iPhone Editing: The Complete Lightroom Mobile Masterclass | Benjamin Dizdarevic | Skillshare
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iPhone Editing: The Complete Lightroom Mobile Masterclass

teacher avatar Benjamin Dizdarevic, Filmmaker & Photographer

Watch this class and thousands more

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

Watch this class and thousands more

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

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Teaser

      1:34

    • 2.

      Disclaimer

      0:59

    • 3.

      The Other Side

      3:14

    • 4.

      Overview of Interface

      4:38

    • 5.

      Staying Organized

      13:09

    • 6.

      Correct First

      4:05

    • 7.

      Color Correction

      14:39

    • 8.

      Tone Curve Pt 1

      7:37

    • 9.

      Crop And Straighten

      4:25

    • 10.

      Healing Brush

      6:00

    • 11.

      White Balance

      9:24

    • 12.

      Vibrance and Saturation

      4:39

    • 13.

      Color Mixer

      9:52

    • 14.

      Color Grading

      7:28

    • 15.

      Tone Curve Part 2

      7:07

    • 16.

      Black and White

      5:16

    • 17.

      Effects

      8:59

    • 18.

      Masking Part 1

      7:47

    • 19.

      Masking Part 2

      6:46

    • 20.

      Blur

      3:08

    • 21.

      Detail

      11:20

    • 22.

      Full Edit Part 1

      17:29

    • 23.

      Full Edit Part 2

      14:05

    • 24.

      Full Edit Part 3

      17:47

    • 25.

      Presets

      6:19

    • 26.

      Export

      4:47

    • 27.

      Assignment

      3:05

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About This Class

Welcome to your new and exciting journey in mastering Lightroom Mobile! This course will take you through the software on your phone (or tablet) point by point so that you can master all the technical and creative features of Lightroom Mobile in one large masterclass, to level up your iPhone photography. The things you will learn include:

- Importing images and staying organized by categorizing your photos in folders and albums.

- Create a smooth workflow by learning how to tag your photos, mark them by keywords, flag them and rate them so that you can filter your photos and find them with ease many years from now. 

- Master the technicalities behind the color correction and understand important lingo like shadows, midtones & highlights. Learn how to correct your photos to make them resemble reality as much as possible.

- Learn advanced features like the tone curve, which you can use for both color correction and grading.

- Stylize your photos by mastering the color grading features such as the color mixer, tone curve, black and white color grading and color wheel respectively. 

- Understand how you can use all of these features to create your own style. 

- Create your own presets and export your photos in highest possible quality. 

I'm a big proponent of learning by doing so this course will provide you with RAW photos and JPEGS so that you can sit and edit together with me, as we go along. 

The curricula is designed to carefully teach you everything about Lightroom Mobile through practice, so that you can make sure to really implement the concepts you learn in your day to day editing after finishing the course. 

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Benjamin Dizdarevic

Filmmaker & Photographer

Teacher

Who Am I?

Hey there, my name is Ben and I'm a Bosnian-Swedish filmmaker and photographer, living and working in Stockholm. My passion has always been in the arts of the camera, whether it be photography or making movies. Besides that, I really really enjoy myself a good cup of coffee while I snuggle up and watch movies with my wife.

My Passions

This passion of mine, in the later years, extended into wanting to teach others how to create art using a camera and how to create a business out of their passion.

I'm glad you found your way over here to my page and I hope I'll be able to provide you with good value as you go on your journey!

Where To Find Me

I always enjoy connecting with like-minded people who are on a similar path with me. If... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Teaser: Lightromobile gives you a vast range of creative opportunity. Besides color correcting your images to resemble reality as much as possible. You can also twist and turn targeted colors to create any style you like. Imagine being able to make your photos resemble some of your favorite movies. Or to create your own style, which you can later on create as presets and reuse with the click of a button. Well, I'm here to tell you that you can do all of that and much more in just a few hours from now. I'll start off by teaching you how professional photographers create a smooth workflow for themselves and keep themselves organized for years to come. We will then go through all of the features that Light R mobile offers, such as color correction, presets, color grading, masking and effects, and noise production. I'm a firm believer in learning by doing so. What I'm going to do is I'm going to provide you with a bunch of raw photos and Jpegs so that regardless if you're a premium user or a free user, you'll be able to sit there and edit together with me as we go along. This course is designed for the beginner and intermediate photographer, meaning that as a beginner you will learn everything you need to learn. And if you're an intermediate, you will get the remainder of the knowledge that you need to really become an expert in Litro mobile. So if any of this has piqued your interest and you're prepared to go on this journey to really master the software and become a pro editor, enroll in this course today and let's hop right into it. 2. Disclaimer: Hey guys, a short disclaimer before we get started with the course. I edited my photos using light remobile for ipad. The layout is slightly different from the layout on light remobile for iphone or Android. Even though the layout is different, the functions and the features remain exactly the same. If you're editing using a different device, don't worry, you'll still get the full experience because the icons representing the features are identical on all devices. It's just that the placements of the icons may differ depending on the device. So if you get confused about the buttons not being in the same place on your particular screen, just follow my lead and look at the icons. They may be on the side of your screen or on the bottom, but they will be there. Feel free to pause any of the chapters as you go along if you need a minute to find the icon and then just proceed normally, good luck. 3. The Other Side: I like to look at editing as the other side of photography, in other words, a form of complementary art to the art of photography. One part of it is taking the photo, The other part of it is fixing up, changing, modifying, or enhancing that photo. Now you can go completely wild with this. You can create any styles you like. I can take a photo of the Sahara Desert and I can make it look like it's in the middle of a blizzard storm on Antarctica. And a lot of people get excited about that once they start learning about light room. And they think about all the various possibilities of the crazy things that they can do. And all of that is fine. All of that is good. You can create any style you like. You can create abstract art. You can create realism. You can create anything you like. The approach that we're going to have throughout this course is the approach of maybe not realism in it of itself, but more so the sublime effects that you can achieve with color grading and color correction. If I'm taking a photo in a warm setting, If I am, then later on to edit that photo, I'm going to make sure to complement that warm atmosphere. I'm going to add a little bit more yellows and oranges and really make it in that same style. So then when somebody takes a look at that photo, they really almost experience the atmosphere as it was in reality for me as the photographer. But one thing that's important to keep in mind that this is some of the lessons that I learned as a beginner photographer a few years back. Is that some people are opposed, entirely opposed to the idea of editing. And might criticize you just on the basis of the fact that you've edited a photo. Or you will meet people to do the opposite. And they overly edit everything and they create crazy styles and whatever. And might think that your photos look kind of boring because it's impossible to adhere to all of them. At the same time, you have to approach this course and your editing and your photography from the point of view of what it is that you want. In the end, it's all about what you want. And you will have a much better time shutting out all other kinds of voices that tell you this and that, unless it's constructive criticism, which adheres to the style that you want. But with that being said, the knowledge you're going to get here is the knowledge you're going to get here. Just because I will be editing in a certain style doesn't mean that you have to. I will be providing you those very same raw photos so that as we sit together and edit this, you can do what you want with them. You can go wild. You can move more toward the realistic side of things, anything you like. I'm just going to be teaching you all of the basics behind this and the deeper sort of understanding behind color theory. Understanding color correction, shadows, midtones, highlights, and how each and every slider affects the photo. So that you can fully master all of the sliders, the tone curves, everything that's involved in all of the features of light room. But enough about that. I think we're ready to move into the next step of the process. 4. Overview of Interface: All right, I hope you're as excited as I am to begin this journey now. We're going to start off with just going through some of the features of light remobile. We're going to be comparing the free versus paid version. And just get a bit of an overview of the interface so you know what to expect in the coming modules. If we start off, I assume you've already downloaded light remobile or have it available on your device. In my instance, I prefer to use the ipad for editing. It's the same software. It's the same app, but you can use it on the phone or on the ipad. I'm choosing to use it on the ipad because I prefer a bigger screen. Let's open up the app right here. The first thing we're being faced with are three main interfaces that all contain sub interfaces. We start off as you can see in the left bottom hand corner, we start off with device, then we move over to light room itself and then we have Community. In the device section is essentially just an overview of your albums on your phone or on your ipad. That means all the photos that you've taken or imported into your device. From this section, we decide pretty much what kind of photos we're going to be importing. We're going to go through that in the following module. Then as we import the photos, we move over to the light room section. That's when we're faced with the main interface. This is where all the magic happens. As you can see, we have a section called Room Albums, and then we have a section called My Albums. Finally, on the bottom right hand side, we have something called Community. Community will be very useful for you if you want to get inspiration from other photographers who are taking photos, editing them. And you can see the before and after. There's plenty of things you can do in the community. Let's go through some of the features. We open up an image here and we can see all of the settings that the photographer used to achieve the look on this particular photo. What you can do with this is you can first of all just look at the settings a get inspired by them. You can also click the three little dots up here and save this particular edit as a preset on your own device so you can reuse it. And you're also able to click on the little almost infinity sign up here to remix the same photo that this person took. You get access to the original file and then you can get in here and you can make the changes that you want to make or create a style that you want to create based on this photo. Now what's important to mention in all of this before we get started with everything, is that there is a free version of light remobile. And there is a paid version of light remobile called Light Remobile premium. So let's go through some of the features that are not available in the free version. The biggest difference of all in not having the paid version is that you are not able to edit DSLR, raw photos. This is a big deal, I think, not as a beginner. I don't think that you should worry about in the learning process of light room, the difference between Raw and J Pig and so on. Like you shouldn't worry about that too much because you're here to learn after all. So you don't have to have the perfect photos, but essentially with raw files, most photographers shoot in raw format. You get access to a ton more information in that photo that you take. Meaning that when you go into the editing process, you can really twist and turn and stretch the photo with exposure, midtones, highlights, and all of that stuff. To a greater extent than just using the standard format, which typically is Jpeg. Now when we have that out of the way, we're going to start talking about the beginning process. Photographers are very picky about, especially professional photographers, about how they organize their files. We're going to be going through the creation of albums, the importing process, how you can flag different photos so you can later on filter them and have a more extensive search in the thousands of photos that you're going to have over the years to find them easier. Staying organized is probably the first and fundamental, most important thing that you're going to have to learn when using the software. We're going to hop in and talk about that next. 5. Staying Organized: You will inevitably have hundreds, thousands of photos. Maybe not today, but in three years from now, definitely. And what's going to happen is three years are going to pass. You're going to look back in your light room and you're going to start looking for a particular photo you took, you know, this summer of 2023. And it's going to be impossible to find. There's no way for you to find it, because you have to navigate through all those thousands of photos. This will be very stressful, it will be annoying, and it will demotivate you to sort of even find that photo or to continue on with this. Imagine just having a, you know, when you have a really dirty room, there's clothes everywhere, there's cups everywhere, there's dishes. And you try and sit down and focus. You have a really hard time focusing if your room is not clean, right. Similarly, it doesn't just apply to light room, it applies to everything. Let's take a look at the bookshelf in the background here, for instance. Everything is properly organized because if I have a large bookshelf with a lot of books and I'm looking for a particular type of book, how am I even going to get started doing that? The solution to that has just been to organize the bookshelf in order of either category, or color, or both. And this is just so it can be not just aesthetically pleasing and satisfying to us having organized it this way, but it's also to find books in an easier manner. The same thing will apply to light remobil, the way that you organize your photos by category, by albums, by folders, by keywords, colors, All of that stuff is just going to be very helpful to you in the future. But also on the day of a shoot, let's say you have an event you're shooting or a wedding. You're shooting, you're going to be taking 345000 photos. Imagine dumping all of those in and being disorganized. That editing process will probably take you weeks as opposed to three days. You know what I mean? Staying organized is definitely the very first and most important step in all of this before even beginning editing. Now I'm going to show you how to do that in Lightroom mobile. So as you open up the app, we start off in the same section that we did the first time we opened the app, which is the device section. The device section gives you the ability to choose the various albums that you have available to you on your phone After you select the album, where the photo is that you want to be editing, you open up the album, you get presented with the photos you hold. Click it and you click on Import. After you've done that, you can move over to the light room section. Here you can see you have two different sections here. The first one in the top left corner, you can see it says light room albums. These are the albums that light room has created and organized for you in particular categories or in particular ways. First, we have all photos, meaning that every single photo that you've imported, you've edited that exists within light room are available to you in the all photo section. Then you have a separate album called My Edits. Which means that if you've ever opened up a photo and you've done a single little edit on it, it's going to be showing up on the My edits tab. Which means that if you import 1,000 photos and you edit one of those, which you think is really good and you've failed to organize it properly within light room, then you can find it much, much easier by just clicking on the My Edits tab and it's going to pop up right there. Then we have the unedited ones which are just the opposite of that. If you haven't edited the photo, you've just imported it, it's going to show up in the unedited section. Then we have LR camera photos. Light room comes with a camera app, so you can photograph using light room, which I think is a far more superior camera than any phone camera. It has far more features and settings and so on. But if you ever use the lightroom camera app, those photos that you take are automatically going to show up in the LR camera photo album. Then we have imports. These are photos that you've imported outside of light room photo is not taken by the LR camera app, but photos that you've imported from your photos album from dry from anywhere else. When you've imported them, they show up in that imports album. Then we have an AI feature here called people, or at least I think they're using AI. Essentially what that does is that it identifies the people in the frame. If you have somebody called David, a good friend of yours, maybe David, you can find David through that. And then we have the deleted section where just all the photos that you delete end up there. Then we move over to the bottom section, which is my albums. This is where all the organization is going to happen on your end. In the My Album section, what you do is you click the plus side and you can choose to either create a new album or a new folder. The difference between these two is that in an album, you create an album and you dump in photos, and now that is an album of photos. But let's say you have several albums of the same category. Let's say you've done event photography for five different companies. That's going to require five separate albums for each and every one of those shoots. How do you organize all five of those? Well, in that case you create a folder, create a folder, for instance, called event photography. Once you create that, you can upload or dump in all those five albums of the five companies that you shot for into that folder. You can categorize them. So in my instance, I have corporate portraits, I have family photos, I have fashion shouts, I have just fun photography, random photography. I have iphone, I have something called Lab. I have something for this course, Street photography and so on and so forth. So that's the first step in understanding how you organize yourself in Lightroom mobile. Now let's take a look at the photos that I have here. For the light room course, I have one called color correction, an album within a folder called color correction, and one is called color grading. Within this, we have another step in organizing ourselves, because this is when we actually take a look at the photos that we've dumped in here. And it can be thousands of photos that we somehow have to organize. How do we do that? Well, we click on a photo, like for instance, this photo that I took of Hogwarts in Universal Studios. Then you click on the Little star sign here to begin rating. Now what you can do is either on the bottom section where you see one to five stars, and then you see two flags that you can use. These two flags are essentially the flag with the check mark means that this is a photo that is called a pink. This is a photo that you plan on editing. Then you can pick it and in addition to that, you can also mark it one to five stars. You can either click the section down there or you can use a shortcut, meaning you use your two hands on the right hand side of the photo. You can drag your thumb or any finger to select either pick a photo and then you drag it down to make it have no flags in a neutral photo or X, which means the photo is rejected. That's on the right hand side of the photo. On the left hand side. We then have the stars. We drag it up and down and we choose a star rating 1-5 That's how you choose stars and flags. However, there's an extra added step to all of this, which is when you press this little looks like a price tag here. The second to last label right there as you can see there. You can choose keywords. Keywords that you write. Here's one called smoke, whatever it may be. What you do with this is that you add relevant keywords to that photo so that in a few years from now, when you're looking for a particular photo that you don't remember exactly where it was taken and what it looked like or which category of photography it was. Then later on when you filter this and I'll show you how to do that, you can simply punch in the keyword for that. If I just punch in G words, then I'm definitely just going to get the photos that I've taken of G words. In this case, one photo. Now I'm going to show you how to filter it. We go back and now we're in the color corrssion album. And let's say that I have 5,000 photos here, and I would like to filter those and find particular photos. Then you click on the little icon here in the middle here. You decide, do you want to filter by stars, by flags? Then you also have things that are built in type camera people, location, all the metadata and all of that. But you also have a section called keywords. Let's say I want to filter all the photos with say, one star. What I do then is I click on the one star right there and you can see no matching results. That's because all of the photos that I took there are all rated five. Next to the star rating system, you have the greater, equal, or smaller than icon right there, something that we learned in basic math. I guess in this case we have something that's smaller than when the arrow is pointing to the left side. We have something that's smaller or equal to one star, which is nothing. Then we have something that is equal to one star, meaning that the photos that are specifically one star are being selected, which is also nothing. Then we have the final one, which is greater than, equal to, or greater than anything that has one star or above is going to show up. And that's when we have all the five star ratings. If we want it just the equal sign, meaning you just want to take a look at the four stars. Then you click on four stars and you click on the equal sign. You only want the five stars. Then you click on five stars. That's how you do it. Selected based on star ratings. Then we have the follow up section, which means which are my picks, the check sign flag right there. That's for picks. Now keep in mind that you have now filtered in two categories. You have only photos that have five stars but that you also flagged as picked. You have two categories. Then you have the unpicked ones together with the picked. In order for you to remove the pick stars or the pick flag, you have to click on it again. Now all of a sudden we don't have any photos because there's not a single photo here that I've marked in two ways, which is five stars and also unrated, no flag that doesn't exist. But if I were to remove these stars and then click on these other sections freely, then we're only going to get photos based on that one category. Let's take a look at key words you can add on keywords. The lightrom has already decided which keywords or categorized the keywords that I've picked for all the various photos. So then I can click on hog words. And then as you can see here on the top corner here, we have three types of filters. We have the picked one, we have the keyword hog words, and we have five stars. That's why none of the other photos show up. So you can filter very, very deeply in various different categories. It's important to just remember what you've filtered. And if you just remember the five star, then just remove all the other filters so that you can find the photos with just five stars. This is how you stay organized in light, remobile. What you can do next is I am providing you with raw photos, these exact same raw photos in the resources section. You can click on that link and you can open up a Google Drive map and get access to all of these photos. We have four photos in the color correction section, four photos in the color grading section. These are all raw files. If you have the free version of Lightroom mobile, then go into that same folder and go into the subfolder called Jpeg. Then you're going to be finding these exact same photos, but they're not going to be in raw, they're going to be in Jpeg. For the people using the free version of light room, you have to download those Jpegs because you will not be able to edit the raw files. Once you do that, do the same thing as here. Open up light room, create an appropriate category folders, and once you've done that, we can finally move on to the next section. 6. Correct First: The very first step in editing a photo begins with something called color correction And then color grading. Color correction means that you fix up all the things about the photo that are a little bit technically off. So let's say you take a photo and it's slightly too dark, then you color correct by first adjusting the exposure of that photo to make it look as even as possible. Maybe some shadows are crushed, maybe some areas are too overexposed and you want to bring down that exposure. We break down the highlights or increase the mid tones. The point is to create a base before you get into the actual styling of that photo. By doing color grading, it's divided in those two sections, corrections and grading. Now, some people, especially when they first start off, become so excited about color grading or creating a style that they instantly go into the color grading section. And they start twisting colors, adding colors, removing colors, and so on. And then they realize that they have to actually do some corrections to that photo to make it look in the way it's supposed to. They do the color correction or the correcting aspect of editing a photo. Last, the problem with this, before we get into the actual process of color correction, it's important to talk about why color correction needs to be done before color grading. For instance, imagine you're building a house and you start off with building the roof. Then you build the foundation, you build the groundwork. Now all of a sudden, you have to bring that roof on top of that building to finish it off. You can do that, it's very possible. But then you would have to bring in large machines that are all going to have to carry on that roof and put it on top and maybe the measurements were off. And what happens then? Then you have to redo the roof or parts of it redo the foundation and parts of it all to make that already finished roof fit to the already finished foundation. Now, to be clear, I am not a building expert. Okay. I've never built a house. I don't know how this works. Maybe that's the way people do it. But it just sounds logical to me that if you are to build a building, or build a house, that you start from the ground up. You start with the foundation and you slowly work your way up. And that's the same way that we should approach color grading and color correction and editing a photo. The reason for this is if you make some changes, let's say you've already graded a photo, you've created a style. And then you go back to the color correction aspect and you think, well, all I have to do is just brighten it up a little or fix up the shadows. It's not a big deal, right? It is a big deal because what happens when you change when you start pulling on those sliders? It will actually, some parts of it will actually affect the colors in the photo. So let's say for instance, you add a ton of contrast after the fact. When you drag the contrast slider, you will introduce more saturation. So you will introduce more intensity in colors. And then all of a sudden the gray that you did doesn't look good any, or it looks altered. Maybe it's not the way you want it to be. Or for instance, if you've shot it under exposed, then you have a dark sky and you want to brighten that up. Then the more you pull on that exposure slider, the more you brighten up the sky, the more you lose color in the sky. The blue that you originally had in the sky that you've graded for now becomes less intense and washed out. So the choices that you make in the color correction aspect will inevitably affect the coloring of the image of the sliders, some of the features, some of the tools, not all of them. But that's why if we color correct first, we will start off with the best possible foundation before we actually start messing with the colors and creating a style. Now, with that out of the way, let's hop in and let's start color correcting our first photo. 7. Color Correction: Starting out from the base point, right here we have the same album, same folder, we've got light room course, and we got color correction album respectively. We're going to hop in and just start editing the first photo here. This photo has already been color corrected. As you can see from the bottoms. Here we have a clear view of the trees below the Hogwarts Castle. We have the Hogwarts Castle itself, and we also have the sky that isn't overblown. But if we take a look at the original version where we started, you can press the backward clock thing to revert back to any edit that you've done. That's in the very bottom here. You can list through all the different edits that have been done, all the way down to the original. Here's the after photo, and here was the starting point that we began with. This was straight from camera. This means that when we take a look at this photo, we can see that the shadows here are fairly darker. There's still areas here that could be lit up or that could be viewed that we don't have access to right now. Sometimes this is because this photo, when I took this photo, I took it relatively balanced in terms of exposure. But a lot of the times when you take photos, you can end up with a photo that looks like this. You have overblown highlights, You could have crushed shadows, and the photo doesn't look good. We will make mistakes as we take photos. That's important to know. The first thing that we do when we take a look at this is we just see what we have to work with by pressing on this top top section right here. That's the edit section. Let's start at the very top. We have the edit section where it says auto, which essentially just means Litro Mobile will do the adjustments for you and it's going to light it up like this. Typically, I don't prefer using the auto function at all because I'm anyway going to end up doing a lot of changes to it. I think this might be a little too overblown. I don't really like this. I'm just going to reset. And by the way, if you want to reset something, say you're using a slider, all you have to do is double tap on the slide or on the circle itself, and it's going to revert back to zero. This is where we started, and now we're going to start working on the image itself. There's several ways of doing this. First, we have the obvious sliders that we see right here, exposure, contrast highlights, and so on. Then we also have this little curve icon right here which opens up the curve section. And you can also color correct using that. This is more of an advanced feature. I will touch upon this a little bit later. Let's start off with just the sliders and go through what all of them do for exposure. What's important to know about exposure, exposure slider, is that it works in the same way as when you take a photo and you expose using ISO. If you go up a notch here with the exposure slider, we can see the numbers corresponding right there on the side. What this essentially means is that right now if we go up all the way to one, we have now exposed for one stop over. It will be as if you were taking the photo in real life and exposing one stop over. Then we have two stops, three stops, and so on until the image breaks. The exposure slider works in such a way that it will expose the image as taken from the entirety of the image. It will take all of the areas, the shadows, midtones, and highlights, and expose them at the same time. This could be good if you need an overall adjustment to the brightness of the image. But what's good to keep in mind is that sometimes if you have overblown highlights, for instance, and only highlights, and then you want to expose the entire image, those highlights are going to be further exposed. Look at this. Now we want to expose for the castle, right? We have now exposed for the castle, but we have completely destroyed our sky. That's because the exposure slider takes all of it and just brightens it. The exposure slider is just usually used as a slight little bump in brightness. In this case, we could maybe go a little bit up, just slightly 0.20 or so, but in color correction, we have to start looking for the exact areas that we want to expose for. As we can see on this image, the sky is relatively okay, the castle is a bit too dark. And especially the greenery down here, which is very dark, touching all the way upon black where information is lost. This is what we have to work on to even out and balance the image. We have now slightly exposed the image. What we can then do is up the contrast lighter or down with the contrast lighter, depending on what we want to achieve with this, with the contrast lighter, if you increase it too much, then the contrast between the highlights and the shadows is so strong that the image just looks very fabricated, very harsh. And what it also does is that it introduces, you can't really maybe see it right now in this image, but if you take a close look at the sky right here, as you increase the contrast, more color is being introduced. In other words, it's being saturated. So if we take down the contrast, you can see the sky is almost kind of gray. And we pull it all the way to the right. Now you can really see the blues in the sky. This is good to keep in mind because sometimes you might not want more colors being introduced. Just remember that contrast and saturation are related to each other. They're not the same function, but they do affect each other in one way or another. I'm going to leave the contrast lighter for now, considering I see that to be more of a stylistic part of color correction. Instead, I just want to be working on the balancing of the image, which leads us to the next section, which is highlights. Now, an image, when you take a photo, a photograph is comprised of three main areas. We have shadows, we have midtones, and we have highlights. The highlights are the brighter parts of the image that are, say, up here with the sky. We have mid tones, which are neither too dark or too bright, which could be areas right here around the castle. That could be the mid toes. And then we have shadows which are way more in the shade. That's of course, the areas down here by the forest. Those are, generally speaking, the three main areas of exposure in photography. Then in addition to that, we have the whites and the blacks. Now the whites are the peak white areas of the photo, the absolute brightest parts. It's not the same as highlights with highlights as you can see here, we're touching the entire sky because all of that is part of the highlights. We're dragging the slider to the right and you can see the entire sky is being affected, But with the whites, it specifically targets the absolute peak whitest parts. The same thing will apply to the blacks, which, you guessed it, it's like shadows, but it's the blackest part. If these are the shadows in the forest, the blacks are going to be here, the absolute blackest point. What we can do here is we can increase the blacks. All the absolute darkest areas are going to be lit up. Or we can darken them and destroy the image. But that's what the blacks does, that's what the whites does. But it's good to know and keep in mind, because this will be related to the tone curve as we start reading the tone curve, that an image is comprised of shadows, midtones, highlights, and those are the areas right here when you start color correcting, the first thing you have to do is take a look at the photo and decide which areas do I want to target. In this case, we have say shadows. So we're going to hemp up the shadows a little bit to increase them so we can reveal more information. Down here as you can see like, So then we have the Blacks that we could play around with if we don't want to be losing the information as you see right here on this. Is this somebody's head or is it a haystack? I don't know which. You can brighten up as well so you can get a little bit more information. This is the before and here's the after. What we've done right now is that we've increased the darker parts of the image. Now let's start working a little bit more on the highlights. I think the sky is a bit too bright, not in terms of exposure. I think the exposure is fine and we should have used that slider. But as you expose, you're also taking away a lot of information from the sky. What we want to do is we want to bring back some of that information so we can see the clouds more clearly. And what we can do then is we can target them by using the high light slider. If I drag down the highlights, you can see that more of the sky is being introduced. We can see more detail of the sky itself as opposed to if we go the other way, you can't even see the sky. It's just a white, shiny blob. But if we go down, we are revealing more of that sky. Then what we can do to balance this is that we can start exposing a little bit more and then bringing down the highlights a little bit more so we don't darken the image too much. But right now now we can see the sky clearly. Take a look at the before and after. Now we have clear view of the Hogwarts Castle, the sky and the forest area, the shadows and the blacks. This is now a point where we would reach, where we think. All right, let's start using a little bit more of that creative aspect of color correction. Now is the time that I would personally go back to contrast and maybe add a little bit of contrast. Because when you balance an image out too much, it becomes a little bit flat and we want the image to pop. After all, I will be pulling the contrast lighter, just ever so slightly, maybe, plus ten, to add a little bit more of that pop. There we go. This is now in terms of color, correcting an image and balancing it. We will also be talking about the tone curve, but we're going to be doing that separately. There's one section here, I forgot, which is right under Edit at the very top. We also have Profile. These are built in lots or presets that Adobe has. And it will have the Adobe color function installed and used for every photo. But you could change this according to your preferences, but it will affect the photo. We have Adobe color, we have monochrome. If we want to go for a black and white image, we have something called landscape, which is more applicable to landscape kind of photos, which I guess this could be it. Let's see the difference between landscape and color. Here's color, here's landscape color. Landscape, we can see it does some auto adjustments in the darker areas. It adds a little bit of vibrancy. It seems the sky is a bit more blue. That's pretty much the difference maker. I like this profile and I might even use it. We also have portrait, we have standard, which is more of a flat profile if you want full control of every single color that you adjust here. The saturation, the vibrance, and so on. That maybe go for standard. We have vivid, which is going to introduce more colors. We have something called artistic. I typically don't use most of these settings. I either stick to color or standard. A lot of the times I go for standard because I like to introduce and intensify the colors myself. I'm going to go for standard. But those, they're automatically put in your favorites. Those are the profiles. And then you can go down and take a look at all of these. They are more creative, artistic, black and white profiles. But again, it's up to you if you want to play around with those. I prefer to just do everything myself. Let's go for standard. Now we have reached a point where the photo looks okay, it's balanced, it's fine. Maybe we can add a little bit more contrast. What's good to know is that when you edit a photo, in whichever section, whether it's the color correction or color grading, always revisit the sliders because you will make one change and then you will make a second change which might affect how you want the first change, you will be jumping up and down from all of these sliders. Another tip is instead of not just going back to all the sliders, but when you use them, don't just simply set it to a number that you've imagined in your head. If you say, for instance, play around with highlights. As you can see when I'm moving that slider, I'm not just going straight down to 81, but I'm playing, I'm going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And I always like to go too far and then start pulling back. That's probably the most important piece of advice that I can give you. Go too far, pull back, because our eyes may be good, but they're not that good. And we won't be able to see the full extent, the full context of a photo unless we start pulling it left or right, left or right. We might be satisfied with it at first glance, but then we finish the edit and we take a look at the photo the day after, and we see a lot of changes we want to make. This could happen. I'd like to just pull the slider back and forth, back and forth, until I find a certain point that I'm happy with. In this case, I think the -80 was a good point for me. Now, the photo has been color corrected using the sliders. Next up, we're going to talk about the tone curve and how you can use the tone curve to achieve the same things and the differences between what a tone curve is and using the sliders. 8. Tone Curve Pt 1: Okay, so what we have next is the so called tone curve. The tone curve is used for both color grading and color correction. And it can be used instead of the sliders that we've used right now to create this photo, or it can be used in combination with the sliders. It depends on what you want to achieve. Now let's take a look at the tone curve itself by clicking on it. Now, this could look extremely confusing, especially for beginners. The tone curve is extremely scary because as you start pulling on the slider, you see that changes are being made to the photo in various ways, but you might not know why or what it means. Because it looks like a graph reminds you of math class. All of a sudden, it's important to understand how to read the tone curve. The tone curve has two main points. One is at the bottom right here and one is at the top right here. Those two points are the two farthest points that we call the blacks and the whites. Now the tone curve should always be read from left side to right side. It's divided up into sections. You can see those little blocks right there, those little squares that are part of the graph. It's a good way to sort of illustrate all of this, because on the left side, let's say the first block, the entire sort of first section with the four squares going all the way down to the black point. We have the blacks and the shadows. So if I were to drag the slider by going to the right, we can see that we're darkening the sort of black areas of the photo. And if I were to do the opposite and go up, we are brightening those blackest parts of the image. But you can see that the sky is not being affected. That's because these are just the blacks and the shadows. So moving on to the next block, we start moving from shadows into mid tones and that's the area. Let me create a point right here. That's these two general areas that I'm marking right now. Those areas will affect the shadows and the mid tones. So let's begin by pulling, just to illustrate on the second point that I've made there. I'm pulling it down to make the shadows darker, or I'm pulling it up to make the shadows brighter. Now what happens is you can notice that as you're pulling on a certain point, other areas of the tone curve are being affected as well. This is why we create these so called points. We create the points so that we can lock the curve in place and only affect specific areas of that photo. Because if we're not using any points at all, and now I want to affect the blacks and the shadows and whatever. You can see that the entire tone curve is being affected by this. Even the highlights, the whites, everything is being affected at the same time. But let's say I only want to affect the blacks, the absolute blackest parts. Then I'll create a point, say right here on the shadows. And then I'll start pulling up the slider on the very bottom to affect the blacks. Only if I see that some parts of the shadows are being affected more than I would like, then I would create a point even lower down so that only the absolute blackest parts will be affected In order to lock up the entirety of the tone curve so the top part doesn't get affected as well. We just create more points like so then you can see that the top part of the tone curve is not being affected now at all. Only the area, pretty much that I'm touching right now, that's why we create points. As a conclusion to this, we have the brighter parts of the image or the darker parts of the image are being affected by the bottom part of the tone curve. And the brighter up, if you pull to the right, it's darker. If you go up, it's brighter. We've covered the blacks, we've covered the shadows. Let's start playing around with the mid tones as well. That's the middle point right here. If I pull that up, you can see that. Let's first create a point up here so we don't affect the highlights as well. Now we're just touching the midtone areas. If you take a look at the castle itself, when I'm moving the slider up and down, you can see the castle is becoming clearer. It has a little bit more of clarity to it. That's because those are the midtones and those are the areas we're affecting. If I pull it down, we're losing that contrast to feel to the castle. The rest is fine. You can see the trees are not being affected as much, the blacks are not being affected. It's just the mid tones, that's how we touch those midtones. And then finally, we have highlights and whites, similarly to the bottom part of the tone curve, The first two points, the first one is blacks, the other one is shadows. Here we have the last two points, which is the first point up here is going to be the highlights, then it's going to be the whites at the very top. If we want to affect the highlights, then we start affecting, or start pulling on the second to last pointer up here. If I want to bring down the highlights, I do so by pulling on that slider right down toward the darks. And if I want to brighten it, I move it up toward the highlights or toward the brighter areas to brighten it up. Finally, we have the whites. If I pull down on the whites, only the absolute brightest parts of the image are going to be affected. And we can see that we're pretty much breaking the image by going all the way down and taking down the whites. And then we can increase them even more, and you can see very clearly where the white areas are. This looks almost magical. It fits the theme here of hog words and Harry Potter and so on. But this is just, so you can see the strong effects of the tone curve. That's how you use it in terms of color correction. Then we can see on the right side here, we have selected light, but we also have red channel, green channel, blue channel. And we're going to talk about those during the color grading section. We're not going to talk about that now. Instead, we're just going to focus on this. If you feel a little bit insecure about using the curve itself, creating your own points, then you can press on this icon right here to open up an alternate form of tone curve where everything is being affected evenly. You don't have to create any points. Let's say I'm grabbing the shadows and I'm pulling them up. You can see that there's a even curve being created. I'm not creating any points, I'm just pulling on it. And if I pull on the mid tones, you can see everything is being evenly touched and the highlights like so. And we're creating sort of a style based on that. You can either use that for simplicity's sake, or you can create your own points by using the original tone curve right here when we start color correcting the rest of the photos. I will then be utilizing and using the tone curve, the sliders and everything so you can see this more in practice, but for now all you have to know is that it's red from left to right. We have from blacks all the way to whites, and in between we have those shadows, mid tones and highlights. And the curve affects that according to where you create points and where you pull on the curve. Now let's move on to some of the other features of light room before we go back to color correcting and color grading. In this case, specifically, the healing brush. 9. Crop And Straighten: I want to cover the crop and straighten tool first. The first thing we want to look at is the aspect ratio. Now the aspect ratio will affect how the photo is being viewed on each and every screen. There's a different aspect ratio used for social media. You've heard of the perhaps nine by 16 ratio, or if you're watching like horizontal video or photos, then you have 16 by nine, which is the opposite of that. So the first thing we're going to look at is the aspect ratio function. Now the original was shot in three by two. Three by two is pretty much the standard for photographers. That's typically how we take photos. If we have the three by two and we start pulling on the image, we can see that all of the corners of the image are being in relation to that three by two aspect ratio. If we want to create our own, we can unlock it by using this little lock icon right there, and then we can create our own custom aspect ratio. If I pull a corner here, we can see that it's not aligning with the three by two. We're creating our own look, how wide or narrow we can go with the image. We can create anything that we like if we want to make any minor adjustments but we don't want to affect the entire photo, Then we have all the other ones, one by one, two by one, and so on. The basic ones are going to be three by two, and it's going to be either 16 by nine if you're doing a horizontal image. Or it's going to be nine by 16, which is going to be the opposite of that. If we click on the button next to the lock, then we create a nine by 16. Now this would be perfect for say, Tiktok or other social media where you are viewing images on your phone. So those are pretty much the standard aspect ratio. So if you want to change something for social media, then you can use the nine by 16 or the 16 by nine. And you can also zoom in and out of the image so you can fit into that frame. Besides that, we can also click on the rotate and flip image. So we can rotate it like this any direction we want. We can flip it like so to create a mirror effect on it. Or we can do it up and down like so now comes to the actual straightening of the image. Now I want to first use the entirety of the image. So I'm going to go for original. Go back to the starting point, then we have the straightening tool. With the straightening tool, you can either click on the straightening button right there to make Adobe licromobile do the straightening for you. It's going to straighten the image for you. What it does is that it analyzes the image and sees which areas need to be aligned horizontally, perfectly to the best of its ability. But what you can also do is you have the little angle function down here, which means that you can straighten the image in whichever way you want, just by pulling on the slider down here. We are now changing the sort of perspective of the image, when that is used is when the software itself hasn't been able to straighten the image on its own. And you notice that you want to make a change. Or if you want to make a creative change, like for instance in this photo, we can take a look at the people and we can straighten the photo according to the people. Or if we look at the framing around it, the window of the subway, we can choose to straighten according to that which the software will not do on its own. We have to do that then we can just start pulling on this and adjusting it according to that frame if we would like that. And if we prefer that, it all depends on what you want to achieve. Either you want the software to have an automatic control over the straightening by deciding itself where the horizon is and how it should even it out. Or you can use the manual feature of straightening to do it yourself to your liking. And you can choose to do the crop and straightening in whichever phase of the editing that you like. I personally actually prefer to first before I even color correct. I prefer to go in and crop and straighten. So I begin with a composition that I'm satisfied with and then I start color correcting, But you can do it in whichever order you like. I'm just going down the line of the navigation to take it point by point so it's easier for you to digest. But typically, I personally would start with this. Now with that out of the way, let's go into the healing brush and talk about what that does. 10. Healing Brush: The healing brush, you can find right under that crop and straightened section, which looks like a patch right there. That's called a healing brush. With the healing brush, you can achieve various things. The point is to mark a point or several points in the image that you're dissatisfied with and you would either like to remove or clone. You can choose the different features here by clicking on the heal button and you can see that either you can remove, you can heal, or you can clone. Removing and healing are two different sides of the same coin. Essentially, what you do with the healing is that if we zoom in right now and let's say we find a point that we want to remove from the photo. Let's say this like white area right here. I want that removed. Maybe it's a bit distracting. I don't know. The first thing we do is we pick the brush size. Let's start with the very bottom. So we start with the remove. This is pretty much like Photoshops Content aware removal tool. What it does is that the software will analyze that part, which you mark, and it will look at the whole of the image and try to recreate something in its place in order to replace that. If we create a brush that's approximately the size of that thing and then we simply click on that point. What it's going to do is it's going to attempt to remove it like so. As we can see right now, it created a very good result. That doesn't always happen. Sometimes when you remove something, let's remove part of this pillar. For instance, you can see that the image starts breaking a little bit and the results aren't going to be perfect. Let's bring this back. The second way that you can remove something is by choosing which part of the image, that area will be replaced with you pretty, you're healing that part. So let's say that we have the same brush size and we want to remove this white area right here. When we click on it, we are given an option. In order for you to view that option, you have to click on the refined section right here. And now you can see clearly which area the photo has chosen or the software has chosen to replace that with. Now it has chosen the corner of a window, which doesn't really suit our image. What we want is more of that dark area so it fits with the overall sort of atmosphere. So we can then drag this along and you can see that it just copies a different part of the image onto that. Now we're manually content removing This is in case the automatic function doesn't work, then you can use this instead. What we can do is then we can move to one of those darker areas and we align it. Or we can use the same area right here. And we align it with the image so that pixel wise, it looks the same. Now we have successfully manually healed or removed a part of the image. Now we can see that both those areas which used to be bright, now we're just dark. That's how you heal. Where you can then also do as. The final step is that you can choose to clone something, which is the opposite of healing or removal. Which is essentially just you pick an area of the photo that you want something more of instead of removing, You're adding in this case, let's say we're looking at those windows right here of the Hogwarts Castle. Let's say I feel the image feels a little bit empty and I want to add more windows. What do I do? Well, I pick the area that I want. I'll select a window right here, and then oh, sorry, it's the opposite. I pick an empty area that I choose to fill in with this feature. Then I choose this window, for instance, and I add another window, and I choose another area next to it, and I add another window and so on. It's not going to be perfect results right now, but this is just to show you that that's what it looks like. Now we're adding windows or areas to a certain photo by literally just cloning them. Let's say we want another one here. We add another window. You can add as many as you want. You can just go wild and pick and choose any windows, any areas, whatever. Now, this looks really off, but that was the point. You can even try and make it with bigger things, but it's not always going to generate good results. Let's say for instance, I want to copy, I want this and I want to copy that tower right there. Now we have two of those towers, but as you can see, the clouds are not entirely perfect. You can see the area right there. It looks computer generated. It's not always going to generate good results. And you always have to refine it and look for better options. But this is where you can achieve with the healing brush. Another good way as an extra tip is if you're photographing portraits of people. Then this healing brush will be perfect for removing small little imperfections such as pimples on the face. This is instead of you having to open up Photoshop and work there. Light room offers a great variety of AI generated features that you can use for some very basic too advanced photo editing. Without having to incorporate as much Photoshops, you don't have to learn a second software unless you want to do some really advanced editing. Now, before we move on to the other effects and features that light Room offers, I think that we should go back to the original edit section and take a look at the entire process of color grading first. Because I believe that those other features are going to be in addition to that already sort of created graded style. So let's go back, and now finally, talk about color grading and how you can use that to create your own style. 11. White Balance: Now some people, some photographers, prefer to do the white balancing during the color correction segment. Others like to do it during the color grading. For me, it varies. Sometimes I do it as I'm color correcting, other times I wait for it until I start grading. And I do it as the last process of right after color correction. But the way that you access it is that you go to the edits panel. Up there right at the beginning in the light panel, we have the color correction that we've done previously. Then we move over down to the color section. Now W B, as you see right there, stands for White Balance. Let's talk a little bit about White balance. What white balance really means. White balance is a neutral state of color. Which means that the best way to look at it is to look at the whites in the image. If you take a photo of something, you might have noticed that sometimes the image turns out to be very orange or very blue. This is because the white balance is off. And that's why we get to take a look at the whites right here in the photo and see what we're working with. We have the white shirts, we have the white signs which already look fairly white balance. It looks like regular daylight, but we're going to be playing around with this anyway so I can show you how to do it in this image. It's going to be fairly easy because we have a lot of white subjects to look at. We have white signs, we have white shirts, we have white cars, buildings, and so on. So it's very easy to take a look at the white balance if you don't have anything white in the image. What you can do when you take a photo of an image is that you look for that white in the image and take a photo of that first under the same lighting conditions. And then shoot your subject or whatever so that you can then use the drop tool right here. If you click on the drop tool, you're basically telling the software which part of the image it should identify as white. So if we select the white on this guy's shirt, for instance, it's going to decide and set the white balance according to that. If we move it over to something else, you can see that the white balance is changing drastically. Because it's trying to turn the gray in this photo into white. And we don't want that, we want the white to look as white. Now let's say you don't have anything white in the image. Well then you have to play it around according to how you see the image. All the colors should look naturally as is, because everything will change once you set the white balance wrong. Let's say the white balance was set like this. You can see that the image is a little too blue. And now let's pretend we don't have anything white to play off of. Then we have to set the white balance according to that. Let's say the image was like this, and we want to white balance this. What you can do is, like I said, either use the drop tool for something white or use some of the presets. Here we have B and right next to it it says as shot. Which means that the white balance right now is according to how it was shot. Then we can do auto white balance for the software to figure it out itself, or we can set it to certain presets or standards daylight. In this case, it was daylight. So I think this works fairly well. If you shot under cloudy conditions, you would choose cloudy. But you can see in this case, that wasn't the case. Now the image is turning a bit more warm then we have shade and it's going to be even warmer, then we have tungsten. We definitely don't have any tungsten lights here. If we do select tungsten, we're going to get a very blue image fluorescent. We've got the same flash, we haven't used flash, but it's going to be the same, the results will be off. You can either choose one of the presets if you know for a fact under which conditions you've shot at. But these presets are, of course, a shortcut and we don't work in shortcuts. Here I'm going to show you how to do this without any use of shortcuts. Let's first set the white balance completely off like we did right here. Now the image is blue, which is not supposed to be. You've got to select this checkmark right here to set it. This is not white. You look at the white shirts, we see that they're blue. We look at everything. The overall scale of this is toward the blue side. What we can do in terms of that is just look at the photo and think we already notice that it's a bit too blue. What do we do? We use the temperature slider to start pulling it more toward the warm side. When you pull to the right, you're going in the warmer direction. Where you're pulling it to the left, you're going in even bluer direction. So we started off somewhere around here. So then what we got to do is just eyeball it and start moving it around. We have the temperature slider, and we move it, and we move it until we sort of feel, like I said, now we're pretending there are no whites, so I'm not even looking at the whites. We're just moving it until we're satisfied that the image doesn't look too warm or too cold. But somewhere right in between, let's say it's somewhere around here now, it's not too warm or too cold, we can actually pull it down a little bit more like so. The second part of white balancing is that you look at the overall tint of an image. What is tint? Tint is something that pulls in either the side of magenta or green. Now, whites tint exist. The reason why is because every camera manufacturer, for instance Sony or Cannon or whatever, in the way that the camera is manufactured, in the way that it's created. When you take a photo, it naturally pulls more either toward the magentas or the greens. Some camera manufacturers, when you take photos, look slightly more green. And then you take the exact same photo with a different brand and you might get a little bit more magenta. That's also something that you have to eyeball and you have to take a real good look at the image. What can really help here in this instance is that you pull in the slider of the tint to see it more clearly. In which direction it's pulling. Right now it's on plus six magenta. Let's say I'm moving it more toward the green. Then when you do that, it's easier to see what tint the photo had just by pulling on the slider up and down, you can see, oh, now it's a bit too green. And then you move more toward the magenta and you go, well now it's too magenta, usually just go back and forth, back and forth until you end up where it's neither too green or too magenta. But it's balanced right in between. That's how you use the white balance tool. In light room, you either have, like I said, something white in the image that you can base it off of. In this case, we have a white shirt. White balancing would be very simple. We pick the eye dropper, we move it to the white shirt, and we're going to get a fairly good result. The eye dropper is not always perfect. Right now, I was more satisfied with the way that I manually white balanced this as opposed to the way that the eye dropper did because I ended up at 5,450 Kelvin. Now we have 5,850 which is far more than originally the way that we balanced it manually. So it's not going to be perfect. So you can try out by moving it to different white areas in the image and see if it makes a difference. Now we're still at 5850, but we see that the image has been more evened out in terms of tint. The other one I felt was a bit too green. Let's move it to a different sign and see if it makes a difference. It seems to be pretty consistent in liking this to be at 5,850 Kelvin, which is fine. I personally don't see this as being 5850. I prefer it to be the way that I did it. So I'm going to move it down just ever so slightly to say five, five, somewhere around here. I think this is just enough. I think the other one was a bit too warm with the tinting. Like I said, you have to eyeball it. Sometimes it's more obvious when you look at image and you can see that it's really pulling toward the greens or really pulling toward the magentas. And the point is just to balance those out to the best of your ability. And it's going to depend on the atmosphere that you're shooting in. And it's going to definitely depend on the camera manufacturer. So that's why before color grading, that's why it's important to first balance out the image in terms of even playing field like we did with the color correction, so that we can start adding a style. Because we don't want to grade a photo when it's already looking like this. We don't want to go into the grading panel and start messing with colors when the base of it already looks off. Right? We want to start off from a neutral point so that we can selectively choose colors from the color mixer and the color grading panel to create a style. So let's take this back to where it was around five. Five, now we have a balanced image in terms of temperature and in terms of tint. And we can move on to the next section, which will be saturation and vibrance. 12. Vibrance and Saturation: Now probably at some point you've used either saturation or vibrance. You already know that if you pull the saturation slider, you intensify the colors. Then if you move all the way to the left, you end up with a black and white image. But the key question here now is what is the difference between saturation and vibrance? Because as you can see, if I move the vibrant slider, we're also intensifying the colors, but it looks a little bit different. Now, what is the difference between saturation and vibrance? Saturation. Let's begin with that, because that's the easiest one to work with. Saturation is going to take every single color in the entirety of the image, and it's going to evenly intensify them or remove them and desaturate them. It looks at all of the colors in the image and evenly intensifies them. But sometimes when you take a photo of something, some of the colors might be more intense, the others might not be as much. If you want to intensify those slightly desaturated colors as they are, when you take the photo and you drag that saturation slider, what's going to happen is it's going to saturate those colors that were desaturated, but it's also going to saturate the colors that were already heavily saturated. There will be an imbalance between those two colors. And the imbalance will be much more clear because you're saturating something that's already saturated. So the saturation function might not be good for that purpose. This is where the vibrancy slider comes into play. Instead of doing what saturation does by looking at all the colors in the photo and intensifying them equally. What vibrancy does is that it leaves the already very saturated colors in the image alone. And it only intensifies the ones that are slightly desaturated. You can see this visually. Let's pull up the saturation slider, and you see that every color in the image is being intensified. Now let's just pull up the vibrancy slider, and we can see that only the sky and some parts of the blue in the image are being intensified. But you can see that the reds are barely touched, the oranges are barely touched. Some of the greens here are barely touched. That's because those areas are already saturated enough that the vibrancy slider will not touch those colors. That's why the vibrancy slider is very, very good to use in combination with the saturation slider. Or by itself, maybe you just want to add a little bit of vibrancy to make those blues pop. Then you can add just vibrancy. But if we did the same and increase this, the saturation slider, then we see that even the reds are being affected when they already were saturated. Which will just make the image look a little bit too intense like this. That's the difference between saturation and vibrance. Now what I prefer to do is I like to, as a beginning point, to always take down a little bit of saturation overall. Let's bring it down to say, minus ten. I'm specifically looking at the colors that are overly saturated. I don't want the reds to be so intense. I take it down to say, minus ten -13 And then I will counter that by bringing up the vibrancy slider so that the desaturated colors will match the intensity of the now desaturated red colors. Then I drag the slider of the vibrancy to the right. And now we see that in terms of intensity, in terms of saturation, the blues look very even to the reds and to the greens and to everything else. In terms of saturation, I always drag down a little bit of that saturation and then increase the vibrancy so that I find a good point. You don't have to do it like this, You can just add vibrancy or you can remove saturation, do whatever you like. But now I'm just talking about balancing out the image in terms of color and intensity. We did that first with the white balance slider, then I go on and do it with the saturation and vibrancy. When this is done, right now, I'm satisfied with the image the way that it looks. Now we can finally go in and start grading and picking specific colors in the image that we either want to alter, saturate, or add new colors to. 13. Color Mixer: We're now moving into a feature called the color mixer, or the color mix section. In light room, what color mix is doing is that it has the channels of all the colors that are in this image. And you can choose based on targeted colors. You can see you can choose the reds, the oranges, yellows, greens, and so on and so forth to individually alter only those colors. This is a very powerful tool because essentially what it does is you can either choose to change the hue of certain colors. That if we, for instance, pick the reds here, and we change up the hue toward the right side, we're going to see that those reds are turning orange. Or if we drag them in the opposite direction, they slowly go more toward the magentas and the purples. This is to change up the hue of only the color red. And then we can change up the saturation of only the color red. So we can remove the saturation of just the red color. Or we can intensify just the red color. If some areas of the photo that have the reds is dark and we want to brighten it up. Then we go down to the Luminant slider. And we drag that either to the right, as you can see, the reds are only being affected now by this luminant slider or to the right to darken them. That's how the color mixer is divided up. We have the color channels, and then we have hue saturation and luminus. Now the question is, what do we do with all this information? I purposely picked this photo that I took in Tokyo because it has a lot of colors to work with. So that we can really demonstrate this powerful tool, which is the color mixer. Let's say that we want to create a particular style in this photo. And the style being, we want very complimentary colors to all of this. Because if you take a look at this photo, right, we have reds, we have yellows, we have greens, we have oranges, we have blues, we have some purple, some legentas. We have so many different colors. I think all the channels here are being touched like with the amount of colors that we have here, that could be a bit overwhelming. Let's say we want to have a more clean look where everything has either complementary or the same colors. Let's start by doing that. Let's start with the red channel. Let's say I don't want anything in this frame to be red. Let's say I want it to be like this cafe, Cafe Miama. I want everything to be orange instead. Let's take the reds right there and switch up the hues so that it matches with the oranges of that cafe Miama sign. Now we have less colors to look at. We've deleted or altered a color to make it match with everything else. Now that that's done, we can move over to the oranges and see if we can change up the oranges to make it match even more. Maybe we got to change up this sign slightly more to make it match with the rest of the reds. Like now they look more like it. Let's go over to the yellows. That should probably be the Mcdonalds sign up here. If we drag to the right, we're introducing greens, and to the left we're introducing oranges. And we want those yellows to match the oranges that we have as well. That should be around this area, may be hue -40 or so that even the yellows look exactly as yellowish mustard, yellowish orange that we have in the rest of it. Then let's take a look at the greens. What can we do with the greens? What happens? We pulled to the right, we get more emerald looking aqua greens. And if we move to the left, now we're introducing a little bit more orange and warmer hue to the greens. What can we do with that? Well, either we can try and make it match. If it can't really match because it is still green, either we accept that it's green and we want the greens in the image, or we can choose to completely desaturate the greens and remove them from the game entirely. We only work right now with yellow, mustard, oranges and blues. We have also a bit of magentas, but we're going to get to that in the end. Then let's move to this Aquas. What happens if we change up the hue of those? The only thing being affected is the sign up here. That's what's being affected. Either we can make it match with the blues or we can introduce a new color. But that's not really what we want here. We want to play the elimination game. We're going to move it all the way to the right, so that that sign matches the sign right under. If it doesn't match exactly, well, that's when we move on to the blue channel. In the blue channel, we can do the same, we pull the hue so that it matches a little bit more with that color. Now I can see that the blues on that Kraft cheese Market sign wasn't really identified as complete blues. Instead we're just affecting the sky and the sign next to it. But let's see what we can make happen. If we move to the right, we get purples. And if we move here, we get the aqua tilish colors. What do we want? That's the question. If we move, well, let's make it more deep blue. I like the idea of having deep blues. Or even perhaps we can create a bit of a beach feel. Although this is not a beach. We could have created a beach field by moving more toward the teals and having teal and orange, but I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm just going to go a little bit more at plus ten or 11 plus maybe around eight. In blues we have deeper blues and then the warm tones. Now the question is, what do we do with the magentas and the purples or the pinks? One thing to keep in mind is that whenever you change the hue of a specific channel, you're going to change all the colors that are of that color in the frame. What does that mean? If you change the oranges too far or too much, the skin tones of your subjects, if you have any clear skin tones, is going to be altered as well. In this case, everybody has their back turned. This guy has a mask on. But you can see a little bit on his ear that it's not a completely natural looking skin tone. So if you're going to play around with the hue slider, just be mindful of the fact that you will affect the skin tones as well when you alter the channels. Orange primarily, but a little bit of reds, a little bit of yellows, and sometimes parts of magenta and pinks because we could have some magentas and pinks in the undertones of our skin. So just be very careful with that. When editing, always make sure to zoom in and check out that you haven't really destroyed a part of an image. But looking at this image, honestly, I don't feel like I want to use magentas in purples at all. Especially because I don't see any skin tones here that are going to be too affected. So I can freely play around with that. So with the magentas, I'm just going to drag it all the way down. And with the pinks, I'm going to drag them all the way down. So that then we have some sort of black and white bag going on right here instead of a off magenta and pink bag that I'm not really interested in seeing in the frame. What I'm also noticing right now, because now we've reached the end and we're taking a good look at the photo to see what we've affected. Let's take a look at the before and after. Here we had all different kinds of colors and now we've created a complimentary style. Now, I don't quite like the way that this family mark sign was affected when I removed the greens. I might reintroduce some greens like so I don't want them entirely gone because I think it looks off. Maybe I'm just going to push them more toward the warmer tones. Now that looks bad as well. Instead, let's move it more toward the tealish tones so that at least we have some look which matches with the blues in the image. We can do that. Instead, we brought back the greens. Now, looking at this overall, I'm satisfied with it in terms of just creating a visual style. I'm satisfied with the way that it looks. If we wanted to remove even the blues, we could play around with that and completely eradicate the blues. So we get a nearly black and white image, but we only have sort of the oranges popping. So we can do that. And then we can remove the greens as well, so that we pretty much just have a black and white and orange, mustard yellow image. You can play run with this however you like and create any style you like. But what's good with the color mixer is that you can then mix and match colors before moving into the color grading right here. Because with the color grading, we're going to talk about that next. You're introducing new colors in the shadows, in the midtones and the highlights. But with the color mixer, I'd like to first and foremost, just even out the already existing colors and make the match to the best of my ability to the kind of style that I want. And as you can see, we can create a whole variety of styles here. But let's say I want to keep it like this, okay? I want this yellow mustard style and mostly black and white image. Now we can move on to the color grading panel, and we can start introducing some colors to finalize the style that we're going for. 14. Color Grading: Like I mentioned previously with the color grading panel, we are now introducing new colors based on the three main features that I talked about in the color correction section, which is shadows, midtones, and highlights. We choose what we want to do with all three of those sections. Similarly as with the color mixer, we are now deciding the intensity, the saturation of the colors that we're introducing, the hue of them, and the luminance of them. Let's first and foremost go into just the shadow section and take a look at that. What happens if I start pulling around on this color wheel? Well, only in the shadow areas. We are now introducing the color, say magenta or green or blue. You should read the color wheel in such a way that the more you pull toward that color, the more intense that color is going to be. If I pull this from the center all the way to the blue, we're going to have a very heavily saturated blue in the shadows. Similarly, if I move to the yellows, then we're going to get the yellows or oranges, or reds. You're going to find a way to balance this, to not have to intense colors so that people don't look at that and go, this is way too graded. Maybe that's your style, maybe that's the way you want to go for. But we're going to play a little bit more with a subtle look here. That's what the shadows, and now let's take a look at the midtones and do the same. We pull this and only the midtones are being affected. You can see that the shadows are not as you can see on this guy's suit, It's relatively still black. There are still some areas here that are identified as midtones, but relatively it's black. And then we do the same by pulling it up and we see the midtones now are yellowish, orangish red and so on. The same thing with highlights, Now only the highlights are going to be affected. We can make a warmer look, we can make a colder look, and so on. Now, we've got to use these in combination. If for whatever reason, I rarely ever do this. But if you ever want to change everything, the shadows, midtones and highlights simultaneously to match one color, then you move into the final section here, which is called global. Then everything in the image is going to be colored that way. The shadows, the midtones, the highlights, I rarely ever use that. I just use each section separately and then decide on which colors I want to use. In this case, I like the fact that we already have the black and white theme going on. I'm not going to introduce any colors in the shadows, I'm going to skip that in terms of mid tones, we see that the overall theme here, thanks to the step in the color mixer, we're working with these warmer tones, the yellows, the oranges, and so on. Let's play around with that and see what happens if we add a little bit more yellow to the overall image. What I do is, similarly to the way that I use the sliders, is that I pull too far. I go all the way just to select the exact color I want. And I move the wheel around until I find the orange that we're working with. I drop that, take a good look at it, and see, is this the color that I want to work with? And then I start pulling it back toward the center so that I can desaturate or de, intensify the midtones. As you can see here on the bottom, we see the number which corresponds to the hue and the number which corresponds to the saturation. This is as if we're saturated it by 29 points, which I don't want. I think it's a bit too much. I'm going to move it down to say plus 11. Now, we've added a little bit more warmth into this image in the mid tones, but I want to do the same with the highlights. Maybe I want to make this a really warm photo. Then I'm going to add some more oranges into this, and I'm going to do the same and pull it back until I find a sweet spot that the highlights are matching a bit more with the coloring of the oranges and the yellows of the signs. There we go. Now we have a before and after. This was what we started with. This is what we finally ended up. And we've created a style now let's say, I think the highlights are a bit too dark. Now that we've colored them orange and we have the look, we can now decide to illuminate the highlights by pulling on this aluminum slider. You can see only the highlights are being affected. If for whatever reason you don't want to tinker, like let's say this is saturation 11 in the midtones and you're not quite satisfied and this is 25 and you're not quite satisfied and you're trying to find that sweet spot where you can either do is pull those sliders back and forth until you find something. Or you go into the blending and balanced section down here to, to even it out a little bit with the blending. If we go all the way to the right, we can see that more of the mit tones are being intensified. And then back they're being less intensified, so we can maybe make it a bit less orange like So then with the balance, we're going to have the difference between the oranges in the highlights and the oranges in the midtones match or come together. We can either balance them out by making everything a little bit more orange like, so more intensified. Or we can balance it the other way by removing some of that and making it less graded. If we want to go for a really orange style, then we pull it this way. If we're going to go back, then we do it that way. But instead, I think I'm going to stick around and balance it at about 36, 35. Because I still want the intensity of the colors that we've chosen here. But that's pretty much where I would stop now if we wanted to, just so I don't skip out on the shadow slider. If we wanted to, we can add a little bit in the shadows as well. What do we choose to do with the shadows? If we take a look at the color wheel here, we always, a lot of the times we want to work with colors that work well together, so called complimentary colors. Now you might be thinking, well, I'm not a designer, I don't really know how to think in terms of complimentary colors. That's not really what I do. One way to look at it is just to take a look at the color wheel and think like this. If you choose one side of the color wheel, the complementary color that you can use is going to be on the opposite side of that color wheel. In this case, we've used oranges and yellows for the midtones and the highlights. The complementary form of grading would be to pull the slider toward the blues to create a complementary look. It can either be blues very intensified or more toward the teals. We have a teal and orange look, then you can do that and then pull it back as well, so that it's not as intense. Because now this is very dominant in the frame. But then we've got to pull this back, it's not as crazy, but we can have say saturation 18. We're introducing a little bit of those blues. We don't work with just blacks and oranges. I prefer or the natural black and white look to it, I wouldn't use that. But this is just to demonstrate how you can think in terms of complementary colors and how you can fully utilize the color wheels in the color grading feature of Licrombile. 15. Tone Curve Part 2: Now there is one final way that you can alter the colors in an image and color grade, besides using the color mixer and the color grading panel, which is something that we mentioned, if you remember very early on in the color correction section, which is the tone curve. The tone curve is not only used as a form of color correcting, but it can also be used to alter the channels red, green, and blue. This is what RGB stands for. When you hear of RGB, it stands for red, green, and blue, and those are the three main channels composed of in every single photo. If we go back to the light section and we open up the tone curve, here we can see we've played around earlier with the regular color correction settings using the tone curve, but here we have red, green, blue R, G, B. What happens when we alter these? First and foremost, the tone curve in the color section is supposed to be read in the exact same way the tone curve was read previously when we talked about it. Which means that on the very bottom side we have the blacks and the shadows. And if we move it to the right side, we make them darker. And if we move it up, we brighten them. But in this case, if we move the darker parts on the bottom, toward the right, we're not making the image darker the way we would with color correction. Instead, we are removing reds. In this instance, this is the red channel, and if I move it to the right, you can see that the reds from the image are being removed. Instead, we're being introduced with a different color, which in this case is a form of cyan. If we move over to the green channel and do the same, we remove the greens, we're introducing purples or magentas. And then we move into the blue channel and we do the same, and we see we're introducing yellows. What happens in the opposite? We go back to the reds. And instead of moving them to remove reds, what happens if we move it up is that we introduce more reds. And the same will apply to greens and blues. If we move it up, we're going to introduce more greens or blues respectively, to their channel. In this instance, we're taking a look at this photo and we decide what color we want to introduce. I use the tone curve very rarely for color grading specifically because there isn't a lot of color to work with. We only have the red, green and blue channel and the opposite side of the spectrum, which in this case will be the greens or scans. Maybe I don't want to work with that, Maybe I want to introduce a specific or different hue of that color. But for the sake of example, just so we can use this, let's do it. Let's create those points that we talked about before, that it's good to create those points so that the entire curve doesn't just move as we're moving the sliders. Now let's say that in the shadows, I think that they're a bit too warm. I want to remove some of the warmth in the shadows to make them colder. What happens then is that when we introduce that can it will be the same as when we grade it and we introduced a little bit of blue and cyan in the shadow section of the color wheel. What we can do is we can pull this now toward the right, so that we're removing the reds, but introducing the can, if I'm pulling it too far, just to show you what happens, the curve, if you pull too far, the entire curve here is being affected and we don't want that. Instead we can either do that or we can create a separate point bang in the middle so that only those shadow areas are being affected as we pull on the curve like. So now we have more of a blue look in the shadows. Now let's say I want to introduce some yellows, some even more yellows like we did in the color, grading in the mid tones, in the highlights. Then I'll take the blue channel because I know that the opposite of blue is going to be yellow, and I'm going to use that to affect those colors. Let's first create our points right here, so that only parts of the image are being affected. I'll create points like that. And then I'll start working on the mid tones and I'm going to move them more toward the yellows as you can see. Then we want some of the highlights as well, and maybe even the whites. So now we can see that we've introduced a lot of warmth by removing blues. This is the way that you can go about creating a style using the tone curve instead. Now, the most basic form of tone curve usage is that you want to create some contrast in using the tone curve. What you do by doing that is that you create a so called S curve. With an S curve, we create these three points. What we want to do with an S curve is that we want to make it look like the shape of an S. But ever so slightly, we can take the shadows here. And by bringing those down, we're creating a bit of contrast. And then we can bring up the mid tones to have even more contrast between midtones and highlights. We can decide with the highlights that maybe we want to have them a bit brighter. Maybe we want to bring down the absolute white, so they're not too bright down. And then the absolute blackest points, maybe we want to increase them a little so we create a faded effect. As you can see here, we're creating a fade like, so this is like a standard S curve. When you take a look at it, it resembles an S. That's a very general form of color correcting, which I forgot to mention earlier in the tone curve section. That's how you can color correct in a general way so that you can create contrast and create an image that pops. And you can do the same with these channels. But the same rules don't apply there, because you have to decide exactly how much of each color you want to remove. And the results may vary depending on how much of that color existed in that photo as you took it. This is the entirety of the tone curve and how you can use each of the RGB channels to grade, or you can use the color correction section. But personally, I rarely ever use the tone curve for grading. I just go down to the color mixer and color grader and use that. But play around with this and see what works best for you. Now what happens if we have an image that is black and white and we want to grade that? That's a bit confusing because you might be thinking it's a black and white image. There are no colors. But is that really true? Let's explore that in the next chapter. 16. Black and White: A lot of people seem to overlook this. You can, it's fully possible to color grade and use the color mixer when working with a black and white image. You naturally think that if the photo is monochrome, it's black and white. There's no point in even touching color grading and color mixer because it's a void of color. How would you even begin doing that? The thing is, though there are colors in a black and white image, unless you've taken the photo with a black and white profile so that it's purely black and white. If you take the photo in color such as we have here, and you convert it to black and white, the information of the color in the image is not lost. It still exists in that photo, which means that you can alter everything, all of the channels of red greens, blues, and all the hues. And with the color mixer, even though the image looks black and white. Let me show you how to do that. Let's first start by converting this photo into black and white. We can do it in two ways. Either we open up the profiles here when we create a monochrome image like so. Or we open up the color section and we just desaturate the entire image until it's black and white. I'm just going to choose the profile called Adobe monochrome. Now we've turned this into a black and white image. Let's now go down and you can see right here, it says black and white mix, and it says color grading. You have those two options available to you which you wouldn't have if this was impossible to do, right? So let's open up the mixer because we already know which photo we're working with. The same photo. We remember the colors that we worked with. Now we can just decide how can we alter these colors. We have the red channel. As you can see, there's nothing to saturate or change the hue of because it's a monochrome image. But we can alter the look of this black and white photo depending on how we choose to be illuminated. Let's take only the reds. And let's pull that slider up, and you can see that the black and white, red aspects of this photo are being illuminated. Or we can darken them to create a more contrasty, punchy, black and white photo. But let's move it up a bit, then let's touch upon the oranges as well and maybe lighten those up or go for that more contrast punchy look. Then we go down and then with the yellows we do the same. We either go up or we go down. Let's do it something in between like. So then we have the family marked sign with the greens. We can bring those up. Then we have the cyan which are going to be with the sign up there at the top that we talked about earlier, right there. Then we have the blue, which will affect the sky and a lot of the clothes here. We can either darken that, as you can see, all the blues are being affected. Or we can do the magentas and the oranges. We can darken the bag right here by just using that. But as you can see, we can actually affect the color channels in a black and white photo. That's when you have to approach it differently. Because you're not creating a look based on the colors. You're creating a look based on the intensity of those colors. In terms of luminance, you're working more with a contrast versus less contrast look by altering the channels in the black and white mixer. That's the way you have to approach black and white color grading, or color mixing. Now with color grading, we can definitely add more color. We can't really alter the hue and saturation of the already existing colors in the image. But now we can add color if we choose to. Let's say we want to play around with the shadows, but we want a colder black and white look. Then we can just simply pull this more toward the blue. As you can see, we are introducing color, but we're just doing it in the shadows and the image is still black and white. We can, let's say we want plus 20 in terms of creating a blue or black and white look. We can then do the same and move more toward the oranges here. So that when we create a look like this, let's say it's plus 35 and we do the same with the highlights here. Now all of a sudden, the previously looking black and white photo we had, and this one look way, way different, because now this one looks very more vintage. This is the way you can create a vintage black and white photo. You can really punch into it even more by adding grain and stuff like that. But we're going to talk about the effects and all the other features of light room right after this. But this would be the beginning phase of creating a vintage look of a black and white photo, right? Definitely don't overlook all of these color functions. If you're working with black and white photos, you can alter anything you like even though the photo is black and white, as long as that information was photographed that way to begin with. 17. Effects: To access the effects, we're going to go into the edit panel and click on Effects. Once we're in there, we can see that we have various options here. We have texture clarity, the haze vignette, and then we have some grade out options that are not available right now until we apply vignetting. But starting off with the first one, we have texture. Now what does texture mean? Texture, It's easy to think about it if you compare it, for instance, to the tool sharpness or sharpening. It essentially takes all the little bit of textures, like we can see the leaves here on the tree, and it's going to intensify those textures. Whereas when you use sharpening, you're essentially sharpening the entire image with texturing. The software is looking up all those finer textures in the image and only focuses on those. Let's try it. For instance, let's look at all these leaves because we won't be able to see this if we just zoom it out. Let's increase the texture to the max. Look at the difference it makes. It makes the image much digitally sharp. And if we go to the left, it removes that texture and makes the image look dreamy, right? This is where you have to decide creatively what kind of a look you're going for. Do you want to go for the more dreamy look, or do you want to add texture? It depends on what kind of image you're working with and what kind of image you're working toward. Now with clarity, the software looks at the entirety of the image to make it more punchy. What does this mean? It's easiest to just show it. If we do clarity all the way, you can see that it reminds you of texture, but it doesn't only touch the textures. You can see this side of the screen as well. We've got the clouds, we've got the buildings. Everything is being affected by this clarity effect. Now if we zoom this out, we can much clearer see the effects of clarity, whereas it's less visible if we just use the texture panel you see, because it only identifies the textures, the details of the image. But with clarity, we can go all the way and you can see the strong effect of it. Or we can go down, but it does the same. As we go down, we get this dreamy hazy look. That's what texture does and that's what clarity does. A lot of times, for instance, if you're shooting wedding photography, then a lot of the times you're going for the softer look. In that case, you might want to bring down the clarity ever so slightly to make it look a little bit dreamy or hazy. And then if you're losing a bit too much of it, maybe you can reintroduce a little bit of texture. We're going to apply this in practice later on when we edit. This is just a quick show of what these functions can do. Next up we have the haze. Now the haze does pretty much what it says in the name. It's going to either add a bit of a hazy effect or remove and introduce contrast. So let me demonstrate. In this instance, if we look at anything that is supposedly hazy in this image, it's going to be the sky, right? That's the area that is going to be affected with the dehazing. If I move the dehazing slider down, then you can see that it's almost literally as if haze is being added into the frame, which can be a really cool creative effect. But if we go in the opposite direction, it becomes punchier, more contrasty. And the more we push, the more the image breaks. You see that the more you break it, you can see all the artifacts forming up here and it's just horrible. Same principles apply here. I think the effect panel is used mainly for that purpose. Depending on what kind of a feel you want to go for in showing these photos. With all three of these things, you can apply them to create a dreamy effect. Let's for instance, bring down the haste to -15 Bring down the clarity to -17. Maybe add a little bit of texture so we don't lose all of the detail and look at that. Before and after we started off with this, we ended up with this a very dreamy looking image. That's just one way you can use that. Finally, we have vignetting. Now vignetting, what that means is essentially you have on the corners of your frame, you can choose whether or not you want to have darker corners or brighter corners. Now the gives or takes or the pros and cons of this is that if you have an image where you really want the audience to center, focus on something, then you should probably bring down the vignetting like so as you can see, the more we go, the more we have this circular shape forming here. Or this oval shape. You don't want to go too far because it just looks too fake. But if you add a little bit of vignetting like so, then you are essentially making the audience focus on the center point. Similarly, if we go in the opposite direction, it's going to do the same but opposite. It's going to create white frames around it, you see like. So that too can be used for. I use it sparingly. I don't really use vignetting that much. I prefer to do all the masking myself, targeted masking, and we're going to get into that next. But vignetting could be cool for a quick little fix, a little bit of a small effect where the audience is going to focus on whatever is in the center. That's what it can be used for. The midpoint roundness feather and highlights are all going to be in relation to the vignetting, so let's use the vignetting all the way so we can see the effects. See with the midpoint, we're pushing the edge of the mask all the way to the corner, for instance, so it's not so obvious with roundness. We're changing up the shape slightly so it's not too painfully obviously oval, but we're making it more of a ball shape. With feathering, we're deciding how much we're going to feather out the mask. It might be feathering more intensely toward the middle, or it might be feathering out. But the more you feather out, the more the edges become clear. And we don't want that. It's usually good to add a little bit of feathering. The standard feathering at 50 works just fine, but you could feather even more like so. Now if we bring back the vignetting to a normal level, and then we introduce a little bit of it, say -15 you see that it's a very subtle effect. People don't even think about the fact that there is a vignette there, but they feel it, it's subliminal. Finally we have with the highlight slider, we decide how much the highlights are going to be affected by this. If you take a look at the highlights in the corner here, what we're doing essentially, is we're deciding how much of them are going to be covered and how much of them will be affected by this mask. Which can add a little bit more like a feathering effect to it, to the edges, It's not so obvious. That's how you use vignetting, dehays, clarity and texture. Now the final point here is what we talked about when we talked about editing vintage looks is to add grain. Grain, of course, is the effect which is used in old film cameras. When you're photographing with film or you're shooting something with film, that is the way that movies used to look. That is the way that old photographs used to look. And it can give the nostalgic feel to it. Now in order to see this, we have to zoom in a little, especially around the darker corners, so we can see how much grain we're actually applying. Let's apply an exaggerated amount of grain, just so you can see what we're working with. So like plus 60, you can see the difference there, like how much it added. What you can then do is you can adjust the size of those little grain balls, right? You can make them larger, you can make them smaller and more fine. And then with the roughness, we're deciding the intensity of the grain. And this way it's going to be very, very grainy, like a super old camera with a rough type of film and all the way down it's going to be a finer grain. Let's go for a really grainy look like. So you can see now in the entirety of the image that it's packed with grain. This is also something that I like to use sparingly. If I do add grain, I'm going to use plus 15, maybe up till plus 25, rarely ever more than So. With the sizing and roughness, I just play around to my liking each and every time, Sometimes I even leave it on the default setting. These are some really cool effects that you can use to enhance the image and add a little bit to that look that you're going for. If it's a vintage field, then you can definitely go up with the grain. If you want to do wedding photography, you can go with the soft look. There's plenty of things that you can do here and use this creatively. Now let's hop into the next section where we talk about masking. 18. Masking Part 1: Masking is a very powerful tool that you can use within Adobe Light Room, mobile and the desktop versions. In which you can essentially create various masks of various shapes, like oval shapes or gradient masks. Or that you can use to brushen up the image or particular areas of the image so that you can typically perhaps relight a certain area of the photo. I'll show you how that works right now. To access masking, we have to press the button which is right under the healing patch, right there, the round shape. Then here, from here, we can decide what mask we want to add. You can see that these areas are grade out. That's because we have to add a mask first by pressing on the plus sign right here. And then we decide what it is that we want to choose. Now I'll show you how selecting subject and Sky works in a different image. But right now let's go through, for instance, just using the brush feature. We click on the brush and we have successfully created a mask on the very left side. Here we now decide the size of the mask. Maybe we want to do it like, so the feathering, now it's more feathered, now it's less feathered. And it works just like that, like the vignetting tool. Finally, the flow which essentially chooses the intensity of that mask, how strongly the effect is going to show. Maybe we can do it a little bit more subtly like so like 60. Now that we've created our mask, it's time to actually select an area. Let's say I want these rocks down here to be a little bit more illuminated. What I'll do is I'll simply add a mask like this. I'm simply just using my finger and marking the area that I want to effect. Now finally, we see that the previously grade out sections have been available to us and in light we have all the same settings, in light, in color and effects, or at least very similar, not all of the features are available. What we can do now is just effect that one part of the image that we've selected with exposure, we can bring up the exposure, but only on that part of the image. We can bring up the shadows a little bit like. So we can bring down the high light, so it's not as intense. Now, we've successfully opened up that one area of the photo without having to affect the rest of the image. We can do the same with color. We can bring in the temperature slider like so, and make it really look like a strong beam of warm sunset light is hitting this image. We can saturate or desaturate as much as we want. We can change up the tint. We could even select our own colors, change up the hue like so to make a match with the rest of the grass. Or we can do a selective color under here and just literally choose which color we should apply to this. And then down to effects, you can see we have the exact same features available to us, so we can affect a particular area of the image. This is what the masking tool does universally. The question is just which mask you pick for which situation. Now we've explored the brush, now we can do the linear gradient. And the linear gradient works like this. You simply start dragging your finger onto the screen like so. And you're creating this sort of radial filter. And when you drop it, you can then grab one or the other of the corners and just create an even more feathered sort of look to it. And you can drag the other corner forward like so. We can do the same here, if we want to light up that part of the image. We can do so if we want to darken it to create our own little vignette, we can do that as well. We can do it to the other side. Linear gradient on this side as well, to match the look that we're going for here. Finally, we have radial gradient. This could have been used instead of the brush, for instance. We can remove the brush right here. We can delete that mask and instead create a radial gradient, which is pretty much the same shape that we were going for, But we have a shape to work with and we don't have to manually create that shape. We've got the same thing. We can start exposing, we can add a little bit of color and so on. I'm not going to redo the whole thing. Those are those functions. Then we have color range. Now with color range, you will only affect areas in the photo that you select the color of. Let's choose only the color green. You can see that this particular color green is being now masked all over the image. All the dark areas that are not green, like the branches and so on are not being affected by this. What happens now is that we can do that and then we can apply this mask and change the color of say just the greens. Look at that and create a little bit of a fantasy look that we're going for here. And then we can desaturate a little bit, maybe add a little bit of warmth to really make those colors pop. Look at that, That's selecting in terms of color range. And then we have luminous range. You pick the area that you want the luminous range of to be affected. In this case, if we pick only the darker areas, then only the darker areas will be passed out. In this case, we could, for instance, pick the sky and only have the top part. Let's say we think that that sky is a bit too bright, then we can bring down the highlights of that area. If the mask is not quite doing a good job, what we can then do is we can refine it. We click on the Edit, and then we can refine how strong we want the effect to be. By pulling on this lighter down here, we can make the absolute top peak white areas. Or we can select a wider range as well. We decide where the limit goes. If we do the peak peak white ones, then it's pretty much only going to affect that strongest part of the image, which is the sky. And it's going to deselect the tree which was selected earlier. Now if that wasn't clear enough, let's do another example. Let's pick the luminance range. And let's do only the blacks, the darkest parts of the image, which should be somewhere around here. These are the absolute blackest parts of the image that we're now selecting. And we can even pull the slider down, so we really only touch those very deepest shadows and blacks like. So as we pull this one down, we can see that only those areas are being affected. And whenever you're happy with the result, then you can start switching up whatever you want. Maybe you want to add a bit of coloring into the, into the shadows, in the black tones right there. We can change up to hue. And the same principle applies. Maybe we want to brighten those up a little bit. We expose only those areas. Of course, this doesn't look good at all. I'm just doing this to demonstrate something. But as you can see, there's so many ways that you can use these masks to target specific particular areas of the photo and then adjust only those parts. It's a very powerful feature that when used right, when used creatively, can really make your image go from good to absolutely fantastic. And we're going to apply all of this that we've learned later on when we edit these photos together. 19. Masking Part 2: Finally, let's take a look at the previous point that we missed, which is selecting according to subject or sky. Now with subject, what the app is going to do is it's going to try and identify automatically what the subject is in the frame. Typically, it's going to be the very people in the forefront. But a lot of the times it's also going to select, as you can see, people in the background or objects in the background. If you're not satisfied with the result, a lot of the times the results are good, but sometimes they're not so satisfactory. Then at the very bottom here, you can see a plus and minus sign. If you click, you can subtract or add to the mask. If it hasn't selected the entire subject, you can add more for it to add the remainder to that mask, or you can subtract. Let's subtract in this case. Now we can subtract according to the same rules of the mask. Either we can use a brush, linear gradient, radial gradient, color range, whatever. In this case, let's do the brush because it's the easiest. Let's select the people all the way in the back here and brush them off by using this mask you see, now we're deselecting the people that are irrelevant to the mask that we want to create. Look at that. We could even switch up the size of the brush so that we can just select the guy, the dude in the background. We're not going to do it perfectly now. This is just to show you what this can do, but we can also see that the face of one of the subjects has not been selected properly. What we can then do is add to mask. We can also brush it up and paint on her face just like that. The remainder of the jacket. A little bit of the shoes on her hand as well, that we literally only have them selected. It's a bit of a dirty work here, but you get the point. Then of course, the same principles apply. I don't have to show you again, but you can use all of these features again to brighten up that subject to darken, to add effects, to change up the colors, whatever you like. Finally, we have select sky. Now in this image we can't really see the sky. Let's pick a different picture where we can actually see a sky so you can see how it works. Let's go back to Hogwarts. I think Hogwarts is a fantastic example. Let me first remove all of these healing brush changes that we've made previously. Like so. All right, when we select masking and we press plus now the software by selecting Sky will attempt to just select the sky. It may do a good job. It may do a bad job. Let's see, in this instance it looks fairly okay. But we do see that it's not just the sky. We're also getting some areas here of the rocks that are selected and some parts of Hogwarts Castle itself. Now, we could also do the same thing here. We can just subtract, pick a brush and just start brushing away. I'm not going to do all of this now, but that's essentially the principle. A lot of the times this AI does do a good job. But if it does miss a little bit of an area like now, you can just brush it off just a little bit like so. And if you're a perfectionist, then you're really going to spend some good time doing this. We have to approach this creatively and think, how can we select the sky without selecting the sky? Because if the select sky option doesn't work well, well, what we can do is we can use the Luminants. We can select the sky using just the aluminum slider. And then we just have to tweak this around a little bit until we get the desired result. Now we're selecting too much of hogwarts. We don't want that, but now we have pretty, most of the sky selected, not all of it. That's one way to do it. A different way to do it is to add another mask. And we can select subject. Now it's going to select just Hogwarts as we can see. Let's pretend it didn't, let's pretend it also selected the forest and whatever. But what you can do is you can select the subject and then you can press on invert. Then it inverts the masks and chooses everything. But whatever was selected in this case, if it was so that it selected the forest and the rocks under, then in that case this would only select the sky. Considering these options have not been very effective, the effective one so far has been the luminous range. In this case, I will probably use the luminous range to select the sky. And we're selecting as much as possible without actually touching the building you see. Now pretty much the entire sky has been selected and we can just decrease highlights of the sky and look at that, make it punch. Maybe add a little bit of exposure up the shadows. Maybe bring it out in the whites. Add some effects with clarity to make a more dramatic sky. Get rid of the haze, and really create the sort of HDR effect of a sky right here. You can do plenty with these masks. So this was just to show you the absolute vast range of creative opportunity that you can have just by using masks. They can be used for targeted color grading. They can be used to really add a pop to your image. To really center, focus somebody's attention on something to relight a scene. You can pretend, for instance, here we go, that there's a really strong light source. Let's say the sun is coming from a certain direction and we only want to light that area. We bring up the exposure and we pretend as if the sun is coming from that direction. And then we might want to add a bit of coloring as well, so that we see that there's warmth coming from that corner. And then we can do the opposite on this side. And we can create a, a darker look like, so that we really only get the intention on the castle. Look at the effect that we created. Now it's insane, like how much you can actually achieve just by using the masking feature. Right? And don't worry, like I mentioned previously, we're going to be going through all of this as we edit all these photos together. So you can see step by step how we can use all of this in a creative way with the color correction, with the color grade, with masking, with effects, the whole thing. But moving on now we have one final effect to go through, which is right now, a very new feature in light room until we move on to the noise reduction and detail section of everything. And then finally, we start editing together. Let's hop in and talk about this next feature. 20. Blur: When you're photographing something. And you might not have access to a fast lens. By fast lens I mean lens with a very low aperture so you can create this blurry background. Well now you can do that using light re mobile. You access that under the mask section where you see this little eye drop or water drop tool. Now what you do is you simply start adding some blur amount. Or you press on circle bubble blade ring or a eye to get the various effects. In order to know what it effects, you can use the blur amount all the way to the mask max, so that you can see where the effect is if you want a visual of it, if you want an overlay of it, you click on the focus icon right here. You can see that right now, this is selecting the subject, which it has already decided what the subject is in the frame. If you're not happy with that, because like we mentioned, it starts selecting areas that are not really the ones that we want. What you can do then is point select. And then you decide which is going to be the center focus of the frame. For instance, this woman, she should be in focus, right? And then we can see the intense blur amount like really exaggerated this, You can't even see the face of the person behind. But this is just to show you what it can do. So this is the regular circle blur effect. Then we have something called bubble and it adds a little bit of a different variant of that blur in the background. Then we have five blade, which adds a different effect. We have ring and you can see these circular shapes popping up in the background. And we have cat I, whichever one you prefer, you can use, But be careful with this tool, because as you can see, when the blur amount is 100, this looks entirely fake and really, really bad. What you might want to do is just add a little bit of blur if you're into this sort of artificial way of adding blur, as opposed to just shooting with a fast lens. If you have one, maybe you don't. But this could be useful as well to just focus on what's important in the image, which might be one area. Or it can be the entire sort of selection of subject. And you can see the software is detecting the subject themselves. But be careful when using this tool, because like I mentioned, it's just going to be too strong and you don't want to overdo it, right? So that's all in terms of lens blur. As you can see in the top right corner there, it says Early access. So this is an entirely new feature, very fun to play around with and we'll see, and I'm excited to see how they're going to update this in the future. All right, so that was it in terms of masking and effects. Now we're going to move on to noise reduction and sort of detail working and image noise reduction will be very good to use in case you're using a photo that you've shot with a high ISO and you've got this grain that you don't really want or this noise, rather not the grain that you want to remove from the image. How do you do that? How do you approach noise reduction? Let's talk about that next. 21. Detail: I hope you're as excited as I am because now we've reached the final stage of photo editing, which is detail detail touching, noise reduction, and color reduction. This is typically the last step in the editing process before we start exporting and creating presets. Now we're going to specifically talk about the three main functions, which is sharpening and noise reduction. But within that also color noise reduction, to remove some specs of color and to reduce noise in case you have shot with a high ISO, which has caused unwanted noise in your photographs. Now to access this, you have to open up the editing panel again. And you have to open up this section right here called Detail in Detail. We can see several options here. The main ones are going to be, like I said, sharpening noise reduction, and color noise reduction. And within those we have some fine tunement. Now sharpening is a form of to create this digital sharpness that digital photography typically has and to enhance that in case you think your photo looks a little bit unsharp or if you want to bring back the sharpness that was lost in the editing process. It's important to not misunderstand this and think that sharpening is the same thing as focus. So it doesn't mean that you can bring back focus. If you photograph something that's out of focus, the sharpening tool will do nothing to amend for that. So when you photograph, you have to always make sure that everything is in focus because there's no amount of technology in today's standards that can fix that. Sharpening is just adding sharpness to an already existing image, so you will still have an image that's out of focus if you photographed it that way. But it will just add sharpness to that unfocusedness. I guess it's not going to look very good, but it will not fix your focus. So keep that in mind. Now let's take a look at what sharpness does. If we take a look at this photo and we just start adding sharpness, you can't really see much, right? But if we zoom in on this guy's face and we exaggerate the sharpness effect, now you can see clearly that we have sharpening sharpness added to it. And you can see the more you push, the more broken it's going to look. Because you can literally see the square pixels on this guy's face. But this is like with the previous examples. I'm exaggerating it just to show you the effects of it as you take up the sharpness. You can also then choose to fine tune it by using radius and detail. It's good to just play around with the setting so you can see for yourself what it does, but it basically helps you either mask out or even out the edges of the sharpening effect. Let's increase the radius a little to show you that the more we increase it, then we see the clearer effect of the sharpening going on here. If we reduce the radius, we get less of that. Now under detail, we've got the same thing. We increase it and we see that the effect is intensified. We reduce it, and we see that the edges are soften out and the sharpness effect is not as obvious. Of course, you won't see all these square pixels like this unless you really push it to the limit. Now we're up at 150, which is the maximum. You wouldn't really do that if you want to sharpen something. If we go back to the standard, which was about 40 and we just increase a little bit, let's say by 50, 60. And then we can play around with the radius as well. Maybe bring it down a notch so we don't really see these pixelated frames around it as much. Typically, I don't really sharpen my images because I believe that in digital photography, images look overly sharp to me as is. But it could be used if you want to sharpen it even more if you're shooting in a software format. If you're shooting with say, film and you want some of that digital sharpness, then I guess you can add it, but I typically don't sharpen my images at all. The final one would be the masking, which you can see. The more you increase it, really reduces those pixelated edges and makes it almost invisible. Play around with those settings to your liking. Essentially, it's hard to get into the exact science behind the radius, detail and masking. But you can play around with it while zoomed in to see what works for you. Next up, we have noise reduction. Same thing applies here. If you take a look at this photo as is, you look at it and it looks completely fine. But where you can really see the noise shine is when you zoom into the darker areas like so. Then you can see that this was shot under dark conditions and you can see the digital noise being caused here as a result of shooting at high ISO or under dark conditions. As you can see right there, what noise reduction does is that it helps amend that, it helps remove it. If we start dragging this noise reduction slider, you can see the more we drag it, the softer. The image becomes, so essentially we're removing the noise caused by the high ISO. And you can do this as much as you want, but just keep in mind, as with all things, when we go too far, you can see that the face of the subject becomes all plasticky. And as a result, when we zoom out, the entire image looks plasticky. It looks like a wax doll. This doesn't look very good, right? So you don't want to exaggerate the noise reduction as well. Typically when I noise reduce, I will go up to say, 20, maximum 30. And if I really have to push it, then maybe 40. But I rarely have to do that. I will just noise reduce a little bit, say at 25, to show you the effects. I'm going to do it all the way. And then we can touch upon these detail sliders. We have this detail slider which will bring back some of that detail that is lost as you Noise reduce. Then we have contrast, which is going to do pretty much the same thing. It's going to bring back some of that information. But if you do it at plus say 25, then with the detail we bring it back just a notch like so, maybe a bit of the contrast as well. Then we get a pretty clean image. Unless of course, you zoom in really like to the pixels and you take a look at it. And some people do do that. But you have to keep in mind that when you take photos, you will always end up with some level of, this is just the natural way that you take photos and that the camera takes in information. You're always going to have a little bit of noise. The entire point of photography is just to reduce that noise as much as possible, onset by shooting with as low of an ISO as you possibly can. And if you can't, then you come in here and you compensate for that in post production. If you're using the desktop version of light room, then light room has implemented an AI function and noise reduction so that the AI will analyze the photo for you and create a perfectly balanced noise reduction based on that, based on detail, contrast and noise reduction. But since we don't have that available to us here, we have to do that manually. Just keep in mind that we're talking about the ranges of say, 20-40 If you push it further than that, then I think personally it looks a bit plasticky and I don't prefer that now, except for noise being part of an image like so. We also have color noise, which is noise that appears inside colors, which you can see right here. What happens when we reduce the color noise? You can see that if we push this too far, some colors here on the edges become muted. That's a good thing to keep in mind. If we go in the opposite direction, then we can really see the color noise reduction, which is basically these artifacts that appear in the transitionary areas of colors. Take a look at these corners right here. By doing this, we're evening out the edges so that the colors blend in more perfectly. But then if you go too far, you're muting some colors that are just naturally saturated. And then you can use the detail as well to just even out those edges. Smoothness is going to help with that as well. Here we have, if we go all the way down, we can see those colors being brought back. But we're also counteracting the effect of color noise reduction. And if we go up, it's muting it even more. So it's just about playing around with these to get the good result. I wouldn't really recommend going all the way with the color noise reduction because we don't want some of those colors to be muted. You can sometimes see it very clearly in a photo and it just looks off. As a very final touch to all of this, of course, we have the detail that we went through, but under that we have optics. When you take a photo with a lens, any kind of lens, it's always going to come with some sort of lens distortion. It's not going to be a perfect sort of even photo. So what enabling lens correction does, you can see the effect here, is that it's going to fix it up so that it looks sort of correct. You can see that the vignetting on the sides is also getting removed, so the image just looks fresher. And remove CA stands for removing chromatic aberration. There's basically some color spill and we can't really see it on this photo. And I'll be looking through the other photos as well. I can't really find any chromatic aberration to show you this, but the effect is very subtle. In case you get some sort of chromatic aberration, I just enable that to stay one step ahead. And then finally in geometry, we have various sort of distortions or like ways to change the perspective of the photo. You can click the upright and it will be similar to the way that we straightened it. Using the crop and straightened tool, you can use it automatically, or you can choose based on level, based on vertical, and it fixes up the photo for you in terms of perspective. Then we have constraint crop, which will distort your image if you want to make it look a little bit more like a fish eye like this. You know, you can really go far like so. And it looks like you've taken the photo with a fish eye lens. Of course, don't go too far. And in terms of vertical, you can straighten up, you know the photo like. So you might be wondering, why would you ever use this? Well, sometimes when you photograph, say architecture and the line, you haven't been able to shoot the building like at eye level. Then you can sort of fix it up and make the building look as if you shout it at eye level, you shot it from really high up. And these are all the tools that you need to edit a photo. So what we're going to do now with all this information out of the way is that finally we get to the fun part, which is we're going to start editing photos together. Like I mentioned in the beginning, all of these photos that you've seen here in the color correction album and in the color grading album are going to be available to you in raw format or Jpec format if you're using the free version of light room. When you're ready for that hop into the next chapter and let's get started. 22. Full Edit Part 1: Let me welcome you to the fun part. So what I'm going to do now is simply, I'm going to start editing a couple of these photos and I'll just apply some general commentary. So let's check it out. First and foremost, I think that I would like to it let's do this one. I like this one. Looking at this photo, I'm being kind of inspired to go for a bit of an old Kodak look to it, so I'm going to go ahead and do that. Starting off, I want to take a look at and see if the photo is perfectly straightened. We can see that there are some slight variations, some changes that have to be made here. I'm going to try it manually as well, just to check out the differences. I'm looking at this guy's ear right now, his left ear, to see if it's properly balanced. I think this looks better than. Let me take a look. Yeah. Than the auto straightened function. I'm going to do that manually. First things first, look at here. I'm going to take a look at the profile and see if I want to work with color. Or perhaps I want to go for standard or landscape. Let's see, which one do I prefer? I'm going to go for standard. So I have a bit more dynamic range, less colors, so that I can work with the style myself. I'm not entirely happy with the cropping actually, with the straightening. I think this might look good. I don't think his ear was a good way to look at it, but this looks better. Yeah, I'm happy with this. First things first color correction. Now I can either choose to use the sliders or the tone curve. I'm going to start working with the sliders and see if I have to add something with the tone. No, actually I'm going to work with the tone curve. I'm going to create my points right here in going for the film. Look, I think that adding a bit of fade like so we'll probably got to do a lot for the photo, so I'm going to do that then I'm going to start pulling on this slider to create a bit of contrast, just ever so slightly like. So in terms of the curve, I'm going to leave it at that and move over to the sliders. We already have the fade effect added, which is already pushing toward that filmic look like old film look. Next up I'm going to look at the high lights. I want to bring it down ever so slightly. You don't want them to be too strong. I'm looking for something where the colors and the light is going to be slightly muted. We don't want it to be like this, right? So I'm going to look at muting a lot of these things, like -20 or so. And I'm going to take a look at the exposure slider as well. Maybe I can reduce it just ever so slightly like that with the shadows. I might bring those up so that we don't crush them entirely. Because if we're going for that faded look, then the shadow shouldn't be too crushed, the whites and the blacks should be fine. But I'm going to pull on the sliders anyway, just to check out the situation. Actually, Yeah, I would like to increase them maybe by plus four or so. With the blacks, it's the same. We're not going to go too far. But yeah, maybe a plus five or so. Looking at the before and after here, we have a far more contrast. The image that we started with here, we're working with that as you can see, like softer look to the image. That's about it. Like in terms of color correction, I'm pretty satisfied with this. There weren't a lot of changes that had to be made. Next up, I'm going to move over to the color section, and starting off I'm going to look at the white balance. Now the way that I shot it, it ended up being at 5,550 Kelvin. Typically, for daylight, we have around those areas, like between 5000505600700, depending on the conditions. But this is generally speaking, daylight. I am satisfied with the white balance. Looking at this guy's white shirt, it looks fairly white. Looking at all the signs, they look fairly white. They're just ever so slightly warmer. Maybe I can push this down just slightly like so 5,200 now, it looks perfectly white in my opinion. In terms of the tinting, like I mentioned, it could be difficult to see which a tint, like slight tint the image has. It helps to actually pull on these sliders and see in which direction it's pulling. If I go to zero, I can notice that this is a bit more to the green side. I'm going to move it up just ever so slightly, maybe, plus eight, plus ten. I'm satisfied with this, I think. Let me see the before and after. Yeah, this looks good. Saturation wise, with the film. Look, I don't like things to be too saturated, so I'm going to bring it down a notch, say at -15 Then taking a look at the vibrant. If I start pulling the vibrants up, we're revealing more of those colors. But I don't want to go too far either. In fact, I'm going to bring it down a notch as well. To say minus six. I want to go for these like muted colors. I like the look of that. Now let's see what the color mixer we can take a look at, let's say the reds right here. And see what we can do with those. We are lucky in the sense that there isn't a lot of skin tones to be visible here. So we can play around with the oranges, with the yellows if I want to. Let's see, by moving this up, we're going for that same look that we had before. I'm not sure if I really want to go for that. I like the more poppy colors to it. I think the red should move more toward the purple side. Saturation wise, I want to bring it down just ever so slightly luminance. Let's see if I want to go for a brighter look or a slightly darker look. I want to go for a slightly darker look, just like so with the oranges. Let's take a look at what's being affected by pulling the slider. We can go in the same direction as well, or we can keep it where it is. We want to go slightly more for the complementary colors in the direction of the purples, the magentas, and so on. So I'll bring it down to say, -50 saturation wise. I'll bring it down like so by using the luminant slider. By darkening, we can see that the colors here on this sign are becoming more intense and on par with the rest of the color scheme. I will bring down the Luminant slider as well. Yellow moving to the left, I think would be the right choice here, because we get too many yellows by going in that direction. I'm going to go down to say -55 57 saturation wise. I'm also going to bring it down ever so slightly luminus as well. Moving on to the Greens, let's see what we can do with the greens. With the greens, I do like going in the warmer direction, but I just think that this family mark sign becomes really ugly when I go in that direction. I will go and push a little bit further toward the emeralds to the right side like so saturation wise, I think it's a bit too strong, so I'll bring it down as well. With luminens, I'm also going to bring it down. You can see a general trend for what I'm going for here. Let's see what exactly is all the aquas. I think the only thing that's really aqua here is going to be a bit of the corners here. As you can see on the family marked sign. I like it to match like so and a bit on the sign up here. But I like the look of it, the way that it looks right now. I'm not going to desaturate this. I might play around with the aluminum slider just ever so slightly, but this time bring it up and then we got the blues. I think that when it comes to film, I don't want to go in the like purple direction, but I definitely want to push it more toward the aqua beach feel to it. Not too far, but maybe say at -30 or so. Then I'll bring down the saturation. Let's see if I bring it up, what's going to happen? I prefer to bring it down, actually I'm going to have it in -27 I might just brighten this up ever so slightly plus four saturation wise, like magenta and pink wise. Let's see if we have, it's only pretty much the bag that's being affected. Maybe there's other corners in the image that are being affected by this. But I'm going to just focus on the bag right there, because that's our main topic in this color scheme. In this case, I prefer to have it at say, -12 Saturation wise, I'll actually bring it up a little bit at say plus 25. And Luminans wise, I want to brighten it up ever so slightly with the pinks. Let's see what is being affected with the pinks. I can't really see much pinks. It's going to be on the bag as well, but I'm not going to change the hue. I'm just going to bring down the saturation and the luminance just ever so slightly. Here's the before and here's the after. I'm really going for those muted, muted looks. What I do want to do now is move over to the color grading because I think it's time to add a bit of warmth. I like the way that the, the shadows look, but I'm going to try a look here. I want to see what happens if I start going in the green directions of, of the shadows. I'm going to start bringing down that saturation. It's not so intense, but ever so slightly toward the greens, because I think that's complementary to the film. Look, say at saturation 11. Then I'm going to go in, not exactly the opposite direction, because that would be the pinks. But I do want to go in the warmer tones, at least the orange, yellows. I'll bring down those as well. To say 19. And then I'll do the same with the high lights. Go for that warmer look like. And stop it around. Maybe a higher point, maybe I'll go for like 27 or so. Now let's see what happens when I start pulling the blending slider to see what we prefer. When I go to the right, we get more of the warm tones. When I go down, we're moving more toward those magentas. I'm going to keep it not too warm, but say blending at like 54 balance. We're going to go for the same and see if we should, yeah, let's definitely go push for that warmer look, say balance plus 20. Let's see, the before, let's see the after. Now, we're really touching on those on that film look that I'm going for. I really like the way that this looks. Now I'm going to go ahead and add some of the effects that are going to work in favor of this texture wise. We could bring it up just ever so slightly plus 13 clarity. I'm going to go downwards or upwards. I think that for this look, we should go for a softer look. Say clarity -23 has it would be a good idea to add a bit of haze to this look. Instead of going in the contrast direction, I'm going to bring it down to say -25 vignetting wise. I don't know if I actually want a vignette for this photo, now I'm going to skip the vignette entirely. Finally, we got the juice of this look, which will be the grain. Let's go for a rougher look. I'll push it up to plus 30 size wise. Let's make it slightly bigger roughness. I want this to be really rough. I'm going to go to say, 56. This looks good. This looks great. Now this reminds me of going from before the overly digitalized photo, which was of course taken with a digital camera to this film. Look with the common theme of like the greens, the warmer tones, and a bit of that purple. Typically, you would want to go for the warmer look, even in the complimentary colors up here. But since this is Japan, I'm leaning more toward the colorful look for it, which I don't have to do. I could go back to the reds and change them up and make them, let's see what that's going to look like. If I go back and I start going for the more orange feel to it, I actually do prefer the oranges. After all, I said I wasn't going to do it. But looking at this, I do prefer the oranges. They just seem to be working better with all of this. And I'll do the same with these ones as well. I'll pull them back up. Yeah, I definitely prefer the orange look over the other one that I was going for. But either would work like depending on what kind of feel you want for it. But this way we have a cleaner image. We have the all of the complimentary colors added, all of the unnecessary colors changed or removed, And now we ended up with a really good result of a Kodak looking image shot in Japan. I believe this was in Tokyo. Let's see if there's anything else. I have to do. Color detail, sharpening, I don't like using sharpening for film. I'm actually going to bring it all the way down. I don't want this photo sharpened at all. I don't need to noise reduce. I don't need to color noise reduce. I'm going to leave it as is. This is something that maybe I should have done right from the get go to show you why. First we have to remove chromatic aberrations, which is not going to be so visible to the naked eye, but with enabling lens corrections. Sometimes when you do that, the image can become slightly brighter, which could change up the way that you want the color correction to be done. In this case, it didn't really make a big difference, but I will enable it anyway just to make the image looking proper geometry wise. I don't think I have to do anything here. I'm going to leave it as is. All that's really left now is to see, are there any things in the photo that I want to remove using the healing brush? I don't think so. I like the way that this naturally looks the way that it is in terms of masking. Perhaps we can add a few masks here and see what that does with the linear gradient. Now we can see that the sunlight is coming or the daylight, the general light is coming from that direction. I want to use the corners of the frame. By darkening those, I'm going to feather this out like by darkening these, then we're really being brought into, I'm just going to bring down the shadows, just a little bit of the exposure as well. Our focus is going to be on the right point, which is the center of the image. Let me try the same on this side and see if I'm satisfied with that. I'll bring down the exposure ever so slightly. I'm not going to push it too far. Just like we have our own little personalized vignette going on here. Here is the before, here's the after. I'm liking, generally speaking, the way that this looks. Let me push the limits a little bit and see what happens if I, I'm going to feather this out very heavily because I don't want to go too far with this. And I'll bring it down all the way down here just to ever so slightly bring down the exposure. I think this works. This definitely works, Yeah. Now let's see if there's anything else that I want to do. Perhaps I can find some ways to brighten up the subject. Let's see what happens if I use a radial gradient. Like so I respect the direction of the light by adding a gradient exactly where it's supposed to be like. So by brightening this up, we get more focus on the center part of the frame and especially the back head of this guy's head like. So I like that. But I do want to bring down the highlights just a little bit more because those were brighten up too much now. -25 Let's see, do I want to go for a bit of a warmer look there? Yes, just the slightly plus 20 is that I like. This looks powerful. I'm loving this look. I really do think that, with that being said, here's the before, here's the after. I am completely satisfied with this photo, and I think that we've managed to create a Kodak look for this Tokyo Street photo. 23. Full Edit Part 2: All right, next up we have this sort of natuish architecture photo like nature in a city profile wise. I'll do the same. I prefer the standard one for the dynamic range and for the muted colors that I can then later on add if I want to. As usual, we're going to start off with the color correction tab. And this time I'm just going to work with the sliders to start exposure wise. We can see that this is an underexposed photo. Typically, I like to shoot my photos underexposed so I can bring it back in post. The reason for doing this is because when you lose information in the highlights when you photograph, it's far more difficult to bring those highlights back when the information is lost or nearly impossible to bring them back. Whereas just the way the cameras are manufactured, bringing back more crushed shadows is far more easy. Therefore, I always expose for the highlights as opposed to for the shadows. Had the image looked like this when I have taken it, then it would be really difficult to bring back all of that information in post. That's the reason you're going to see most of my photos being dark when I take them. Let's first, I'm not going to work with the exposure. Instead I'm going to start off with the shadow slider to bring back the information in these trees or plants or whatever they are. Then I'm going to now bring up a bit of that exposure to see. I will have to overexpose now for the highlights. And I can do that because the information is not going to be lost to just brighten up the image. And I'm looking specifically at like the water and the trees to make sure that everything there looks correct. Like so. And then I'll bring down the highlights in the sky so that we can get that information back. Here's the before, here's the after, looking good. Now in terms of contrast, let's bring that contrast slightly up, ever so slightly, maybe, plus 11. The whites might be a bit too strong. Let's see if I can bring them down. The blacks. Well, we can go for a bit of a punch here. Look here, I guess. Let's try that. -13 before, after. I'm not going to touch the tone curve on this one. I'll leave it as it is. This looks fine. Now moving over to the color section, let's set the white balance. I think right now it's at 5,150 What happens if I apply a preset and I do daylight? Daylight is 5,500 but it is a bit too yellow. I think I'm going to bring it down. Well, I'm ending up pretty much where I was, but I like this also. I'm sensing that there's too much green undertones, even the word tint. Plus ten. I have a feeling it's a bit. Yeah. I'm going to bring it up to say plus 15 instead to make the image look more clear. Like saturation wise, I'll bring it down like so. But I will bring up the vibrancy because I'm not going to go for a very old and muted look. I do want a bit of that color information. I'll bring up the vibrancy to say plus 36. I'm happy with the way that this looks. Now I'm moving over to the color mixer. In terms of reds, there isn't much reds going on here. I'll leave it as is oranges. It's probably going to be the building up there. Yes, it is. I do want the oranges. Let's bring up the saturation all the way so that we can see what the hue does. The yellows look greenish, yellow, and really ugly. So I'm not going to go for that here. We're going too far in the playful colors directions. I'm going to go for this instead. Somewhere in between, maybe -31 I do want more of that color. I will actually bring up that saturation to say plus 45. I might even brighten it up a little bit to get more of that information like yellow wise, let's see what that does. There are yellows in the shot, we have yellows over here, we have yellows over here, and we have yellows showing up in the details of the trees or plants. I actually don't like the look of these yellows at all. I think I can get away with just completely eliminating yellows from the shot. I think it's a bit distracting and I don't like it, I'm going to bring it all the way down. Greens? We definitely have greens in the frame. Let's saturate this all the way up and then start looking at the hue to see which direction we want to go for. I don't want to go for the dirty yellow look. I think I would prefer the more emerald approach to this. Not all the way, but we're still going to push it fairly much like plus 33. Then I'll start working on that saturation again and maybe bring it down to. I don't want to to muted. Actually, I might just leave it at plus ten luminus wise. I want this photo to pop a little more. I will bring up the luminus now in terms of the aquas, we have them in the water. As we can see, if we change up that hue, we want to make it match the greens. I think rather than going for the blues, let's leave it at S -35 But I will bring down that saturation because I think those colors are a bit actually. Let's take a look at this. We have the colors there. I might just get away with removing this as well, because we can see it doesn't really match perfectly. But if I remove it all the way, then we see the black and white and all of it. I'm not going to do that, but I will bring down the saturation. Actually I bring it up and then I'll try and match it with the greens right there of the trees. This is probably the best way to look at it and try and match it. Then down the saturation, actually I do like the way that this blends in. I'll keep it plus 58, like, so now when it comes to the blues, bring the saturation all the way up to see what we're working with, and then I'll start switching up those colors. I'm obviously not going to be going for the purple look, and I'm not going to be going for this look entirely. But I will go somewhere in between so that we get a bit of a summer feel to it. Let's say -32 like so now that I've decided to sort of go for those aquas and we can see them clearly, now I can start bringing down that saturation. Now the question is just, do I want any of the blues in the frame, or do I want to go for a harsher look and remove all of the blues from the frame? I don't know. You could go in this direction, I guess, and you can have a fairly black and white photo and just have the Greens pop. That will be a very stylized look if you want to go for that. But I do like the information in the sky so we can really see the blues like. So there's two ways to go about this. Either you can have the information like so or you can remove it and bring it in later. Let's try that. I'm going to desaturate the blues entirely. I'm going to desaturate the magentas, and I'm going to desaturate the pinks now that we move over to, let's see if I can do anything luminous wise with the sky. Now that's a bit too contrasty, I do want to add a little bit of this should be good. Now I will move over to the color grading tab and see if I can add a look through this. Instead with the shadows, I like it the way they are currently, but in the sky in the mid. You can see. Now we can add some of those blues if we really want the blues, either in the mid tones or in the highlights, if we want to go for that look. But I'm not quite sure, I do actually prefer a bit of a warmer look. In all of this, I will actually move more toward the yellows in the high lights. I'll see if I even want to either go for a really warm look or maybe we should go in the opposite direction. Now let's keep it more in the same range, like in the yellows right there, but I'm not going to push too far. This is just to complement the highlights, but I'll keep it at say plus 15 in terms of the actual shadows, I'll probably keep them as is, or I could go for another look here. I'm actually satisfied with the way that it is, this hazy, warm feel. It's not quite a summer feel, but it's definitely pushing in that direction. But let's see if I go back to the color mixer and I actually do reintroduce these blues. What's going to happen? See, now I've changed my mind. I do like the blues here. I will reintroduce them ever so slightly, let's say. Plus five saturation. We don't entirely go for that black and white style. Let's see if I push it even further, what's going to happen? No, I like it like this. As you can tell, this is the way the editing process is. You choose a direction you go in and then as you make those changes, you might get inspired to start switching things up. You will always have to revisit, or at least I recommend that you revisit the sliders. You go a bit back and forth and see if the choices that you made are entirely satisfactory, or if you want to switch it up a little bit and create something else. This I'm satisfied with. However I'm looking at this, and I'm still noticing that there's a bit too much greens in the tinting process. I do want to push that more toward the magentas. See what a great difference this makes? We started off like pretty much here and you can see the greenish undertones by pulling on the lighter. But I do like to go more in the magenta direction. Like it's not wrong of you to want to switch up the overall warmth, not by just using the color grading section, but to actually revisit the temperature and the white balance. If I want to go for a warmer look, now is the time to go back to the white balance and perhaps switch that up as well. Let's see if I go warm. Now it looks industry rustic old and I don't want that. But if I go in the colder direction, we are complementing more of that sky. If I do that, I drop it down to 4,800 and then go back to the color grading, then I could blend or balance the warm tones that I've introduced in the midtones and highlights to make it ever so slightly warmer. Just a little bit like. So let's see. In fact, I could increase the saturation on this one to say plus 28 and I could increase the saturation on the midtones as well to say 35. We get a bit of a more summary look to this. Here's the, before this is what we started with. Very cold, gray, dark, and now we have an ever so slightly warmer, finer look to our image effects wise, do I want to go for a softer look? I do want to go for a softer look here as well. But texture wise, I do want to bring back the information, the texture information in the trees here, let's say plus 11, haze wise, we can do the same and open up our frame a little bit more by bringing it down just a minus seven. We don't need more than that vignetting wise. Let's see what happens if I do add a vignette. Do I want this or do I want to go more for the brighter? I do want a slight vignette, I guess, But what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull it all the way so I can play around with the mid section here and see where exactly the mask is going to end up. And I do want it to be rounder, and I do want to feather it out even more. Now that we have that starting point, I can start bringing back some of that vignetting. Actually, I think, let's see, the highlights should be a bit saved there. Feathering wise, I want to bring it out now. I do like the way that it's being finally feathered. Like so let's see if the midpoint can be moved even more. Yes it can, the roundness could be pushed a bit in the opposite direction, like so now with the vignetting, we can bring this down. Just so I have ever so slight vignette like at minus ten, I'm not going to push this far at all. That's in terms of those effects. I'm not going to be adding any grain. I'm not going to be going for that kind of look here in terms of detail sharpening wise, I could leave it as is. Noise reduction is not entirely necessary, but if I do add up a little bit, it's going to soften up that image ever so slightly more. Color noise reduction, I don't need optics. We're going to enable this as we always do. This is a photo that I'm pretty satisfied with. This is where we started, this is where we ended up looking good. All right, let's move on to the final photo, photo number three. 24. Full Edit Part 3: All right, we've arrived at the final photo here that we're going to be editing as usual. I will just take a look at this and honestly I just prefer the standard. But this time I will actually just work with the color instead. The photo is, as with most other photos that I take, pretty damn dark. We're going to start fixing that up right now. Let's do the exposure first. Push it so that I can then bring down the highlights when I need to. I'll push up the exposure, I'll bring up the shadows, and then I'll start bringing down the highlights so they're not so strong contrast wise. I do like the idea of contrast right here. I'm going to increase it like that. Whites as well. Increase them just slightly blacks. There we go. Now we can see that the white balance here is clearly off. It's good. I wanted to pick a photo where we have a bit of a challenging feat to us here. Because we could use the eye dropper tool to use it on this white sign or this white sign. However, you'll notice that complications will arise when we do that. The reason is let's do that. We're bringing it up to the white here, now the image is very green. That's a white sign right now. Let's bring it up to the other white sign now. It's very warm and off. You might be wondering why is that. We do have two white signs, but they provide very different results. The reason for that is, let me remove this. The reason for that is because white balance is going to be set according to the light shining onto that white subject. Here we have a very warm lamp illuminating this sign. However, here we have a lot of that natural daylight, as well as these lights shining onto this white sign, which is going to give very different temperature results. It all depends on the light source. We can't really rely on setting the white balance according to these white signs because our main subject is not going to be those white signs. Our main subject is this guy right here. We have to set the white balance according to him. And there's nothing really white that unless we can try and eye drop this thing, let's see what that does. Oh my God, it actually worked Well, that's a shame because I didn't really want to go for the easy solution in this case. But it did actually work perfectly. I didn't notice that before. Let's not use that. Instead, we're just going to work with the sliders because I wanted to provide us with a challenge. So we don't just use the eye dropper tool in every single photo, because obviously you're not going to have something white in your photo every single time. And you should be able to set the white balance yourself. But let's try out the presets first and see what happens if we do a auto. Works perfectly fine as well daylight, but we're not going to do it the easy way. Screw that. Instead we're just going to take a look at this guy and think about it in terms of his skin tones. His skin tones are very yellowish right now, we don't want that. What do we need to do? We probably have to move the temperature slider in the opposite direction until we end up with skin tones that look fairly okay. Like say maybe all the way down to 3,200 Then we have a slight warmer tone on his face. But it's natural considering we have the light source coming from whatever this thing is like. He's cooking some kind of food, some kind of meal. But this should be correctly white balanced according to his skin tones and his face. But what I brought up earlier in terms of it all depends on the light source that is illuminating the main subject. You can clearly see the difference between this guy's face, which is correctly white balance. But then when the light source changes, this white sign looks very blue, right? So the white balance is going to be really off depending on which light source is illuminating it. But since our main focus is this guy, then we should adapt our white balance to him, the subject. So 3,200 is what I'm satisfied with. I am sensing that there's a bit too much greenery going on in the undertones. So let's move this around a bit so we can see what we end up with. This is approximately where we were now. You can see that it's a bit too green. But if we just move this lighter up and down, up and down until we end up somewhere that we like, say plus one, Actually I think this is pretty good. Then we have this guy just perfectly white balanced, or as close to perfection as possible. We did forget one step, which is the crop and straight. And let's see what the automatic tool does. It did a pretty decent job, so we're going to leave it at that. Do we want to recompose this somehow? I want the guy to be perhaps dead center. We also reveal some of that sign. Let's see what that looks like. We got it like that. But then we also have some empty space here, which I'm not really satisfied with what happens if I actually do zoom in. But I don't want to lose that lamp either. I like that light source, let's keep it somewhere around here. In that case, we're sacrificing most of the sign up in the corner, but it's not as important. Maybe if I do that. Instead we get at least some of those letters and it's not too obvious of a cut out like that. I like that. Now that we have that done, let's move over to the color mixer and see what we're going to go for now. What a look do we want here? We could really go for anything. We can go for a worm look. We can go for a cold Kodak look that we did earlier. But instead, let's try a cinematic look. Let's pretend that this is still frame from a movie. Let's try and make this look cinematic. How do we do that? Well, let's begin with the color mixer. And this time we can't really touch too much on say, the oranges, because as you can see, his face, his skin tones are going to be affected. I wanted to pick this photo on purpose so that you don't think that you have absolute freedom all the time to push and pull every single color in the color mixer. We do want some challenges in this case. Let's see what we're going to do with the reds. What happens if we oversaturate the reds just so we can see where they end up? We've got reds in the corner here. What about his skin tones? How much of his skin tones are affected by this? Not that much, to be honest. It's mostly the hat. And then the really ugly red lines here. This gives me the impression that I could play around with the reds a little bit more freely than I initially thought. Let's see, do we want to go for orangeish style there? Do we want to go for the more red? I like the deeper red, so I'm going to go for the reds. And I'll bring down the saturation. Because with cinematic photos and look we do like the more muted colors. We're going to go for that now because he's in a dark hut, I want to maybe illuminate this hut. Let's say if I go all the way down, no, it's not going to look good. I do want to eliminate it so we can see his hat more clearly. It's say plus 32. Now what do we do with the oranges? We can't really do much. His skin tones are going to be affected. It's not going to look natural. But is there anything in the skin tones that we need to fix? Let's see if I pushed this a little bit more in the yellow direction. Yeah, we could fix it up by plus one literally. I think this is good saturation wise. I want to leave it as is luminance wise, we could illuminate because if we illuminate him, we're also illuminating the bottom part so that we get a clear directional light coming from the source in the bottom. You see that? That looks really, really cool because then we don't have to relight it manually later on plus 21, I think he can really be illuminated. Yellows. Let's bring the yellows all the way up so we see what we're working with. Yellows are, in my opinion, extremely distracting here. I don't want them. Either he can be completely or all of the yellows are going to be turned into oranges. We have those complimentary colors, or we remove it now. We can't really remove them. We could, but I'm afraid we're going to get some strange artifacting going on. If we zoom in, it's not going to grant like, perfect results. I think we could go for that, I guess. But also we have the yellows up here which are going to, it's not going to give a consistent look. I think I don't like it. Instead, I'm going to use the hue slider and go all the way to the oranges so that we just match the oranges. And in fact, I might just bring up that saturation ever so slightly to plus three. And I could illuminate a little bit more here so that he really pops green. Let's see, the greens. I'm moving the saturation up and down. But interestingly enough, these trees are not being identified as green. It's probably going to be in the aqua channel or in the blue channel. Greens are not really being affected here whatsoever. It looks like I might just eliminate them or just bring them down because nothing is really going to happen there with the aqua. Now maybe this is the trees are not even in the aqua channel. Maybe they're in the blue channel. They're not in the blue channel either. Except for some parts here, I guess I'll bring down those blues because by going for the cinematic look, I actually want to eliminate a lot of those blues. And just leave them as is, like black and white, the aquas. I could bring those down as well, to be honest. Now the question is, what do we do with the magentas, the purples and the pinks? I think that in this case, I just want to match them. If I bring up the saturation all the way to see what we're working with, then I can see how I can match this. We can see that there's a difference between those two colors. But if I pull this in this direction, then everything is matching. You see like, so now what we do after that is we just bring down that saturation because I don't want them to be overly saturated. Bring it down a little bit and I'll bring these down a little bit so that we have a consistent look in all of this. This looks great in terms of color mixing. I think I'm pretty satisfied with color grading. If we want to go for that cinematic look, we could go for the very classic look that everybody else is going for, I guess. But if you want to learn it, this is the place to learn it. Let's go for that teal and orange look. Let's start off with the shadows and push them into a teelishort direction. Right here, it could even be blue, but let's go for the look maybe around here somewhere. And then bring back that saturation like. So then we have to go in the opposite direction to create a complimentary look. If we went for the blues, we've got to go for the oranges. We can do that in the midtones. And we can do that in the highlights as well, because then we are reminding ourselves of that cinematic look. Let's see if I go for a deeper blue. If that looks better or maybe, yeah, just maybe slightly deeper blue like so. Now let's play around with the blending and balancing to see where we end up. We can go for a warmer look by going to the left or a colder look, but I think I should go for a slightly warmer look and balance wise, we can go for more heat inside as opposed to more cold. Because I think that works good with the subject that we have going on here with him cooking and the flames and all of that. Maybe I'd say plus 21. Now I want to go back and fix up a little bit in terms of the exposure because I think it's a bit too dark still, but also bring down those highlights, there we go in terms of masking. I think that I know I said I didn't have to, but I do want to add a bit more shine right there. We really see the light source. We have motivated lighting right there. I'm going to do that then. I'm going to just bring up the exposure of that little flame going on there like that. And bring down the highlights. Then in terms of everything else, we could darken the bottom part like, so I'll feather this out and I'll bring it down. The focus is really on our subject right there, like so. And then I could also add a bit of darkening on this area right here, softening it up. Doing that, bringing down that exposure as well so that we really, really focus on our subject right there. However, I don't like the way that I will do this. What I will do it even though it looks too contrasty. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back and I'm going to go to the tone curve and I'm going to create a fade. There we go, we bring back some of that information. Ever so slight fade should be good in this situation. Take a look at the wild changes that we've made here. We've gone from this dark, mustard, yellow greenish photo to this cinematic style. We could even add a final little gradient onto this side as well, like straighten it up and push back. Just so we're not distracted by anything else going on in the photo like so now we've ended up like this looks like a proper still frame from a movie or a cinematic documentary where the story of this guy at the Christmas market working his butt off nine to five in the cold. This looks really, really good. I'm really satisfied with this, and if we wanted to, we could also use the healing brush and start removing things like this sign here. But I don't actually want to do that. I'll leave it as is. I'm super satisfied with this photo and with that being said, we are done with the color grading or the entire process of color correction, color grading effects masking all of it being shown to you in practice. And how you can use each and every one of these tools creatively. Because even if a photo doesn't have something naturally, there are so many creative ways that you can use and utilize all these tools to create those effects and create those looks that you want to be going for. We've had the cinematic look. We've had this old Kodak look with this photo. We've had this nature look here that I wasn't really sure what I was going for. Just like a natural look a bit. Summary, I guess, but that's about it. I wasn't going for anything in particular. But this is the way that you could create various styles. Now if you want to go for a style, because you might be wondering how did I know which colors to use? How did I know that I had to go in the tealish way and the oranges way to create a cinematic look and so on. What you can do is simply literally download still frames from movies and keep them next to you as your editing. And then you'll see more clearly what kind of colors are included in that still frame in that movie and just redo it. Just copy that into your editing and you're going to get the same style. Now, I've done this so many times before that I don't really need reference photos for these classic styles because I've done this so so much that I know it by heart. But if you're just starting out and you want to create certain looks, download Studio Gibby movie stills download, Blade Runner stills download like whatever you want and just copy those styles and you're going to get good at it with time. So I hope that this has been helpful to you and I think it's time for us to move on to the next section and talk about presets and exporting, and finally the assignment. 25. Presets: I hope that you've had a great experience editing these photos. Feel free to edit all of them one by one if you feel like it. And use and incorporate what you've learned into editing your own photos. Now, what happens when you've edited a photo and you're really satisfied with the result and you would like to save this as a preset. Well, it's fully possible to do it in this integrated system in mobile. And I'll show you how you simply open up the photo that you want to create as a preset. And the preset section is right here in these like two little lenses, the dark one and the gray white one. What you do there is that you open up the presets and you already have a list of recommended presets from light room here. There's plenty of there that you can choose from. There's premium presets as well. And there's a section called yours, which are the presets that you've created. What you do then is simply as you open up the presets tab, you click on the three dots in the top right hand corner. You select Create Preset. Now after you do that, all you have to do is enter a preset name, room, cinematic for instance. Then you can create a so called user presets group. Or a presets group. What that is, is if you have a selection of presets that you want to save within the same category, maybe it's a cinematic pack like I have here. Cinematic Night, black, cold, warm, clean, black fashion photography, Kodak, all, all different kinds of groups. You can just create your own group right there by pressing on Create new preset group, name it and then it will be saved in that group. And then you can access that preset whenever you want by just opening up a separate photo, opening up presets right here, and clicking on yours, but it doesn't end there. You can have a wide range of availability in terms of presets, not just from light room, but from the community itself. So what you do is, for instance, you select this photo, you click on the Share button right up here, and then you click on Post to Community. You give your photo a title, you describe it. You select which categories it belongs to and various permissions and whether or not people are allowed to remix it. Which means that people can use your photo in its raw format and do a spin audit, their own interpretation of the photo and edit it themselves, and then you can access all those remixes later on. What happens when you share that edit is that then you can go into the community tab right here. As you can see everybody who's posted their edits, it shows up right here. You get the get inspired section. You have the trending section featured daily inspiration. And your photo will turn out to be, for instance, here in the new section. Your photo will probably pop up there. You can also follow people, you can check out various remixes. What happens then is you open up a photo right here. And if you take a look at this photo and you feel like you'd like it, you can take a look at the edits here that were made. You can see the tone curve, you can see all of the settings that were used to create this particular look. And if you click on the Remix tab up here, then you have the availability to take a look at the original photo, which you can then edit in your own way, and the person will be able to see the edits that you made. Besides that, you can also click on the three dots in the corner and you can actually save other people's edits as your own presets so that you can apply them later on. So you don't have to necessarily do all the manual work, but you can just save other people's presets and use them like that. Just keep in mind that with presets there's a caveat to it. Presets, a lot of the times will be perfectly applicable to the type of photo that was taken under those conditions. Rarely ever will you find presets that simply match perfectly to your photo at that time of day. Within those conditions, within that season with white balance, you will always have to make some slight changes to have that preset work for you. But the big changes such as the color grade and effects and all of that, will probably apply, for the most part correctly to whatever photo you're applying it to. But you will probably have to color correct before applying the preset. That's probably a good idea to do so that your photo starts off, like we mentioned, in that even playing field before applying that preset. But with that being said, when you take a look at your photo and you click on Create Preset, a lot of the times you just want to select the creative touches that you've made with, with that photo. Maybe you want to uncheck light because within light is the color correction. Color correction is going to look different for each and every photo, unless you took a pretty much identical photo and you want to apply the same preset. But I would recommend you turn off light, you do not select it, or things like masking, because that might not work for that particular type of photo optics you could select, It's the whole chromatic aberration and all of that that could work for each and every photo, because you're going to apply it anyway. But in terms of profile, that's up to you. Color effects, detail optics, all of that is probably going to work for the upcoming next photo that you apply it to. But light, in other words, color correction probably won't. So it's not necessarily a good idea to create a preset based on the light settings, but more so just the creative settings, because you will have to color correct the photos afterwards anyway. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all you have to know about creating your own presets, storing them, uploading them to the community, and finding more inspiration and more presets from other photographers in the community section. 26. Export: We're at the final stage here. You have done everything that you can do in light room, mobile. All that's really left is to finally export your photo and upload it to social media or print it as a poster, and do whatever the hell you like with it. So how do you do that? Open up the photo that you would like to export and click on that Share button up there. After you do that, you can either choose Save Copy to Device, which will be some general automated settings. That light room will set for you and it will download that photo in your photos album. Or if you want to pick some specific settings, I advise you to press on export. As here, you can choose very simple options, but various ones you have either a Jpeg version of that, which is the classic sort of format, which photos are in. You can press some original, but then you might end up exporting a raw which can't really be opened by a lot of software outside of light room. So I advise you to use Jpeg for the most part. Or if you have specific needs for specific clients or specific software, then you might have to change it to Avid J Excel, Tiff or DNG. But Jpeg is the standard format, so typically you would want to export Jpeg in terms of dimension. This will be how large the photo will be. In terms of pixels, we have the absolute max quality which will be largest available dimensions. Then we have small, and then we have custom. If you want to apply your own dimensions to the photo, which one should you pick? Well, in terms of largest available dimensions, that's going to be a lot of information. A big photo, which takes up more space than a small one, do you really need that? Typically, you don't. If you're going to use your photo for social media, for a tablet, for a phone, even on the computer, you don't need the largest available dimensions. You're perfectly fine exporting in small. And then in terms of quality, you can choose 90% you can choose 100% Remember, the higher up you go in all of these, so largest dimensions where the top quality, the more space, the more storage it's going to take on your device. And then if you feel like it, you can include a watermark. Watermark is something that's going to show up on the photo, Somewhere on the corner of the photo where it has your name, like the photographer's name. So you always have your credit on that photo. And you can customize that by either adding your own graphic, choose file. You can select your own graphic like your logo or something. And then you can choose the size, the opacity of it, or you simply add a text. In this case, it's my watermark. Let's keep it at a. And then you can change various fonts that you want to use. Let's do Academy. Or you can choose the color of it if you want it to be black. Or if you want it to be white, then you can choose the size of it if you want it really huge watermark. But typically, we don't want it to be too distracting, so I'd like to keep it small then as well the opacity which you could bring down a little bit, so it's a bit more discrete. And then you can choose the offset on the horizontal axis and on the vertical axis. What does that mean? Well, if we push this, then you can decide the exact sort of positioning in the corner of the frame. It can be here or in the vertical one. You can push it all the way to the top wherever it fits. Sometimes if you have something important going on in one corner, then you can change the watermark to be on a different kind of corner, then you simply include the watermark. You can also include, if you want some metadata, camera raw information, location info, if you want to name the file something specific or if you want the original name output sharpening, which is if sharpening should be applied on export. I typically don't do that, but I do recommend that in terms of color space you keep it to RGB because that's pretty much the standard. You can also do Display P three or Adobe RGB, but just remember you might have some differences in the way the color is being interpreted. And your photo might not look the way that you've edited. Because you might have made the changes in SRGB as opposed to something else depending on your screen. But RGB is the common one that you should just stick to. And then you simply press check and then your photo will be exported and available to you on your device. And that's it in terms of exporting a photo, if you have any questions about this, make sure to leave a comment or message me and I will get back to you now. It's time for the big assignment. So hop into the next chapter and let's get started with your projects. 27. Assignment: All right, so you've reached the end of this course. I hope it has been as fun to you as it has been to me. Now it's time for your class project, your assignment to demonstrate what you've learned. To see that you've really incorporated everything that has been taught throughout this course. And that you're able to apply that in your own photography. Now the photos that I provided to you, we're not just photos as an example, it was also photos to be used as part of this class project. So you can choose one through eight of all of those photos freely as long as you complete one photo in which you demonstrate your color correction abilities by just correcting the image without creating a style, without adding fancy effects. Or masking. Simply correcting the photo so that it looks as close to reality as possible. So with the correct white balance with the correct exposure, no crushed shadows make it look not entirely flat but just enough correct for it to pass as a realistic documentaristic photo. That's assignment number one. Assignment number two is to pick either that same photo or a separate photo from the course curricula so that you can create a style. And you can then create a style in any way that you want. It could be what we've learned here, it could be Kodak sort of film style. It can be cinematic. It can be your own style. Your own twist to it. I urge you to create something of your own, but you can do anything you like. After you completed the editing of these two photos, feel free to upload into our Facebook group that I provided as a link in the resources where you can get feedback if you ask for it or you can just show off your photography. After you've finished this assignment, you can freely upload any kinds of photos that you edit along the way, your own photos to the Facebook group to get further feedback, further support from the community. This Facebook group is not just going to be for this particular class assignment, it's just going to be a collection of photographers as a community sharing photos that they're taking and editing so we can help each other evolve. And please remember guys, if you did enjoy this course, make sure to leave it a rating. Leave it a rating and a review. Because it really, really helps the algorithm to push this course forward. And if you want updates on future courses that I'm going to be making, and if you want access to some of the free resources that I have, certain precept packs, certain PDF files with information about photographing using a camera in all its different settings. Make sure to sign up to my newsletter where I will be providing you with these free resources and I will keep you updated on future courses that are being released. With all of that out of the way, I would just like to congratulate you for finally finishing this course. I hope you've found this information valuable and I hope to see you next time.