Lightroom Masterclass for Beginners!

1. Intro: Hello everyone and welcome to my course on Lightroom. In this course, I'm going to be giving you an overview on how to edit your photos through Lightroom. We'll go through each of the different tools available as well as examples on when you would want to use each of these tools. Additionally, I'm going to be going over how to import and organize your photos, which is a must when you start taking more photo. We'll cover everything from white balance to tone panel, presence panel, tone curve, high dynamic range and more. I've also include a bonus series of videos which show my workflow from a photo shoot from beginning to end. I wanted to take a few minutes in this video first though to explain a few key points. First is the meaning of workflow. A workflow is a series of actions somebody takes from beginning to end, which results in a final product. Now this could apply to a photo shoot, editing pictures, making video, anything you want. This includes things such as how people import their photos to keyboard shortcuts, to how they like to organize things, a sequence of editing, and even how they like to export their images. Now, while there's no right or wrong way to do this, there are fast and slower ways. When I started editing, I learned from the workflow of another photographer, and after I got familiar with what he was doing, I started to develop my own workflow. You don't have to follow me exactly all the time, but you should get familiar with each of the tools and how each one affects the photo. That way, you can develop your own workflow, what works for you. It's definitely not wrong or bad to edit a photo. In fact, most commercial, advertisement, and fashion shoots require this ability, but realize as a photographer, you are first and foremost the person who makes the picture and the editing process should be part of enhancing your original vision on your pictures. But I personally wouldn't edit just for the sake of editing. If a photo doesn't need any editing, then there's no need to edit it. As part of this course, I also invite you to join my private Facebook group called Learn Your Camera, photography made simple. After answering a few simple questions, you're going to be able to post through pictures that you've taken an edited, get constructive criticism, and get further tutorials and an instruction. With that said, let's dive in and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. 2. Quick Overview of LR: In this video, we're going to be going over a really fast walkthrough on the develop module, and I've already opened up picture and I have photo that I'm going to go through and just simply do some quick edits just to show you the power of Lightroom and to get an idea of all these different sliders, I'm not going to use all of them, just the ones that pertain what I want to do here. The way I like to develop in Lightroom is going from top-down unless I have a specific idea of how I want this image to look before. Sometimes I'll take a picture and I'll look at it and I'll go, oh, I know exactly what I wanted to do with this. Other times, I want to play around with the information to see what I can bring out of the photo. Already this isn't anything amazing. So I know I'm going to have to pull some more information out of it to make it more impactful. The first thing I'm going to do is adjust the alignment of the memorial here, and you can go and do that by clicking on ''Auto'' on transform, and it's going to detect this and it's going to align it. Because it did, now the photo needs to be cropped to get rid of the white. So I'm going to click ''Constraint Crop'' and there's the photo now aligned. The next thing I want to do is I want to get rid of these dark edges around the photo, and that's done by going into Lens Corrections, clicking these two boxes, specifically profile corrections, is taking the kind of lens that you have and it's doing any corrections based off of that specific lens type. Sometimes it can automatically detect it, other times it can't. So in this case, it can't. So I'm going to go to the model of my lens was a rocket in, broken in and it was not a 50 millimeter, it was 12 millimeter, and just by doing that, it handled all the edges and it brightened up the photo considerably. So that was super cool. Now that I've done that, I can go up here and handle the white balance. Now, on that day while it wasn't super cloudy, it also wasn't super sunny either. So I want to adjust this and it has some automated selections here, I can go in and mess with these sliders, but I want to just see what my options were here. Let's try daylight, cloudy, shade by flush. Maybe that was more of how it looked on that day, but I'm looking at it now and it looks really blue. So actually just want to leave it on as short because what I'm actually thinking of doing is turning this into a black and white. Before I change it to black and white, I want to see how much data I can pull out of this image. I'm going to show you what I mean by pulling the data out. If I bring down the highlights, all of a sudden, you see more data in the sky, and let's look at before and after. Besides the hallway angle being weird, there's a lot more information in the sky. The one on the right is the after, the one on the left is before. I'm going to mess with the highlights here. Couldn't bring up the shadows a bit and you can see that more in the grass, and I'm going to adjust the whites and I can do this, Lightroom is a cool option if you hold down Option on Mac or hold on the PC, and as you adjust these sliders, you can set your white points and your black points here. In a later video, I'm going to talk about what these white and black sliders do specifically. But you can see there's a tremendous change in the color itself. Maybe it's not really pretty colored, but more vibrant than the before. Then I'm going to go down here and this is another feature I can do to change the same sliders that I just did, just in different ways. Here I just eyeball this. This isn't like something really technical I'm doing, and then in this section I can bring out more detail. Now, I don't really mess with this other one. I'm not going to mess with the vibrance and saturation because already has a lot of yellows and greens. I'm going to choose to make a black and white. For me, this makes a tremendous change already because instead of the colors that are popping out, you're getting the detail. I'm going to see how far I can push this photo and the amount of detail I can bring out. Here there's this group of sliders under black and white, black and white mix, I'm going to take these sliders and start messing around with these. Bring out more, the reds, darken the oranges. These are adjusted in the actual colors in the photo, but how they would look, black and white. Interesting that the green slider isn't affecting much and the camera captured the grass because normally green as a yellow. So here, by bringing down my Aqua, I'm getting more detail in the sky, getting even more by bringing down the blue, but it's also introducing some noise there, this is more detailed in the sky, and this doesn't look like it's affecting anything. I'm going to go back up here, I'm going to adjust these even more. Oops, you messed up. Control or Command Z always can be useful. Now I'm going to go back to my white balance. Because now I'm not worried about the colors, this is just going to effect the amounts of lights and the amounts of darks. So just go through here, big change with daylight. The only thing when you mess a certain point, you're going to see something here. You see this white line that goes along this memorial. It's not there in this photo, and that's just from messing with the colors a lot. There we go. That's fine. I'm going to go to make this sharp. Let me just set it around 80, I normally do 80. I'm going to do what's called masking. So option on Mac, Alt on a PC, you can make sure that the only things that get sharpened is the memorial on the grass and the flags and all the black are the areas that don't have this effect. The reason you want to do that is to avoid any unnecessary noise or damage to the wide open areas that don't need many sharpening. The photo now is slightly noisy. So I'm going to bring this up to 10. Now, I want to do one more thing here. I'm going to change the colors, so I know this's a black and white photo, but you can give the light parts its own sort of color, just like a one color, and you can give the dark parts a separate color if you want. So we're changing the whole photo, we're not bringing back color that was already in the photo, we're almost sort of like painting on the photo with one color or split toning, so two colors. I'm going to pick a color with this first one, and then I show or reveal that color with the saturation, and I'd just go, I'd personally keep under 10. Some people do a lot more depending on the look you're going for. So that affected all the light parts and the dark parts being affected now. I'm just going to play around till I pick color. Good. I like that, but I noticed here on the front it's two blown out from it. So what I can also do is I can take, this is called a brush, and I'm going to simply paint, and so you can see when I'm painting, I'm going to turn that on, paint. This tool allows you to make adjustments on this one specific area that I'm painting on. Now, when I make these adjustments, just turn this off. Now, only that part that I painted is affected, and to get the effect that I want, I'm going to mess around with the sliders until I get that. I think it's just going to be an exposure. This normally when I use this brush to do stuff like that, normally it's just handling the exposure, and then its fine. Good. I'm going to do one more thing. This is just a different kind of brush where you can drag bars of different adjustments along the photo, and I'm doing this sort of just to draw more attention to the top part. Here's the before on the left and here's the after. Could probably go in and do even more on it, but we've done a lot of things. We've corrected this poorly shop photo I took by making the memorial straight, which also cropped it a little bit more. We've also brought more detail on the sky. We changed it to black and white, so it's not these ugly, kind of muddy colors here. We've done some other things to bring up more detail in the grass so makes it more interesting. Only took me a few minutes because I was explaining everything as I was going on, but it could take you much shorter to actually do that. Then you have really interesting photo were before you did it. So I just wanted to give an overview of what you could do in Lightroom when you take a picture and you think, oh, this is kind of like a worthless picture, well, maybe not, maybe you can bring something really cool out of that photo. That is all the power in the Lightroom Photoshop, any editing tool. 3. Library Overview: Now, when you first open up Lightroom, you're not going to see a bunch of pictures in it because presumably this is the first time you're opening up and you haven't downloaded anything. Say, you have pictures in here, this is what it would look like in the center, you have all of your photos, and on the left, you have a series of panels, which has all of your file management, and on the right, you have a couple of other settings you can play around with or data about each individual photo. On the bottom here, you have a few different ways to view this whole grid, and sort them, and rate them if you wanted to. This little slider allows you to make the thumbnails bigger or smaller as you wish. Here at the top is a drop-down menu. If you were to click on say, "Metadata", it will contain all of the computer information that is within each photo. Metadata is basically things that describe something else. In this case, the metadata for a picture will include all the settings, and the kind of camera it was taken on, and the date, and the time, how big it was, and all of that data. It's not the image itself; it's just the data describing that photograph. You can go ahead and sort through your photos by using this. Say, you want to just see all your Canon pictures, you can click on that and see all your Canon pictures. You can do the same thing with these top here. I normally have this off. You can have different Filters, Camera Info or Exposure data, Rated, Unrated. A lot of different options here, and here we're in Library, but you can see Lightroom also has a Develop section, something called a Map, Book, Slideshow, Print, and Web. Real quickly, Develop is where you do all of the editing, where you develop just as you would in a Darkroom. Map, you can actually have the computer recognize the locations of where you took these pictures and it will put them on a Map. It's a cool feature. The Book section helps you make photo books, and actually gives you layouts, and helps you do all of that. Slideshow, you can make really great slideshows with your pictures. You can even add music, super cool. Print is the section, which helps you prepare your image for printing, and that's a whole different subject. Then you have Web, where you can set your portfolio up or pictures within specific website. Now, over here, on the left side is your file structure and a big thing with Lightroom is the file structure. There's other editing programs out there, but the main thing that you would use Lightroom for is the file structure. The editing program itself is good and it's powerful, but you could do the same thing in Photoshop or with other editing programs or similar. I'm not going to totally be down Lightroom. The main thing is the library structure. This seems confusing, but it really isn't, and stay with me here. First, at the top, by the way, Navigator, this shows what picture that you selected. You select that picture, and then if you hold it, you can see it pop up on the screen. You see it big and you let it go, and it goes back. That's all. Let's define a couple of these things, Catalog. The Catalog is where all of your photos are stored, and you can have more than one Catalog. Normally, you wouldn't need to, but you have the option to. You just go to File and you click "New Catalog". But that's where all your photos are stored; it's just where everything is. You have a couple of different options here, which you don't necessarily need to use, but they're there. All Synced Photographs referred to, if you have your Lightroom connected to your Lightroom Mobile app, then that will show up there. The next section here is called Folders. Now, this section shows where all of your pictures are on your computer, including any hard drives that you have. This is really important to take note of because so you see here I have one terabyte photo, that's an external hard drive, and that's where I keep all my photos. It also recognizes one that I have all my video stuff on and then a backup that I keep and it also will show you how much data is available in that. If I click down, I have within the external hard drive all of my files of different photo shoots or projects that they have. Now, if I want to make any changes within the external hard drive, let's say, I want to combine Ian's Photoshoot with David Bramer's Photoshoot, I need to do that within Lightroom. Otherwise, what's going to happen is, and I'll just blow this up so you can see this a bit better. You're going to get these little exclamation marks. What these say, the file can't be found. These are reference images. These are just images that are little snapshots; they're not the item itself. They will disconnect all your photos if you try to do it without doing it within Lightroom. That's just something very important to remember, if you want to make any changes or you want to make new folders, you can do that all right here within Lightroom itself. You can rename it and do all that good stuff. That's Folders. You have the Catalog, which has all the pictures. Now your Collections is essentially Lightroom's way of making a number of different folders for whatever you want. You have something called collections and collections sets. Again, they're just a way to differentiate between different folders. At the end of the day, they're just containers, or files, or drawers, or however you want to define these. Say here, I have a collection set called Clients, and within this one, I have collections. So you see I have a main file and then I have subfolders with all of these photos. Then I have pictures right to the D.C., and this is just one collection. I made a collection set with just one collection. I don't necessarily have to do that. Over here, I have Portfolio and within my Portfolio I have different categories, Landscape, I have that categorized differently. It's up to you how much you want to structure this, but one thing to know is that all these photos are not separated within these collections. Meaning, let's say, this photo here, I can also find in this file here, does not mean that I have two of the same pictures. Everything that you make in these collections are just references to the original file. In fact, anything that you do in Lightroom to that original raw file is not permanently made. It all reference images and you can always go back, and years from now, you can reset that editing process that you did and get the original file. It's all non-destructive as they say so. It's not a permanent change as soon as you make that edit. Anyway, these pictures here are just all references. It's not like you're making a bunch of duplicate copies or anything like that, it's just you have all of your photos here, and then within your collections, you just categorize them however that you want. You don't have to use collection sets. If you click on here, and you can create collection, collection set, it's up to you. You can just have a bunch of collections sets with nothing in them. It doesn't matter. The point is it's just further organization for you. Now, one other point, there is something called a smart collection. Now, a smart collection can be useful. A smart collection essentially gives you an option to say, any picture that has a rating greater than or equal to two stars will automatically go in that file. Let's say your system is, for all of your finished edits, you always five star them and you want to see all of your five stars from the beginning when you started doing that. You create that. Now, I don't use the five stars, but what would happen is all of those five stars would enter in there. You can go in and you can edit smart collection, let's say, because I don't use that, I think I use three stars. Now all the three star pictures would wind up in here, automatically and then you can go ahead and then you can rename it, or you can make another one or I'm just going to delete it. Super cool. One other thing at the bottom here is called published services, so you have the option to connect Lightroom with a number of different other websites or programs. Here you'll see slickpic and pixieset. These are both just different photography portfolio websites and they have this option where if I go in here and within Lightroom, I make a folder and I put all of my finished edits for that shoot in there, it will automatically upload to my portfolio online, which is pretty cool. I got to say it makes things a bit simpler then normally what you would do is you would export them normally as JPEGs, then you would re-upload them to whatever the site it is. That's a pretty cool feature. Your portfolio website, if you have one may have the option to do that. It has this Flickr site and Adobe Stock already here. It's pretty cool. At the bottom you have import and export. When you choose to import, it'll bring up this new screen that will have a left panel, a middle panel and a right panel. I have some other videos to show an example of what that process is like but again, here it has your source. This is saying, where are the pictures coming from and here it recognizes my computer hard drive, it recognizes my other hard drives. If I had a SD card in there, it would recognize that and then I would be able to go over here to the top and say copy as DNG, copy, move or add. When I copy as a DNG, it takes that raw file and it compresses it and turns it into a new kind of raw file, which there's nothing wrong with that. It makes it a bit easier to handle, and that's pretty much it. You can choose just to copy them straight as the original file or you can move them entirely or you can say, you know what, all these folders here, all of them, I want to keep them in this. I also want to put them in my portfolio folder, and I can do that all right within here, it's very easy. On here, the right panel, file handling applied during import. We knew import files, it does two things. It imports in, but in also it builds little mini preview so you can quickly go through the photos without any problem. This essentially changes the definition of these. How close do you want to zoom into these photos when you're inspecting them? How important is it to you that they show up really big on the screen or are they really not that important? It doesn't change anything about the photo, it just is how it's being presented and then you can choose to add it to a collection. Adding it to a collection here would involve making a collection which you can do. I want to name this. What's this one? Billy goat trail. Billy goat trail 2, and then everything that I add will get imported in Lightroom. Then I already have a file made for that one. Applied during import, you can choose to apply and preset if you want or any one of these other presets that Lightroom has, metadata would involve pretty much anything that you want. When you click "New" it pops up with this whole screen here, which has all these different things that you can add that will stay within the photo. If you wanted to protect your photo, for instance, or make sure you have a way to track it or label it that's yours without directly putting like a watermark on it. You can go in here and let's see, is mine here? Here we go. I put my name and then put at least my e-mail. You could put as much information as you want in these and that will put some additional protection. Meaning, if somebody has or is using your picture, you could prove that it's yours by using a simple program to look at the metadata. The other thing you can do is keywords. Now I'm going to do a video on keywords and how to categorize that during your input but that's another way you can organize your photos. I'm going to come out of this. We have the grid, we have this left side which shows the file management and then on the right side here, the top, it gives you like a little histogram where you can see the pieces of information. You have the option to do a quick develop. If for some reason you're like, okay, all these photos, they're going to need increase in exposure, for example. Then you can do it all at once with this setting, key wording is, you can add keywords, or you can also use this to find different photos that have the same keywords and you have your metadata here for each photo. You click on a photo here and it will pop up, the name, the date it was taken. It'll show the dimension of the file, the settings, the focal length, the flash data, the type of camera, the lens, the model. If you have this option in your camera or you allow Lightroom to look it up when you import it, you'll even have a location of where you took it and you can put comments on there though. Right now, it says it's not supported right here, but you can really categorize and sort through all the way. It's almost a little bit of fun to do once you get into it but that is an overview of the library structure. 4. White Balance in LR PT 1: Now in this video we're going to be talking about white balance. Now, what is white balance? White balance is also called color balance, gray balance or neutral balance. This term has to do with the overall colors in the photo. When you white balance a photo, you're taking the overall colors in the image and you're making sure that they appear as close to the actual subject as possible. There's a couple different ways to adjust the balance of the overall colors in the photo. In some cases, you're going to want to make sure you have what's considered a correct white balance, and in other cases, it's going to be more up to your creative intention. Here I have a photo I took of some cookies. I have two pictures here. Both these the pictures were taken on the same camera, different angle, but they were using different lens. You notice in this photo here, the cookies and desk here, they have almost like a more reddish color to them, and in this photo, all that's gone and it looks more cookish. First, let's talk about the temperature slider. Now the temperature slider is the first thing you're going to be adjusting when you look at white balance and color temperature refers to a scale that goes from a deep blue all the way to a yellow on the far right. There's a second slider here, we're going to get to in a second. If you notice when I drag this slider, you see how dramatic the overall colors change. I'm not even in the yellow section and already it's starting to look extremely yellow and unnatural looking. I drag it over more to the blue, and now I have what is even closer to this image, but not quite. Now, the reason that this is actually so wonky right now is because when I took this picture, I used the light from a tungsten bulb. I had a lamp there and essentially I just took the cover off, took a photo using that light. It's not like a horrible photo, but the colors were really unnatural. In this photo, I actually took my studio constant lights and the bulbs in there were actually set to daylight. This gave off a much cleaner light source that simulated daylight, which is going to be, as you see here, a bit more bluer. Watch what happens as I drag this up. Immediately you start seeing warmer tones, more yellow, more yellow, and I don't have to go too far before it just creates a really ugly looking picture. Dragging it back, dragging it back, and now you get totally blue. By double-clicking on the sliders, any one of these sliders that you click on is going to bring it back to the original setting. The second part in adjusting the colors has to do with something called tint. Tint here refers to green and magenta. Combining these two sliders, you can adjust the white balance to make it as correct as possible or do something really creative. If we go back to this first photo here, and we just try to mess around with these sliders. You can only do so much with the light source that you have. Adjusting the white balance, adjusts all of the colors in the photo. In order to selectively just change one or two of the colors, you have to use some other tools which we're going to go over in a later video. Here's another example where you want to make sure that you have correct white balance. These are some basic pictures of some socks that I took for a company. I used a white seamless background. In this case, I again used constant lights that were daylight balanced. Again, daylight balanced means that the light was as close to the sun as possible, and on the scale here it's going to be in the bluer range. Last picture I have where you'd want to make sure there's a correct white balance, I took a picture of a ring. You can see here if I increase this just a little bit, all of a sudden, it looks gold. When you're selling silver ring, you don't want it to look gold, you want it to look silver. You can see actually it almost looks a little blue when we switch it back. But that's because the main source of light was daylight. 5. White Balance in LR PT 2: Here is a photo of a chiropractor showing his patient some chart here, and in his office, he had fluorescent lighting. You can't see it too much here. It looks a tad on the yellow side. But if you were to move these sliders around, you see I just added plus 6 magenta and created this effect. Let's see what it looks like before and after. I can tell you from looking at it in the skin tones, his skin has almost like a greenish, maybe even a yellowish cast to it, and I added just a little bit of magenta and I brought back more of the redness on the skin, which for Caucasian skin tones, it's going to be a little bit more on the reddish yellow side. It's not going to have this cast to it, and then if we add a little bit more blue, that takes away the Golden and let's add that plus 6 back again. It's like a before and after. What we've done is we've removed this color cast that was there before. Again, it's not going to be super noticeable unless you're looking at the before and after. But you're going to see in his cheek here, there's going to be some little difference. You're going to get the pinkish tone of the skin back, which wasn't there that much before. Again, you want to be really gradual with this. We're going to talk about what's called the eyedropper tool. In Adobe, it has an eyedropper tool. A lot of other editing programs has a similar function when it comes to white balance. Basically, you're going to click on this. You're going to take it over the picture. It's going to automatically give you the correct white balance. But you have to click on the right thing. What do you click on? It's not going to be white, it's going to be something neutral, and it even tells you, pick a target neutral. What's a neutral color? A neutral color is going to be something gray. But if we were to go and pick something we think is white, which is, let's see if we can find the whitest white. Let's see what happens here. It can't even set the white balance there. The patient has a gray shirt on. Now, that is something that is closer what we did before. There, it essentially drop down the magenta, but also made it a bit cooler too, and you can see this neutral color, it looks gray. The shirt looks gray. In this photo, this gray looks slightly greenish, and so does this shirt, and that's because of the light that's coming out of this fluorescent light. Now, we can see that the current white balance is set to as it was shot in the camera. I want to go over another feature here, which is the different automatic settings that you can choose. As shot basically means whatever you got in the camera is what it's showing. Auto means is going to give what Adobe or the editing program thinks is the correct white balance. Here, I added a lot more blue. It doesn't look that great to me. Let's try daylight. That added a lot more blue and it just looks more blue. Let's try cloudy. This goes back to the setting I had. It still has blue in it, but you can see the program added a bit more magenta, and cloudy basically adds in a lot more yellow, warms up the photo, and the next setting, shade, warms it up even more. Here, we still have a little bit of magenta, but then it boosted the warmth up a lot, and that's a nice photo. When I took this photo, I remember it being really colorful and I did remember it being a lot warmer. So this is closer to the actual scene and I like this. Tungsten. What tungsten does is when you have a tungsten light or a lamp, which is going to be a yellow color, what this program does is it'll add in blue to balance that color to counteract that to make it look more natural. There was no tungsten light here, so there is nothing to balance. So that's why it gives such a blue color. Fluorescent. In fluorescent here, it adds in blue, but it also adds in some magenta because in fluorescent lighting, you're going to get more of a greenish color. So it's trying to balance up by adding in more magenta. Flash here is not too bad, and if you're shooting indoors with a flash camera, you're definitely going to want to make sure that your white balance is set to flash in the camera and the color of the light that your flash has. 6. Tone Panel Part 1: So in this section we're going to be talking about the tone panel, and this is going to be on the right-hand side, this middle column here. What's tone? Tone is the qualities of the light and the dark parts of the image, and by manipulating different aspects to this, you can change a dramatic amount of things about your photo. There's two panels that adjust the tone. There's this tone panel right here, and then there's something called the Tone Curve, which addresses it in a similar way, but in this one we're going to talk about these sliders here. There's no right or wrong way to go about adjusting these, it's more on whatever your workflow or preference is. So let's start with the first one. Exposure is going to adjust the overall lightness or darkness of the image. As you see here, as I bring up this slider, the image is going to be brighter. If I bring it down, it's going to be darker. So next point here is what's too bright and what's too dark. Part of this is going to have to do with your own perception, your own idea of what you want the image to be. But generally, there is a accurate way to determine if an image is too bright or too dark, and there's a couple terms that is used here. To determine if an image is too dark or too bright, you have here what's called the histogram. The histogram is a bar graph essentially, and it shows from left to right the dark parts of an image and light parts of an image, and in light room at the top corners here you see these little triangles. When these triangles change colors, it shows you that there are parts of an image that are too dark or parts of an image that are too bright. As you see as I move the Exposure slider all the way to the left, you're going to see the triangle change colors, and you're going to see more information, more bars here are getting more and more squished to the left and the overall image is going to appear darker and again, sometimes you're going for that look. It's not necessarily bad, but if you're talking about what is correct exposure or what is a properly lit photo here, this is not going to cut it. You can see here that when this is gray, then you're going to have parts of your image that are too dark. It doesn't mean your whole image is too dark, it's just going to show up as parts of it. By placing your little pointer here, you're going to see different blue areas of the photo that just indicate where it's too dark and by too dark means there's no more in detail in the photo. It's all gone. If we go to the opposite side here, then all of a sudden it gets way too bright, and it actually starts looking way too bright before the program recognizes that there's blown out highlights, which we'll get to in a second. You can see here, now, it's squished over here all the way to the right and the photo looks way too bright. Again, by placing your pointer on it, you can see the red parts of the image show that is where it recognizes no more detail. Too bright. Whenever I'm editing a photo, I generally never adjust the exposure because you're going to lose quality in the overall image and you can brighten up an image in other ways that still saves quality. So we're going to look at that in the next couple sliders. The next one right below exposure is called contrast. I rarely adjust contrast because when I finish my next couple of adjustments, it basically does what this tool does. Contrast here means the degree of darkness and lightness when put together. More contrasts in a photo means you're going to have a greater degree of darks and whites in an image. You're basically pumping up both the darks and the whites at the same time. If you look what happens to the histogram, you'll see that it actually gets stretched apart. So all the lights are going to the right and all the darks are going to the left, and you end up with a very dark in the dark areas and very light in the light areas. Reversely, if you take away the contrast, you're taking the light parts of an image and the dark parts of an image, and you're almost blending them to make the dark parts lighter and the light parts darker. So you wind up with a very washed-out look, desaturated. You'll find when you adjust these various sliders, you're also adjusting the brightness, darkness, deepness of the various colors too. So again, I also don't adjust the saturation of a photo or tone, because I find after I'm done with my tone adjustments, I've actually brought out enough color to where I don't need these two sliders, but we will go over these in the next video. 7. Tone Panel Part 2: Here are the main ones that you're really going to want to know how to adjust: highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks. Different people start with different sliders. It's up to you, but I'm going to go from top to bottom. What are the highlights of the photo? The highlights of the photo are all of the lighter or brighter parts of the image. You're going to see that in these petals here. Highlights don't necessarily mean all light parts of an image because there's something called mid tones, which are the areas between the brighter parts and the darker parts of the image. But the highlights here, if we increase the highlights, you can see two things happen. One is these brighter pedals here get very bright. You also see an increase in the yellow color. Whereas if we decrease, you see all of the light parts of an image have gone down, the brighter petals, and you also get a different color. So just keep that in mind when you adjust the highlights here, not just adjusting the brightness, but it's also going to have an effect on the color. The shadows, this talks about, well, it says the shadows, the darker parts of an image. If we bring the shadows up, which means if we decrease the amount of shadows in the image, you can see the overall photo looks brighter. What you also find is it didn't touch any of the highlights. With exposure, the whole image brightens up. But with shadows, it's only going to affect the dark parts. Highlights, the light parts. The white in the blacks are similar to highlights and shadows. Whites here meaning anything in the image that's pure white. Blacks meaning anything that's pure black. Now one thing that's pretty cool is in the Adobe program, what you can do is you can hold Option on Mac or Alt on PC and by clicking and dragging the whites, it changes the view so you only see the whites in the image. These different colors that you're seeing are indicators that there's pure white here and there's no detail. You can also see that we've increased the photo's brightness to where there's no detail in the white parts of the image. Generally when adjusting this, you're going to want to have the white slider to just where before you see any white in the image. Here there's a tiny blue dot and I probably don't even really care about this dot. I think that's just a tiny little reflection here on the grass. It's not that big a deal. The black, same thing. Holding the option key and dragging the slider all the way to the left, you see where the black start to show up. If I let it go, you'll see the image is way too dark and you've lost all the detail in the shadows. So we're going to hold option and drag it up. You can drag it all the way up until you don't have any blacks in the image, or you can have a little black. The difference is if you drag it up here, you're going to essentially decrease the contrast. If you drag it down and you're going to increase the contrast, which can give you more color and sometimes a bit more of a punchier look. Now let's go ahead and, using the tone bar here, adjust this image. Let's decrease the highlights, increase the shadows just a little bit, not going to mess with the whites, and increase the blacks. We look at before and after. The more contrast we add to a photo, the more easy it is to tell the difference between all of the gradients of the light and dark. The less contrast, then the harder it is to see and it all blends together a little bit more. Which isn't a bad thing in some cases as we're going to go over in a moment. One other thing you can do here if you want to, I never use this, but you can go ahead and drag directly on the histogram to change the various exposures. 8. Presence Panel: Now, we're onto the "Presence" panel here in Lightroom, and you see a couple of sliders here, texture, clarity, dehaze, vibrance, and saturation. All we're talking about here are the details in the photo and then the intensity of the colors. We're still talking about the light and the dark values of the picture, but just adjust them in a different way to bring out more detail. This is a great example because this is a wooden chess set and you're going to see as I increase this first slider, the "Texture", it's going to bring out all of this texture on the surface. This is what this does if you have texture on a surface, whether that's skin or wood, cement, brick, it's really going to show that. But you want to know how to use them so that you're only making that subject pop out, not the rest because it's very easy. See, as soon as I increase that "Texture" bar, you see the texture increase here, but you also see it on the wood. Before, that actually was blurred out and you just got these couple of pieces. If I decrease all the texture, it creates almost a smooth look, a little bit blurry too. Again, it's doing a similar thing that decreasing contrast does, but just in a different way on another level. Going to "Clarity", clarity does what it says. It makes more clear whatever is in your photo and it handles this by adjusting the contrast in a different way. Here you can see the surface better, just like in texture, but you can also see the colors. They get almost desaturated and they get darker. If I decrease it, it gives almost like a funny halo effect. Then we're going to skip "Dehaze" for now because I'm going to use another photo to show you that. But "Vibrance" and "Saturation". Saturation, I think is pretty commonly known. Basically, you're increasing the overall intensity of the colors in the photo, or you're decreasing it and you taking away the colors in the photo. By increasing it, all the colors are now more intense and they also change the hue a little bit. Meaning these brown pieces are now a bit more on the red side, these brown pieces are a bit more on the orange or yellow side. If we decrease it, now we essentially have a black and white photo. We've taken all the colors out of the photo. Vibrance is pretty cool because it handles the intensity of colors in a very smart way. It takes whatever it tells the not as intense colors and it gives them a boost. It only adjust certain parts of the colors. I find that Vibrance affects skin tones, and also like grass and trees, vegetation, a lot more than it does other colors. So the green in skin tones, also some reds I see it affecting. But I hardly ever touched saturation. In fact, sometimes what I'll do is I'll decrease the overall saturation and then I'll add back in the vibrance. That's a personal decision because my camera, I feel that it's a bit too saturated straight out of camera. I use a Sony A7 III. Sometimes, especially when I'm photographing people, I do bring that down just a little bit and then I increase the vibrance to have a bit more of a gradual increase in colors. Here if we increase the vibrance, you can see much more gradual basis. It increases all those colors. You can see also it does something to these tiny little highlights here and makes them blue. All that is, is this is actually taken using light coming in from a window nearby, so this is sunlight and the temperature of sunlight is blue. If I were to edit this photo, you see we've already adjusted the tone here, the light and dark values. I would increase the texture a bit, increase the clarity a bit, and then because I've lost some saturation by doing that, increase the vibrance just a bit. You can see what we've done is we've really made it stand out more. The key when you add it, always keep this in mind, don't edit a photo for the sake of editing. Edit a photo with the intention of bringing out your message even more. If you took a picture of a wooden chess set, you really want to emphasize that fact that it's wooden and it's a chess set. All these small adjustments I did were intended just to make that stand out even more. If we didn't touch the photo at all, it would still be a picture of a chess set. If I really wanted to emphasize or show the grain in the wood and all of that, then I would make these tiny adjustments to do that and still try to maintain the integrity of the photo. One thing we didn't really touch on was the Dehaze slider here. I'm going to pull up this photo. Here we have a nice layer of fog and the whole point of this dehaze is to address areas of fog or if there's haze in an image, sometimes you want, sometimes you don't want. The dehaze also affects the overall exposure and I'll show you what I mean. If I increase dehaze, the whole image gets darker and you can see it's getting rid of some of this fog and you can actually see through this fog. Whereas if I increase it, I should say decrease the dehaze to add more haze, then you're adding a lot more of a haze look, foggy look, and it's harder to tell what's behind there through all this fog. The whole image though appears washed out. I rarely touch this slider, but it's good to know that it's there in case to you do have a photo that looks really like overall just washed and you're unable to use any of these other tools to recover it. It's good to know that that's there just in case that you need it. 9. Tone Curve: This video is about the tone curve. Now in a previous video, we talked about the tone sliders in the basic panel up here. But we're going to close that and just talk about the tone curve. Now, how is the tone curve different from the tone sliders in the previous panel? I'll tell you, more control. You can achieve the same or similar results with the sliders. But if you really want to get fine detail control, you want to get familiar with this tone curve. There's a couple of different things that you can do with the tone curve. First, notice here that right next to adjust, you have these little circles. This is relatively new with Lightroom's update. Basically, your picture is separated into different channels. Channels just think of them like different parts of something, like a cake. You have the sugar and the floor, and you have the icing, these are the different parts that make up the final result. These channels are the colors. If I click on red, then any adjustment you make is just going to effect the red in the photo, same with green, blue. The silver white one, this adjusts the light. This one adjusts all of the colors. Then it has some word here but we're not going to pay attention to. This little guy here adjust tone curve by dragging in the photo. If you click on it allows you to drag directly on the photo in these various areas. So you can get a really precise if you wanted to in the photo. See we've already made it look super cool, picking random places in the photo. If you just want to adjust the curve with these sliders here, you can do that and it's totally fine. You can just make these final adjustments after your basic adjustments and getting even cooler result. What I like to do is, after I make my adjustments here in my basic panel, then I'll go down and make further adjustments with these sliders. But you have the option to go ahead and directly pull on this. Here I clicked in the white here and you can click anywhere on the line and you can adjust it like this. You see how small these are, the adjustments I'm making. This is really all you want to do, is this small adjustments. There are times when maybe you'll make some bigger ones, but this is all that you really want to be messing with. Normally, I don't use this option just because sometimes it can get really messy with me. You might fall in love with this way and that's totally up to you. Down here at the bottom it gives you a couple of presets. If you click on these, it will add its own contrast and add a stronger contrast and take a moment and notice the shape of this curve. It's like a really fine S. It's common this shape here is common when you want to add contrast. When you mess with contrast up here, that's what it's doing. It's bringing down the shadows and then increasing the highlights to add a greater contrast between the light and the dark. If you want to go the opposite, then he would just make like a backwards S. But that's just a little thing here too for you to recognize. By going here in the red channel, you have the ability to take out red or add red. When you take out red, check that out, you get a nice green color because that's the way mixing colors works. Here we are on the green channel and you see it's red. If we want to take out that green we going to add red, but we've already taken out all the red, and so now what's left? Blue. So going to take away the blue. Now we get some weird fungus looking stuff. This is again, just to show you what you can do with this. Now, why would you want to mess around with these at all? Finer control, if I wanted to adjust the contrast, I could do it through here and adjust the overall light values. But I could also adjust the color contrast without getting too confusing or complex about this. It's just another aspect, not major, but slight way you can adjust your photo. If you wanted to be super cool, we can, let say we make a little S curve here. We go to green, we do the same thing. With blue, we do the same thing. The before and after. You can make fine adjustments with that tone curve, it gives you a lot more room to play around with. If you have the time and you just want to experiment, or if you see something about a photo and you just can't put your finger on. Well, how can I improve this? It might be within this tone curve, because of the amount of control you can put on it. Again, my normal workflow is I'll make my tone adjustments here in the basic panel. Then I'll go down and by I make small adjustments using the sliders for the curve. Generally that works fine for me, but again, it's another tool for you. 10. HSL Panel: All right, next we're going to cover the HSL panel, which means Hue, Saturation, Luminance. So in color, a hue means the different colors. Red, orange, yellow, green, Aqua, blue, purple, magenta. Saturation refers to the intensity of that color. So from very red to no red at all. Luminance refers to the darkness of that color or the brightness or lightness of that color. Here you have the option to see them all at once. Just like the tone curve, you can take this little picker here and you can change anything that you have your mouse over, whether its hue, saturation and luminance. Sometimes I use this, sometimes I don't. All right, so when looking at a photo and deciding, do you need to adjust anything or not? I don't adjust the hues very often, and the reason is you do too much playing around in this and you're going to wind up with some funny looking pictures and I'm going to show you what can happen. I'm just going to do some really crazy stuff here. All right, so I have adjusted all these different colors. You can see here, some areas look fine, but the other areas, like in this one section where the water meets the edge here, you have part of it isn't changed, the computer didn't recognize some of these colors and so left that area blank. Here on this building, I don't know if you can see this, but there's actually weird, funky looking colors on the edges. The main ones that I normally adjust are going to be saturation and luminance. So if you had a picture of a vase of flowers, if I adjust the yellow, only going to adjust the yellow in the image. If I adjust the orange, its only going to adjust the orange there, with the blue because I'm using daylight here. You're really only going to see it in the back. Let's say I wanted more the red, but just the red, then would bump that up a bit. You can see it changes just the red aspects to the photo because we're dealing with a sunset here. Let's really try to emphasize these colors without degrading the image too much. So these are all small adjustments. So I'm going to adjust the orange, the yellow, little bit of the red. Next we're going to go to luminance, and we're going to play around with these actually and decide if we want it lighter or darker. Again, do not go overboard or else you're going to wind up with these funny-looking colors in the image. For this photo, this is all I would do, but let's go to another photo. All right, the colors here are more distinct. So here, let's say I want a lighter sky, take the blue. Doesn't seem to be any of that color there. Here, this stands out too much, so I can go to the Saturation and decrease the Yellow and the Orange I'm going increase, because I like that, go back to the luminance and leave it at that. If I wanted to or I wanted to get really crazy I could change the view of the sky and create some just different effects which sometimes might look good and sometimes might not. The point here is that it's a tool for you to use, but you don't have to use it, so don't feel like just because it's there you have to mess with it. 11. Split Toning: In this video, we're going to be talking about split toning. Now, split toning is adjusting the colors of the highlights and the shadows separately in the saturation of it. So remember, colors here we're talking about hues. A hue is different, distinct colors. So you have red, green, yellow, blue, those are hues. The saturation is the degree of intensity or the lack of intensity, where zero being no color, 100 being super vibrant, glaring of whatever color that is. I mainly use this tool when dealing in black and white photos, but that's going to be another video that's dedicated just to black and white. Here is a silly picture I took myself and I'm going to show you how this works. So the highlights, again, if you look at any of the lighter parts of the image where the light is on. So my arm, this part of my face, even the reflection in my eyes, the paper, the white paper, the light on the background here, that's all the highlights. Here you're going to see a slider going from this red color through orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, magenta, and then actually back to red because that's how the color wheel works, it goes in a circle. This little box gives you a finer level of control and different colors that you can choose from. Right now, we're just going to show you the sliders. The shadows is going to affect the colors, the individual colors, in all of the darker parts. So this section where there's a shadow here, the lens under my arm, this part of my face, it's going to affect all of that, my hair over here. This is going to change the colors there, so you can create a mix of two different colors to create some really interesting effects. In some cases, corrects the colors of the image to make them represent what actually look like in the scene, in some cases. Here right now, it's on red. If I were to just leave it on red, I would activate this tool by increasing the saturation. Now, even though it looks like all of the photo is red, if I adjust this middle, which is the balance, which essentially tells the system how to favor or distribute the colors, you'll see that I can really make it glaring and weird, or I can make it very subtle. As I drag this along, you'll see all these different colors come up. Then with the shadows, same way, so here is red. Now, when using the highlights and the shadows like this, I would be very gradual. Unless you're going for some really cool creative effect, I would be really subtle with this. So whenever I use this tool, I generally don't go beyond 15, more closer to 8-10 or something like that, because you don't need a lot to change the picture. But if I were to do 10 with the highlights and 10 on the shadows, then I could play around with the different colors. Let's say like those in the highlights and that's around a blue, and I can play with the shadows. What I've done here is the highlights now have a bluish color to them, and the shadows have more of a purple color to them. Then I can further fine-tune this using the balance, and I can show more one color than the other. If you know your complimentary colors and you're familiar with some color science, then this will even be easier for you to go, "Okay, so this color and this color go together, but this color and this color doesn't." Here in these little gray boxes, you can pick more accurately what you want your color to be, to say I want that there. You can click and drag too. These boxes up here just suggested colors, and here you'll have your shadow and your highlight colors. Say, okay, that looks cool. This is my saturation, so I like it about there. You can go into this little color picker, you can mess around with that. You can get some really interesting effects. That's a particular look, you could maybe make a filter under this or something. You could take it one step further and take your graph here, or you can mess around with the blacks. But the point is, however you do it, you take the blacks and the photo and you essentially decrease that. What that does is it creates like a washed-out look. This is when you look at Instagram filters and stuff like that, this is what you're seeing in these washed out filters or images is they're just taking black levels and they're decreasing that, so they're much less darker parts in the image in contrast. If I were to increase the contrast, it brings it back. But by doing that, I've created a different feel, a different look, and it says something different. That is the split toning, and we can see them before and after. Some people would say this looks better, and it's another way to communicate what you're trying to do with this one tool. It plays with the lights and the darks and the different colors there. That is the split toning tool. 12. Detail Panel Sharpening: In this video, we're going to be talking about the Detail panel. Now, the detail panel allows you to do two different things. One is sharpening and the other one is noise reduction. So the first thing that you'll see here is this little box with part of your picture. This is actually a zoomed in clip of your photo. How sharpening works is, Lightroom will take your picture and all of the pixels on the edges of whatever is in your photo, it will manipulate them to make them stand out even more. This can be a really useful tool to sharpen up pictures of landscapes, or portraits, or anything that you want to make really stand out or pop. Sharpening is also great for prints, making sure that the image goes from your screen looking good to a sized print, also looking good. Using the "Option" for Mac or "Alt" for PC key, you can bring up a few different views to help with this process. So let's take a look at the first one. If we click and hold "Option", the purpose of this is to help make this easier to see and you can see it even clearer in this little window here, but look what also happened at the same time. It took all of the stuff that's inside the edges and outside in the sky, and it made it all pixelated. How can we solve this? Generally, you're never going to increase the sharpening all the way to a 150, so keep that in mind. This is really just for the sake of demonstration. So there's three of the things you can do. Radius tells Lightroom how many pixels from the edge to affect on the sharpening. Now realize that Lightroom isn't looking at a picture of a building. It's looking at a bunch of information, so it's not necessarily going to be able to tell where all the edges are by itself. So you need to give it some help. So looking at radius by increasing the radius here. Holding "Option" on the Mac or "Alt" on PC, you can get a clear view of this and you can see the edges go from not very clear, too thick and bold. Again, that bold line, the black bold lines are the individual pixels that are being affected. Detail essentially allows you to recover some of this detail that you lost. So, again, by holding your "Option" key, by increasing it, you can really screw up your image by decreasing it. You've now handled all that noise and fuzz, but you've also smoothed it out. So here is the image. Just looking at it without zooming in, and it's not really easy to see even when I boost it all the way up, it's hard to see. When you sharpen something, you're always going to want to be zoomed into your subject. So in this photo, and you can't really see it, the only thing that really is dramatic is the sharpening slider, the overall amount. So let's just reset this. Masking is pretty cool because what masking does is it allows you to tell Lightroom only do the sharpening in this specific part. The way you do this is you're going to hold "Option" or "Alt" on PC, and you're going to click and drag, and you're going to see that all the white is your sharpening effect. As you drag it up, you're hanging in on to only the areas that you want sharpened, all right. You've handled a lot of that blurriness. So now, it's only affecting these parts of the image. We could bring the radius back down to one detail. All right. So you've sharpened your image here. 13. Noise Reduction: This is part 2 of the Detail panel, and we're going to be talking about noise reduction in this video. For this, we're going to be talking about noise reduction in luminance and noise reduction in color. I have two photos to show you what that means. Let's talk about luminance. This is the most common noise you're going to run across. In this picture, I'm going to zoom in so you can see this. Hopefully, what you're seeing is all this noise in this image. This is going to be all of these little specs in the sky. It's not smooth, it's just all crunchy and granulated, whatever term you want to use for it. It's the opposite of smooth. If you want to handle this in post-processing, you're going to come over to noise reduction and you're going to just drag this luminance up. Moves it back in and a lot of it has been handled. While I'm so zoomed in and I'll put it back to where it was. That's all the noise. Now it seems to go away. A couple of problems with this is when you use a lot of noise reduction, what it does to the detail in the photo, is it will make it smooth and blend it together and look all natural. Here are the waves with noise reduction, here's the waves without. With, without, with, without. The quality in this photo isn't that great so it's a little bit more difficult to tell. But we see, let's see here. Yeah. Here's a good example. All that detail that was in the horizon is now just blended together. Where before, you could see more data, more information that was coming out of that photo. Now if you want to get around this, you want to apply noise reduction, but you don't want to lose detail in the important stuff, you can increase the luminance and then this Detail slider handles that part. As I move this, you'll see a massive difference in the waves. I'll zoom out so we can see how it affects the rest of the image. As I increase the slider, it puts more detail, more information back. But the catch is you also get noise back. Maybe, well, I want no noise and I want all the detail. It really does depend on the photo that you have and how much detail. You could probably get away with applying a lot of noise reduction in this photo because the waves going out to the distance probably doesn't make too much difference. But it's just something to be aware of when you use these sliders. Contrast slider helps give you more detail on the image too, but in a different way where you pump up the luminance, and then you lose all that contrast in the image and it looks super smooth, not really great at all. It's another way you can bring that back in the image. The thing is, some of that noise reduction will come back and I'll show you here. It'll come back but in a different way. These are just different ways you can fine-tune and adjust the noise reduction. Honestly guys, if you have a great picture, a little noise is not that big a deal. But this is to show you how to use the luminance sliders in handling this noise. The second noise you can get is something called color noise. I actually pulled this from the web. I did not take this. This is not an original photo by Jordan Berg. This is a very dramatic photo showing all these different kinds of color noise. Let's see what happens when we adjust this. It actually will desaturate the colors and adjust. It will try to make it fade or go away, or not be as apparent by taking the colors and the values and making them go away. See no noise reduction here. Full on noise reduction. With this photo, all the sliders are doing are adjusting the colors. If I apply the luminance sliders to this same picture, you see it addresses it in a very different way, very different. Here, it keeps the detail in the image, but it takes away that color. That is noise reduction sliders for colored noise and luminance noise. 14. Effects and Calibration Redo: Next, we're going to cover what is called the effects tab and the calibration tab, and it's pretty simple. Under Effects, you have Post-Crop Vignetting, style, amount, and all this stuff like that. It's pretty simple. You move the slider right, you're going to get this lighter edge, and you move it to the left and it's going to get darker. This is in effect, this is if you want to hone in on your subject of the image or you want to blow at the edges. Let me just bring this down to show you. If you choose these different styles, it'll affect how it darkens or brightens the image in different ways. Just cool little things to play around with. Once you start messing around with this, you can then go into these other settings, and these just adjust really the shape of this vignette. You can play around with that, create different effects if you want to. I'm going to reset that. Next, grain, essentially, is another effect you can add, purely from an aesthetic view. If you want to add some grain, I'm going to show you by zooming in. Let me increase the grain till you can see it. All of a sudden, I'm going to make this really big again, just so you can see what it's doing. You see how it's just rough and there's a lot of texture here, and it actually looks like you did a really bad shot of this, this is actually a certain chemical effect back when you used to develop film, depending on the kind of film that you use in processing and all of that. It added what was called grain, and a lot of people find grain adds a really pleasant effect. You can go ahead and add it in Lightroom to a digital photo. I would suggest moderate use of it. Next, I'm going to use a different picture to show you, this next one which is calibration. Now, with calibration, it's another way to adjust the colors in your image. Just think of it like, another way to adjust the individual main colors, different than color grading or adjusting the lightness or darkness. This has to do with how the camera specifically perceives the colors, and it just modifies that really, and this is again, something you play around with. If you were to go to, let's say take red, you can adjust the hue, but then you can also adjust the saturation and get different effects here. You can try this green, you can adjust it, and then blue, same thing, and you can just create different effects. That's really all that these things are, very optional when it comes to the edit effects and calibration. You may decide you like adding a vignette all the time and maybe you don't, and maybe you won't ever use these two. But that's a quick overview on what effects and calibration can do. 15. Lens Correction & Transform: In this video, we're going to talk about Lens Corrections, and we're going to be talking about the Transform panel, just because it's going to be faster to do it that way. Now, here we're going to use this photo, I wanted to actually go over a little quick keyboard shortcut. If you have any photos that come out in a portrait layout as opposed to a horizontal, it's really easy to flip around. You just hold Command on a Mac or Control on PC, and then you click the left or right bracket, and you can flip it the way you want to. Here, Lens Corrections. Now, in your camera, it has its own settings as to different corrections or slight things it does to the photo. One of them is called chromatic aberration. In a lens, sometimes because of the way it's made and the way the light comes in, you can get strange colors on the edges of things, because of the way that the lens receives the light. Chromatic aberration is where you will see some weird coloring on the edge of your lens when taking photos, generally towards stronger light sources. It can be seen sometimes as a purple area. This just removes this automatically. Profile corrections. The profile is essentially the way that your camera will interpret the different colors in the scene. Every camera brand has its own profile, and in a lot of cameras nowadays, especially the professional ones, you can go in and tweak those profiles. But it's some mathematical equation, technology, whatever it is, is the way that it sees red or green or blue. Again, that gets into a pretty technical area, so right now, just know that your camera has a certain color profile, and Adobe can pick that up and read it and applies it to your photo. But I'm going to show you what happens when I click this off. This is what the photo looked like, based off the lens I was using. When you click it back on, it essentially handles and you can see it mainly cropped it in and addressed the edges of the photo. If you'll notice here, it's darker on this wall here and then you enable it, and all of a sudden it's brighter. If you didn't want any crop or the program to do any of that, you probably would want to just handle that manually, which gives you the option to do here. But the only thing I ever really do is I just make sure these two boxes are checked, and I have used lenses that it doesn't recognize, so here, there's always like a ton of options to choose from. All the different brands here and various profiles. You can manually adjust this through the distortion. If your lens gave any distortion, you can manually adjust them, and then say, okay, this is what I want then you can constrain the crop, which means now that you've made the image look like this, you can tell Adobe to crop it in, so that's no longer there. Defringing is an interesting tool that you're not going to see in this photo, but I'm going to show you a photo where it does apply. Here, hopefully you can see this, but you see how in this one corner you have these green patches? This allows you to get rid of this, because sometimes your lens, based off of the different light that you're using, will capture this on the edges, at times you can get a little bit of that. It's really hard to tell unless you're looking at it close up. But let's see here. It looks like this is the only area here. You can manually adjust it. If you see green, you go to the green hue and you can adjust that. There's a little bit of green here. You adjusted it here, and then all of a sudden, you're now manipulating those parts. Or you can take the color picker and pick that area, and it will automatically address that for you. You can find another one, and another one, until you handle that. You can see the before and after. It's still there a little bit. Sometimes, you might just need to live with it. Now, with this photo, this is going to be a good example on how to use the Transform panel. Here, we have a crooked monument. This tool allows us to fix that. You have various ways to do that. Probably, the first thing and hopefully only thing you'll need to do is click Auto. It's sensed what was crooked and corrected it, and you can see that the way it did it was by rotating the photo, and it did create some issues here, but if I constrain the crop, it's fixed. You also have the option to guide it manually or to level it, to do other things with it. But you can see that auto works fine, and we actually have to reset the photo because we did so many changes. Auto. You can go and change around this way, by moving the photo and stretching it. You can stretch it the opposite direction. You can rotate it, which is what the program did automatically. You can change the aspect of it, make it taller, fatter. You can scale it to make it larger or bigger, or you can move it from left to right or top to bottom. This little symbol right here essentially is another option for clicking on Guided. This would be a good example to show lens correction on, because I was using a Rokinon lens, and that did not pick it up. I would have to go in, find the make and the model I was using was a 12 millimeter, yeah. If you see what it did there, was it brightened up the photo and got rid of any darker edges with this selection. It's very useful. There you have transform and your lens correction panels. 16. Cropping Tool : This video is showing how to use the cropping tool in Lightroom. I have a photo here that is not only not horizontal, it also has a bunch of stuff in it that not really wanted in the photo. The first thing we're going to do is, we're going to go into the Develop panel, and we can get to that super quickly by hitting the "D" button. Now, we're in the Develop panel, and first thing we want to do is turn this the right way. We can do that by holding Command on Mac or Control on PC, and say, left or right brackets. There we go. The crop tool is here, it's this little box. When you click on it, it'll open up a new panel and give you this nice grid here. A couple of things, with this box, you have the option to directly crop on it by going to the edges. Here you can drag it from top down, bottom up, from right to left, and left to right. You can also drag it using these corners and create any crop that you want. Obviously, when you crop something, it's also going to take the image and get rid of all this stuff. You can do that manually. If you go over here, you see this little lock here, if you click on that, this all of a sudden changes the way that you can crop it. Now, when you click this edge here and you drag it down, it's going to maintain these dimensions and give you an even crop. If you un-click it, then you can squish it and squeeze it any way that you want to. Now here, you have a couple of different presets. This is useful if you want to post it on social media, like Facebook or Instagram. They have certain dimensions that, if your photo doesn't fit in those dimensions, then it's going to fit it for you, and so you'll find a photo with a top of a head cropped off. I've definitely made the mistake in the past of posting something and then looking at that post and the subject is totally cut off because my photo was not in the right dimensions. You can click any one of these. You can get a one by one, and one by ones are great for headshots. They're great for Instagram. Facebook also uses it just fine, and that will give you a perfect square. A couple of these other options are four by five, eight-and-a-half by 11, slightly different there, five by seven, two by three, and then there's some other ratios here. You notice alongside it, you have additional information for these dimensions. If you need a 16 by nine to fit a screen, if you're putting this into some video presentation or something like that, this will be the appropriate crop so that when you upload the photo to your video editing program, it will fit there with no problem, otherwise you will have to crop it within your video editing program, which isn't a big deal but something to know. Then you can go ahead and enter custom numbers. I don't really use this. Now another thing you can change is the angle. You can only go so far with this angle. That's why you want to do the command bracket tool to rotate it all the way because you're not going to be able to go all the way with this tool, so it's just something to know. The last little box here is Constrain to Image. Constrain to Image is, sometimes when you are making these crops to your photo, mine doesn't have it right here, but sometimes you'll get a white background. Unless you crop that out, or tell the program to do it, then that will stay in the photo, and I'll show you actually using the transform tool what this means here. Here, now you have this white background. This is just because Lightroom has substitute something for the photo to help give it this appearance that you've now altered the verticalness of the photo. By clicking "Constrain Crop", now you have a very big headed subject and no white box, so that's useful to know. We're going to undo that actually. Good. We're going to go back to crop. Now what I want to do is simply crop and, I don't want to rotate it. Let me then just crop out all of these unnecessary parts, hit "Enter", and I've now cropped my photo. I can crop it closer if I want, and I might even do that. There's a theory that when you crop towards the angles of a person's body, they can be a bit more flattering. If you crop towards where the legs go toward the knee, or to the waist, or the elbow, that can make the person look slimmer and give them a nicer, more flattering look. We don't have to do that, but it's a reference point here. Good. I like that, and can continue with the edits. When I edit a photo, generally, I always start with the crop tool, if I need to, if I see, "Oh, I need to crop this photo." I don't like to crop too much, because then you can get into some image loss and quality. It's good whenever you take a photo that you get it framed right the first time and try not to crop unless you need to get rid of things, or you find something is really distracting in the frame, like this one. My particular lens that I was using, I wanted a full body shot, but it also include that other junk in it, so now I just I'm cropping it in so that I can still get almost a full body shot without the other stuff, maintain the proportions of her body with the lens that I have, accomplish that at all with the crop tool. 17. Workflow Walkthrough - Import: Today, we're going to be editing the photos that we took from our portrait session with Devin. I'm sitting here with my computer and I'm going to open it up. I have my memory card, I'm going to insert it into the back of my computer, and we're going to open up Lightroom here, Lightroom classic. We are going to the grid import, and my computer automatically detected the memory card and pulled up my photos. The first thing I'm going to do is uncheck all of them. These first couple of photos are from a previous shoot that I did. Good to have these photos here. One thing that I forgot to do, which I like to do before anything, is go to my external hard drive where everything's being placed. Go ahead and make a folder where this is going to go into, and we're going to call this Devin photo shoot. We're going to go in here and we're going to make another folder. We're going to call this final edits. Now, we're going to go back into Lightroom. I like to do the expanded screen here. Let's click on this first photo here. The first photo actually took was bracketed and that was from a previous photos I was taking of a house, so we're going to just skip past that one. Now, I'm going to be calling through these photos, and this process can be a little bit lengthy, depending on how many photos that you have. We took 448 photos. Now, this is essentially the process of going through and picking out the ones that you want to keep and picking out the ones that you don't want to keep. We're going start here, double-click, and I like to use the keyboard shortcuts, where I'm going to be hitting the left and right directional buttons to choose the different pictures and the P key and X key. P means pick, that's going to be checking on the ones you want to keep, and X means to uncheck them. You will only hit X if you've have everything unchecked. Then you're only going to hit X, if you accidentally hit pick on one that you don't like. It's really just the P key and the left and right that makes it super fast. I'm a guy who likes to if I see it and I like it, immediate P. If I have some indecision on either just skip it and decide that's not good, or I can always come back to it. But whenever I'm going through these pictures, I'm always thinking with what the client wants, I'm always thinking with, is it a sharp photo? I'm also thinking with the exposure, and is it something that I can use in my develop. Can I develop that photo or is it lost? I look for various composition and things of that nature, and generally, it always jumps out to me, when I first look at the photo. If I look at a photo for too long, and I think this happens with a lot of people, then it's going to lose that first impact, and you're going to be a little bit unsure where to go. Let's start this process here. These first couple of photos, we're just testing out. I like this one just because of this sharpness I got on the face. Here, the arms are sharp, but I think the face isn't so sharp here. We'll keep it for now. Here I got out the flash because I'm having some some difficulties. Yeah, that one, I like. Also, I remember, he really liked some of these photos which I personally thought were definitely too dark, but he really like that dark style, so I have to also remember that as well as I'm going through which one here. Here, he switched to a white t-shirt and I immediately see the white. It was going to be really reflective, so I was going to use it to my advantage. I love these pictures of having him against the blue sky. We can see what we can do with that. Now, this isn't a horrible photo, but I can see right now. Those are the reflection of me in these glasses and I can see part of my modifier. Whenever you're shooting somebody with sunglasses or even just regular glasses like I have right now, you can probably even tell in this video there's some glare coming in. I just have window light right now because- 18. Workflow Walkthrough - Editing: Here we are. I have all the photos that have been imported into Lightroom. They've all been converted into D and Gs, which is Adobe's raw format, that's a bit easier to work with. What I'm going to do is add some keywords to all of these photos. It was something that I meant to do when I was importing them, but it's super easy to do it at any point. What I'm going to do is we're going to hit Command A or Control A on a PC to highlight all the photos within this collection, and there's a 146 that we got out of the original 400 and it was about 450 photos. We're going to go to this box here called keyword tags, and already it has some suggestions based off of some of the last keywords that we've used. We're going to just add some keywords by typing in some really general keywords for the shot. You don't want to get super specific, but we can do photoshoot and you write keywords and then come on the next one. Photoshoot, Devin, model, portrait, environmental portraiture, outside, golden hour, male model, river because there's some river there, off flash because I use some of that. This was also part of a tutorial that I'm putting together here. I'm going to put tutorial and course just for my own sake and see anything else? No. Good. Hit ''Enter'', and now all of these, if you want to search for them, you can do that super easily. There's several photos here that I'm going to use for demonstration purposes, which are these? De-select and click here. I'm going to set these and give specific keywords, lighting example. Now these photos will have that, not the rest of them. There are couple of these I'm going to use, but I took these very specifically knowing I would use them. Good. We have them in the collection, we have all of them converted, we have them tagged, now it's time to go through and start developing some of these. We're going to go up here. We can either go up here and click ''Develop'', or we can just tap the D key to go into the develop mode. It's going to develop on whatever picture I have selected. We're going to go out of that by going back into our library grid view, or just hitting the G key super-simple. We're going to go up to the top. Let's start with, I personally like to start with photos that I get excited about. Some people they'll just go straight in order. Some people, they know exactly what look they're going for and they have, you can do an automatic preset and just automatically go through all these photos and edit them. Some of these photos, I probably don't need to do much developing, but there are specific settings that I want to do with him. I'm going to go through these and show you how I would go through. First one, I like these where he's behind this blue sky or where the blue sky is behind him. Really like these, what I'm going to do here, any of the basic panel which has your white balance, has your tone, sliders and has your present sliders. First thing, I look at this photo, I really like the blue tones, the blue and white, it's more of a high key photo, which means a lot of light or brighter colors. What I want to do is I want to enhance the colors here. Whenever I develop a photo, I take a look at where I like that's there and I enhance that. I don't try to change it from what it is. Otherwise often I'm going to have to spend more time on it. Here, I like this effect. I like that it's not super saturated. I want to enhance that. The t-shirt is a bit blown out, I want to bring that down just a little bit and I want to create a bit more of a washed outlook. We go down here, first we're going to handle the t-shirt and I'm going to just do the t-shirt. If I want to make a selection of a photo and just edit that, my best friends are going to be these top tools called the local adjustments settings and I'm going to use the adjustment brush here. First, I'm going to make sure there's no previous settings on here, sometimes can mess you up. Then I'm going to click on ''Effect'', go down to burn, which darkens it. I have my brush here and it's minus 0.3, it's really going to have a nice subtle effect. I'm going to try this out. I'm going to brush along here. Then we can see what this looks like before and after. All I did was I just darken t-shirt, just a 10. I'm also going to add a bit of texture to it. When I say a bit, of course, I mean plus 70. Let's see what happens when we bring the exposure down a bit more. No. We're going to leave it like that. Good. That's all we're going to do with that. We can click ''Enter'' or click ''Done'' or hit ''Enter'' on the keyboard. Next thing we're going to do is take this whole photo and we're going to take the darks here under the tone curve, and we're going to increase it just a tad. Here's the before and after. That takes away some of the contrast and gives it even a bit more of a lighter effect. The last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take his face and I'm going to make it pop out a little bit more. I'm going to take the brush, it's set to the last setting I had which was the burn, and I'm going to add some texture and clarity to the face to make the face pop out a little bit more, so we have a washed-out photo, but his face isn't totally lost in this effect. We're going to go to clarity, and that automatically gives me about 43. I'm going to make sure my brush is here? I'm going to increase my feathering, which is the outside ring. We're just going to paint along his beard and his face. You can see I only got his right side here and sharper focus, but we can bring some of that back Here, get his hair. As I'm going through this, I'm getting a little bit more saturation on the hair a bit more yellow. Decrease the clarity on that, increase the texture, and see how that is. Sometimes I'll make an edit and in my head, it looks really good, and then I do it and I'm like, no, it doesn't look that great, which is totally fine because it's so easy to do edits and then undo them. Done, and then Y shows us before and after. If you want to see a different version of the before and after, you can just go down here, before-after left and right is what I normally look at. All I did was I developed the photo to enhance the photo. I didn't do it to do something completely different or new. I just took the little bits, and that's all. I like that, and by hitting F, you can look at it the full screen. Nothing else around. Good. Whenever I'm done with a photo, it's good to mark that so you can flag it, and you can also just hit P or X to reject it or pick it. So when you're done going through all the photos, you can look at just the ones that you edited, because even as you go through all these photos, you're only going to be editing some of these that actually really stand out. Maybe only some of those are going to be the final ones. We went from 450 photos to a little over 100 photos, and then we're probably only going to end up with maybe 20 photos that will actually be giving to him. Maybe more. But that's basically the process. It's like a filter system that you go through even in big, major, important events like a wedding. You'll probably end up taking a lot more photos, like 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 photos maybe, depending on how long you're there, and wind up with maybe 50-75 photos that you actually present to the couple. It's just the process that you go through, and the better you get, you will find yourself being more selective about the photos, so you won't wind up with as much, but it's still the same process. You're not going to take 50 photos, and then love 50 photos, and then edit 50 photos, and then deliver 50 photos. It could happen, but this is just something to keep in mind. I like that one just the way it is. So I'm going to flag it. Here, I want to do something to make him stand out a bit more. I'm going to click my "Radial circle," draw over his face, and it applied the last local adjustments settings that I used used. Further that a bit more. Here, in this case, I decreased the contrast. Why did I decrease the contrast? Because using texture and clarity increases contrast in a different way, and sometimes it can overdo it. So I just bring back the overall contrast and I can balance that photo out. Having a lower contrast is sometimes complimentary on the face too because it will help to mix the lights and darks. If the person has any unflattering facial features, it can help to hide that. He had some acne scars on his cheeks, it wasn't really that bad it actually help give them more of a rugged look. But for women especially, if you're doing any retouching, decreasing in contrast can help take out some lines in the face where the light is not getting into, and also wrinkles, stuff like that, contrast is a great tool to use for that. That's all I did, and if we look before and after, in the face, it pops out a bit more. On the smaller screen, you're going to notice that a bit more. I'm looking at this on a, you can't see it here on the video, but this is, I think it's like a 27-inch Mac computer. So these are really blown up, and I always have to keep in mind that these are going to be often looked on in a much more condensed screen, unless you're giving your client prints that are larger or if they also have a large computer. Most people, your clients, aren't going to have a large, big computer to look at their photos. They're going to be looking at them on the phone, which is going to be super small, and your edits can really vary dramatically. I can look at this and go, this is a fantastic looking photo, and then look at it on my iPhone and go like, the colors are too saturated, or that edit is too dramatic, or I can't see that and I need to go back and change it. Or decide, that picture looks better than that one because of the perspective you're looking at it. We can pick this one. I like it. Let's see what happens when we do the same filter. Contrast it here. too much. Because I wasn't clicked on the radial circle, all these changes weren't showing up. So that's just something to note. I find the blacks slider is super useful for creating certain looks that you can't get with any other slider. It takes the overall dark parts of the image and it brings them up so that you'd have no true blacks in the photo. Instagram filters actually use this effect quite often, that washed out, old style look that you see a lot of Instagram filters use. Nowadays, most phones have these kinds where they're doing other settings, but they also just raise the blacks, and it gives like a washed-out, sometimes really flattering, cool look on the photo. I really don't want to change anything on this photo. So I won't. I'm actually Make going to go back to the grid view and go to the next one. I really want him to see these, and these are the ones that I want to edit right off the bat. This helps my editing process go a lot faster because I can always come back and finish them, or I can always go through and decide, "Hey, I'm doing the same edit to all these photos." Then I can decide to apply them to all of the photos because it's super easy to do that. Otherwise, I'm spending time editing photos that I'm not super excited about, and often that can mess with the edit. Again, use the best photos that you have. I'm going to edit a couple of more photos just so you can get a feel for how these go. Then we will see how do we export them out to a final product. 19. Workflow Walkthrough - Edit in Black and White: We've added a couple more photos. Now, I want to show you how I would take a photo, and turn it black and white, and why I would turn it black and white? Sometimes, it can take a really dull looking picture and make it super interesting. First, we're going to take this top basic panel here, and we have the option under Treatment. We have color, black and white. Now, we're in black and white. This brings up a couple of different options for us here. First, it takes out the vibrance and saturation because there's no colors, so you don't need that. Second, down here, instead of the hue saturation and luminance sliders, we now have something called the black and white mix. That's where we get to have some fun, and really creating a very interesting black and white picture. Because instead of changing the colors, you're taking the color values that were in the original photo, and you're just adjusting the lightness or darkness. Here, a white t-shirt and his skin had some red tones in them, some orange tones, and his hair also set some yellow tones in that. We can adjust those separate colors, the lightness and darkness, and get some interesting effects. But first, let's go up here and adjust our tone here. I like the sharpness of the photo but I want to brighten it up without losing the contrast. We're going to go here, increase the shadows a bit, not too much. I'm keeping in mind when he said he liked the darker photos. What I'm going to do is, without ruining the contrast too much. I'm opening up the shadows in the overall picture, specifically in this part of his face, but then I'm adding back in some more contrast. Good. Then we can increase the clarity just a bit, maybe some texture. What I want to do is, I've done this now with a couple of his photos. I'm going to take the adjustment brush, I'm going to go to the softens skin light, and use my mouse wheel to increase the size here. I'm just going to paint on his cheeks here and handle some of that. Because I like the effect that clarity and texture have, but it adds a little bit too much, it draws the eye a bit too much to his cheeks, that's why I just do that. Click "Done", and we can already see the before and after. Really nice how the light is being shaped around his face. Good. Now, we have the black and white mix. Here, we take the first, red, and we can slide up and down to see what part of the picture that changes, like that. We have very specific portions of his face go brighter and darker. Depending on the look you're going for, it's up to you. This is pure creative decision, there will be some cases where you see, maybe he's wearing a yellow shirt and it's like way too stands out or maybe there's a yellow design on the shirt and that stands out too much, you can actually get rid of that totally by adjusting the yellow lightness. You can make it bright so it doesn't actually appear in the photo. But here, this is really just creative. I like to go for really cool mix of light and dark. That's what I'm going for when I look at this, I go if I darken that, I lose some of the light in the photo, like the look that gives if I lighten it. I think it gets a bit too bright. I'm going to go actually a little bit dark and let's see what the orange does. That affects a lot more of his skin. Going to just decrease that a little bit, yellow, his hair, and we're going to brighten that up because that's a nice, interesting contrast. See if there's any greens. Yeah, some greens in the trees in the background, but we're going to darken that because we don't need to see that. There's no blues. Any purple? No. Magenta? No. Before, after, before, after. Good. One thing that I didn't do is I didn't do the eyes. Here with the eyes, again, we're going to draw a radial circle, put it over the eyes, make sure it lines up. We're going to reset the effects, and we're going to go to increase the sharpness, decrease the contrast, get some of the shadows out, pump up the highlights a bit, increase the texture, and a bit of clarity. We can even add some whites, I don't know let's see. Maybe just a touch their. Duplicate it on the other side, make it a bit smaller to fit the eye and undo some of that effect. We can look at the before and after. Look at that. It's important to make sure that your feather is set correctly, otherwise, if you have no feathering and it's super hard, you're going to see that circle very clearly. Whereas if you have it nice and feathered, the edges are going to be really gradual. So it's going to look a lot more real, and we're going to go to the before and after, way more detail. It always amazes me how much information that cameras today can capture, especially in the darker parts. If you look here, look at this, there's only a little bit of catch light in his eye right here, a little bit in here, very, very dark. We've changed the black and white. We've done some things with some of them developing taking away some of the contrasts and bringing out some of the tones, and the catch light is there, a lot clearer in both eyes. I want to actually see, yeah, we even have some more reflection in this part of the eye. You can just see the outline of my lens right here. This reflection, the light is bouncing off of the lens hood. I think that's just amazing. We're happy with that one. Let's go to another one and see I have a couple here. One other thing we're going to do is, I'm going to right-click, go to "Develop Settings." I'm going to copy everything I did here, and it brings up this menu. Here's all the things you want to copy. The only thing I'm not going to copy over is the local adjustments because they're just not going to wind up on the right place on the face. So we're going to copy this. Right-click. "Develop Settings," "Paste Settings." Half that work is already done for us. We can just go over here and soften the skin up. We can go to our radial circle, take the eyes, reset this. We can go to now, increase the sharpness, decrease the clarity, take away some of the shadows, increase the highlights, add some texture, some clarity, bring in some more whites, look at that, duplicate and bring back some of the shadows, some more of the contrast. Just decrease the settings here. Done. I'm going to go to the next one. Actually, this one is pretty similar to this one. I don't think I'm going to edit that one. Another cool thing you can do with black and white, is you can go down here to the split toning option and you can change the hue of the highlights and the shadows, and you can get a blend of colors, which I think is pretty cool. Let's go ahead and mess around with that. I like to start with this and hue, you can choose anyone. But in order to see what you're doing, you have to add some saturation. I'm going to add five. I normally don't really apply more than that, and just drag it along to see what color combinations, I like that. Then the balance you can decide to favor one color more than another color and I like this blue, I like that. Here we have two black and whites. I when I have multiple photos that are similar, I like to do a bit of a different thing with them. So let's now add some yellow to the highlights and make almost like a green look, favoring the yellows. If we want to, we can click this little box up here and we can pick another color, like what I just did there. I have to say that because I've been looking at this screen for so long, I could totally walk away and come back and look at it and go like, oh what the heck am I doing? This looks terrible. But right now it looks awesome. But I reserve the right to change my mind. Now I'm going to go through and finish getting some of these edits and then I'm going to show how to export them into the final file. Then I can show you my process for uploading and sending them to the client. 20. Workflow Walkthrough - Editing in Photoshop: Okay. I wanted to do a quick little tutorial on using Photoshop with Lightroom. This isn't going to show you everything you need to know about Photoshop at all. Some people get into photography and they start with Photoshop and stay away from Lightroom. Some people stay with Lightroom and avoid Photoshop, and some people do both. Lightroom, in my opinion, is a lot simpler, straightforward to use when you're just editing pictures. But there's some cases where Lightroom is not going to handle some things, especially when it comes to editing out things. Here I have this photo of Devin, but here is my light stand leg that's in the way. Lightroom has a tool called Spot Removal where you can get rid of some blemishes or sensor dust or really small stuff. But I've not found it to be super useful when it comes to getting rid of more complicated things. This light stand, that's going over some grass, and this walkway. What I'm going to do is I'm going to right-click, I'm going to "Edit In Adobe Photoshop 2020." We're in Photoshop here, like I said, Photoshop is a really powerful tool and this isn't a video on how to use everything. So I'm just going to show you super basic, simple what I would do in Photoshop from Lightroom, and then how to go back to Lightroom with that edit. Here we're in Photoshop and we want to remove this light stand. There's a couple ways you can go about it, and that's one of the things that I find it with Photoshop that makes it really powerful, but also sometimes a bit more complicated to learn because you can do one thing in five different ways and none of them are right or wrong. Another thing to know about Photoshop is that unless you make a copy of this, unless you set your photo up a certain way, any manipulations that you do to the photo are permanent, while in Lightroom you're always editing a copy of that. In this case, what we're going to do is we're going to create a copy, Command J, and we're going to take this in. First thing I'm going to try to do is simply use the Spot Healing Brush Tool up here. I'm going to increase the size by clicking the right right. I'm going to just start by clicking and dragging and see what that does. It does pretty well. We're going to continue to remove that. What this tool is doing is it's pulling information from the immediate proximity and it's replacing that with whatever is surrounding it. Sometimes I'm getting just really sloppy erasing. Sometimes I'll try making it bigger and seeing what that does. Nope. Okay. Next thing is we're going to take the Patch Tool. The Patch Tool is really cool because you simply draw around it, and then you move it to the location that you want to replace it with. There's some grass right here. I'm going to move, and you see how that area also changes to whatever it is that you have that shape over. I'm still holding the mouse, I'm going to move it. What that does is it takes the information there and it blends it with your selection and Command D. You can see it did a pretty good job just after one click. I use the Spot Healing Brush and the Patch Tool quite a bit. I'm going to use it again to get rid of this sloppy job that I did with the Spot Healing Brush, and here, there you go. We can see the before and after by clicking this little eyeball here. There's still some new particles here that weren't there before, but anybody looking at the photo wouldn't for the first time if they didn't see the light stand there, either they would not be able to tell. Sometimes good enough is better than perfect. Because believe me, you can spend a long time in Photoshop and try to go for perfection and wind up with something completely different than what you were going to go for. It's not a big deal if you don't get that perfect. Giving you example of something else I would do while we're in here, is the Z key, sets it back to zoom. You can zoom in here and sometimes there's blemishes and stuff that I want to get rid of. We can do that just for this demonstration, but I would go back to Spot Healing Brush Tool. Make that a lot smaller by hitting the left bracket and clicking on it. Boom its gone. Super simple. Say I wanted to get rid of some of these other marks, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone. Hold shift bar to click and drag around to see if there's anything else, and nope, let's hit "Z" for the zoom. Fit screen. Anything else I want to get rid of? No. Okay, good. At this point then I'm just going to Command S to save it, or Control S on a PC. You can see it's saving in the bottom left-hand corner, and when it saves, I'm going to go back, and it saved a copy into Lightroom. Here's the picture before, and here's the one with the edits. Super, super easy. That is an example of how I would use Lightroom with Photoshop in making these minor adjustments. 21. Workflow Walkthrough - Final Export and Sharing: I just finished editing the photos I want to send to Devin and I'm going to go back to my grid menu. You can come up here to the right-hand corner and you can decide to filter out all the ones that you picked or flagged. Let me do that now. Here we have 25 photos. There's probably some more photos there that I could've selected, but I really like how these came out, I'm going to send these over to him, and I can edit some more if I want or if he wants. You can see some different versions of them but so far I think these came out pretty cool and so now we're going to export them. What we're going to do to do that is, come over here. I have a couple of options. I can export them as JPEGs onto my external hard drive, which I'm going to do, or I can upload them to my portfolio on my website where then he can get a download link, he can look at them, he can comment, he can give me feedback, and he can get them from that. There's lots of different ways you can share photos nowadays. You can either have a website that's directly connected to Lightroom, which I have, I'm going to show you how to do that. You can also export them out as JPEGs and then send them through various programs: Dropbox, the cloud, the Apple Cloud, you can send them through a program called WeTransfer, do any number of things. I find is more professional to have your own website and within that website, the ability to send private links to your clients so they can go on your website, search through the different photos and download them, or pay for them all through that one website. You can do it other ways, like download them onto a thumb drive, and then you can give that to the client and they can pay you that way. But nowadays, with everything going online, into the cloud, and all of these different things, people are more used to just going onto a website and downloading stuff from there. I'm going to show you this way first. Here, on the left-hand corner you have something called published services, and right now I have my website on a program called SlickPic. I've tried lots of different ones. Another one is Pixieset, but mine right now is on SlickPic and what you have to do is you have to connect the two programs. You have to connect the website with Lightroom in order to make this work. For some reason, every now and then, it disconnects. But that's not a big problem because you can just go into Edit Settings. We went into Lightroom Plug-in Manager, SlickPic. It says plug-in is currently disabled, so you enable it, and it's working. Now what you want to do is create within this, an album. You can do that by ''Right-clicking'', we can create album. We can call this Devin, and getting created. I can "Right-click" on the album and I can set as a target collection, and you can do this with any collection in Lightroom. It makes it really easy to select a bunch of photos and just with a couple of keystrokes, send them right into that collection. When you set it as a target collection, this little plus symbol turns on, and now anytime you select a photo, all you have to do is hit the "B" key on your keyboard and all of those photos will go into that album. If I were to "Control A, P". Now I added all 25 photos to that collection, and here they are. Again, these are in a collection. They're not copies of your photo, they're reference photos. Meaning that you only have that one raw file that's saved in your program, but you can categorize them using reference photos, which are just little bits of information. You can do a bunch of different things with it, and it won't clutter up your space, they're easy to handle, they won't add a ton of storage because they're super small. When you get more and more familiar with it, it's going to be a huge lifesaver, because you can have one raw photo and you can have 10 different edits on that, and only have one original file. Then you can export as many JPEGs as you want without degrading the quality. I did not start out learning how to organize Lightroom, and that was a big mistake for me because I wound up with a bunch of duplicates which I have to go through or just decide just to leave there as it is. The organization is the strength of Lightroom. It doesn't have to be the first thing that you learn how to do if you just want to get right into editing, but if you plan to do anything professional in photography and use Lightroom as your organizing source, it's something that you should learn rather quickly because it's really easy to stack up couple of hundred, several thousand photos after a couple of shoots and then wind up going, here's all your photos in your catalog. "Cool, how do I sort them? How do I organize them," if you want to go back and look at some or you need something. Once they're in the album, all you do is you go up here and you hit "Publish". It's going to take these pictures and it's going to upload them to the site, and it should have up here, it's hidden by the bar. But if we minimize this exit full screen. Here, you'll see that it's publishing the collections on the website. We're going to go to the website right now. Here's the back door of my SlickPic account. Here, it's showing this album that we made within Lightroom that updated in SlickPic, so you don't have to make an album in your portfolio, make an album in Lightroom, make another album in your external hard drive, just one album, which I think is pretty cool. Again, there are other websites that have this plug-in function. I think Pixieset, the one I had before, had a same function. Adobe has its own portfolio program that you can use, which of course uses that as a way to upload your photos instantly and you can even upload them onto your own website if you have the certain codes and capability to do that. Again, lots of different ways to organize and share your photos, best just to find one way, get familiar with that, and then if you want expand on to that. We're going to let this finish uploading. I refreshed the page and it's all here. He can go in here, he can decide if he likes it, he can write comments, and he can download it directly. Because right now it's listed as a public album, I want to just go ahead and make this a private album. I'm just going to go ahead and make this an unlisted album, depending on the program you use. Depends on how this is done, I've also used Squarespace before. I like that because you could do a similar thing, you can send somebody a link, and then it creates a nice little mini portfolio for that person's photo shoot. We're going to unlist it and then we're going to share it. Bunch of different ways you can share it. See, it has even more options you can do it. I'm going to copy the link and e-mail him. I've just e-mailed him the link and hopefully he likes what we've done here. The last thing I'm going to do is take the same images and we're going to go back to Collection over here, Filter Flagged. "Control A". I'm going to export them to the final edits folder that we made earlier. This is basically the only things that I do here, 3,000 pixels and long edge resolution, 300 pixels per inch, just fine. I'm going to export them. I like to export my final edits because then I can see them on my phone and in the final JPEG version. Like I said earlier, it can be really different sometimes what you see on your phone versus what you see on this big screen. Also, I can walk away from the screen which I need to do after editing session like this, and I can look back with some fresh pair of eyes and go, "Okay, that was good. Or, "You know what, not my best work." I will recommend, if you're going to be posting to social media, to do that process of walking away then looking at it before you go ahead and post it. I've done this too many times where I we're so excited about a photo shoot I did and I wanted to share with my friends and family, I post that up, and in one or two of the photos were just not that great after looking at it later. So you don't want to then go back and delete it and then people are like, "What happened to that one photo?" That's all for this video. I hope you learned a lot and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out.