Transcripts
1. Create Mood and Light in Early Evening Images in Lightroom and ACR - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Create Mood and Light in Evening Photos Using Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. In addition to teaching Illustrator and Photoshop, the Graphic Design for Lunch series of classes also include some photo editing and photo management classes. These are taught for both Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw, as both applications share the same base code. This means that within one class, you'll simply focus on whichever application you prefer to use. Today we're looking at editing early evening photos to create a more compelling mode and light. In addition to applying basic edits to the images, you're going to see how you can enhance an image with lighting effects using the tools in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. As you're working through this class, you'll see a prompt to recommend it to others. Please, if you're enjoying it, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about photo editing in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started working with Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom and creating mood in early evening images.
2. Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom for Lunch™ - Create Light and Mood in an Early Evening Photo - Part 1: I'm going to process two images in this video. They're both very different images but shot in similar circumstances. I'm going to do one in Lightroom and one in Adobe Camera Raw. But the techniques are going to be equally applicable to either Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom, because the develop module in Lightroom is essentially exactly the same as the develop tools are in Adobe Camera Raw it's just that they're in a slightly different place. We're going to start with this image it is strike out of the camera. Now for any image, I'm going to look at the Histogram because that's going to tell me what's happening in the image, and it is a smidgen underexposed. So I'm going to kick up the exposure just a little bit, just to add a little bit more lightness in the image. This image was shot just before dark just before the Sun went down. There was some really interesting light in these buildings, and that's what I want to capitalize on. But I want to knock out the river and also the Tower of London here, because I want to set the same for this to be a image that was shot when the lights were on and the buildings and the sun was down. So I want it to be a lot more moody than it is right now. To this end I want to bring down the sky, so I want to get a bit more depth in the sky, and the sky is pretty much in this highlight area here. I'm going to drag down on the highlights. All of a sudden you can see probably what I was beginning to see when I took this photograph is that there's the Sun setting in the background, but it was a really moody image. Out of the camera, it just didn't look that good. Now we shadows, we can bring detail out of the shadows. All we can plunge it back into the shadows. I wanted to bring just a little bit of detail out of the shadows at this stage because I wanted to start lightening these buildings a little bit. I also want a white point and a black point in my image. Now the easiest way to get a white point and a black point is to hold the Shift key and double-click on this indicator here, and that will give you a white point. Do the same thing, hold Shift and double-click on the black indicated here to get a black point, if you're curious and don't know what that's all about, I'm just going to hold the Alt or Option key on a Mac and just show you. When I click on this indicator, you can see that there's just a couple of little dots of white in the image. These are white pixels, and what we want to do when we're adjusting whites is we want to have just the smallest amount of whites in the image size. Something like this is way too much. But we would back it off until we have practically no whites at all. I would probably even prefer not having any whites at all. So I'm just going to go to plus two on this. With the blacks we are looking for something similar only we're going to get a white screen, and the darker pixels are where the blacks are in the image. So if we bring out black solo way down, you can see that we're turning the image into pretty much ink. I'm just going to take this backup, and what we're looking for when we're adjusting the blacks is we're looking for just a few black pixels in the image. We're happier about getting some black in the image, then we are white because black is income paper. Whites are not income paper because there's no white ink. You don't mind having some blacks and the image. In fact, it really helps the image, but you don't want lots of whites because that's not going to print anything at all. Let's say the before and after so far, this is the image out of the camera and this is the image starting to be re lit. I'm going to add a bit of clarity because clarity is mid tone contrast enhancement. What it does is it boosts up the mid tones in the image. That's where a lot of this building interest is. I'm going to give it a boost of clarity, and I could also give it a little bit of extra vibrance because I want to say some color in the sky and also in the buildings. Now at any point, if you like this image you can stop. You don't have to go all the way but I'm going a far bit further than we are right now. Before I do that, really a big concern because this image is a little bit crooked. I'm going to the crop tool and I'm just going to straighten it a little bit, amusing the grid lines across the image to just work out roughly where the embankment is here on the South of London, and just trying to adjust to that, and I'll click "Done". If I were doing this in Adobe Camera Raw, I would probably leave cropping until last, because Lightroom electric crop and rotate the image. So what you see on the screen is what you're going to get. In Adobe Camera Raw, it's actually doesn't work quite the same way, and I find it a little strange to be working with an off center image or crooked image. I would do that last in Adobe Camera Raw, but pretty much that's the only difference between the two applications. We're going to look now at the radial filter. I'm going to click on the radial filter. I'm going to drag it over this image and just place it over these buildings. Now, your radial filter might already have some settings applied to it. When you add it to the image, something might happen. That's fine. You can just zero it out by double-clicking on the word effect. That will reset all of those sliders. But, of course, it would be helpful to know whether this radial filter was adjusting inside the filter circle or outside. So want to do usually is just drag on exposure because that makes it really clear what settings this radial filter is working on right now, and clearly what's happening is it's affecting the outside area of the image. I'm going to double-click on the word "Exposure" to go back. I'm happy right now to adjust the outside of the image. To do that, I am going to decrease the exposure just not with quite so much enthusiasm as I did a minute ago. I'm bringing down the exposure. May also want to have another heat at highlights here. Just bring down the highlights are little bit again to get this moody, the Sun's just set field to the image. Clarity are probably don't want these areas to be too sharp. The reason for this is that these areas here are really quite light and anything that is in sharp focus and its light is going to be what attracts your eye. I want you to look here, not down here. I'm actually going to back off clarity. So I'm going to take it off about to minus 40, minus 50 to try and drop down the clarity in these areas. I'm also going to do the same thing for sharpness. Again, trying to draw your eye to the middle of the image. The other thing you want to do with your radial filters, make sure that you're feather value is fairly reasonable because you don't want this to be a hard edge effect. A feather of about 50 is pretty good, if you want to see what's being affected, just click here on the show selected mask overlay, and you can see that the outside, this radial filter is being affected by the adjustment, but so too are little bits inside it. You might at this stage want to increase your filter size to maybe bring back some detail in this area of the image. But just be aware that this mask overlay will show you your feathering, but also where the filter is being applied. I'm going to click "Done". Now I went to like the middle of the image. I'm going to do exactly the same thing again. I'm going to add another radial filter. So I'm just going to bring it in here. I want it to light the buildings. I'm going to position it in position either the buildings. This time I want to invert the mask because my feeling is that it's working outside the radial filter, which it is, if I invert it, it's going to work in the middle and not the outside edges. So I what I want to do is I want to increase the exposure here a little bit just to lighten this up. I want to throw a hate more clarity this, I really want these buildings to be really apparent and really draw your eye. So I'm going to add some sharpness to them too. I can add a little bit of saturation if I wanted to, I could add a little bit of contrast. Really at this point you're looking at what you want out of the image and what's going to give that to you. Anything that's going to sharpen the image, improve the color, draw your attention to it, is going to really help in this area here. When I'm finished, I'm just going to click done. Now, I want to kill the Thames right now. It's still drawing my attention, I don't want it to be quite as intense as it is. I'm going to use a graduated filter. Graduated filter is a linear filter, so you need to drag in the document either up or down. We're going to click here and drag upwards. That's going to attach it to the bottom edge of the image, and it's going to filter out between the sets of lines here. This is the filter applied at a hundred percent and then it's going to be gradually stepped down until at this point it's no longer being applied. Again, if you're curious, show the mask overlay so you can say where it's being applied. In this case, I want a gradual filtering off here, so I want it to paid her off gradually. I don't want it to be a harsh transition. But down here, I don't want the exposure to be so high, so I'm going to start dropping down the exposure. I can drop down the contrast to try and flatten this a little bit. When I do it lightens up a little bit, so I might want to bring down the exposure. I can also hit this again with a little bit less clarity to try and soften it a bit, reduce the sharpness. Anything that draws your attention away from here into here, and I'll click "Done". Now, if I think I've done too much here, I can edit it so I can go back to the graduated filter. Click on the pin that is controlling this adjustment and just back it off. Either I can back off the settings that I've created here, or I can click this down pointing arrow, and what this becomes is an amount slider. So I can slide it to totally remove the effect, or I can slide it over here to increase it even further. Somewhere in here is my sweet spot. Just want to bring it down a little bit, but I thought it was perhaps a little bit too intense. So click "Done". I can do the same for the sky with the graduated filter. Click on the "Graduated Filter". Again, look for a gradual transition. Now if you find this graduated filter scoots around a bit, just get it down, just put it down somewhere, and then use the edges of it to adjust it so you striped met. You can also hold the Shift key as you draw it, and that will also constrain it to a straight line. I'm going to bring down the scale a little bit so I need to get back my adjustments. So let's click this little icon here to bring them back up. I'm going to just drop the exposure down a little bit, dropped the highlights down a little bit. Maybe increased the saturation a tiny bit, just to get what I want it in the sky and click "Done". At this stage, let's look at the before and after. This is the before, and this is the after. It's a totally different image. It really looks quite different to what it looked like earlier. But I still want to do a bit more with it. I still want to work on this building and this building here. For that we're going to use the adjustment brush. So I'm going to click on the "Adjustment Brush". It is huge right now the size is quite high and the feather is quite high. I'm going to back off the feather and just reduce the size. Of course, we can also do that using the square bracket case, the open and closed square bracket case. I don't want auto mask on because I actually want to be able to select the area I want to effect here. Let's just click "Show" selected mask overlay so we can see what we're doing. I'm just going to cover up this building here with my mask. Turn the overlay off, and then go and heat it with similar adjustments to what I used in this area too. I'm going to increase my highlights a little bit. In fact, shadows is probably going to help me a bit more here because this is in a shadow area. Clarity will help me quite a lot. A little bit of exposure here will help me just to lighten this building up. I don't think I need to much more saturation. I think it's pretty saturated as it is. I might add a little bit of sharpness again, just to reinforce that this is somewhere where I want your eye to go and I'll click "Done". I'm going to do the same thing over here perhaps just not with quite the same intensity. Let's show the selected mask overlay so we can see where we're painting. Of course, if you don't get your painting right to begin with, you can always go back later on and just add to what you have selected here. Again, let's go for shadows. Just lighten it up a little bit of clarity to crisp it up. Sharpness again to add a little bit of crisp. We may do a little bit of extra saturation here. Let's click "Done". So at this point I'm pretty happy with this image. But let's say the before and after now. To do this, I'm pressing the backslash K. Just tap it once to get the before image and tap it again to get the after image. We've achieved what we set out to do, which is to set a mode and to create an image that is a whole lot more than the one that came out of the camera.
3. Create Mood and Light in Early Evening Images in Lightroom and ACR Part 2: This is the second image that we're going to process, and I have gone and opened it in Photoshop and because it's a raw image, it's, of course, going to open in Adobe Camera Raw. I just wanted to show you that the same effects as we were getting in Lightroom, we can get with Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop. This is an out-of-camera image. We're going to start by adjusting it. I'm looking at the histogram here, and I'm thinking it's slightly underexposed, so I'm going to increase the exposure just a little bit. Because I wanted to move the image, I don't want to really fix the exposure totally, but I do want to lighten it a little bit. I want to bring back the sky because it was a really nice sky and it's a bit blown out here. The sky detail is going to be in the highlight area. I'm going to drop the highlights down and you can see that that's really helped sky. Now in terms of shadows, we may or may not want to get detail out of the shadows. I'm just going to try this and see what I get. Well, I do want to enlighten the Gherkin in here, so I'm thinking I possibly may increase the shadows a little bit. That is actually lightening the shadows by going in this direction so we're bringing detail that was hidden in the shadows back out. We want a white point and a black point. So Alt or Option on the Mac and just start dragging on this slider. Now, I do have a couple of light areas here, but these are lights and so they don't sort totally as being white points because they also will out of the way of the air that I'm going to be interested in showing with this photo. Let's just go and see where our next white pixels are coming. Well, they're coming in up here and in here somewhere. I want to be below those. I want to wind back a little bit, but I'm not going to wind back so far, but I'm going to adjust these areas here. I've got a white point at about plus 16. Hold the Alt or Option key, do the same thing with the blacks, and of course we are happy to have blacks because that's ink on paper. Let's go and get ourselves some richer blacks. Clarity, vibrance, and saturation. Clarity that mid-tone contrast enhancement really is going to crisp up this image, really going to help get some detail and color into the Gherkin, so we do want to add some clarity and we can add some vibrance. Now, if you're unsure, the difference between vibrance and saturation is that saturation just saturates everything, it just adds color to absolutely everything. In contrast, vibrance only adds color to areas of the image that are not currently fully saturated. It's a kind of adjustment if you like. It also has a protection for skin tones. It protects against the orange in skin tone, so it doesn't make people look like they've gotten the case of jaundice. Let's wind up a bit of vibrance here because I really like to kick this image into a bit of action. We can also look at contrast at this stage and see if a little bit of additional contrast would help, not convinced about that. I actually think a little bit of negative contrast might work a bit better, so I'm going to go there. Now let's look at the radial filter because we can use the radial filter to adjust the Gherkin. Click on the Radial Filter and then just draw out our shape. The Gherkin is on an angle, the radial filter is up and down, but we can rotate it and we should. Let's just rotate this out and place it pretty much over the area of the image that we're interested in. Don't want to get haloing here, so I'm bringing it in a little bit making sure I've got a good feather. You can see here in Adobe Camera Raw, we actually get a hint as to what's happening. Well, we're told that this is affecting the outside. Well, I'm happy to affect the outside right now because I want to darken the outside a little bit, but I probably don't want to do everything that's happening here. I'm just going to wind back the exposure a little bit, but not all away. I'm going to look at the shadows. I think I actually could leave the shadows where they are. Dehaze is going to apply a dehaze effect around the edges which is going to blackened and sharpen things a little bit. I probably don't want that because I want your eye to go to the Gherkin, not to the outside buildings. If the outside buildings, I'd actually be happier with a little bit less sharpness. I'm going to bring back sharpness and I'm going to bring back clarity in a negative direction because that's going to fluff the edges a little bit. Right now, this part of the Gherkin is being caught up in the adjustment because we're adjusting everything outside the ellipse and part of the Gherkin is in that area. I don't want that to be the case. I'm going to go here and get the brush. I'm going to click on the Brush and it's huge. I'm just going to use my open and closed square bracket keys to adjust it, and I want to subtract an area from the effect. I'm just going to run down here and remove this bit of the Gherkin from the effect. I'm not going to remove this bit here, but I also going to remove this bit up here. This new tool in both Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw allows you to use the radial filter but then add bits to it or remove things from it and we, in this case, wanted to remove things from the outside effect. Next up, we want another adjustment. I'm going to click on "New" and we're going to create a second radial filter. Same thing, rotate it to match the Gherkin, size at pretty much to cover the Gherkin knowing that I can add bits to it in a minute if I want to, so bring it in off this outside because I don't want haloing there if I can possibly help it, and I want to invert this. I'm want to start affecting the inside here and, of course, we've got settings that we totally do not want here. I'm just going to zero everything out here so that I can work on it by hand. I want to increase the exposure here a little bit, so I'm going to wind up exposure a little bit. I definitely want more clarity because I really want this to be in your face. Let's add a bit of clarity. I might drop the shadows down a little bit because I want a bit more contrast. Dropping the shadows back is going to make more of a differentiation between shadows and highlights, so shadows are going to be a bit blacker. I could also look at again, a little bit of additional saturation just so that we're affecting the Gherkin and not everything else.A little bit of sharpness won't hurt either. Now, again, this area here and this area up here are being left out of it because they're outside the radial filter. Let's go and get our brush and let's go and add these areas to it. Again, adjusting the brush by using the open and closed square bracket keys, and we're adding these areas to the radial filter. This was a really wonderful tool that Adobe added to both Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. It was in Adobe Camera Raw before it was in Lightroom, it's been really helpful, really like that tool. To finish up, I want to add a vignette to the image. I'm going to go back to one of these tools here to just disable the radial filter because that's now been applied to the image, and let's go and apply this vignette effect. We're going to click on "Effects" and we've got here Post-Crop Vignetting. This just means that the vignette is going to be applied to the cropped image, so if we cropped anything offered, the vignette is going to move into the newly cropped area. It's a better vignette than the one you get in the lens correction tool for that reason. I'm just going to drop down the slider here in a negative direction. I'm using highlight priority here because it's one of the three different effects you can use. You can use color priority or you can use Paint Overlay. Paint Overlay probably the one I use least of all. Highlight Priority is pretty good. That just gives you a nice vignette effect and as a vignette on and off. If I want to see the before and after on this image, let's just go to Snapshots and I'm going to add a snapshot called completed and click "Okay". Now from this dropdown menu, let's go to Camera Raw defaults. This is the image as it was out of the camera that we opened up here in Adobe Camera Raw. We can go back to what it looks like when we finished processing it and it's got a lot more mood to it, it's a lot more exciting of an image. There is a way of processing raw images in both Adobe Camera Raw and in Lightroom. I'm actually going to give you these images. I'm going to give you a link in the class project area to both these images for your own personal use, so you're welcome to download them and load them up into Lightroom or into Adobe Camera Raw and follow along with this class. Your class project will be to post a sort of early evening image of some sort that you have edited and you can feel free to use mine as your class project, that's just fine. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and you've learned something about creating mood and light in Lightroom and in Adobe Camera Raw. If you did enjoy this class, when you say a prompt to give it a thumbs up, please do so. There's recommendations. Help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley, thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
