Transcripts
1. Course Introduction: When it comes to photography, it seems like editing is one of the most overlooked pieces of the puzzle. Editing allows you to extend your artistic expression and craft the photo that tells a unique story, a story that can inspire, or a story that can spark imagination in your viewer. What's amazing about editing in this day and age is that you can do it all on your phone. You can create absolutely beautiful edit using only your smartphone. My name is Shawn Don and I am a professional travel and lifestyle photographer from San Francisco, California, currently traveling throughout Asia. With my on-the-go lifestyle, I can tell you it's very difficult for me to sit down and bust out long editing sessions on my laptop. Plus oftentimes I just don't want to bring my laptop with me when I'm traveling or it's just heavy and sometimes it just gets in the way. Over the last few years, I've slowly transitioned my editing workflow from Lightroom on my computer to Lightroom Mobile. I can tell you that my workflow has become perhaps even more efficient than it was on my computer and much more convenient as well. So today in this course, I'm going to walk you through my entire mobile editing process, give you tips for how I stay efficient and introduce you to one of the most powerful mobile editing software's to date, Adobe Lightroom Mobile CC. In short, in this course, you're going to learn how to create absolutely beautiful edits using only your phone. I'm going to introduce you to some basic editing topics, talk about things like color and exposure and how those things can have a profound effect on the emotion or the mood of your photo. I'm going to teach you everything you need to know about Adobe Lightroom Mobile.I'm going to break it down section by section so you can completely understand the program and what every tab does. I'm even going to assist you with finding your own unique editing style, and I think that's one of the most important parts of identifying as a photographer, is having your own unique style. I believe that a lot of that unique style comes in the editing process. After that, I'm going to walk you through four complete edits from start to finish, all edited on my iPhone. We're going to do an epic landscape photo, a moody portrait, a gritty street photo, and then we're going to finish off with a warmer lifestyle photo.You'll walk away from this course with not only the confidence to create stunning edits on your phone, but perhaps more importantly, with a greater understanding of your own editing style and how that editing style makes you unique. The possibilities of mobile editing are endless and I'm so excited to share this course with you in the hopes of not only inspiring you, but giving you practical knowledge that will drastically improve your editing process. Whether you're an amateur photographer and you shoot all of your photos on your phone already, or you're a professional photographer with a DSLR and you're just looking to learn more about the smartphone editing process and how it can improve your workflow, this course was designed for everybody and it will give you a strong foundation for creating beautiful edits on your phone. I can't wait to have you on board. With that said, I really hope you take the time to enroll in this course. If you do, then I will see you in the very first lesson. Let's go.
2. Course Overview: Hey guys what's up, thank you so much for taking the time to enroll in the course. I'm really excited to have you here. Before we really dive into the content of this course, and trust me, there's a lot of it, I want to kind of overview everything, just so you know how everything is laid out and how everything is organized in this course.So starting things off, we're going to start with a mobile editing overview.We're going to start talking about the power of mobile editing and then we're going to move on to talking about the Digital Anatomy of a Photo.The things that actually constitute a photo digitally. Then we're going to talk about the ever so common Raw vs Jpg debate as well as the Adobe DNG file and what that means for you if you're shooting with your smartphone.After that, we're going to move on to section two where we are going to be talking about Editing and Emotion and how that emotion can translate into storytelling.So we're going talk about how exposure affects emotion, how the lighting affects emotion, things like having a bright photo versus a dark photo, or high contrast versus low contrast. Then we're going to move onto color and how color plays a strong role in emotion.Talking about things like color theory,the anatomy of color, really, really diving into it. That's a really cool lesson if you're interested in color. After that, we're going talk about how those things affect the story telling.What kind of story you want to tell with your image and how the edits can affect that story. From there we're going to go on and talk about different editing styles, how to find your style, things like inspiration, where to find it, as well as other tips for finding your own unique editing style, which I think is very, very important so I included that lesson.From there we're going to talk about some apps. Of course, we're going to be talking about Adobe Lightroom Mobile CC, the majority of this course, but there are a few other apps that I think are really awesome and I wanted to include them in the course just as an added resource.We have a video on that. From there we're going to start diving into Lightroom Mobile CC and we're going to really dive into it, starting things off with a general overview of the entire app and all of the different tabs.Then moving on into specific videos regarding the actual editing process, Importing, prepping the photo, editing, the exposure and the color and the effects, everything you need to know basically about the program.From there we're going to have a few supplementary lessons.One of them is on presets, the other one is on common editing mistakes that a lot of young editors make and how to avoid those mistakes.After that we're going to tie everything together into actual real life editing examples, with no pausing, just editing the photo from start to finish and incorporating various lessons from the course. Starting things off with a moody portrait, kind of an epic travel landscape photo, a warm lifestyle photo and then finishing things off with a kind of a gritty black and white street photo, which I really love.After that I'm going to give you some tips on how to become a better editor. These are things that I've learned over the years that others have taught me in that I think are absolutely central for you in becoming a better editor in the future.After that we're going to do one last lesson, summing things up, just going over a few last things about the course before the course finishes. That's basically the course, that's the overview and now it's time to dive into the content.So without further ado, let's do it.
3. The Power of Mobile Editing: In this section, I want to talk a little bit about why mobile editing is actually an effective replacement for editing on your laptop or editing on your PC in this day and age. At the top of that list is that industries are changing and I think mobile editing is absolutely the future of editing in terms of professional photographers and things like that. The reason I say that is because if you look at technology and where it's heading, look at laptops, for example, they're getting skinnier and they're turning more into things like tablets. The divide between smartphones and laptops are slowly closing every day. They're getting smaller and smaller and smaller, and with software editing software getting smarter and more powerful, you don't need an incredibly fast, powerful computer to edit photos and it's my belief that technology is going to continue to adapt and the laptop and the mobile phone are eventually going to become one. Why don't I start now? You know mobile phones are good enough and there's many other reasons why this is at the top of the list in terms of the future of technology, I think smartphones are there, you know, they can do so much that laptops can do already. Why not use them? The next reason why I think mobile editing are so powerful in this day and age is efficiency. I find that it's so efficient for me to edit on my phone. When I'm out and about, maybe I'm waiting in a cafe, I want to take a break from my work, I can just pull out my phone. It's always my pocket. I can pull up my phone, open up Light-room and edit and I have all my photos there and I can do everything that I need instead of, you know, sitting down, putting on my computer, opening up Light-room. It just feels like it's more efficient to edit on my phone than it is to edit all my laptop, which is pretty amazing how far, you know, this technology has come. But the fact that we have these mini computers in our pockets all the time makes it very efficient for us. Maybe you're at home with your family and you're bored, pull up your phone and start editing photos. You don't have to have that laptop with you or that computer, you can do it all on your phone so I find that my editing process is very efficient when I edit on my iPhone simply because it's so readily available. With that, I also find that editing on my iPhone is very, very comfortable. I don't have to sit at a desk and edit, I can lay in my bed and edit and I do, I must say I edit a lot of my photos in my bed or on my couch just chilling. I'm just going to turn the lights off and I'll just dive into it. Also, we use our phone so much. We're very comfortable with our phones in terms of navigating with our phone for the thumbs. So the editing softwares that we're going to be talking about today are actually pretty intuitive and they're not too difficult to use on your phone and that's simply because we're so used to using our phones so much. Unfortunately, a lot of us use our phones too much, but that opens up the possibility for us to be very comfortable on these apps that, you know, might seem unintuitive, but actually they're very, very intuitive and easy for us to use. The next reason is actually one of the most important reasons on this list, and that's color accuracy. Most people consume media on their phones nowadays, you know, most of us consume images on Instagram or Facebook or,you know, we even surf the web on our i-phones or our smart phones nowadays, YouTube, everything, right? When you're editing on your phone, you know, you're seeing the color for how it's going to look for most people out there as well, while you are on your computer, most people aren't consuming media on their computers anymore, they're consuming it on their phone. You can see a more accurate representation of how your photo's going to look on a phone when you're editing it on a phone. So I found that I make less adjustments before I go post my photo when I edit it on my phone. Then when I edit on my computer, I have to make changes once it gets to my phone because it doesn't look right. Maybe the contrast isn't strong enough or something like that and I edit on a Mac, you know, and Macs have very color accurate screens, but most of us consume our media on mobile phones, so why not edit on a mobile phone so you know that you're getting the most accurate color, the most accurate representation of the image that others are going to be seeing as well. The last reason is accessibility. Everybody seems to have a smartphone in this day and age and not everybody has a computer. Finally, there's apps available that allow you to edit your photos at the same level that a computer can and I think that's amazing. The fact that people anywhere can edit amazing photos, you know, despite not having a computer, just using only their smartphone. So accessibility, you know, many more people can edit on their smartphones than they can on their computers so that's the last reason.
4. The Digital Anatomy of a Photograph: In this section, I want to talk about the digital Anatomy of a photo you might be thinking to yourself this isn't that useful but actually this is central to editing. No matter if you're editing on a smart phone or you are editing on your computer, the digital Anatomy of a photo is very important to understand. There's three things that digitally comprise a photo light, color, and detail. I'm not going to be talking about these things in a scientific lens. I'm going to be talking about these three things in a Editing lens. Light in accordance to editing is just the exposure of a photo so that the highlighted areas and the dark areas and the overall exposure of the image regardless of color. Color is a second thing that we can edit in an image, that is, the colors of the image.We have complete control over the colors of the image. That's the second aspect of a photo. The third aspect is detail, things like sharpness, the amount of grain in the photo, and just the overall detail in the photo. These topics can get much more complicated if you want to get into things like photons and light and stuff. I think that information is just not that important. All that information, we don't really need to know because when it comes to editing, those are the three things we're going to be editing, light or exposure, color, and the detail of the photo. Those are the three things that we have direct control over in the editing process. That's why I wanted to have this section to introduce you to the different aspects of editing and how they all play it together. Light, color, and detail.
5. Course Project: Alright guys, over the course project, I want you to edit one photo using Lightroom Mobile. Once you've edited that photo, go ahead and post the before image and the after image in the course projects down below. Go ahead and do that. That's a great way for us to weigh in and see your style and it's a great exercise for you as well. One thing I do recommend, if you want to take it a step further, is to actually take that photo and edit it in two, three, four or 10 different ways and post all of those. That's awesome because you can get really crazy with your different edits. You can do maybe a realistic edit, a crazy stylized edit, an abstract edit. Once you post those, we can look at all of them and we can be, i like this one, i prefer this one with these colors, et cetera. That's a great exercise to see what other people think of your editing styles. It's a great way to know other people's preferences when it comes to color and exposure and things like that. Please take the time to do that. It's a great way to interact with me and interact with other students in the course. Once you do post your student project, go through and look at the other projects as well because that's a great way for you to see what other people are doing and how they're digesting the course information. Please go ahead and do that. Post one before, one after image. I can't wait to check them out. If you do want to take it even a step further, you can explain about the edits, why you chose those colors, why you chose it to be that way, and then the story behind the image. That takes things one step further and allows you to engage with the content even more. Either way, at least post the before and after. I can't wait to check those out. With that said, let's move on to the next section.
6. The Raw vs. .Jpg Debate: Now, it's time to talk about something that we hear often, is this RAW vs JPG debate. You might have heard this and you may not know the difference between what a RAW photo is and a JPG photo is. Essentially when you shoot a photo on your camera or even on your smartphone, there's different file systems that you can use. JPG photo is one of the most common file format you can use, and essentially a JPG photo is a compressed photo. When you take a picture with your camera and you save it as a JPG, the camera will automatically edit the photo on its own to how it thinks it should look. It'll edit it, it'll compress it. That results to the smaller file size and an image that often looks very good outside of camera. Then the other side of things is a RAW photo. A RAW photo is a photo that captures as much data as possible. When you take a RAW image, it's capturing as much information as possible and it's not compressing it in any way. Why that's good is because when you go into editing, you have a lot more flexibility with editing a RAW photo. You have a lot more detail on the highlights, a lot more detail on the dark areas and you can really edit the photo to your own liking. When you first look at the photos out of camera, the RAW photo might look really gray, really boring, but you could edit that photo to make it look however you want. JPG photos, like I said, they're compressed. They're a smaller file size than the large file sizes of the RAW photos, but they're a little bit more difficult to edit. With that said, I'm not going to tell you to shoot RAW, and I'm not going to tell you to shoot JPG. There's a difference for everybody. RAW photos they take up a lot of space on your phone and that can be difficult. But the good thing about RAW photos is you can edit them in Lightroom mobile. Actually, Lightroom mobile released an update a few years ago so you can edit any RAW photo in Lightroom mobile. That's amazing the fact that you can edit RAW photos on your phone. That was the thing that transformed the mobile editing process to actually be legit, as when you could edit RAW photos on your phone. With that said JPG photos are totally fine, it just depends, do you want to spend more time editing and creating a really epic, beautiful photo? I would go with RAW. If you just want to do some very simple edits and just touch up things like exposure and color, JPG is fine. You're not going to see a massive difference between the two, but I did want to add this section because I think it is important. Now with that said, if you're a mobile shooter, you should be shooting all of your photos through the Lightroom mobile app. The reason for that is because Adobe Lightroom mobile has its own RAW files called the DNG file, so you can capture a RAW photos on your phone, giving you much more flexibility in the editing process and allowing you to create edits that have more detail, or that have more vivid colors and things like that. I highly recommend if you are shooting on your phone, shoot through the Lightroom mobile app because you could shoot in that Adobe DNG RAW file which is amazing in my opinion.
7. Exposure and Emotion: So before we actually go into the editing process and actually editing photos, I want to talk about editing and emotion and how closely related they are. I think this is really important to talk about because when it comes to editing, we can have so much power over photo and we can really change that photo's story or the emotions that that photo convey. So starting off on the top of that, I want to talk about exposure and emotion. When I say exposure, I mean basically how bright or how dark the image is, and this will have a huge impact on the overall mood of your photo. So starting off, let's talk about dark photos and some of the emotions that a dark photo might convey. So I personally love dark style photos. If you guys have seen my Instagram, you've seen my photos they're dark. They're moody. That's the style that I really like, and that's just simply for yes and aesthetic standpoint. I think they look really cool, but also the emotions that they convey are really interesting to me. Some of those emotions that you might see, you might think about when you see a dark photo, might be things like mystery. You know, dark photos. They sometimes they hide information, they conceal information so they're mysterious or their ominous in some way, maybe a little bit scary in some situations. They can be very powerful. You might use the word powerful to describe a dark photo. You might also use the word refined. So darker photos can have a sophisticated or refined looked to them. So you can explain it in that way. You can also use the word intense. You know, if you have a lot of dark areas that can be really intense, or dark photos can also be very sad and very somber, you know, very calm and relaxed. So we're going to talk about how those different emotions change when we get into things like contrast, but contrasts aside right now we're going to get into contrast and a little bit. But just in terms of the photo being overall dark, overall light, those are some of the emotions that you can expect from a darker photo. Now bright photos, on the other hand, are very different in almost opposite from the emotions that you might express from a dark photo. So you might experience things like optimism. So bright photos are very optimistic, they are very upbeat. They make you feel happy, they make you feel good. Airy might be one of those adjectives that you might use to explain a bright photo. Airy means, bright, open, optimistic, ethereal. In some ways, ethereal is a good word. Another, word you might use is gentle, bright photos can be very gentle, very calming, very relaxed. Bright photos can also be sad or somber, just like the dark photos can, bright photos can as well. I think the difference there comes when it gets to things like contrasts. So contrast is what I want to talk about now. So contrast is essentially a differences between the bright areas in your photo and the dark areas in your photo. A dark photo can have both high or low contrast, same with a light photo, it can have both high or low contrast, and that contrast, is going to greatly affect the mood of your image. So if you have a dark image with very low contrast, which means there's not a lot of differences between the dark and the light areas. Maybe the images more gray. That might be a sadder or a somber or a relaxed mood or emotion that that photo gives off. But on the flip side of that, have a dark photo that has very high contrast. You might think of things like refined or polished or intense. High contrast can be an intense look. So some of the words that you might use to describe a high-contrast look. Regardless of whether the image is bright or the image is dark. Some of the adjectives you could use to describe high-contrast images are dramatic, intense, loud, vibrant, punchy, sharp. In short, high-contrast images look good, they stand out, they pop, they're bold, and they can be very powerful images. I think that's one of the reasons why high contrast images are so popular. When done correctly. Using contrast can really, really change the mood of your photo. It can provide a very profound impact on the viewer. With that said, I do want to say that contrast is one of the most abused functions in the editing process when it comes to beginner editors. We're going to talk about contracts later on in this course. But using too much contrast is one of the biggest mistakes I see with young editors. So when it comes to images with low contrast, they might not stand out as much. Low contrast images are usually a little bit more relaxed. They're not so bold, they don't stand out, but don't dismiss them because when used properly, low contrast images can elicit very, very strong emotions within the viewer of your photo. I think some of my favorite photographers of all time have really taken on this low contrast approach. The reason for that is because, good light doesn't need a high-contrast to stand out, you can capture beautiful light and not have it be high-contrast light. Some of the words you might use to describe a low contrast image might be things like subdued, gentle, soft, quiet, muted. There's a lot of different emotions that can come from low contrast images, just like there's a lot of emotions that can come from high-contrast images. That's why I wanted to add this section in the courses to get you to start thinking about how contrast and light in general can really affect the mood in the emotion of your photo. So now that we've talked about light and how that can really affect the mood or the emotion of your photo. Now I want to talk about color in this video. We haven't talked about color at all. We only talked about bright images, dark images, high-contrast and low contrast, right? But none of that has to do with color. So now, in this next video, we're going to dive into color and talk about how color can have a profound impact on the mood or the emotion of your photos as well.
8. Color Theory and Emotion: So now that we have talked about how things like light and exposure in contrast affect the mood and the emotion in your photo. Now I want to turn to color. Color can have profound affects on the mood, the emotion, or the story that your photo is trying to tell. And one of the greatest things about colors that we have complete control over it in Adobe Lightroom, on mobile or on your PC. So we're going to talk about a few different things in this section. We're going to talk about the anatomy of colors. So what are the things that comprise color. That's important because we can actually edit all of those things that comprise color in Adobe Lightroom. So we're going to talk about the anatomy of color; we're going to talk about color harmony; so which colors look good together; and which colors don't look good together. And of course, we're going to talk about how color affects the mood and the emotion of your image. Lastly, I'm going to introduce you to a few really really cool tools that can help you refine your color and really look at the color of other photographers that you really like. Some of the photographers that inspire you, on how to break down their color so you can use similar colors in your photos. Okay so starting off, we're going to talk about the anatomy of a color. The anatomy of a color is very important because actually in Lightroom Mobile, we can control all three aspects of color. Those three aspects are hue, saturation, and luminance. Hue is essentially the actual color, whether that's pink or purple or blue or green, and all of the shades in between, that is hue. Saturation is the purity of the color, so how pure that color is. The pure the color, the more saturated that color is, the more vibrant it looks to our eyes. Right? The less pure, the more closer that color gets to gray, which is the absence of color. So we're talking about saturation a lot in this course, and essentially I'm just referring to the purity of a color. The last aspect of color is luminance, and that essentially is how bright that color is. So the more luminant a color is, the brighter that color is. If it is less luminant then it will be darker. Think about a dark blue versus a light blue. Light blue has very high luminance, but dark blue has very low luminance. Those are the three aspects of color. They all affect emotion in a lot of different ways, but I wanted to talk about this because we can actually edit. Like I said, we can edit all three of these things in Lightroom Mobile, and we're going get into that later on in this course. So the hue of color is very important. I just talked about hue and what hue is. And an easy way to explain hue is to bring up the color wheel. The color wheel has every color that ever exists in the spectrum of colors. Right? You can find any color on the color wheel somewhere. It's hidden in there somewhere. So we're looking at the color wheel. The middle of the color, the exact center of the color wheel is true white. So that is the absence of color, true white. On the outside of the color wheel, we have colors in their purest form, the highest saturation possible. You might be thinking to yourself, Shawn, why are you showing us this color wheel? Well, I'm showing you the color wheel because I think it's a fantastic way to look at color harmony. And color harmony, in short, is basically what colors look good together. There's colors that are harmonious and there's colors that are not harmonious. This is something that I can sit and talk about, but actually, it's much easier for me to show you this. So I'm going to hop on my computer and show you this really cool app called Adobe Color CC. Just kidding, I'm not going to jump on my computer, I'm going to jump on my phone. There is no dedicated app for this. I'm not really sure why, but you can do everything you need to do in the browser here. So just go to color.adobe.com and you're going see this color wheel here. And this color wheel is awesome because it allows us to look at multiple different types of color harmonies, which we can then use in our photos later on. So when he opened it up, you're going to see this color wheel, and you're going to see five boxes, some sliders on the bottom, and then you're going to see these weird like fingers or whatever you'd call them within the color wheel themselves. If you tap this little dot here, the little target on the left, you're going to see a few different color rules and these are essentially different types of color harmonies. So starting at the top, we have analogous. Analogous means, essentially all of the colors that are selected stay a specific distance away from each other. As you can see here, they're all staying no matter where I moved that middle color, they're all staying a specific distance around each other. And this is a really nice color harmony because, it's very naturally occurring. You'll see this in nature a lot. For example, if you look at a field and there's pink flowers, there's going to be a lot of different shades of pink and red and orange and everything is kind of related. So this is a very kind of natural color harmony that we see quite often in nature. You can come up with some really interesting color harmonies here. Going to the next one is monochromatic and monochromatic is essentially just different shades of the same hue. If we get yellow here a different shade of that hue is brown and a darker yellow, kind of greenish, you can see if I scroll that around, what that's going to do to each color. There is different shades of each color, essentially. The next one is triad, and this is basically a triangle creating a triangle around our color wheel here. This can lead to some very vibrant color combinations; very bold, very colorful, and absolutely gorgeous color combinations with this, even if you bring it down in saturation, you still get some really lovely, lovely color combinations here. Like look at this one. It's a very, very nice. Next we have complimentary and this is probably the most common that we see. Complimentary is essentially just different sides of the color wheel. These colors just look awesome together. A really popular one now is blue and yellow or blue and brown. That's a really nice color combination that we're seeing a lot on social media. It's been part of cinema for a very long time. That's a nice color combination. You can get kind of a steam punk cloak with green and our cyber punk with green and pink. A lot of really cool, beautiful color harmonies here with the compound colors, sorry complimentary colors. Next we have compound, and compound is complimentary with added analogous colors as well. So it gets a little bit complicated, but you get basically complimentary colors and analogous color harmonies going on at the same time. That's a really cool one. Shades is basically just different shades of the same colors similar to monotone but a little bit different. Then custom is just whatever you want to do. You can drag the points wherever you want, etc. But the coolest thing about Adobe Color CC is this little camera here in the corner. So if you tap that camera, create from image, you go to a photo library. Then if you select one of your images, let's find a good image to select here or some nice colors going on. We'll select, this one. What it's going to do is it's going to open that image in the app and it's automatically going to select different colors around the image. That's awesome because now we know, what colors we're working with. You can use this with your photos, with other peoples photos. Then if you tap that little target on the left again under save here, you can select different color moods. We're selecting colorful right now. You can select bright and it'll select the brighter colors in the image. Muted will select kind of the de-saturated colors in the image. Deep will select the darker colors, et cetera. Perhaps one of the most important things about this feature is what I'm about to show you now. Once you upload the photo, you click this color wheel back there and it'll take you back to the color wheel. Then you see this color that we have in the middle here, what Adobe refers to as our base color. Well, this is also known as a key color and that is essentially the color that's most prominent in your image. Once you come back to this color wheel and select your base color, well then you can go and select different color harmonies and that base color will stay the same. It will basically give you other colors that are harmonious to that key color in your image. Then you can go in and try to add some of these colors into your image. This is such a cool feature for, learning what colors, will look good with the colors that are already in your image. That it can give you an idea or some inspiration on how to edit that image. I can tell you that this app has been central for me in exploring color, learning more about color, learning more about what colors look good together and color harmonies. Stepping my color game up to the next level. One of the things I also recommend with this is to upload other people's photos. Go ahead and screenshot their photo, upload that photo into the app and then do the same thing, explore the different colors that are in their image. You can do this, especially with photographers that you really like and photographers that you look up to. You can also save these color schemes and you can have them all collected. Or if you just sign in with your Adobe CC account. Another really cool thing about this app is the explore features. If you tap the create button on the top there and then you click explore, Adobe is going to show you a bunch of different color combinations that look really, really cool. They're super inspiring to see because they give you an idea of colors that you can have in your images. I love just looking at these before I go into editing just so I can get an idea of colors that look good together, color harmonies, even if it's at a subconscious level, I know that it's helping me in recognizing the colors in my image and creating something, that is visually appealing not only to me but to other people that are going to be viewing my photo as well. Once again, it's color. adobe.com and It is a resource that I want 100 percent recommend checking out. You don't have to spend too much time on this. I think it's a really great tool for just learning how to navigate color, and understanding color, understanding color harmonies. Just overall improving your editing process in general. Another really cool resource you can use for color inspiration and color navigation is the Pantone app on your smartphone. The Pantone app is amazing and It's so artistic, and it inspires me so much. What you can do is you can go to images here in the Pantone app. Let that load. This will have some of your images here. I'm just going to scroll down and select. I was playing around with it last night. You can see some of my photos here. I'm going select this one. This is a photo I took with my girlfriend. Here we're eating some fried chicken and waffles at this cafe. What it's going to do is just select a different color palette, on the top here. You can see that color. You can actually click on each color and it will show you what that color is. It's really cool and it kind of shows you different color combinations in your image. You can kind of play around with it and get some inspiration here. You can also upload, like I said, other photographers images, and that is a really good place to find inspiration. If you want to learn more about what colors they are using, you can do that. You can click it. You can even see their sRGB code there, so you know exactly what color they're using. I also really like this app because you can use it for inspirations. You go to images. Then you get the top here and you hit Inspiration. It'll show you some really, really cool images with just amazing color. This is one of the reasons why I love the app. It has these beautiful color schemes with color combinations that are accomplishing many different forms of color harmony, complimentary colors, analogous colors, triad, a lot of different really interesting things, like this is a beautiful photo. Look at the colors just spot on. It's totally inspiring to see images like this. Especially right before you go into editing, gives you a lot of different ideas. It can help you in the editing process. I highly recommend checking out this app Pantone. You can do some really cool exports too, where you have this Pantone thing in the middle. It just looks artistic. Check out this app, it's really good for inspiration and finding different color harmonies and just experimenting with different color, when you're editing your own photos. All that stuff aside, color harmony isn't all that. We haven't really talked about color and emotion. That's the whole point of this video, lets talk about color and emotion. I want us to take a little bit to talk about how colors, how they actually make us feel. One of the first people to actually start experimenting with color and start exploring color and how it affects psychology is this guy named Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, I really hope I'm saying that correctly, to all you German people I apologize if I said that incorrectly. Essentially this guy was a German poet, an artist, and a politician who in 1810 he published this work called The Theory of Colors. The most interesting thing about his work, was not the color harmonies that he talked about and things like that. It was the psychology behind the colors and how he depicted each color as to how it made us feel as human beings. His work was really, really interesting. I highly recommend you give that a read. In short, he broke down each color based on how they make us feel. That was kind of the first time where color and psychology came together. Since then, this has become a really popular topic when it comes to color theory and color and emotions. I'm just going to go through each color real quick and give it a really quick break down based on the emotions or adjectives that you might experience when you see that color. Starting things off with red, it's passionate, it's aggressive, It's sexy, it's intense. It can really add a lot of intensity to your photos. It's a really strong, really bold color. Next is orange. It's playful, it's energetic, it's exciting. Orange is a really nice color and the complementary color of orange is blue and that's used in a lot of cinematography so orange is a nice color and it's naturally occurring as well. Next we have yellow, it's happy, friendly, warming, calm. We also use yellow for warning. Caution tape is yellow. That's something to think about, but yellow is generally a softer color. Nice to look at. Warm tones, et cetera. Green is natural, prosperous, trusting. There's a reason why so many companies use Green in their logos or their name is, it's a nice color, it's trusting, it's easy to look at and very natural as well. Blue is serene, trustworthy, inviting, warm. It's a really nice color. It's a lot of people's favorite color for a reason, mine included. Its just a very nice color to look at. Purple is luxurious, mysterious, romantic. It could be elegant. Pink, you might use words like young, innocent, calm, perhaps feminine. It's a gentle color, it's a nice color. Brown is natural, earthy, rustic. This is one of my favorite colors in photos because it's so natural, it's so naturally occurring and you're going to have it in so many of your images. It's just a very nice, comfortable color. Black is powerful, sophisticated, mysterious. It can be scary. Black is technically the absence of color, but it can be used as a tool in your photos to guide people's eyes and really add a lot of emotion in your photos. White might be clean, virtuous, bright, hopeful, happy. It's just a nice color. Actually technically, it's not a color, but it is a nice tone to have in your photos. Then Grey, which is technically once again the absence of color. It's neutral, it's soft, it's gloomy, it's moody. I use a lot of grays in my photos because I think it can add a lot of emotion in the photos. It's just one of my favorite colors to use. In short, each color has very specific emotions that elicits when we see it. Something to think about, is color is on a spectrum. It's very difficult to achieve pure orange and pure blue. You're going to have colors that are in between those. It's very much on a spectrum, that color wheel. There's billions of colors in that color wheel. Finding the right tunes, the right balance between, say, red and blue will give you a violet that elicits a very specific emotion. It's, really interesting to think about color and emotion. I want you to think about it as we're going forward. When you're editing your photos. Think about the colors that are in your images. How you might be able to change them to elicit different emotions, different feelings within the viewer of your photo.
9. Storytelling and Editing: So now that we've talked about exposure, lights and color and how those things affect the emotion of your photo, I want to talk about how those things affect the story of your photo and what story that image is trying to tell. Essentially the thought processes that people go through, when they see that image. When it comes to photography, a lot of the storytelling is going to come from the actual content in the image. If there's a person in the image, that's going to tell a much different story than if there is no person in the image. The content of the photo, has a lot to do with the story. This is a course on editing, so we're not talking about the content of the photo, we're talking about, the editing of the photo. In order for me to best explain how editing can greatly impact the story of your photo, I want you to take a look at these two photos here next to each other. In this photo we have a girl or running in the forest. She might be running away from something or maybe she's running towards something depending on how you imagine it. On the left here we have a really dark image, a lot of deep colors, a lot of deep tones. On the right we have this bright and airy color image. When I look at these two images next to each other, I see a very different story here. Like I said, on the left I see maybe she's running from something, but on the right, I see maybe she's running towards something. It's a completely different story. This is just one example. You can do this with any photo. You can take any of your photos, and you can edit them in two different ways or three different ways, or 10 different ways. This is something I often do. I create many different versions of one photo, and I look at them and I think about how they make me feel. What story are they telling us, unknown to people that I know, people that I care about and I ask them what they think. That is a really good way to see, the thought processes behind your photo. The thought processes that people go through, and the stories that they might think about when they see that photo. Storytelling, a lot of it is the content of the photo, but you can drastically change the story based on the edits,in post-production.
10. Editing Styles: Now I want to talk about editing styles and you might be thinking Sean , there's like a bajillion editing styles we just looked at, Adobe Color CC. and you could see how all those different color combinations, I mean, the possibilities are endless. Yes, but in my opinion, there's two main categories of editing styles. There's realism and there is stylized. So realism is basically trying to capture the most realistic look as possible. So capturing colors that are most closely related to reality and same with light. So it's maintaining the true nature of when that picture was took. This is popular with photo journalists or people that are trying to capture things as realistic as possible. Whereas the other side of things is a stylized looks that's using colors that maybe aren't that natural, but you're using those colors because you want to have a photo that maybe sparks a different emotion, or is aesthetically pleasing in its own way, so a lot of photographers kind of find a balance between the two. They might go for a stylized look that's stylized but not overly stylized. So they are still using colors that are somewhat natural and maybe in some situations they might appear that way in nature, but most of the time they don't and some photographers you know they like to go for on realistic and they just tried to keep the colors as natural as possible. Personally, I think the stylized look is really cool, but at the same time, I don't like to stray too far from reality and make it look too foreign but you can get some really, really cool looks when it comes to the stylized edits. Some popular ones that are going around online right now are the CN or blue and orange look. There's also the CN and pink or green and pink, these are colors that aren't very natural. They don't actually occur that often. Maybe in cities they do, but for the most part, they're not naturally occurring colors but that doesn't mean they don't look cool, and that doesn't mean they don't look good in images. So i just want you to think about where do you fit in, are you going for more realistic look, are you going for an overly stylized look, are you trying to find something in the middle? I think it's important to look at painters in the past. A lot of them were divided. A lot of them wanted to do realism, ultra realism. They thought that true talent belonged in realism where other painters and other artists thought that it doesn't matter if it's realistic. It's about the aesthetic beauty of the image of the painting, of the photo so where do you fit in there? Are you more interested in the stylized look or a realistic look? That's something I want you to think about as you go on, because that's an important step in finding your own unique style is to kind of find where you fit in on that spectrum of realism versus stylized.
11. Editing, the Right and the Wrong: So the title of this video is, editing the right and the wrong. So things that are right in editing and things that are wrong in editing. Actually the title is kind of a trick question. There is no right or wrong in editing. That's the purpose of this video is to explain that however you edit your photo is 100 percent okay. As long as you can explain why you edited it that way. Or maybe you can't explain why you edited it that way, but you were just inclined to edit the photo that way, that's okay. There's no right and no wrong when it comes to photo editing. If you want to pursue a realistic look, that's great, if you want to pursue an overly stylized look with insane saturation and just super unnatural colors, that's also okay. At the end of the day, editing is an artistic process and no matter how you edit your photos, you are not wrong. Certain edits might look better to the majority of people out there, but that doesn't mean that if you don't edit for the masses, that your photo is wrong. Just think about that moving forward, no matter what you do, it's totally fine. Don't worry about being right or wrong, just worry about creating something that's beautiful and something that you care about.
12. Finding your Editing Style: Alright, in this video, I want to talk about a few things you can do to find your own unique editing style. And these are three tips that I've come across throughout my time editing. These two things have really helped me find my own editing style throughout my years as a photographer. So the first one is something I talk about in every single one of my courses and that's find inspiration. So go on websites like Pinterest, go onto websites like Instagram or apps like Instagram and just search for things that are beautiful to you, things that you like, and look at them with a keen eye. Open them up, look at the colors, look at the exposure and try to figure out how that photo was edited. Are the colors natural, did the photographer do much editing at all? Think about these things and look at photos that you really love and think about them with a critical eye. You can also take those photos like I said, and open them up in programs like Pantone, that really awesome app, or in Adobe Color CC, and look at the colors that they're using and then take a keen eye and look at the exposure. Is it bright, dark, et cetera. That's a great way to start to learn more about the editing process. The second tip I have is to mimic. A lot of photography teachers will tell you, no don't copy others. But in my opinion, I think copying others is the best way to learn. You're doing something that works and you're experimenting with it, you're trying and you're failing, and you're just learning the process. I don't think there's anything wrong with mimicking other photographers. Because as you mimic, you're going to learn so much, you're going to copy other photographers, you're going to learn and then over time your style is going to adapt and change. When I first started as a photographer, I didn't have my own style. I didn't know what I was doing. I just knew that there were photos out there that looked good to me and I wanted to create photos like that. So I tried to, and I copied them. A lot of the shots that I took are similar, so I would go out and similar lighting conditions and try to capture the same shot and I can tell you that I've learned so much doing this,so, so much. And my style over time, became very very unique. So I don't think there's anything wrong with finding photographers that you like, photographers that you look up to and trying your best to mimic their work, because over time you're going to find your own style there. So say you find a photo, go out and try to shoot a very similar photo, and then go into editing and try to edit a similar photo, try to do a similar edit. You're going to learn so much throughout this process. The last tip I have is just to edit. You're not going to get better unless you're editing often, you should be editing as much as you can. Take one photo, edit it ten different ways with ten different color combinations and ask your friends which ones they like. Over time, you'll learn what other people like, you'll learn what you like and you can kind of combine those two things into your own specific style. If you don't have photos right now, you don't have to be a photographer to be an epic editor. In fact, you can edit other people's photos. There's this really awesome website called Wesaturate. It has a tone of different raw photos that you can download and actually edit. So you can download these photos, import them into Lightroom Mobile, and you can edit them on your phone to get your own unique look on that photo. What's really cool about Wesaturate is that for some of the images, they provide the raw photo and then they provide the edited photo that the photographer edited too. So the JPEG based on the photographers edits. So you can download that raw photo and then look at their edit, and try to match their edit and see if you can achieve the same kind of stylized look. That's a fantastic way to learn editing and I highly recommend checking that website out. It's called the wesaturate.com. So those are just a few tips. But at the end of the day, it's just going to come with trial and failure. Like everything you do in life, the more you do it, the better you'll get at it. So just continue to practice, edit as much as you can, try to experiment with different styles and I promise you in time you're going to find your own unique editing style. Took me a few years, but now I'm very happy with my style. But at the same time it's also continuing to change. So it's a continuous process. You're just going to keep getting better and I wish you the best of luck in finding your own style. But with that said, let's move on to the next section.
13. The Best Editing Apps: We've talked about a lot of different things up to this point in this course, all related to the back-end of editing an emotion and styles, and things like that. But we're almost ready to start actually editing in Adobe Lightroom Mobile. But before we do that, I want to talk about a few different apps that simplify the editing process. Of course, this course is focused around the king of all mobile editing apps, Lightroom Mobile, but there are some other apps that I also really like that you can use before you edit your photos in Lightroom Mobile, specifically if you're shooting with JPEG and non-raw photos. These apps have some really cool filters that I think look really good and give you a decent color based to play on later when you're editing in Lightroom Mobile. Let's check out some of those now. The first one I really like is VSCO, and you guys have probably heard me talk about this in my other courses. If you've seen some of my other courses, VSCO is an amazing app that has some really awesome filters. I love this app simply because the filters in it are really freaking cool. I specifically love A6. A6 looks really good. It has some muted colors, and it just looks really interesting to me, so I'll use that quite often before I even import a photo into Lightroom Mobile or after if I want to get that A6 effect, I'll implement it into my editing process. VSCO, a really cool app. You guys can play around with these different filters but it actually gives you a really good starting points, so you can expand in Lightroom Mobile. You can actually edit in this app as well, but I find the features are just limited compared to Lightroom Mobile, so what I'll do is, I'll save the photo with the filter I like. I'll export it, save it to camera roll, save it for full size and then I'll open that up in Lightroom Mobile and make changes, which we'll get into. Another really good app with some cool filters is snapseed, so you can check that out. There's some cool filters in there that will also give you a good starting point. You can build on them in Lightroom Mobile. Also, RNI films is an app that I really like simply because it has a really cold dust and grain filter, which I think is actually better than the filters in Lightroom Mobile. We're going to talk about those, but I think if you want to add some some cool vintage dust and grain, some texture to your photos, RNI film is an awesome app for that. Adobe Photoshop fix is another app that I recommended. I'm actually going to be using a little bit in the editing section of this course simply because I think that Adobe Photoshop fixes really good when it comes to cleaning blemishes on skin, cleaning up skin a little bit. I'm going to pair this really well with Lightroom Mobile because they're both made by Adobe. You can just like open the image in Photoshop fix, and then open it right back up into Lightroom. It's super clean, super efficient, and it's really good for editing things like skin but that's pretty much it. Those are just some apps that I think are really cool. But now, it's time to really dive into the king of all mobile editing apps. Adobe Lightroom, Mobile CC. We're going to go through it, break each section down, and really dive into the nitty-gritty of how to use it, how to get the look that you want, and basically just how to navigate the software so you can become better editor in general. Let's go.
14. Lightroom Mobile CC Overview: Alright now it's time to start talking about the king of all mobile editing apps, Adobe Lightroom Mobile CC. It's an amazing app that has almost all of the same functionalities that you get on the desktop version of the app. So one thing I do want to note is there is a premium version of Lightroom Mobile CC. It's actually called Lightroom CC. There's actually no mobile, but it's much easier to just call it Lightroom Mobile CC, but there is a premium version and for $10 a month, you get access to a few more features including specialized, specific edits of different parts of the image. You get a one terabyte of cloud storage. You can sync your profile and your presets over, and then a few other features as well. It's something I recommend. It's very easy to sync photos over from Lightroom on your computer to your phone and it's just a flawless process. It's really awesome. Highly recommend checking that out. If you guys don't have premium yet and you're interested in trying it, you can get a seven day free trial. I'll add a link in the description of this video or of this course, you guys can check that out. Like I said, I highly recommend it. And as I'm going through and explaining Lightroom Mobile CC, I am going to be mentioning and using some of those premium features. If you don't have the premium version, it doesn't matter, you can just ignore those. There's only a few, so it's not that big of a deal. You can still get amazing edits just on the free version so you don't need the premium version. But with that said, I want to dive in and just kind of go over the app and just kind of break down the different parts of the app. So let's do that now. So when you first open the app, this is where you're going to see. You're going to see basically the library. That's what those three little books are in the left-hand corner of the screen. Upper left-hand corner. So you have all photos here, Lightroom camera photos, etcetera. So I organize my photos and albums and that's what you can see here. And you can actually see this number on day two, Indonesia slowly going up because I'm actively seeking photos from the desktop version of Lightroom over to my mobile phone as we speak. That's why that number is changing here. But this is basically the library you can click here and see all your photos in there which you can import into Lightroom. Up here on the right hand corner you have settings here, just some some basic settings. You have the sinking, that's what the little cloud is. So right now, you know, it says it's synced backed up. So I've synced all my photos and you can also search. You can search through your photos there. Kind of a cool feature. But I organize mine in albums here. So let's go to 2019. Let's go to February 2019. And you can see I have two albums here already. Trip to Chiang Dao, which is up in Northern Thailand. And then I had a little breakfast shoot here, so that about 30 photos in there. What's cool is you can just create another album. So you can create an album here. Test album. So if there's a test album, I can click that album and then I have the option to add photos just by clicking that little photo with the plus sign at the bottom right-hand corner, I can go from camera roll and then I can add any of these photos. So I can add this photo was already in Lightroom, but I just want to use as an example. And then if you wanted to, if you were going to shoot, you wanted to shoot with a raw photo. You just click the little camera down there and it opens up into a camera and you can go around and take raw photos. And actually there's a few different functions here. High dynamic range, professional, automatic. The high dynamic range is cool because you get a lot of detail on the highlights, a lot of detail in the shadows. But that aside, in this album area, you have a few different things. You have your settings, you have a filter, so you can filter based on how you sorted your photos in the past. And we're going to get into that there's a cloud and then once again, there's a search function. So let's go back to an album where actually have some photos here. It's my breakfast album. And I'll click on the first photo here. And you can see a few things which is the photo information to left, and then you can see the date and the time it was shot, as well as the name. If I swipe right, I see all the photos from that day. Let me go back to the beginning here. Now you see all these editing functions on the bottom. We're going to get to that. But first, I want to talk about organization. And this is very, very important and I'm going to explain this later. But if you click here, edit the little arrow. There's a few things. Rate review, activity, keywords, and info. I don't really focus on info keywords or activity. It's kind of irrelevant for most situations, but rating and reviewing is very, very important for staying organized. One of the cool things about Lightroom is you can easily organize your photos. So here I have the [inaudible] opened in the review section now, and as I scroll, I have this star thing here. So if I like a photo, I can go ahead and tap these 5-stars and then I can read it based on how much I like it. Usually I just do five. I don't mess with doing one or two or I always just if I like it, I make it five. You can also flag it. You really like it, you want to flag it. Then you just keep scrolling and do that for all the photos you really like after you've done that, after you've done the review and you've gone through and done that with all your photos, you can go back to the main page. You can hit this little filter on the top, and then you can sort by photos that have five-stars. So then you don't have to look at all the other photos that you didn't like, you only see the photos that you really like, which is a really, really cool feature. And that's one of the things I love about Lightroom Mobile. Okay. Now once you open up a photo, you're going to be once again back on that Editing Tab and you're going to see a bunch of different icons on the bottom here. And I do want to kind of go through them and give you a general overview of them. We are going to get more detail on them later on in this course, but I do want to give you a general overview of the different sections, the different tabs. So starting out on the left, we have our selective edits. This is a premium feature. So you can tap here, you can do different selective edits of the photo. So if you want to just say you want to make that one tomato stand out, you can do that with this. Healing is also a premium feature. This is good for cleaning of skin. Once again, I'll show you how to use this later on. We have crop, so this is how you can crop and arrange photos profiles so you can change the color profiles, which is a pretty cool feature. Auto adjustment, which I never use and I don't recommend you use it either. We're going to do things manually in this course. And then we have light and this is where we adjust exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, blacks and whites. Once again, I'm going to dive into each of these features once we get into the editing, but I'm just outlining things here. And then once again, we have the tone curve, which is awesome for making very cool edits, the tones, the colors, everything's like that. And we have the color tab where we have the temperature of the photo, tint, things like that. And then we can get into the color mix. We have an Effects tab where we can mess with clarity. And a lot of other really interesting features that add texture and detail to the photo. Detail as well. So things like sharpening, noise reduction, optics, something I don't use too much, but it's there essentially just, you can change, you can fix, correct your lenses if there's chromatic aberration, things like that. We'll talk about that more later on. Geometry. So, you know, adjusting distortion. And then we have presets. So Lightroom presets that you can add. And then previous basically just allows you to apply edits from previous photos and then you can reset. So that's basically all of Lightroom, all the editing features. Once you want to export, you just hit this little Save button up top here and you can save to camera roll or you can share it. The maximum that you can share it directly to things like Instagram or other apps that you might have. So this was just kind of a rough overview of the different tabs, different features in Lightroom. But we're going to get really into them in a few lessons here. But first I want to talk about the editing process. So the process that you go through when you edit a photo. So let's go do that now.
15. Lightroom Mobile CC Editing Workflow: So when it comes to editing in Lightroom Mobile, I think it's important to have a process that you follow, a progression of editing for each photo. The reason why that's important is because it allows you to stay organized, it allows you to accomplish everything you want to accomplish with your edit without leaving anything out or going out of order or anything like that. It's really good and it helps you maintain your efficiency and just create better edits in general. So there's a process that I follow and I think it's pretty effective. So the first thing you're going do is import the photo. Like I said in the last section, importing is really important. You're going to import your photos, keep them organized, and you're going go through and sort them. So like I did with the breakfast menu, I went through and I was sorting the different images, selecting the ones that I really liked and ignoring the ones that I didn't like. And then what you're going to do is you're going to prep the photo. And when you prep the photo, you're going be doing things like cropping the photo, maybe removing blemishes. Just some really simple kind of pre-edits just to make sure you're ready to get going and ready to start editing, doing the more major edits like exposure and color and things like that. So after you prep the photo, you're going move on. You're going to edit exposure. So you're going to be adjusting the exposure, the lighting, the contrast, the highlights, the shadows all of that. That's the next step. After you adjust exposure, it's time to move on to the color. And adjusting the color and really playing with the color and finding the colors that you really like and messing around with them there. One thing to note is when you are editing colors is going to affect your exposure as well. So you can kind of go back adjust the exposure, go back adjust the color, go back adjust the exposure. So these two things you're going to be editing quite a bit, exposure and color. Those two things are relevant to each other in many ways. After you edit the color and you think you're exposure is and a good place, you can move over to effects and details or you can add things like vignetting, clarity, sharpening. If you want to add some noise grain, you can do things like that. So it just adding some extra effects to enhance the mood of the photo. After that, you're going do some selective edit. So maybe adding gradient filters, burning and dodging things like that. In short, you're just going to be fine tuning the photo before you post it. So making sure everything is perfect before you go on and post it. So now that we've gone through the editing progression, it's time to really dive into each one of these sections and talk about them in depth. And in this next part of the course, I'm going to be diving into each one, talking about all the different sliders, what they mean, what they do, how they affect your photo, how they affect your edit, how they affect each other. So we're going to get really in detail here. And I'm going to take it one step at a time. So we're starting off with importing and we're going move on to prepping your photo, exposure, color, et cetera. So pay attention here there's a lot of really great information here that you can pick up on when it comes to editing photos were going to really dive into Lightroom Mobile and just get into it. So let's go do that now.
16. Getting Photos to your Phone and Importing into Lightroom Mobile: So the first step when it comes to editing in Lightroom is to get your photos in Lightroom. There's a few different ways to do this. Obviously, if you're shooting on your phone, it's going to be very easy to just import the photos into Lightroom because you're already going to have the photos on your phone. But if you're like me, and you're shooting with a DSLR or a mirrorless camera, and you have a separate camera, you want to get the photo's to your phone. There's a few different ways you can do that. Most cameras nowadays, newer cameras have Wi-Fi where you can automatically send your photos directly from your camera to your phone. So I use a Sony A7III. It has a Wi-Fi feature, so I can very easily just send the photos from my camera to my phone, I have them there. And then once they're on my phone, I easily just import them into Lightroom and I have them. I always make sure that I keep them into very specific albums. So if I go out and I go cafe hopping on, on February 3rd, I make sure that when I upload those photos in Lightroom there in a folder called February 3rd cafe hopping. So it's nice and organized and I know where to find my photos once they're in Lightroom. PS, you can send them directly from your camera to your phone, if you have a newer camera, if you have an iPhone, Apple sells a dongle where you can actually plug your SD card into your phone. I think they have similar dongles for Samsung or android phones as well. So you don't have to have an iPhone to do that. But essentially you just upload your photos directly from your SD card to your phone, which is pretty cool and that saves you a lot of time as well. The last way to do it, and this is where I do quite a bit, is I actually upload my photos onto my computer first, and then I add them to a collection. Then I sync them over via Lightroom CC Creative Cloud. You do have to have the premium version to do this, which I said is like $10 a month. But it is awesome. What I do is I'll go out or go on a shoot. I'll take like a 1000 photos, and that's just too many to send directly to my phone. So what I'll do is upload them to Light room on my computer. Then you can create a collection. Then once you create a collection, you can sync that collection and that will sync directly to your Lightroom Mobile CC. Then that current collection shows up in your Lightroom Mobile, and you can have all of those photos there ready to edit. One of the cool things is if you edit one of the photos, all those edits transfer over platforms. So if you edit it on your phone, you make edits and then you open it up on your computer those edits will be there. You can actually edit it on your computer. Then those edits once again, will show up on your mobile device. It's really, really cool, I really love that feature. So those are the three ways to do it. Just to recap, you can send them directly from your camera to your phone via Wi-Fi, f your camera has that feature. You can use a manual dongle to plug your SD card directly into your phone and upload them that way. Or you can use the Adobe Creative Cloud feature, which is my favorite. It automatically syncs the photos over from your computer to your phone and back and forth. Those are the three ways to get photos to Lightroom. With that said, let's move on to the next section, prepping the photo for edits.
17. Prepping the Photo: Alright, now that we have imported our photos, we have them in Lightroom. Now it's time to start editing and the first thing we're going to do is prep the photo for the bigger edits. So when I say, prep the photo, I mean just do a basic, smaller edit just to get it ready for the larger edits like exposure and color and things like that. So the first thing we're going to do is crop your photo. So I open it up here. I hit crop here on the left and then I can adjust it. I've already cropped it here and I've cropped it basically to match the horizon line. I want to keep the horizon even so, crop it like that. Nice and easy. And then another thing I'll do is I'll scroll over here to optics, and then I'll remove chromatic aberration and sometimes enable lens correction. Chromatic aberration is basically when you have a really highlighted area next to a really dark area - so a high-contrast area. You might get some weird color fringing. You can see this purple tint here in the middle in her armpit on her shoulders. Removing chromatic aberration just removes a little bit of that, not a whole lot but most modern lenses you're going to be okay, but some of the older lenses you're going to get a lot of chromatic aberration. Lens correction just basically removes the lens distortion if you're shooting with a wide angle or vignetting. In this case, I was shooting with a 35, 1.4. So we have some vignetting, which basically means some darker areas are on the corner of the image and you can enable that to reduce it. But I'm going to leave it. I liked the vignetting. You can also mess with geometry but if I'm being honest, I've never messed with geometry before. Another thing you can do is hit healing and if you're doing a portrait, you can adjust some blemishes on the face. You can tap and hold the top circle here and then scroll up and down, that will adjust the size and then you can just paint over blemishes or areas that you want to fix and that would just reduce them, get rid of them. You can also do that with dust as well. If you have dust in your image, you can find the dust, use the healing tool, and get rid of it. But essentially, that's all you got to do for prepping the photo and now it's time to get into some of the more sexy edits like exposure. So let's go do that now.
18. Editing Exposure and Tone-Curve: Alright guys, so now it's time to dive into some of the bigger edits, starting off with exposure I strains to this photo because I think this photo is a photo that better exemplifies some of the settings we have here in Light room Mobile. So this is a photo I took in Japan at 35 millimeter F-1 0.4, at a faster shutter speed to freeze that water. Super cool image In this section we're going to talk about lighting and exposure and as I stated before, you adjust the exposure of a photo via the light tab in Light room Mobile. So when you open up the light tab, you have a few different things. You have the Exposure Slider. So the Exposure Slider is going to basically adjust the overall exposure of the image. Let's say you took a photo and it was a little bit too dark well, you can just simply go in here and raise the exposure a little bit for this photo. Believe it or not, I like the exposures simply because I liked my photos dark, but I am going to bring it up a little bit here. The Exposure Slider is something you might come back to later on as you're continuously editing the image, you might continuously come back to the sliders here. Contrast is essentially going to increase the differences between the dark areas and light areas your photo. So it's going to put more blacks into the dark areas, is going to put more whites into the white areas This is a great slider, but I actually like to do my contrast adjustments manually using the white and black sliders. We'll get to here in a few minutes. Now we have the highlights and the shadows sliders. The highlights are basically going to effect the brightest areas of the image. For example, here we see on the top of this water pipe that's a bright area. If I increase the highlights here, It's going to increase that area more saying within the water, if I bring that down to kind of pull out more detail in those areas. So a lot of people will tell you to drop the highlights in an image to pull out the detail and that's something I often do as well to soften the image and this image, I am going to bring it down just a tad. Shadows is going do the opposite of highlights, is going to affect the darkest areas of the image. So you can see here, if I bring this up, it's going to pull out a lot of detail in the shadows area, so you have a lot of different information to work with. Whereas if you bring it down, it's going to really crush those shadowed areas. In this image, I'm going to bring it up a little bit to plot some detailed because I am going to crush that detail later in the blacks. So the whites and blacks are essentially only affecting the white and black areas of your photo. Basically areas that are technically devoid of any information Because if you have true white, there is no information in that area. Same with too black. If you have too black, there's no information in that area A lot of photographers will tell you you don't lose any information in your highlights or your blocks. But if you look back at one of the most famous photographers of all time, Adams, he said that an image must have areas that are devoid of detail in the highlights and the shadows in the whites and blacks That will create a level of contrast. That's just very aesthetic to your viewers. If you look at his photos, you'll see that the high contrast look and I totally believe that having those areas that are devoid of any detail in the whites and the blacks adds a level of aesthetics that can't really be matched. So I like to increase my whites to a level where we are losing some information in those white areas and the way you can know that on Light room Mobile is if you slide it with your right thumb and then you tap and hold the screen with your left thumb and slide, You'll see this. This is essentially telling you which areas are devoid of detail, which basically are true whites. So we have, the further we slide, the more what we get You can see there on the top of that pipe, we're actually losing detail there. So I'm going to go just maybe here not to much. You don't want to go too much because then you have too many areas of the photo that are completely devoid of detail and you don't really want that. So just a little bit and then we can do the same thing on the blacks. We slide those blacks down and you can see what's going to happen if we basically slide it all the way We're just going to go a little bit just so we lose a little bit of detail and stop there. I like to really crush my blacks because I'm going to soften them later in the tone curve, but that's a good adjustment there. So a lot of people ask me, [inaudible] what are the differences between the highlights and the whites and the shadows and the blacks? Well, they're very similar but basically, one thing you should know is the highlights and the shadows are orbiting effect the brightest and darkest areas of image, Whereas the whites and the blacks are going to affect all of the areas of the image that have either black or white pixels. So those are going to have a much more dramatic effect on your photo, the white and black sliders. So that's something to think about. But once you make these basic exposure adjustments here, we're going to move on to the Tone Curve and the tone curve is something that is difficult for a lot of people to understand. It's essentially dictating all the tones of your image It can have a profound effect on not only things like exposure in contrast, and how soft or how faddish your images is, but also a colors as well. So when you open up the tone curve, you see a few things. You'll see this RGB, the red, green, and blue it looks like a Google Chrome symbol down here and essentially that is going to affect every pixel in your image. So pixel is comprised of three different colors, red, green, and blue and when you're adjusting the photo on the tone curve, you can isolate those colors as you see here, red, green, and blue, those separate pixels or you can adjust them altogether. For most photos, you're going to just adjust them altogether because that's going to dictate the tones without adjusting the colors of the image but if you do want to dive into the colors, you can get some absolutely amazing color combinations that you can't get with the HSL sliders, which we'll get to later. But following a basic progression for the tone curve in the general RGB, when we are adjusting all of the colors here, I'd like to create three different points and create a basic S curve This is really popular with a lot of editors. This is what they do. One of the first things I'll do is drag this down a little bit What that's going to do is darken the image, darken those blacks a little bit and I'm going to do the same thing on the top. It's going to create a lot of contrasts. You don't have to do it that much because this does greatly affect your photo. Next thing I'm going to do is grab that bottom point and drag that up and watch how it's softening out the blacks, just soften and everything up and making it nice and easy to look at. I love this adjustment and I do this with all of my photos because I like to have my blacks kind of nice and soft. We'd still have areas that are devoid of detail, but we're soft sitting it out and making it easier on the eyes and you can do the same thing with the highlights if you so choose but we don't have too many highlighted areas in this image, so I'm just going to leave it. You can also adjust the contrast of the image once you have these points set by dragging this middle point up and down, that's going to affect their contrast. So if you want to soften things up more, you can just bring that down. If you want to have more contrast, you can bring it up. We're just going to leave it right here in the middle and moving on to the various color rooms here. So as I said before, if you would make adjustments, who you're making adjustments to, separate parts of each pixel. So if we add these points in the red space here, you can see what's going to happen if I drag a point here. So on the bottom left we're affecting basically the shadows of the image. If I drag it up, we're going to put more reds, or in this case browns, because we have a lot of browns in the image into the shadowed areas of the image. If I drag out the other way, it's going to put the complimentary color of red or brown in the image, which in this case is blue. It's going to add blue into the shadows. If I do the same thing on the top, if I drag it up, it's going to add blue to the highlights, if I drag it down is going to add a red to the highlights and actually I think this looks really cool with a little bit of blue in the highlights. If you guys have seen a lot of my cafe photos, this is something I do with a whole lot of my images. I like to add some deeper blue tones into my images because I think it just adds a level of color depth that can't be matched. You can go ahead and play with the other sliders too, you can come up with some really cool color combinations by messing with these RGB sliders here Just note that even just moving it a little bit can have profound effects on the overall color of your image. So I'm only going to adjust this red one here because that's at a point where I like it but that's essentially how you would edit the exposure of the image and this is what you're going to do before you edit the color of the image, right? I know the tone curve does actually have some profound effects on color, but you can't isolate color in the tone curve like you can with the color adjustments. So let's move on and adjust color next.
19. Editing Color: I'm moving on and editing colors now. You're going to edit color with the color part here in Lightroom Mobile. Once you open up color, you're going to see a few different things. You are going to see black and white on the left. If you tap that, you can make your photo black and white. You have the color mix on the right. You have the white balance. White balance is essentially how your editing software or your camera understands true white. Our eyes naturally can understand true white no matter what lighting scenario you're in. If you're outside, if you see white and it's under the sun, it's going to look white. If you're indoors, something white is going to look white. But cameras can't emulate that process like our brains can. You actually have to set the white balance, so that editing software or the camera understands what true white is. Actually, you can be really creative with this, you don't have to have a true white in your image. You can create an unbalanced, so you have more warmer tones, or more bluer tones in your image as a stylized look. The white balance drop-down menu here has a bunch of different white balance setting usually you can choose. These are great because these are essentially settings that you're in your camera. But if you're shooting with auto, it'll automatically choose one of these. I'm going to go with daylight, because I think daylight looks really good, then you can go ahead and adjust this. In this photo, it's not too big of an issue. But if you have a photo where there's a lot of white in the image, or you're shooting where there's both natural light and artificial light in the image, you'll have to play around with these a little bit more to make it look more natural. But in this situation, the adjustments are pretty simple. Moving down we have tint, that's also a part of white balance here, you can drag it to the left or the right. I just going to leave it normal, so I'm going to double tap that and bring it back to where it was, which was at 10. That's good enough. Then moving down, the vibrance and saturation sliders are going to affect the overall colors in the image. Vibrance is going to affect the more muted areas of your image, so colors that aren't so bold, and saturation is going to affect all of the colors in your image, all of the hues in your image. I actually edit these later on in the editing process after I've gone through and honed in the colors where I want them. You can do that by going to the color mix here. The color mix essentially allows you to edit all three of those aspects of color that we discussed earlier on in this course, hue, saturation, and luminance, and you can do it for all of these different colors, which is super cool. If I click red and I adjust the hue for red, we don't have a lot of reds in this image as you can see, so it's not going to do too much. But if we click yellow and I adjust that, you can see what it's just doing to the yellows there. They're going more towards orange here and then back this where they're going green. Same with the green, you can see what that's doing there. One of the cool features is, if you tap this little icon here at the top, that one, you can adjust the colors by selecting a different part of the image. For example, if I click hue here and then I tap back here. If I slide up, it's going to adjust the colors that are in that area. Same if I slide down, it's going to change the hues. That's actually not making that much of a change in the image and that's simply because there's not a lot of color back there. To us, it looks like there's a bluish color back there, but actually, that gravel is gray and we added that color in the tone curve, that bluish color in the tone group, if you remember in the exposure section. That's not adding that much detail enough. In fact, the colors of this image, they are in a place where I really like them. But if you have an image which the images we're going to be editing later on in this course are going to have a lot of different colors, that we're going to be editing and honing in to get the right color that we like. You're going to see some heavy adjustments in this HSL section. But in this image, we don't have that many adjustments to make except for this orange and yellow, which I do want to get an a place that I really like. We have a lot of blues in this image and we know that the complementary color to blue is orange. If I drag this hue slider over from right to left, it's going to make those yellows more orange, which is the complementary color to blue, it's going to look better to our eyes. Then I can also go ahead and adjust the luminance, which is the brightness value of that color just to make it stand out a little bit more. You can do that for different colors as well, you can adjust the luminance. Not all the images are going to have all of the same colors. This image doesn't have a lot of colors in it, believe it or not, it just has that yellow, but we did add that blue, which makes it look more complimentary. If I tap there's the before and we do see some greens, but it looks almost monotone. After, you can see how we added those deep blues in the image and it looks really cool. But I just wanted to go over the color editing section, including the white balance in this image. But as we get into future images, you're going to see some pretty heavy color manipulation. But with that said, let's move on to the next section, we're going to be editing detail. Let's go.
20. Effects and Details: Now it's time to edit the effects and the detail of the image. If we hop into the effects tab here, there's a few different effects that you should know about. Clarity is an awesome slider, but probably one of the most heavily abused sliders that you have in LightRoom next to contrast. Clarity is basically going to affect contrast on the minute level, so it's going to really, really sharpen the image and add a ton of detail. When I first started out as a photographer using Photoshop and LightRoom, I can tell you that I used this slider so much because it looks cool, it looks different. But as I've grown as a photographer, I use it less and less, and then in some images, I actually bring it down. In this image, I think because it's such a simple image, we can drag it up a little bit, so maybe just like 10, not too much, just to add that extra level of detail, extra level of texture in the image. The dehaze slider is going to do exactly what it says. It's going to dehaze the image, it's going to get rid of the haze, and then if I drag it to the left, it is going to increase the haze so I'm going to soften things out. It looks very, very ethereal if I drag that down, but actually, I'm going to leave it right where it is. That's not something I want to affect too much. Vignetting is a really cool feature, and this mimics older lenses where you have this black coming in on the edges. You can also do the other way, but that is something I'm just not a huge fan of. That's subjective of course, but something that in my opinion doesn't look very good, so I do like to add some black vignette because it does look natural, and then you can go ahead and change the midpoint. This is going to basically change how far in that vignetting is going, so if you really want to isolate your subject in the middle of the image, you can drag this down, but I'm going to leave it right where it's at. I'm not going to add to much of vignetting because we already have so much vignetting in this image; it's already a very dark image. Adjusting the feather will basically adjust how soft that vignetting is, so if you bring it all the way to zero and then you bring the vignette down, it's a very hard lines, you can see there's very hard lines around the edges there so I think having a lot of feather just looks good. Same with the roundness. This is going to affect basically the roundness of the corners. You can see how that's adjusting there. If I'm being honest, I will not play with these too much. These are adjustments that I just don't usually make. Highlights is basically going to effect the highlighted areas within that vignette. Moving down, we have grain and grain is essentially going to add grain to your photo, which mimics a higher ISO look. A lot of photographers, they would try to avoid as much grain as possible, like shooting at the lowest ISO as possible, etc. But if you look at older images, they have natural film grain in them and they look really, really cool, and I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of photographers nowadays are adding grain into the photo, just adding texture, adding detail, and bringing things back to a more classic look. So you can do that here. If your slide this up, then you can adjust the size of the grain with this slider and you can adjust the roughness of the grain with this slider so you can really get some serious grain going on. I think the grain's sliders in RNI films are better, and after we adjust detail here, I'm going to save the photo, open it up into RNI films, and edit that grain in a separate app. Let's move on to detail here. Essentially, this is just going to allow you to sharpen the image. This is a feature that I don't usually use my lenses are pretty sharp already, and I think if you add too much digital sharpness, it can look weird. But I can say that this has totally saved my butt when I was doing shoots and I slightly missed focus on somebody in my image. I've gone through here and I've added a little bit of sharpness just to make them a little bit more in focus here, so then you can adjust the radius of the sharpness, you can play around with this to get it to a natural state. I typically don't add too much sharpening to my images, I just think I like the way they look out of camera. Even if they are blurry, sometimes that's a cool look. Moving down we have noise reduction here. This is great if you're shooting with an older camera, or you're shooting at night or in a low light environment, you just have a ton of noise grain that you just want to get rid of. If you drag this up, you can get rid of the noisy areas in your photo. One of the things I recommend is to zoom in on a darker area of your photo because that's where you're going to see the most noise grain, and then you can soften it up. Maintain a certain amount of detail with this detail slider, and then you can smooth things out with the bottom slider there. This isn't a function I use either, cameras are getting very smart nowadays. Typically, if you're shooting at a lower ISO, you won't have that grain so you don't have to eliminate it, but it is there if you need to. Now, moving back up to the top of the effects tab, we have something called split tones. Before I do that, actually I want to just adjust the exposure here. Looking at it on the screen, it looks a little bit dark. It looks different on my iPhone, but once you get it to a screen, it's going to look a little bit different, so I'm actually going to erase the shadows here and just bring out some more detail. I think it's just a little bit too dark, maybe the contrast is a little bit too high. So just making these adjustments before we move on. This is okay to do, you're going to consistently come back to the exposure tab and edit the exposure as you're editing the rest of the image. That's how the place where I like it, I think it looks a lot better on the screens now. Now, let's get into split toning. Split toning is essentially allowing you to place colors in the highlighted areas and the shadow areas of your image. This is very similar to what we did earlier with the tone curve in the RGB curve where we could go into each color and adjust the color space to basically change the pixels. This is a little bit different, we're not actually changing the pixels of the image, instead we're adding this color, so we're adding it on top, almost like a filter in a way. This allows you to get some pretty cool color combinations. You can use that wheel we talked about earlier, Adobe Color to compose some interesting color combinations and have them play around in the background a little bit to just add that extra pop of color. If I go all the way to the top here and I scroll left to right, this is equivalent to 100 percent saturation of that color. It looks pretty crazy and this is for the highlighted areas, but once I drag it down, we can get more of minute colors throughout the image. For example, in the highlighted areas, we could place some orange, some yellow just to further accentuate that complimentary color of the blue and the orange. Let's try that. Let's drag it up just a little tiny bit. Then for the shadows, you can use the opposite color, so we have the opposite color of orange is blue. We already have a lot of blues in our image, and I just think it'll look funky if we add even more, but you can add blues in here or any color for that matter. This is something I used more with photos like landscapes if I want to get a unique color in the clouds or something like that, but I find with most of my images, splits toning just doesn't look how I want it to look. It is a feature that I use from time to time but for the most part, I'm not using this. I'm using the tone curve and I'm using the HSL sliders. But once you do add your colors, you can adjust the balance so if you want to have more saturation highlights or more saturation shadows, you can just adjust the balance of the colors here. Pretty cool feature and if you do play around with it and you do your research on which colors look good together and color harmony, you can come up with some really, really cool color combinations that you can use in your images to do that split toning. With that said, I did say I wanted to open up this image into RNI films and show you guys how I would implement grain and or dust in RNI film. Let's do that now. I'm going to tap this little box at the top, and I'm going to hit "Save to Camera Roll", maximum available. Now we're exporting it as a j-peg so we can't open it back up in here as a raw once we open it in RNI films, but that's okay because the photos are on a place where I really like it. Opening up RNI films, you're going to see this, you're going tap load the photo here on the bottom. You can go to All photos and then you can tap this photo here, the one that you just edited. All iPhones has some pretty cool filters. Like if you did want to add a filter before you went into editing your photo in LightRoom, but that's not why we're here. We're talking about grain and dust. Here's the grain function. I just like the way their grain looks. You can basically just address the strength and the scale and if you tap and hold on the image, you can see the before and after. I'm not going to add too much grain to this image, but I just wanted to show you guys how you can do it here. One of the features that I really like is the dust filter here. If you go forward this way, you're going to add a white dust, if you go the other way, you are add black dust. Most of my images, if I forget to clean my lenses, they have black dust, so I'm going to add a little bit of black dust. Maybe not in this image, it's not as faded enough. If you're going to have an image that's heavily faded and has some noise grain, I think this can add a lot of really interesting texture. I know photographers that use this on all of their photos. It's just a workaround, so you don't have to open up your photo in Photoshop and add all those fancy grains, you could just do it in this app. The fade feature in this app is also really cool. If you want to add a little bit of extra fades, so you opened it up in this app and you realize like, "Oh, I didn't fade it enough, or it's not warm enough or something like that," you can make a little bit more adjustments in here. That's totally okay. I think it's totally okay to continuously make changes to the photo in different apps. Like if you open it up on Instagram and you're getting ready to post, it's okay to make changes. I always make extra changes before I post, and that's simply because when you look at a photo for so long, you start to not notice things. You don't realize the photos too dark or you don't realize the contrast is too high or the colors a little bit weird. Actually, that's why I came back and edited the exposure just a few minutes ago because I looked at the image and I was like, "Oh wow, that is a little bit dark." That's simply because I've stepped away from my computer for a few minutes, came back, and then I realized it was too dark. That's going to happen if you sit there and edit a photo from start to finish, there's going to be things about it that you don't like. I always recommend stepping away and coming back. But once you've done, you can tap this in the bottom right-hand corner and click "Save to Camera Roll". That'll save your image to the camera, or you can open it straight up into Instagram. But before we do that, let's take a step back. I want to go over some of the selective edits you can use in LightRoom to fine-tune your photo, add contrast into different areas, and just make it more of a compelling image, so let's go look at that now.
21. Fine-Tuning With Selective Edits: We're back in Light room over here and I just want to show you how you can use selective edits to fine tune your photo and make sure everything is ready to go. This is where you can make your photos standout in terms of having unique contrast, different areas of the image, having unique areas of color and things like that. I do want to say that you would do this before you added the dust in grain, but I just wanted to put that in the last section because I think it belongs within that topic area. The selective edits is a really cool tool. If you tap selected here on the left, you're going to have most of your basic adjustments sliders. But then if you top up here, you have three adjustments, you can make a brush, so what this is going to do is you're going to have a paintbrush where you can actually paint over the photo in various areas. You're going to have a radial filter, which is a circle and you can drag that and you can actually invert it to affect everything around it. And then you're going to have a gradient filter where you can drag that in. The further you drag it, the more gradient it's going to be. You can move that around affect a different part of your image. In this image, if I'm being honest, its already at a place where I really like it, and the selective edit come more with things like skin and things like that. But in this image, I do want to do some burning and dodging, and burning and dodging is essentially accentuating different areas of the image with highlights and shadows. So making a higher contrast in very, very specific areas just to make the image pop a little more and things like that. With this image, what I could do is come over here and the contrast is already in a really good place but we can mess around with it a little more so I can go here, click the brush. If I tap and hold on the top, that's going to adjust the size. I'm gonna keep it there. The middle is going to adjust the feathers. How hard you want that to be? I'm going to keep it if forty-five percent it could a decent feather going on. I'm going to go on to light and I'm going to drop the shadows here. What that's going to do is just get me a little bit darker areas I can paint over this dark area here and this dark area here. Drag with two fingers paint over this dark area here, etc. I could paint over various dark parts of the image to accentuate the darkness of that area. That would be called burning. Then you can go ahead and continue to adjust it even more if you would like. That's just only going to adjust the back of those cups there. You can do the same with the highlights. I really like to do this with images like landscapes to increase the contrast in different parts of the image. I also like to use this with portraits to do things like softened skin, which I'll show you in one of the examples later on. That's just a really cool feature. The other filters, especially the gradient filter, is one that I use often. You can really add a lot of interesting contrast of the image. In this bottom part here we have a lot of dark areas, but I'm going to go ahead and add this gradient filter and add even more darkness to this bottom just to increase the mysterious look, the dark look of it. I'm going to drag that down and just increase, decrease the exposure even more than it already is. Just crushed that whole area. It's making sure that your eyes go directly to these cups here and then as they flow from the cups, look kind of flow up to this big object here and kind of float around the image that way. After I do that, after I make those selective adjustments, I'm ready to go, I'm ready to post this photo. I think this photo is awesome, especially after those Tone Curve adjustments that we made where we added that deeper blue to the tone to the photo. I think it adds so much this image, that this image was lacking before. What I'm going to do is tap up here, save to camera roll, and I'm going to go ahead and post it. That's essentially how I would edit this image from start to finish before I post it on Instagram. But now I want to dive into some photos and just edit it from start to finish. I'm not going to break it up. I'm just going to show you how I would edit these photos from start to finish. We have four different examples. I'm going to try to make them quick. Just going through and doing all the edits that I would do before posting the photo. With that said, let's move on and do that now.
22. The Power of Presets and How to Use Them: I wanted to add this section to talk a little bit about presets. I think presets are an awesome tool for Lightroom Mobile. The fact that you can use them on Lightroom Mobile is already amazing, but I think they're absolutely awesome for creating not only epic, awesome, beautiful edits, but efficiency as well. It saves so much time when you can just click a Button, and add a preset and your photo is pretty much done. I edit most of my photos with presets on Lightroom Mobile. In fact, that's how I edit all of my photos. I always start with a preset, and then I adjust it from there. But if you're one of those people that's asking yourself, "Okay what is a preset?" A preset is basically a saved edit. If you edit a photo, you can save all of those settings. The color edits, the exposure, the tone curve, everything, and you can apply that to another photo, and that's awesome, because it saves you a lot of time. If you worked really hard getting those various color schemes, then you can apply that same edit to another photo, and you don't have to do it all over again. Another reason why presets are awesome is because if presets were created on the desktop version of Lightroom, there is one feature on the desktop version of Lightroom that the mobile version doesn't have, and that's sliders for the red, green, and blue primary colors, which allows you to get some really, really awesome color schemes that look really, really cool. If you have presets that were created on the desktop version you can get some really, really awesome color combinations. I sell presets on my website, and I have three different packages, the Travel package, the Cafe package, and the Portrait package, and they use all of them. But there's a ton of different awesome presets out there, and I just want to show you really quickly how awesome they are when it comes to editing. Here I have a photo here by friend too, this was taken in New Zealand. Really cool photo. When I tap presets here, I have my different preset packs. I'm going to go to my Travel pack because that's the one I use the most, and then I can just tap each preset, and you can see, it already applies the edits from previous photos right onto my image here, and there's a lot of really good ones here. I want to get like a Orange Teal. I can go with Tshidakwa or Tokyo or there's so many different ones here. Wellington looks really cool. I like that one, desaturated, and then after that, after you apply the preset, you can just go through and just do some basic adjustments. Lowering the highlights, getting more detail there, maybe bring a little bit more color in here. In short, presets are just an awesome tool and I highly recommend you try them out. I sell three different packs from the websites, so if you're interested in this Travel one, Portrait one, and a Food one as well. Those are there, there's links in the description of this course, but there's a lot of other presets out there as well. You can actually create your own presets as well, which can save you a lot of time, so if you work really hard finding that edit, you can save it, create your own preset, and use it later on.
23. Common Editing Mistakes: In this section, I want to talk about some of the editing mistakes that I see with a lot of editors out there. Especially with newer editors that are still learning and they're still trying to find their style. I want to say that, it's okay to make mistakes. It's part of the process. I just want you to be aware of these so you can think about them as you're editing and as you're going forward and trying to find your own unique style. The first one, seems counter-intuitive, but it's actually over editing. I see people over edit their photos to the point where it just looks kind of, off. I know I said earlier in this course like there's no right or wrong with editing and that's true. This is just based on my subjectivity. Photos that are a little bit over edited, they just don't look as aesthetically pleasing as photos that are edited with more fine tuned edits. To make it just pop instead of just overly saturated, too dark too bright, etc. One of the things I recommend doing is when you're editing is to step away. Edit your photo for a little bit, but don't spend three hours at once. Edit it for a little bit, go away, do something else, get your eyes off the screen and then come back to it. Then you can see it with a fresh set of eyes and just take a keener look at it and see if you want to make any more adjustments to it. If you like it once you come back to it, export it and you're done. Over editing is a big mistake, I see with most new photographers. It's totally okay, I just want you to be aware of it. This leads me to my next point. The second common mistake is not stepping away. That's what people will do. I'm guilty of this as well. I'll edit a photo. I'll play with the colors. I'll do all these edits and then I'll just export it right away. I won't step away, go do something else, and come back to it. And often times when I don't step away, I always noticed that my colors or just a little bit off. They just look a little bit unnatural. They're just not how I wanted them. I always recommend stepping away and coming back. That will allow you to see with a fresh set of eyes. Instead of just staring at the screen for an hour or whatever and your image starts to shift and you start seeing weird colors and it looks natural to you even though, it's not. Don't be afraid to step away and come back to it. The next mistake I often see is not cropping your image. Don't be afraid to crop your image to a better composition. You can completely change the composition of your photo by using an effective crop. If you take an image and it just doesn't look that good, try cropping it. Try adjusting it to create a better composition. Cropping can be a really awesome tool. With that, straightening as well. Always make sure that you straighten your photo. A photo that's not straight, even if the edit is spot on, if the photo is not straight, it can look a little bit weird, so make sure you always straighten your photos as well. The next common mistake I see is too much contrast and too much clarity. It's very easy to use those sliders too much. They're awesome sliders. But you can get a little bit trigger-happy and go too far with the contrast slider and then it just makes everything look a little bit too punchy, a little bit too high contrast. That's a big mistake with a lot of young photographers. If you are going to add a contrast, I recommend toning them down, maybe adding some fade with the dehaze slider. Going backwards with the dehaze slider, adding a little bit of haze, just to calm things down a little bit. Then also clarity is a really cool slider, especially in the beginning. Don't go overboard with it. Take it slow because it can really have a dramatic impact on your photo and make it really a little bit too punchy to the point where you can't focus on anything because everything is just super sharp and in detail. Make sure you're not abusing those sliders too much. The last mistake I see is using odd colors. Maybe these colors are natural, but they're just not harmonious. You're using colors that just clash, that don't look good together. If that's the style you're going for, once again, it's not wrong. But it's just something I see that I think a lot of photographers don't do intentionally, but they just have some weird, odd colors in their photo. Maybe their white balance is off, or they use the tint slider wrong and the photo's like overly pink or overly green or something like that. Make sure you're avoiding some of those odd color combinations. One of the things I recommend is just to make sure your white balance's in check before you start editing. That's one of the biggest culprits of weird colors is having incorrect white balance. But that's it for this section. Just wanted to touch on those. Just so you're aware, these are mistakes that I see a lot of people make. I made all of them when I was a young photographer and I still make these mistakes. So it's totally okay, totally natural. Just want you guys to be aware of some of these mistakes.
24. Editing Example 1: Moody Portrait: All right, guys now it's time to edit some photos from start to finish. So we're going to start things off with, a moody style portrait. And I took this photo in Bangkok in China town with a Canon 5-D Mark 3 and a 35 millimeter F 1.4. I absolutely love this photo. Got some really cool setting with a lot of really cool lights and all of the cool colors. We're going to edit this photo from start to finish. So first thing, we're going to start things off with editing "Light exposure". It's about where I want it. I don't want to change too much there. I'm going to leave "Contrast" where it is. I'm going to take the "Highlight" and I'm going to bring it down. The reason I'm doing that is just kind of bring out some detail in the back area there, just behind her. Not too much and then I'm going to bring the shadows up. Same thing, just kind of increasing a little bit of detail that we're going to take away later with the whites and blacks. I'm going to bring these "Whites" up little bit. We have some true "Whites" in the image there. Go ahead, bring the "Blacks" down. We won't want to crush them too much, but I do want to have some darker areas in the image. I'm going to bring it down. So you can see we are adjusting the contrast of the image and the colors when we adjust these "Blacks" and "White", because the more you increase your "Contrast" the more colors you're going to get too. That's why she looks a little bit more saturated. So after that, we're going to move on and edit the "Tone curve" here, make my three points, bringing that down, bringing those shadows up, soften them up a little bit. Just look so cool. Then same thing up here, just a little bit too much. Actually I'm going to leave the whites. I think we're they are at, looks good. Let's move on to the "Colors" here. I do want to add some colors to the "Tone curve" here. And in fact, I do want to add maybe some "Brown" here, some "Red" a little bit because we have so many interesting colors already. Why not? Compound it and make it look even cooler, will do that. And then I'm going to do some "Blue" kind of in the "Shadows" here. A little bit much to tone it down a little bit. So, what this is doing is essentially balancing it outright because I've put in some reds and the shadows. And now I'm putting some blues and the highlights, the complimentary colors, just kind of balancing somethings out right here. That looks pretty cool.There's the , before and after actually look at that color depth. That's insane. So now that we were just at the tone curve, I do want to kind of fine tune our exposure here. I'm going bring the "Exposure" up and then I'm going to reduce the "Highlights" here just because I think we just have a little bit too high of contrast. Just lower that down a little bit. Then I'll move on to "Color" here and I'm going to adjust the "White balance" here. She looks pretty orange, although I do really like the white balance and the rest of the photo, she looks pretty orange. So, I'm going to adjust that with the "Mix" here. I'm going to go in, I'm going to tap this here, remember saturation and I'm going to hold her skin, strike it down a little bit just to "Saturate" some of those oranges and those colors a little bit much, I think. Then I can go ahead and it kind of boost the "Luminance" just to kind of boost her skin tones a little bit, make them a little bit cleaner, a little bit brighter and you can go ahead and do that with different parts of the image. I'm going to take this and tap this "Blue" area and I'm going to drag those "Blues" down and look what that is doing to the blues here. It's kind of making a more of a sky blue. Love that blue. Really cool. And then I'm going to go ahead and adjust the "Red" too. But I'll make those "Reds" will drag them up, make them a little bit orange. Just a little bit. Very cool. So here's where we are now this before, this is the after. Now let's move on to adjusting the effects. So "Clarity", I'm not going to adjust "Clarity" much at all. In fact, I'm going to leave it where it is. In fact, I'm going to leave all these sliders where they are, except for maybe "Vignetting" just a little bit. To really put the focus on her, increase the mood a little bit but the most part the effects are where I want them to be and same with the detail. That's pretty much where I want them to be. So now we're at a point here where we kind of want to make some final adjustments. I'm going to go ahead and put a "Color". I'm going to reduce the "Saturation" a little bit. I think it's a little bit much. I'm going to go over here to "selective" and I'm going to just adjust some of the things on her skin. Before I do some "Skin smoothing", I'm actually going to open this photo up in Adobe Photoshop fix so I can click "Open in", Hit maximum available and then it'll give me the option to copy to Photoshop fix. So now I have the photo open in Photoshop fixed and I can adjust her skin, make some better skin adjustments in this app here. So if I tap here, it brings up this little brush here and I can go over her skin. Her skin is very nice to begin with, but I can go over her skin, find any blemishes and just simply drag over those blemishes. It'll sample a different part of the skin and just kinda clean it up a little bit. Sometimes it works pretty well, sometimes it looks kind of funky, so you kind of got to just play around with it and get it to a point where you like it. You can also use the "Clone stamp" to kind of clone things around the image. Then you can also fix red eye If you have red eyes and the photo, and you can "Liquefy". This isn't something I do. I don't change my models. But if you want to, you can adjust different parts of the face and things like that. Well, this is a pretty cool feature if you go to "Smooth" and then you tap "Face", it'll automatically find the face and smooth the skin for you and look how good her skin looks just after that, auto feature. I don't want to do it too many times you can keep doing it, but just once is good, It'll automatically edit her skin so it looks really good. If you're done with the photo now at this point, you can go ahead, tap these "Arrow" at the top here or you can click "Save to camera roll". You can open it up directly on "Instagram", or you can save it to Lightroom so you can open it up and make a few more changes. Maybe if you want to change the colors a little bit more or anything like that. That's something I often do. Like I'll look at this image in a few hours and I'll see things that I want to change, so I'll come back to it and make the changes there. So I like to come back to my Images, but if you're ready to go, just hit "Export", you're good to go. So once again, here is the before image, and here is the after image with the skin smooth and everything like that. I really love the colors here, I really love what we did with her skin. I really love the blues and the tones and everything just looks a lot more interesting. So this is a photo that I would be proud to post on Instagram. So I hope this was a helpful lesson for you. Let's move on to the next example.
25. Editing Example 2: Travel Landscape: Now it's time to edit a travel photo. This is a photo I took in New Zealand, Piha, just outside of Auckland. I chose this photo because we have a lot of different colors, we have a landscape, it's just a really cool image. So we're going to edit this photo from start to finish. First thing, crop, it's pretty much where I need it to be. Don't really have to make any changes there. So we're going to move on to light. I'm going to jump straight into the curves on this image. I want to create my three points here, and then I'm going to go ahead and create my basic tone curve, that I use in pretty much all my photos. Because this is a landscape, we can really mess around with the contrast here, and you can see I'm really playing around with it, making it pretty dramatic. So just before, there's the before, there's the after, that's just the tone curve. Now, let's go back and fine tune things. I'm going to lower the highlights there, I'm going to increase the shadows a little bit, and then I'm going to play with the white and the black point just to make sure we have some really nice contrast in the image. Now let's go ahead and bring up the exposure a little bit, drop those highlights a little bit more, drop the lights. That looks pretty good. With the tone curve, with the colors in this image, I don't think I'm going to add any colors in this image because I like the way it looks. I like the colors to begin with, so I'm going to leave it there. But I am going to adjust the colors here, in the color mix. I'm going to make the photo a little bit warm because I like this part of the photo here. I want to really pull out some of the colors there, because that blue and that orange look really good next to each other. So I'm going to drag it out to the right and make it a warmer image and then I'm going to jump into the color mix here. One of the first things I see is this blue. I want to change the blue to be a different shade. I'm going to go over here, I'm going to sample this blue, and I'm going to bring it down, and that's going to make it a lighter blue. I don't know, I really love this shade of blue. So I'm going to bring that down, and then what I'm going to do is to slightly desaturate the blue just to make it a deeper tone. I'm also going to do that with the screens. I'm going to tap and hold here, and I'm going to drag this down. But actually that's affecting yellow, so I'm not going to do that. There's a lot of yellows in that green. So what I'm going to do, is just go to green, I'm going to drag that down, and I'm going to go to hue and make it a little bit of a different hue of green. Nothing too crazy? But I really do like the yellow in this image. So I'm going to actually increase the saturation of yellow just a tad, and then in order to combat that in this bottom area, I'm going to add a selective filter. With a gradient filter, I'm going to drag that up here, over this green area, and I'm going to hit color, and I'm going to hit saturation, and I'm going to drag that down. The reason I'm doing this is because I find green to be a distracting color if it's too vivid. So I like to desaturate my greens quite a bit. I'm also going to drag the temp down because I don't like that there's a lot of yellows in this green patch here as well. So now the greens are a lot deeper, a lot muddier, and then we have a lot of really interesting colors going on, on the top of the screen, blue and yellow. Now it's just a matter of finding which colors work. I'm actually going to bring yellow back down to where it was, and I'm going to add some yellow areas along the beach by adding another selective filter, adding a brush and then just painting over this coastal area here. Then once I paint over some of this area here, I can go into color and then I can increase the warmth in that area, to increase the yellow or orange colors in that area, just to make it contrast really nicely with that blue. So we get those nice complimentary colors going on. Not too much because you can really overdo it here, but just a little bit. We're looking pretty good. Here's the before, here's the after, here's the before and after. I actually find that the blue sky is distracting from the rest of the image. I just not a huge fan of it. So what I'm going to do, do another selective filter here, another gradient filter. Then I'm going to drag a filter down just over this blue sky a little bit, drag it over the blue sky and then I'm going to just simply increase the highlights a little bit. Maybe the whites, maybe the exposure, and then not too much. I don't want it to be too crazy. Then I'm going to reduce the saturation here. Because I find that the blue skies are distracting, I like having that white to contrast it, then we can go over a little bit more, to make sure we have that area, cool. I just think that white allows our eyes to focus on the center of the image where all the interesting colors are going on. So there's the before, there's the after, there's the before, there's the after. If you did want to spend more time on this photo, you can go ahead and maybe try to increase some of the reds here. So you can go into colors and maybe to see if you can increase some of the red saturation, without making the photo look too crazy or just playing around with some of the different colors. But this set a place where I really like it, really, really cool image. So after that I just go ahead, export, save to camera roll, boom, and ready to upload. So I hope this was a helpful example. Let's move on to the next one.
26. Editing Example 3: Warm Lifestyle: Now it's time to edit a warmer lifestyle photo, this is a photo I took in Auckland, New Zealand. Absolutely lovely photo. We have the light coming in from the window, creating a nice kind of gradient on the backside of this dish here we have nice contrast, just a really cool photo. So starting things off with the crop, maybe I'll just straighten it just a little bit, but I think it's it's pretty much where I want it, so I'm not going to edit that too much there. Move it over to light here. Exposures and a good place. I'm going to lower the highlights a little bit. Still it just a little bit. I'm gonna increase the shadow is a little bit, and then we're going to move that white point up, remove those blacks down. Nice, and we've got some nice contrast in the image. Moving on to the tone curve, making the three points here, dragging that down, dragging that up just a little bit. And then we're going to soften those blacks like usual. It's not too much maybe right about there is pretty good, and then we can come back out here and make those blocks a little bit more pronounced there. Did the same thing here. Drag it up. All right. Cool.That looks pretty good for now. I do want to add some colors and the tone curve here. So let's go to the red add up three points and I'm going to drag this down a little bit, just to add some blues in the shadowed areas. This is something I like to do with all of my food or cafe photos is add that blue. We have a little oranges in the image and those colors look really good next to each other. So out of that blue come back out to the light. I'm seeing our highlights are a little bit weak, so I'm going to boost those up a little bit. Increase the contrast a little bit. Now let's move over to color. We want to do a warmer image. So we're going to drag that white balance slider to the right, and that's going to create a lot of weird colors in our image. But that's not to worry because we have the color mix here. First I'm gonna do is go to Green. I'm going to saturate that kind of tone down those trees a little bit, and then I'm going to go orange. I'm going to saturate that little bit because we have a lot of oranges in the image and we also have a lot of yellows and the image let me saturate those just a little bit just to kind of make it more of a natural look. So here we have the before and the after. There's the before and there's the after. So we can continue to kind of mess around with it, mess around with the colors and get them to a place that we like them. I think that looks good where it is, yellow hue. Don't want to mess with that too much either, and the blue. I'll bring that blue over a little bit i like that shaded blue just under that glass there. Looks pretty cool. All right. I really like this blue here outside. I think it really complements the warmness of this image here. I think it looks pretty cool. So now I'm going to zoom in on this food and I'm going to add a selective filter just on top of this food, and this is something I do with food, with coffee, just to kind of increase the detail of them. Sometimes I'll sharpen, then sometimes I'll add clarity just to really make sure that you see that food. Make it look really appetizing. So that's really going to make that food stand out on the table. So there's the before, there's the after. What I'm going to do now is just go in and just maybe adjusts for white's a little bit, black's a little bit, just kind of fine tune the exposure. And then I'm actually going to open this photo. I'm going to save it because I like where it's at. And I'm going to open it up into RNI Films. And I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to add some green. Actually, this is a really cool way to add some warmth as well. You can add some nice warmth in the RNI Films up to if you want to make it a little bit warmer like that, and then we can scroll over here to the dust and we can add maybe some black dust here. And then we can also add a little bit of green if you wanted to do something like that. You can also fade your photo. They have a really good fade function here. You can also do this with the DAs in light room or if you just wanna do on Instagram before you post. So there's the before, there's the after. So you can go a little bit overboard on this. But I do like to add maybe just a little bit of grains sometimes, but not a whole lot. Some people do it a lot. But once you do that, you just tap this button here on the right, hit camera roll and you're good to go. So let's go back in to Light room and just see the before and after one more time, before and after. This is just a quick edit. Like I said, I would usually come back and kind of adjust things and make sure everything is where I wanted it to be before I went ahead and posted the photo. But I hope this was helpful for you guys, and let's move on to the last example.
27. Editing Example 4: Gritty Street Photo: This is the last example photo here, and this is a photo I took at a market in Jakarta very late at night. This guy is just smoking a cigarette and doing something here. He looks like he's cutting up something. This is a really cool image. We have one key light on top of him kind of spilling down over him, a lot of stuff going on in the background. This is a 35 millimeter,1.4 as well, my favorite lens. First thing we'll do is crop the image. I'm going to bring him a little bit to the center and I'm going to drag this down, maybe get rid of that light a little bit. I don't think we need to have that in the frame. That looks good where it is. Now he's more centered. We still have a lot going on in the background, a lot of interesting colors. I want to make this photo black and white. If you guys have seen my street photography course, you know that I love black and white street photos. I think they look really cool. This is also just another opportunity to just show you how you would edit a black and white photo in Lightroom Mobile. In order to make it black and white, you can go to profiles then you can go ahead and tap Adobe monochrome and that will just change the profile to black and white, and it'll give you a black and white image. Already it looks pretty cool, but in my opinion, it looks blunt. One of the first thing I'm going to do with this image is edit light like usual. The exposure, I'm going to bring that up a little bit. Maybe bring the highlights down at a little tiny bit and then bring the shadows up to really pull out some detail in the image. Then I'm going to go over the whites and I'm going to drag that to the right. Really make sure that's at a point where not only the lights are being clips where we're losing detail on the lights, but other parts of the image as well. I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing with blacks. Really, really get a lot of contrast in the image here. Very Ansel Adam style. So there's before, and there's after. A lot of really interesting contrast going on. Then we can go into the tone curve, create our three points and do what we always do. Drag that up, soften that out, drag it up a little bit. Very very cool. Now we've soften those blacks out and made it a little bit easier on the eyes. We can go back and drag that down if we want to. Awesome, it looks really cool. One of the cool things about editing black and white photos in Adobe Lightroom Mobile is you can adjust the luminance values of every color in the image. So even though the image is black and white, the computer still understands that there are colors in this image. Each color has a value and you can still effect them all. You can still adjust the luminance of all of them. For example, if we start off with red, if I increase the luminance here you can see what that does to the image, it's going to affect all of the red objects in the image, change the color. I'm looking at his shirt, I'm going to drag that down a little bit. Now we can move on to orange. We can do the same thing. Orange is usually going to have a big effect on your photo because skin is orange and we know that he's wearing an orange shirt. Some of the lights are really orange, so I'm going to drag it up a little bit. Moving on to yellow. Yellow also has a big impact because it's a lot of yellow in the image. Green, not so much, just some of the crates in the back so I'm going to leave that maybe right there. Some of these other colors, they're not going to have too profound of an effect. Usually orange, red, and yellow, those have the most profound effects on your image. After we've done that, then we can move on and edit some detail here, we can add some little bit of clarity. Actually, I think clarity is going to pull too much away from him, so I'm not going to adjust that. In fact, what I'm going to do is create a selective filter, radio filter, put it around him. Then I'm going to invert it, and that's going to basically affect everything except for him. What I'm going to do is go over to effects and I'm going to drag clarity down just to soften out the scene behind him and make sure we have our focus on him. That's just going to blur everything around him, just to enhance that out-of-focus areas in the back. Now we have full focus on him, and the background isn't too distracting, but we still have enough detail to know what's happening, to know that he's in the market and that he's surrounded by other dealers and things like that. Very, very, very cool. With effects, if you did want to increase the overall clarity of the photo, you could do that maybe add some vignetting, but that's something I think we already have a lot of good natural vignetting here, so I'm not going to adjust that. There's the color version. There's the black and white version. Make some fine adjustments here, just maybe those highlights. Then maybe add just a little bit of grain. Make it look more like a classic photo suite. That's basically how I would edit this photo. This is the before, there's the after. Maybe I'll go and make some changes later on, but right now it's at a place where I like it, so go ahead and export. That's it. I hope this was a helpful example for you guys. With that said, let's move on to the next section.
28. How to Become a Better Editor: Already we have talked about a lot of things in this course. We're now starting to wind down. But before we close out, I do want to give you guys some tips to help you become a better editor in the future. Just because you now understand light room and how to use it and all the different sliders, it's not going to make you a better editor overnight. In fact, there's a lot of different things you have to do to make sure that you become a very effective editor in the future. The first one is something that I mentioned earlier on in this course and that's just experiment. You're not going to find your editing style right away. You're not going to create stunning edits right away. Experiment, edit as many photos as you can, try different color combinations. Come up with horrible color combinations that aren't harmonious, come up with super dark photos. Just edit and experiment. Do whatever you want. Let yourself go and come up with all kinds of different edits. I always say, edit one photo in 10 different ways. I said that earlier on in this course and that's something I still do when I want to stretch my editing abilities a little bit, I'll edit a photo in a bunch of different ways. That's a great way to learn. The next tip I have for you is to step away. I mentioned this in the common mistakes. A lot of people, they don't step away from their photos and then they get tunnel vision. They start to see colors in an unnatural way. Step away from your edits, come back and just do it frequently. Don't spend one session of three hours editing. Spend six sessions of 30 minutes. That's going to be much more effective. The next tip I have for you is to learn the color schemes that you like. Play around with Adobe, Color Cc and Pantone. Find the color combinations that you like and figure out how you can capture those colors with your camera and then how you can enhance those colors in the editing process. That's going to allow you to create stuff that you really love, that you love to look at. It's also going to help you find your style in the future. I also recommend using presets. Once you do find that color scheme that you like, save it. Or if you have a photographer that you really look up to, check them out, check out their presets. You can get their color scheme that way and implement it into your own photos. Like I said, I have presets, so if you like my photos, you can get those on the website. But there's a lot of other photographers out there as well. Presets are an awesome tool for getting those really specific color schemes that you really like. The next tip I have is mimic others. Once again I mentioned this earlier on. Mimicking is such a great way to grow and it goes hand-in-hand with experimentation. You can experiment with your photos and try to mimic others. Capture similar photos to the one that they have and try to edit it the same way or go to that website I mentioned earlier on, wesaturate.com, download the raw photo and try to edit that photo to match the edited version that they also uploaded on wesaturate. You can try to match it, which is really awesome tool for improving your editing abilities. Lastly, don't get discouraged. There's no right or wrong. Just do whatever you want. Don't let people tell you that your edit suck. It's just part of the process. If people don't like your edits, whatever, that doesn't matter. At the end of the day it's about you, it's about what you like. Just keep experimenting, just keep trying new things and I promise you're going to become a better editor in the future.
29. Summing Things Up: That pretty much sums up the content of the course. While we talked about a lot of different stuff in this course. We talked about editing an emotion. We talked about apps that you can use. We went deep in detail into Lightroom mobile and I showed you how to edit some various photos like landscapes, portraits, shoot photos, and lifestyle photos, and hope all of that was helpful for you. But at the end of the day, if there's one thing that I want you to take from this course, it is that with time, with effort, with experimentation, you're going to become an awesome editor and you're going to find your own style and you can do that all with your mobile phone. You don't need to have a computer to be an awesome editor. As long as you have a smartphone with Lightroom, you can do anything, you can create any image and you can have your own unique style. With that said, I really hope that you guys enjoyed this course, if you did, I would really appreciate it if you left a review. It's very helpful for me as a teacher, I'm learning things every day as well, I'm learning how to better present information and things like that. Any feedback you guys can give me, I would really appreciate it. Go ahead and leave a review. Tell me what you liked, something you didn't like. Also, I would love it if you completed the course project, once again, just post the before version and the after version of a photo that you edited. You can post multiple after versions and ask what people think. I think that's a great way to see what other people think of you edit. Edit one photo, three, four, 10 different ways and we'll weigh in telling you which one we liked the most. I think that's a really great way to learn and also to see what other people think of your photos and of your style. If you guys have any specific questions, feel free to leave a question in the discussion section of the course. It's a great way for not only me to answer, but other students to answer as well. If you guys do want to check me out on social media, you can check me out on Instagram at Sean Dolt and then my website is seandolt.com. But that's all I got for you guys. Thank you so much for sticking around this long and watching the course. With that said, I hope to see you in my next course. Thank you once again and I will talk to you later. Bye-bye.
Sean Dalton, Travel Photographer
