want that background really blowout and be nice and stark. I'm going to bring the whites slider up, and sometimes it makes items disappear like these matches. It's really hard to see them. I'm going to bring the highlights slider down just a little to try and bring those back just a hair. Let me show you it's very subtle. This is before highlights slider down, and this is after. It also brought in some darks. Maybe I'm going to bring that halfway between where it was, and then I'm actually going to go in and hand paint this. Let's open up our adjustment brush. That's this paintbrush over here. I'm going to make sure my effect is burn-darken, and I'm going to just color in this match. I don't want to make my paintbrush tool too big because I don't want to really affect my background. But I'm painting this in so that we can see the detail here and it brings those shadows back in so that you can see those matches a little better. Let me show you, this is before. Let's look at those matches. This is after, before, after. It just is like, "Hey, you guys are still here, don't worry, we haven't made you disappear to oblivion." One quick thing I wanted to show you see how the top of my image is white-white, it looks the same as the background, and then the bottom, there's a lot more contrast here. The bottom of my frame is darker than the top of my frame, even though I used a reflector, it's only going to take you so far. What I like to do is use a graduated filter that's this little middle icon here underneath the histogram. I click it to open and I'm going to change burn-darken to dodge-lighten. We're going to make it a little brighter. To use this tool, we have our little plus sign cursor. We're going to click where we want it to start and then let go where we want it to end. I'm going to click and drag. The center icon is the middle. I'm hovering over it right now so you can see where it's applying anywhere that is showing this red mask, that's what's getting affected by this. Then the distance between the center line and the other two lines is the fade. If you wanted it to be really sharp, you could adjust it like this, and then the fade is much sharper, but that is usually more obvious that you've done that. We want it to be nice and subtle. I give myself lots of space to work with. Then I want to just even do a double-check and make sure. Here is before the graduated filter focusing on the bottom half of this image here, and here is after. It seems a little bit bright. Brighten this up a little so now the picture feels a little unbalanced. I'm going to select it again by clicking that gray pin. Then I'm going to bring the exposure adjustment, which is set to 0.25. I'm going to bring it halfway down, so to 0.15, right there. That's just a little bit more subtle, but it's good enough that it evens out that background like we wanted. Now I want to increase the vibrance since color is a big part of this image. I like to use the vibrant slider because I feel like it's more natural slow gradation than the saturation slider, which goes crazy. That red is electric. It's a little intense, so I try not to do the saturation slider. I go for the vibrant slider first. Then from here I feel like the top of my image is just a little bit faded, a little bit blown out. I'm going to drag another graduated filter. This one, I'm going to select darken and I'm going to adjust it because I know the darken is going to do a big shadow. I'm going to make it just a lot more subtle, negative 0.1. I'm also going to do a contrast slide. I'm just going bring the contrast up to like 10, and then I'm going to drag my graduated filter down. This is just going to add contrast and just a little bit of darkness to help bring those pixels back to more of a middle area rather than really, really bright. I'm going to select this and then I'm going to show you what it did. This is before, focusing on the top of the image and this is after. Just enough to be like, hey, we're here and we're strong. That's what I've got there. Now that I feel like we're pretty much there in this basic slider, I want to show you something that you can do for fun. I'm scrolling down into the HSL color drawer. This is Hue, Saturation, Luminance. Let's say you felt like your red was just so dull and not very saturated at all, but you didn't want this blue area to be supersaturated. You could drag up just the red slider, maybe it's too bright, we can bring it down to tone it out a little bit. If you didn't like the blue section at all you could drag the blue slider down to completely desaturate, I took the blue and the aqua, and that would help take out any distracting colors that don't go with your color scheme. I personally feel like that blue is not too offensive, so I'm just going to go ahead and leave that in there. Let's say that you felt like your white background was nice in white, but all your red items seemed a little to orange and you wish they could be a pink or red. If you tap into the Hue slider, you can adjust how red, the red is, or how yellow, the yellow is. This more orange, there's a lot more yellows in this shot if I bring my red Hue slider up. If I bring it down, it's going to be a lot more pink, it's going to enhance more of those blue tones, a cooler version of the red. So you can really fine tune your image to precisely the shade of red that you want or whatever color that you happen to be working. I'm just going to bring my red slider down, just a hair just for fun. Then from here I want to sharpen and I think my image is almost ready. So let's scroll down to the detail draw. This is where we do our sharpening and our noise reduction. I mentioned before, if you're using a really high ISO, you might end up with some noise. A lot of these like little hairy pixels in here that are grainy, and distracting, and they're like fuzzy, they don't look very clean, we can clean that up using the noise reduction sliders. If you move the Luminance on the noise reduction up a little bit, so I moved it up to 27 it really smooths that out. I'm going to do a little bit more dramatic so you can see the difference. See how it's really smearing, kind of painterly. If you go back, here's your crunchy, and then here's your painterly. But if you feel like this is smudgy looking now, this is where our sharpen comes in. So we want to sharpen. I usually drag my sharpen slider up about halfway and then I'm going to take a mask to it. So let me show you what the mask does, if I pull this up, it looks like nothing's happening. When you're using the masking if you use the option key on your keyboard, it will turn your image black and white and show you what's being sharpened. So anything that's white, as I adjust the slider, the white in the image is getting a sharpen effect and the black is not getting sharpened. We don't want our background to look super sharp we just want the edges of our objects to be super sharp. This is more important with portraits than it is with objects because people don't want their skin to be super sharp, but they do want their hair and their eyelashes to be sharp. I bring up the masking so that the edges are nice and clean, and then I can zoom in here and look and see what we did. Before sharpening, my image was smudgy this logo was a little bit harder to read and then after it's just like, nice and clean. But we still have those smooth pixels, you don't see a lot of that noise that we had before. Especially look at this console right here. Here is before sharpening or smoothing, and here is after, it's smoother, it's sharper it's exactly what I'm looking for. Really, really love that for cleaning up this image to make it look really clean and professional. One quick thing before I export, this little pin case is crooked. I wish that I had straighten this up, this line right here is so distracting every time I look at that, I'm like I wish I could just twist that just a little bit. Same with this little pushpin I wish I could just twist it just a little. Another thing to notice, so when we resumed into the game, what you can see all these little specks in here. You can use the Spot Removal tool and use the scroll wheel on your mouse to adjust the size and you can sit and click out all of these little specs in the image. This is probably more important if he dust appears in your background. Let me see if I can find a spot where I have dust or cat hair that I want to get rid of. Oh yeah. Here we go there's a little spot in here. Honestly, no one's going to look at your picture this close except you so only edit out the stuff that you really feel like takes away. Like I have this cat hair right here and now but I've seen it, I can't stop looking at it. I'm going to click and drag to get that one out of there. This tool just selects an area nearby that's similar and it replaces the pixels with those pixels and so it tends to do a really good job cleaning up stuff like this. Once you're happy, you click that button to accept it. This tool doesn't work to fix things that are crooked so I want to pull this image into Photoshop. I'm going to right-click on the image in the film strip and I'm going to go to Edit in Adobe Photoshop. This is going to bring the tide, the original file into Photoshop. Here we are in Photoshop, I am working on a background layer. I'm going to double-click it so that it's unlocked layer 0 perfect, I'm going to scroll in to these little perler beads and this little pin case. Let's start with the pin case. I like to use the Lasso tool, so I'm going to select the Lasso tool and I'm just going to click and drag till I've got the whole thing selected, including it's shadow, but I don't want to select about playing cards. I'm going to get nice and careful and close. Once I've selected all the way around, I'm going to right-click on this image and click "Layer Via Copy." This means it's not going to cut it out of my original photo it's going to make a copy that sits on top. This is nice because then you don't have holes in your photo, it's in own layer I'm going to hit Command T. This selects it and it's ready to transform, T for transform. So I'm going to select outside of the box and I'm going to click and drag just to rotate that right into place. I want to make sure this line is nice and straight, and then I'm going to enter to accept. Now, when I look at this image really closely, you might not be able to see this, but there's like a little line from where my crop was and it's showing up just a little bit. Sometimes it's more obvious, especially around the shadow area of the image. What I want to do to fix this little tiny line right here, I'm going to select both layers and merge them. I'm going to use the Band-Aid, the spot healing brush. Right now my brush is way too big, so I'm going to hit the left bracket on my keyboard to shrink the size so that it's more manageable, and then I'm going to click and drag. This does a lot the same as the spot heal brush in Lightroom, it's just sampling nearby pixels to smooth that out a little bit. Now I feel like this edit is seamless. Let's tackle these perler beads next because they're going to be a little trickier. These are not very straight at all, they angled down toward the pen and I wish they were a little stronger. We're going to go back to our Lasso tool we're going to select this area including the shadows. We're going to right-click, layer via copy. I'm going to Command T for transform. I'm going to click and drag it just a little to line it up and then I'm going to adjust the angle of this, I want these top three perler beads to be pretty well in line. I think that's about right. These two are a little bit funny. I'm going to do those separately, so I'm going to hit Enter to accept this crop. While I'm still working on layer two, I'm going to select just these two perler beads Command T for transform and I'm going to just bring them, so they feel a little more in line. There we go, that's better. I'm going to hit Enter to accept and then Command T to deselect. So I'm still just on one layer so you can see that's my adjustment. It's very subtle, but now I can go in and fine tune because you can see it's a lot more obvious that I've made some adjustments here. So I'm going to select both layers, I'm going to merge them and then I'm going to come into my Band-Aid tool, which is my Spot Healing Brush. I'm just going to just slowly click and drag, erasing these awkward lines where the shadows don't quite match up. I think, got a little spot in here. I think that looks a lot better. Here is before I made any adjustments on those Perler beads and here is after. Just straightened them up just a little bit. We have one more object I want to adjust, it's this thumbtack. Very same technique, grab the lasso tool. If you don't like using the lasso tool, you can also long-click on that one and change it to the polygonal lasso tool, and then this one's more like a click and drag, it makes a polygon shape. This one I feel like is a little harder to edit because now you've got these very harsh lines. The lasso tool is a smoother circle, so sometimes it's easier to hide it, but it works just the same; right-click Layer Via Copy, Command T to transform, adjust the angle. Since I have a lot of space to work with here, I can grab the entire shadow, hit Enter. This one, I don't even need to adjust at all because it is so clean. I'm going to select both layers, merge them, and then I'm seeing this little speck right here that I can't stop looking at, so I'm going to go into my band-aid tool and click that out so that it's gone. You could spend forever cloning out any little tiny dots. Some people prefer to do this in Photoshop because it's a lot quicker than it is in Lightroom, Lightroom can be a little finicky, but I spent a lot of time in Lightroom, so it's a lot quicker for me to just be in Lightroom doing this kind of stuff, then taking my photo into Photoshop. Now that we are all finished, we can go, "File", "Save", and this saves the image over in Lightroom. So it's going to create a virtual copy in Lightroom that has all of your edits. Let me show you that. This is my virtual copy, here it is right here in my timeline. I've done this a few times, so I've got some extra photos in here, but here is the photo that we started with. You can see these little objects and the thumbtack are crooked, and then this is our final image. Before we export and get this on our phone, I wanted to show you one more quick trick that I like to use in Photoshop. This is a different example photo, this is my blue image that I created. I've got this image setup for sharing on Instagram, we have that four by five crop. But keep in mind, this is going to look really good when you're scrolling in the feed, but on your profile, it's going to be a square. It's going to show up as a square since your profile images are all square. If you don't want it to look like a square in your grid, you don't want it to crop out, maybe you want to give yourself a little more space around the edges. If we want to turn this into a square, and we don't have any blue space around it, and we don't want these white boxes, I wanted to show you a trick where I invent part of the background. I've changed my crop to be a square and I've brought the crop out to the edges, I'm going to hit Enter to accept. Now I have a square shape but I have these white borders. There's a really fun content-aware fill trick you can do. I have selected my Marquee tool and I'm going to select this entire white bar, including just a few pixels of the blue. I'm going to right-click inside the selection, go down to "Fill", it'll bring up my Fill menu. I want to make sure my contents are set to Content-Aware, and hit "Okay". This is going to use an algorithm where it decides what this background is supposed to be. Since this is a nice thin area, it filled it in perfectly. I'm going to hit Command D to deselect. It's almost as if this was there the whole time. This is such a fun trick to use when you've accidentally cropped a little too close and you need to give yourself a little more space, or if you need to reformat your image to fit a different dimension. I'm going do the same thing on this side, Content-Aware Fill, and it is perfect. Command D to deselect. Now I have a beautiful square, it's a tall setup so it's meant for the tall Instagram, but as a square, it's going to look really good on our feed. There's a way to fine-tune that to your particular taste. Let's say that you want this to be a cover photo, a thumbnail image, a 16 by nine, maybe a desktop background and you really just don't have a lot of space on the edges here, and you don't want to crop in your image at all, you feel like it's just cutting off all that hard work that you did. I do this a lot for my cover images for Skillshare, so you want to increase that crop box so that it's a 16 by nine and it snaps to the edges. I like to scooch it so that my main objects are in the center, or maybe if I'm doing a cover photo, I want to anchor it to a side so I can put some text over here. Either way, we want to go ahead and get that nicely centered and hit "Accept", and then we do the very same thing. This is a bigger area, we can click and drag and fill this in very nicely. Here is that big giant space. The Content-Aware Fill tool isn't always perfect. This is a great example of when it works really well. Let me show you an example of when it works poorly. I'm going to step back in the process and start with our tall picture. If I went straight from tall to a 16 by nine, I have a lot of white space and it has to just really take only a little bit of this blue. It's going to have maybe a little bit of a harder time giving you that clean background, let me show you an example of that. Sometimes when you're using Content-Aware Fill, strange things happen. It doesn't have enough background blue to work with, so it just copied a lot of my pencil tips and stuff so I have a lot of really strange shapes over here, and this is not effective. This is a great example of when the Content-Aware Fill tool goes awry. A couple of things you can do at this point, you can take your Band-Aid tool, you can adjust it so that it's nice and big, and then hand-edit all of these little pencil pieces out of your image, and then you can take your Marquee tool, maybe also just this area, Content-Aware Fill. This is a process that can take a long time if you do it the wrong way. Command D. I just took out all of those weird little pencils, but now I have a large blue space to work with. Now when I take this side, I can right-click Fill, Content-Aware, it's going to have a lot more space to work with, and so typically this side ends up a lot smoother. See, that was a lot easier. This is rough looking now, you can tend to smooth it out by just trying to do another Aware Fill. You can just do this over and over until your image looks good. It's very time-consuming. This method definitely works, but the way that I did this before, remember, where I started with a square crop and increased my image slowly, ended up with a lot smoother of a transition and I didn't have to clean out any weird looking shapes. If you're having issues with your Content-Aware tool, keep in mind. Give it some time, go slowly, doing a little bit at a time, and it's going to be a lot more effective. This is a fun technique, I actually use it for a lot of my classes. See this cover photo right here for my concrete backdrops class, I took it tall because that was my example. I was going to put it on Instagram, and I had to invent this second half of the image. This has all been Content-Aware Fill, same with this picture of small cat. I took this picture tall and then I needed space to put text so I had to create this section right here. Let's see, I have another example of when I did this. This is my pancake photo. I took this nice and tall and I had to sit and Content-Aware Fill this side and this side so that I had room to work with. Easier than doing this would be to just make sure that when you're shooting, you also do a wide photo. I guess this only really matters if you're doing a desktop background or if you're planning to make a thumbnail, maybe for YouTube or for Skillshare over here. Just some fun food for thought, but to round this out, we are back in Lightroom. I want to get this photo to my phone so that I can post it. I'm right-clicking down in the timeline, going to my Export menu. I have it to put in the subfolder, Flat Lays, in my pictures folder. I rename my files, that's just what I like to do. So I have this to say red final flat lay, and then each of the numbers. So I'm going to put number 3 because I know the last one I exported was two. Scroll down into the File Settings menu. I always export as a JPEG in the SRGB color space. The other color spaces are for printing, and because everything I do is on the Internet, SRGB is the safest bet for me, and I check my Limit File Size to 1,800 K. If you didn't want to limit your file size, I tend to set my Quality slider to 90 rather than 100 because the biggest difference between 90 and 100 is file size. You can't really tell pixel by pixel, this is just something I read on the Internet. But I do check limit file size to 1,800 K because this is the max that you can share on Skillshare. I want to make sure that anything I'm exporting will be easily uploadable to the Skillshare project uploader. In the image sizing tab, I resize to fit the short edge to 2,500 pixels at 240 resolution. This is what I've always done, it's overkill, the photos are way too big, they don't need to be that big. You could set it to 72 and it would be just fine, but I set it to 240 in case I want to use the images other places around the web. I set my output sharpening to Sharpen For Screen, I include the metadata on export, and in the post-processing section, I typically have it show in finder so that it's like, here's your photo, it's all ready. You could also open it in Adobe Photoshop. The difference between opening it in Photoshop here versus when you're editing is, this one exports the photo as a JPEG and then opens the JPEG in Photoshop. Whereas when you just open it from the Lightroom Filmstrip into Photoshop, you're actually editing the TIF file. I'm going to show in finder and hit "Export." Here is my photo in my folder, I'm going to open up AirDrop. I am working on an iMac and I have an iPhone which makes this super slick, I just click and drag this right over my face, and it appears on my phone. Now, it's in my camera roll and I can easily share it to Instagram. If you're not working on a Mac, you could easily upload things to Google Drive, you could email files to yourself, but either way you do it, you'll get it to your phone and you can go ahead and share it. I wanted to give you a quick refresher. If you're sharing your project on Skillshare, make sure that you click over to the Project & Resources tab and then click this "Create Project" button. This is going to take you to the Project Uploader page. You want to click this Upload Image. This is going to put the cover photo so when you're looking at the gallery view, you'll be able to see your image. If I wanted to share my red flat lay, it's going to open up here and it's going to crop it into a wide, one of those 16 by nine thumbnail photos I was telling you about. This Skillshare projects section, you don't need to make it perfect. For this, usually, I just crop in, I make it fit nicely as best I can, and then I hit "Submit", but this is cropping your photo. If this is all you do, I can't see the whole rest of your image to give you feedback on it so make sure that you also put your photo in the project description section here. Click on the little image button, put in your flat lay, and it's going to drop it in here so we can see the whole entire image. Then from here, you can add some text, tell me about how it went. "This was awesome, let me know what you think." Sometimes I share class projects on Instagram, like when I'm really excited about projects that have been submitted. If you want to be tagged, make sure you add your tag in here. That way, I can make sure that if I share, you get notified too, rather than me just doing a screenshot with your name in it. Anyway, there is a few tips. Make sure you add a title, Red Stuff, and you get hit this Publish button to publish it right in class. Thanks so much for watching.
8. Mobile Editing: Instagram, Lightroom, Snapchat: Okay. So let's talk about how to edit this photo on your phone. Once you have your favorite image selected or you know which one it is, we're going to go ahead and do a quick edit in the Instagram App, and then I'm going to show you a more intense edit using the Lightroom Mobile App. Then at the very end, I'm going to show you how to reverse a video, if you decided to take a video of you swiping all your stuff away. Let's jump into the Instagram app. In Instagram, we're going to do a new post. So go down and pick the image that you are wanting to edit. If it's a little tight on the screen, you can adjust the crop double tapping the photo, or hitting this little extend button that's going to shrink or make your picture fit to screen. Because I shot a tall photo, I want to make sure it's nice and tall. I'm even going to pinch in just a little bit so that my white border is pretty even, and then I'm going to fine tune this in just a minute. Let's hit "Next". This is going to take us to our editing page. It brings you right to the filter page. Sometimes I add a little bit of a filter like the Clarendon filter, but I usually only add it at like 10 percent. You would click on a filter again to add it. But we're going to go without a filter to start. Let's tap over into the edit tab just on this side, and then we're going to adjust the brightness. Like I mentioned, this photo, my camera wanted to make that white background really gray and blue in the shot, so we're going to fix that. I start out tapping into the brightness, we're going to bring this up just a little bit. Actually quite a lot. I brought it up about 60, so let me show you this is before, and this is after, so we got quite a bit more brightness. Let's hit "Done". Let's increase the contrast. I like a high contrast image, it makes the whites whiter and the darks starker. Let's go into warmth. This image seems really bluish to me. If you're not sure if your image is a little too blue or a little too warm, it helps to just play with the slider until it feels like what it looked like in real life. I need to warm mine up just a little bit to get those whites as close to white as possible. Here's before and after, it's pretty subtle, but it will do. Let's go into shadow, I've got a lot of dark shadows in my image and I think adding some detail in the shadows is going to make our image a little bit better. The one thing that adding light into the shadows does though, is it tends to flatten the image out. We're going to hit "Done" and we're going to go back to the contrast slider and bring up the contrast just a little more. This is before and this is after. Here's where we are so far. I feel like I want to increase the saturation just a little bit, make this really stand out. I'm going to bring up the reds. This is making my background look really blue. You can see there's still a lot of blue tones in my background, so I'm going to bring my saturation up, and then I'm going to take my warmth up a little bit more just to even that out. That's pretty good. I'm going to take my highlights and make them blown out. This is just going to make the whites and my image just pure white like I want a nice clean crisp image. Sometimes if the lights are too bright, I like to take the highlights down, but for this particular shot, highlights up is the way to go. Here is before and after our highlights slider. That really helped clean up that shot. Then last thing is sharpening the image, I like to sharpen the image just because it makes it really clean and crisp for sharing online. Here's where we're at so far. This is before, and this is after, I think we pretty much have it. I want to fine tune my crop a little bit though, so I'm going to hit the adjust slider. This takes your image back to what it started out as, but it will keep your edits. Let's just adjust this a little bit because I feel like the lines on this side need to be a little straighter, and then I want to grab the photo and slide it around. I'm going to make it a fill that crop a little bit better. Then I've got a little bit of perspective shift I need to do, so I'm going to hit the perspective slider and just adjust this side. Basically, this side is a little too close to the camera compared to that side. If you're not sure if this is helpful, you can always just play around with things like this till you feel like, I feel like I've got a nice good, solid inch around the edge and this whole shot and so that is more effective for my shot. Here is where it started, and here's where I've got. Now I can hit Next, and I can add the hashtag and I can post this picture and share online with everybody. This edit is pretty good. I still feel like there's a few things that I really want to change, and I'm going to show you how to take it a little bit further in the Lightroom app next. Let's go ahead and pull this into the Lightroom app. Here is our photo in Lightroom, I went ahead and pulled it in. The same thing, we are going to adjust the brightness, so let's bring up the exposure. You can get a lot more fine tune edits using this app, so I'm bringing up the contrast. You can just do a lot more with your image. I'm going to do the same thing with the highlights, bring them up. I'm going to bring my whites up just a little bit, and my shadows need to come up as well. That brings in a lot of brightness, and all of my red objects makes that red really stand out. I'm going to bring the blacks down, this is going to increase the contrast overall. Let me show you here's before and after. I already feel like this app is doing so much better of a fine tuning job on here, especially in the color because we're going to increase our temperature and make it just slightly warmer. It's feeling a little bit overexposed, I'm going to bring my exposure back down just a little bit just so we feel more true to life. I'm thinking we have a little bit of green tones in the shot, so I'm going to just increase the tint just a little bit, it's very subtle but it's just enough to take the edge off of that. I'm going to increase the vibrance just a hair. It really doesn't need it, that red is very intense, but just for fun. Then let's go into the "Effects" menu. If you wanted to add some clarity, sometimes it can help make your image look a little sharper, but it can also dirty up the image. So don't go too far. I'm just going to do like maybe plus six. Next I want to pop over into the detail drawer. Again, we're going to sharpen this image, we want a nice sharp photo. Then if you're shooting with lower light, you'll want to use the noise reduction slider, if you're noticing a lot of grain in your image, the noise reduction slider is going to be a really great choice to help even that out just a little bit. Then let's go ahead and tackle our crops, I'm going to scroll over into the crop section. You can see I'm leaning sideways just a little bit here, so we're going to straighten that up and it's going to be great. It might be hard to see, but I've got a little bit of grid lines on the screen which I'm using to line up my shot. I'm going to lock it into a four by five, and then bring the crop in just a little bit. That looks really good to me, so we'll check to select it. I feel like the bottom half of my image is darker than the top half of my image, so I'm going to try and darken just the top half of the image. I'm going to go into my selective menu, I'm going to hit the plus sign to open up that, I'm going to grab the graduated filter, and then I'm going to drag it down across the screen. Do you see that little red haze? That means whatever's red is where the filter is being applied. I'm bringing it down about halfway, I'm going to grab this square and grab it down just a little bit, and then while it's highlighted, I'm going to go into my light menu and I'm going to bring the exposure down just a little. You go too far it's going to look really obvious, so just do just a little bit to bring that information back in on those really bright spots. You can take the highlights down a little bit, that'll do the same thing, and then I'm actually going to bring the blacks down just a little bit. Let me show you, this is before the graduated filter, and then that's after. It's just enough to bring a little bit more information in there. From there I think we're pretty good. I've got a little bit of some cat hairs in here that I want to take out. No one would ever scroll in this close, but I'm scrolling in this close to show you here's how you can take those out. We're going to go to the healing menu with a little band-aid, and I am going to adjust this menu. The top one has to do with how big it is, so if you press it, you can scroll up or down to adjust how big your little spot heel is. I'm putting it at 40, and then I'm going to tap on this first one. It's going to sample from a spot nearby and it completely erases that little spot. We've got one more little spec and it looks like it's sampled from another clean spot in the image. Then let's take care of this little cat hair. I'm just going to drag a line and it's going to sample from down there. I think that that looks really nice. Cleaned up those little spots for me, I'm going to hit "Check" to accept so they're completely gone now. Now there's not any of those distracting little spots in our image. If you have like a scratch on your board or something really like, that's drawing a lot of attention, you definitely want to get rid of those, they're really quick and easy to do using this app. Again, here is before and after. We're going to go ahead and hit the share button, and we are going to export it to the camera roll. Now our photo is done and it's ready to share online. Now I want to show you how to do this image in Snapchat. I've opened up the Snapchat menu, I'm going to hit this to go to my camera roll and I'm going to pick my video. I found out it has to be 10 seconds or shorter, so I had to trim my original clip, but here is the clip. It's just me pushing items out of the frame, and it is nine seconds long. It stops right here and then it starts over. To edit this image, I'm going to hit the three little dots, and I'm going to hit "Edit Video". This is going to get it ready for Snapchat. Now, what I want to do is add firstly a color filter because this image is really dark and bluish, so I'm going to swipe and magic, it looks great. We're going to do that/ we're going to apply another filter. I'm going to hit this button right here, and I'm going to swipe until, so this is the slow most snail, this is the faster rabbit, and this is the really speedy rabbit, we don't want that. The next one is the backwards one. Here I am putting the scene back together, it's not the best quality, but it's really fun and it's super shareable, so I feel like if you've already gone through the work to put together this scene, you may as well mess it up in a fun way and share that to so here is that. Now if I want to share this on Snapchat, I'm just going to hit the arrow and post it. But if you want to save this and share it somewhere else, you hit the Export button, and you can save the video directly to your phone and it will save it and it is ready to share. I went ahead and turned the sound off for this, but if you wanted to hear the sound, it's just clunky. I didn't think the sound was helping, so I just muted it and it was better. That is how I do a quick little video in reverse in Snapchat.
9. Final Thoughts: That's everything. Thank you so much for taking my class. I hope that you had fun and I hope that you feel inspired to start collecting a bunch of colorful objects and organizing them as you've seen, taking a picture and sharing it so that I can see it in the project section on Skillshare. If you want to share it on Instagram, don't forget to tag me so that I can come by and see, and if you enjoyed this class and you want to watch more photography classes from me, I have a whole library of courses over on my Skillshare profile that go from talking about making your own backdrops to photographing coffee and chocolate and pancakes and toast. I love photographing food. I have some product photography classes as well as a few on portraits. If there's a specific class that you're not seeing that you would love to see me teach, I always love to hear your suggestions for future classes, and I hope that you enjoyed this one and I will see you in the next one.
