Learn Adobe Lightroom Classic Essentials : Maximize Photo-Editing Workflow | Kent Hart | Skillshare
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Learn Adobe Lightroom Classic Essentials : Maximize Photo-Editing Workflow

teacher avatar Kent Hart

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

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

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro

      1:52

    • 2.

      Class Project | Create A Preset

      3:07

    • 3.

      JPG vs RAW

      3:59

    • 4.

      Editing Interface

      13:51

    • 5.

      Exposure Correction

      7:54

    • 6.

      Color Grading

      6:19

    • 7.

      Special Tools

      10:59

    • 8.

      Export Settings

      5:08

    • 9.

      Let's Wrap Things Up!!

      1:41

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About This Class

Spend more time shooting and less time editing by learning the ins and outs of Adobe Lightroom Classic. As well as the power in using presets!!!


In this class, I will teach you the basics of Adobe Lightroom Classic. You'll be able to navigate your way to anything you need to use and come to know the functionality of those things. I will walk you through each tool while showing you how I use them with multiple scenarios of my own photos. 

And by the end of this class, you'll handle Lightroom Classic like a beast! I made this class to help you take full control of your photo-editing workflow!

You can pick up your Lightrrom Classic Preset Pack here -> Presets

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

  • Difference Between JPEG & RAW File Types (When & Why To Use Them)
  • Adobe Lightroom Classic Interface (All Important Features & Their Function)
  • Exposure Correction (Making Your Images Presentable)
  • Color Grading (How The Color Editing Features Work)
  • Special Tools (How To Use The Tools I Consider "Special")
  • Exporting Settings (The Best Exporting Settings To Use)

This Class Is For You?
This class is welcoming to student of all levels, however the class is built for beginners in mind. Experienced Lightroom users can use this as a refresher!

Who Am I?
My name is Hart – and i've been living in Colorado for 5 years now. Ever since I got my first camera back in 2019 to capture my travels, I've been hooked on photography! I went on to start a Youtube Channel and have been published nearly a dozen times. I learned all the ins and outs of photography and would love to share my knowledge with you all!

Let's connect!
My YouTube channel: Harttheplug | The gear I use is in every video description :)
Tiktok: @harttheplug

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Kent Hart

Teacher

Hello, I'm Hart. I am a photographer / videographer based out of Colorado Springs, CO. When I started my journey I completely relied on guessing / experimenting and this habit caused me to burn out pretty quickly. So I began to believe that education is more important than having the cool gear and fancy gadgets. I'm here to help you squash any questions or doubts about getting started. From Camera Basics all the way to being a Content Creator. You ready to become a photographer/videographer? Lets Do It!!

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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.