Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi, My name is
Hart and I've been a photographer for about
four years now in Colorado, published in about a
dozen magazines and easily editing over
thousands of photos. I've learned a lot, but there's one thing
that stuck out to me. It's that you can look at similar photos from
different photographers, but fill a completely
different way. You see standing out
from other creators and more importantly, showing people how
you see the world is essential and I think is the
essence of photo editing. At the end of the day, it's
about leaving your mark on the world and I'm excited to show you exactly how to do that. But before you can create a unique style that people
can recognize you for, you first must know how to
operate a photo editor. By the end of this
class, you'll have the ability to
navigate through one yourself and have a
full understanding of what everything does. We'll first go over
the file types, RAW and JPEG, the
differences between the two, and when to use them. Then we'll get a good grasp on the editing interface and
what all it has to offer. Lesson 3 will be
Exposure Correction, where we'll learn how to
make our photos presentable. In Lesson 4, we'll be
playing with color, super excited about this one. In Lesson 5 we'll be going over the special tools
at our disposal. You can use cropping to reshape your composition or
highlight your subject. Learning how to use
mask will allow you to do some crazy things
in a photo editor. Last but not least,
we'll be going over the perfect exporting
settings for your photos. I want you guys to
leave this class with an editing style so good, everyone will remember you. For this class project, I'm going to show you how
to create your own presets, really focus on how you see the world and save a preset that you love and share it with the class in the
projects and resources. This class is about building your confidence and with
this confidence you'll be able to achieve
the look you want for your photos every time. Are you ready to
learn the basics of photo editing?
Let's get into it.
2. Class Project | Create A Preset: [MUSIC] Alright guys.
Before we get started, I want to quickly
go through what our class project
is going to be. I want you to part ways
with this class with an editing style
that you absolutely love and that other
people will love as well. Go on Instagram and
look at a couple of popular photographers
and what will you see? There's one thing
that they all have in common and that is consistency. All of their photos
look pretty similar. And to achieve a look
or as we would call it, an aesthetic like that, we are going to use presets. Let's hop into Lightroom
and I'm going to show you how to create
your own presets and at the end of the class, after you've learned
everything, of course, you'll be able to create
your own presets, and that will be
something you can always start off when
you start editing. It will save you
time and it will altogether increase
your workflow. It took me two years to
start using presets and hours and hours wasted
away and editing solved. Learn from our mistakes
and use presets. So let's hop in, let's learn. We are in Lightroom right now and this is a
photo I took a while back and I'm just going to show you guys quickly
how this works, and by the end of the class, I want you guys to
create one of your own. How this works is, you're going to make all
of the corrections to the image that you want
in your final look. We're going to go
over to the basic tab and you can see we
have temperature tint, the exposure settings, the
whole nine yard's here. And we're going to
learn about all this in the second lesson, but for right now, I'm just going to make
some adjustments here. That's before, that's after. That's all I did, just the
basic exposure correction. But now we're going to
go to the left side of our screen under the navigator
bar, you'll see presets. Go ahead and click
that drop-down, and you'll see a plus symbol in the top right corner of this. We're going to go
ahead and click that. And then we're going to
click "Create Preset". This Window will open for you, and in here you're going
to put your preset name. I usually do seasons or the
type of look I was going for. And then you get to check all of the settings
you want to keep in that preset saving or
leave things behind as well. I'm going to name this
basic add adjustment, and before you save
it, you'll see right under preset name,
you have group here. I saved mine under "User Presets" and you can make
new groups if you want to. You're going to press "Create". Now let's go back
under the presets tab, you'll see user presets
where we saved it. At the top we have
basic adjustment. I'm going to undo everything
that I did to this image. This is the bare
image and you'll see once I hover over
basic adjustment, it'll apply those same
changes I just made, and that is the
beauty of presets. It'll save you time
and you'll get a good consistency
in your photos. It may take a while to truly
develop your own style, but once you start playing
with the exposure, the color, and stuff like that, create presets that you like. If you end up editing an
image that you really love, create a preset for it, so all your images can
look like that. At the end of this class, I want everyone to submit just one photo and put it in the project
gallery down below, and just tell me what you like about that preset and why
it resonated with you. That is the class project. I can't wait to see
you guys' work. Let's get into the learning
portion of this, shall we? [MUSIC]
3. JPG vs RAW: JPEG and RAW are
two files you'll be dealing with when
you're taking photos, when and why should you use one or the other?
Let's talk about it. [MUSIC] JPEG is an acronym and it stands for Joint
Photographic Experts Group. Note that that does
anything for you or me, but I thought it was
pretty interesting, totally, okay, if
you brain dump that. But the first thing you
need to know about JPEGs, they are much smaller
in file size. That's because JPEG files
were made to compress the data that is captured
in your camera sensor. Since it does this, it
will be really hard to edit these types of photos. The less information
you have available, the less control you
will have in editing. But a good thing about JPEG is they are universally accepted. Whenever you send
photos to people or people exchange photos
or share photos, they're always going to be
in JPEG for the most part. Since they are much
smaller file size, they're much easier to share. Now the RAW file is the complete opposite
of JPEG, of course. It captures an uncompressed
file full of data. Now these RAW files will
be much bigger in size, but you'll also have more
control while you're editing. When it comes to bringing
back the shadows, the highlights,
whites or blacks, it won't be a problem
if you shoot in RAW, because there's more
information available to you. Unlike the JPEG file, this one is definitely not
universally shareable. Most devices can't even open RAW files without having
a specific software. Now when should you
use one or the other? This is very simple. If you expect to do any
type of editing, shoot RAW because you need
the information to edit. If you know you won't be
editing the pictures. It's just some quick shots
and stuff like that, shoot JPEG, save some space. Just remember that shooting
in RAW will give you the maximum amount of control
in the editing process, and JPEG will give you
little to nothing. You might say,
well, I need to add some type of color
to the images. The good thing about JPEG, since it was made
to not be edited, JPEGS come with a good bit
of color baked into it. You truly don't have to worry
about editing JPEG images. You can definitely go
and see for yourself. But if you shoot a JPEG
image and you try to bring back the shadows or
push up the highlights, you'll see the
image will quickly start to destroy itself. Me personally, I never shoot
in JPEG unless I'm asked. Let's go ahead and
visualize this. Here we have the RAW
file labeled CR3. Depending on what
camera you have, your RAW file will
probably be named something different than
mine and that's okay. Just know that the file type
is specific to your camera. Over here we have the JPEG. Let's go ahead and
open up the info on both of these
and take a look. On the RAW file, we have 18.4 megabytes, and on the JPEG, we have 4.8 megabytes. You see how big the
difference is here. That's because in the RAW file, like I said, we have way more information to
play around with. Let's take this into Lightroom. Look at the top of
the screen here at the histogram and see how it changes when we switch
between RAW and JPEG files. In the JPEG histogram, you can see the
greens and reds are spiking and the blue
is also very high. In the RAW photo, it's more even doubts,
it's more flatter. When you shoot in RAW, you
get a more flatter image. If I go back and
forth, this is Raw, this is JPEG, you
can see that there's a bit more saturation
on the JPEG. Again, JPEG does not save as
much data as RAW photos do. If we look here at the
temperature and tint, we have the actual
readings here, 5,700 Kelvin and a
plus 4 on the tint. We go to the JPEG one, it's zero and zero. That information is not
recorded when you shoot JPEG. I'm going to push the
shadows up on both, and you can see there won't be a super big difference because this is very
controlled light. But when you're
shooting outside, or you shooting at a
studio or whatever, it's really easy to lose information we're
shooting JPEG images. Just remember that nothing in these images are
underexposed, overexposed. There's really no
information to lose. If I overexposed or
underexposed something, that information would
not be able to be brought back in a JPEG image. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between
RAW and JPEG files. Personally, like I said, I always shoot RAW because you never know when you
need to edit an image. If you don't know where to find those settings in your camera, go to my camera basics class and you can learn
how to do that. But without further ado, let's move on to
the next lesson.
4. Editing Interface: Let's see if we can find
our way around Lightroom. In this lesson,
we'll be going over the Lightroom editing
interface where everything is, what everything does.
Let's get into it. There's going to be
some things in this lesson that we will skip. This is just the basics.
I want to get you guys editing the fastest
way possible, so let's hope in. First when you open Lightroom, you'll see this
screen right here. In this page you can
preview everything about your photos and
the photos themselves. But the first thing
you need to do in Lightroom is create a catalog. I'm going to show
you how to do that if you already
haven't done that. How do you create a catalog? Don't worry, I'll show
you. You're going to go to File and New Catalog. This pop-up box will appear and you're going to
name your catalog. Let's do new photography. Cool. I'm going to Create. Boom, Lightroom will close
and reopen with that catalog. If you already have
a catalog and you're not inside of that catalog
and you want to be, the same thing go to
File, Open catalog. This is mine right here.
I'm going to open that. Relaunch. Now that we
created a catalog, let's import some photos. Obviously you're going
to insert your catalogs into your computer and they will pop up here
automatically most of the time. If they don't, you'll just find them here under your cart name. For me, I have them 2021, 2022, year, month date, and I can find my stuff
pretty easily like this. However, that's not the only
way to do it obviously, find what works best for you and go ahead and stick to that. Checking and unchecking
these boxes will say, I want to import this or I
don't want to import this. If I uncheck this one and
I just leave this one checked and I press Import
here at the bottom right, it will only import that photo, it will leave the
other one behind. Now we're going to go over
to the tab that we're currently in, the Library tab. Everything here is a
part of the Library tab, and there's a lot here,
so let's get into it. First let's go over
the viewing modes. Down here, you'll see these different buttons and
let's see what they do. The grid view is what
we're already in. It's a grid view of your photos. Simple strides at a point. In the grid view, you can adjust the thumbnail size if
you want a closer look, just go down here to
the thumbnails and you scroll and they will
get bigger and smaller. The next one is going
to be a loop view. That view gives you a
closer look at your photos. We can scroll through these and really see them in detail. The next one is the
comparison view. If I were to have two
similar photos of her, I could put them
side-by-side and say, I don't want that
one, I want that one. Easily, what you can do is you can go down here
to these little flags. The one has an x, one doesn't. You click the X and you'll see down here the photo
is now grayed out. I'll unclick it and it
receives that color back. When it grays out, that means that you
unpicked that one. It's just a way to easily
tell which photos you want to work on and which ones
you don't want to bother. The next view is
the survey view. It's a little different
from the comparison view? I know it looks the
same, but that's because we need to
do something first. We're going to go back
to the Grid View. We're going to click here. Scroll to number 6, Shift press, and that
selects all of our photos. Now, when we go to
the survey view, all these photos would be here. Now this is how you can bulk
pick and unpick photos. Once you hover over a photo
the flags will appear. If you want to unpick while
hovering over that photo, just press X, that will do
that for you and you can pick. The last viewing method we
have is the people view. This is going to create an index of all the faces
in your catalog. If you ever need to
do anything with someone's face and
you do it here, those effects will already be ready to go when you get there. Up here in the top-right corner, you're going to see filters off. Let's click on that, and let's go to camera info to start off. This information here is going to be called your metadata, attributes about the camera, the lens, focal lengths,
all that stuff. You'll see none right here. Then when we go to camera info, it switches to the Metadata tab. Whatever camera you shot
on, it will show you here. You see one is the
usr, one's the R6, you have three
different lenses here, three different focal lengths, so it'll tell you that
information if you ever need it. Let's go to the next
one, default columns. Camera and lens are still here, but the focal length is not, and it'll give you the date
that you took the photos, exposure info. This
is more metadata. Like before you have
your focal length, you have your ISO, aperture
and shutter speed. If you need to know
that information, find it underexposure info. We're going to go to flagged. This is going to show
you the photos you flag. The flags are in the top-left
corner of these photos. So let's quickly go here. Let's flag this one, and let's flag that one. Now when I go back to flag, you'll see three
here instead of one. If we unflagging, they will disappear from this list because they're no
longer flagged. Rated. Now you can rate your photos one
star to five stars. Let's hover over this one and you'll see these
dots at the bottom. It may not look like anything, but when you click one of them, boom, that's five stars. That's four, that's three, that's two, that's one. You can just click on the one
and the one will disappear. If I three star this one, and I three start this one, and I go down here and we're
going to click three star, will see only the
three star images. To turn it off, you'll click on one star and then
click on that again, and it will unfilter
that for you. Now, let's go to the
unrated and you'll see that everything that
has not received a rating, one of these stars is not
going to be on this list. If I start one of these, it'll disappear because
now it's rated. Like I said, these things are
here to help you organize. Definitely use them
to your advantage. Almost done with
the Library tab. Let's look at the
navigator side of things. On the navigator, you will
see a preview of your image. This image is just going to be a preview of the actual image because they need to save
your GPU from frying itself. When you make changes
to your photos, you're actually making changes
to a preview file and then they'll apply those changes to the actual file at the end. With that being said, you
have two options here, you have fit and fill. If you do fill, obviously
it will fill the screen, and fit it will just show
you the entire image. That is the dropdown options. If you click on fit itself, it will move you
to the loop view. Click on it again, it'll move
you back to the grid view. We already talked about
what the catalog is. Let's go to the folders. The folders are
going to show you the makeup of your catalog. The catalog is basically
everything combined. The folder is going to
show you the breakdown of where all the photos
are coming from. You may have a photo from
2021 you're editing, and then 2022, and then like maybe
August, maybe May. Those are going to be
in different folders. It will show you the
individual folders that those photos come from. Next, we have collections. This is a way that
you can easily recall a group of photos. Say you want to
group these up into street photography in these
into portrait photography? Again, click one, go to the end, Shift, click again, that will select all
of them for you. Now that you have
all those selected, you're going to go to
collections and you'll see a plus sign at the
top right corner. Click on that, and then
create collection. We're going to name this
street photography. Include selected photos. Let's turn the location on. We're just going
to press "Create". Now that that is created, we have street photography
there that we can always summon at will. You're welcome. Same thing. We're going to take these two plus sign, create collection. Boom and boom. It's that easy. Now we can shift between street photography and
portraits instantly. That's it. Let's go opposite side of this to the
histogram side. If you don't know what a
histogram is or what it does, go ahead and go watch
my camera basics class you can learn that there, but basically it's
going to give you your light reading and
your color reading. The histogram is going to break
down for you your blacks, shadows, whites and highlights. At the bottom of the
histogram you'll see the camera settings for the
photo you have selected. The next tab we have
here is quick developed, which is pretty cool. If you want to batch edit your photos and
you don't want to get into the specifics this
is a good way to do it. Beside this Quick Develop tab, you have the custom button here. This will bring up presets that you can apply to
whatever you have selected. I'm going to go to
my user presets. Let's go to this one. Boom, you'll see that the
photo here just changed. To give you guys a closer
look I'll go through the loop view and
let's do it again. We're going to go to Custom, User presets, and this
is my dark preset, boom. If that looks good to you, you're ready to export
already, which is really cool. This is why we need presets. But if you want to get
deeper into the edit, you can do that here also by going and dropping down here, you can change the
white balance, you can change the tone control, which is the exposure contrast, highlights, shadows,
whites, blacks, clarity, vibrancy, all the stuff
you need to adjust things, which we will learn about
in the next lesson. These options down
here are also filters. If you want to see
your only flagged, if you want to see all, or if you want to see
your rejected photos, or unflagged photos, those options are
down there for you. In the rating filter, you have these options here. Rating is greater than
or equal to, blank, rating is less than or equal to, blank, rating is
equal to, blank. It all depends on what you
choose the stars to be. Whatever you rated your photos, if you want to find
them like that, super easy way to find them. Organization is key. Up here, if you want
to find the ones that you edited or make
changes to, click that. We've made changes to this one only so that one will show up. The other option is
here is no filter, so we'll bring
everything back for you. If you would like to rotate these images literally
just do this right here. It goes either way. That is the Library
tab. I know that was a lot of information,
but trust me, if you learn how to
navigate these things, it will make your
job a lot easier. Let's move over to
the Develop tab, which will be editing photos
in in the next lesson. The Develop tab is for editing, so it will automatically
put you on the loop view. The second view we have
here is the reference view, and this allows you to
match your photos together. You would grab a photo
from the bottom, drag it, and put it there, and then you will click
on one over here. The one on the right is the one you're going to be
actively editing. This is the reference. Your reference one is going to be the one
that you probably already edited and you want this one active
to look the same. I know these aren't the same
picture, but basically, if you want the colors and the exposure and everything
to look the same, this is a great way to do it. You can change the orientation
of your referencing. You can change it
from top to bottom instead if you want that view. I think that's
absolutely hideous, so I'm not going
to do it that way. Now this one right here is
the before, after view. The before, after
it's pretty cool. Obviously we want to
see the differences that we're making
and stuff like that. But what you can also
do is copy here before image to your afterimage
and vice versa, or you can switch the
edits between each other. Those are the views
in your Develop tab. Awesome views, very
helpful as always. Now that we got the
views over with, let's go again to the navigator side of things
and let's take a look. We already know what
the navigator does, has a preview of
our image there. We already covered presets
in the class project. I'm hoping you guys are starting getting some
traction with that. The history is going to keep
a log of everything you've done and you can go all
the way back to import. You can go to a different
shadow adjustments, different highlight
adjustments and stuff like that, and undo that. Cool. Collections. We went
over collections, awesome. Down here we have the
copy and paste button. I'm going to go ahead and
throw a preset on this. Cool. Got that preset done
and I'm going to press copy. You can see here, you
can select all of the attributes you want
this thing to move over. This is all the
things I had checked, if you want to take a
screenshot or whatever. But basically you're
just choosing what you want to carry
over to the next picture. I'm going to press "Copy", that will copy that information. Go to this picture and just
quickly press "Paste". Let's move over to the
histogram side of things, guys. If you'd like a super
histogram geek or whatever, you can edit right here. All you have to do is just drag and it will start
to change your image. You can do this
with any section. I'll go to the shadows here and you can change the shadows, you can change the blacks, the highlights, and the whites. In the Basic tab, this is
where you're going to be making your exposure
corrections. We're going to go over
this in the next lesson. Toner curve is
another way to make corrections to your
exposure, but also color. Here we have the Color
Grading tabs here. This is what you'll be
color grading with. In the Detail tab you can
sharpen and smooth the image. Lens corrections.
Sometimes we have those aberrations
in the lens and stuff and you can
correct that here. Transform, this
will allow you to crop in a more
controlled manner. In the Effects tab, you have
the vignetting in the grain. You can add grain vignetting, and calibration is just
a bunch of tint in saturation and hue calibration. We click here, this
is our cropping tool, which we will go over this
in a special tools lesson. All of these are going to be
in a special tools lesson, but I'm just showing
you where they are. This is going to be
the healing tool. You can make Photoshop
type adjustments in here, cleaning up skin,
stuff like that, the red eye correction, and lastly, the Holy
Grail, the masks. There's a person down here
and we can get into it yet. Slow down, we going to get there. We're
going to get there. I'm about to end this lesson
y'all getting too excited. Look, the last thing
is I got to show you guys if you
have two screens, these buttons down
here, one and two, clicking on two will
open up a second screen. I do not have two
screens, but if you did, you could drag this to your
other side, which was cool, you can have that one super big, have this one super small, so you can see your
adjustments in real-time in a much
larger screen. This button right beside the
numbers here will bring you back to the Library
tab and in grid view. With these arrows here, you can go back and
forward with your actions. Now that you know where
all the important things are in Lightroom and
you know how they work, now we can learn how to edit. Let's get into the next lesson. Exposure correction.
5. Exposure Correction: [MUSIC] Hi guys, welcome back. Let's fix some photos, Shall we? In today's lesson, we're going to going
overexposure correction. This is going to
be the process of correcting any bad
looking photos. This is referring to highlights
and whites being too bright or shadows and
blacks being too dark. If you don't know
what exposure is and how to get it right
in your camera, go ahead, go to my
camera basics class. You can learn that
information there. But to quickly explain
it when you're shooting, you'll have an exposure
reading in your camera, and you want to land that
little dot in the zero, negative one, positive one area. But there's some situations
where we have to underexpose or overexpose, to get the photo
that we want and fix it in post and editing. Let's learn how to do that. Again, up here we have the
histogram and if you want to see what's messed
up in your photos, what is too bright,
what is too dark, come up here to the histogram and look at these
arrows at the top. This on this side is what is
clipping in your shadows. There's nothing
clipping right here, it would show up in blue.
I'll show you that now. Let's take the blacks
all the way down, and let's go back up here, and you'll see all these blue, this is lost information here. On the opposite side of things, this arrow is going
to show you in red, what is lost in the highlights. If you can't tell with your
eyes what is messed up, you can look at this
and this will tell you. I like to shoot photos
that look true to life, if that's not your
style, that's fine. But this is what the
temperature and tint is for, and also the white balance. If you want your photos
to look a certain way, play around with those to get the look you're looking for. I shot this photo in a neutral
profile and my camera, that's what I always shoot
in because it doesn't have a lot of saturation, it doesn't have a
lot of sharpness, but you can change the
temperature and the tint, to rebalance your white balance. Or you can go here and you can pick one of the
pre-selected white balances. I never really mess with those, I wouldn't, if I were you, I
would adjust in my own self. The first thing we have
here is your exposure. This will cover everything. You're blacks, shadows, highlights, and your whites. When you pull this
down and drag it up, it will affect everything
across the board. The next thing you
have is contrast. This is going to separate your highlights and your
shadows apart from each other. When you push this up, you'll
see that your highlights get brighter and your
shadows get darker. It's separating the
two, that is contrast. It also adds saturation. Take a look at the red car, when I slide this up, it's more red than
it was before. Contrast adds color. Keep that in mind when
you're editing because sometimes you might
not want to add color, you might want the
contrast looks, so you up the contrast. You might have to bring
back the saturation. Next thing is highlights. Now the highlights
are going to control the bright parts of your image, and you can see what
this is doing here. If there's something
that looks like this, if we took the
picture like this, we would take the
highlights down, until we could see a good bit of that building just like that. Cool. Now the shadows are just that anything that
falls into shadow, your cameras saves
information about it. If you're shooting in wrong, bring the shadows up, if you want that in
there and you can see that we were able to bring
all that information back. But now the photo
is a little bit hazy so we can't
push it too far, we want to do it to where we can see a little bit more than we couldn't before. Now the whites are
going to brighten a lot of the image up. You use the white to balance out the highlights,
that's what I usually do. First, I adjust highlights, and then I see if the whites can make the picture
look even better. That looks pretty good to me, and I'm going to bring
these shadows back down. Now the blacks are the
lower end of your shadows, so anything that's super dark, that is what the blacks
are going to control, and you see what it's doing
here to the image here, and I usually don't mess with blacks unless I
absolutely have to be bringing some type
of information back that is important
to my image. Vibrance and saturation
are just color. Play around with
those as you please. They add color and
take color away, but in different ways. Just play around with those. Up here you have an automatic
black and white button. You press that image is
automatically black and white. You can also press the
Letter V on your keyboard, that will automatically do
a black and white for you. Press it again, it
will bring it back. Here we have our color profile. You can go through
these yourself. They make little
small changes to the images and stuff like that, so play with that as you will. I don't really use
that too often. Right here is a white
balance selector, and basically you'll find
something white in your image. It can't be bright like this. It'll tell you like
this is too bright. I would find
something as white as possible but not too crazy bone. Then you click that, it'll set a temperature and tint automatically for
your white balance. I like to get my
photos as close to where I want them
while and cameras, so I don't have to adjust
any type of white balance. But if you happen to
not like your photo, once you get into Lightroom, you can change the
white balance. You can change how it looks
as long as you shoot raw. Remember that. We're going to
move on to the tone curve. Out of all of the tabs here, these are the two that are going to control your exposure, making your image look
presentable bear. Without any color
grading, without any special effects or anything, just making the image look neat. This right here is
your parametric curve. You'll be put on this
one automatically. It controls your shadows, darks, lights, and
your highlight. You can either adjust it from
here by pulling on these, or you can go down here and
just shift it like this. Why would I use this
instead of using the basic. Well, with the tone curve, you have a lot more
controlled in the basic tab. You can drag this thing to whatever you
want your image to look like and make more
micro adjustments. In these down here are doing
the same thing basically. But like I said, this is
for micro adjustments, this is for more
control if you need it. If we go to the next one, this one is going to
be more free floating. You can create however
many notes you want and you can push
and pull on those, and this will change your image. If you don't like what you're
doing, you can right-click, reset all channels and boom, it'll, pop back to where it was. These right here, you're going
to be balancing color out. Again. If you want
that much control over everything in your
image, you can do it here. You got to red until here, you've got green and magenta, and you've got blue and
yellow too much one side. You'll get that til, you get red on the other side. This is very powerful too if you want to get
a stylized look, if you want to make
your photos pop. Another cool way to use
this is by selecting this tool in the
top-left corner. Select that, and now you
can affect certain parts of the images just by
pulling and pushing on them instead of making
the adjustments yourself. If I go to the shadow here
and I pull this down, the shadows will come down. You'll see on the curve the shadows are going
down as I do that, let's try to find a mid tone. I'll say this is a mid tone. We're going to pull on that, and you see the mid tones
will come up in the curve. How about the highlights
and the whites? Now the whites are being adjusted just by
pulling and pushing. This will prevent
you from having to make those minor adjustments, pulling and pushing
on this right here, and sometimes getting a little daunting.
That is that tool. Down here are a couple
of presets you can use. You start off at linear, which is just a straight line. You can move to medium contrast. That'll add a little
bit of contrast, and then strong contrast
a little bit more. Guys, if you have a
photo that is too bright or it's too dark, you can easily correct that
as long as you shoot in raw, you can bring that
information back. This game is about repetition, and after so many times, you'll be as good as me. As a reminder, keep working
on those class projects. In the next lesson, we'll
learn how to color grade, and by then you'll be able to
edit a photo that you love. But if you already have a preset made and you're fast, good job, feel free to drop it down in the project gallery as soon
as you're done with it, you don't have to wait
until the end of the class. I would love to see them and talk about them with you guys. With that being said, let's
get into the next lesson.
6. Color Grading: Hi guys. Welcome back to
photo editing basics. This lesson is going
to be color grading. Color is one of the
most important ways you can tell your story
through your images. Today, we're going to go over the HSL/color tab and
the color grading tab. What is HSL? HSL means hue, saturation, and luminance. The hue is going to be
the shade of that color. If it's red, green,
blue, yellow, etc. Saturation will
be the intensity, or the purity of that color. Then luminance is going to
be how bright that color is. That's what HSL means. Now the HSL and color
tab will allow you to adjust these three
features in your image. You can independently target
colors and adjust the hue, saturation, and luminance of those colors to give your
image a different look. Let's hop into Lightroom
and see how to use this. When you come into Lightroom, obviously you'll be
on the library tab like we went over
in the last lesson. You're just going to go
over to the Develop tab. I chose this image because there's plenty of color
here as you can see. Let's go through these two tabs, and let's see what
they can do for us. First we have the
HSL /color tab, we'll click the Drop-down here and you'll see this right here. Let's first go over this
feature right here. We remember this little circle right here and what it does. You're going to click that
and wherever you drag, it's going to target that
color and then you can change the hue of those colors. If we want to do
yellow and orange, that will change the hue of
that. That's what that does. I just wanted to get
that out of the way in case you guys want to
use that, it's there. Up here, you can select
what you want to change. Right now we're
on hue, but if we go to the red and drag the red, you can see the
strawberries turning little pink and on the other
side they turn yellow. We're changing the hue, the shade of color of that right there and that goes
for all eight of these. There's eight colors on here. There's red, orange,
yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple, and magenta. If we go over to
saturation right here, this will change the
saturation of those colors. Red again, we can make
those strawberries punch, or we can desaturate them. Remember the saturation
increases and decreases the intensity
of that color. If you ever make a
bunch of changes like this and you want to go back, all you have to do is double-click on the Name of the color and it
will reset for you. There you go. Last
but not least, we have luminance here. Like I said, luminance is
how bright the color is. Watch when I drag this red up, you'll see the strawberries
get a little brighter right there and you
can darken it as well. Now, the last one
here we have all. This will bring up
basically all three of these in one little view here, and you can adjust
them at the same time. Now that is the HSL tab. Now, let's go to the color tab. Now the color tab is
basically the HSL tab, but individual colors
with individual sliders. Instead of having to say, I want to target my reds. Let's change that and change
that and change that. Instead, you can just go to the color tab and
look at the red. You have the hue, saturation,
and luminance here. You can change all that
if you want to target a color specifically without looking at all of
this stuff here, this is a really good view. Also, this is all colors. You can do this right here, and it'll select the
individual colors you select at the top here. As you can see, there's nothing much to the HSL color tab. Super simple to use. All you're doing is
shifting the way the colors look and appear on your image. Cool. Awesome. Now let's go
to the color grading tab. First, let's see up here, this is what's called
the three-way. Basically, this will display a color wheel for
your mid tones, your shadows, and
your highlights. If you want to view
them individually which I suggest that you
do because it's easier to make fine adjustments when it's like this, it's
a little bit bigger. The first one up here
is your shadows, the second one is
your mid tones, and the last one is
your highlights. This last one here
is your global. This will adjust everything. These color wheels
were made to shift colors in a certain
part of the image. That's why they
have them labeled as mid tones, shadows,
and highlights. If we go to the mid
tones and we want the colors to change only in the mid tones and not the
shadows and the highlights, we would drag this
color wheel around and you can see how
drastic those effects are. Pushing and pulling on this knob around this little color
wheel will increase, or decrease the
hue and saturation in those parts of the
images you're targeting, which is right here,
the mid tones. If you want to increase and
decrease the luminance, this little slider down
here would do that for you. You can see as I drag
this around, plus 100, negative 100 That increases how bright all the colors are, but in this case, how bright all the mid
tone colors are. Now when we go to the
individual color wheels, they have the luminance
bar here at the bottom. Now the hue and saturation
is just hidden. You click this little
drop-down here, and boom, now you can have control over
your hue and saturation. The way this works
is you're going to drag this hue bar up, and you're going to see
this gray little circle floating around the color wheel. This is going to tell the little knob in the middle which way to go once you start sliding
up the saturation. You'll see the knob
heads in that direction, and that goes for the mid
tones and the highlights. Same technique, drop-down,
slide the hue up, the saturation will
go in that direction. Cool. Two more things
we got to talk about, the blending and the
balance modes here. The blending slider
will control how the colors overlap between the shadows and the highlights. Any changes you make
to these three here, it will appear in the three-way. You see how that are there. Cool. If we drag this
blending slider to the left, it will reduce the colors overlapping in the
shadows and highlights. You see now it's a little
even and now it's uneven, because it just brings
those two together. As you can see when I drag this blending slider
to the right, the colors separate
even more than before. The balance slider simply
balances the effect of the color and the shadows and
highlights. I'll show you. When I drag it to the left, the effect will be more
strong in the shadows. When I drag it to the right, the effect will take
hold in the highlights. The blending and balance
sliders are a global effect; it does not affect these
individual color wheels. That is the basics to
the color grading tabs. This is a trial and
error type of thing. You really got to go in
there and play around with the color to see
what works for you, and see what you
like in your photos. Once you find
something you like, use our class project, which is creating
your own preset, to save a reference file
that you can always revert back to when you
start editing again. Guys, I hope you enjoyed and
learned a lot this lesson. Let's move on to the next
one. Shall we? [MUSIC]
7. Special Tools: This going to be quick.
We're going to go over four special
tools available to us in Lightroom
[MUSIC] and see how we can get the most out of
them. Let's get into it. We're going to learn about the Crop tool, the Healing tool, the Red Eye Correction
and Masking, what they are and
how to use them. Remember that you will probably always start at the library tab. Just go over to
the develop so we can get a closer
look at our images. I briefly went over composition in my camera basics class, the class before this one. If you did miss that, go ahead and go back
and watch that. But cropping is a good way
to recompose your shots. First of all, you'll have these dragging
points all around. Obviously you pull down, it'll pull down from the
top and from the side. The corner sliders will
pull down from the sides. If you want to just reposition your frame and you
want a perfect crop, just press Shift
and then pull down. Doing this will allow you to maintain that perfect rectangle. You can crop to
wherever you want to. Go ahead and
double-click outside that box and there is
your recomposition. You can even take your
cursor and draw a box where you want the crop to be and it will do that for you too. If we come to any angle of this photo and we click outside, we can change the
angle right here. We can shift it left and right. Another way to do that
is to come back up here to angle in wherever
you slide it. Again, it will change
the angle of the photo. That is the cropping tool. You can use this multiple ways. You can use it for
recomposition. You can purposely
take your photo zoomed out and zoom in
post with cropping. If you take an image
and it's not straight, you can restrain your image. Very powerful tool. Let's
move on to the next one. Next to the cropping tool,
we have the Healing tool. You can activate this by
pressing Q on your keyboard. We're going to go to a
portrait to show you this one. The Healing tool
has three modes. The first one is the
Content Aware remove. It's super similar to how Photoshop works with
skin retouching. You'll have your cursor here. It'll look like this circle
right here, like a target. We can increase and decrease the size of this cursor here. The opacity is how much effect will take place when
you place this down. You see this black
spot right here. I'm going to click on it. Boom. I'm going to
click on this here. You can also click and drag. Clicking and
dragging also works. Basically what this tool does is it samples the area around it and replaces the imperfect
skin with the good skin. You see that all those
imperfections are gone. It's almost like Photoshop, super good tool to use. Let's move on to the other two. Let's see what the
Healing mode does. I'm going to drag
across this line. Boom. You see that it'll
sample areas around it. This one, you can control
where that sample comes from. As I pull on this, you see that the area
being sampled is changing. That looks good. We're going to do it to this side as well. Now that's done,
now we have this. You see that got rid of the
wrinkles around her mouth. Very powerful tool. It's very similar to
the Content Aware, but this one you
have control over where it's being sampled from. The last one is the Clone Stamp. This tool is going to go one
for one of what you click on. Whatever is in this circle
will be in this circle. The other ones use a
bit of algorithm to blend stuff in together
automatically. This one is a one
for one exchange, whatever is here will be there. You see when I move this, if I drag it here, there's
a white plot of skin there. If I were to use the
healing brush to do this and I dragged it
to the white skin, it still would do a little
bit of blending for us. If you want to avoid
harsh lines like this, you would want to use the Healing tool or the
Content Aware Tool, but you can see how
powerful tools is. We cleaned her face
up pretty well and pretty fast in all
in light room. Didn't have to do
anything in Photoshop and this looks pretty good. Let's roll into the next one, the Red Eye Correction. This is very simple. All you're going to do is
take this little box here, place it over the eye, click and you can drag it to
where your eye actually is. Then you can change these
two sliders right here. This will increase and
decrease your pupil size. This will darken and
lighten the pupil. There's not much to this.
It's pretty simple. If you have red eyes
and your picture, you want to remove
them, that will do a pretty good
job at doing it. They also have the
pet eye option. Last but not least, the
most amazing tool I believe that is in
Lightroom, Masking. To pull up your Masking, just press shift and W together. At the top of the
list, we have subject , sky and background. You see down here,
this people thing just populated and
she's already selected. This is basically what
the subject mask does. Let's go through
these. Let's learn. That's fun. The subject masking is a pretty new
feature to Lightroom, but it works amazing. Let
me show you how it works. In Lesson 2, we went over how this can be
auto-generated for you. But if you don't have
this already done, you can just press subject here. You'll see at the bottom of
the screen detecting subject. Boom, she selected, I took
this picture at F 1.8. If I take this off,
you can see she's clearly separated from
the background already. It's not hard for that AI to go through there
and masker her up. If we zoom in, we can see these little areas right
here are selected with her. If you want to get rid of that, you can just go up
here to your mask, you're going to
click on subtract. I always do the brush
because on the brush, you can control the
size and you can go through and erase what you
don't want selected with her. Now, obviously this part
will take some patience, but if you take your
time with it and stuff, you'll have a crispy
outline of your subject. In that guy's is the subject
mass is pretty cool. Now she will only be affected by these changes
we make up here. If we want to up the highlights, we can do that only on her, bring the shadows
down and you see how all these corrections aren't
affecting anything but her. Look at this before you see the black spot under your cheek, you see all the
pimples and stuff. We removed that with the healing tool and we
added a mask on there. Realistically that would only
take me like two minutes if I weren't teaching.
Keep that in mind. This thing is quick. I'm not going to go
through all of these because these are just color
and exposure adjustments. We went over that,
the last two lessons. You guys already
know how to do that, but this is how you're going
to mask out the subject to only affect that subject
and nothing else around it. Let's try this photo here. Let me throw and edit
on it really quick. The next mask is going
to be the sky mask. You click this, the AI will do the work and it will
select the sky for you. This actually did
a really good job. You can even see
in the trees here, the red in there. Now we have only
our sky selected and now we can adjust the sky. You may have to make
minor adjustments, but they're minor
adjustments instead of everything so truly
blessed with this. In the next one is
the background mask. Click on it, AI does the work. This will identify
your background and your foreground. It
will separate the two. You see a little bit of
this fender is selected. We can go to subtract,
go to brush. We're going to go ahead and
erase that off of there. Now we have the background selected and same
as the other ones, we can adjust only
the background and look at that art objects. We select objects. If we click on something
like this bus, it will take anything
in that circle that you sampled and try to find an
object that I can select. Now it shows this window here. If it didn't get
everything you want it, you can go to add and you can go to objects
again if you want. Go ahead and select that again. This one is not that
reliable in my opinion. You see, I got to
select this thing multiple times and is
also missing things. If you don't have a clear cut objects
like a shape almost, this probably won't be much of help to you but I'm
going to press add again and this time I'll
just go to the brush and I'll just paint in the
rest of this bus here. After that mask and
five adjustments, we got that bus fully selected. Now you can control
the bus alone. I would like to show you how
you can use these together. You can see the before
and after here, the mask did a really
good job but now we can go in and we
can select the sky. Now let's go ahead
and bring this down. You see that extra
building in the back coming into focus,
that is beautiful. We don't want to mess
with the whites too much but that is amazing. That's so cool. Now that we
got those adjustments down, we can go to the global image and we
can bring the shadows down a little bit
maybe the highlights, bring a little bit more of
that building in there. Guys, I love that photo. The next one is the
linear gradient. This mask is very blocky. What I mean by that is
anything underneath or above will be affected
and that is simply it. First you'll notice
these three lines here. These three lines
will indicate how much of a gradient you're
going to give this mask. You see the closer I pull it, the harsher that
line will become. The longer I pull it, the less harsh that
line will come. If you want a gradual change, you'll choose
something like this. If you want a harsh transition, maybe you shot like a sunset
or something on the water, you would do one of
these super close to one another and that will make a harsh transition.
I'll show you. We're going to go to
the middle line here. Here you can change the
angle of this mash. The middle square will allow you to drag it around
where you want it. We want to darken the sky a little bit,
bring those clouds back. Amazing. You see these
looks pretty natural now because I have the lines
separated quite a bit. If I decrease the
separation of these lines, a gradual change
will become harsh. You'll see now
there's a clear line between where the mask
starts and where it ends. We don't want that so go ahead
and stretch these things out you so can get a natural
look just like this. To finish up, we're going to go over the Radial Gradient mask. This one is also amazing too. Basically on this
one you're creating a circle mask.
Let's select that. Now we can draw a circle and you see the red spot is
what is being affected. I have an old and
a new wallet here. If I want to bring attention
to the new wallet, I can place a radial
mask over this. Let's decrease it a little bit to where it only
covers the wallet. Now with this wallet selected, I can brighten this thing up. Look at that, but the old
wallet is still in focus. Why don't we go
back to the linear gradient and we're
going to create another mask to block out
that left side of the frame. Let's decrease the shadows. Now we don't want
to make it look unbelievable so we're going to do this as much as we can
until I say that's cool. Let's bring this a little
bit further over here. Boom. I really like that. One side is darker than the
other with a linear gradient. We took the radial
gradient and place it over the new wallet to
brighten it up a little bit. You can use the
radio gradient to highlight just about
anything in your image. It will help your viewers know what you wanted
them to focus on. The last two are super simple. The Color Range Mask is
literally just selecting a certain color and masking
out all other colors. If we want to select grays, that will select every
piece of that gray and you see the brown
wallet is not selected. Now when we adjust this image, everything but the
brown will be affected. Now the Luminance Range Mask. Now remember luminance is
how bright something is. That is what this refers to. If we click on this
dark spot of the image, every piece of the shadows and the blacks will
be selected in this mask and vice versa with
a light part of the image, all the white parts
will be selected. There's so many things
you can do a mask. It's actually crazy
how far masking has come since I've
been a photographer. But that being said guys,
that is the Crop tool, the Healing tool, the Red e
Ye correction and Masking. Very probable tools. I call them special tools because they are truly
special and they will help us get to that place we want to
get, which is perfection. There's no such
thing as perfection, but there is a such thing
as greatness and you can achieve that with these
tools I just taught you. I hope you guys learned
something of value. I will see you guys
in the next lesson. We'll learn how to export our
photos. Excited, I am to.
8. Export Settings: Guys. Welcome back to
photo editing basics. I'm glad you guys
made it this far. This is the last lesson, we're going to learn
about export settings. What is the best possible
way for us to get our photos outside of the software
and into people's eyes. Once you're done
editing all your photos and you want to
export everything, just press Command or
Control if you're on PC A and that will select all your photos at
the same time for you. You don't need to go and do the click here,
shift click there. That's another way to do it, but Command A is the
hotkey for that. Once you have all the photos
you want to export selected, you're going to go down
to export right here. This Export window is
going to pop up here. At the top here, it'll show you how many files you're exporting. Let's start at the
top at location, I have them always
exporting to my desktop. If you already have a folder
you want to put them in, you would specify that here. This right here
putting subfolder, will make a folder for the
photos you're exporting. Just to show you what
that looks like, I'm going to just select one
and I'll go and export here. If I unselect put in
subfolder and I export, go to my desktop you'll
see these two here. This was when I unchecked, put in sub folders, so it just
put it out hereby itself. This is the one that was put in a subfolder, so existing files. This will be when
you already have a pre-existing file with the same name as the
one you're exporting. If you want Lightroom to
ask you what you want to do about that? Ask what to do. If you want Lightroom
to choose a new name for the new exported
file, that right there. We'll do that. Overwrite
without warning, that's a very dangerous one and I wouldn't recommend that. Skip would just stop
the action altogether. Next is filename, I leave this unchecked. But if you need
more organization, this is a really good way to
do it when you need to find. [NOISE] It seems like we have a technical
difficulty, guys. Give me one moment. This lesson that
was supposed to be about six minutes long and the file got corrupted on my computer somehow, I don't
know how that happened. But look this gives
us a chance to step outside of the lecture area. I'm going to summarize
everything to you guys about export settings
to save you some time. I believe I was
around file naming. How do you want to
find your files? I'm going to show you
some screen recordings as well as I'm talking. The first way is the default way which is leaving
it to Lightroom. Lightroom will choose the
name and the number of that file depending on
how many you export. There are some settings you can choose to better organize, and those are the
sequence numbers. You can use the higher
sequence option if you're exporting a lot of photos
and it looks like this, or if you're just
doing a couple, you can just leave
it where it is. Second way you can
do it full control. Limit yourself, I'm going
to give you three ways to name your photos so you can find them a little bit easier. The first way is the date. You can do it like this,
like this, like this, just name it the date
that you took the photos. Really easy to find it when
you know the day you took it. Location is my
second one and you can easily find your
photos like this. If you knew where you took them, you can just type it in and
all your photos will pop up. Now that could be
a problem though, if you visit the same
location more than once. But keep that in
mind. You might have to name it a little
something different. In inspiration, sometimes we get inspiration to
take some photos and maybe that's the
way you identify the photos so you can save
it as the inspiration name. After you choose a
name for your photos, you can use these three
options here to help categorize your
photos by number. Next one, file settings. File settings, you're mostly always going to
use JPEG and sRGB. Reason being because
most platforms like IG, Facebook, browsers and web sites are standardized to sRGB. JPEG is universally shared
like we learned in Lesson 1 and sRGB is standardized among
all websites and browsers. Now the quality you
export your photos at is an experimentation
type of thing. But I would say, don't go any lower
than 60 percent. I did a little experiment for you guys where I exported
the same photo 20 times from 100-80 and I showed you the
differences of file size. Remember the numbers 92
and 82 and those are the percentages
that you can keep the most quality while
dropping the file size. If you don't need
to save on space, just export in 100
percent quality. If you plan to re-edit
the image later, export in 100 percent
quality, you get the deal. Now when you drop the export
quality of your images, what it's doing is taking
that file and compressing it. When you compress an image, it affects the banding, the edge sharpness, and
the color fidelity. I'll show you an example
of each right now. This is banding the staircase
affecting your highlights. Edge sharpness is
self-explanatory. Your edges won't be sharp and
color fidelity as parts of your photo that doesn't remain true to its original color. Keep in mind when
you're dropping the quality on your images, Lightroom is basically
simplifying all of your pixels and group them
into these big blocks. That's what gives you
that inconsistency. Guys, we're getting to
the end. Image sizing, I leave it at 300
pixels per inch and I leave resize
to fit unchecked. The last thing,
output sharpening, just sharpen your photos
while you're editing. Do not use output sharpening, it's a little counterproductive, just trust me on that one. That is it, guys. I
appreciate you guys. Let me know that this
lesson was corrupted. It was a black screen
for almost four minutes. But congratulations, you just made it to photo editing basics. You are awesome. You're a rockstar and I know
you're going to kill it. If you already edited
a photo that you really like and you've
made a preset for it, that's the class project. Go ahead and drop it
in the project and resources so we
can talk about it. I would love to see you
guys' beautiful work. Let's wrap this thing
up with the conclusion. See you in the next one. [MUSIC]
9. Let's Wrap Things Up!!: All right guys. This is the
end of photo editing basics. If you watched my last class, you know where
we're at right now. This is the parking garage I recorded a lot
in the last class. I haven't had a chance to go watch that, I'll go
ahead and do that now. Don't forget to finish
the class project, create your own preset, and drop it in the
projects and resources and tell us why you
made that preset, how it makes you feel,
and so on and so forth. The first lesson we learned
about JPEG versus row, when and why to use them. The second lesson was
a very long lesson, but we went over the
entire editing interface of Lightroom classic. The third lesson, we
learned how to fix photos, or do a little bit of
exposure correction. In Lesson 4, we learned how to color grade and how
to play with color. In Lesson 5, we went over the special tools that are
available to us in Lightroom. And finally, in Lesson 6 we learned about
exporting settings. What's the best way to
get your photos from Lightroom in front
of people's eyes? That is my entire workflow when I'm editing
photos in Lightroom. I hope you gained a lot from
it and stuff like that. I appreciate you
watching to the end. Feel free to tag me in your photos and stuff on
Instagram or Facebook. Wherever you post them at,
you can find me on there. Add the plug and I'll
definitely love to see the work you create
from this class. Once again post your projects down in the project
and resources, and I would love to
discuss them with you. I'm almost done
teaching the basics. I'm going to get into
video basics and stuff and video editing basics. And after that, we'll go
into some more fun stuff where I teach you how to make
skits and stuff like that. How to market yourself as an
entrepreneur in this craft, and a lot more stuff, that should be pretty exciting. I will see you guys
in the next class. And once again, just thank you for striving and going
after your dreams.