Learn Lightroom on Your iPad: How to edit professional photos

1. Welcome!: Hi, My name is Jacob lamb. Welcome to the Basics of light room for iPad. In this class, we're going to cover the basics of Lightroom on your iPad or any other tablets. We're going to cover in the menu options and how to navigate the software, as well as each individual slider and tab for editing your photo. In the end, we'll add it three photos together. One good, 11, overexposed and one underexposed photo to see how we can salvage bad photos or make a good photo. Great. There is an ever-increasing standard in today's world for the quality of visual content. So whether you are shooting professionally for someone else, or you're just trying to manage your own online business or personal social media presence. It's incredibly useful to have the most popular and most powerful photo editing software under your belt. This class will include raw photos for you to be able to edit and make the tweaks that we're making in the class together. And at the very end, there'll be a final project for you to take a photo from unedited to a finished product and share with everyone else in the class. I'm excited to meet you and see your projects. And let's get started. 2. Navigation and Adding Photos: To start, we're just going to look at the intro screen, the buttons from the homepage and how to add photos so that we can actually edit them. When I open Lightroom, you're going to be taken to one of two places. First, you could be taken to your All Photos tab. Here on the top right. You'll see there's a few ways to search through all of the photos that you've brought into the app. Here, I've got a lot of real estate photos and they can be hard to sort through. When I import the photos, I can give them tags or even star ratings are flagged some of them, if I especially like them. Now that I have my all photos open, I can use the Search button to search for filenames. Or I could use the filter button and filter by type, even the camera that I took them with or any keywords that I've used. I can also filter by the star rating that I've given certain photos. Then I also have next to that the notifications, the cloud storage, which of course is filled, it always seems to be filled. Then also just some view settings. I can select multiple photos to edit them. I can add photos from here, or I can just change how I'm looking at these photos. Under the all photos tab, if you click the arrow, you have a few more options of how to sort through photos. You can see any that you've recently added, which is especially helpful if you're trying to upload and edit quickly, they'll all be right in that folder. Or you could even see recent edits or photos you've recently deleted. Now, you can also make a personal album and put the photos in there that you want in there. There's no automatic sorting in the album. It's completely manual and you have full control of which photos are in that album. I've created a small folder here with the photos that we're going to be using in this course. Now, in the bottom right of this page, you're going to see two buttons. One of them is for the camera. This is going to open the camera on my tablet so that I can upload photos to Lightroom right from the device, brand new photos. The other option is going to be this Add Photo button. And I can add photos from anywhere on my device, even SD cards or cameras that I have plugged in with a USB. With a USB, I could import from camera device. I can also import from all my photos, the iPad camera roll or I can sort through my files and browse around for the photos that I need. When I click a photo and upload it, then they'll show up in this folder. If I don't necessarily want them in this folder, I can go back to all photos and then hit the photo upload button. On the top left, you'll see that there are four buttons. The first one, of course, is going to be our folder is where we currently are. The Next button is photos that we've shared to the web. You're able to share directly from light room. And so this is yet another way to organize photos that you've already put out. The third button is kind of like Adobe's social media. Within the app, you can see tutorials or featured artists and just browse around and get some motivation for your own edits. Finally, then on the flip side of the social media with the earth button, we're going to see daily inspiration and other featured photos. We can also watch edits of people doing their own photos, watch the process of them doing that, and then save there at it as our own preset. And we'll go over presets, how to create and use them in a later video. That however, is how we're organizing files and photos within Lightroom. 3. The Photo Editing Page: When we select a photo, it's going to take us to the photo editing screen. And here there are a ton of options. We're going to quickly look around what each of them are and then we're going to dive into each individual tab how to use them and when to use them effectively. Then we'll show some photo edits on the spot. For now, all we need to know is that we've got a couple of different tiers of tabs. Of course, we've got our photo and we've got a row here that shows light, color, effects, detail, optics, and geometry. This is where I think we're going to be spending the bulk of our time and how we manipulate the photo to produce what we actually want. At the top of this tier, we have an auto button and that's going to edit the photo for us. It's a great option if you're short on time and want to make some minor changes. But for the most part, it's best to go manual. The auto function doesn't always do the best job. Here. If we press it, we can see that it just changes and adapt some of the color. I think it did a great job in really made some of the colors pop. But it won't always, especially for more nuanced images. So I'm going to undo that. And then underneath you'll see we have a profile tab. Now, the Profile tab is sort of Adobe's starting places. And so you can select any of these without changing any settings. And it's sort of like half preset. So if I wanted to start from, maybe not this Adobe color setting, but this adobe Portrait setting. Then it's going to make these minor changes. You can see the biggest change in vivid. And then I can edit that image. So it just changes where we're starting from without adjusting any of our settings. Further on the right we have another set of tabs. This set of tabs here is going to be the sliders, presets, cropping, a healing brush, a masking brush, previous edits of our photo and finally, all versions of our photo. We're also going to go over each of those tabs, just like we're going over the tabs in the left bar. For now, I want to focus outside of these tabs and really notice things about the editing page specifically. First of all, our undo and redo buttons are here at the top, just in case I made an edit that I didn't want to. We've also got a help button that's going to help with tutorials. If we need help on the spot. We have a Share button where you can either save your photo or share the photo across the web. Again, we have our Cloud and then settings to organize, view. Start a slideshow, or again, take us to those app settings. Those also an option here to create a preset which we're going to use later on. So remember in your head that creating a preset, we're starting with those three dots. In the bottom right side of this page, we can favorite a photo by giving it one through five stars or a check flag or an X flag. We can make comments on the photo or share with others and see their comments. We can add a tag to easily find this photo further down the road. If we want to come back to it, I might tag this one horse. And then later on when I search for the keyword horse, I will easily be able to find this photo. Let's take a quick look here. I'm going to go to all my photos. I'm going to search up horse. And there it is, right there. Finally, I can get a lot of information about this photo. I could title or caption it. I can see what ranking I gave it, but I can also see the camera that I took it with and a lot of information about the photo. 4. Order of Operations: This video is in kind of an interesting place because we're going to be referencing tools that we don't quite know about yet. But I wanted us to keep the order of operations in mind as we learned about the tools so that we could already be creatively thinking about how we can best use them. See if this video was at the end. We would understand everything in this video, but we might not be able to think about it as we run through the course. So I recommend at the end of this course, once you have a better understanding of the tools and how they work, come back and watch this video a second time to get the most out of it. For now, we're going to talk about the order of operations when we approach a photo. The very first thing we want to do with the photo is we want to adjust the lighting. Now that may sound strange to you, but we want to adjust lighting before we adjust anything else for a couple of reasons. First, any color edits that we make might be canceled out. If we need to change the lighting later, we could ruin the edits that we've spent time on. So the first thing we want to do is we want to make sure that our sky and our subject are well lit. We've got a good contrast between them and nothing is overexposed or underexposed. For example, let's say that I have the lighting out. Things are really bright and I try playing with the color of my photo first. Well, I can try to save some of that color in the background, but it's really not an easy task. Then when I go and I decide to adjust the light second, things look a little bit cartoony. We've got strong purples on the horse's body and especially his hair. You've got purples back in the trees and they're a little over saturated. I would not call this a good photo. The first thing we want to do before we make any color changes is to adjust the lighting. Adjusting the lighting includes masking a subject that might need a special case fix. The second thing we're going to do now is we're going to adjust the geometry or the cropping of the photo. So if your photo is off or not centered or straight, we can fix that and edit properly. Here, I think my horse is a little crooked, so I'm going to either drag him straight or I'm going to hit the straighten button here. And then I'm going to take away any of the crop that I don't want or add some in that you may want. Now we've got a photo that's set on the lighting and we've cropped it and straightened it. Next we can do the color correcting. Now, I'm not talking about color grading or adding a mood or feel to your photo. I'm talking about color correcting. The difference between color correcting and color grading is really important. In color grading, you're adding in color to change what the photo is feel is with color correcting, we're just giving ourselves a neutral photo to work with, without any crazy colors that may have come through on the camera. Now, for example, we might've taken a photo that came out way too cool or warm. This photo here, it looks a little bit cool to me. See some of the whites are coming through with blue tones in them. What I'm going to do is I'm going to open up my color and I'm going to warm it up with the temperature setting just a little bit until I feel that all the colors are true. We can do the same thing with the tint tab. Maybe our photo was taken a little too green. I can't tell you how many times I've thought I adjusted all the settings right in my camera and my photo has come out to green. Well, on the tint setting then I can raise it up towards the magenta just a little bit. I've also got another option here, and that's for Adobe to do some of this color correcting by itself. The way we do that is by clicking the dropper tab here. Now with the dropper, I'm going to highlight it over what should be white in the photo. When I highlight what should be white and I let go, it's going to color correct? For that to be white and everything else to match. You'll notice if I hold this over the horse's body and say, Hey, this is supposed to be white. Well, Adobe tries to correct for that, except since this color isn't white, we've got kind of a wild photo here now. Another white I can reference might be the top of this barn in the background. I'll say, Hey, that's white and Adobe will correct for that. I personally like to do things manually. But if this is something that you're not quite comfortable with or correcting an image by yourself, then you can use the dropper. If there's something white in your photo. A great rule of thumb is to always color correct first and lighting correct. First, you want a nice, flat, stable, neutral image that then we can color grade and play with the lighting with afterwards. 5. Adjusting Lighting: We're going to start by looking at the settings in the Light tab. Now, light, of course, has to do with how bright or dark different sections of your photo are. Something that may be new to us, is that we can independently change the brightness of the highlights, shadows, whites or blacks in our photo. Let's take a look at each of these sliders. The exposure slider just changes the overall brightness and darkness of the photo. Now, for any of these sliders, you can double-tap to return them to 0. I'll double-tap and my exposure goes back to 0. The contrast slider is going to change how contrasted the highlights and shadows are from one another. So if I slide that all the way down, it's going to flatten my image and make the highlights and the shadows, the whites and the blacks, much more similar to one another. Not a lot of difference. As I slide it up, then we see a huge difference in the bright and the dark sections. The darks become more dark, the brights become more bright. The highlights are going to impact the brightness of the highlights of the photo, the parts of the photos that aren't the brightest. So without affecting something dark like maybe the horse's legs, I could affect something like the sky or the tuft of hair on his face. I will adjust the highlights here. I can turn them up. Things get brighter or darker, especially in that sky, without really affecting the legs. It's the same thing for the shadows, but the opposite. So now I can impact the darker parts of the images without really impacting things like the sky. So I can make the shadows darker or lighter. And you can really see that ground come out without any impact on the actual sky. Now, whites and blacks are very similar. Typically your brighter colors will be in the highlights and your darker colors will be in the shadows. But it's a little bit nuanced from the highlights and the shadows. We can still impact our whites and you'll see everything get brighter and darker. But this time it does impact the legs and the ground. A bit. Same thing with the blacks. This is going to bring a lot of those dark colors up and brighten the whole image, or darken the whole image as well. A lot more so than the shadows do. Now, I am probably going to turn the contrast up a bit. I will drop the highlights, try to get some sky in there. Drop the shadows a little bit, bring the whites up to keep the image bright. And bring the blacks down. A little bit of exposure in there. And so far we started editing this photo. One more thing in the Light tab, we won't go too much into detail here. But if we click this button, we're going to get into the tone curves. Now this here is a really interesting way to impact the light or color of an image. For example, if I click down in the lower left half, that's going to start impacting shadows can really bring them low or high. In the same way, if I click in the top right, that's going to start impacting the brightness and whites. And I can bring those up really high or down really low. You can create some interesting curves here that would otherwise be very difficult to do with just the buttons themselves. And you'll notice that everywhere you're touching is adding in a dot. That dot is just a point of reference where you're bending this, this curve. Now it's not just for light, but we can also use it to impact color in an image. If I click red, green, or blue, all of a sudden I can pull the blue, the blue hues out of the highlights of this image and look at that, that's leaving a lot of green and red in there. Small edits are best less is almost always more when it comes to photos. So be really careful when you're editing like this. But you can create some really interesting images and play with color. And a really nice way. 6. Editing Color: Okay, so we just took a look at the light tab. And so far, I really like how this image is coming along just from working our way through the tab. If I hold my finger down on the screen, I can see the old version of the photo before we edited so that we can compare and contrast what we've done so far. So this is our edited version. If I hold my finger down, we've got the original photo. And honestly I think the edits that we've made to light and to color are really nice so far. But speaking of color, let's close our light tab and go down to our color tab. Now we have some options for temperature, tint, vibrance, and saturation. As for the temperature of the photo, this is going to affect how cool or warm your photo looks. And so we can adjust our slider from a blue cool image all the way up to a warm, red hot image. But again, less is always more. So I'm going to give it a little bit of temperature here, just raise it up a touch and warm up the image. It is an image that was taken in fall. And so warm, orangey colors are best for something like this, especially with the horses rich color. As for the tint here we're going between not blue and yellow, but green and pink, the tint of the photo. So right now the photo actually looks a little bit green to me. We could take it to an extreme. Either way. I'm going to take it back to its original and I'm going to raise up the pink just a little bit. Maybe that's too much. Next we have Vibrance and Saturation. Now, these two can be a little hard to separate from one another. They both strength and colors in the photo, but there is a difference. Vibrance just help some of the colors that aren't as strong. It kind of raises the baseline and helps the colors just have some more life in them. Saturation impacts the strength of every color. Vibrance. We can be a little more lenient with where saturation, it becomes really, really oversaturated quickly. So I'll show here vibrance, we can still bring it down to black and white, just about, there's a little bit of color in there. If we raise it all the way, we've got a little too much color peeking there. The purples are peeking through. But we can really be pretty lenient with it here. Maybe we'll bring it up about halfway. Saturation. We can bring things fully down to black and white. Or we can really overexposed colors until it almost looks like a cartoon. Saturation. I like to be a little more careful with, and I'll bring it probably just into the single digits there. Now, we have a couple really handy options for editing color, and these are wildly powerful. We have the color mix and we have the color grading. Color mix is going to let you adjust the hue, saturation and luminance or brightness of individual colors in the photo. For example, a lot of this image is red and orange. So if I click on the orange tab, I'm now only impacting the color orange in this photo. So I can adjust the saturation of just the oranges. I can bring it all the way up or all the way down and you can see how much I'm orange is in that photo. I can adjust the hue of the oranges to be a little more yellow or even a little more red if that's what I want. And the luminance is going to change how bright or dark just those oranges are coming through. So I can drop it down and you can see that tree in the background especially dropped down. Or I can raise it up. And that tree is looking a little overexposed and again, cartoony. But this is a fantastic way to bring some colors out of the photo completely that we don't want. I'm seeing some strong purple tones coming through that. I don't necessarily like. So I'm gonna go ahead and pull the purples out of there. And that's going to clean our photo up quite a bit. Maybe I want to leave a little bit in. I don't want any black and white in the photo. And we can also play with the oranges, strengthen them, change their color a little bit and just bring some life to the photo. Then we have the color grading tab. Now, sort of like the tone curve. The color grading tab is going to lead us adjust the hue of the shadows, mid tones, the highlights, and then the overall color. We can adjust the color, of course, by dragging to one side of the wheel. And we can adjust the strength or saturation of that color by how far towards the edge we drag. So as an example, maybe I want a little bit of blue in the mid tones. Here. It's looking great, but I feel like it is looking just a little too red. So I'm gonna give it a little bit of blue in those mid tones. You'll see that it takes out a lot of the red just by canceling it out. A great practice in editing a photo is to be more minimalistic and take away a color rather than just add another one in. But here, it seems to have worked nicely. I can also adjust the luminance just like we could before of that specific color. Now, the blending here is going to really show whether a blue overpowers a picture, blends in with the photo. Well, so kind of a silly example. Let's come into the shadows and let's add in some pink. It's beautiful. Now if I have my blending at a 100, you can see how strong those pings get. And if I change it to 0, it's not quite as overpowering. Coming back to my blue mid tones, the balance here is sort of like an opacity. It determines if the blue is actually make a difference at all. If my balance is all the way over to 100, then I've almost not made a change. In the same way we can make all these changes to the shadows of an image. Highlights of an image which would really impact the brightest spots the most, but does leave an overlay on the image. I don't tend to play too much with these here. I like to bring in my color in another way. But we'll close the color grading. We'll we've got a simple black and white button in the top left if that's the way that you want to go. And we've also got a white balance option. Again, I like editing things as shot and adjusting them manually. But if you shot on maybe a cloudy day and you find that things are much too blue. A cloudy preset could be a lifesaver. 7. The "Effects" Tab: It's time to look at the effects tab of our image. Now, under the effects, we have things like texture, clarity, dehaze the vignette, and more. Texture is just going to do exactly as it says. It brings in texture to your image, which we can see especially on some of these horses hairs. If we bring texture down all the way, then things get very soft, almost like a dream. We bring it up all the way. Things get very sharp and brought out to the front. Now, if I haven't said it before, less is more. If we bring texture up all the way, it can create a beautiful image, but it can also mess with some of the other settings. I like to bring my texture up just a bit and keep a little bit of that dreamy feel in their clarity does something very similar, but it also adjust some of the overall exposure on the image. If I bring my clarity up, you'll see some of those shadows drop. Some of those highlights blow up. Now if this is the look you're going for, that's fantastic and we can call it done. But again, I like to bring it up just a little bit to not mess with any of the exposure options that I've already set. The D Hayes is fantastic. If you've taken a hazy photo, maybe there was fog and you didn't want in there or your contrast on your camera was set too low. If I bring the Dehaze down, you'll see what I'm talking about. Sometimes a photo looks like this and you just want to bring a little bit of that haze out. Well, this can do that for you. So I'm bringing it up. Obviously there is no haze anymore. But if you don't have any haze that's not one to necessarily worry about. Maybe I'll bring it up by just one click there. The vignette you might be familiar with. This is how we add the black corners a photo by dragging it down, or white corners in a photo by dragging it up. When we've set the vignette that unlocks the midpoint roundness and feather. And so this is just going to change. Settings on the vignette itself, make kind of a square border with it. But I'm not going to apply a vignette. I'll set it to 0 so those options disappear. We've also got a grain setting and you may be thinking, well, I thought grain was a bad thing. But not necessarily. It's a stylistic choice and can give our photo more of a film feel. You may be surprised if we zoom in and add the grain in all of the way. Well, that's pretty extreme, but even zooming out, the photo could look worse than it currently does. Grain is nice to add in a little bit, so I'll take it away and then bring just a touch in to give it a nice, almost nostalgic feel. 8. Adding Detail: So far things are looking good. We can see our original photo compared with our edited photo. And I think the edited is really quite nice. Now we're going to look at the detail tab. And the big ones in here are going to be sharpening, noise reduction, color, noise reduction, detail, and smoothness. If we look at the sharpening, it does something very similar to what texture did, but a little more extreme as well. It will sharpen our whole image. Just like that. It brings out some of the grain, Absolutely. But we've got a nice crisp image will apply a little bit of that. Noise reduction is going to do the opposite of what the grain did. If we've taken an image that has grain we don't want, maybe we took it too dark and had to lighten it and a lot of the grain is in the background while we can apply noise reduction to get rid of it or even get kind of a dreamy feel. I've pulled up another photo to show the noise reduction setting. If we've taken a photo that's too dark and we really want to bring it up and you can see there's a lot of noise and messiness there. Well, we can go into our noise reduction and I'll drag it up to an extreme here. And we can see it's gone almost too far the other way now it's got a dreamy feel. And depending on the photo, the color noise reduction may work as well. Although here it seems that our regular noise reduction does the trick and cleans up a lot of that background noise. This is a great way to save a dark photo by bringing all of the lights up and applying some noise reduction. 9. Optics Buttons: There are certain scenarios where you'll need some Lens Corrections and we can do that through the optics tab. This is the tab you'll probably use the least in Lightroom. Lightroom can get your lens information. It can apply optics settings to correct your lens automatically. 10. Geometry Settings: Finally, we come to the geometry tab. This is incredibly helpful for real estate to get nice straight lines. Or if you have any distortion that you need to correct yourself, we have the option to distort an image until it is proper. We can also change the vertical option. The horizontal geometry. Rotate our image, change the aspect here by stretching it out in either direction. Scale just by blowing it up or shrinking it down. And finally the X offset and the Y offset. If you've properly compose your shot, then you won't need to worry about this tab. But there are times when it may be helpful to just adjust an image and how we're viewing it. We can also apply the constrain crop option, which will get rid of the white and crop the image as we distort it. Finally, we have these two intersecting lines. And if you're interested in editing real estate photos in Lightroom, these lines will be for you. Here. I'll bring up another photo of a building. And we can apply these to geometry lines by clicking with our finger and dragging. And we'll say that's a straight line in the room. This is also meant to be a straight line in the room. And then it will adjust the room to get all of the lines and angles straight with the image. 11. Saving and Using Presets: Finishing up the bar on the left. Now we're coming to the right side. Now of course, up at the top, we've got our button for the sliders, and underneath that we have one for presets. Now, presets are a powerful tool to make quick edits on your photos. If I click these two circles here, I'm going to get three options. The first one is Adobe's recommended presets for the photo. Second option here is all of the premium presets they've got for you. You can click any category and then shift around on your photo, see what kind of quick edits you can make. I will undo these presets. Finally, we've got our own presets. These are ones that we've saved ourselves or any that you've gotten online and can bring into Lightroom. So for example, I have some user presets here. Of course, I like our edit on the horse more. And if that's the case and I've done something that I really enjoy, then I can come up to these three dots on the top and I can hit create a preset. Now, it's saving all of the things about my photo that I've done and I can give that preset a name and pick a group that I'd like the preset to be in so I can find it and reference it later. You'll also notice underneath it's giving me the option to select what parts of the photo I'd like to save as a preset. Maybe I enjoy the color of the photo, but I don't necessarily want to bring over every single lighting option. Well, I can just uncheck the light box and then I'll be saving the color effects and detail. 12. Cropping Your Photo: With the presets in mind, let's take a quick look at the next two tabs. The first one is the crop tab. Now, here we can adjust how much of the image that we'd like to edit. We can also adjust the aspect ratio of the crop box. So maybe we can have it as a square or something more cinematic and video like, like 16 by nine will go to original. And we can also adjust the rotation of that crop box, keeping to the form factor of two by three. We can lock and unlock that two-by-three as well. So when it's locked, it will stay to two-by-three and when it's unlocked, I can move it in any way that I like. I can rotate my image. I can also flip it horizontally or vertically. Then down at the bottom of the image, you'll see this little 0 degree sign and a slider, which I can use to rotate my image if it's off centered and it will keep that crop factor as well. Or I can just hit the straightened button and allow it to straighten the image for me. 13. The Healing Brush: Underneath the Crop button we have the healing brush. So I will get out of the crop and go to the healing brush. Now, the healing brush is going to fix any blemishes in our photo that we don't necessarily want here. Maybe I don't want some of these fibers coming onto the horse's face. So what I can do is I can click on them. It's going to put one circle on top of where I've clicked and one circle with an arrow towards the first circle. Now, the first circle where I clicked is where we want to heal. The second circle is going to be bringing a portion of the image over to where I clicked and it's going to replace it. So maybe I want to find a bit of horses hair with that second circle. That doesn't look too obvious. Do the same thing down here. And slowly, but surely we can click around and replace portions of this image, this over there, and put another one right there and we start to get rid of some of those fibers on the horse's face. Now, there are a couple important things here, and we'll open up our healing brush again. When we click somewhere, we can adjust, first of all, the size of the circle. So I can make a small adjustment or a large adjustment. Secondly, we can adjust the opacity. So maybe we don't want to fully take something out. Maybe we want to lessen it. Well, here I've got the original image. And here I'm bringing in where the second circle is until it's at a full opacity. Another important note is that I don't mean to just click for a circle, but I can also draw a shape. And then I'll get a second identical shape to replace the first one. So for example, I don't need to just tap a circle. Maybe I can draw right here, make this kind of weird oval thing. Then it's going to give me a second identical shape that I can move around anywhere that I need on the image to replace my first section. And again, we can adjust the opacity. So we can see that white line or just start to cover it up with another part of the horse's body. 14. Masking Your Shot: Now underneath the Healing Brush tool, we've got a tab called masking. Masking is an incredibly powerful tool where we can select an object or an item or a draw over a section of the image, and then make edits that impact just that part of the image without touching the rest of it. Now, when we're masking, we have a few options. First we want to add a mask. So I'm going to click on the Add button here. It's going to give me a few options. The first are automatic. I can select the subject of my image and let Adobe try to figure out what the subject is. Or I can select the sky. Now underneath that, I've got some more manual options. I could draw a brush just like we did with the healing brush. I could use a linear gradient or a radial gradient. Finally, I can affect even just a color range or a luminance range, which is kind of like selecting the highlights or the shadows. Now, let's take a look at each of these. If I'm selecting my subject, it's going to try to figure out where my subject is in here. This is an artist I did a photoshoot for named Joey cost and Tino. So we're going to thank him for letting us use this photo and we'll see if it can select him. So I'll tap Select Subject. It'll take just a second. Now you'll see this red haze on Joey's body. It's done a really good job of selecting my subject. With that selected, then I have all my light and color options. The color looks a little bit different in general, but I can make many edits that will only affect Joey and not the rest of the photo. And we'll see that with the light as well, I could expose him differently or drop the exposure. And you'll see that the background stays exactly the same. I'll hit the plus button again here. And this time I'm going to select a brush. So now I have the ability to adjust my brush on the left side. The size, again, the feather, which is how soft or hard around the edges it is. As an example, if I've gotten no feather, I'm drawing a straight line. It kind of looks like I've painted it on. In contrast, select my brush. If I've got a high feather, you'll see that it blends much better and kind of fades out on the edges. Now, when I select something with the brush, I'll try to go roughly around Joey here. Now I'll be able to impact what I've brushed over without impacting anything else. That important note is with the brush. You also have a eraser setting so that if you've taken your brush too far over your subject and you don't want to do that, you can erase the brush in the same manner you brushed it on. We're doing well so far. Let's hit R plus arrow again and we'll check out what a linear gradient is. And here when we've tapped the linear gradient button, we can drag on the photo and you'll see that the top part is the most effected, the bottom part is the least affected. We can change where that's hidden. So now we're kind of grading across the photo, fading across the photo so I can make an edit that won't impact the bottom, will impact the top. And we'll just sort of start to fade as the photo goes on. We come to a sort of similar thing with the radial gradient, except this one, we're going to impact inside or outside a circle. So I've just clicked the radial gradient button. I'm going to draw a circle here. And you'll see that inside that circle is going to be where my edits are. I find this one really useful if I want to make edits on the face of a person. There's also a button here down in the left-hand side to change the gradient so that instead of being on the inside of the circle, it is on the outside of the circle, so I'll tap that. And now my circle is the only place that's safe from edits. We've reversed it entirely. So here I'm going to drop the exposure. That doesn't look like a very good photo to me, but I can come on and adjust the feather and then reverse it. Now we've got a dark photo besides for the face of our subject. Now we're going to take a look at making an edit over the color range of a photo. Here I can move this ring to select a color and you'll see it brings all of the other colors with it. We can refine it to be really strict to just the color we highlighted or to start to include other colors that are similar. Now I can make my edits. Here, I'll apply it and make my edits to just those colors in the image, which not only impact the trees around, but you'll also see that it impacts his eyes since they match a little bit with the colors around. Now, if I want to impact the luminance range, I can again select illuminance. I'll hold this over his skin. Then I can adjust once again. How inclusive I'm being with that luminance. Now I'm going to drag this up here and see if we can really narrow in on his skin. And you'll notice his skin is selected and red. And so now I can make adjustments there and it's including a little bit of the background, but it's still a very nice feature. Let's change our photo here to one that we've got some sky included. We'll come back to our horse and we'll go to the masking. And here I'm going to do Select Sky, which is the only one that we haven't seen yet. It's going to detect the sky for us and this takes just a second. And then we've got the sky highlighted and we can make our color changes. And you can really see we're bringing down the highlights and bringing out a lot of the blues of our image. 15. Copying Edits: We've done a lot of work on this photo here. Again, if I hold my finger down on it, we can see the original photo. And at this point, it's a very different photo looking back and forth. Now, if I go underneath the masking tab, I can come somewhere where I can apply previous edits from a photo. Now, this comes in really handy if you're editing real estate photos or if you're editing photos from the same sheet. So that shoot that I had done with Joey that we saw in the last video, there were a lot of similar photos. So if I make one edit to one photo, I don't want to make all of those adjustments to the next photo. I can hit this tab and I can click a simple button to bring all of those adjustments over. Now, I don't necessarily want to do that on my horse photo, but it does become incredibly handy. Another option is when you're looking at all of your photos, you can hold down on one and you can copy down at the bottom. So we'll copy all of those settings. And then we can go to another photo. We can hit paste. Now, all of those settings will be applied to our other photo. Finally, finally, the last tab down here is going to show us previous versions of this photo. So if I've made many edits and I've saved it and I don't necessarily like it. I could take a step back or even go all the way back to the original photo. Now I can make edits on my original photo here, version original, applied as current, and I can start editing this photo again. Maybe I wanted to try something a little different, darker with less contrast. For some reason. I don't know why you would do this, but maybe you wanted to. Now I can come back to my versions. I can see the current edits that I have. I can also see all of the saved versions of this photo. So I've made my edits a second time through and I've thought, no, I don't really like that. Well, I can click an older version and bring back all of those edits of the previous photo. 16. Edit 1 - Make a Good Photo Great: We're going to run through three photo examples here. First, we're going to edit what I think is a decent photo. Then we're going to edit too bad photos to see what happens if we've got a shot that's underexposed, overexposed. For our good photo, I'm going to take this image of our friend Joey again. And we're just going to make some edits through it and talk about it. First thing I want to do is make sure that everything is straight and cropped as I like it. So he looks a little cricket to me, I'm going to hit the straightened button. That looks good. I might take it a little bit further here. That looks good to me. Now we're going to go correct. Before we go into light will go into color. Everything looks pretty decent to me here. I might tint it a little more magenta to bring out some of his skin tones. Then I'm gonna go ahead and add in just one hit of temperature there. I'll give it a little bit of vibrance. And I'm going to say that that's a great starting place. And we can already see if I hold my finger down, we can see the slight edits we just made. There's our previous photo and the new one. And you can really see the previous photo is coming through a little green. Might be hard to see the first time we look at the photo. But when we go back and forth between the edits, we can really see, oh, that original photo looked pretty green. With those changes made, I'm going to start working my way down the tabs. So I'm going to start in light. I'm going to drop some of the highlights and bring the exposure up a bit. We want some contrast in there as well. So I'll take the highlights down, a bit more, shadows down as well. The whites, I think we can take a little way. And then the blacks will also take just a touch away. A lot of times when I'm editing photos, I'm not keeping a science in my head. There are of course, rules that we follow that we know make a good photo. But I'm also just adjusting these sliders up and down. Sometimes in a photo bringing the blacks up can really bring it to life. Sometimes it can really squash it and make it look flat. And so it's helpful for me to go up a little bit, down a little bit and say, okay, which of those do I think is working better here? And typically bringing the blacks down just a little bit is really nice and adds that contrast in there. So now we've got a pretty well-lit photo. One thing I do want to do that I mentioned later in the tips and tricks, is I want my subject's face to be a little bit brighter than the rest of the photo. This really brings people's eyes to their face. What I do to balance that out is I'm going to bring the exposure down. Maybe by just one or two. I'm going to go to my masking brush. And instead of selecting my subject because I just want his face, I'm gonna do this radial gradient. And I'm going to select his face here. Now with my subject's face selected and getting it narrowed in pretty well, I'm going to go into light and I'm going to expose just as much. I took the exposure away from the rest of the photo. So now we've got a slight light boost on his face and we've taken it away from the rest of the photo. Lighting looks pretty good to me. Let's go back and forth and see from the original I'll hold my finger down. There's our original photo and here's our current photo. I think those edits have really made a great difference. Let's go down and take a look at the color. We already color corrected this image. And I'm not sure there's a lot of change that I want to do. But let's go in and see we'll come into color mix. Now here, the greens of the image are really the strength of the background. I don't want to touch those too much. Maybe we'll take a bit of the saturation away. So as we don't take away from our subject and out any tones in the photo that aren't supposed to be there, like purples and pinks. We can also squash down a little bit. Again, if we squash it all the way, that's going to put some odd spots on his face. You can see all of a sudden he looks a little dead than when we had those purples in there. So we just want to squash them a little bit. Purples and pinks. We don't want to kill our subject. Oranges are going to affect his skin tone most. And so we can give that just a tad of push. And he's got some reds in his face as well. Now, the blues in the photo are most going to affect his shirt and his eyes. So you can see if I raise the saturation on the blue, we're getting a lot out of his shirt. Or we could even make it gray at this point. I'm going to take just a little bit away so that we focus again mostly on his face. And with the hue, we could even take his shirt all the way to a more purple color, will leave his shirt the color that it is, and adjust the luminance just a little bit. Now of course, we could go a little crazy with it. We could add in some of the color grading options. And really bring in some different tones and feels to our photo. So maybe I wanted a little bit of a blue background here. We'll blend it best as we can. Or I actually like some red shadows here, maybe bluer highlights and really start playing around with the photo. But I actually like it to have more of a natural feel. And I recommend as well as you're getting comfortable with editing, just see if you can create a good image first and maybe use some of those presets after that to bring in more of a colored feel. Something like this, I actually think looks really cool. But before we apply, our presets will continue to edit our photo. We're coming down into the Effects tab. And for the Effects tab, I like to zoom in on parts of my subject here, you can really see the nuances and we'll add some texture in there again, less is more. So a little bit of texture, a little bit of clarity. And dehaze. We can zoom out and really see what that's doing and how it's affecting our image. If we go too far, we're going to put just a touch of that. Now we've got a sharp, crisp looking photo that's colored and lit really well here. I don't want any vignette on it. That's not my thing here. And I'm not sure if we actually need any green. I'm not sure if that would add or take away from the photo or I feel like in this case it would take away and to keep the grain down and we can head on down to detail. We're going to add a touch of sharpening here, but his face is starting to get just on the edge of sharper. It starts to look a little bad. I don't want to over sharpen. As for noise reduction, we don't have a lot of noise in the background. I bring that up. We can see it all kinda fade away and get dreamy there. We don't need a lot of noise reduction. I'm going to keep that pretty low. Finally, then the last two tabs, optics and geometry. I don't think we need a lot of there's no lens correction that needs to happen to this photo and there's also no geometry corrections. I didn't take it from the side or from the bottom or upside down. So I think this photo looks pretty good. At that this point here, I would kind of take a look at the thing as a whole and say, well, maybe I do want some color changes. Maybe I want it a little bit warmer in the woods there. The tint still looks good to me. I can push the saturation just a touch to really bring it to life. And now I've got a photo that I really enjoy. I don't think it looks so colored that it's cartoonish. And we can compare it again with our first example here, the original photo. We can see a big difference. You'll notice none of our changes. We really pushed the bar too far when we've got a 100 changes to make a small edit on each one, compiles to make a big change. 17. Edit 2 - Save a Bright Image: Let's take a look at a bad photo. Now, before we do, I want us to notice something on this page. Most of these photos say raw on them. That's because I'm shooting raw with my camera. Now, if you're not sure what RAW vs JPEG is all about, we're not going to cover that in this course. We'll cover that in a photography course. But for now, just know that when you shoot RAW and you have a lot more editing options in a much better chance of saving your photo if your camera has a RAW setting, I highly recommend it. There's still a lot you can do with a JPEG, but if your highlights are blown out or your shadows are underexposed and too dark, it's gonna be tough to salvage any visual information out of that. With a raw image, you have a much better chance. So we'll look at an overexposed shot that I did for a company. Now, I wanted the space to be exposed and colored well, but that gave us some problems when there's a window with a sun coming straight through. So what do we do? Well, the first thing we do is we see if we can adjust the highlights and the whites in a photo. I'm going to bring the highlights all the way down and the whites all the way down. And already you can see in this raw image a lot of information outside that we haven't quite lost, especially if I expose down. You can even see the building next to it, which was not the case when the photo wasn't edited. So I know that this is a salvageable photo. I'm going to bring the exposure back up here and already this is looking a lot better than the original. A little bit dark for me. And so when things are a little dark, this is a case where I'm actually going to bring the shadows up a little bit. Maybe the blacks as well. I'm going to take just a little bit of the temperature out in the color. Now, I'm going to come into my masking. What I'm going to do is I'm going to brush and I'm going to keep that feather. Hi, I'm just going to brush a little bit on this left side of the photo before we get to some of the light. Now as I come into the light, I'm going to expose it up just a touch. Otherwise, that left side is really a different brightness than the rest of the photo. Something else that we can do if your window is really giving you trouble, is that we can mask again. And this time I'm going to mask just some of the brighter sections here. And with that, I'm going to bring some of those highlights down, a little bit more highlights and you see the whites. At a certain point, we start to flatten our image and they get this dark kind of dead spot in there. And that's telling us that we just can't go any further. So we'll leave that where it is. This is our current photo now, much easier to work with. I would call that more, I'm light correction rather than a stylistic or artistic thing. And we've got our current photo, and then we've got the original photo. And I'd say the current photo, I'm much more likely to turn in after I've made the proper edits than working with the original. Another option here that we can't necessarily do with Lightroom. But if you've got a camera that does bracketing, you may look into bracketing. I know we're diving into some photography advice here, but bracketing is when you set a camera on a tripod and it takes many shots of different brightness in the same space. So you'll have one photo that looks way too dark and one photo that looks way too light. And then many photos in-between. In Lightroom, you can take all those bracketed images and you can combine them into one. What this means is from the deepest darks to the brightest highlights. You've got all of that information in one photo and that's called an HDR photo. Here, as an example, I've got a bracketed photo where I was really able to save what's outside the window because of the dark photo I had. And I was really able to save what's inside because of the light photo that I had. If I come into my light here and I turn the exposure all the way up. You can see that from the lightest photo I had, we could completely blow out the entire image. From the darkest photo that I had. We can get some really true colors outside at some really deep levels. I'm going to undo those there. But it's a great way to save both the inside and outside of an image bracketed photos. This photo is another example of when it's too dark inside and just too bright outside and some quick edits again, I would drop the highlights and some of the whites. And already you can see that the outside has toned down by quite a bit. The shadows in this case and the blacks are going to affect the inside. We can drop the blacks for some contrast and raise the shadows up. And then from there I'd put some color in there, maybe some vibrance for the plants. Maybe I would even directly impact the greens here, give them a little bit more saturation and adjust their hue to be more of a rich, lively green. Really, really quick edits to fix an original photo that's just not working. 18. Edit 3 - Save a Dark Image: Let's take another bad photo example and see if we can salvage it if something is underexposed. Now, if you're shooting in RAW, there are some really wild examples of boosting the light from a photo that was otherwise pitch black and getting a lot of color in life out of it. Now, of course, at that point you're going to have a lot of background noise. So that's where those noise remover sliders that we saw can be so useful and we'll probably use them today. So here we have a photo that's just too dark, but our subject is standing in some light. So if we boost the exposure up by a large amount than our subject's face is going to be too light for the rest of the photo. So let's do this. The first thing I'm going to do is bring up some of the shadows and some of the blacks. Then I'm going to raise the exposure just until I feel I've got the forest at a good brightness. Okay. Now with my subject, I'm going to take on the masking. I'm going to just brush some of the brightest parts of his face here, right where the sun is hitting, maybe a little bit on his shoulder as well. I'm going to come into my light and I'm going to drop some of the highlights and a little bit of the whites. My biggest thing that I don't want to do is I don't want to drop too much of the exposure because he starts to look very different than the rest of his body. But maybe I can take it down by a couple. Now at this point, you'll see we've got a lot of green in the background because we boost it up such a dark image. So what I'll do is I'm going to open up the detail here and bring in some noise reduction for the background. Now, just like with our other photo, we still want to apply all the same settings. So I'm going to warm it up a little bit, adjust the tint to match his skin, give it some vibrance. I can still adjust the color mix here. Maybe I don't want the woods to be so overwhelming in their color. I like him. In this more yellowish and desaturated forest, his skin will either be oranges. Yeah, it looks like it's mostly orange. We're gonna give him some illuminance out of the color sliders here. And that's going to help us bring him to life in the midst of this forest. Then finally, let's see what we can do with his shirt as well. And bring it into some color grading to make some slight edits here, I'm liking these green shadows here. Blend it best as we can. You'll see we salvaged quite a bit a dead photo. Here is the original photo. If I hold my finger down. And our edit, it's a big, big difference. We saved a lot of the photo around him without ruining too much of his face. And even something that I would do on his face. You see there's so much purple around there. I'm glad I zoomed in because I would take some of that purple and I probably bring it out of his face without making him look dead, purples and pinks. We take away a little bit. 19. Extra Tips and Tricks: I want to take you through some tips and tricks that we haven't necessarily covered. But I find very useful. The first one here we've talked about a little bit is to brighten the face of a subject just like we did here in this photo. Give it a little bit of life by darkening the rest of the photo. Just buy one or two taps and then brighten the face by the same amount. That's going to bring all of the focus and to the face subject, which is really the goal of many photos, especially when you're doing headshots. The second one is more just a navigation thing. Again, in the settings, you can see all of the navigations and taps. But something I find incredibly useful is if I adjust the exposure instead of trying to slide it back down to 0 and go really slowly, which you can do, but it takes time. Just a double-tap anywhere on that slider is going to bring it right back to the center, or at least the starting point of where it was. Now probably my favorite tip here has to do with the share button, the same way that we would share the photo or save it to our device. Here we have the option to edit in Photoshop, so I can click that button and it's going to open my photo in Photoshop. It may not bring all of the edits that we've made, but any edits that we make in photoshop will be brought over into light room. For example, I've got this fence in the lower third of my photo that I don't want in there. So I'm going to grab my Healing Brush in Photoshop, which I think works really well. Now in light room, you're healing brush is going to allow you to take another portion of the photo. Remember those second shapes, those identical shapes, and bring it over to the first one. In Photoshop. It's going to use it's AI to try to get rid of any blemishes or impurities. And especially with something like this fence, I find that really useful. So I'm going to click and drag along the fence here. It's going to turn black and it'll take a second, but photoshops going to try to remove it. There we go. We've got a little touch up to do. But for the most part that fence is gone. Now, when I've finished editing a photo with some of photoshops tools, I can hit the send to Light room button. It's going to take that photo back over to our light room where we can keep making lighting and color changes. Now when it comes over, you will see we still have our raw image with the fence. And then we also have our Photoshop image next to it. Now if you've made all of your edits to the raw image and they didn't transfer over when you did any Photoshop edits. Well again, what I recommend is that you hold down an image. Remember you can copy settings and then you can bring it over to your Photoshop image. 20. Congratulations!: Those are the basics of Lightroom editing. Whether you're just color correcting and image are really making some crazy edits. All of the different sliders can be powerful tools to help you create the exact image you've got in your head. Have you got any questions you can always reach out to me at Jacob at lamb Lessons.com or just go to lamb Lessons.com. I'm looking forward to hearing from you and thank you so much for going through this with me.