Transcripts
1. Intro: Hello everyone. My name is Daniela and I'm a food blogger and a food photographer. In this class, I'm going to teach you how to edit your food photos in Lightroom. I will show you my workflow the way I do my food photography editing, some general tips and detail. During this class, we are going to go through for real examples. You're going to see from start to finish how i edit for photos. Three of them will be in Lightroom Desktop and one will be in Lightroom Mobile. I will also talk a little bit about editing food photos by using resets and to give you a little bit of information about me. I am food photographer since 2012 when I create this money, first full block, that is cooking, food photography has become my efficiency then. And I had learned by myself through trial and error to a lot of reading and taking classes. In 2019, I published a cookbook, which apart from recipes, also had lots of photographs and in 2020 are created my second block, taco and tiramisu, enrich and get an aggressive piece from all around the world to this class is about photo editing only. But if you'd like to understand more about photography, you can check my other class, which is cryptography for beginner, in which I am talking about how people learn to photography if you're interested in this topic, thank you very much for your interest in this class. Let's get started.
2. Prerequisites + general advices: Thank you very much for taking this course. I'm really excited to start now, let's start with the prerequisite for the class. Obviously, you will need 40 manipulating software. We Lightroom is the one that I'm going to be teaching here. But there are a lot of softwares out there which have similar workflow like Lightroom. So for shortlist class is going to be useful for you even if you don't use Adobe Lightroom. Also, if you don't have a Creative Cloud subscription and you can use the free application, Lightroom Mobile. You can edit your photos as well pretty nicely. The only issue that you might not be able to use some of the options of the paid application. But I'm going to go through editing in light wrong, particularly even without subscription. Before starting with anything else. I want to talk a bit about photo editing in general, because I have noticed a lot of misconception on the topic. Some non photographers consider Ended English cheating, which is not true. Editing is the final work on the photo, which has been created with a camera. Even before the digital photography era, professional photographers have meaner touching photos. No difference now is that there is photo editing software which is much more accessible and much easier to use than the methods used in the past. Nowadays, we see more beautiful photography than ever. This is not only due to the advanced photo cameras and lenses. All great professional photos had been retouched, no exception. Even the best image needs to be retouched in order to make its best qualities shine. And there is another thing that I want to make clear to retouching. You can convert a good image to a stunning photo, but nobody can make a bad photo, do great, no matter of their editing skills and software used. But fanning and composition, wrong lighting and lack of focus cannot be changed in Lightroom, Photoshop, or in any other photo manipulating program. Now let's talk about food photography editing. When we added the food image, we are trying to show off the best of it. We are aiming for mouth-watering food, which usually means contrast, clarity, sharpness, and beautiful colors. In the next videos, you will see how to achieve these qualities in different ways by using just Lightroom. Domain object should always shine. Ideally it should be the light spot in the photo is the eyes naturally lead to the lighter part of the image. This is something you should consider also during styling and shooting, especially when you want to accomplish a muddy field. If the main object looks dark, sometimes you can make miracle by using the adjustment brush to lighten it a bit. One of the most important tips here is should enroll. The row format is much better for aiding since it preserves much more of the photo information in comparison to JPEG, that is especially valid when you want to change the exposure. As a side note, I would like to add that it is better to shoot the row for two slightly under exposed. It is much easier to increase the exposure during the editing, then decrease it. Overexposed photos tend to lose the details much more than the underexposed ones. Let's go now to the next videos and see photo editing in action.
3. Lightroom Editing: Stuffed Peppers Image: I'm starting with this image of big papers. This is an image for one of my blocks. And as you can see, it's a little bit dark, as already mentioned. And normally prefer to take the photos are a little bit darker because that way it's easier for me to edit them afterwards. If they are to lights and dimes, information is being lost. And if I increase the exposure because of some darker parts, some parts become overexposed. So my advice is to keep the images rather a bit darker than to light. So looking at the image, it looks like the white balance is good, but we can see this afterwards as well, after we increase the exposure. So the panel on the right, you see the panel on the right you can see the details of the photo. It has been shortwave, ISO 240 millimeters. And here we have a number of tools which we're going to use. I normally use mostly the crop and straighten tool, but in this case maybe I want to use it because bottle looks pretty straight. And another favorite tool that they use is the adjustment brush tool. It's a very nice tool which makes adjustments to only to certain parts of the image as a brush. And normally I darken or lighten some parts of the image, normally the hero object. But in some cases you might also want to add additional parameters and see if we are going to use it in this particular image. When I described here to show you how the tool looks and then I want to clip them. So I will explain you a little bit about each and every part of the adjustments. First, we have the basic adjustments. Did these are the adjustment that we are going to use almost in every image. And they're kind of mandatory. The rest are, majority are optional, but in some cases they can kind of make them achieve and more perfect than it is. In most cases will need to touch the exposure normally to increase it. And I will increasingly to get exposure. Let see, for now, let's leave it like this. Every image has a different exposure, so it's always different. If we need to move this cursor or not, then I like to move the contrast always a little bit to the right, but I won't go too much. And potentially we might come back and increase the contrast again. Highlights. I usually bring them down because in majority of the images, when we increase the whites and exposure, it becomes too shiny. So we want to keep it nice and not with too many highlights. This is what I usually do. There are certain cases when increasing highlights will do a good job. But in these particular images, I preferred to bring them down because we have a lot of white. And therefore I'm going to increase the whites a bit, but not too much. Because then we see some parts which will start shining a lot. I will decrease the shadows a little bit because there is an area with more shadows here you can see. And also, on the other hand, I will increase the blacks. So as you can see now, the image became even more contrasting because the blacks, these are the black areas while the shadows are going down. So you can see how the original images looked and you can see our result here. Let's go a little bit down and let's continue with the rest of the parameters. Texture is a parameter that I don't always use actually. It's not really mandatory for majority of the picture. Sometimes it might create nicer texture, but I think here we have quite a lot of textual parts in this image, so I don't really think it's necessary. But clarity is one of the parameters which are really led to increase for fooled images. So if we turn it like, Let's say I put it on 30, the image becomes much more contrasting, but at the same time it gives texture. And you see the details much more clearly defined, really nice for food photos because they look much tastier this way. For other kinds of photos like portrait for example, it's not always nice to increase the clarity that much, but it also depends on the particular style that you want to achieve. Then the decays parts. Honestly, in some cases it might be useful, but I'll leave it for the, for the end. I don't really think it's needed for the general images we're doing now, just a general, full editing. So we don't want to have some specific effects like vintage or Dreamy, which decays is very good for these two styles. I'd like to increase a little bit vibrance and also saturation, but not too much. Because here we have the red which is which may become overly saturated if you increase this parameter too much. So looking at the image, it looks quite much nicer compared to the original now, but something is not perfect. What I don't like that much is that first the papers which I want actually to highlight are too dark. And on the other hand, the overall image is kind has too dark and tool like parts. Also, I would like to play a little bit with the colors, because with the colors we can achieve much more harmony, which is eye pleasing. So the next parameter is the tongue curve. There are two ways to edit Dong curves. One is called parametric curve, the other one is called point curve. For starters, parametric is much easier than the point curve. However, with a point curve potential, you can achieve better results. I will start here with the parametric curve. And on the next image I will show you also the point curve. So what do we have here? Highlights, lights, darks, shadows. Looking at this image, it's a barter, really light compared to others which are darker. We want to preserve the contrast by keeping still the light bar. It's a little bit less shiny and the parts slightly lighter. So I'll bring the highlights a little bit down. And now put the lights a little bit up, but just a little bit. Then the darks are bringing a little bit down very slightly. And I actually bring the shadow so little bit down, meaning decrease them. So here I think we lost some part of the contrast. But actually it's better to keep it like this because we have enough clarity and we can try to increase the contrast from here. Yeah, I think it works better and leave the curve just slightly, slightly changed without going too much. Here. I will even decrease a little bit and lights actually, I will leave them at 0 was the toys builder. And I will use this Adjustment Brush settings that I have from the previous editing. I will pretty much living like this. And in order for me to see, I'll check this box. I will just go to the darker parts, leaving the lighter site. Likely. Ok. I think that's better. Yeah. I like it like this. What I don't like is that the red became too intense too, right? So we're going to fix this as well. I'll say Dan, for now. Let's just call it only through this part. And I will go directly to the colors. We have three ways of adjusting colors. The saturation, which you know, modalities, the intensity of the cours, the hue and the aluminum. This is the lightness basically and the color. So I don't want my red to be that saturated. Or rather, I prefer the luminous not to be too high. So bring the luminance a little bit down. And I will bring the situation just a little bit down. At the same time, I want my papers to have a slightly pinkish shade rather than this orange one that is here. So I bring to the site and magenta. So now they are not that much into the orange. At the same time. I would like the green to be more intense. So increase situation, rain down actually belongingness. And speller the 20th. Now the photo looks pretty much nice, but we see some little grain here. The reason of the grain is because these parts were actually quite dark. There were way too dark. And when we make them lighter, even though the ISR is relatively low, we should have some grey. So I'll try to improve this by using noise reduction. I find it better that way. Let's not go too much overboard because it might go in the details of the photon. In any case, if this photo is not made for a large print, it's not going to be a problem. I've used a very old camera. This is also the reason why it showed these grain with such a low ISO. But overall, when you see the picture like this, it doesn't show with the grain and I'll show you afterwards the photo in the computer exported and you see that it's not going to be, the brain isn't going to be a problem. Okay, we'll go down a little bit to Lens Correction. Normally on lenses have some distortion and in some cases the distortion is not, doesn't look very good. So by enabling these two parts, we see that my true detects automatically what are the lenses and helps to reduce the distortion. Normally in this case, the distortion just is sort of like that in slight light change on the edges is not something that really makes or breaks the photo, but at the same time in doing traditional lightness, which I like. And lastly, what I would like to change because I like my photo a little bit moody. I will put some vignetting which automatically made the photo slightly darker. So ultimately, I would like to increase just a little bit takes Bowser bring the shadows are little bit. Additionally. Yes. And that way I will need to recruit illuminance on the right. And maybe slightly the situation again, cause I don't really like my colors to pop so much, especially the red one, the rest are fine. So I would like to leave this photo as it is now. We may want to have additional editing Photoshop if we see something that goes that's not a superfund. For example, if you would like to remove this cramps, best is to use Photoshop because the Spot Removal tool in mitral usually doesn't do such a good job. I never use it honestly. It's not very good in my opinion. So if you like to edit these parts in Photoshop, you can just go to photo editing, editing Adobe Photoshop, or in our application potentially. And you can do that. Now. I will not bother because honestly, I like my images to be a little bit imperfect because in my opinion brings authenticity to the photo. One more thing to add. In many cases, the photo editing is purely subjective, especially when the photo is really nice, this particular photo, the only thing that you see at four side is that you need to edit exposure. Other than that, of course, we need to increase the contrast. But the particular details that we are editing, this is quite the objective. Of course, there are also different ways to add this photo in mind. Rather than decrease the shadows, you might increase them and make it very dramatic. There are things you can do to some Hayes, et cetera. But these are not things shareable, but these are not things that I honestly like very much. So I prefer to leave the photo more nature. And in the next videos you're going to see also how to edit a photo in a slightly more creatively.
4. Lightroom Editing: Cookies Image: Here is another image that I would like to show you with general editing. Some cookies, which are a nice thing to edit, to shoot and David. So let's start again. As we can see again, the image is slightly under exposed, so we're going to increase the exposure. Obit. What is particular about this image is that it's all blue, so we need to be very careful with the blue cours this time. And we might want to give a little bit of a different shade to the blue. The good thing is that blue contrasts quite nicely with the yellowish. And this, we want to highlight this contrast. So I won't touch the contrast here because the photo is pretty much contrasting. But I will bring down Agenda highlights and bring up the whites just a little bit and maybe increase a little bit. Exposure again. Then the blacks I will bring down, but I won't go too much because we have quite a lot of blacks here. And now it's lighter. But this of course is not everything. We're going to work it within the cursed. Let's increase the clarity. I'll put it at 35 this time with little bit more. I'll increase the vibrance, which makes the warm colors pop and rock situation just a little bit. I want to work the colors because they're surely three main covers, the yellowish, orange, blue. And here is a little bit of pink, which I want to highlight as well because it's a nice fresh color site. So let's see what we can do with the curves. I will lose again the parametric curves in order to improve a little bit the lights and the shadows. So let's bring down the highlights and let's increase the light slightly. At the same time, I want to bring the darks and the shadow down, which gives a really nice contrast hesitancy. It's just a little bit without losing information. Because sometimes by decreasing tomato highlights, you may make the photo to do. And you know, all these here, they're quite a lot decreased TO I think this is pretty much good. Lights. We can keep them as they are again. Two, it's better to keep them. Keep them just a little bit up here. I think in terms of light, it is growth because it's kind of Moody who with strong contrast and this is actually what the photo is meant to accomplish. On the other hand, if you want, of course, different result, you need to consider this while shooting. So this is what is meant from this photo to be kind of contrasting. And let's go down and see what we can do with colors. And like the blue. And it is actually quite an shapes or keep it like this. I want to increase a little bit the yellow shaded in order to be more contrasting to the blue. And the same time the orange, yellow to orange and blue, orange to do just a little bit. Because here, when you have a lot of these covers, just one index and it might change dramatically the image so wanted to be orange on the ground and when the coffee to have a little bit reddish parts or maybe this way. And at the same time, I would increase the magenta. And in the situation and include the law. The red, magenta and the purple, which will make the flour to pop. Split toning is not something that I normally use with the general editing, but with a more creative editing, it's actually quite nice. So I'll show it to you in the next videos. What is left we want to remove again. Chromatic aberration is an effect from the lenses. It happens when the contrast between light and dark is not well set and sometimes they're very unpleasant shades of colors. But we don't have this in this case, but just in case I'm always checking them both. Profile correction didn't really do a lot here. Again, in just a little bit of light on the sides, which is fine. And we might want to consider vignetting. Let's see if they like it. It is nice, but on the other hand, it is hiding my flour, which I really like. And if we leave it at 0, it's still nice, but I will just go slightly like ten. Then this is ok. Just to give a light mood, Venus to this image. One more thing to do. To read image is pretty nice like this. I like it. It's much more improved than the original without actually be dramatically different. Potentially if we want, we call
5. Lightroom Editing Chocolate Truffles Image: So this image, we're going to make it a little bit creative. It's not that this particular style of editing is super creative, but the kind of image that we have requires a little bit of creativity from our site because it's not that straightforward. If we just did it, it's straightforward to still be not that pretty, mainly due to the color of the background. Also, I'm not really in love with the color that I've chosen and not even with filings. So I'll try to work it out during the editing process. Of course, as I've said previously, you cannot improve bad image. This is not definitely not a bad image, but the result by just editing it straightforward is not what I would like. So I will play a little bit more with the colors and with settings in order to give it a special mode. So we're starting as usual with the exposure. And let's contrast for now because I'm really not sure how is it going to go with this extreme dark here and extremely light here? One thing I don't really enjoy is the fact that here you have a lot of white and here we have it very light and extra here the dark is too much. So bring the highlights has done is possible actually to the end. And now we're much better. The Shao's up. Came the white church. Not yes. And black slit or be down but not too much because with these blacks, we want to highlight them way more than necessary here. We're not going to touch the texture again. We're going to test the clarity as usual. So let's put it up to 40. And we go into with within vibrance up 15 in situations. Let's put it online. For now. I want to try here to do something with a point curve. I will try to improve the image. And you can see here these are the blacks. To the histogram. The blacks, the shadows, the exposure and highlights and the whites till the forgeries in the middle. The highlights and the wide surrender and the blacks and the shadows are here. So I would like to increase a little bit the blacks. That is relatively fine. I still don't like perfectly delight, but we can improve it didn't afterwards. If you look at it as a close up, you see that the details are much easier to spot, so it's quite much nicer than the original. I would like to improve the colour of the background. And then start saw wrote to Q and bring just slightly brutal Aquadro reaction. And then at the same time increase the blue situation. It's pretty much fine. This gives a shade between bluish and acquire, which I really like. I would like to thank the green slightly to the yellow but just a bit. Okay. And i will increase slightly. The luminance of the Green was quite dark here, just a bit. And looking at damage traditionally, we can give it a little bit of light here. Is likely the setting state again from my previous edit. I usually use similar kinds of settings for each edit with a brush and just adjust if needed. And you can see that the blue here is much nicer than grayish here. So the photo is different that way and the glow contrasts with the yellow also has a nice shaped in comparison to the other colours. I want to try to computing damage without going too much. When your crop automatically, you have the grid to measure the roof torts. It looks nice, but I don't like this light bulb here. So we need to do something to fix it. Let's go down. And let's do some delineating after of course, electing these two parameters which we would like, the judiciary, the vignetting is going to darken. He almost did the work.
6. Using Presets for Food Photography: So let's talk about using presets for food photography. Lightroom presets are very good for editing photos in bulk. One preset is brain made settings, which are recorded and just apply it to the photo. That way you can apply presets door, dozens and hundreds of photo at the same time. However, you cannot just apply the precess because every photo is different. Every photo has different settings, especially different exposure. And in most cases the presets needs to be modified to study TO, but also not every preset is suitable for every photo. That's also something that we need to consider. Generally for photography, presets are slightly different in most cases then the portrait presets or landscape preset, there are different settings. As we already saw, that the food needs to be mouth-watering. The food needs to look yummy, delicious. And we cannot just apply any preset or need. For example, a lot of landscape or portrait presets have some strong split donning like bluish, something like this, which is not always great for. So we need to consider very well what kind of presets we are applying. We shouldn't just by any presets are there. We need to aim, particularly for food photography presets because they're specially developed for fault. I have my own presets which I have developed with the time and they helped me a lot in editing my photos because I don't lose time. Also, my style is kind of consistent. I have different presets, but they are all kind of similar to my general style, which is slightly moody, not always too dark though. So while over here the pre-set up, it's the developed up. On the left you see the presets. Just to say quickly, you can import proceeds by clicking here on the plus sign. Import presets. You can import directly or you can create presets by applying this way, the edits that you have already done on your photo. So I'm going to my food presets, which I have presets, but I want to show you my food presets, How am I am applying them? Because these are the proceeds I generally use for my food photo editing recently, majority of my photos are edited with these presets. First, unwilling to check which preset is best for this photo, as you can see, you can achieve different effect by applying different preset. But I'm considering which one I like the most with this particular photo. I want a lot of contrast at the same time, I don't want to have too dark parts or I think I'm going to go to DS1. As we look. We see that, okay, it's nice. And let's operate here before and after. We see it's nicer, but it's not perfect. So there are things that we want to adjust. First of all, what I want to address and I should ever just before applying the presentment, it's ok. I want to adjust the position of the straighter. I don't make very much difference here, but we can remove it in Photoshop later. So we have nice whites, but it's too much shadow here. One thing I want to change is the exposure. When a blank presets almost 90% of the times, you need to change the exposure. But if I apply a lot of the exposures t here is this white part which I don't really like that. It's so strong. So I'm going to bring the highlights a little bit down. And i will increase actually does preset has whites which are not very strong. So I'm going to slightly crystal relative to the amount of leave them neutron. And I will increase the exporter just a bit more. Okay? And then with the adjustment brushless DC, which are the last settings that stayed here, I will do slightly here. Increase the shallow, Just a little bit. Decrease the shadow sexual. K. Maybe also. That is better. Okay, I don't want to have strong shadows here on the cup. Otherwise the shadows on the other side are good. Okay, this is pretty much better. And let me see if I made the vignetting of these preset. Yeah, if tourists quite strong, maybe we want to pull it out just a little bit more to bring additional neediness. And here it is. So nice and easy quickly with down and brought edited this photo.
7. Editing in Lightroom mobile : I'm going to show you now how to edit photos in Lightroom Mobile. Here on the screen, you have factually, if your choices, you can take a photo directly in DND format, which is the role for mobile. And I'll show you how by clicking on this icon with camera, you see screen CMI is already in DNG. If you tap on the Format on top, you see the PNG or JPEG. Now we don't want to take a photo because I have already taken a few photos and will reach them by going to all photos and finding the exact images. So here they are, my two, both. You see the icons on the bottom. Each icon represents a set of settings that you can take. The ones that are not available for people without Adobe subscription are selective. And the healing tool, other than that, all the rest are available even with the free option. So you just need to create login for Adobe and you can use Lightroom and you can also install your own presets. You can also create your presets and I'll show you now how you can do this. So I will start this image by cropping a little bit of it because I see on the top right some piece of cable which is hanging there. So these used to be if I just crop it. Ok, this liberal world we're going to light, which shows basically the exposure contrast highlights, shadows, white, black. These are the main options that we used, while somehow around 15 in black, so minus five. Supposedly the photo was taken like this with the professional mold. So I want to increase the white a little bit more and decrease the black solid, albeit more the shadows as usually we are going to decrease them by turning to the right and highlights we are going to decrease them by turning to the left. For now, I wanted to contrast and exposure, but probably we will do it later. You can also adjust the curves on the same place. For now I'm not going to touch the curves. So we go to color, the white balance, temperature and tint, vibrant saturation and where you see mix. With option, you can update each separate color by itself, Hughes a duration and luminaires. So I'll start with Vibrance and Saturation. I want to increase them just a bit, both of them. And now, what do I want to do with this image in terms of color? I want to highlight the pinks, reds, yellows, but I want to bring down the blue because blue doesn't seem to be much in the rest of the colors. This tablecloth was not the bests I used. Actually, I like the roses, but the blue background is not the best for this image. So. I want to work to bloom and increase luminance. Decreased situation almost to the bottom. And they want to decrease situation also of the core color. So you can see now that we almost lost the glow. But I'll go to the yellow. I'll increase a little bit the situation. And also slightly the luminance, the greenhouse. So I would like to highlight. So y will increase, saturation, will decrease luminous because I don't want to be to luminance. And the red. I would like to increase slightly the situation. I don't want to touch the luminous For now, just magenta. I also would like to increase both the saturation and the luminous. For now, I'll say done. And go back. The photo looks slightly dark moments, so maybe I'll go back a little bit to the light and increase also the exposure. This looks better and let me increase also the contrast. Much. Ok. Now I like it better. I want to go to effects where I want to increase the clarity to 25. And this looks fine. And let's put some vignetting to these photo. Looks nice like this. Over the photo looks much better, but it still has some very dark parts. So let's go back to the light and let's pull the shadow so little bit down to the right side. And I will increased exposure a little bit more. I think this is much better. Me the highlights now are popping up too much, so maybe we want to decrease them further. Then actually this image is much nicer than it will, so I'll tap on it. And you can see the original, which is very kind of not interesting. And now it just, the tuples just pop very nicely within the middle of these cloths. Now let's say that we like this photo so much that we want to save the adjustments to our preset. The presets are located at the very right part of the screen. So we go to presets and reopen basically all the processes that are already available on these form. But if we tapped on top right, we have the options, create pre-set, manage presets. So I want to create a preset based on these adjustments. So I will say this is a precepts EPO EPO precinct. So fine. And click on fine. And I click on top right. And it, Apple presented that added to user presets. If we have presets that we want to import to our mobile phone later we bought presets or we downloaded free presets from some side. The way we import them is again true DNG file. So the mobile presets are coming in the files, their photos, DNG photos which you can simply upload to your Lightroom and save the same way as you create a new present. So I try to look for some DNG photos. Let's say that this was a photo which I want to import as a precept. We can imagine that this is preceded that you have bolt. So again, we do the same thing. This photo is edited. We can see the edit. Just go to presets. Tab on the right side, create presets and we create a new preset. And we of course, select all the parameters that you want, including these presets. We might not want to include some parameters like for example, white balance is not really so necessary. We want to exclude white balance and we can exclude it. And the same way we type the new precept and we save it in our reset location.
8. Project & Final Thoughts: The project for this class will be for you to edit a photo and show me the before and after result. Optionally, you can describe shortly how you have edited it or just summarize your workflow. Thank you very much for taking this class. I really hope you learned a lot. Please feel free to take my other courses, which might like as well. I will be really happy to review this class. This is going to be very helpful for me. And if you have any recommendations about it, please leave them in the ratings. This is going to help me to consider feature classes and for updating my current class. If you liked this course, please follow me. And also don't do the data, follow me on social media. Thank you once again for baking the spot. I can't wait to see your projects.
Daniela Lambova, Food Blogger & Photographer
