Fundamentals of Photo Editing

1. Introduction: I'm Justin Bridges, a fashion and lifestyle photographer based in New York City. In today's class we are going to get to talk about editing. When I first started with photography as a hobby, I was just snapping pictures and eventually when I unlocked the whole tool of editing, it really took my pitches to the next level and it really started in forming my eye and helping me become a better photographer. Editing is for anybody who takes a photo, whether you just want an amazing looking Instagram page, or you want to take your hobby or your career to the next level by giving your photos that professional look and feel. So, in this class we're going to talk about everything editing. We're going to talk about how do you approach an edit, we're going to look at technical skills, we're going to look at creative application and we're going to look at all the different tools in light room that can really bring your image out and make it sane. I want you to think about editing as a taste level, as an approach, as a mental process in order to make your photo feel and convey the message that you felt when you took the picture in the first place. Although we're going to be primarily using light room for today's edits, editing is not tools specific. Once you understand the process, you can basically apply these techniques anywhere, with any app. At the end of this class, I encourage you to share your photos, I'd love to see the before picture and the after picture. I'm here to help answer any questions that I can and hopefully some of your classmates will chime in as well. I'm excited to have you join the class, let's get started. 2. How to Approach Your Edit: I want to acknowledge right here and right now that there's a wide range of ways you can drive an image to get to a final result. But the important thing is, I think we want to cover or talk about how do you game plan to get an image that both speaks to the reality of what you shot, and also embellish with little bit of creativity. There is an artistic side of this where you can drive an image really far one way or the other, and that's fine too. That's a different type of discipline. What we want to cover is, how do we make an image seeing the best way possible with the most responsible level of taste, and in some ways, add that professional touch for those of you who do care about having a career in photography. So, if you take photos, whether it's for a hobby, for profession, you are an editor. Everybody that snaps photos is an editor. But one of the things that we want to cover today is avoiding some of the pitfalls of overdoing it. What I mean when I talk about, is your edit overdone or are you overdoing it with a photo is I'm really asking, is your edit distracting? Is it going to catch me off guard? Is it going to be unsettling? That's what we want to avoid, and that's why we're going through the process of strategizing around the edit and really thinking about what we want to do to the photo so we don't overdo it. There's really only a handful of reasons why people edit photos. One, to technically correct things that were wrong when the shot was taken, and two, it's the fun part to be creative with their photo and really bring it to life. When I'm speaking to the technical aspects of fixing a photo, we're talking about everything from, say color correction. Say, you got the white balance wrong when you shot the picture. Or, looking at things like distortion or lens vignetting from the actual lens itself. We're also looking at, maybe you shot the picture too bright or too dark. So, we're looking at all the things that bring that picture back to normal. A lot of these technical fixes are pretty straightforward. So, this isn't really the area you need to worry about overdoing it. But the other approach that we were talking about which is the creative edit, this is the part where you really got to be careful, show some restraint, and really hone in on strategizing around the image before you overdo it and it becomes a distracting edit. That's why we're going to start looking at things like adding contrast or playing with curves, we're going to talk about using grain, clarity. Color is a huge part of this section of the edit, and then there are some things you might want to do in Photoshop, say removing an object. Those are all part of the creative edit, and those help round the basis and give you an image that sings. So, before I like to edit, I like to establish a game plan. I think you should have one too. There are two things you're going to be trading off against; one is accuracy and the other's creativity. So, I like to think about my game plan as a triangle. It mimics the exposure triangle in a sense, but on our three points, we have accuracy, which is like color accuracy, realistic look to the image, and then we have creativity, which is when you push colors, maybe you change the composition of the shot that you took with cropping. Then, at the top of the pyramid, we have basically mood and taste level, and we're basically holding the creativity pieces and the accuracy pieces together like glue. The top of the pyramid is what keeps you from pushing something too far. It allows you to make sure that the mood and the adjustments you make with color and composition still fit the message you're trying to convey. All these things just work in a harmony, and you can lean it towards the accurate side, the more realistic side, or you can lean it more towards your creative side and go wild. So, the more you push an image creatively, is the more that you're going to be walking away from color accuracy because creativity, remember, has the contrast, where messing with the colors. The more you move the colors, the more a blue gene doesn't look blue anymore. So, we always want to constantly be thinking, "How much do we want to push creatively? How much do we want to be accurate? Do we want the denim to look as blue as it's supposed to? Or are we okay with letting that slide a little bit into our artistic mind? Keeping an eye on those, deciding what your balances, it's going to be individual for everybody. But we're going to talk about how do you game plan around that. If it's a professional client, I'm looking at it and I'm saying, "Okay, I'm going to need a lot more accuracy here, a little less creativity." Then for the intangible things, I'm thinking about, "Do I need to clean up the skin? Do I need to fix hair? Do I need to get a wrinkle out?" All those different things help me get to a final point with an image where I can be proud and the image really speaks to what I was seeing when I took the photo in the first place. When I'm working on a personal photo, I think about it a little different. That the triangle leans a different way. So, on the creativity, a point of the triangle, it's a little bit bigger. The accuracy, maybe I don't care as much, and in the intangibles, I still care, but maybe I don't want to clean up somebody's skin so much that they look perfect. Maybe I want to reflect in the portrait that the person maybe had a couple blemishes, but that's okay because I want it to be more realistic along with more creative colors. You have the option to looking at your game plan or your triangle, you edit triangle as everything is a trade-off, but as long as the triangle stays in somewhat of a perfect harmony, you're going to get the results that you're looking for. 3. Shooting Tips to Ease Your Edit: So, there are a couple of things I want to share with you, that I think about when I'm out in the field shooting, that help make the edit process roll a little bit smoother. The first thing on the list that I like to check off as soon as I get into the field and pick up my camera is to make sure that my cameras shooting in RAW. Now, there are two basic flavors you can shoot him with your camera and that's RAW and JPEG. If you shoot in RAW, you're going to have the most flexibility, the most versatility with pushing the image, when you get to the computer and start to do your edit. If you shoot in JPEG you're going to lose a little bit information because of compression and a number of other things, and you're not going to have as much leeway to sort of manipulate your image later. The other thing that flows into the files is that if you shoot RAW on your camera whatever photo style, which we're going to talk about later, that you decide to use won't be permanent. But if you use a photo style with the JPEG, then that's going to be baked into the image and it's something that you can't get back when you go to the edit process. There's going to be a setting on your camera that has RAW+JPEG. If you have a big enough memory card and want to both so that you can quickly take a JPEG and post on Instagram or whatever and then use a RAW later when you really want to do a nice tied edit, that's totally fine. But just make sure that if you're for this class you want to be shooting and RAW or RAW+JPEG so you have a good file to work from. If you're worried about whether or not your camera shoots and RAW, don't worry, it does. All DSLR's, mirrorless cameras, you should be good to go. For your iPhone, you can actually get third party apps that will shoot RAW as well. I think what's available as apps like ProCamera, Obscura, Manual and Lightroom Mobile, but we'll link to some of those in the details of the class. As you progress through photography and get better about your compositions, you'll probably start shooting the exact crop that you're looking for. But if you're not there yet, one of the things I like to tell people is, shoot a little bit wider than the amount of space or the composition that you need, because once we get to the edit process we can take a little bit of a wider photo and crop in to what the actual composition that we were intending. The one thing you need to be careful about is don't shoot super wide. So, if you have a person sitting here in the middle of your frame, and you want to shoot a little bit wider because you don't know do I want to make this horizontal later, do I want to capture more of the scene, don't go out so wide that you have so much space and the person makes up just a little part of your frame. Because what happens is you're going to start losing some of the quality that you have on that person, meaning, you only have a finite amount of pixels on the sensor of the camera to showcase all the quality of the picture that you're taking, and the further away you get from the most important part of that picture, you're spreading out the amount of pixels or the amount of quality across the frame and you're not focusing that on your subject at hand. So, there's a happy medium between shooting a little bit wide so you can crop in and shooting too wide that the person that you're shooting or the subject you're shooting, doesn't get enough of that rich detail that you need for your photo at the end of the photo process. When you're out there taking photos, you're going to be presented with a number of different lighting scenarios, and one of the things that's important besides just nailing that exposure is to think about what it is going to look at the end when you get to the edit process. One of the things I like to tell people is to try to shoot it flatter, meaning, if it's really bright maybe you shoot it a little bit darker than you need to, or if it's really dark try to shoot a little bit lighter. What you're trying to do is sort of even out the highlights of the picture and the shadows of the picture, so you get a flatter image. The flatter the photo is, the more you can do things to it. So, you can add more contrast or subtract more. When you have baked in a lot of that contrast and a lot of the shadows or high brights and dark shadows, the more that stuff is baked in the harder is to reverse it if you need to do that in the edit process. Let's think through a couple of different ways that you can get less contrast in your image when you're out there shooting and you're trying to figure out what do I do. One scenario, if you're outside and it's very sunny and shadows are being cast on your model's face, under their nose, on the wall that is behind them, is you can move from an area of really high sunlight, to a shaded area underneath an awning, underneath some structure, and sort of negate all that direct sunlight. That's going to help you shoot a much flatter image and you'll be surprised with the results when you get into the edit process. Another thing you can do, is sort of adjust the settings you're using in the camera. This is going to be by far the hardest way to do it, versus just moving your subject into an area that helps flatten out the light. But if you're facing a circumstance where you're shooting really really bright, stop down or reduce the amount of light that's coming in the camera by shooting either faster shutter speed, a higher or lower aperture, meaning, a higher aperture number, or making sure the ISO is cranked all the way down to 100 or the lowest your camera would go in a bright situation and then doing the opposite of that when you're in a dark circumstance. Now, again like I said, this is going to be the most challenging way to do it because you only have so much latitude to work with. If you go too dark in the image or to light in the image and end up clipping, what we call clipping a highlight or clipping a shadow, meaning you shoot too bright and you can't get back any of that data or you shoot too dark and you can't bring that darkness up enough to recover it, then you're going to be screwed. So, I would always look to re-position your subject or re-position your frame before I would try to flatten out the image by shooting in the camera a different way. One other thing you can do if you can't necessarily change your position that really helps flatten out the image is, if you have a friend or you're working professionally, have an assistant or an intern or somebody helping you, make sure you're always carry sort of like one of those round or oblong reflectors, with the white side or the gold silver side, because even bouncing a little light into the shadow side of your subjects face will help sort of flatten out the shadows and highlights. So, first thing remember is we're going to try to move the subject or move the scene into an area where there's less direct sunlight, the other thing that's going to be easy is using a reflector to sort of bounce some light into the shadows and sort of even out and level out those highlights and shadows, and the third thing, which is going to be the worst thing, the last resort is going to be shoot either darker or lighter depending on what scene you're facing with. Darker if it's really bright, or lighter if it's really dark. An important part to photography is obviously understanding the DSLR. On your DSLR, mirrorless camera, or whatever you are using there's going to be different picture profiles available. They range from everything from standard, to neutral, to vibrant, portrait, landscape there's a bunch of different modes and those different modes will give a different sort of preview of the image on the back of your screen or however you're looking at the image so that you kind of sort of understand where the image could go or how it's looking. So, be careful when using picture styles only use RAW or RAW+JPEG. But one of the cool things about it is if you are shooting RAW, you can actually use a different color profile or picture style to sort of understand maybe where you want to go with the picture, making sure your exposure is linking up to how you see the picture in your edit process. So, it's a super helpful tool. But just remember, always be cautious if you shoot in JPEG. You're going to want to either stay in standard mode or in neutral. One of the most essential things when you're out there shooting is making sure you're shooting an accurate color, and that's sort of what white balance does for us as photographers. We use white balance on auto a lot of the time and you shouldn't be ashamed to use it. I use auto white balance all the time when I'm shooting, especially when I'm not connected to a computer and just walking around with my camera. Usually the camera we'll get it right in a lot of situations, but there are also a lot of tricky situation where the camera gets confused and thinks the color balance is tungsten light or fluorescent light when it's really daylight or something like that. For those situations where your camera gets it wrong or you just want to make sure that you always have the right colors, you're going to want to carry around a white card, color checker, or something like that. One of the things I carry with me all the time is this color checker. It has a white card or you can use a gray card, it also has on the other side, a set of colors for more creative looks. But the essential thing that you want to know here, is that you have a white or gray card so that your camera has a picture of what was going on in the scene when you took the picture. So, how do you use the white balance and how do you use it to achieve accurate colors in your camera when you get to the edit process? When you set up, say you're shooting with a friend and you're taking portraits, when you figure out the light that you're going to shoot them in, either sunny or you're under a shady under hang or whatever scenario that you're shooting in, what you want to do is once you get the settings in the camera setup, you want to open up your white balance or white card or gray card or whatever it is you're using, you want to shoot that picture, your person can hold it up or if you're shooting a scene you can lean it against the wall. But you want to shoot it in that setting, captured on your computer or your camera and then forget about it. When we get into the edit process, we'll talk about how you implement it. But having that in your back pocket or around your neck on a lanyard or whatever is going to be key to making sure you have your color accuracy intact when you go to the edit process. So next up, let's talk about importing and organizing your photos. 4. Importing Your Photos: So, now you've probably taken a bunch of good photos and now it's time to walk through how do we import them and organize them on our computer. If you shot your images to a card on your DSLR memory card, the first thing to get those images off the card, you need to have a USB and a card reader. You're going to plug it into your USB port. If you already have those images that you shot and put them on your computer already, not a big deal. We're going to show you how to get that too. One of the main things I want to call your attention is, whatever you do, especially if you shot to a memory card, you want to make sure you're copying or importing these files separately, and we'll show you how to do that, so that you're not working on the images that are still on the memory card. They need to be on your computer and separate. Just in case anything happens, you want to have two copies or a separate copy to be working from. So, the first thing we want to do is open up Lightroom. That's going to be where most people do their photo editing. So, again if you plugged in your USB and your memory card reader and you've already inserted your memory card, a box will pop up. If you have any of these files on your computer, you're just going to go up to file and click "Import photos and video" and that'll launch the prompt that you need to get started. So, what I'm going to do is just run you through the whole page just so you have an orientation of what's going on, what things to focus on, what things you can just ignore. The first thing we want to look at is on the left side, I have a bunch of folders up here but you'll basically see a file system. In this file system is where you're going to find the pictures you want to import. So, if you had a memory card, it would pop up right underneath this part that says Macintosh HD and you will just click on the memory card and you could go directly to the file that's holding the pictures. Again, I have these on my desktop and if you do have it on your desktop as well, you open up this drive, you go down to wherever you're storing your files and you're going to click on the folder where the files are that you want to import. So, I'm going to be using some pictures I took on a quick vacation to Joshua Tree and the middle of the desert. I've clicked on the folder, all the images have now populated onto this workspace. If you actually see up here in the middle now, you have a checkbox that says All Photos. Now, if you wanted to go through this and say, okay, I know I want exactly this photo and not anything else, then you can uncheck this and everything goes dark, and you can go through here and say, okay, I want image 13, maybe image 32. But for the purposes of this, I want to load all of them in, so we can organize them and then show you how you would call through them and decide what to edit. At the top of the screen you're going to see a bunch of options, Copy as DNG. In Lightroom, a DNG is digital negative file. It's like working in just above a raw file. Picture if you had film that you got developed and you could still keep a lot of the data in those the film strips that are left over that you don't actually use unless you need a print or scan them into a disk or something, a digital negative is just another wrapping for a raw file in a sense. So, you can copy as DNG which will import the files, convert them into a DNG and then put them in a different location. You can copy the files which means just copying the files from your card and putting them in a different location. You can move the files, meaning it's going to drag the files off your memory card and move them, not copy them. Or, you can add the files from where they are. So, if you already have a filing system, like I have right here. It's in the pictures and then Joshua Tree and you don't want to move the photo, you just want to import them where they're at, you're going to use add. But for the sake of going through everything that's on here, I'm going to start with copy as DNG just for a second. Now let's look at the right side of the menu. So, first category, File Handling. This is basically how you want the program to work with the file. Build Previews is basically, when you're importing a photo, it's trying to decide what's the most efficient way for you to be able to look at the previews or so it's quicker for you. So, if I click on the thumbnail once I've imported it and I want it to instantaneously show a preview, then I want a good preview there. But the trade off is, if you build a preview for that thumbnail or for that picture, the more detail you put into that preview, the slower the program's going to run. So, I will just leave it on whatever the settings are or our minimal. You can leave build previews unchecked, it's going to cost more space on your hard drive. Don't import suspected duplicates. This is something you check if you think that you have files that you have imported more than once. Click this and it'll do that troubleshooting for you and try to prevent you from importing any duplicate files. If you want to have a automatic backup of the files you bring in, say one folder is just where all the four files you are going to work with and then you have a separate folders where you just want to keep all the raw files that you're not going to work with, you can check this, make a second copy and then it'll open up a prompt. You click this and it'll allow you to pick where you want to set up another file that just hold your backups. Again not a necessity, unless you're super scared that you're going to lose some files, but if you need some peace of mind, definitely do it. If you want to set up a second hard drive for that to copy to, that's something you can do. Add to Collection is something that is not important for what we're doing today but it allows you to group certain photos together in a collection, so it's easier to reference. Scrolling down to file naming. So, if you look at my my files, you'll notice that I've already named them JoshTree-D1. I've already named them something just because it was easier and I was on vacation doing this. But if you're just coming in with raw files, they haven't been named, they're just a bunch of string of numbers, coming straight out of your camera, you can come down here, check the box then you got a template. You can decide one of the given templates that they give you. Some of these might actually work really well for you, so it's really a personal preference. I typically import using like a shoot date because I always want to know what data I got and then I'll either add a file name, like create my own filename or shoot name, or I'll just pick one of these because it's easier and it's quicker. But again, it's all about personal preference, so you decide whatever naming system you want that helps you stay organized. Date usually helps and place where you shot something usually helps and then a string of digits at the end that keeps the pictures in order of how you shot them. Now, this is a cool section. It's called Apply During Import. If you have presets or you want to use Lightroom's presets and presets just explain it or like filters. It's basically a color treatment or a type of style that you want to apply to your picture at import. If you shoot everything in the same light, like say you shot in a studio or you shot in a natural light in the same exact spot, all the photos are the same exact lighting or whatever, this works the best that way, when all the shots are consistent. If you want to apply a black and white filter or something like that onto the images, again if you're shooting raw, you can always take this away. But if that's how you think you want the images to look, you can just pick a filter. The one thing I do live on is I live on metadata. Metadata basically is and you can create a new one here, so I can show you what this looks like. But allows you to add information to your file, copyright being the biggest one. If you want yours to say copyright, Justin Bridges or your name. So, you can ignore it or use it, up to you. I'll just leave it on my name. The next thing underneath the metadata is the keyword section. The keyword section is you're basically tagging photos. So, if you want to go back and say, okay, I want all my pictures that have trees on them. You can type trees in here and you're going to separate everything by comma. But you can type trees in here and then every image in this that you're importing will get tagged with trees. Then another shoot later, you have trees in that again. You type trees in and the next time you go to look for photos, you click it and all your pictures of trees will come up. So, it's super easy, super good way to stay organized and find photos across multiple shoot dates and call them up at once. Actually, let's do Joshua tree. Not a big deal. Comma, landscape. I also have some portraits in here so we'll do that for fun. The last thing you want to do is you want to understand if you are copying your files from your memory card somewhere else. Again, I'm not doing that, my pictures are already on the computer. But if you need to copy your photos somewhere else, this is the section you're going to do that in, Destination. So, how do you want to organize it? Into one folder? Sometimes that's the easiest. Sometimes you can do it by date, you can do by original folders. It really is just about how do you want to do it. If you want to just drag everything that same folder, just type pictures or put it all in pictures and then use the keywords to help separate which photos you want to call up when you're going for your edits. So, I am not copying anything this time. So, I'm actually going to do "add" because I have again the files on the computer. So, all I want to do is have Lightroom, add them to the program so that I can start working in them. So, now, let's import it. All it is is clicking this button and all your files will start to come up again. So now you get all your photos imported into your Lightroom library and now I think it's time that we start to look at how do we make selects and decide what we want to work with, what images we want to edit. 5. Picking Your Selects: So, let's talk about how do we sort of make selects. How do we decide what image we want to work on? I think primarily the way I start is sort of in phases. So, the first phase I'm going through all my images and I'm just trying to see okay what sharp? What's a technically sound photo? What's a photo that's worth looking deeper into? As I go through images like that to check to make sure that they just look correct, I select ones on those or I put a star on them. So, in Lightroom there's a cool way to organize your photos and make your selects, these icons at the bottom, it's how you sort of look at the image. So, this grid system is what's up right now, that's the array that just shows you all your photos at once but you can also get a closer look at your photos using the loop view and this is how I sort of go through one at a time. You can use your arrows to go left and right and now you see at the bottom, you're able to make stars or sort of rank your photos. So, for instance, if I like this photo I click one and it sets a rating to one, zero takes it off. My base layer for sort of going through my images as I'm going through and I'm just putting a one on any image that has a potential. Now, for this part of the class because I have 500 photos, let's just zoom through it to just show you an example of what I mean by technically sound or viable. If you look at sort of this image right here, this guy is completely blown out. If I go a couple images later, you'll see that there's a lot of sky there, there's enough detail in the shadows here, I'll zoom in, you can see details in shadow. So this is something I can work with. So, I'm going to back out, I'm goign to click one on that. Just going through a couple more photos, there are a couple of photos here where I don't find the shots visually interesting so those are easy to cut already even if they are technically sound and I won't mark those either. So, those are things to be thinking about. It's like is the photo technically sound or close to it? Something I can work with? Meaning is the focus on the subject at hand sharp? Do I have good highlights and good shadows, good exposure? Is there enough composition that if I need to change it or I like the composition as it is, do I have something I can work with there? Is the shot visually interesting? If it's completely not interesting and I'm talking about objectively like to you or to anybody else I know that subjective, but you'll start to get the your photos and be like, okay, this is not important, this isn't cool, whatever and it'll start to become more of an objective thing than a subjective thing. But if there's something that's not visually interesting, I just cut it right away. It's not important, you know these are cool but whatever. Now, this is kind of interesting everybody likes a nice little flower bouquets shot. So, let's maybe pick something that has a good sort of distribution composition in the screen. Let's go with this because there's a lot of detail at the forefront of the picture might be interesting to edit. Don't worry, I mean, you're going to take photos that you're not happy about, or look horrible, or aren't interesting or whatever. It's okay to just scrap things or save them for later if you want to revisit them and really be brutally honest with yourself about whether a photo is viable, or you like the photo, or you think other people will like it, it's totally fine. You want to share your best work not all your work. I love this, his hand sort of emotion, it's hard, you see he's looking towards the light in some of these photos and so there's a big glare, maybe it looks good in black and white but it's a little distracting and it takes away from his eyes. So, maybe this is a good version where it cuts out the glare, you still have the glasses, you can see a little bit of his eyes, his hands now rested on the guitar so it looks like he's sort of in a comfortable position, let's keep that one looks kind of fun. Moving through, we got some cool night time scenes in Joshua Tree. You'll notice here it's really dark, I'm going to zoom in. Now, sometimes a silhouettes really cool so you don't automatically discard something just because you can't see any detail in the shadows. So, for instance this one, I think is an interesting shot because of the silhouette so let's keep it and then we also have another image where we have a happy medium so maybe it's one of those questions where I'll select both images when I get to the edit process, I'll go okay do I want to roll with an image for the silhouette of it, or do I want to pull out all the visually interesting details and so I'll have to use this photo? You're really just going through here, thinking through how do I want to use this image? What do I want to convey about this image? What is more interesting to me? You don't want to overthink things, you just want to sort of get in a groove of like judging yourself, judging your work and in that judgment of your work, you'll start to figure out your style and things that you like and you know the type of images that you want to create. Let's flip through here. I kind of like this angle, there's a lot of negative space but the negative space is very interesting because there's so much beauty in the cloud, so lets keep this one. Zoom through this, you'll notice when the image is trying to load, you don't get the full sort of brilliance of the photo and then once it loads the preview, then you sort of get the real image. This is a shot that was incredibly too dark and I also overexposed so half of it is in shadow, the other half was way too bright and so you got this conglomeration of just messiness. Let's mark this maybe this is savable, maybe we can convert it to black and white and make it interesting, let's see what we can do. This is going to be one of the more interesting shots that we're going to work with. Now, you can see there're shadows everywhere, there's light at the end of the tunnel, there's light at the front of the tunnel. This was a challenging shot because I didn't want his head completely in the sun but you know what can you do? And you don't want to shoot the legs too hot or make them too bright, you don't want him to be too dark and so there's going to be issues like this where you're going to have to problem solve on the spot and this is what I was talking about earlier about making sure that you're learning from your edits so when you go back to shooting, you can master these kind of tricky situations. Let's zoom into his face and see if there's some detail there make sure it's sharp enough okay. So, you might not be able to see this as well as I can but there's still some richness of detail, there's still some sharpness there so let's work with this, this will be a fun one to talk about. Now, inside is where you're going to run into the most of your white balance issues because of the fluorescent or the tungsten lighting or mixed sliding because outdoor lighting plus indoor lighting, you're going to get some funky result out of your camera. This is an example where the camera thought three different things were happening just based on where I pointed the camera or who was in the frame and so this is an area where shooting a white card is going to help you in fixing it, but it's also something that we can talk about to show you how to correct for white balance. So, I've reached the end of the row, I've marked everything that is of interest to me as one stars. The one-star helps me separate the whole row or the whole session of shots into what I want to start looking at. What was visually interesting? What's technically sound? What's a good place to start an edit from? But I still want to narrow it down even further because even if I was just shooting let's just say desert shots all day and I narrowed down 500 shots to 100 shots, you don't want to edit 100 shots and you're not going to use 100 shots. So, you want to go from 100 shots to maybe three. In order to now regroup and see what have I selected as one stars, we need to turn on a filter to sort of narrow it down and only show us what we selected as a one-star. So, down at the bottom right, you're going to see a thing that says filter and you can drop down and so you can click this and now you can filter your images by a lot of different things. You can filter them by camera info, by exposure info. Now, we gave them a rating, we gave them a one-star so we want to click by rated images. So now everything in here is a one-star. So, I selected a bunch of different images and now let's talk about what we actually want to edit and sort of walk you through so you can see what you want to do with your images. I want to get something that's super challenging, something that's sort of straightforward, and something that's just super visually interesting and make sure we don't want to portrait here. So, what I'm going to do is now select the three-star. So let's go with a good shot of my buddy Boom, this guy's really cool. Let's go here and then let's see if we can save him for fun, I think the challenging shots is where you learn the most from it. So, let's pick this is a challenging shot and then I would never select this but let's use this as an example of how you are going to correct white balance and this might be actually interesting so there we got it narrowed down. Now, I selected everything 5-stars, now how do you drill into that? You're going go right back to filters and you'll see that it's greater than or equal to, you can change this by the way. I want this to show me only stars that are rated greater than or equal to and how many stars that I select five. So, now you see at the bottom of the screen where now narrowed down to five. I'm going to call these up into the grid view so you can sort of see what we're looking at, increased the size of the thumbnails. So, we've got six images, what we're going to do is look at every image and basically discuss a game plan, how would I attacked this? How would I fix any technical issues? How I add a little bit of creative flare? And how do I make sure the intangible piece the mood, the vibe, the taste level, not overdoing things? How do I make sure that is the glue that holds the picture together so that the image ends up being enhanced and really singing to your audience? 6. Technical Fixes for Every Photo: So, now we're going to start editing some photos I've narrowed down. What I usually do is, I start with the technical fixes. So, that's where we're going to start off this edit. So, what you want to do is when you're ready to start editing, we're going to go from library, which is how we view, we stay organized, we rank, we keep all our images organized. We're going to jump into the develop tab. That's where you can start making actual edits. It's on the left side of your presets, and all that stuff will show up to your history of your edits on the picture, will show up. Then, all your tools are on the right side of the screen including your histogram. My favorite thing to start with this lens correction. This is what gets rid of distortion and vignetting if your lens itself is causing any issues. The better built the lenses, the lesser of the stuff you're going to have to deal with. The first thing you're going to do is, is you going to click Enable Profile Correction. Then, usually Lightroom will actually know which camera, which lens you using and it populate it for you. But what you need to do if it doesn't pop, and it's just go find your camera. Mine was a phase one. It's guessing what lens I use, which is why it is showing you a correction already. However, I actually use the different lens that it got that wrong. So, that's okay. I'm going to just flip it, and then make sure it all reads the same. So, there were good. So, what it does now is, put on a distortion and a vignette correcting algorithm. But if you want to see what it does, you can drag this slider back and forth, and you can see how it flattens or gets rid of a weird curve of distortion. I'm just going to leave this on android. So, that's the first thing I do. I go jump right into lens correction. Now, if you're using a cheaper lens, there will be some issues if you're shooting into direct sunlight, or this very hot sunlight on say, somebody's hair, where you're going get this thing called chromatic aberration. What you will see is a muddy color like a hot purple or hot green color that is along edges of very fine detail like hair. When you want to get rid of that, you want to click this box. There's none in this picture, so you're not going to see anything happen. But that's just something to keep in your notes, or keep at the top of mind, if you do see something like that pop up on one of your shots of a portrait of a friend or something. So, I'm going to just jump right into the next technical fix, the picture at the bowling alley. I'm just going to do the exact same thing I did for the other picture, set up my lens profile so that it corrects any distortion, any vignetting very quick easy. I'm just going to leave it, how it popped up. There's nothing I need to do here. You might have noticed when it fix the other lens, it goes a lot more brighter. Not a big deal. Here you'll do what it thinks is best for your camera. Then, if you want to push against it, you can push against it. If you want to leave it as is you can leave it as is. Now, here is an interesting case. We're having a white balance card. Would've been awesome. But I was on vocations, and not really paying a lot of attention to things like this. The camera has guessed wrong about what the white balances in the room. You know when white balance is pretty much off, because if you look at whitest things in the picture, one of the widest things in this picture would be the wall. You'll notice that it looks the color of the lights, or taking the color cast from lights and presenting it on the white. So, the easiest thing to do if you haven't shot a color card is, you can do this two ways. If you don't have a color card, you're going to go up to here. WB means white balance. You're just going to click that, and then you're going to click Auto. If it works well, keep moving on ahead. If it doesn't work well, you might want to guess what the lighting condition is. Was it tungsten light. That's to blue. So, I must be off, maybe it's fluorescent light. That's a little bit closer, it's a little bit pinkish. So, maybe I'll go down here and squeak the temperature or the tent. It's cooler to warmer, and then in the ten it's green to purple or magenta. Usually, you're not going to have to mess with this. So, unless you go to image, it's super messed up, and then you can tweak this to your heart's content. But let's go with auto here. That's one way to do it. The second way to do this is, if you did shoot a color card, you're going to forego this part, and there's a little eyedropper right here on the left. Let's pretend you have a white card and this screen it just sitting next to the beer or whatever the bottle of beer. You're going to click this eyedropper. Now, you have eyedropper on the screen. You'll want to pick a neutral color target, which in a lot of cases will be your white card or your gray card. Either one will work just fine. Because I don't have one, I'm going to pick the most clearly white spot on the picture. So, that is I know the wall, and you see how that got me to a similar spot. Maybe it's a little blue because in the front it's in shadow, but that's normal. When you have two different sets of color changes in a picture, you're going to get a little bit of a wonky color or white balance. There's really not a lot of ways out of that, but that's okay. It actually shows depth in a photo when you see the transition from a bright area to a dark area because shadows tell you when you're transitioning through lighting patterns. The other cool thing is say, you shot 20 of these photos, there's bolling, there's this scene, there's a bunch of different other things, but it's all the same lighting, and you just want to fix the white balance. What you want to do is come down here to the bottom left. There's a Copy and Paste. What you're going to do is click Copy. It's going to pull up a dialogue. That dialogue allows you decide, okay, what things from this photo do I want to copy to another photo. You want to uncheck everything, check none, and then you want to click white balance. Now, there's going to be sort warnings here. You can read them. If it applies to what you're doing, make note of them. If they don't, then ignore them. This one does actually make a difference. You want to usually keep Process version and Calibration on. You'll never going to actually likely use this when you're editing. So, just always keep these two things checked and you're good to go. So, white balances is the thing that we really care about here. We're leaving this on, and they're going to click copy. Then, you'll come down here where your thumbnails are. You can control A or command A, so you select everything, and then you're going to hit paste. So, before I do the last technical fix on this photo, I want to just say again with white balance, obviously you're going to try to get this as accurate as possible. In some cases, you may want to go a little bit creative with your white balance, where it makes sense to warm something up a little bit or cool it down. But also just because the computer says, this is the white balance, doesn't necessarily mean that you can't have an opinion on what looks more accurate to you what, feels right to you. Editing is a bit about technical and accurate things, but it's also about the intuition which will cover more in creative. So, trust your computer, but also trust your intuition. This is something you learn per picture the more you do. The last thing I want to do with this photo is I want to scroll down here to Transform. You need this by the way checked for this next thing I'm going to do. So, make sure you've always done this Enable Profile Corrections first before you go to this step. Down at transform, this is where you start dealing with when you shoot from a low angle and things look like they're falling away, it'll prompt them back up. Or if you shot something a little crooked, it will try to horizontally align it. So, what I always do is, I start with auto, and I see what it does. This one did it perfectly the first time, and sometimes you just walk away from it, and that's it. Sometimes you know exactly that you you're only dealing with a level issue, level being horizontal, vertical being vertical. So, that's what auto did. It just did a level correction. Vertical would do a vertical correction, and full would start looking at everything below, so vertical, horizontal, rotate aspects scale. All this stuff that you don't need to pay attention to right now. What I'm usually most concerned with is making sure things don't look like they're falling away too much, and things are at the minimum. Don't look crooked and falling left or right. Now, you have a picture that I would never used, but now you understand how to look at white balance, lens correction, and transform tool to get your picture looking right-side-up. So, those are my basic technical fixes. The next thing we're going to do is, jump into the creative side of the Edit. 7. Creative Edits: Light & Shadow: So taking a look at some of the technical edits, and now it's time to dive into the creative edits and this is the chance and the opportunity for you to push your image to the place that you really want to get it. This photo is kind of cool because you've got the sun creeping in from the left, the foreground is a bit shadowy compared to the background and the sky. So the first thing I actually want to do is, I want to play around with this idea of the silhouette versus sort of bringing out more detail on the trees. Let's zoom in a little bit and let's see what we have. You see all this rich texture in the trees? If you pull out, you can't really see a lot of that from afar, you get the idea, you get the shape but you're not getting all that richness. So let's play around a little bit with bringing that out so you can see it from afar instead of having to zoom in to get that. So, one of the first places I like to play with is at the top here. You have exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks. What we're going to focus on now is highlights and shadows. This shadow slider allows me to either bring up the shadows or push them down, make them darker. You can tell in Light room too, when you're making something lighter, it's sort of a wider gradation and when it's darker, it goes from sort of a light grey all the way down to a sort of a black or dark gray. So, let's slide this very gently. Actually let's overkill it just so you can see how much texture you can bring out. Now, this is an example of what I would call somebody overdoing it. Light is about capturing highlights and shadows, it's not about making everything fully lit and this is making everything fully lit which doesn't seem natural, it doesn't seem right. You can see a lot of this rich detail which is cool, but you'd only really see rich detail from afar if you were just standing there during the full daytime and that's not what was happening. So, let's back out again and let's find something that's sort of a happy medium. Remember, you can go to your history, step back and then let's just inch it up a little bit. So, if you want to go very slowly, just click the number to the right. You can either insert a value or you can grab your arrow key and just slowly increase to get to a point where you're like, "Okay, this makes sense. I like this." So I'm going to stop right around 40, okay? I think this brings out just enough of the detail that I'm sort of happy with it. Now, the sky is a little bit cloudy, a little bit sort of muddy if you will and that's okay, that's how the day looked. But let's see if we can adjust the highlights to see if we can get more pop out of the sky or maybe bring back some blue. The first direction I'll go is to make it darker just to see what that looks like. So what you have is you are bringing back a little bit more detail in the clouds, but the more you push highlights down, the more you get something what we call muddy, a muddy white. So, you're kind of seeing that in here and down here. In this picture, it's not a huge deal. It's not that bad. But the white sort of turns gray instead of just being a little bit of a less bright white and so let's back that off and let's see what happens if we push the highlights up this time. Now, we're blowing out the sky completely and we're losing a lot of rich detail everywhere except in the top right corner. So, I'm going to back that off and it looks like a happy medium for us is going to be somewhere in the range of sort of darker highlights but not overdoing it. So, let's drop this down and let's find an area where it starts to feel really good. Now, here's the thing. When you sort of bring down highlights and you push up shadows, you get what I would describe as sort of a flattening out effect, meaning your foreground, your background the lights and the 'darks' start to collapse into each other and that's what makes up a picture less visually interesting. So, the next thing I'm going to do is sort of bring some of that back by introducing some contrast and clarity. So, contrast you can do two ways. When you use the contrast slider up here, you're basically handing over the controls to the software and saying, "Okay, give me sort of a global switch on the contrast." So, let's check this out. If I want more contrast, I turn it up, the brights get brighter, the darks get darker. That's contrast. It's increasing the difference between things. When I go the other direction, it sort of flattens everything out. It's sort of the opposite effect. It makes things go from different to same. So, obviously you can see here what a boring photo. The scene doesn't even feel alive anymore. So, let's take away the adjustment and let's see what happens if we just add a little bit of contrast. We want to add enough contrast, but not too much that we sort of undo what we did with the shadows. So, this is starting to get interesting. So, that's just doing a global slider or the usual slider. Now let's take a look at the tone curve instead and see if we can pinpoint a little bit more how we want to apply the contrast. So, think of these big sliders at the top in this tone area as macro adjustments and then when you get down to the tone curve think of that as sort of a micro-adjustment. So, looking at the tone curve, you'll see that it's sort of corresponds with the histogram. So, on the histogram you have shadows all the way to your highlights and then on the tone curve, you have your darks and shadows all the way to your lights and highlights. So, they almost mimic each other but when you're looking at tone curves, you're looking at light only. You're not looking at a saturation specific slider. So, when you adjust this macro contrast, you're adjusting everything from color down to the highlights and shadows. But if you work on this tone curve, well it might slightly affect the saturation levels, you're really trying to pinpoint a move against the lights and darks without affecting the saturation of the image. What I want to do is create what we call an S curve. It's how we sort of add contrast. An S curve will sort of look like an S on this graph and basically what you're doing is pulling down darks, lifting up highlights but you're doing it, you're pinpointing where you want to do it versus letting the software just do it across the board. So, my darks, I don't want to get incredibly dark. I want to start dragging the darks down closer into the mid tones, which means I don't want to affect the darkest areas of the photo which will be sort of the base of the tree, these darker bushes. I want to adjust the darks more so in these sort of mid tone, mid exposure areas. So instead of dragging down here, I'm going to lift up and put my cursor here a little bit closer to the mid tones. I'm going to click my mouse and I'm just going to drag a little bit down so you start to get a curve going and you've got to be gentle too. Depending on how dark or how light your images are, little moves can really make a large effect. So, let's play with the light side of the curve and pull up a little bit. So instead of going in the mid tones, which is what I did with the sort of shadow area, now I'm going to go towards the highlights a little bit and see if I can just push it out at the top of the curve. All right. So what you see here is when I apply the curve, we're getting some richness around the bushes sort of in the bottom third. It looks like those bushes are sort of, I don't want say catching fire, but they're catching this brilliant sunlight and it's making that stand out in the picture which I think is really cool and you're getting that same vibe sort of on the tops of the trees. So, the next thing I want to do is really push this and bringing it to life and the way I like to do this sometimes is clarity. Clarity is sort of another way to sort of micro adjust your contrast. When I like to push clarity, if I want to say, make something bolder like a man's beard, if I want to sort of bring out some sort of punchiness to the photo. Let me show you how punchy you can go. Again, this is going to be an opportunity to see what overdoing something looks like. I call this a cooked image. Imagine you printed off your photo, threw it in the microwave, turned it on for two minutes and this would be what you would get out of it. It's almost caught fire and then you blew it out and then, "Oh my God, what do I have here?". So let's back that off and I'll show you. You're going notice on all these tools, you're pushing and pulling. It's almost like you have the edit triangle and then you have sort of the tool triangle where each tool sort of relates to the other one. So, you can push clarity, you can push contrast and all of them do similar things but they do it in a different way so you get a little bit different effect, but they all will lead you down the same path. So like before when we backed off contrast, you got flat. If I back off clarity, I get flat and I get sort of muddy, non-sharp. So, what you're seeing is that the little micro difference between clarity and contrast is that with clarity it's going to affect the sharpness more. So, it's going to affect sharpness, they're both going to affect saturation and where contrast is pushing apart the lights and the darks, clarity is pushing apart the micro sharpness in the image while also making the contrast, the light and dark differences do something different as well. So, there's so much overlap and there's so many different ways to do the same thing but each of them will have a different effect. So, let's push the clarity up and again I'm going, to hit the number I'm going to do it slowly so we can see what's a good place to stop instead of dragging this left and right really fast and we're going to end up somewhere around 26-27. Okay. So, I'm starting to like the way the image looks. We started with a flat image, a little too dark, not enough detail anywhere in the photo. We have this beautiful sunlit area on the bushes but we weren't really calling attention to it and we've managed to make this photo feel alive. So, that's all the changes I wanted to make in terms of exposure and tone. So, let's go ahead and look at color. 8. Creative Edits: Color: So now, we're going to look at color. We're going to focus on hue, saturation, and luminance, as well as split toning. So, saturation is like, how do I make colors richer? How do I give red more red? How do I give green more green? So, watch this. We'll drag this. More color, right? Less color, all the way to black and white. Let's go all the way to 50 to make a dramatic point here. So, this is very saturated, overly so, but I want to make a point about vibrance. They are both interconnected. So, watch what happens when I drag vibrance over with saturation up. It is making an impact on the richness of the saturation change. Now, watch what happens when I drive it the other way. It has the same effect of driving down saturation except it doesn't remove color completely, because again, it's a modifier on top of the given saturation. So, just so you know, vibrance does work without saturation, it's about adjusting to the given amount of saturation in the photo. See this? Again, doesn't take away color completely, but it will push it in the direction of where saturation would be going. So, let's leave this at zero for now, and let's drive the saturation a little bit, just to show you where I would be happy with it. So, I'm going to back this down to 20. I don't want to overdo it. I don't think I really need any vibrance for this, but let's, just for the fun of it, add a couple of points here, we can make it all the way up to 50 and not feel crazy. So, this is me on the cusp of too much saturation, too uncomfortable for me, but not too crazy that it would drive anybody nuts. So, that's an idea of where you can go, I'm going to remove both of these, and drop down to this HSL color, and black and white area. HSL is just short for hue, saturation, and luminance. When you are working in the HSL tab, you have three different ways to adjust color. Hue is basically, what's the degree of that color. So, let's look at blue. If I drive blue a certain direction, it will turn almost purpley, and if I go the other way, it will go almost green, and all these sliders will interact with each other because you're basically mixing paints. Pushing out one color, making a color stronger, mixing it with another color to make another color, and so that's what your hue is going to do. It's just going to change the effect or the sort of the tint. So, let's take that off. Let's look at saturation. We'll just keep playing with blue because we have the sky here. If you're looking for straight-up saturation, just making blue more apparent. You can push this hard, and then you get "Oh look there's a blue sky." What I love about going here for your saturation changes, is that you don't have to affect the entire picture, you can just pick the color tones that you're looking to effect. This is one of the few times where you can drive something all the way to 100, and it doesn't look crazy. So, let's go back to Hue. Now that we've driven the saturation there, let's see what happens if I push that. See how much more richer that purple is because we gave more color to the sky, and the same thing the other direction. So, when I don't have this on, you can't even see that there's a lot of blue here. But when you start messing with individual colors, there are going to be areas of the photo where you didn't expect there to be color cast or color things, and they're going to pop out at you. So, I'm going to leave the hue off, I'm going to leave the saturation here, and then let's go over to luminance. Luminance is going to affect the brightness or the darkness of a given color. So, still playing around with blue. This is making the blue brighter, keeping that sort of color tint, or trying to hold to the color tint. This is making it darker, which is a little bit of a moodier shot. Again, when you mess up things in extremes, you see it pop up in unwanted areas. So, you have to be really careful about how you apply these things. So, let's take that off. One other thing I want to call your attention to, is anytime you want to see what it would look like to just take off an adjustment and you don't want to necessarily go back into history and get rid of what you've done, there's going to be a little tab above every single section, and you can turn off what you've done, and turn it back on, and your adjustments will stay. So, that's just a really cool tip for just turning off and turning on your adjustments. Now, in the same tab, you can click color, and this allows you to pick your colors, and then do all three things in one grouping of sliders. Then you can code black and white, and what black and white will do is convert everything to grayscale. Then you can adjust the saturation. It's already auto-adjusted, but then you can adjust the saturation based on color. So, going back to the example of blue, we know that blue is here in the picture and around here in the picture. Do I want it to be brighter or less contrasty, or do I want to get really contrasty with the black and white? So, essentially, it's like, do I push it more to the white side of black and white, or to the black side of black and white? So, I don't want to do that. I want to stay with color because I think that's what makes this picture so interesting. So, we'll go back here. The last thing I think I want to touch on in terms of messing with the color. In this photo is we want to take a look at split toning, which is just below it. This is an area where you're going to push colors into the highlights and push colors into the shadows, and then you're going to work with the balancing act of how those should interrelate. So, this is interesting. We have, in the highlighted areas of the photo. Highlighted, meaning the brightest areas of the photos, we have blue, we have white, and then we have this sort of yellowish tone on the bushes. I want to push the riches of the blues in the sky, but maybe I also want to take a look at making it feel sunny, like overly sunny, where in the desert. So, turning on the saturation a little bit allows you to see the impact of the color a little bit easier, as well as this little color block there. So, let's drag this. I want to go all the way to blue, because I want to see, "Hey, can I make this sky a little bit richer without making it look insane?" Maybe I can. But the danger here is that when you have white, it's going to push whatever richness of color into the white, and so it will make the white not appear white. So, we all know what a cloud looks like. We've never seen a cloud that look tainted by blue, we seen blue behind clouds, and we've seen blue in front of clouds, but we've never seen blue in the cloud. So, if you push it too hard, you're going to get a color cast on the white, and then it won't feel as legitimate or realistic. So, let's show you what it would be to push really hard. That's way too much saturation. You can see, look at that color block, it's changing the whole time. So, you can see the impact in the photo, and you can see the impact of the color that you're actually creating as you mix around with your paints, if you will. Then let's take that out no saturation, and then slowly enter it, and leave that there. Now, let's work with the shadows. So, let's add a little bit more warmth into the desert soil and the trees, and will slide this a little bit over, and then let's just go ahead and-. This is okay. So, that was almost everything we had to do with color. Remember, all the things that we do, they will affect color as well, so just keep that in mind, but let's start taking a look at the detailing as we finish off this photo. 9. Creative Edits: Detail Work: So, now we're going to take a look at the detail. This is we're going to look at sharpening, we're going to look at grain. All this finishing touches that really make the image saying as we get ready to export it. Sharpening. You're primarily going to be focused on amount and radius. The radius which is like, when you're thinking about contrast or like picture pixels, as like a bunch of overlapping circles on your image, that saying how many pixels across do I want to affect the sharpening of? Dragging these back and forth until you get a sense for, "Have I gone too far? Am I doing too much?" Remember what we said, doing too much looks like too much. Just right, in here between 25, and 40, and 50. Once you go beyond that, you're going to start getting into danger territory, so just be very careful. This is the way you finish an image, and overdoing it can ruin all the work you did before it. Okay? The last thing, the most exciting thing is the grain. Sometimes, when we want to give the image the apparent feeling of having being shot on film, or at least, a texture and character of having that depth of film quality. Digital can be super clean and super- it's too straightforward almost. So, see how this, you don't see. I brought up the shadows, you don't see any noise here. It's like this was, remember where this was. Let's take all the corrections off. This was dark. Now, we brought it up, we've added color changes into it. We've brought exposure into it. We've really changed the image around a bit even though it doesn't look like we did too much, and it's still very clean image. So, it doesn't look like film, it just looks too perfect almost, right? So, grain adds in that level of character and texture that really gives the image a good nice finish, a nice veneer. So, here's the amount of grain. So, absolute amount of grain and zero. Let's leave it on 50 just so you can see a sizable amount of grain. Now, here's where you can see it the most and the white. Now, the size of the grain is like picture sand. If you've got a smaller piece of sand or a bigger piece of sand and do it on your image, it's basically looking at the size of that grain. So, this is when it's at the most fine, it can be that's at zero. There's still a grain, but it's very, very, fine. See how thick that gets? That's at 100. The more grain you add, by the way, the more soft the image becomes. So, when you get to 100, you get an image that looks from afar maybe it's interesting, but you don't want to look at an image and go, ''Wow, that is so grainy, that I can see every stitch of grain in it.'' So, let's back this off to something more reasonable like a 30. So, this is like normal grain and then the roughness of the grain. So, let's make it big again, so you can see. Then, let's look at the roughness of the grain. See how the quality of the roughness changes? So, at zero, you're still getting big grain because the size is 75, you're getting a lot of grain because it's at 70. At zero roughness, you're getting smooth grain. At a 100 roughness, you're getting like just really jagged edges of grain distributed across the picture. One quick little tip at the end of this, if you want to draw the reader or the audience's attention to something, you might actually want to play around creatively with vignette. You make it dark around the edges. There might be some cases where shooting a portrait that's a little moody or dark, or you let something to evenly on a black seamless or something, so the edges of the black seamless are a little bit like too bright, and so you want to make it apparently look a lot darker like you learned a little bit better. There are ways to use vignetting as a way to fix something, and then there are ways to use it creatively. I tend to avoid it in most cases, but it really depends on the subject that you're shooting, the way you lit it, the way you want the image to read, and again, season to taste. So, now, we've got this photo to a place where I'm happy to share with friends or share online or whatever, I think we've taken it from flat and boring to exciting and colorful and brilliant. On the next picture, I'm going to start sharing a couple extra tools that help you even fine-tune a little bit more, and really drive the picture to the next level as well. 10. Advanced Edits: So now that we've finished that last image, I want to transition to a portrait of one of my buddies where we're going to start looking at a couple of extra tools that I didn't cover with the Joshua Tree shot. Next shot is going to be a little bit more challenging, it's technically a sound shot where I had to pick which one did I want to expose for, and I decided I'm going to have to expose for his legs, they're the ones in the sunlight and if I expose for his face, it would have been so bright on his legs that I might not have been able to recover it. I knew that with the camera that I was using, it'd be a lot easier for me to pull out the darkness in the face, and it would be to bring down the blow out of light in the socks and the shoes and maybe even the highlights on his legs. Okay. So, let's do all the normal things that I would do. I'm going to go ahead very quickly since you're already used to seeing me do this, I'm just going to toss these things on real quick. I'm going to level that and leave that on, and we'll take a look at white balance. So, it wants to really make this not warm, I don't want to do that. This is a creative decision. So, I'm going to go back to our shot and because that's the vibe, that's the mood. Those are the things you want to start using your intuition to make judgement's, okay. Now, all that technical stuff is out of the way. Now, let's have a little fun, right? So, the first thing I really want to address is, I want to look at the shadow area because while this is an okay photo, and all the things are technically correct, I think it's going to be way more interesting to be able to see my friend a little bit more clearly, so we can see his character, his spirit and blend it in a way so that we have still moody shadow. But we have a nice more even distribution of light to dark. So, the first thing I'm going to key off of is shadows, because that's really the important part we're working with. If I went all the way to 100, it's brought him out, but it's still a very strong shadow which is why I was trying to push me to jump the exposure up too. I actually agree with them that the shadow should be closer to 50 because when you're bringing up exposure and shadow at the same time, you're doing a lot of double work, but you're doing it in a way that will create a different type of flattening that it would be if you just push shadows all the way. On top of that shadow, isn't 100 percent perfect at doing the entire shadow recovery. So, we're going to bring it about 50, then we're going to drive the exposure too. Now, again, we have to talk about mood here, right? I can easily derive this up a little higher, and I can bring more of him into exposure, and then I can do exactly what they did by driving down the highlights on the legs, so we get a more of a flat structure. But let's experiment, let's say I don't agree with them and let's experiment with leaving the exposure a little less keeping a morn shadow. One thing that I want to point out here, I have half the picture and shadow and so everything I do is really about the shadows, and a little bit of what I do is about the highlights. But the most visible part of the photo isn't highlight, so it's almost distracting piece, most of the work I'm going to do is in the shadow. So, I'm constantly giving and taking, giving and taking, and that will be super frustrating if you end up in a circumstance like this, but sometimes it's what you have to do. So now, this share is a bit lit. So, I want to bring down the highlights here, a lot of what I do is gonna affect his leg, so I want to find a happy medium. I think this is okay. I want to just go ahead and sort through how I feel about the shadow on its face, so I'm going to bring your attention to the top right. Let's start with the Radial Filter for this photo, I'm going to put this on a shadow save. This is what it will look like, 15. If I wanted even more, it would be 75. So, let's just go with one of their presets. You have a little cross cursor on your screen. This is what you're going to do to draw like an ellipse or a circle or shape around whatever you're trying to affect. This right now as it said, is excluding where I want to make the adjustment. So, right now it's on 75. So, everything outside of this circle has been lifted by this adjustment. Now, if I want to apply things that are inside the circle, boom click invert. So, this is brighter but not unnaturally so, right, it's blended in. If you want to readjust this, Radial Filter, your little gray dot pops up, you click it to get back into it, when you hover over it, it shows you what is actually included. This is what we call the mask. The mask is always this red colored thing, and it just basically says, "This is what I'm affecting right now, watch this." If I go the other way and I hover over it, it's telling me "This is where I'm affecting the photo." I'm going to invert it, little trickier. See how the edges of this mask are transparent. If I go down here, you see this slider called feathering. Feathering is what effects the edges of the mask. When you feather something, you make it softer. When you decrease the feathering, you make it harder, so I'm going to show you harder. That's how you apply a very sharp mass where it's literally the edges of the circle are just sharp. I hesitate to do sharp mask unless you are literally going to be able to trace the outline of an object, because unless you are tracing the object, you want the mass to blend in naturally, and to blend in naturally, you need to feather things. So, this will not look good, say for instance I do something like this, now I take this off, that's what a hard feather does. Now, if I go back here and I click on this to get my circle back, now let's boon the scene as somebody pointed out a nice strobe light at this. See that soft circle now feels like a spotlight. The softer, the more natural degradation, the more likely this is going to look realistic. So, let's put this back on over his face. Let's go back to the original circle, there we go. Say 50, actually lets drive it a little higher, let's go 70 because I realize I'm not actually, when I have it at 50, it's not getting enough of the hat, and I wanted to bleed into the neck a little bit. Now, the last thing I want to do, I want experiment with pushing the exposure up just to see is this going to look crazy, now does this look like it matches the rest of seen? No, not at all. So, this is called overdoing it. So, you want to find this happy medium of, okay, let me brighten his face. But let's not make it seem as though this couldn't have happened in real life, right? So, this is to me, this is okay. Remember here's where we started and this is where we're at. So, we've already dramatically made this more interesting because we can see his face better, I'm no longer distracted by how bright his legs are. I'll show you how we can bring down the legs even more, so we can start to flatten out him and then apply the contrast globally on the whole photo. So now, let's go over here to the Adjustment Brush. This allows me to paint in exactly where I want to affect another different change. So, I'm going to work on highlights, I'm going to go with just regular highlight safe which is about a 50. Here's my brush, you'll see two lines, this radius basically speaks to the feathering again. You can increase and decrease the size of your brush by either sliding the slider, or you can hit the left bracket, right bracket. You want to basically use a brush that is going to fit what you're trying to do without spilling over, so here's the leg. Then you want to have a feather that's very soft, so let's do this around 45, 46, flow just leave at 100. Then so, let's go and put this on, I'm going to just paint the leg a little bit. You can already see that the amount of highlight reduction that I put is way too much but that's okay. I'm going to fix that in a second, let's just make sure we get everything here. So, as long as I'm still selected on this, I can drag any of these sliders and effect what I just did. So, highlights I did too much, 25 and that might be too much, so let's go up a little bit more, 15. So, creatively, you might want to look at this and go, okay, if I'm going to reduce his legs that much, maybe to make it contextually make sense, I'm also going to reduce the highlights in the floor, right? So, just as an example, let's just show you what it looks like. It's a really big brush and take forever. Let's just paint in what it looks like to apply that same mask to everything. Oh man, this is great, right? So, now I'm blending in everything. So, I have- I even looked to him, the legs aren't as distracting, his face a little bit brighter, but it's obvious that he's still in shadow. Now, I want to actually add another mask because instead of applying clarity across this whole image, what I want to do is just apply clarity to him, because if you notice, we're now flattening the image out, so I brought up the shadows, I brought down the highlights. Everything is starting to feel like it's lacking the depth that you would want. Usually, what you want is a foreground that feels the most punchy for you, and then it trails off into the background. But we have a case where we have highlights in the back, highlights in the front, shadow in the middle, and so, when those things start merging, you want to make sure that you're maintaining the depth in the photo. So, I'm actually going to use another Adjustment Brush, and this time what I want to do is add some clarity to my subject, bring down the size of the brush a little bit, okay. I'm going to just trace over roughly, this is what a lot of clarity looks like. I'm using this to bring my subject out of the photo and this is too much. So, now that we're in this, let's do the adjustment how we think it should be. So, now he's popping out of the photo without being overly cooked. Now, let's do the normal things that we would do, and I'm going to zoom through these because you know what we're doing now, you're getting used to it. Okay. So, I sped through the rest of these edits, I looked at color, I looked at some of the other things like we did in the other photo. I want to call your attention to one thing I did differently, I told you I don't really use the vignetting, but I did toss a little tiny bit on. I'll just show you. I put a negative 17 on just a little halo. So, if I take this off, so on, off. Remember which on a focus the energy here, and because this is already shadowed and I don't care about all this detail, it's a little bit easier for me to be comfortable using in vignetting because I'm enhancing and already current shadow. I'm not creating a new shadow. So, the other tool I want to bring to your attention is the crop, this is also something I do at the end of my photos to decide whether or not I want to change the composition. What I want to do is say, okay, do I want to bring more attention to him and cut out a little bit of what's going on? I still have them in the center thirds or at least the frame and the center third, so I'm going to cheat a little bit over because I didn't get him perfectly centered. I want to push, I don't want to push this back frame, this window, I don't want to push it, so it's so offset that it's distracting and since he's not lined up with it, but I still wanted to sort of be in the center thirds, I'm just going to cheat a little bit and try to make sure a third of the information is where it belongs. So, this is still a little bit too far to the side, so I'm a little bit limited to what I can do. Maybe it looks normal with him in the middle thirds and the frame is a little bit off to the side, that's a lot better. But am I too close to him now? Especially with all the changes that I made, they are realistic but the more attention you call the changes you've made, the more drastic those changes become. So, it's not just about your absolute changes, it's about the perspective that the audience has on your image as well. So, right now the crop shows you the bright area is where you're cropping to, the dark area is what you've cropped out. They've got a number of different crop factors. One by one, that's your Instagram crop, not your story crop, but your Instagram crop. Sixty nine is not only banner but it's also going to be your Instagram story crop but vertically. Let's take a look at what it would look like if I just wanted to get this photo ready for Instagram. This is a great way for me to salvage getting rid of that, maybe getting a little bit of a better centering position. Now, I feel like this is a little bit more harmonious, it reads better. He's more centered, the back window is not as centered but it's not as distracting. Let's go back out to where we were, show you a couple more things with the tool just so we know how to use it, and work around it. I hinted earlier in the class that, if you're unsure what orientation of a photo you want, that you should shoot it horizontally. It won't work for every photo in terms of the composition, but it will work if you shoot a horizontal photo and you want to go portrait style. Basically, you're just going to push up or pushed up until the crop turns the other way, now you have a horizontal picture, then you can line this up how you want. So, now I think I got the photo where I want it. Let's a recap real quick, we started here, right? And then we got it all the way here. Our usable photo and very impactful, it still feels warm, but it also feels cool, it feels like a desert morning shot, it reads vibrant. The model of the subject is at the front of the screen it's popping out, and that nothing's distracting it, and you got a revolutionized picture. So, let's move on to the next photo. 11. Fixing Common Photo Issues: So, let's move on. I want to show one more tool in lightroom that I think is invaluable especially for those of you who shoot a bunch of landscapes or shots where you have the sky in the upper half and foreground is grounded. If you say, it's a little dark in the foreground, I don't know if I want to go with the silhouette look. The graduated filter is just like the radio filter and that you're basically applying a broad mass, but that having to pin everything in. Click on the graduated filter, it's already on new, so what you're going to do, you're going still get this crossing, but instead of a ellipse or a circle, you're going to be drawing a line. We're going to start from the area in which you want the mass to be the boldest up to the point where you want the mass to fall off and you'll see what I'm talking about it's hard to explain. So, here's where I want to start the bulk of the mask. So, you can actually drag below that's fine because you can decide where you really want to start the bulk of the mask, but I just for the purpose of this class I'm going to start it right where the picture starts, because that's where it's going to be heaviest. Then, I'm going to drag up and you see how this is a graduate of filters, I have to drag past stuff in order to bring in that save. So, if I stopped here, you only get a little bit. So, you're seeing the bottom line, between the bottom and the middle line, that's the strongest application of the filter. Then after the second line to the third line, that's where your fall off happens. So, I'm going to drag past because I still want to capture some of these bushes. This looks about where I needed to be, it's coming off. Now, remember that trick, hover over the center button? See it where the red is applying, it's very bold at the bottom. So, I've captured most of the mask where I need it to be, and then it's slowly falling off above the middle line and applying gently across the rest of the trees. That is a very quick way to show you how to apply a gradient onto a landscape. If you're trying to get blue sky back or something that was little blown out, what you want to do is go to your highlight save and you're going to do the same thing from the top to the bottom. You're going to drag down, you're going to drag a little past where you need it because you want it to blend in and you're going to let go then you're going to hover over it just to sort of assess that I get it right. This area is the strongest up here, it turns out that it might be easier for me to drag this a little bit further. So, I can always just grab the lines again. I can also turn this if I need to, like if you had sun coming in from one side and I want the gradation to happen here, or here, you can turn it. So, this is a very useful tool in the program. So now, I've got the fall off starting a little bit lower and if I wanted to go all the way until the line of the trees and then stop, I have it here. Now, again, like any other tool, I can drag on, drag off, I can make this brighter instead, I can do different things I can add. Just because I selected that I want to work with highlights, doesn't mean I can't say, "Oh, let's punch up some clarity." So, you can do all the same adjustments, but you can apply them differently in a more efficient way instead of using a brush and painting the whole sky, or instead of using a circle that won't cover everything. I can just use the gradient tool and apply uniformly in a graduated way and there you go. So, now, you can see from here, to here, I brought back the foreground a little bit, a little bit more visual interests. Now, last thing I want to cover is saving a really messed up photo. Let's assess this really quickly. Blown out highlights, right behind the shoulder, even some lens flare or some light flair here, we have a blown out light on the left side, because I try to expose to get him, let's zoom in. Not sharp. There's motion blur because there's natural light and a slow shutter speed, so there's a motion blur here and because there's motion blur, you can also expect there's not going to be some sharpness in the photo. Now, I won't use this, I will never use this to blow it up. I would never use this as a portfolio image, but this might be an image if I liked his positioning of his face and his body, whatever, I might want to use this for Instagram. So, let's show you how to rescue a photo. Because this is blown out and the colors are nasty, it's unlikely that any auto use will help me. See, I'm just running through nothing. This is not saying that the white balance is inaccurate for what I was seeing when I shot the photo, but it's just saying there's so many mixed sources of lighting that it's almost not going to be helpful. So, what do we do when we have so many mixed light sources and we don't, that's not sharpen it's not nothing is helpful. Why don't we just flip it to black and white? Now, we've reduced the amount of distraction in the photo. Do we want the lights in the background? I think we do, because what's beyond it is not very pretty, so let's keep the highlights. Next thing we want to do, quickly bring out the shadows just so we have a little bit more detail there and I'm not going to go into the curves and stuff because that's just going to be a mess. So, I'm going to add a tiny bit of contrast, vary a little bit. I might drive some clarity, because clarity remember, will bring you light and contrast at the same time in a sense, it's going to get a little punch here. But if I really wanted to focus on this, I might use a radial filter here to bring out the face to match where the exposure is hitting on the body, not that important, is it's just a safe. Because I've converted to black and white, I don't need to worry about the noise is much. There's naturally occurring grain and noise in the photo, so I can either add a little bit more grain, I can work with the grain that's already here, but I do need to sharpen, I'm just going to use a preset. Again, it's just like dragging from left to right with more sharpening. This will give it the appearance that, "Okay, maybe it was sharper than it is and there's just a little motion blur." The last thing I'm going to do, I would only use this photo on Instagram, so let's just use the crop tool to go ahead and visualize how that would look. I can cut out this whole distraction here, and now it's just a dude hanging out in the window light. If I want to make this a little tighter, so you're not seeing so much stuff going on, and I still get a lot of the strongest details in the picture, I can do that, I can crop in, so I just want to show you how black and white can take a photo that is very challenging, lighting wise, white balance wise, sharpness wise and you can save it. Again, sharpness is about perspective, not necessarily about absolute sharpness sometimes. So, if I crop in, I'm going to see how motion blur this is. If I stay far away, now you maybe can tell a little bit in the eyes, a little bit, maybe in the hair right here. But by enlarge, your eyes are caught towards what looks like apparent detail, it's still blurry but from far away, sharp. A lot of what you're doing is about illusion. You're driving, the audience to where you want them to look, you're driving them to think that something is sharper than it is. You're using all your tools in your toolkit to change somebody's perspective of the picture that you took. So, this is something that might work. Again, I'm sure you can find a better photo, but if you're in a crunch there's a save there. 12. Exporting Your Finished Work: So, now we've walked through technical edits, creative edits, we've rescued a photo or two, I've walked you through all the different tools that can help you really enhance your photo. So, now we want to use the photo. So, how do we export the photo, and get it ready for Instagram, or your website? So, you have a beautiful photo here, you want to go up here to "File", you're going to get a drop down. Just like when you imported your images earlier, the next section of this menu is exporting. So, let's click "Export" for now. It's going to pull up a dialog. This is how we're going to decide what we want to do. On the left side, you're going to have some presets. You get the ones that Lightroom has. So, they have different things set up, skip the Google stuff. Then you can set up your own presets, and they'll fall under here. I encourage setting up your own presets that makes your workflow a lot smoother. I'll show you how to do that in a second. So, export location, very straight forward. Where do I want to put the file that I am working on? If you want to put the folder in wherever you imported the photo, click same folder as original photo. If I want to choose the folder later, I can do that too, or you can pick one of these predestined folders that are already listed. Now, if you have a specific folder mind, just leave it there, and then you can choose. I don't have the same folder that was already listed, so, I'm just going to go back to where I have this. I'm just going to label a folder in here. One thing I really love to do in my organization is I will do an underscore first, and then I do the folder name, because that automatically puts it at the top of whatever you're looking at. So, click it, choose, now it's filled in here. Now, if you want to rename your file as it comes out, you can do that too, up to you. Click "Rename", and then you can, like we talked about when you imported, you can change the naming and all that kind of stuff. I like my output images to correspond with my input images, because if I ever want to export or change a retouched photo, and I want to know, which photo was I working on in the first place, if I shot a bunch of different similar photos, like I shot the same Joshua Tree photo, but I shot it in different exposures and all that kind of stuff, I might not know if the crop and everything's the same, I might not know which photo I was working on if I look at the whole library. So, I keep my input names, the same as my output names, always, always, always. If you ever decide to change them, because you have to get them ready for a client, or send to family members, that's fine, but it's just going to make your life a little bit messier. We're not working in video, so don't worry about that. So, now file settings, one of the most important parts. When you are working in photos that are going up on the website, or your portfolio, you don't need 100 percent quality. They don't display that way, and they make the file too big. So, what we do when we get ready for Web, is we usually leave this on JPEG, here's all the choices. PSD, which is a Photoshop file, TIFF, which is usually used for printing, DNG which is what we talked about earlier, which is about the digital negative, and Original, which means it's going to export it as whatever file it is now. So, I'm going to use it as a JPEG. The color space sRGB, don't get caught up with this. If you're going to use something for Web, sRGB is going to be the best color space you're going to be able to use, so don't really tweak this area, or you just going to get confused. If you want to limit the size of the file, based on say your portfolio site has, it says, "We can only take files that are five megabytes or smaller", you can actually constrain it here. Remember a megabyte is 1,000 kilobytes, so, if you want to keep it to 1,000, or five megabytes, or smaller, you're going to type it in here. Not important for what we're doing today. Changing the quality when I'm exporting photos for Web, I keep quality around 70, you can also constrain the file but put it at 100, it'll still downsample for web, or Instagram. You can probably get away with dropping it down to 30-50, 70 is a good safe space. So, let's do that now, let's just create a preset for exporting for the Web, or Instagram. The next place is image sizing. These files are super big aspect wise, so you can resize it. You can resize it by different ways, with height, dimensions, long edge, meaning if it's horizontal, the top or bottom, those are the long edges, if it is vertical, the long edge is going to be the sides, the left and the right side. That's what you're basing it on. What it does is you pick the length of the longest edge, and then the other size will fall in, because it's locked into an aspect ratio. You can do this by the amount of megapixels, I never touch that. You can do it as a percentage, meaning I want to reduce his picture size by 50 percent. So, what I always do is I work with long edge, I do long edge, I know for my portfolio site, that the longest, or the biggest image I can have is somewhere around 2,500, or 1,600. I have it at 1,600 right now, that's totally fine. Resolution. If you're in America, pixels per inch is going to be probably the most prevalent measure, pixels by centimeter more of a European standard. We'll leave it on pixels per inch. This is confusing, and it's something that you will get used to, just knowing the settings, even if you don't know what they mean. So, resolution-wise, you're going to go 72, if you're just using for Web. If you're going to print, you're going to want to do 300, but you're usually probably won't be printing a JPEG. So, for all intents and purposes for Web sizing, let's do 72. Now, there's another opportunity to sharpen your image, you want to play around with this experiment with your images. Remember, you've already sharpened them locally on the image. Then it's going to sharpen it again as part of the process. So, it's going to get it ready for wherever you're going to use it. There's no way to tell like how sharp is it going to look, there's only the setting low, standard, or high. So, when I'm using this, I will export one image is low, one is standard, one is high, so I can see sort of what it's doing, and then I'll pick the one, and I'll save that as my preset. Then you can decide whether you want to include the metadata in your exported file, and you can use one of the presets here. I'll just leave it on all metadata. So, if I save my name as copyright, it's included, and that's all that is needed for me. If you're a type of photographer that has to export proofs for a client, you can use this watermark. The last thing on the screen is going to be post-processing. So, after you export your file, you can decide to open up the folder where it was exported, that's shown in finder. If you decide to export to Photoshop file, PSD, you can have it open in your Adobe Photoshop, if you want to do some more work on it, or any other application that makes sense. Once you decide that, you're good to go, to click "Export". Now, before you click "Export", if you want to save this process as a preset for yourself, you're going to click "Add", and you're going to say something like "For Web", and you decide what folder you want it to be, you can set up your own folder. This one says, "My Presets", or whatever. User presets, so I'm going to create "For Web", boom. So, now I'm ready to export. So, I'll click "Export", it'll export. So, if this ever pops up, it means you have a file that's going to be exported as the same exact name. So, Lightroom is really cool, you can overwrite the file, say you're just exporting it because you wanted to make a quick tweak, and then export it again. You can overwrite it, you don't need both files. You can decide not to export it, which is like skip this file if you're exporting more than one. You can say skip it, and go on to the next one to export. You can cancel this process altogether, or if you want it to create a unique name, meaning it'll just add like a _one, or _two, you can just click that. So, you have options. I'm going to override it because it's the same photo, I made no tweaks. That's it, that easy. 13. Final Thoughts: So, we made it to the end. We've covered everything from game planning and thinking about what you want to get out of your images. We've talked about the edit triangle where we discussed color accuracy and technical skills with creativity, and linked that to mood and vibe and all the intangible things that really help hold the image together. We've even covered some of the more specific tools in light-room, so you can go all the way from global adjustments all the way down to those micro-specific adjustments and really effect the parts of the image that you care about the most. So, what I hope you take away from this is that you're not editing in a vacuum, you're constantly thinking about what you shot, what you want to get out of it, your game planning and strategy from beginning to end, so that you're not overdoing or over thinking what you're doing with the photo. You're just doing enough to the photo to make sure that it's artistic, to make sure that it's singing like it should, to make sure that the people that see it and the people you share it with really can enjoy it and aren't distracted by the edits that you apply to the image. So if you want to see everything I did to the image, what I have done is exported the digital negative files, so they're available for you to download. You should be able to just import them right into light-room and you can see all the steps that we went through and all the edits that I applied to the image. You can take them off, try to work with the image yourself to get the same look that I gave to them. I encourage all of you to please upload your photo, share them with the class, share them with me, I want to see your before photo and I want to see your after photo. Run me through some of your process, just don't put them up there. I want to see what were you thinking about, what was your game plan, and why are you happy with the final image. Along with those photos, if you have any questions, please feel free to post them. The more questions you ask, the more I can help you and the more questions you ask, the more other students will get to benefit from those questions. If you're looking to dive deeper into your photography learning, I have other classes on Skill Share including DSLR fundamentals and lenses, which are a great addition to your skill set. I really do appreciate you taking the class and I hope you take something great away from it.