Fundamentals of Lightroom II: Editing and Post Processing | Lotus Carroll | Skillshare
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Fundamentals of Lightroom II: Editing and Post Processing

teacher avatar Lotus Carroll, Artist, Photographer, Teacher

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Trailer

      0:55

    • 2.

      Software Overview

      3:17

    • 3.

      Personalize

      2:17

    • 4.

      Manipulate Images in Library Mode

      5:22

    • 5.

      Crop and Straighten Tool

      4:03

    • 6.

      White Balance / Temperature & Tint

      4:42

    • 7.

      Tonal Scale / Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites & Blacks

      6:32

    • 8.

      Presence / Clarity, Vibrance & Saturation

      3:16

    • 9.

      Bring It Together

      1:55

    • 10.

      Tone Curve

      8:18

    • 11.

      HSL / Color / B&W / Split Toning / Camera Calibration

      9:55

    • 12.

      Detail

      7:47

    • 13.

      Lens Corrections and Effects

      7:34

    • 14.

      Spot Correct and Red Eye

      6:43

    • 15.

      Local Adjustments: Graduated Filter, Radial Filter & Adjustment Brushes

      14:41

    • 16.

      Working with Develop Presets

      3:56

    • 17.

      Bring It All Together

      3:32

    • 18.

      Export & Share

      2:34

    • 19.

      Explore Photo Classes on Skillshare

      0:36

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About This Class

Professional photographers and enthusiasts alike will love this class in the basics and behind-the-scenes secrets of transforming your photos in Adobe Lightroom! It’s the favorite editing tool of Lotus Carroll, and she’s eager to show you how to get started.

Adobe Lightroom is more affordable than Photoshop, offers a database-driven organization system for streamlining your workflow, and, most importantly, has the significant photo editing capabilities to transform your photographs into images that fully realize your creative vision.

In this class, you’ll learn how to navigate and customize view modes, master the core functionality that’s driving the program’s popularity, and learn the secrets of all the develop panels and tools that transform Lightroom into a processing powerhouse.

What You'll Learn

  • Introduction to the Lightroom Workspace. Look around the software setup, focusing mostly on the Develop Mode, where processing is done.
  • Use the Library to View and Manipulate Photos. Survey large image collections, compare image view modes, and manipulate images with shortcuts.
  • Explore Image Editing Essentials. Learn how to use Lightroom to adjust the basics: crop, alignment, tone, tint, exposure, contrast, brightness, clarity, vibrance, and saturation of your photos. Play with extremes to enhance your understanding of the program’s full capabilities.
  • Experiment with Advanced Editing Techniques. Go beyond basics and learn to fully develop and transform your RAW images in Lightroom. We’ll cover key adjustments (white balance correction, noise reduction, sharpening, etc.), working with presets, sophisticated filters, useful brushes, split toning, lens corrections, and more.
  • Export, Publish, and Share Your Work. Export your work to Photoshop (or elsewhere) for further editing, and share your photos using the power of social media.

What You'll Do

  • Deliverable. A series of processed images from Lightroom.
  • Brief. Explore about how to integrate Lightroom into your own workflow and creative process.
  • Collaboration. As you go through the class, update your project to share your progress with your fellow students.
  • Specs. Be sure to share full width images and screenshots with the class in your project.

By the end of the course, students will have the skills to successfully post process their images to suit their individual style, delivering a final product they are proud of.

Whether you already have a large photo collection or are just getting started, this class is the ultimate guide for using Lightroom to transform your photos into compelling images with impact.

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Class Outline

  • Software overview. Photographer Lotus Carroll will show you how to use Lightroom, starting with a closer look at the module where you’ll edit your photos. You’ll explore the module’s side panels, which include zoom functions and processing tools like tone curve, split toning, lens correction, and camera calibration.
  • Personalize. You’ll learn how to get unnecessary menu bars and panels out of your way when you work, and you’ll learn to adjust the background color of your editing space.
  • Manipulating images in library mode. You can work on photo enhancing even in the library module in Lightroom. Lotus will show you how to rotate photos directly in your library, and she’ll walk you through the various functions in the quick develop panel that let you make “quick and dirty” changes to your photographs before starting to post-process in-depth.
  • Crop and straighten tool. Making sure your photograph is the size and shape you want comes before any other edits. With the crop and straighten tool, you’ll learn how to manipulate your photograph’s outline, use the slider function, and straighten individual elements within your photograph.
  • White balance. You’ll learn how to alter the white balance in your photograph based on both Lightroom presets and your own customized adjustments. You’ll see what a photograph looks like after applying a cool vs. warm tone, and you’ll learn how to find the “target neutral” shade in your photograph.
  • Tonal scale. In playing with your photograph’s exposure, you’ll learn to embrace trial and error in achieving the right balance between highlights and shadows in your photograph.
  • Presence. Presence is how your image “pops,” and you’ll learn to adjust it using the clarity slider in Lightroom. Lotus will give you some portrait photography tips as you explore saturation.
  • Tone curve. You’ll learn how to manipulate the tone curve graph. Lotus will make subtle tonal adjustments to demonstrate best practices for portrait retouching.
  • HSL and color. HSL and color control the hue, saturation, and luminance of your photograph. Lotus will offer saturation tips and teach you how to edit color by temporarily setting your image to black and white.
  • Detail. You’ll learn to find a happy medium when sharpening your image and how to use a mask when sharpening.
  • Lens corrections and effects. Lotus will show you how to change the distortion in your photograph, alter its aspect, and add visual effects like shaded edges.
  • Spot correction and red eye. In professional photography, there’s no room for red eye. You’ll learn how to mask red eye and other small blemishes in your photographs.
  • Local adjustments: graduated filter, radial filter, and adjustment brushes. You’ve learned how to alter your photograph as a whole; now it’s time to zoom in. Lotus will introduce you to various tools that help you edit your photograph one section at a time.
  • Working with develop presets. You’ll use the presets to get photo processing tips by checking out the corresponding panel settings for each preset.
  • Export and share. Lotus will go over the export and publishing functions in Lightroom.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Lotus Carroll

Artist, Photographer, Teacher

Teacher

 

 

Hi! My name is Lotus and I am an artist who mainly makes photographic images, dabbles in painting, and writes poetry and short narratives. I specialize in self portrait imagery as well as nature photography, and am a stock photographer as well. 

I really enjoyed creating my Lightroom Editing and Organization Classes (see below). Feel free to ask me anything about Lightroom or photography in general. If I don't know the answer, I'm happy to figure it out or help you find it. That way, we'll both learn something!

Want more? Visit my about.me page.

See full profile

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Transcripts

1. Trailer: My name is Lotus Carroll, I live in Austin Texas. On Skillshare, I'm going to be teaching how to use lightroom to develop or post-process your photos. We're going to be using some very basic tools as well as more advanced tools to change the photo. We will be able to take our raw image file and process it in various ways to create a beautiful image. You can use lightroom to process photos from anything. The students are going to be able to post-process an image amazingly. They're going to be able to take wherever they are with their processing and elevate that. 2. Software Overview: Before we actually get into processing, let's look around and see the workspace a little bit. If we open up Lightroom, it opens to the library module. I'm going to get some things out of my way right away. I'm going to go to window, screen mode, and I'm going to go to full screen, and now I don't have this menu bar at the top unless I go up to it with my cursor. It's out of my way. Over here, we have all the modules, library, developed where we'll be doing processing map, book, slideshow, print, and web. I'm going to go ahead and click over to the develop module. That's what we're going to be using as we post process our images. Tabs on the left and the right side hold panels that you're going to be working in. Let's look closer at those. I'm going to collapse the tabs so we can see everything very easily, and I'm also going to make one quick change. That is I'm going to turn on solo mode. It equals me to hide anything I'm not currently working. So, if I open a panel, the other ones will automatically collapse and not be in the way when I'm trying to focus on something else. Go over to the left tab and look at the top panel. This is your navigator. This is a view of the image that you're currently working with. You can fit or fill, which will bring your image all the way into the screen. But you can also zoom in. Here's a 1:1 zoom. We can get a 1:3 zoom. Moving along, let's see what are other panels on the left tab are. We have presets. This is where all of your developed presets are going to be, where you can get a whole lot of processing done, many different steps in one click. You have snapshots, history, which shows everything you've done with an image, and collections. These are the collections you set up while you're organizing your photos to sort them. Let's move over to the right tab and look at the panels there. At the top, we have the histogram for your image, a small toolbar of processing tools to use, your basic, tone curve, HSL, color, black and white, split toning, detail, lens corrections, effects, and camera calibration panels. The bottom of both tabs, we also have buttons. Copy paste, over on the left, and previous and reset over on the right. There's a toolbar here at the bottom of your image area, and at the very bottom, we have the film strip that shows all of your images. So, this is our workspace, and this is the module where we're going to be staying most of the time during this class on processing. 3. Personalize: You can personalize the workspace in the Develop module to look the way you want it just like you can in other modules. Very quickly, we can hide panels to get them out of the way, or hide the tabs on the sides to get them out of the way so that we have more room to look at an image. We can also hide the film strip at the bottom. Again, giving us much more room for image. Now, the panels or the tabs on the side can be auto-hid and shown as they are now, or you can control them by telling them to be manual. That means you're going to control what they're doing by clicking on these arrows and bringing them out and in when you want to use them, and when you don't want to use them. I mentioned before that you can enable solo mode, that means that when we click on one of these panels, the other ones will collapse. That streamlines your view, and it stops you from having to scroll so much to see what else you want to work with on the side here. If you'd like, you can change the background color. Right now it's gray, but we could change it to black if we like. I prefer gray so that's where I usually stay. I'm also going to hide, I've already hidden the top menu. I'm also going to hide this modules menu by clicking on this arrow. Now, it's really starting to look the way I want it to look when I'm processing. I don't have a lot of distractions, and if I want to get to my filmstrip, I can always hover on it down at the bottom to pop it up, or click to have it come back up. When I'm working on one image though, I really don't want it to be distracted by other images down at the bottom. So, I just want this image to be nice and big right here. One last thing is that you can actually get a really quick full-screen previews by clicking F, or you can dim and turn out the lights by cycling with the L key. This is dim, this is lights out. So, those are the things you can do to start customizing your workspace so that you're comfortable in the Develop module with the way things look before you start processing. 4. Manipulate Images in Library Mode: We're going to be spending most of our time in the Develop module here, but I wanted to jump back to the Library module real quick to show you that you can actually do some processing in the Library module. Personally, I don't like to do processing in the Library module because there's not as much fine tuning available, but I did want you to notice that you can do some things. For example, if you want to, you can rotate your photos using the arrow keys when you hover over an image, or you can also use the brackets. Click on an image and click Command and either a beginning or ending bracket, will flip the photo around and around rotating it. You can also flip a photo. Let's go to Photo and here you'll see the Rotate Left and Rotate Right. You could also flip horizontal or you can flip vertical. I'm going to back up, I'm going to go back by clicking Command-Z, undo, undo, undo. This as a nice way to back up what you've done. You can also edit an undo the last thing that you did or we do it. Another thing you can do is create virtual copies here. You can either click on the photo and select Create Virtual Copy, or you can click on the photo and select Command-Apostrophe, and that will create a virtual copy. It's not an actual copy, but it's a Lightroom generated virtual copy of your photo. Now, let's go over here to the quick develop panel on the right tab, will open that up and you'll see that there are some processing steps you can take right here. One of the things you can do is click on this presets area and actually choose a preset to apply to a photo right here. Presets will contain many processing steps in one click, to obtain a certain look. Lightroom comes with several default presets. These are the ones that are available right here. So, example, if I want to take this Infrared, Lightroom B&W Filter Presets, I can click on that and it's applied to the photo right here. I can also manipulate white balance by choosing a presser, let's back up by doing Ctrl+Z or Command-Z, and let's apply a daylight white balance, not much of a change. How about a tungsten white balance? There you go. I can control tone here as well. Let's expand all of these. I can auto tone which means that Lightroom is going to decide what the tone of the photo should look like. But can also increase or decrease exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, clarity and vibrance, all right here. Now remember, these are kind of quick and dirty controls that are not as fine tuned as the ones that you'll have in the develop module. But you should know, that you are able to do that right here in the Library module. Something else that you can also do, is you can take the developed settings from one image and you can apply them to another image or a group of images. So, for example, I could click on this image and right-click to get a drop-down. Go to Develop Settings, Copy Settings and decide which of the things in that processing I want to apply to the other photo. Then I copy those, go to the other photo by clicking it, again go to Develop Settings, and this time I'll paste the settings and we'll see that the changes to the second photo match those of the first photo. You can also select several photos and do the same thing, applying the changes to several photos at once. Finally, and let's back up there, I can click on this photo, hold Command and click on the second photo and now I can click Sync Settings down here at the bottom right. The same menu pops up and I can click Synchronize, and again the developed settings between the two, are going to be synchronized such that whatever you highlight after the first image, is going to take the processing that was on the first image. So, these are the things that you can do to manipulate a photos developed settings, in the Library module. Now, let's move on to the Develop module. 5. Crop and Straighten Tool: Okay. Let's go to the Develop module. We're going to get this menu down and click on Develop, or we can just click D and go there quickly. We're going to start off talking about Crop and Straightening. So, we're going to talk about the Crop and Straighten tool. Let me choose a different image that will be better for this. How about this one? Okay. You want to crop and straighten, go up to the menu and click on Tools. You can find the Crop tool here. You can click R on the keyboard, or you can click on the Crop Straighten tool right here. Let's open that up. Hover over your photo and you'll see that there is an outline. You can grab any part of this outline and pull it in or out to manipulate the crop. Right now the lock over here is unclicked. Let's click it. Now, when we pull in and out, we're going to be cropping the photo at the same aspect ratio. What's cool is we can get a drop-down over here and we can choose different ones. Anyone that we choose, whenever we pull here, it's going to maintain that aspect ratio. Now, if you're wanting to free form, you can unclick the lock and work from either side and change the photo exactly as you'd like. You can also be a control freak who likes to draw things and grab your little tool right here and come out in the image, click and drag exactly where you want it. The crop will fall right there as you drew it when you let go. I'm going to go back over here and I'm going to get my one-by-one and I'm going to pull back a little here and come over here. I think this is going to be what I want. Remember that when you're moving things around in here, you're not actually moving the square that is the cropping square. You're clicking and grabbing the image in the background and you're dragging it around behind this crop square, Okay, let's move back over here. In fact, I don't think I'm going to do on-by-one, I think I'm going to go five-by-seven. Pull it back outside. That's good. What else do I want to do? Well, that looks like this line out here on the horizon is a little off. I want to straighten it. Inside my Crop tool I can also straighten. To straighten, I can either hover over the image edge with the crop and see the curved arrows. When I see those, I can click and I can drag it around until I think it's straight. This nice grid overlay appears so that I can compare it to that. Or, I can use the Slider tool over here. But something that's really cool is I can click on this tool and bring it into the image. Then, I can draw a line in the image across something that I think should be straight and it will automatically move the image to straighten along the line that I created. I think I'm done. I've got the crop I want and I've got it straight, the way I want it. So, I can either click Close here or I can just click Enter on my keyboard. Now, I have the image cropped and straightened exactly as I wanted. 6. White Balance / Temperature & Tint: Okay. Now, we're going to talk about manipulating your white balance. Let's open up the Basic panel over here on the right. You can see right at the top, you can either work in color or black and white, and then right below that, you see an area that's going to allow you to manipulate the white balance in the image. So, few different ways you can do this. First thing you can do is, you can actually apply a preset white balance. The first option is auto. This is going to automatically decide the white balance for your image should be based on some algorithms programmed into lightroom. If we click that, there's the automatic white balance. The other things you can choose from, are presets that should match the shooting conditions. So, let's say, shade or daylight. It's going to change the white balance based on those precepts. What else can we do? We can actually play with the sliders ourselves to decide. We go blue or cold, you see what happens. We go yellow or warm, we see what happens. What we're going to do when you're playing with the slider is, you're going to be deciding with your own eyes what looks best. Personally, I like a little bit of warmth in this image. I'm going to move the slider half a little. Can also play with the tip here on the slider. Do we want to go weak green or super fuchsia. Playing with the extremes helps you see what you're going to do to the photo. But usually you're just going to want to make really fine adjustment. I like this. Let's go to the History panel over here on the left, and we can back up to where we started, and let's try out this way. Grab your little dropper tool, and what you're kind of try to get is a target neutral, and what you need to find is something in the photo that is a light neutral grey. This mind be hard to find sometimes. Yeah, I'm having a difficulty. Is that a light neutral grey, it's more like a brown. Here's our light neutral grey. That's pretty close, let's see what happens. Oh, well, a lot of blues came back in. So, that's an option, but I have to tell you that my very favorite thing is to just make the colors look the way I want them to. This is going to be personal for everyone. I'd like to move the sliders like I said. So, I'm going to move it back over, so it's a little more warm, and that I think is the warmth I would like for this image. Let's grab another image real quick and see what we can do with it. How about this one. Well, yellows. So, what do I want to do here. I think I want to move the slider over towards blue. What a difference that makes. Now, instead of my son looking like he has jaundice while he's blowing bubbles, he has more of a natural skin tone. I want to see what the before and after is here. I can do a really nice shortcut, that is, I can use the backslash key on the keyboard. If I click it, I can see the before, and the after. There's also a tool down here at the bottom in the toolbar, where I can click to see the before and after both on screen at the same time, and if you cycle through these, you can see some different versions of that. It's a neat visual representation of what you've done. Click the Loop View next to it to go back to the one image. Remember the backslash, before after, before after. Okay, so that's a basic white balance. 7. Tonal Scale / Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites & Blacks: The next thing we're going to want to do is work on the Tonal Scale. We're going to be controlling Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks. Again, there's a couple of ways we can do this. Look in your Basics panel again over here on the right side. First of all, we again, have an Auto option and this is where Lightroom is going to decide all of these things for us. Let's click that and see what happens with this dark image. Okay. It's gotten brighter. It's stretched out the graph, you're on the histograms so that we have more of spread with our Tonal Scale. But I'm really not happy with what I'm seeing. It doesn't look great to me and I think I can do better making some of these fine adjustments myself. You can either go over here to the history and click one back or you can get hit command Z to go backwards. Now, what can I do? Well, I've got pretty dark image. So, what happens if I upped the Exposure? Well, if I take it up, I'm actually controlling overall Brightness in the image. So, when I raised the Exposure, the Brightness and everything across the entire image, it's going to go up. If I lower it, it's going to go down. I feel like I can raise this a little bit, then I'm going to want to make some other adjustments. Let's move on. Contrast. What does contrast do? Well, contrast is what it sounds like. It's the difference between the lights and the darks and this is mostly affecting the Mid Tones. If you raise it, the difference between the lights and the darks gets a greater. If you lower it, the difference between those lights and darks gets much much less creating a kind of flat look. I think I'm going to leave that alone for right now and work more of the others, but I will come back to this one. I'm going to double click right here where it says Contrast, that I'll take it back to zero. Well, what do highlights do? With highlights, you can manipulate or adjust the Brightness of the lightest parts of the image, so you're either making the brightest parts brighter or the brightest parts darker. You can see when I raise and lower it, all the parts of the image where the sun's light are the brightest are getting even brighter. What do Shadows do? Shadows are the darkest parts of the image. So, when you raise or lower those, you're either making their shadows or the darkest parts of the image lighter or darker. You think that maybe here the darkest parts of the image could stand be a little bit brighter. What do you think? Let's bring that up. We're starting to be able to see the definition in some of these films now. Whites. When you change Whites, you are manipulating the white clipping in an image. If you change this, you're either mapping more of the lightest parts of the image to pure white or less of them to appear white. Let's see what happens when we lower it all the way and when we raise it all the way. When we raise it all the way, we have the most white clipping and we're blowing things out. With Blacks, you're affecting black clipping. You're going to be mapping more of the dark parts of the image to appear black when you raise or lower this. So, lowering maps more of the dark parts to appear black, raising maps less of them to appear black. I think that what I would like to do is bring up the White some, and then you're going to bring those Blacks up a little from the Highlights down a little to get more nice richness here again, and I think we up the Exposure just a little and add in some Contrast. Now, let's see the difference. I'm going to do my before-after. Before, after, before, after. So, we still retain some of the moodiness of the image and the deepness of the colors, but it's not as dark and hard to see as it was in the beginning. You look at the histogram at the top, you can also see a representation of what's going on in the image. Hover over the histogram and you'll see that each place you hover over changes this word right down here. These are the Blacks, Shadows, Exposure, Highlights, and Whites. What are these triangles? These triangles will show you if there is clipping in the image. If you hover, you can see that in the image here, it's showing red spots where there is highlight clipping. According to Lightroom, these are way too bright. There is highlight clipping there. If I click it, that'll stay in the image and I can actually make some adjustments to try to get rid of that. I'd like to bring down the Whites to control that clipping and it's gone. You can also see that the histogram has changed slightly here. Look again, when I bring the Whites back up, it stretches up over to the edge here and piles up on the edge. When I bring the Highlights down, the clipping goes away and you see that that has receded. Click to let that go now. So, play around with the extremes to see what happens in your photos and then start working on fine tuning in image by making small adjustments to the right channels here. 8. Presence / Clarity, Vibrance & Saturation: Okay, the next thing we're going to talk about is using the tools in the basic panel to manipulate presence. Well, what's presence? Well, presence is the punch or the pop of your image, and you can adjust that feeling by using the clarity, vibrance, and saturation sliders. The clarity slider is confusing to some. What does it actually do? Well, the clarity slider is going to be adding local contrast. It's going to be adding detail on the edges. It's really easy to overdo clarity. In some instances with your art, you may want to do that but you should know that you should try to be careful with clarity because like I said, it's very easy to overdo it. Let's see what happens when we increase clarity. You can see that in the gentleman's face, some really big differences are happening when we get all the way up to 100. What if we drop all the way down? Whoa, he looks like a dream. So you can see the big changes in what's happening here in the image. I'd say, especially with faces, to be very careful with adding too much clarity. We're going add a little. Let's just add a little. Okay, vibrance. This is a good image to talk about vibrance because it's very vibrant. Well, what's the difference between vibrance and saturation? Both of these sliders are going to help you increase the saturation of the colors in the image, but they're going to do that in different ways. The vibrance slider is actually going to increase the saturation of different color channels in different amounts. That is it's going to be increasing the saturation of the less saturated colors more than the saturation of the more saturated colors. This is to try to avoid any clipping that would happen. The saturation slider is going to increase overall saturation on all the channels the same amount, up and down, as you move the slider. If you want a little more fine and careful control of your saturation, you should stick with the vibrance slider. Don't avoid the saturation slider. You can see what it does as well. We move all the way down to monochrome or all the way up to, oh my gosh, I think I dropped acid. If we want to, zero that back out, just double-click on the word saturation. What happens when you move vibrance all the way down? You can see that not all of the color channels are being adjusted at the same level. Some of the color is still visible. When I moved saturation all the way down, they're all the same, all gone. I think I'll increase the vibrance here just a little. So play around with these three sliders as well. Be careful not to overdo any of them, unless your art is about that. 9. Bring It Together: Now, let's bring it all together and use everything that we can in our basic editing essentials to process this one photo. You want to go into the crop and straighten tool. I'm going to crop this image down a little bit. Actually, I'm going to lock it and crop it 2 by 3. Okay. All right, I'm going to change the angle just a little bit there. Click Enter. All right, what I'm going to do here? Cool, I'm going to go a little warmer. Okay, exposure, a little more contrast. The highlight's down, is up and the saturation down a little bit. Clarity up and I think I am going to increase the light just a little more. Let's see. All right. Let's see the difference before and after. Before, after. So, you see that using just these editing essentials in the Basic panel, you can do so much to improve the look of your photos. 10. Tone Curve: Okay. Let's close the basic panel, and let's start working with some advanced editing techniques. The first thing we're going to talk about is using the tone curve panel. So, go ahead and click that. Just for a quick description of what's going on here, we've got the tonal scale represented here, and we've got output values on the horizontal axis, and input values are going to be on the vertical axis. When you started off and there haven't been any changes made, you're going to have this straight line like there is right here. Let's put our cursor back over that again. You'll see that when you hover over different points in the line, that you have the areas highlight around it and the word will pop up to tell you what part of your tonal skill you're going to affect if you click and drag there. This is shadows, darks, lights, and all the way at the top is highlights. The bottom, you can see the split scale that shows you how much space is being allocated to those things. So, this is the shadows, this is the darks, this is the lights, this is the highlights. You also see down here at the bottom that there are sliders and you can manipulate the same thing. When you hover over those sliders, you can see the same shading appearing upon the graph. The first thing I'm going to do, is I'm going to turn this image black and white because it's often easier to see tonal changes in black and white. I'm going to do that very quickly by clicking V on my keyboard to toggle black and white. This is my son by the way. He's doing his blue steel. Let's actually go right out here and start dragging around to see what's going on. We remember that shadows are the darkest part of the image, highlights are the lightest part of the image. So, what do you think we might want to change? Well, maybe before we even do that, we should learn what this little tool does. I feel like maybe I can look at the image and see what I want to do more than I can understand what to drag around on this graph. Click on this. This is the target adjustment tool. Now, if I drag it over his face, I can see that the different images on the graph are also being highlighted representing where the colors highlighting are falling or the areas of the image. For example, this is in the highlights, this is in the darks, this is in the shadows, the darkest parts of the image. I think that what I want to do is bring up some of these areas so that it's not so dark. So, I think we're going to click, and now we're going to pull upwards a little. Look at that. We see his face brightening. Look over at the graph and see what changed. We can see that we created a steeper curve here, we don't have the straight line anymore, and we've brought up the value of the darks. The shaded area and the slider represent that. Well, I think I still want to bring this part up just a little. I'm going to click here and drag up too. I've created some contrast here, created lighter lights. I've brought up the tone in this image. You can do the same thing by manipulating these things on the graph. Let's grab the darks. Let's create even more contrast. So, when we created this curve, we created a greater differences between the dark and light and we see that there's much more contrast in the image. That's not what I really want though. I still do want these dark areas to be brighter. I can go back here and go to the sliders and manipulate this also, and just bring those dark areas up. Now, what if I wanted to bring some of these tones up higher than the areas they're allowing me to manipulate with them. If you want to allocate more space to the darks or the lights, you just need to spread your split scale out. You need to give it more space to move them. So, if you have an image where you need to go further, you move the split scale at the bottom to give yourself more room to work within the total scale. I think that in order to finish this little guy up, I'm going to bring those darks back up, bring those shadows back down a little, and that's good. We can do the before-after backslash trick here. We can also use this little switch on the panel. This will turn off anything you did within this one panel, and you can see the difference. So, that's what it looked like before I applied changes in the panel. This is what it looks like now. It looks a lot better. So, don't be afraid of this. Go ahead and try it out with an image. You'll be able to manipulate things and start to really understand your tonal scale better the more you practice with it. Another thing that you can do here in the tone curve panel, as you can come down here to the bottom, click right here, and you'll see now the sliders have disappeared and your options have disappeared. Now we're messing with the RGB, red, green or blue channels. So, we're working with colors now. Let me get a different image really quickly here. Let's work with another image and the color is festival. If I want to change, what's going on with all of the color channels at once, I'll just leave it on RGB. Go up here and drop a point, grab it and raise it up to see what happens. I'm raising the brightness and all the colors. Go down and you see that I'm lowering the brightness and all the colors. Now, if we want to add more contrast, I can make a steeper curve here. Right now it's a straight line. So, it doesn't have very much contrast. But if I drop a point in here by clicking and I raised this way up and bring this down, and created a much steeper curve and you can see that we've added contrast. Let's back out of this, and let's change this to work on one of the color channels. So, let's go to red. Drop a point, and now we are going to be influencing the red channel, and add more red or less red. The opposite of vertice sign. We can do the same with green, more green. Let's get this fuchsia color in here by going down and the same with blue. We've got more blue or colder, down we've got more yellow or warmer. So, that's another area where you can play around. You can actually manipulate colors or on each channel or you can go all three channels and manipulate the brightness and darkness as well as the contrast just by moving the curve around. 11. HSL / Color / B&W / Split Toning / Camera Calibration: Let's focus more on colors now and I go to the HSL color black and white panel over here on the right. Let's click on HSL, we'll start there. HSL and color are both basically going to help you control the same things. You're going to be able to manipulate the hue, saturation, and luminance of color channels. In HSL, we can either focus on just hue, just saturation or just luminance by clicking on those words, or have all of those show in the panel at once. In the color part of this panel, we can look at each color channels hue saturation and luminance at a time by choosing a color or we can see them all lined up in the panel. Here is where we're going to be able to make these certain manipulations to the colors in our images to change them in ways that we would like. We want to make the brightness of a color more, we would increase the luminance. If we want to increase the presence or the saturation, we would use that slider. If we actually want to change the hue of that color channel, we can change that slide. One of the things that happens though is, we'll have an idea of how we want the photo to change but we can't actually figure out exactly which of the color channels is going to offer them must control. If you click over to HSL, we have these target adjustment tools again, that you can actually take out into the image and start testing things out and see what's happening. So, let's say I want to change the hue of that flower. Well, I'm not exactly sure which channels are going to be affected. So, I'm going to take the tool and bring it into the image, click and I'm going to start dragging up and down to see what's going on. You can see over here on the slide that the sliders for purple and magenta are both moving. This is great, I think I like it when it's more pink. I'd like for it to be a little more saturated too. Got to bring it out here again and increase that. Looks like again, purple and magenta were increased. Click on the leaf area, and let's raise up the brightness of that leaf. Very nice. You can see that there was a shift in yellow luminance and green luminance. That's the nice difference here about HSL rather than the color area of the panel. There is no target tool here. In both, you can play with the sliders yourself. Let's go over to the black and white part of the panel, and we'll toggle that to black and white but there are still color channels in your black and white image. You can affect the look of your black and white image by changing that mix. So, what happens then if I change the red? Well, the things that are red are going to start getting brighter or darker in image. Things that look green. In this way, you can actually impact the way that you're black and white images look. I do you think I want to raise the mix in the leaves a little. You can see the changes here in the yellow and the green channels. So, using these controls, you can make hue, saturation and luminance changes to specific color channels in your image, or go to black and white and adjust the black and white mix using those color channels. Now let's move on to split toning. I think going to pick a different image. Let's pick this funky image of the snail. Scroll down and click on the split toning panel. This is the panel that I think people are often confused with or they feel like they don't know what they're doing. You just got to jump in and start working with it and you will get very comfortable with it over time. This is all about deciding how you want your image to look. What you can do here, is you can control the color tense of the highlights and the shadows and you can manipulate the hue and saturation as well. Let's click on this little bar here. This is a visual way to pick from the color spectrum what you want your highlights to look like. You pull your tool across and you can use this little dropper tool to select wherever you want to draw into little box and that's going to color your highlights. That's a little too strong. I think I'm going to go down into these orangey colors way down here. That feels good to me. I'm going to leave it that way and I'm going to click X to close it. We can see that the hue has changed a little here. I can also adjust the saturation and the slider or if I click in here, there's a saturation slider at the bottom that I can just you see the box moving up and down, and see that at a fairly low saturation. Click Execute and let's go to the shadows. So, look for that box again and let's get some green going on. Maybe even some blue, it's got some blue going on in the shadows. Let's use a little switch on the panel to see the difference between what we did in the beginning and now, you see this subtle shift, I'm going to go in and I'm going to increase the saturation on the highlights. But I'm going to change the balance so that you can see what's happening there. What is the balance? Well, is the balance between the highlights and the shadows, or you having more of the toning from the shadows or more from the highlights. So, that slider lets you control what's happening there. I think I would like to have more of the tuning from highlights. Even now I want to increase the shadows saturation. Again, let's do a before and after and you can see the changes in the image. These are going to be your preference. Split toning is very personal. Different people have different likes and dislikes for tone coloring, and shadows, and highlights. You need to play around with it a little bit to get comfortable with it and to start feeling confident. Don't shy away from it, get in there and start coloring your highlights and your shadows and figuring out what looks best for you. Once you've become practiced at it, you will be able to use it with much more power and put some really cool looks on your photos with the split toning. One more thing that we can look at to actually affect some color here is down here with the camera calibration panel. This is basically where you can apply a camera colored profile to your photos. You start with the Adobe Standard that's the default. We want to change that to one of the camera profiles that is accessed by the images that you've been ported the cameras that you've used, you can choose from those, say let me pick a camera portrait profile. You can see the change or a camera neutral profile. You can see the change there. You can also manually adjust the tin in your shadows and the hue and saturation in the red, green, and blue primary. Again this is something that you might want to play around with just to see what you can do here, and it will take some practice but you can add little tweaks that looked pretty neat. In fact, I like that a lot. I think I would just jump back up here in brightness image a little bit and a little contrast, vibrance. I'm really liking Mr. Snail here. Now, he's looking pretty good. Let's see before and after. He is looking pretty awesome. 12. Detail: Okay. Now, we're going to talk about detail. So, let's go to the Detail panel over here and click on that to expand it. We're going to start off by talking about sharpening. Right at the top here, you see you've got these different sliders that'll affect the sharpening and you've got this little window where you can get a really close up view of what's going on here. If you want, you can click on this little patch and take it out here to get exactly the portion of the image you want to look at, or you can click on this little drop arrow to get rid of it. Then click on this exclamation point to get a more accurate preview by zooming in right here in your image space. When you're sharpening an image, you're doing exactly what we just said. You're making it look sharper. You're going to sharpen the edges and add more detail to them. When you drag the slider out and you look in this closeup preview, you can see the changes. Now, way down here, you see it's a lot softer. When we're at the top, it's much sharper. But there also seems to be some artifact going on in there, so we don't want to over sharpen. Let's draw it back a little. We can also adjust the radius and detail sliders. Radius is going to decide how much of a radius on the sharpening we need to have. It seems like you can get bigger chunks in the artifacts when you get bigger, more fine with a smaller radius. Detail also adds more artifact in. It's more fine with less detail but we do want detail so let's not drop that all the way down. I'd say to be careful with your sharpening. The great thing here is that we have this masking tool. The masking tool will try to get rid of some of that in places where we don't want sharpening anyway. It's going to eliminate the sharpening effect in places where there are solid areas of color so that we can stay on the edges of things to add more of a sharp edge. A cool way to see this happening is put your cursor over this slider and click Alt and then click to drag the slider. It looks pretty weird, but what you're seeing is that in the dark areas, the effect is not going to be present. So, if you have masking at zero, the sharpening effect is present across the entire image. As we drag this masking over towards the right, we see the areas of the image are getting darker. In those areas, the sharpening is not being applied. We can drag that all the way until it's only being applied to the areas we want it to be, right on these edges, that's the very best. So, I'm going to let go. The amazing thing here is that we were able to apply this sharpening only where we wanted it just by using this masking slider. Do not avoid this masking slider. You're going to be able to get a great sharpening effect on your images right where you need it on the edges by utilizing that. I'm very happy with the way the sharpening looks here now. Let's do a before and after by using this little light switch, and we can see it was much softer before and we did that all without having all that artifacting in the rest of the image. Okay, let's switch over to talk a little bit about the noise reduction tool. It's really nice because often, we're going to have to take pictures in situations where there might not be as much light and we still want to get the photo but we're going to have some noise introduced into the photo because of the situation we took it in. Well, Lightroom is going to allow us to reduce that noise in post-processing. Let me find an image to work with here. Here we go. This was obviously taken in a darker area, a little candle burning. If you look at the preview here, you can see the noise in the image. I'm actually going to select an area right up here. Whoa, look at that noise. Skip the luminance noise reduction and I'm going to go down to the color noise reduction. I'm going to talk about that a little bit first. The color noise reduction is going to help us get rid of some of this crazy color splotching that's going on here that you can see by grouping together the colors that can be blended together and smoothing that out. So, if I come down here to the color slider and click on it and drag it over, as I slowly drag it over, you can see that all those little color splotches are disappearing. That is so awesome. How easy was that to do? Look at this difference. I'll drag it back and you can see all of that color appearing and then just go slightly over and it's gone. It's much more smooth-looking within the color. If you want, you can adjust detail and smoothness as well. But I would be very sparing and careful with these. Detail tends to add in a little bit more noise if you overdo it again. It's trying to add back in some of the detail that you lose when you make an adjustment. You don't want to overdo smoothing either. Now, what about some of this noise that's not color-related? Well, let's go back up in here and pull on this noise reduction slider. As we pull it over to the left, you can see all of that smoothing out. Let's go all the way over. See how creamy it's gotten. This is the time you're not going to want to do that to an entire image, so we'll back it up again and we'll just add a little bit of noise reduction. To counteract some of what almost seems like blurring, you can add back in a little detail. But remember again, the more detail you add back in, the more of a noise effect you're gonna get back so always be very sparing with that if you can. I wouldn't go past 50 most of the time. You can also add in some contrast. Again, that's not something I actually use very often. Most of what I want to do is in the noise reduction slider itself. But look at that. What a difference we have now. From before to after, let's click this switch and see the difference. Look at all of that noise and it just goes away. This is a very powerful tool for images where you need noise reduction. So, don't forget that that exists. Definitely, you don't have to treat those kinds of images as throwaways, just fundamental Lightroom and use a little noise reduction. 13. Lens Corrections and Effects: Okay, let's go over to the panel called Lens Corrections. Let's click on that. Lens corrections is going to enable you to change some of the things that happened to an image because of artifacts that are created by lens like vignetting or distortion, things like that. The easiest thing to do is to go into the basic tab of your Lens Corrections panel and enable the profile corrections for your lens. You click over the Profile, and you'll see that you can also do that here, and you can choose a specific lens profile. You can see in the image that it brightened up a little on the edges, so there was some vignetting there, and you can see the distortion changed. It's almost like the image got pulled at the top and the bottom edge, so it flattened out a little bit and that distortion went away. Another thing that's available here, is removing chromatic aberration. So if you have some strange color fringing going on in your images, you can click to remove it, didn't really see any in this one, and you can constrain the crop. I always like to constrain crop on all of my images anytime I start to change the alignment or the distortion, and the image starts to come out and leave white or gray edges around the outside. Lightroom will automatically crop those off, so they don't remain a part of your final image. We have some tools here that will determine what needs to be leveled or rotated in your image to get things lined up properly. You can do level correction. You can do vertical perspective corrections, or you can do full-level horizontal and vertical perspective corrections. Let's try doing the full. This is definitely not what I wanted from this image. So you see sometimes when Lightroom tries to apply some rules, it doesn't actually fit what you want to see with your eyes. Let's command each to back off of that. Instead, let's go over to the manual tab, and let's work on some things with this image. I think what I'd like to do is stretch it out just a little more, and then I want to take the vertical. I want to grab the top end and bring it down a little towards me. That feels good. Now, also going to rotate just a little, there. I like that much better than before. I think I could also stand a crop this one on the side. Let's open that crop tool. Let's get it cropped. Okay, I'm liking that a lot more. Let's see our before and after. This is before. This is after, or you can go on your history and go all the way back to the import version and compare it to the current edit, and you can see the difference. Just as a quick overview, you can change the distortion, the vertical, the horizontal where you can rotate the image, doing all kinds of crazy things here, scale the image, and change the aspect of the image. That's a better view of changing the aspect of the image. We're stretching it from top to bottom or side to side. Okay, let's move on to effect. Click the panel below here, there's the effects. Here we can add in things that often happen with the camera. You go back up here and go to the manual type of Lens Corrections, and you'll see the lens vignetting. If you come down here, you'll see post-crop vignetting. These are similar or a bit different. In Lens Corrections, you can change the lens vignetting which is actually vignetting that happens all the way from the edges, the real edges of the image. Dark or light vignetting. You can make the midpoint small or large and that's from the true edges of the image. If we go into the effect, we can have post-crop vignetting. We cropped the image. Let's bring it down. Then we use lens vignetting. We only see a little bit of that vignetting creeping out because it's really being applied to the edges, the two edges of the image that we've cropped off a lot. We want those to be applied to the edges of our cropped image. We go into effects. We use the post-crop vignetting. With this, you can actually change the amount and the midpoint like with lens vignetting. You can also change the roundness of it. It could be very round or it can back off like this. We can feather it less or more. So, here's a really hard-edged vignette, almost looks like a frame or a very, very feathered one, that kind of fits. You can also adjust the highlights in the vignette areas. So, let me bring this around, so you see more of that vignette. Using post-crop vignetting is a great way to add some interesting effects to your photos, and then also here in the effects, we can add grain. So we just talked recently about removing noise from an image which is kind of light grain. Now, we're going to talk about adding in grain. Grain is an interesting thing that you can play with to change the feel of an image. Often it can give a sort of old school film look, and here's a way you can add it in without actually having it. You grab the grain slider, and you pull it over, and the more you pull it over, the more grain you are going to get. It's almost like you're throwing sand in the mix. What size is the sand granular going to be? Well, we can change that size over. You see that each granule almost is bigger, if we make a size larger. You can also make the edges of the granules more rough or less rough. There's less rough. There's more rough. You can get the look that you really, really want, if we know how to play around with it a little bit to see what happens. I like a grain look in some of my images. I like for it to be somewhat subdued, not as rough or large in size. You can play around with it and see what suits you most. 14. Spot Correct and Red Eye: Okay. Now we're going to talk a little bit about the tools here at the top. We're going to start off with the Red Eye Tool and then talk about the Clone Tool or Spot Removal Tool. I actually had to create a fake red eye in this image so that I could deal with the red eye but let's just pretend like that was a natural red eye. You click on the Red Eye Tool, and what you're going to do is take the tool out to the image, I'm going to zoom into his eye a little so can see it better. We're going to click and drag, side to side and top to bottom, to try to cover the eye area and then let go. Lightroom is going to try to adjust what's going on in here. Let's help it by moving the sliders. Let's drag out to darken that area and maybe change the size of the pupil, that's good, there we go. Now I'm going to click close here and I'm going to back off the image and we'll see it looks much better. Let's go back into the Red Eye Tool and we'll click to undo that and redo it, undo it, redo it. So you see it can very easily help you get rid of red eye in photos. Now let's close that again. I'm going to look for another image, we select this one. These little spots down here at the bottom you can see those but you know what will be much easier to see if I use this visualized spots down here in the toolbar, let's click that. Suddenly, it is much easier to see the spots that need to be corrected. Now sometimes these might be other things and you can tell that by looking at the image itself. Go over here and click on the clone tool, now bring your tool out here doing the right click function and dragging up or down will change the size of the brush. You can also change the size of the brush with the size slider. Looks like we have two circles here, what is that? Well, I have a lot of intense feathering going on. We can either feather very little and have a hard edge or have a soft edge around what we're doing, kind of a blurred edge. I like having a little bit of that, that makes things not so hard edged and fake looking. Probably you can change the opacity. Do you want what you're cloning over something else to be completely see through? Hardly ever, but you can change the opacity along this line to suit your needs. Now we're either going to clone an exact replica of something or going to heal. In instances like this healing is going to be a much better thing to do. Let's get our size adjusted over these spots and if you just click and adjust your source by clicking and dragging, you'll be able to get rid of these spots very quickly. H for hide those tool of relays and it looks like the one right here didn't exactly work out so great. So I'm going to go back to that and grab it and change it. See the spot? There it is. I'm going to sample from a little bit different spot here now, I think it's going to be better. That's much better. Okay, let's just really quick on how to get dust spots, I'm also going to show you with a different image something a little bit more neat that you can do with the clone tool. Do you think I have enough images of my son? I think I do. Well, no. We can always have one more. I think that what I would like to do is we're going to couple of things with the clone tool on this. One is; I'm going to get rid of this distracting piece of sidewalk that's showing. I think this image would look a lot better if everything around here was this modeled green grass from behind him. So let's do that first. I'm going to take my brush out here and I'm going to make it a little bit bigger and I'm actually going to paint by clicking and dragging instead of just making a spot. Now I'm going to paint over this entire area and then let go. Now it's automatically saying it wants to sample from over here. Sometimes the auto sampling area is great, sometimes it's not. Let me hide by clicking H, it could be better, I can see an edge there. Let's see what it would look like if it samples from over here. I need to move this around by clicking on it and dragging it. Click H to hide, that looks a little better to me, it still could use some work. Instance of the Clone Tool, selected still. I could go over here and actually change the properties of what's happening. With less feathering the edge is more defined, but when I have more feathering, it's less defined and it blends better. It looks a lot better to me. Excellent. Now there's one more thing in this image that's bothering me. I'm going to take my tool out, hold the spacebar down and click to zoom into his nose. He's got a little bit of something going on right here. Let's fix that, I'm going to paint over this area like I did before and it selected an area over here to sample from which I don't like, so I'm going to move it by clicking and dragging, and then I'm going to paint just a little bit right here. Again I'm going to want to click and drag the source area. Let's hide our tools, that looks much better. So with the Clone Tool you can get rid of spots and you can also repaint entire areas to suit the way you want your image to look. 15. Local Adjustments: Graduated Filter, Radial Filter & Adjustment Brushes: Okay. To really fine tune your images, you're going to want to use local adjustments, rather than just using global adjustments. The next few tools we're going to talk about will enable you to do that. Let's start off with a graduated filter. Come over here and click on the graduated filter, and open up the menu. What you see is a lot of sliders similar to what you were seeing in the basics panel. You've got white balance sliders, temperature and tint, exposure contrast, highlights, shadows, clarity saturation, sharpness, noise, moiré, which is color aliasing that you see when you take a picture of a TV screen, and you get all the funky colors, and defringing, so that's defringing strange color aberrations in the edges of things. You move the cursor over your image, you can see where the tool is. Now, we can start at one part of the image and click and drag. I want to add some presence, some drama to the sky. I also want to make it more blue. I'm going to click and I'm going to drag. If I want to, I can also change the angle. If I come in here by the anchor point, you'll see that there's a curved arrow. Don't click very close to the anchor point, because it's hard to do fine movements very close to it. Instead, move further out, and grab that line, and you can make fine changes in the angle. What kind of changes do I want to make? I'm going to set this exposure slider back to baseline by double clicking exposure. Now, there are no changes that have been made to the image yet. I've just put the filter overlay down the tool has been painted on. Now, I need to load that tool with effects. I think what I would like to do is increase the blue in the sky, and I also want to bump up the clarity to add some drama and some presence to the image, maybe, a little contrast too. That's looking good to me. I can use the switch to see the before and after. Yeah. I like that. Now, I want to do something to the bottom of half the image too, but I want it to be different. So, I'm going to go over and click new. Come out here on my image, and drag another filter out, exposure higher on this, maybe even bring up the shadows a little, but I'm also going to change the temperature down here to a warmer temperature. I like the shadows that are in here so I'm going to leave them. The image looks a lot better to me already. Just by being able to gradually drag across a gradient of specially selected effects from these sliders. Let's see what it looked like before. Now, let's see what it looks like after. I think that's much better. Let's move on to using the radial filter. Let me grab another image. Here's a nice portrait, but I think what I'd like to do is isolate Sarah a little more. I'm going to click on the radial filter here. I am going to double-click on effect to bring everything back to zero. I'm going to take the tool, and I'm going to click and start to drag. I can grab this anchor point when I let go, I grab it again. I'll bring it over Sarah, keep grabbing the points on the outside and dragging them to encapsulate her, as best I can. I'll go with that. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually change the exposure. Let's make it pretty dramatic. Now, what you might have expected was that the change was going to happen on the inside of the filter, but that's not so. Instead, the changes happening on the outside of the filter. You want to make it happen on the inside the filter, you can come over here and click invert mask, and it switches. Of course, for this one, we want it to happen on the outside. Feathering can also be adjusted, and there you can see a very hard edge versus a softer dreamy edge. I'm going to bring it back a little bit. What else do I want? A little less sharpness outside of her, so that things are a little bit blurrier outside of her, maybe even less clarity. I'm going to bring up or bring down the exposure again. Now, this is a pretty intense effect that I applied. If I click H, you can see without the tool overlay. You can see it around her. I want to fine tune that and play with it a little bit, even use my curved arrows on the edges here to turn it a little more. Exposure shouldn't be so great and the feathering should be a little bit more. There we go. That's looking a little bit better now. Let's click the before and after to see the difference. That really brings the focus more on her. We may even just adjust it a little bit more up towards her face, there we go. Radial filter is a nice way to apply an effect inside or outside of a circle or an oval shape tool, all at once. Finally, let's move onto the adjustment brush. The adjustment brush is one of my favorite tools, because I can change the values on any of these sliders. Then I can paint it wherever I want to on an image, however I want to. It's very, very powerful tool for local adjustment in your images. Come over there and select your adjustment brush. Again, you'll see all of the same sliders. But below them, you'll also see a little menu that actually helps you adjust your brush size feather flow and do some masking The size is obvious, you drag the slider to the left, you get a larger brush, to the right gives you a smaller brush. You can also use your right click mousing or your trackpad with two fingers, that's one of my favorite shortcuts. It works so quickly while you're on the image you can change the size of your brush. Again, we can change feathering and have a very hard edge. Or a soft edge. Most of the time we have at least a slightly soft edge to help with blending. Flow affects how much of what you've loaded the brush with is going onto the image on time. It's almost like how hard you're pushing the brush down. When the flow is very low, you are going to have to make several passes over and over again to see an effect. Here, let me drop exposure and show you. If I click and drag, you're not really seeing anything until I do it over and over again. You see a difference? When you bring the flow up. Now, let me do it. You can see it. What happens if I bring the flow all the way up? It's like I'm pushing the brush down a lot harder. Let's go to history and back up. Okay. I am going to reset exposure by double clicking over here. To finish off, you can enable or disable the auto mask. So, if I turn the masking on and I adjust to raise exposure, well, let's actually adjust to lower exposure. When I bring the brush out here and I initially click on green and I start painting around, you'll see that things that are yellow that I'm painting over are being masked out of that. I'm going to hover over the anchor point and click delete to get rid of that. Now, let's will do something to the image that we actually wanted to do to the image. How about adding some clarity to the hair and maybe even bringing the shadows there. I'm going to uncheck automasking. I'm going to give it a little more feathering. Now, I'm going to click and drag in the hair. We can start to see some nice effects happening there. You make a mistake and you color over the boundaries of where you want color, you go click on erase in the brush area and then you can go back along the area that you need to erase by clicking and dragging over that. Another helpful thing is to click all. This will show you where you have already painted. I can see there's a little stray here. Some on my face. I don't really want it. We want to get rid of that, I click all again to get rid of that colored overlay. Okay. Let's see the before and after here by using the light switch. That's nice. That's a little drama into the hair. Another thing that I wanted to show you, that's actually pretty powerful as far as portraits is that you can really work on the eye as well. Let's create a new brush by clicking on new, get the effects back to zero by double clicking effect. Now, let's zoom in on the face by clicking in the Navigator. I'm going to raise the exposure just a little. I'm going to raise up the shadows. Now, I'm going to come into the eye area and paint that eye iris to make the eyes pop in this image. Let me also go click all, so I can see you are painted and I will erase any of the bleed over into the pupil. I'll click all again to get rid of that. Then, I'll fit the photo back and click H to hide the tools. We can see the difference. I think maybe even a little bit more on the exposure. Now, let's click on the before and after. Really a great difference. This is definitely not something you can do by making global adjustments. If you raised the exposure so that you get extra exposure in the eyes, you're going to raise the exposure everywhere if you do it in the basics tool help. By using the brush, you're able to make very specific adjustments to very specific areas of your photo. While you're working with a brush, you might actually like to have two different brushes that are loaded with the same effects that have different brush properties. If you'd like to do that, you have a brush A and a brush B. You can edit the properties of the brush but have them both loaded with the same effects from the sliders. So, all the other things you can do is actually use presets when you're using a brush. Up here next to effect you're see where it says custom. Click on that and pull down and you're see all the other presets that you can actually use. Lets get a new brush and choose the softened skin preset. You're see that a lot of the sliders have changed to help you soften the skin. I will paint that onto the face now. I have got the overlay so I can see where I'm painting. I need to make a smaller brush to get around the edges. Okay, not perfect but you're going to be able to get the idea. I'll erase some of the places where I bled over. Okay, I'm going to click all to get rid of that overlay. Let's see what the differences now. Let's jump back. Definitely see the difference. So, making these local adjustments and using the presets is a nice quick way to get a special effect. You want to create your own special effect. You can change the sliders that will and save your current settings as a new preset. You can create as many of those as you like. Just give them a name and store them there. 16. Working with Develop Presets: The next thing we're going to talk about is using Develop Presets. So, let's go over here to the left tab and click on Presets. You'll see the Lightroom comes loaded with several default Presets. You can click next to each one of these arrows to open these up and expand to see individual Presets. The nice thing here is that, as you roll over them, you can see the effect the Preset will have in your navigator. Let's click to open up some more. These are all Black and White Presets. Here's some Color Presets. So, as a rollover then, we can decide which ones we like and might want to actually apply to the image. The cool thing about Presets is that what you're really getting is, with one click, you're getting the effect of many different processing changes that would take a lot more time for you to achieve. It's also an interesting way to learn how to process a photo to look like that. Here's what I mean. If I click on this Yesteryear Preset that comes in my room, it will apply the effect to the image. Two things are going on now in my mind. One is that I feel like it's a little too much, but I don't want to completely abandon the look. The second is, I want to know what actually happened. If you go into your Basic panel, you can see things that have changed often with this. You can also see changes in other places, like here. In this Split Toning panel, you can see that the highlights and the shadows have been very greatly toned. The saturation on the toning is pretty heavy. So, maybe if we just pull back some of that saturation in the toning, we'll get a more gentle effect with this look. Hey, I kind of like that. In fact, I like it a lot. I like it a lot better than it was before. The other thing that I'm thinking, other than just learning what happened, is to be able to make changes to make me like what's happening in my photo more. So, I learned what excessive split toning does by seeing what happened with that Preset. But I was also able to change the image and not completely abandon the work. I can also open up the Basic panel and change a few things if I like. I think I want less contrast in the image, bring up this shadows a little, and bring down the black some. I'm liking this image. A tip that I have is that you should never really just click a Preset and leave it there. You're not going to be totally happy with that, and the image isn't going to feel completely like your own. You'll get a lot more learning and have a much better effect in the end if you start with a Preset and then make your own changes to the Preset to take it beyond just that one part of your processing. To create and save your own Presets, just make the changes over here in the Develop panels that you want in a Preset and then go to the menu of the top. Click Develop, New Preset. You'll see all of the changes that you can include in your Preset. Make the appropriate selections, give your Preset a name, and click Create. When you do that, you'll find your Preset under the User Presets area. You can make as many of these as you like, and you can even share them with other people if you want. 17. Bring It All Together: Once you've done all the learning and practicing in the panels with a different effects, you should be able to bring an image into the Develop Module and use a variety of them to create a beautiful photo. Watch, while I do just that. We'll start with a preset, and I'm going to improve on it. Let's fix some alignment issues here. We go into the Basic Panel and make a few changes. Could take a little bit more blue, little contrast. We have shadows. If you want to add some clarity to this area to get this cracked earth effect really going. They don't want it to be on Ricardo, my friend here. So I'm going to use the adjustment brush. Bring it down just a little. There we go. We could also like to bring a little more blue in at the top just for fun and a new Graduated Filter down here at the bottom. Make this one warmer. All right, from beginning to end, let's see the difference. Let's do a before and after with the backslash. Here's the before, after. I'm loving it. Now it's your turn. 18. Export & Share: When you're all finished with your images, you're going to want to do one of a handful of things. You're either going to want to export the image to another photo editor to make additional adjustments like say Photoshop or some other external editor or you're going to want to export the image to a hard drive on your computer or elsewhere or upload it somewhere for publishing. All of those things are very easy to do and I'm going to briefly tell you how to do those. First of all if you just go up to "Edit". Excuse me, if you go up to "Photo", scroll down to "Edit In", you can quickly choose to "Edit in Adobe Photoshop" or you can choose to edit in another application if you have one. There's also some other options to "Open as a Smart Object in Photoshop", Panorama, HDR layers. You can also make adjustments in Photoshop and then save and have the image come back into Lightroom. That way, the work that you've done there can also be applied to the photo and still be in your catalog with all your other images as part of your organizational strategy. If you'd like to export the photos somewhere else, you're going to need to go to the "Library" and you'll need to use the export functions or if you'd like to publish it you'll need to use a publishing plug-in. I'm not going to go into detail of that here but if you'd like to learn about that and exactly how to do it, look for the organization in Lightroom class and towards the end of that class you'll learn all about exporting your photos to your hard drive and online, and when you have that all under your belt and you know how to do it, with love I'd love for you to publish something online and share it here or find me online and show me your image by pinging me and your share. That's it for our Develop class you guys should all have a lot more confident about using the panels and all of the things that are available to you to process your photos in Lightroom. If you have any questions or you need help, I'm going to be stopping in here regularly and I'd be more than happy to help you with anything you need, assistance wise so just let me know. 19. Explore Photo Classes on Skillshare: