Transcripts
1. Enhance Color in an Image in Lightroom and ACR Intro: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Enhancing Color in an Image Using Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. In addition to teaching Illustrator and Photoshop, the Graphic Design for Lunch series of classes also includes 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 photos to enhance the color in the images. In addition to applying basic edits, you'll learn how to enhance the color in an image so that your photos really stand out. As you're working through these videos, you will see a prompt to recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. One, give it a thumbs up, and two, just write a few words as to why you're enjoying the class. This is really important for me as it helps me get my classes in front of more students who just like you want to learn more about Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now the images that I'll be working on, I've made available for you to download so that you can follow along if you wish. If you're ready now, let's get started working on enhancing color in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom.
2. Enhance Color in an Image - Part 1: This is the first image that we're going to work on, it is a reflection. So this is the Queen Victoria Building from Sydney, that is reflected in an office building window. Now one of the problems that I'm going to have with this image is these vertical lines, they're very strong verticals and they're going to be impossible to straighten. I'm just going to the crop tool here, and I'm going to straight into the vertical line on the very far right. I'm straightening to this line here, and you'll see that this one here is not vertical. So I'm actually going to just reset that, and let's go instead to the lens correction tool. I'm going to the manual settings here, because this will allow me to pull the top of the image out a little bit. What I want to do is pull the edges out a little bit. I'm going to the vertical option here, and I'm just going to wind back in a negative direction. Doesn't need to be taken a long way, but it does need to be taken some of the way. I'm going to rotate the image, so I'm going to try and rotate it till I get this line straight, so I can check and see if this is straight up and down. I'm going to rotation tool, just going to wind it back in a negative direction, using the guides to align the line on the right, and just check to see if that's actually straightening everything on the left. We're pretty near right now. So I'm going to just let go the rotation button and I'm going to click "Done." I prefer not to use the constraint crop tool here, because otherwise Lightroom's going to make the crop, I would prefer to make my own crop and decide which pieces of the image I'm willing to let go of, so I'll click "Done." Now let's go to the crop tool and let's make sure that the unlock icon or this lock icon is unlocked, so we can crop it to our own dimensions. I'm just going to bring it in, to get past the white areas, but again, making my own choice as to how I want to crop this image, and I'll click "Done." This is a better start for my image, it's a lot straighter. Let's go to the basic panel because this image is underexposed. So we're going to need to increase the exposure. What we're looking for here in exposure, is that we're pretty close to either end of this histogram, so that we've got some darks in the image and lights. Now we won't be able to get all the way with just increasing exposure, and we probably don't want to, because we've got better tools for adjusting a white point and a black point, and that is literally the whites and blacks. For these, I'm going to hold down the ''Alt'' or ''Option key'', and we'll start with whites. I'm going to just drag out. I'm expecting to see a black screen with some lighter pixels, and I'm going to adjust this in a positive direction until I see those light of pixels. Having found those pixels, I'm now going to move this adjustment back, because I wanted to just make those pixels disappear. I'm going to let go the left mouse button, and then let go the ''Alt'' or ''Option key''. You can see now that we've got a bit closer to the edge of this histogram, but we haven't blown out any pixels, which was really important, that we don't blow out any of our pixels and make them perfectly white, if we can possibly help it. For the blacks, let's go and do the same thing, ''Alt'' or ''Option'', drag on the black slider. Again, this time we expect to see a white screen with some black pixels where we don't have any black pixels until I start dragging down towards the end here. Now with black pixels, we're happy to have some black in the image. So I'm not worried about the fact that I will have some black in the image. In fact, I probably want that. I'm going to adjust this. I'm taking mine down to minus 38. That's for the adjustment that I'm making. That's what I need to do is I'm going to let go the mouse button. Let's see how far we've come. This is the beginning, and this is where we are right now. I'm using a backslash key on the keyboard to show you that. So far we've got the image straightened, and we've got a better exposure on it, but it's still extremely lackluster. What I'm going to do, is I'm going to start walking the highlights down a little bit, just to bring a little bit more detail back in the highlights, that's going to give us a bit more richness in this highlight area. I'm going to look at the shadows and decide what I want to do with the shadows. I have a lot of area of the image here, that is in shadow. If I start increasing the shadows, I'm going to bring back some detail in that area of the image. Always when you increase shadows, there is a price to pay and the price that you pay is a general flattening of the image. The color in the image tends to die a little bit, every time you increase the shadows. So you're going to need to build that back, and there are a few ways of doing that. One of them is just with a blanket contrast adjustments, so we could increase the contrast, and that's going to give us a little bit better color in the image. Clarity is what's called a Midtone Contrast Enhancement. What it's going to do is it's going to take the midtones in the image and it's going to add some contrast to them, a little bit of crunch. So certainly going to help this image quite a bit. Vibrance is adding color to under saturated colors, if there are colors in this image and most of them are under saturated at this stage, it will add some saturation to them. Saturation itself is like a sledgehammer adjustment. It's just going to throw color it, everything. It's possibly not something that you want to hit this image with. You can also add some closeness and contrast using the tone curve. When I open up the tone curve, if you used to using curves in other applications like Photoshop for example, this curve tool is pretty much similar down here, in our point curve we've got three options, linear, medium and strong contrast, and we can just try each of those and see if they work. Well, strong contrast is way too much, medium, still a bit much. So let's go back to linear. If you click here to show the slide, you can then start adjusting the curve yourself. You can pull on the curve and adjust the highlights, the mid tones, and the shadows in the image. You can also do that using the sliders here. That would allow you to bring back a little bit of contrast, a little bit of tone in the image this way. It's also possible to use the graduated filter. We've got a really dark area in the image here. We may want to bring a bit of detail out of that. I'm going to the graduated filter, and I'm going to click and drag in this direction, because that will anchor the graduated filter down here, and it will then affect this area of the image, so I'm just click and drag. Now, I've got an exposure setting on this already, and it's really obvious, because we bought a lot of detail out of this area of the image. Not a particularly good result, but you can say that there was a lot of detail than here. I do want a little bit of exposure increased, but probably not as much as I had. You can also then, once you've got that exposure in place, you can do things like increasing the clarity. You don't have a vibrant setting here. The vibrance is only available in the basic panel. You've got saturation, so you could enhance the saturation. One of the results of increasingly exposure here is that we've got a lot of noise in this area of the image. If we want to reduce the noise, we can do so by just dragging on the noise adjustment here. Then when I'm done, I'm going to click "Done." Now you might also have noticed a problem in this image with the purple lines. This is called chromatic aberration, and it's caused by light bending at different rates as it comes through the lens of the camera. We can adjust that as well, and we're back down to lens corrections for this, and we're going to color. While you could select here to remove chromatic aberration, you'll find that's probably not going to be enough. I'm going to click on the fringe color selector, and we're going to just going to hover over the problem, so that the grid of boxes that I've got showing on the screen here, it has a little x mark in the middle. I want to make sure that the x mark is showing a purple pixel, because when I click, I'm going to remove that color from the image, and you can see that the purple fringing has been removed from the image. Lightroom has ascertained that there was some fringing and it has removed it. We have some blue/green fringing here as well, that we may or may not be able to get rid of. I'm going to try and click on that. Well, yes, that's gone as well. I'm going to click "Done" and I'm just going to zoom back out again. The distracting fringing has been removed from the image. Now that we're done processing this image, let's have a look at the before and after. This is the before image, and this is the after image. They're very different. We've been able to really enhance this image using the Basic Panel tools and also in this case, the lens correction tools here in the developed module in Lightroom.
3. Enhance Color in an Image - Part 2: This second image that we're going to look at processing is very different to the first. This image has some pastel colors in it. It's a lot more muted an image. It's also pretty well exposed out of the camera, although I don't believe I have a black point or a white point here. I have saved this image as a DNG image for you, although it is a JPEG. If you download it, you'll be able to double-click on it and open it automatically in Adobe Camera Raw, just know that this is a JPEG image, so there's not a lot of image data that we have to work with. I'm going to start by adding a little bit of exposure to this. I just want to add a little bit of lightening to it. We're going to look at our white and black point. As we would do in light, we're going to hold Alt or Option and just check and see where our white point is, well, where overexposed in the whites up here. I'm going to bring my whites down just a little bit, but I could also bring them down using the highlights. For this image, I'm going to do just that. I'm again holding the Alt or Option key, but this time I'm just going to wind back the highlights. That's brought this area of the image back a little bit. Now let's have a look at our black point again, Alt or Option drag on the blacks. Now, I want to go in a negative direction. I didn't have many blacks in the image, and I want a little bit of black. I'm just going to start to bring that back in here. But back in the image, one of the things I want to avoid is over darkening this area because there is a tendency with this image for this tram to get very dark indeed. I just wanted to protect against that. I'm going to add a bit of clarity. This is midtone contrast enhancement, so it's going to help bring up the midtones in the image a little bit. But again, it's knocking back this tram a little bit, so I want to use that with care. I also want to add a little bit of vibrance, enhance the under saturated colors. Now when I'm looking at vibrance, I'm actually looking at increasing the vibrance quite a bit, but it is concerning me a little bit that the yellows in this image are really starting to be increased. There's no way that the vibrance is going to protect against yellows, but there is an option that will protect the yellows and that's the hue saturation and luminance adjustments. I'm going to HSL here. I'm going to saturation because I want to bring back the saturation on these yellows a little bit. I'm going to the yellow slider and I'm just going to test it first of all. I'm going to drop it all the way back and just make sure that this slider is controlling these areas, which it is. Having proved to myself that that's the right slider to be using then we go and put it back pretty much where it came from, but just a little bit in the negative area. I'm thinking about minus 13 here is going to knock back some of the yellows, but the other colors in the image have not been affected by this. Sometimes if you find that a color or two are becoming too enhanced when you use a vibrant setting, you can use the HSL adjustment to back them off. Think I'm also going to back off the green a little bit here too, I think those plants are a little bit too much. We can also go to tone curve here. The tone curve adjustment is somewhat similar to the one we saw in Lightroom. We've got a point curve that has those three options. Linear, which does not change the image at all, medium contrast, which is adding some medium contrast, and strong contrast, which is adding strong contrast to the image. You can see that when you apply medium or strong contrast, you're going up in the lighter areas of the image which are represented over here on the histogram and down in the darker areas of the image. You pulling the darks darker and you're making the lights lighter. That's giving you more contrast in the image. I think that the most medium contrast is sufficient here. I'm still a little concerned about the front of this tram though, because every time we hit the image with additional contrast, this area is getting blacker and blacker. Well, we do have an adjustment that will help us deal with that and that's the radial filter. I'm going to grab the radial filter and just drag it here. I'm going to make a radial filter adjustment that is pretty much the size of the front of this tram. I'm going to place it in position. Now the moment it has increased exposure on it, because whenever you use a filter in Adobe Camera Raw, you can't put the filter down unless you got some adjustment here. I'm just going to use this little hamburger icon here and reset the setting so that these are back to no adjustment at all. As you can see, that exposure just meant really was helping the front of the tram. I'm going to bring it back up. I'm also going to look at shadows because these areas are in shadows so I can increase the shadows here to bring that area out of shadow. This radial filter is allowing us to compensate for having added additional contrast to the image we wanted it in these areas here. We didn't want the effect that we were seeing in this area here where it was getting very black. Well, we're able to bring some detail out of the shadows, we're able to increase the exposure in this area. The radial filter here has quite a big feather on it, and that's allowing us a seamless transition from where the filters being applied to where it's not being applied. This is going to click on the zoom tool, which is going to take me away from that filter. Now let's have a look at the before and after on this image. You can do that in Adobe Camera Raw by pressing the letter P. I'm going to press the letter P, and you can see the original image and then press the letter P, and let's see the fixed up version of the image with the increased vibrance, better exposure on the image, and a more pleasing image altogether.
4. Enhance Color in an Image - Part 3: The final image that we're going to adjust is this one. I'm giving you the image and this time it is a true DNG image, so there's quite a bit of room to adjust this image. I'm going to start with exposure because this is underexposed by the look of the histogram here. I'm going to increase the exposure here on the image. I'm going to check my white and my black points. Hold Alt or Option as I just drag on the slider to check where my white point is and just back the image off a little bit. I'm also going to check my black point and there's not a lot of blacks in the image, so I'm going to bring some blacks in at this point. I'm a little concerned as to how light this building has become, so I'm going to back off the highlights a little bit to get a little bit more detail into the highlight areas. Now the sky would look better if it was blue. There is a very easy way of targeting the sky, and that's going back to the color options here. These are slightly differently arranged in Lightroom, but their result is exactly same. I'm going to select blue. Now, I like to use Color rather than HSL. I find the HSL arrangement a little bit confusing. Color is exactly the same thing, it's just a different arrangement. I'm going to the blues and I'm going to increase the blues because that's going to help the sky here. I can also decrease the luminance to also help get some blue in the sky. I can also look at this building and say, "Well, maybe I don't want it to be quite as yellow." If I want it to be a little bit more orange than yellow, I can go to the yellow adjustment here. This hue slider allows me to take yellow in two directions. I can take it towards green which is its next color on one side; this direction, or I can take it towards orange which is its next color on this side. I want to take it a little bit more towards orange but not all that way. I'm going to just drop it into the oranges a little bit more. There are a couple of reasons for this one. I thought it was a bit yellow but also blue and orange work particularly well together as an image, so I really want to get that sort in this image. Having made that adjustment let's go back to the basic panel, and let's see what else we can do. Well, we came here to enhance the color in these images, so I'm going to do two things here. I'm going to boost the clarity a little bit to increase the detail in the mid tones, that's going to crisp up the building, and I'm also going to bring up some vibrance. Vibrance is color in under-saturated color areas in the image, that's also going to help the image a little bit. Now before I leave, I'm a little bit concerned about this area of the image down in the bottom corner and it has a lot of black in it. I'm going to the Graduated Filter and I'm just going to drag from the bottom-right up towards the top-left, and that will apply a graduated filter in this bottom area of the image. I'm just going to adjust it so that it's pretty much over the area that's showing quite a bit of black that I don't particularly like. I'm going to bring the exposure back because that wasn't what I particularly wanted to do. I'm going to see if increasing these shadows is going to help here, if it's going to bring some detail out of these black dark areas of the image. I may also get some mileage by decreasing contrast, removing or reducing the difference between the darkest pixels and the lightest pixels. Again, I'm trying to remove this black effect from the image. Clarity might help a little bit here, and so too might adding a little bit of color into the image. I'm going to the color option here, I'm going to select a similar color to the one that we use for the rest of the building. You can see that, that's really helping the image but it's probably too much, so I'm just going to wind that down a little bit and then just click to close the dialog and click "Done". Now let's see how far we've come with this image, we're going to press the backslash key which in Lightroom will give us a before and after. This is the before image, this is the after image. It's a very different image. Now we've been able to really enhance the color and the lightness in this image, and really give it a boost. Your project for this class will be to take one or more of these images, and to adjust them in either Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. You can use my images, they're free for download for your own personal use or you can use images of your own. Post a picture of the final edited image in the class project area. As you're working through these videos, you will have see a prompt to recommend this class to others. Please if you enjoyed the class, do two things for me. Firstly give it a thumbs up, and secondly, write just a couple of words to explain why you like the class. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about either Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and comment on 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. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
