Transcripts
1. Welcome to Adobe Lightroom Landscape Editing for iPad: Hi, I'm Jared hill
and welcome to my Lightroom editing
on an iPad course. This course is designed
to help you go through my workflow for editing photos
in Lightroom on an iPad. Now, this is the way
that I edit photos. It's not the way that
everybody edits photos. But what I've learned over the years is it's
interesting to watch how other people edit
their images and what their thought process
is going into that editing of an image, what they see, what
they decide to change, and what they decide
to leave alone is all very interesting to me. And so I've decided to put my workflow out there
so that you can see how I'm using an iPad to
edit my images in Lightroom. Now Adobe Lightroom
on an iPad is a very powerful tool because
it gives you a lightweight, high-performance machine that
is very small and easy to take with you so
that you can edit your images right on-site. Even now, in a
studio environment, you typically would
have your computer hooked up to your laptop and
you would shoot tethered. But when you're
out in the field, whether you're
shooting landscapes or your own assignment, it's hard to get an idea of what an image is going to look like from the back
of the camera. My iPad is become a go-to
tool for me to pull images off of my camera and throw an edit on
them really quick. It's been a faster
solution for me then utilizing a
laptop because laptops are bigger and the iPad
is just very easy to get in and out of the high
resolution display that is on the iPad Pro just provides a beautiful
experience and a very vivid color
palette for me to examine an image and decide whether or not that is the
one that I want to go with. A lot of times I end up editing images on my iPad anyways, because it's fun and enjoyable to have the flexibility
of a device like this. Even when maybe a laptop or a desktop computer might be the better choice
in some instances. But with an iPad, you have that flexibility. And with Adobe Lightroom
being as powerful as it is, you have all of those features
right at your fingertips, even when you're on an iPad. So we're going to jump
into this course. We're going to talk about
some accessories that I use with my iPad to edit photos. And then we're gonna go into my entire workflow from start to finish of editing
a landscape photo. This landscape photo
is available for you to download so that you
can edit along with me. You can simply load it right
into your iPad and edit. Or of course, you can use
the thought process and editing process that I go through on your own
images as well. If you want the final
image that I edited, you can get it from
my Unsplash account, which is a free stock
photography website. I uploaded this photo
originally to it and it has thousands and thousands of downloads and hundreds
of thousands of views. So feel free to download
it if you would like it, both in either the edited
version from Unsplash or the unedited raw photo that
you can edit yourself.
2. My iPad Pro Setup: Let's talk about my iPad and some of the
accessories that I use as part of my
photo editing process. Now the iPad that I
use is the iPad Pro. This particular iPad at
the time that I'm filming, this is the M1 iPad. This is the highest performing
iPad that they have. And I went with the larger iPad and the M1 addition
because I wanted the additional
performance as well as the higher resolution and the screen with the most
brightness to it as well. I'm often editing
maybe in the car after a shoot or trying to get a few images over to
a client right away. Having the additional
brightness of this display is just great. Also, the depths that I get out of the colors
are great because the display closely
matches what I would expect on my
laptop, MacBook Pro. So when I'm editing
on this device, I usually have my iPad in
the Magic Keyboard case. So this keyboard case here protects the iPad
both front and back, doesn't really provide any
protection around the edges. But as far as the keyboard goes, this is about as
good as it gets, as well as having the
trackpad as well. The track pad comes really useful for when I don't want to use the Apple pencil and I don't want to be
touching the display. It works more like a laptop
with the Magic Keyboard case. So that is definitely not something that
you have to have, but it comes in handy for me as making this feel more like
a traditional laptop. Now, the Apple pencil is also something that you
don't necessarily need, but sometimes it's fun to use, especially if you're
using any brushes. The Apple pencil, this
is the series two. And I have it in a case
because I like having a little bit more grip to it than the standard
Apple Pencil. And so this case is from subcase and it provides
a silicone cover for it as well as a making it possible to put this in a
pocket and have it stay put. And then there's a
cap for the tip of the pencil as well that
just protects it overall. I like having a little bit
of extra protection on the pencil to keep
it from turning colors just because it's
going to get dirty. It falls quite often and get stuck in the
bottom of my bag. So having a little bit of
protection on it is great. Then also, just
having the clip on the Apple pencil as well
makes it much easier for me to stick this in my pocket or Stowe it away somewhere in my bag where it's not going to slip down into the crevices. So an Apple pencil
with a case on it definitely helps me out a lot. Now as far as my card reader, this is a no-frills
SD card reader that I got a long time ago, around the time that USB
Type C was becoming a thing. It's a USB Type C to SD card, and then it also has a slot for micro SD in there as well. Because a lot of times
I'm pulling images off of a drone or
a GoPro camera. So having an SD card
reader that does both is definitely useful. And so this is just very simple. You can see it's very used and starting to be a
little discolored here. The tech, it doesn't
really matter. The brand is as long as it is USB type C and has an SD
and a micro SD card reader. I think those are definitely two types of readers that
you need to have with you. This allows me to just plug it right into the side of my iPad, open up Lightroom, and import images directly
into light room. It's a very simple process.
3. Importing Images: Let's look at how I import
images and delight room. I'm gonna go ahead and pull
my iPad off of this platform here and put it down so that we can see it here on
the overhead camera. So we'll go ahead and put
aside my keyboard case and set the iPad down here
and open up Lightroom. So I'm just going to swipe down. Lightroom is showing
up right here, but I can also just type in
light room and open it up. And we'll just go all the
way up to the top here. We've got an SD card in the
SD card reader already, and we will insert that into the USB-C slot on the
side of the iPad. Now, sometimes you will get a device connected message which all you have to
do is tap Continue. And it's going to open
up the import menu. If you did not get that, what you will see down here on the bottom right-hand corner
is a little plus icon. And choose from
camera device to have all of your images display that are available on that card. Now, all of these
are raw images. These are just images
that I captured the other day of product
shoot for a client. And all I need to
do is just tap on these and select the images
that I want to import. So I could de-select
them by tapping again. I can click the little
checkbox here to select all images that were captured
on that specific day. So maybe you have a
card that you hadn't formatted yet and has images
on it for multiple days. You can import that
way or you can tap on the name of the card
which this card is untitled. And it would import
the entire card. Images that have already been imported are going
to be grayed out. If Lightroom can
determine that the images that you already have in Lightroom have already
been imported, then it's going to
grade them out so you don't accidentally
import them again. So very simple process
to import images. I just simply tap
and tap Import. And then as soon as
it's done importing, I can close this window. I should also get a
message that it is safe to remove the camera device
from my iPad as well.
4. Sample Photo Setup: The image that we're going
to be editing I captured a few years ago in
Glacier National Park. This image is a raw image
and was imported as so. And this image was captured on a Sony A7 Mark for with 100 and
35-millimeter G master lens. And here are the settings
1 400th of a second at F5 and an ISO of 100. Now this is the
edited image here, and you can see that there
were things going on that made this kind of a tricky
day to capture an image. The sky was very
misty and it was not super clear
back in this area. And so some of the areas of this image kinda fell
apart a little bit. But what was beautiful
to me was all of the colors with the
mountain in the background. So let's go and revert
this back to the original. You can see here's the
original of the image and the image itself
looks pretty flat. If we apply the edit again, you can see just how drastic of a difference there is
between these two images. So we're gonna go ahead and put it back to the original tap Apply and our images back
to its original settings. Now the first thing
that I do when I import an image is go into
the optics and make sure that lens
corrections are enabled and I remove
chromatic aberration. Chromatic aberration
makes more sense for things that are
maybe in the foregrounds that are causing issues or perhaps fringing areas
around finer details. Everything here in this image
is far off in the distance. So chromatic
aberration typically is not that big of an issue.
5. Adjusting White Balance: The first actual
change that I make to the image typically has to
do with the white balance. Now, the white balance
on this image was captured at 6400 Kelvin. That is just what the
automatic settings that my camera had decided
to capture at the time. Now, typically with
an image like this, I would want a warm it up a
bit because as you can see, the image is very cool because
of the sky and the water. And only a thin strip
across the image having anything to
do with warm tones. And so I will often
pull this over just a little bit too
warm it up and then maybe even bring the tint over
just a little bit as well to make those colors
pop a little bit more. And we can go back-and-forth always and look at the original. And you can see, of course there's a little bit
of distortion taking place also because of the camera
profile adjustment there. But you can see the
color difference is already starting to pop through. If I'm not 100% sure
where to start, sometimes I will just
grab the eyedropper and look for an area
on an image that I might want to assign as the white balance area
and where I would set my white balance to if I tap
here and drag this around, you can see that as I mouseover or click
over different areas, the image changes
significantly and it's typically changing
these values over here. So as I move this around, we'll see drastic differences. And then if I click Apply, it will make changes to the
area of the image as well. So this is a way just to drag it around and have some
changes take place. If I go ahead and tap Apply, you can see it makes a little
bit of an adjustment there. And that is about it.
6. Crop & Straightening: Now not every image that
I capture is going to be straight because a lot of
times I'm shooting handheld, not on a tripod and I don't have things completely set perfectly, even when you do
shoot on a tripod, a lot of times your
horizon levels can be off just a little bit. I'll go into the
crop tool and just simply click and drag just
a little bit here just to try and align with either the horizon or if there was something in the background
that I wanted to use, I can do that as well. There is the straighten
tool that we can use, but I often, um, don't use the
straighten tool just because sometimes
it gets it wrong. I feel like this is shifted
clockwise just a little bit. So I would prefer to make
those adjustments myself. And so as I bring that in a little bit and I could
pinch in and zoom out on the iPad a bit
just as I set that horizon line right on the water's level
there and hit Done. So now if I go and
look at the original, you can see that there's quite a bit of a
difference between the two with the crop and the color changes that
we've made so far.
7. Exposure Adjustments: In this stage, I'm
looking at setting the brightness and luminance
values of my image, and that requires the Light tab here we have exposure
contrast highlights, shadows, whites and blacks that we can make adjustments to. Now overall, this image
looks pretty well exposed. However, it's a
pretty flat image. It doesn't have a
lot of detail to it because of how
it was captured. And I typically capture
as flat of an image as possible because I want
to make those changes here. I don't want those changes to
be finalized on the camera. If I'm shooting jpegs, I definitely want a
flat picture profile. I don't want anything
adjusted on those images, any creative styling
of any sort. That's mostly why I shoot
RAW, because I just, I don't want any additional
processing on those images. I just want the raw image out of the camera so that I can
make adjustments here. So one of the things
I'll start out with is just looking at the exposure. Which if we look
at the exposure, this is making global
changes to the entire image. And so a lot of times I'm not really adjusting
the exposure too much because I don't
want to make global changes. Yes, sometimes if the entire
image is underexposed, I may bump up the exposure a little bit
or bring the exposure down because typically that
makes a big global change. And then I can make finer
tune adjustments from there. But next I will go and look at my highlights and my shadows. A lot of times with
landscape images, if there's bright sky or things
that are kinda blown out, I'm going to decrease
the highlights significantly and
bring up the shadows to recover some of
the highlights in those more dark areas like
down here in the trees. So often I will push those
away from each other, which creates some additional
contrast in the image. Then I can look
at the whites and the blacks and just
move those around. You can see the changes
that that's making. If I go back and forth, a lot of times I'm doing a similar adjustment to the whites and the
blacks as well. But you'll notice that if I go too far over with the blacks, I really flatten out my image and lose a lot of
detail down there. It removes a lot of contrast. And so when I'm making these
adjustments to images, often I am kinda sliding
these sliders around a bit, just trying to figure out what changes are
going to be made. And it gives me a better idea of what to expect
out of the image as well. So now we've made those changes
to our overall exposure. Let's look at our original. You can see it's already
starting to come alive nicely.
8. Basic Color Adjustments: Now that we've made some
basic exposure adjustments, we're going to look at the
overall color of the image. We have vibrance and
saturation here that are global adjustments that make adjustments to the entire
image and its color. If we go all the way over
to the left unsaturation, we have a black and white image. If we go all the way over
to the right plus 100, we have an overemphasized image that just doesn't
really look real. So I tend to look
at the vibrance. I like the vibrance adjustment because rather than
this just being a hard tool that affects every
color value on the image. Vibrance does things a
little bit differently. As you can see here. If we go up to a 100, what changes here is
the vibrance of course, and the trees, the
brightness of these colors. There's some more
emphasis on color here. And we can even see
more blues and stuff in the background
than we had before. If we go up on saturation, we get a similar look, but everything is a little
bit harder and I don't like those adjustments
to be as drastic. So what I tend to do is increase
my vibrance quite a bit and then D saturate just a little bit just to bring
some of that down. So I use vibrance to improve the color or
emphasize the color. And then I use saturation to
fade that back a little bit, as I found that just
adjusting one of these sliders only is
not enough for me. And I like to overemphasize the colors and then bring them
down a little bit back to where they were
while still maintaining more vibrance in these areas
that I want to emphasize. And so you can see big
differences here and the colors as we continue to move through
editing this image.
9. Color Mixer: Now let's take a look
at the color mixer. The Color Mixer is very powerful because it allows us to make color specific changes to the hue, saturation
and luminance. Now for me most of
the time I'm making changes to the saturation
and the luminance. But depending on how the
colors look here and how much I want to emphasize or
de-emphasize those colors. I will also use the hue to
make minor adjustments. One of the things that
you can do just to see what colors are represented, because sometimes it's
not always obvious. We look at this image
and we know that there are greens and yellows. We would think maybe there's blues because of the
water and the sky. But all these other
colors you wouldn't think are represented
in this image. And I like to saturate and
just go and move through the saturation
just so that I can see the changes that
are taking place here. You'd be surprised
and some of them, Here's orange, making a big change if we
slide that back-and-forth. And so depending on how those oranges look and how
I want to emphasize them, I may make some adjustments to the hue a little bit
and maybe even increase the luminance a bit and the saturation a bit as well
to make those colors pop. Now if we go over to yellow, you can see yellow makes big changes in
comparison to orange. I can slide the hue over
more towards the green or towards the orange depending
on what I want to do. And you can see here as
I slide these around, if I go over to the green, we lose that orangey fall look that I'm
definitely going for. So I might want to give it just a little bit of
hue over there and even increase the luminance and maybe the saturation on
those colors a little bit. Let's look at the greens. Now. On the greens, I often am wanting to
darken those a little bit. So if we look at luminance
and go back and forth, you can see darkening. That adds a little
bit of contrast. Looking at the saturation, I may want to bump
that up a little bit because I'm noticing that even back here in the
fringe areas of that image, I'm getting a little
bit more green, which makes that area
pop a bit more and adds a little bit more separation between the foreground
and the background. If I look at whew, I can go back and forth here. If I want a lot of green, I can go over to
the right there. If I want a little
bit more yellow, I could go over to the left. And so I'm thinking that's
looking pretty good there. Let's take a look at the light
blue or the teal colors. Not a whole lot
that changes there. I can barely tell anything, maybe even up here
in the background. So that's not really going to make much of a
difference whether we do anything with
luminance or saturation, these blues, you can tell
the difference up here. Now, one of the things
that this image has wrong with it is
the white balance. And we made some
adjustments there. But in an image
like this where you have something in
the foreground that is very warm and something in the background
that is very cool. Not cool in a sense
where it's just blew. It cool in a sense where
there's no warmth to it at all, that becomes an issue. And so making changes here too, this is really nice to be
able to isolate these colors. And I can go over to the teal side and you can see how that affects
things over here. Or I can go over more towards the purple side with the hue. I don't think I
really need to make any changes with the hue. But in my style of what I like, I would rather pull saturation out of a
cool background and have it be a little
bit flatter as far as that saturation goes
with those blue tones, then have blue tones
there that just really make the image
not balanced well. And so I will adjust
these a little bit just to kinda see
what we have going on. And you can see I'm adding a bit more contrast back here
as well in the blue tones. Now, moving on to the purple, not a whole lot here
in the purple as we go back and forth
with the saturation. And same thing with
Whatever the last color is, the pinks or
something like that. So the Color Mixer
is a great tool to be able to fine-tune in all
of those different colors. There is also a color picker
tool that we can use. So for example, if
I just wanted to grab this and tap over here and go over and see the different colors that are
represented in that area. I can do that. And so I'm just gonna
go ahead and undo that because I want
to make sure that my colors are as I set them. Now, let's go and look at
our original and our edit. This image is really
starting to pop.
10. Color Grading: Now let's jump into
the color grading tab. I really liked the
color grading tab because this feels more
like video editing to me, color grading is typically
a video editing term, and I use color grading and video editing to adjust the
tint of the overall image. Of course, color
grading has become a catch-all term for adjusting everything in an image
from exposure to contrast as well as tent. But in Lightroom primarily, I'm utilizing it for
ten adjustments. When we click on this section, you can see we have our
shadows are mid tones, are highlights, and a global adjustment that would
change the entire image. If we click on highlights
and we slide our hue around, we can make adjustments globally to this
entire images heel. Now of course nothing is
taking place because we have to add some saturation
and for that to show up, this kind of becomes
like a slider that gives me a fade on the changes
that I'm going to make. So if I wanted to update an image with a little bit
more of a warmer tone, I could grab this and
just kinda pull it around and see what happens
as I move this around. I could go off over here into
orange and just slide back, see what kind of
changes I'm getting. And you can see it as
bringing warmer tones to the overall sky that the more highlight
areas in the image. But to me it's quite a bit much. So. I can also go with the luminance and increase and decrease the luminance as well. Maybe I'll keep that
saturation up a little bit and then play
with the blending. Now, blending allows me
to fade this in and out. I mentioned that I could use
saturation for that as well. But blending allows me to
blend maybe something that was a little too harsh
back into reality. And so I could use
the blending tool just to blend that backend. Then there's also the
Balanced tool as well that helps balance the changes that you made with the original. And that sounds a lot
like fade, fading it in. But balancing and fading
are two different things. Balancing is color matching
and fading is just how abrupt changes are based on the adjustment
that you made. So I might make some minor
adjustments to both of those and then move
over to our shadows. So let's grab the
shadows and just move them around a little bit and see some of the changes
that are made. You can see that pretty
much everything is in the lower portion
of the image. I could go a little bit
more blue or I can increase the saturation of these colors significantly and even change
the hue of them a bit. In this area, I might adjust
it just barely and then bring some of the balanced over just to keep from making
those changes too abrupt. Notice that it's
overpowering here, but as I bring it
back a little bit, it starts to look pretty good. So now if we go and look at our original and our
current version, things are continuing
to move forward, having used the
color grading tool a little bit to adjust our tent.
11. Contrast: Make my initial
contrast adjustments. I like to go in and
use the tone curve. Now, the tone curve
on Lightroom on the iPad is not as good
as Lightroom Classic, but it gets the job done. So there are different options
here for the tone curve. So let's tap on the tone curve and we get different
options here. We can adjust individual
colors and I typically just go for the tone curve that's going to allow
me to adjust contrast. And when I make an
adjustment here, you'll see that I get some lines that allow
me to adjust down at the bottom as well as a curve that I can
adjust here as well. So I tend to bring this
side down significantly. And you'll see
what I'm trying to achieve here as I
move these around. So you can see I added
a lot of contrast to the shadows
areas of my image, but I then use
this as a fader to fade that contrast where
I would like it to be. I can do the same for
the highlights as well, bringing the highlights
up or bringing them down. And so because
earlier in the image, I did kinda flatten out some of the highlights
a little bit. I'm gonna go ahead
and bump those up and then also use this fader. So look at the
highlights and see the changes that are
being made here. It's really hard to tell, but you can see it right along the mountain edge and the sky, the changes that are being made. And so very subtly I might just bring maybe you just bring them forward just a
little bit more as well. And then of course we have a mid tones adjustment
as well that we can use to kind of balance between the shadow and the highlight
adjustment that was made. Now, typically I like
to be able to add multiple points
to my tone curve. And I'm just not able
to do that here. In this particular tool, there's no adding of points. Even though utilizing
these other curves, I can add multiple points. And that's great, but
that's not going to get me exactly where I
want things to be. And so I could make
those adjustments, but they end up being just
way too harsh for me. I enjoy using the tone
curve to the right here and making my
adjustments that way for my initial pass on contrast.
12. Texture & Clarity: Let's talk about the
effects tab now, texture and clarity are two areas that I
make adjustments to. And while a lot of people will just take
the Clarity slider and move it over to the right to emphasize and
sharpen everything. It's really adding a
significant amount of contrast and luminance
to your image. Let's take a look at the
difference between these two. If I go all the way to the left and all the
way to the right, you can see I'm adding a lot of luminance to this area here, even this going from center
or zeroed out to a 100, I'm adding a lot of luminance. If I go back and
forth on texture, you can see that I'm adding
sharpening to the image and I'm bringing in contrast, but only on the finer details. I use clarity to add some overall contrast and
sharpening to my image, but then I add a
lot more texture in order to give myself more sharpening and more
finer detail contrast without over-emphasizing
the image and making it look fake. So as you can see here, I might go up like
ten or 11 or so on, my clarity, and then I might bring the texture
up significantly. There have been many
instances where I've actually gone negative
on the clarity a little bit as I
zoom in and look at some of the finer details
off here in the background, there might be a need for that. If I wanted to soften
and bring down some of the contrast on some issue
areas in the back of my image. You can see how that
affects things. If I do go a little
bit negative, it takes some contrast away
from some areas that I might not necessarily want
them to be too emphasized. So clarity is a neat tool and then texture is a great tool for those smaller areas if you're thinking of
when even zoomed in, if we're looking at how
that affects the image, you can see it
affects the image in a significant way without brightening your
overall image as well. Think about how you can
balance the texture and the clarity to get the emphasis, like the sharpening
that you want without messing your
exposure up to bad. Keep in mind that
it's very easy to overdo it on these two sliders. We tend to want to sharpen up everything and make it so crisp. And by overdoing it on these
two different sliders, we are affecting the
contrast of our image and that is going to make the image look
drastically different. There are ways to sharpen and add clarity without
adding luminance. And we saw that by utilizing the Texture slider as opposed to going crazy on the
Clarity slider.
13. Sharpening: Now let's take a look at the finer details at
the overall sharpening. We are going to go into
the detail tab here. And by default we are at
40 on the sharpening. I like to bump that up a bit, usually to around
70 to 75 because that's going to add sharpening and these
areas of the image. And as we zoom in, you can see some of the
differences that it makes. It's very, very hard to tell on an image
like this where so much is going on
in the background and we're zoomed in so tight, but I usually will go around
70 to 75 on the sharpening. Then I'll make some fine
adjustments from there. After increasing the
sharpening all go and increase the detail
up a bit as well. Because on areas
in the background, typically they lose a bit of detail because maybe
you're focusing in the foreground or the
area in the foreground is far enough from
the background that you're just losing detail. So I'll tend to take the
details somewhere between 5075 depending on how much I need to add on
an image like this, I might go up to 50,
somewhere between 5055. Now let's take a look at
our before and after. We will just go ahead and
tap on the screen and hold down, let off. And you can see we've got
a significant difference here in our starting point
versus where we are now. But let's keep going now to
finish off the sharpening, I'm going to adjust
the masking setting. Now, masking is the ability
to shift what is being sharpened from the
entire image to only the darker
areas of the image. And so if masking is set on 0, sharpening is applied
to the entire image. Now the problem with that is we don't need sharpening applied to things like the sky or clouds that are in
the background. Often what happens if
you leave sharpening applied to those
areas is all you end up with is additional noise
and detail applied to things that you didn't want
detail applied to because they're in the brighter
areas of your image. And so as we start to
slide masking back, we are pulling some of that
sharpening out of the sky, which in a skylight, this is not super important. Let's see if we can make that
visible here on the screen. So we've got sharpening
applied to everything. If we pull this back
a little bit here, you can see how this, how soft this area is because no sharpening
applied to it at all. So we would typically
want to find some sort of a happy medium where the sky is not getting
any sharpening applied, but we're still getting some
sharpening applied to some of these details on the
back edge of the mountain. Full application of that masking versus pulling some
of that masking back and only applying that masking to some of the
darker areas of the image. This is even more important on skies that have
clouds and things that are off in the
background that are supposed to look soft and
not over sharpened.
14. Noise Reduction: An image like this
is going to have a little bit of noise
because there's so much missed and areas in the background that are a
little bit troublesome. So on a landscape, I typically will throw
somewhere between 2030 on the noise reduction. And what that does
is it just takes the finer noise detail in the image and smooths that
out ever so slightly. I usually don't go any higher
on the noise than this, unless the image was taken
in a low light scenario. And there's really obvious noise that you can see in the image. That instance I will take the noise reduction
slider up further. But if you take that
slider up too far, then it's going to soften
your entire image and lose the effect that
we've been working on in these last several steps.
15. Vignette: Now this step varies on images, but I tend to like to
look at it regardless. And that's adding a
slight vignette to an image of vignette
adds a little bit of darkening to the outer
edges of the image and draws your attention towards
the center of the image. This might not necessarily be the intended effect that
you're looking for. If you go heavy on the vignette, which that was my style back
in the day when I first got started was adding a heavy
dark vignette to my image. Then you'll start to
see color shifting and stuff like that happening in
the corners of your image, which is really going to be more distracting than anything else. So sometimes I will throw
just a little bit of vignetting on the
edge and then I'll take that vignette and
I will feather it. If I slide the feathering all
the way over to the left, you can see the hard edge. Feathering fades
that in and out. And it can be either a hard
edge like this or it can be so feathered that it's almost not even seen in
the first place. So depending on what
I'm looking for, I will use this as
a fader that fades the amount of vignetting that
I'm adding to this image.
16. Dehaze: Another tool that I typically
use when the sky is just really blown out like
this is the Dehaze tool. If I go and adjust
the Dehaze tool, you can see how it is very heavy handed on the
contrast adjustments. This is why I don't use
this tool too much, but I also use it just to reveal what's possible
in the background. You can see if I pull
it all the way over, it just destroys my image. And if I go the
other way around, the image is also destroyed, but sometimes pulling
down the dehaze or adding a little bit of D Hayes
might be useful in an image. And in this instance
I'm going to leave just a subtle amount of
it because it gives me a little bit more
separation from the edges of my mountain and
the background here. And I'll just demonstrate
that for you here. As I slide these back-and-forth, you can see that just a little
bit of dehaze is adding to this separation between my foreground and my background. Let's tap for before and after.
17. Masking: Now that we've made
global adjustments to the entire image, both highlights, mid tones, shadows, colors, and
all of that stuff. Now is the time
where we get to do some selective
editing to the image. Lightroom is really powerful
with its different masks. And masks make it
possible for me to make selective edits
just to the image. This makes it easy for me to emphasize areas or maybe darken certain areas of
the image that are just spots that I want
to make adjustments to. So when we click on
the Plus for masking, we have several different
types of masks. For example, we can select
the sky and you can see it's going selecting this guy
and then I can hit Create. It's detecting my sky
and selecting it. And then I can go and make
adjustments only to the sky. So earlier when we were looking at some of these
different tools like texture, clarity and dehaze, I
could make adjustments just to the sky and it leaves
the rest of my image alone. Now, I'm most likely
would not use this selection because a lot
of times it's not perfect. You can see it's
missing a little bit of edges here where I
might need to clean it up. Some of the mountain is being
included in that selection. But I thought it'd be
interesting just to show that that is perhaps a tool
that might come and use, should you want to make
that type of adjustment. So I'm gonna go
ahead and hit plus, and I'm going to choose
radial gradient. Radial gradient allows
me to make a circle or oval type shape selection so that I can make
localized adjustments. For example, I might
want to make it look like maybe the sun is behind me, behind the cameras
shining this way. Obviously everything is
blown out a little bit over here as far as detail goes. And it's obvious that the sun
was not over on this end. So I might want to add area to the image so I can make
this selection and rotate this around a little
bit and re-size this and add a hotspot to the image where
maybe the sun is shining through the clouds
on the opposite side. So I can go to light and I
can make exposure changes, or I can make highlight and
shadow changes as well. It gives me all of
these adjustments including color,
temperature, tint, saturation, and the
effects that details, and even the option
for adjusting more AND fringing should there
be trouble issues on an image that took
place during capture. So I might increase the exposure just a little bit and maybe
a little bit of shadows. And you can see here
as I might make some adjustments and just change the shape of
this a little bit. It adds a nice brightness
value to this area. And so I might just adjust
that shape just a little bit. And we'll make a little bit more of an
abrupt change here. Brightens up that
tree area really nice and makes it a focal
point in the image. I like that. Let's go ahead and
add another one. So we'll go ahead and hit plus, well choose radial gradient. And I just want to
brighten up this top area here atop the trees
on the back corner. So let's just go ahead and make some minor
adjustments to that. And exposure up
just a little bit. Shadows. Just a little bit as well. Very subtle adjustments, but noticeable in the grand
scheme of things. Another change that I might
want to make is to grab the radial and it's really
hard to tell, but I may. And this is very much your creative decision-making that's
going to take place here. And what you see and
what you want to emphasize is what you will
go and make adjustments to. Making these adjustments are very much part of the
creative process. Our to your liking. You may not want to
emphasize areas if your image or you may want to de-emphasize areas
of your image. This is like dodging
and burning. In Photoshop, dodging and burning
allows you to emphasize, highlight areas or de-emphasize. It's basically adding
selective contrast to specific areas of your image. While a brush allows you
to do it more free hand, a radial adjustment allows me to cast light in
different areas. So now let's take a
look at that before. And that after. Very drastic
differences between the original and what
we've got so far.
18. Spot Removal: Now the last step would be looking through the
image closer to make sure that there aren't
any imperfections that I need to take care of. Whether those be imperfections caused by something being on your lens like a little smudge or a spec being on your lens, or something that maybe became really emphasized
as we sharpened and contrasted our image as we zoom in and
just look around. Obviously, I'm zooming
in over a 100% and just looking for things in the image that might
be problem areas. I'm like I said, specks on the lens or different
things that just might need to be removed because they're sticking out
a little too much. Sometimes there are aspects
of your image that you do need to remove because they
are just too distracting. It might be as you zoom in, you see a hiker up here and you want to
remove that person from your photo because they're so small and they're not really, there isn't much
detail there anyways. So those changes
are really easy to make utilizing the
healing brush tool. And while there's
nothing really that I want to remove from this image, apart from this stuck out to me. I don't know what this is
down here in the image, just something that's bright and sticks out a
little much for me. I may go and make adjustments
with my Healing Brush. And so as I decide my brush size by sliding
over a little bit, I would then go and
paint in that area, and that is a little big. So I can always go and
adjust the brush size and redo it or make local adjustments here and
just move that around. That was too much. And sometimes it's hard to
tell unless you zoom back out. But actually that
probably is just fine. As I undo and go back and
forth between these steps, you can see that it
just simply removes that bright highlight area
that I wanted to get rid of. And that's a great
tool for getting rid of any other trouble
areas in your image. I tend to either do
this at the end of the editing process or if I have a lot of problems
that I need to fix, I'll do it towards the
beginning of the process.
19. Thank You: I hope that you enjoyed
this walkthrough of my Lightroom
workflow on an iPad. I know it was a lot of fun
to edit through this photo and really think deeply
about my process. And that process has evolved over the years as Lightroom has added new tools and I found
new ways to do things. The great thing about
the internet is being able to see what other people are
doing and apply it to our own editing style. Now I have other courses
that are available. Some are still forthcoming. And these courses are
going to help you in different areas of
your editing process. Whether you are a photographer or you're even looking
at getting into video and also helping you
with your camera as well. Getting the best image
out of Lightroom starts with the best image
that your camera can produce. So understanding how to
capture images and get the best image out of
camera is highly important. So I ask that you take a look at some of my other courses
that I have available. And if any of them look
interesting to you, I'd love to see you in
one of them as well. Make sure to join my group
that is linked below where you can share some of the images that you've edited. I'd love to see images
that you edited using this process and just see
what you're able to create, sharing it with me and the other users that
are in the group. It's a great way to
get feedback and it's a great way to ask
questions as well. So thanks again for taking my course and sticking with
me all the way through it. I appreciate your time
and your investment in improving your
workflow in Lightroom. I hope that it was helpful and I hope to see you
in another one of my courses soon or in the
group linked below, Take care.
Jerad Hill
