Transcripts
1. Introduction: As a photographer, I love cameras. I've got a film medium format camera that I adore, and I carry my DSLR with me almost everywhere. But I find that I still take most of my pictures on a cell phone. Cell phone cameras are amazing nowadays. You know what? Often, my cell phone pictures turn out great, and it's usually because of the editing software I use. Now, most photographers know that Lightroom is the de facto standard for post-processing. Well, they also have a mobile app which is excellent and has almost the same functionality as their desktop program. If you have Lightroom, and as a photographer you should, then you'll get Lightroom Mobile for free. I'm going to show you,with three different photographs, how I edit them. I'm going to start with a selfie for Facebook, an artsy photo for Instagram, and then a stunning landscape. Let's jump right in.
2. Editing a Selfie: Before we begin, we need to study our picture and see what needs to be fixed, so we can attack those points. Let's zoom into our picture. Now right away, I notice that this really isn't a bad picture, and that's an important point. When you're editing a photograph, just worry about spending time on your best photos and discard the bad ones. But I do see some things that could really use some improvement. First of all, my wife's face is really dark and doesn't match our other faces. It's kind a been shadow, so we want to brighten that up. Next thing I notice is that my face is a lot redder than the other people, in this picture and that's because I had carried up about 20 pounds of photo equipment to this waterfall and it was a long hike, so I was pretty hot. But I want to tone that down a little bit so I match everyone else. Also the picture is crooked. You can tell this easily because of the rocks in the background, they're slanted. I also think that I want to sharpen it a little bit, we got the water in the background, that's really cool. I really want to bring that out, but I also don't want to blow it out with the whites. I might turn down the whites just to us match, we'll see about that. Let's get started. The first thing I always do is set the exposure correctly. Notice that when we go into the light section, how all the sliders are set in the middle. The very first thing I always do is I press auto, and that's going to adjust all of these light settings to the way that Lightroom thinks is best, and it's usually really good. You can see now that all of these levels have been changed, and for the most part I agree with them. I'm going to adjust the exposure to make it just a little bit brighter, and then we'll just leave all the rest the same as Lightroom suggests it. I'm going to go right down the line to color, and I'm going to click on mix, and I'm going to choose the red channel. Because I'm going to try to reduce the redness of my face a little bit, and I'm going to decrease the saturation. I'm just play with this a little bit, to get it perfect and go back to mix. It's not quite right, so I'm going to use the orange channel and play with that until I get the colors of our skin, like I want. To turn it more towards the yellow shade here, you got to go back and forth a little bit to play with these. A lot of it, especially with the color, a lot of trial and error. That looks pretty good. Now we're going to adjust the light on my wife's face. So we're going to go to selective, and we're going to choose the Ellipse tool and just highlight her face that way that we're not changing everything in the photograph, just this. When I choose light and we're going to adjust the exposure just a little bit. That looks a whole lot better. You notice with some of other edits we did, we toned down the colors of the shirts at my wife and daughter, and I want to fix that and bring them nice and bright. It's really the only color in the picture. I'm going to go back to the color and then mix and I'm going to choose the colors of those shirts and I'm just going to play with it until it's a nice-looking color that I like. You have to be careful because sometimes there's unintended consequences here. You are just trying to adjust one thing that you end up adjusting something else in the background. You just got to be careful here. Next we're going to play with my favorite part of the effects. First we're going to take the clarity and turn it up a bit. What that does is that adds a perception of more detail, and then we're going to do they D Hayes just a smidge, and the vignetting. Vignetting gives you that dark ring around It's like you have a lens hood or something on. You got to be very careful with this not to overdo it, but it can really help a whole lot and bringing in the eye of the viewer into the center of the photo. After that let's go to detail and just increase a sharpening a bit. Be careful with this if you overdo, it and makes you feel regrainy and takes out a lot of the detail. But it does need a little bit of sharpening, especially if you're going to show it on something like Facebook, which historically destroys your photo. I'm going to go back to my color tab and I'm just going to up the Vibrance and saturation by tiny bit. Basically this just makes the picture a little bit more colorful. Be very careful, you can look really fake and you can really overdo this very easily. We are almost done, just two more things to do. Next, we're going to go over to the optics and we're just going to turn on the enable lens correction. All this does is it takes out the fisheye that the iPhone gives her picture. Most people wouldn't notice this, but I do. The last thing we're going to do is we're going to straighten it out so it's not crooked. So we'll go over to crop, and when you press the button, you're going to get a little circle. That's like you to twist it, and you can just make it line up to the guidelines how you like it, and there we go. There we have it, there's our finished picture. Here is the before and the now after. Just settle differences, but that's really all you need to make a great picture. Let's go on to our Artie picture.
3. Editing and Artsy Black & White: Let's take a look at this picture. As you can tell this, unlike the last picture we looked at, this is not a good picture. This is just a straight up bad picture. I'd normally I would just thrown this out. But I took it for a specific reason. I had an idea in mind for an Instagram post and that was my little dog and it's large shadow. I was going to post it and say my dog thinks that he's as big as the shadow. Stuff like that makes a cute Instagram post. But this picture needs a lot of work. What we're going to do is we're going to change into a black and white, and a black and white can really cover up a lot of mistakes. If you have a picture that you like the composition, but just something is not right with it, try it in black and white. You might be surprised how good it looks. We're going to rotate it. Then we're going to create a very artsy, high contrast, very dramatic black and white photo. Let's get started. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to rotate it. I'm going to press "Crop" and then I'm going to press the rotate button, and this looks a whole lot better. Then we're going to convert it to black and white by clicking on "Profiles" and then "Monochrome". Next we're going to go and adjust all the little levels to make it just look awesome. First, we'll press "Auto" like we did before, and that will give us a good starting point, but we're going to change a lot of this. Next we'll go to light. Now we're going to turn down the exposure a little bit. It's going to make it a little bit more dramatic, just a little bit. We're going to up the contrast by quite a lot. Making it very contrasty. I'm going to turn down the highlights a little bit so you can see the detail in the lights better. Then I'm going to adjust the whites and the blacks and make them a little bit brighter and a little bit darker, increasing the contrast even more. Now colors you can see if we went over and switch to what it would look like in color, looks terrible. I just did that to show you what it would look like. Now clarity, we can bump the clarity up super and this really gives us a really sharp looking cool picture. Edit the Dehaze a little bit. Then we're going to add quite a lot of vignette. Adds to the drama a good bit. Up the sharpness, a smidge, but not too much like we talked about last time. That's pretty much going to finish this picture. Here we have the before and the after. This makes for a really fun Instagram post. Now next we're going to look at the landscape. I think this is the most exciting about all of them.
4. Editing a Landscape: Before we get started, let's look at our photograph like we did with the other ones. Now at first glance, this also looks like a pretty terrible picture, but it's actually quite good. I took it while I was in the passenger side of my car. My wife was driving and we saw some nice landscape so I asked to switch over so I could ride in the passenger and take some pictures. In the bottom corner we got the mirror of the car, which is pretty bad. The picture is crooked and it's pretty washed out. But thankfully, we'll be able to bring out most of these colors and crop it out and straighten it and it's going to look pretty nice by the time we get done. One of the things I want to focus on is the sky and make it dramatic, because it's actually pretty dramatic. I also want to focus in on the detail of the building, and I want the grass to look a little bit more vibrant. Let's get started. The first thing I'm going to do is crop it out. Therefore I'm going to press crop and then I'm going to rotate it so that the horizon line is more straight and then I'm going to crop out the parts of the car that you can see. Make some slight adjustments and this is going to help us with our colors when we're done. If you cropped it afterwards, you might crop out some of the vignetting or perhaps you'll focus on an item that's not that important but this way we're focusing on what we want to. Like always, I'm going to click "Auto" and just look what auto does, that makes a huge difference right there. Now I agree with most of Lightroom settings. I am going to go through and adjust the exposure, bring it a little bit lighter. I'm also going to play with the contrast a bit, making a little bit more contrasty. It's not going to look good right now, but we'll make it look good by the time it's done. Sometimes you have to go backwards before you go forwards. Now the colors, this is where we're going to make a lot of our changes. First with the blues, I'm going to make the sky nice and dramatic by increasing or changing the color of the blue that we're using. Let's say a purple color and adjusting the luminosity. I'm also going to do the same thing with the greens. I'm actually going to bring the greens down a little bit and make them more yellow so they're not as striking, they don't overpower the rest of the photograph. Adjusting both the saturation and the luminance a little bit. Now, the yellows of the grass, I'm going to change this. I'm also going to bring down the saturation, which makes it less colorful. However with the luminance, I'm going to change that, which gives it a much deeper rich look to it. I'm going to do the same thing with the red slider, although that didn't make as much of a change. There's not as much red in this picture. That's really not going to make that big of a difference. Remember that browns are in the red family. Next I'm going to go to effects and I'm going to bump up the clarity a lot. However when you're working with people, you don't want to increase the clarity too much because it makes the skin look bumpy and brings out any wrinkles and stuff but on landscapes or animals, clarity makes a huge difference. I'm also adjusting the vignetting just a little bit, bringing the focus of the picture into the center. I'm going to sharpen it like we have with our other photos. I'm also going to change the lens correction and then we're going to save it. I probably should have shown you that on the other pictures, but I didn't. I just save to my camera roll maximum available. That's going to be the best. So here's the before and now the after. Wow, what a big difference.
5. Final Thoughts: Thanks for watching. It take some practice and some trial and error but before you know it, your mobile photography will improve greatly. If you'd like to see more of my photography, you can find me on Instagram @timborkert. Also, if you could leave a review for this video, I greatly appreciate it. I'll see you next time.
Tim Borkert, Artist, Game Developer, Educator
