Lightroom Masterclass - Principles and Tools to create extraordinary images

1. Welcome to the Class: Welcome to this class on creating extraordinary images in Lightroom. Lightroom is so, so important. I see it as 50% of the photography processes going out and taking that photo. Then 50% of the photography process is actually getting that raw file and editing it in Lightroom or Photoshop. This course is dedicated to Light room. So all you need is Lightroom. I'm going to go through the tools that I use. More importantly than anything, is going to show you lots of examples. So we'll be going through the basic tools and my workflow and how I use those tools. But more important, anything else? The examples at the end or where the whole thing comes together and it is a very creative process. Using Lightroom is almost for me like taking something that's in its raw state and then just trying to put my creative torch onto it. If multiple people edit the same image, then you'll get different results. So I don't think you have to edit exactly like me. What I'm trying to do is give you the ways and the techniques that I use that then you can interpret in your own way. Let's get into the Lightroom masterclass. 2. Why I Edit: In this video, I want to talk about why I edit. You may think that you add it just to increase the brightness, the shadows, tonal values look correct, the colors, and that's true. Obviously, that's one of the main reasons that you add it. But for me, the thing for most photographers, the reason you edit is you want to try and portray a scene like it was when you were that when you say portray a C and then that sort of makes you think, well what just portraying the same mean. And I think you're trying to sort of recreate the emotions that you felt because usually when you wouldn't one of these amazing locations, you have an emotional connection to it. You think, wow, or do you think that's just an amine or of that? So what I tried to do when I'm editing is try and be true to that. I'm not trying to invoke an emotion and somebody else, but I'm trying to ensure that the feelings that I had when I was in that location or recreated when I look at that photo. So let's just have a look at a few photos quickly just to show this. This is a good example. This was a photo in the Faroe Islands. I've talked about this nutrient videos before. It is all about the color a bit for me, it was very blue on that day and I remember it was overcast and there was no sunrise or sunset. It was just a blue color reflected off the water and down from the sky, the Fed. So when I got back, look like this, it was very grey. Silver, little bit disappointed, and it was just a color balance and just a bit of Tintin The allow me to re-create there. So that was just the basic edit plus a constant to it. Again, this scene here, it was like this. It was solve this warm, a very calm feeling to it. But the edit before when I got it was like this. It needed those warmer tones bringing out in it. You've got to remember this is the raw file. You're going to pull out those things by pulling out those warm tones and managed to re-create that sort of calm feeling to this image. Again, on this shot here, this is such a good example. This was this really nice warm light coming from the side. You can see my friend Marcy and I talked about this in the videos below in a bit more detail. But you can see that before. Again, it was quite flat. The light on here was nowhere near as strong as I remember there. It didn't create that. I didn't feel like the roar image credit, that's a wild feeling. But this has got more than wow feeling, that amazing light coming through. Sometimes you'd have to run it very much. So for instance, this one, this is the before. This is the after you can say that I've hardly changed it and it was just pulling out the clouds there. Because again, this was a very warm feeling. I wanted to recreate this warm light coming through the warm light in the sky when I was at vegetal horn here. Sometimes it's a little bit more moody, or you try to use the edit to improve the composition within the image, which is quite often the case as well. This is a good example. This is the before, it's not very balanced. This is quite light in the sky. This is very heavy. But by editing it, I've created this really moody image and I've used the sky to balance the edit as well. There's a few things, a few reasons why I added mostly to recreate that feeling. I think that's really important when you're looking at your photos. Try and think what you're trying, what you're trying to re-create when you edit that photo is a warm or cool tone, is it a drama, is a calmness. All those things will massively help you when you come to editing. 3. Overview of the Tools I use in Lightroom: Okay, So welcome to the first video in this class. And this is all about just the tools that are used within Lightroom. And that might seem fairly obvious because they're just listed on the right-hand side. But some tools I use a lot and some not so much I thought before I started going through them in a bit more detail. Be good for me to just go through these tools one-by-one. I'm going to start right at the top on the right-hand side here. Obviously I've got some images, some sample images in here that we're going to talk about, this being one of them from Glencoe. What I do is the first thing I'll do is look at the histogram and see if everything's a. And I'm going to go through my workflow in a lot more detail in the next video. But the histogram is always really important to me. Then we get to these tools here, crop obviously I use all the time. Healing brush, I use all the time, unless there's something really complicated. And then it'll import the image into Photoshop and use the tools that I obviously never used red eye correction. I don't have people in my photos or use flashes. And then the masking I use on every single image. So that is the most used tool in the whole of Lightroom. And that will become clear as I go through this. Then we've got the color and black and white. Obviously, I'm developing everything in color. I very rarely do black and white, but color profile, profile is basically what Lightroom can apply to your raw image before it brings it into Lightroom effectively. It's taken the coef, the base color of that raw image and applying some settings too. And it can do things not just restricted to the settings on here. When you apply that profile, it can change the look of your image. So for instance, if I go to here and change it to Adobe portrait, it might look slightly different than standard or light landscape look a lot different, brings out some of the vivid colors. You can if you want to just go through these and choose one that you think's going to work for your image as a base, this is your base. I just leave it in Adobe Color. I never mess about with that, but I have a lot of photographers that change that quite a lot. Then we've got the picker here where if you want to change the white balance, I say for instance, you want the sky to be gray, you can go and pick that and that will set that gray. The sky, temperature and tint to something that I change all the time. Then we get to exposure. Obvious. You can just change our time contrast, really important contrast because it actually, as you'll see in this image here, if I reduce the contrast, it reduces saturation as well. If I increase the contrast, you can see that the colors get more saturated. So often I use contrast to change saturation. Then we've got highlights, shadows, whites and blacks are users all the time. We're going to come into Moodle bit more detail. So presence, I never changed texture, never, ever, ever. But I do change clarity and dehaze. I use those quite a lot, quite often. I'll use negative clarity as well as positive clarity because you can see if I do negative clarity on is water, it's doing something a bit different. So clarity and dehaze, use all the time. Vibrance and saturation. Not that often do I use those sometimes when I do a final tweak to an image, I might just tweak them a little bit, but mostly as we get onto, I used the HSL to change my vibrance and saturation. The ten curve. Yeah, I use this all the time to do some more complex contrast adjustments. If you just want to change the contrast in the shadows or the highlights, then the tone curve becomes really, really useful for that. Then also if you just want to change the input and output. So if I wanted to make things less black or less white, and then I can do it with this. Again, we're gonna come to these tools and a lot more detail. Then we've got the HSL tool. I use this all the time. So the HSL and the masking a probability to tools that are used more than any of the tools in Lightroom. And we're gonna go into those in so much detail throughout this class. Color grading, I use probably 50% of the time, mostly on my woodland images. Find it's a really good way of toning your shadows and highlights to cry something that just looks a little bit more powerful, a little bit more extraordinary, I suppose. Then we've got detail don't really change very much at all. I find that the default level of sharpness is enough. This is something that people for servers so much. But if I just show you print this image when it's edited, if I just went close into this now, you can see that the detail in the same edge is incredible. I mean, it really is incredible. You don't want to over sharpen because then it creates something that just doesn't look natural. It doesn't have that sort of Wow about it. Quite often. The best images, the ones that aren't over sharpened, talks that very carefully. Noise reduction, sometimes I do tend to do it through the masking tool. And then we've got lens correction here. Remove Chromatic Aberration upon everything. Enabled Profile Corrections. My thing does it within the lens. But sometimes I might want to change the barrel distortion a little bit. So sometimes I'll just mess with this a little bit. But I don't use that huge amount. And then D fringe, if I've got fringes, sometimes you get purple fringes on branches when this highlights behind it depended on the lens and the quality of your lens. You can get rid of them with that vignette and that don't really change that much. I do it in other ways which I'll explain about. And then we've got the transform tools, which again, I don't really tend to use those very much because I'm doing any transformation where I want to accentuate the distant mountains for any reason that I'll do that in Photoshop, but I did that very rarely. And then we've got the vignetting here at the bottom. And again, uh, tend to use that very much because I'll use the masking tools. The masking tools in Lightroom are so powerful, so amazing. You can create extraordinary images using those. And hopefully this class is going to explain that. And then calibration, I tend to do as well right at the very beginning and I'll explain that in the next video when I go through my initial workflow on an image and wider, why do for that initial workflow? That's it really. There isn't a huge amount of other things in terms of the editing part of it. Obviously there's other things in terms of printing, export and stuff like that. We'll get into exporting further down. I've got a video on that. But printings a whole, a whole new thing which will probably at some point to Skillshare course on. That's it really, that the tools that are used, There's nothing super complicated about it, but it's about how I use those tools. And that's what we're now going to get into. 4. Controlling Tones - The Basics: In this video, I want to go over the basic tools that I use for controlling tones in images. Let's have a look at a few images. So basically, if I go to this image, this is the raw image actually looks pretty good as a road image. This one, it was a pretty amazing location and the Faroe Islands, this is my friend must be to reverse and stood on the headland here. The first thing I do when I'm controlling tones and looking at change within the image is, well, the first thing is to set the white balance. I'm going to talk about color a little bit further below. But the white balance, those influence the tones of the image as well. So if I just look at this white balance here, and if you say as I move it, you can see that the sum of the tones, like the shadow area here is increasing the brightness as I increase the warmth and goes darker as I make it cooler. You can say that the histogram appears changing the tonal ranges as well as the colors. A change in, I liked before mess with the tones at all. I like to set what I think the temperature is going to be roughly within this image. Attempt to start with something a little bit cooler, so set it about there. The first thing that I do, this is really important is I go to the tone here and I will mess about with the exposure. So I'm going to go on this image and I'm going to go all the way down. And I want to say in these bright areas, I want to say how much detail I've got. I can see that there is a lot of detail there. In this warning image. Sometimes I'll do a HDR or combined a few images. But in this one image, I've got all the highlight detail that I'm gonna need that. Then I want to see the shadows. I'm going to go all the way up. I want to have a look at the shadow details. I want to say, is there any noise in the shallow detail, if I start to bring that out a little bit more and more contrast to it, how's that going to impact the image? Because as I start to apply masks and other things and need to understand the total ranges within this image. I need to understand the capabilities of the image. That's really, really important. And also, you can start to say as you change in things like the exposure, how things change, I can see that there's a brightness level here that will look pretty good. And I can start to pull out. Then I'll just basically set an exposure that I think it's about right? Wishes about probably about they're not worried about blowing this out because I know that wherever I do I can pull that back with a mask. I'm going to set it about there. And then I'm gonna get to contrast. And then going again, I'm just going to say what happens when I start to change this contrast. You can see that I'm pulling out some details in the clouds. Definitely wanted to increase the contrast probability the whole image, I think everything gets better. I want to increase the contrast. But then that creates some interesting problems in the image as well. The dots get darker, the lights get lighter, so I've got to deal with those later. But I'm definitely going to increase the contrast. I usually do that with most images. Then I'm going to pull back those highlights a little bit and then I'm going to start to increase the shadows. What I'm doing here tends to be the same for most images, to be honest. And this is this basic tonal edit. This is not the final edit. This is just setting the things that right to when I start to edit with masks. I'm just, I'm going to pull the shadows right? Or per think. Again, it might drop them down a little bit later, but I just wanted to say what I've got to work with. This is looking better. And then the whites, I'm going to pull up a bit more and I'm gonna draw this highlights a bit what I'm doing by reducing the highlights and increasing the whites and increasing the shadows is affecting the contrast in different areas on the curve. Now you could do this on the tone curve, but to be honest, it's quite tricky. And it's easier to do with these slides as I find some people just use the total curve. I don't use the tone curve very much and I'll explain when I use tone curve, but most of the time I'm just using these tools appear. We're not, we're not worried about clarity and dehaze at the moment because that's just going to set the feel of it. And I probably did that more than a local level. But again, it's worth messing with these tools just to see what happens. So you can see that a little bit of dehaze in the sky is probably going to help with that contrast as well. When I'm doing a mask on the sky and know what to look for. So just playing with the tools is really useful so that when you get onto those local adjustments with the masks, you've got a better idea of what's capable of the image. I'm just going to mess with the clarity a little bit. On this case, I probably will just increase the clarity a tiny bit of the image. But again, our property local adjustments will change that, not gonna change vibrance and saturation. Very rarely do I do that. The HSL level and we'll talk about that in the color video below. Then I just need to go down to the curve, the curve. Now, what you're gonna remember with the tone curve will just put it on this one here is all the tone curve is, is it's saying all the tones here at the input tones, and this is what they're going to look like. So for instance, here it's saying that white goes to white, black goes to black and gray goes to gray. It's very linear. If I change that, if I say, okay, I want all the white tones be the same, I could just do that. And that says that all these terms here are all gonna be white. That goes white. If I go to here and I say all these black tones are gonna be black, then all the shadows get blocked out. Sometimes with the tone curve, what I'll do is I'll say I don't want the blacks to be actual black. And a lot of people will edit that they never have a true black, especially when I'm printing because tree Blackstone print particularly well, so to do that I said that the true black here, this is the import. I actually want it to be just off black. And that's basically reducing the country contrasted my image as well. The more I go like that, the more I have less contrast in my image. I might just note that up a little bit, and that's just bringing out the shadows a little bit. But there's no true black in the image. Now, there's nothing in this image that is true black. And you can see that by looking at the curve, There's nothing black layer. And then further up ago, the more that curve will go there, that's similar to move in this black, left and right like this, not quite the same. The black slider do something a little bit different, but it's similar. For now. I'm just going to just move those up a little bit. You can do some more contrast in this if you want, you could just do more contrast by just doing this and this gives you a little bit more control over it. So if you feel like the contrast slider isn't doing exactly what you want, then you can not do it with the contrast slider, but do it with the tone curve. And that just gives you a little bit more fine control over the amount of contrast in the shadow and the amount of contrast in the highlights. By moving a couple of spots on here or put down. I'll go through that on an, on an image in the example below. Then. That is pretty much it for the tonal basic corrections. There's nothing else to do that's not related to color from a tonal perspective. This is just the basic corrections we will. What we've done is we've gone from that to that we've just done a basic correction on it. Now, we've got to go in and look at the masks on it as well. I'm going to go in and look at some mask, so I'm going to stick with this image. Hopefully we will have finished this image by the time we've gone through these next few videos, I'm gonna do some fairly sophisticated mask edits on this. And you'll see just how beneficial that will be and that's where the real magic comes. These masks are really, really, really good. On to the next video. 5. HDR and Multiple Exposures: In this video, I just want to talk about HDR images or high dynamic range images. And that is purely when you've got so much dynamic range. You can't take it with one shot within your camera. You take two or three shots, you combine them together and you get more dynamic range, hence the name high dynamic range. It isn't an image, it looks awful, which often is associated with HDR images. High dynamic range is so important and it allows you by taking 23 or maybe four images to create a histogram with so much more data. This is a really good example. This was a Madeira. These are the raw images that I took of this particular scene. I took one for the sky. You can see here. If I bring up the exposure, unless you can see that the shadows are really not great. They're quite noisy. You can see the shadows here are really, really noisy. You really don't want to do that. You need to then take another exposure for the mid tones or newborn for the shadow. So I took this one here for the mid tones or the sky up here in a little bit of the mid tones within the image here. And then this one was the main exposure for the foreground here. And then, so easy, if nothing's moving in your scene, as long as you do not move your camera that much needed. If you move the camera a little bit, you can do this handheld actually. Then Lightroom will do a really good job of combining those three images. So you just select the three images, you right-click on them and then you just click Photo Merge HDR that we'll look at those three images, emerge the data together. So the tonal range will be much broader once I've done this and it's merged together now it does to auto settings and auto settings does a reasonably good job of it. In this case, sometimes it doesn't. But even if I didn't do auto settings and just click merge, then that will now go emerge those images together and create a DNG RAW image of those three images. So I've got this image here, which is that raw image. Now this D and J has got a lot more data in the highlight. So if I go down, you can see I've got all the data back here in the highlights. I can see I think it's probably Venus, the sky. And then if I go up here and look at the shadows, and you can see that the shadow detail is so much cleaner. I've now got an image that I can go and start to apply. My head is to, perhaps I might just wanted to increase the shadows, do basic edit to it as I've done before. Increase the exposure, reduce the highlights a little bit. Basic edit, and then go and do some more masking and edit. So I might want to go and do a linear gradient unless I'm doing this really quick and fast. But you can see that by doing that on this particular image allows me to get really nice clean data to work with. And I can then, by going in and spending quite a lot of time editing it, produce something like this. Try that whenever you're out shooting you a little bit sure. If you're not being able to get everything in one shot or even if it's quite tight and your highlights or your shadows are really close to the edge. It just take a few shots, maybe one stop underexposed, one-stop overexposed, and then we can combine them in Lightroom. And you get that data and you can just worry about it later. 6. Introduction to Masking: In this video, I'm going to give you the basics of masking in library. Congruent masking can make such a big difference to your images. It's something that I use on every single image. And it's the thing that I think really as creativity into the images. In this video, I'm just going to go over the basics and then below, I'm going to go over it in a little bit more detail of how you can use masks together, which is when it really becomes very powerful. Okay, so we've got this interface here. You click this button which allows you to select a mask. And all our mask is, is it's a way of selecting the parts of the image to apply some edits to. You get a restricted number of edits to apply on that particular thing. So for instance, if I just went and did a simple one like Slack sky for instance, then that will select the sky and it tries to find the sky in the image. And I want to talk a little bit more about this in a minute. We'll try and select some of the skies. But it does a reasonably good job of it. Once you've got that the sky, you've got these tools to be able to change that Edit. As soon as I start editing, red mask will disappear and you can get it back at anytime by just clicking Show Overlay. I can change the exposure, the contrast, the highlights, shadows, whites, texture, clarity, dehaze, which I think is actually something that I use quite often. One way we'll their mask and you can actually change the hue of it as well, which not great, but potentially interested in saturation, which has gained potential useful to do so, localized saturation changes and then sharpness. Just changing noise in an image as well. Which again is quite interested in quite useful, especially on the sky. Because often you might want to just get rid of the noise in the sky because there's no fine details. You're not bothered about losing details, but you don't want that noisy sky. There's lots of things you can do these selections of tools here. You can also apply a color to it as well so I can make it a different color if I wanted to. Again, that's really useful. I'll come on to why that's useful later on. Okay, so we'll just delete that master, master pair here. I'm just going to delete that mask. And I'm going to go through and show you all of these one-by-one select subject is not great. So this might find a subject. So in this case it has found this, but it hasn't really found a person is just, it's not great. It's good if you've got a person closer up and you're doing portraits or something like that. But for landscape photography, I would never use Select Subject. Select sky is useful, but it's not always brilliant. So for instance, if I go to this one here and click Select Sky, you'll see that it's also selecting most of this mountain as well. You're going to be a little bit careful with this. It's really good. If you've got a mountain range like this where you've got a defined mountain range. And in that case, if I click Select Sky, gonna do a really good job of it. And it's selected the sky. And you can check how well of a job of deserts don't because you can just change the exposure. And you can see that it's done a very, very good job of selecting this guy here, but sometimes it doesn't, so you just got to be a bit careful with it. Back onto this image here. And we'll go back to this mask and then got brush. And that allows you to brush on a change. So for instance, say I wanted just to brush an increase in exposure. I can click the Brush, click, increase the exposure here. And then you've got a selection of things here. I've got size, I've got feather, and you can see that the size of it, if I make it bigger, it makes it bigger or smaller. You can also use the square brackets to make it bigger and smaller. I can change the federal debt service will make how much it's feathered, attend to have it around about 85% feathered and then flow is how much you apply. So for instance, if I have a flow of 25 per cent and I went over this bit of sky here the first time I did it, it would do twenty-five percent. The second time I did it and do another twenty-five percent, then another twenty-five percent, and then the other twenty-five percent. It's now applied a 100% of the edit to that bit I've gone over it. Flows really useful because if you have a low flow, you can just brush it and be really careful with your edits. Definitely think about the flow being quite low and then density is what the ultimate amount of the edit can be applied no matter how many times do you go over it, I always leave that hundreds to be honest, but if you want to be really, really careful and you want to make sure that it never goes past 50% density and you can change that. Then what I'm doing is I'm using the brushes to do small changes. I usually just apply an exposure, maybe some shadows and weiss to this brush. And then I'll just change the size and just brush where I want this change. For instance, here. Um, I want to just Dogen this white on here, down here. And then you can change the Corvette. I can make it a little bit warmer for wanted to make it a bit greener. If I wanted to, then I can change the edit or you can just hover over it and you can see where you've changed it because that will turn red. Brushes something I'll use all the time you see it when I added them effectors. Further through this, It's a super useful mask. You can also with a brush, which is something that I should mention. You can do auto mask. And what that means is if I'm brushing on an edge here, it means it will just make sure it doesn't automatic mask. So if I just show the overlay, I'm just going to change the feather and list 200% when I'm doing it on here, can you see that it's just automatically mask into the edge? Now you've got to be careful because if you do go over, but I can be as long as that cross doesn't go over the edge, then it's going to mask to the edge pretty well. So if you're just trying to do some fine changes to a mask, that automatic if you've got a hard edge is really, really useful. There's a lot to take in there with the brush tool. We'll get on to the next tools, but we'll come back to all these tools as we're editing photos. I didn't worry about it too much. I'm just going to delete that one for now onto the next one, which is the linear gradient. So this is something that I use on every single image. Linear gradients just simply just drag it down like that. And it's like a graduated filter that you're putting in front of your lens. Although it's miles better than that because you can not just have it like that. But then I could rush out a bit where the mountains are or you can control it in terms of is slumped. You can just do so many things with this. And when we add to the power of the mask where you start to blend two masses together, then you just say how powerful it is. But again, it's the same as all the other masks wherever is mass, you can then change the foreigners made the sky darker in this case, which will be a really good idea. I can do that. I might want to add some dehaze to add. You can see I can start to build up the sky. And using a linear gradient I find it's really good for when you are editing skies. It's the thing that I would always do on skies. There's a top tip that I'll get to later, which is put in linear gradients on top of linear gradients, which is super powerful. So that's going to be one of the examples below. That's linear gradient is fairly simple. Nothing, nothing much there. I will just delete that and delete all the masters ago. The radial gradient is bit like linear gradient, but in a regular way, you can change where it's affecting. You can invert it as well if you want to. But here I could say, I want to just warm up the sun hair. So I might just want to warm this up. I might want to reduce the highlights a bit as well. Just increase the whites a little bit. So this is really, really useful for any votes sudden you just want to sort of blend out that color or you just want to change things like the texture of the clarity. So here I might just want to make this a little bit softer, just to make it feel a little bit more of the world. Again, I'm gonna get onto that in a little bit more detail when an edit a photo, but I just want to go through, That's how it is. The other way of using a radial gradient is I can just go in the middle here and then I can actually inverse it. And you can do this with all the filters. You can invert it. So I'm going to invert this and this is a really good way if you just want to create a vignette on your images. So here you can see I can just create a vignette on this and just change the outsides of it and you've got a lot more control over it. I can control where it starts. I can control the tilted and all sorts of things like that. So it's super useful to be able to do really complex vignettes because you can also change the color of the vignette and make it cool at the edges are warmer at the edges. The radio filters just so powerful. All these masks are so powerful. So the next one is color range. If I just go and create a color range mask, here, I can just click. And this will select the color that I click on, and then I can change that. So for instance, in this, I'm not sure I would want to increase the y sub s just to make this pop a little bit more. You've got to be careful with this because it's selecting a color range. It's also going to change things up here that might be the same color range as where you've clicked. It, does it to the whole image wherever that particular colorless. But when we get down to the more powerful use of masks together, you can see that we can subtract this part from this part and we can start to create really complex masks which are more powerful elements of the photos and make it more creative. But it's super useful when he bought something like this where you just want to a particular color. So for instance, maybe I want to pick the blue tones within the sky. Just make them a little bit bluer. I can just get this blue tones and just make them bluer. Or I can reduce the saturation of the blue tones just to get rid of the blue work and make it more prominent, is so, so powerful that really is just like that. There is a luminance one as well. So you can pick tonal values. So I can say, okay, I just want to pick the dark tones within the image. Now this is something that again is so, so important. Luminosity mask effectively. You've probably heard of those in Photoshop, they're really, really useful. You've got to be careful with them though, because if you overdo the changes, you can start to get really sort of flat, muddy areas. So when I go into using these in the examples below, I'll explain a little bit more detail about how you do that. But you've got a lot of control over that luminosity. Luminosity. You pick by choosing that quite carefully and how you feather off that luminosity in a particular area can control just how you might change the contrast references in this area here, we might want to change the contrast of dark tones. I might just want to be just increasing the contrast. Maybe they're making the blacks a little bit blacker here. And just feathering that offer little bit. Luminosity is really important, but you've just got to be careful when you're doing that. As you're building these mass, you can see, you've probably seen here I've got this thing where all these masks together. I can also name these masks. I can go back to these mass. I can switch them on and off if I don't like them anymore. Super good, it's really, really powerful. It means that you don't really have to use Photoshop like you did in the past. That's masking. That's just a basic introduction to masking. There's a lot to take in there. I realized that, but it will all become clear as we start going through those examples. 7. The Power of Multiple Masks: Right, this is where it gets formed. In this video, we're going to combine masks, and this will allow us to do some really clever edit a more creative ideas or images. I'm going to go through your few combinations, but the solvent limited combinations, I'll explain how you might want to use them. So let's get into this image again. We've applied a few masks here in the previous videos. So what we'll do, we'll start with just combining two masks together. So I'm gonna create a new mask here and I'm going to just say select the sky. So I'm gonna select the sky. This will then go and select the sky. Now, obviously if I do this and I'll just say I wanted to change the exposure sky reduced exposure, where you can say that I probably don't want to reduce the exposure of this part of the sky here. But I do want to reduce this exposure of this part of the sky. Now, I could do that by doing a linear gradient. But if I did a linear gradient, then it would go over these mountains. Whereas the sky is done a good job of excluding these mountains. But if we combine the linear gradient with a slit sky, then that's where it gets really good. So what we're gonna do is I'll just leave that for now. We are going to go and go to this mask here, hover over, I'm going to click Option. On a Mac. It says intersect. I'm going to intersect with this sky mask, linear gradient mask. And basically what that does is it's only wear the masks intersect that it uses that that mask. So if I do a linear gradient, for instance, in this way like that, you'll say that it's not doing using any of that because it's only this bit that's intersecting. But obviously in this case I don't want to do that. I want to do it this way. This means that I can make sure that the mask is only applied to the top, but the clouds down here, but not going over these mountains here. And also weren't applied just on this bit here, which is where I wanted to keep it light. So now if I darken the sky, you can see that it's darkening this, but keeping this light. I conditionally things here. I might want to add some dehaze to the right, a bit more texture into. Just brighten the shallows little bit wise, little bit. The half is really, really good. I've, I've created a mask that if a switch on and off, you can see as darken the sky, not dark and the top of these mountains here and not dark and this bit on the horizon here. Super powerful debits. Do I use this all the time? It just makes a really big difference if we get to this image and do the same thing. Again, I'm going to select the sky. What I've selected the sky, and we'll click the option intersect with a linear gradient. I'm just going to do that here. And then I'm going to add some changes to this guy. Maybe darken my warm it up a little bit at the top. We'll maybe just add a little bit of dehaze to it. Now if you compare this, which looks really good, I think with, if I just get rid of the linear gradient, you can say that it's dark and the sky at the bottom too much, it doesn't look real. We don't want to darken the sky right at the bottom here. We just want to have that graduation on. So that's combining a linear gradient with the sky mask, which is really, really good. But we can also do all the things. So for instance, say I have got a mask here that I wanted to do, a radial mask here. So I'm gonna go and I'm going to add a new mask and I'm going to click radial gradient and I'm going to add one here. Just, just gonna make this pop a little bit. So I'm going to increase the exposure. Just reduce it, highlights a little bit. I don't want to lose all that detail. I'm going to make it a bit warmer. Maybe a little bit clarity as well, just a little bit. Maybe just increase the saturation. Now on this, it looks good as it is. To be fair. You don't really need to do much more than that, but I don't really want the sun coming all the way over here. I'd like to just control that. You can do that by intersecting with illuminance mask. So if I intersect it with illuminance mass cannot I just choose a luminance here? You will see now, if I just switch this on and off, it's just affecting this area, the sky area, but it's not affecting the actual mountain itself. But I wanted to just go on to that mountain a little bit. And you can control I really easily by just controlling the tonal ranges that this radial gradient is affecting. I'm just going to pull this down here, this luminance range. And as I do that, what should go over the mountain? Can you see it's just just getting over the mountain there and I can say, okay, I want it to go all the way. And if I wanted If I could drag this and do all the way over, and it's going to affect all tonal ranges. Or I could say, actually, I just like, I don't really want it to affect the dark tones on this front mountain because it's never going to get in front of that mountain. And it's a good way of just getting a bit more depth in your images. Fine controls or just, just so amazing. Another way, there's another thing you can do, and this is so many things you can do with this. It's so clever. Say, before we were doing something where we have this mask here, which was, if you remember, it was a Color Range Mask and it affects, you can see its effects in some of the cooler here is affecting all this area and affecting all this bit down here. Say, I only want to just, I almost want to paint this on this effect. What I can do, and you can do this with any mask that you've already created. Again, I can just do intersect. So I just click the option key, click intersect. And then this time do it with brush. Then it's not gonna do it to any, unless I brush at the moment. It's not going to do it to any until I've rachet. So now I can basically just brush on this effect. It will only if I go and do it here. It's just not going to brush any of us because it's gonna be where that intersects that color range with the brush. It's so, so powerful to be able to do that. It just gives you so much more control. That's the intercept. That's where you're intersecting two mass together and it's where they overlap, that's where it's going to affect the image. The other thing you can do is that you can add to mosques together or you can subtract things from a mask. For instance, say, I was here on this mass that we created this radial mask here, anna thought, okay, well that's good. It's affecting everything as, as I wanted to, but I'm just not sure about it or pair. I want it to be darker here, but I don't want it to be quite as dark there. Well, there's a number of things you can do. It could do another intersect if you wanted, but I could just click subtract here. Then I could subtract with a brush. And again, if I make a really big brush is the best way of doing this, have it on quite a low flow. I can just paint on it or just subtract that mask here. Now obviously I've done that a bit too much. But you can control and almost paint on where that effect is happening, knowing that you're not going to interfere with the parts of the image as I'm painting that I'm not going to change anything here because the mask isn't applying to that because it's got a sky mask and it's got a radial mask. So by controlling those mass and working out how you can intersect them, subtract them, even add them together. You can do so many powerful things with masks and as you say, you want to start to edit the photos below, they just become super, super amazing. So that's the masks, that's the creative control and the more powerful nature of masks when you combine them together, have fun with that. You've got to keep trying things, try different things. There's so many different things that I keep on uncovering as I'm going to an image thinking all that work and just have fun really. 8. Creative Colour: Okay, color theory is so important. Understanding colors and how they match together is so important in landscape photography, would tend to be using most of the greens and the yellows and the oranges, these colors tends to come up a lot and they weren't really well together because they're altogether here on the color wheel. What I'd suggest is go and tapping color theory and you can get color wheels that you can actually buy as well, that you can spin around and work out what complimentary colors was split complimentary, which are analogous. But there's closer go together in this course, it didn't get together and tweaking colors within Lightroom so they match a little bit better. It works really well. And so obviously oranges and blues worked really well together. Greens and sort of mode colors work well together. There's a good set of colors that worked well together. And then landscape colors around here obviously worked well together. But think about color, we'll think about that when you're editing your photo because it's slight tweak in the hue can make a big difference to whether something works or it doesn't work. Or you might want to desaturate something that's just clashing a little bit. Let's have a look at some editing in Lightroom and how we use the tools within librarian to edit color before we finally go on to edit some photos, you know all the techniques that we've used and add them all together. The first one we call it, I've talked about this before in the tonal one is white balance and as long as you've shot in RAW, then you have control over white balance. And the reason it's important to enroll for white balance is that you're not bacon in that color data into how it perceives white balance. And so when you change this, you are changing the white balance of the whole image. Whereas if you change this with a JPEG image, then you're just changing the color of every pixel the same in an image like this. And you might think, okay, he's gonna warm or cool. So you start off from previous thing, okay, well this is probably more of a cool looking image. And then it's protocol a better green in it. So I'll pull it towards the green. But then I think it looks to green. So the first thing I do on any image, once I've set the white balance is scroll all the way down to the bottom. And I just look at the shadows here and sometimes just changing the shadows and how the shadows are processed within your image to make a big difference how it looks for in this case, I liked the highlights look in green, but the shadow is looking green. Don't look good to me. So I'm just going to pull this towards a purpley shadows isn't making a huge difference this, but I don't want a green. I didn't want it full on purpose. I just wanted more towards purple. Once I've done those two things, the white balance in that I might come back to them, but that tend to be sort of set in stone them. Then in terms of color, the first one is contrast. So if I add contrast this image, I'm adding saturation as well. So I'll probably do want to add a bit of contrast to this image because I want to saturate this color down here on the course within the fellows in the background. The next thing I do in terms of colors is all to do with the HSL slider in HSL stands for hue, saturation and luminance. You can do that. Each of these colors, the red, the orange, yellow degree in the aqua blue, the purple, and the magenta. You can change the hue, the saturation luminance role as colors. You can do it two ways. I can just drag the slider. So in this case I could say, okay, I want to change the aqua or I want to change the green. Or you can use this little picker here. And I can say, okay, I'm gonna pick this color and I want to change the hue of the water. I want to make this water bluer. I can then push it up or down depending on what I want to do that at the moment I'm changing the illuminance because can you see that it says luminance. I wanted to go to hue. Click that again and I'm going to just make that a bit bluer. That's gonna make that green just slightly Bulawayo. I want to agree in x, it looks moody. I'm just going to make it look a little bit cleaner. Then I can also, if I want to add a bit of saturation to make it more saturated, then what I'll do is I'll go through an image like this and I'll probably go and pick maybe something on the mountain. This here. And I'll think, okay, that's the oranges, but that's also affecting down here as well as how how is it affecting down there and do it like that? Well, I do. I think it looks good. I want a little bit more saturation in the oranges. I actually want to just tweak the hue. You probably do want to make it a bit more orange. Once I've done that and I've gone through all the coerce and I've changed the hue. Saturation luminance is good because it brings out, you can see that fell in the background, that's making it stand out more. You got to be careful is you don't want to overdo it. But once I've done that and gone through all the colors, and I'm happy with that then I'll probably go back to the white balance and just tweak it again and just see, I need to make that just maybe a bit cooler or warmer. A little bit of an iterative process here. Eventually, I've gone from that to that. But eventually I'll get to a point that I like. Now. At some point I might just want to change certain areas so I can always go. And do it using a mask so I could always go and select a color range and think, okay, I just wanted to change this corner down here. I feel like maybe that wants to be a little bit bluer or a little bit less saturated. To do that, if you remember, we can intersect that with a brush. Now I can brush this on. And I can maybe say I want to make it more orange and maybe brighter. And then I'm just going to brush that on now. I can just brush that on down here. And it'll brush on that color change, but it will only affect these orange colors. That's such a powerful way of using so of masked color. Select color, tweaked that color, intersects it with a brush, and then paint on that change wherever you want. And it will only affect the color that you originally selected. Really, really useful that you can also change the hue of it as well. You got to be careful with that. As you can see, it's gonna do really weird things. I didn't tend to do that. The better way of doing it is just changing it here. If you just want to give it a slightly different view. And this is a good way of doing it intentionally a little bit differently. You're not going to go over the top, but maybe I just want it to be a bit more interesting, I just click that. So I've gone from this to this, pulled out the oranges, they're pulled out these greens there. I might want to click a color wheel and just check that they're gonna match well together. Yeah, that's, that's that image from a cost perspective starting to work quite well. If I just go to another image and just show you, if I get to this one here. This is a good example of where I might want to change the greens down here. I might want to make those greens just a little bit greener or I might want to make them a little bit orange. So in this case I can just go to the HSL slider. I'm going to select this color. And then I can just change the luminance of it. Or what I wanted to do is go and change the hue of it. I don't want a green that looks horrible, but I actually want it to look a little bit warmer, so I'm just gonna move it slightly more to the orange side. Not much, just a little bit. Got to be careful there because that also affects that and it's not what you can do about that. The HSL slider affects all the colors in the image. You can't control water effects and what it doesn't effect. There's no masking on the HSL part of it. The next thing to go onto is the split toning. Split toning. Good example of split toning is if I go to something like this where I might want to oranges and the highlights and some blues and the shadows just to create a little bit more emphasis of the coldness of this, of this wind today. The midterms might want to pull out some already, some blues as well. And basically that tones, those tonal values, a certain color and a good way of looking at this, if I convert this to black and white now, you'll see that it's not quite black and white because basically this is toning those tones. It's not, it's not changing. Just the colors themselves. It's changing the tonal values. So this is changing all the highlights to tone them orange is a change in all the shadows to turn them blue. Went up here, you see that this goes even more orange and this is called split toning. And in this case I can split tone in three different tonal ranges, the shadows, the mid tones, and highlights. And that allows me to do really quite creative things with an image. And this is usually the final option, as you'll see in one of the images below, I do a woodland image and quite often with my woodland images, I'll split toning them because I feel like that gives a very nice feel. It's a very creative, ethereal look to Woodlands and a lot of the Woodlands I did in my woodland and photography book. We split toning. Split toning. We talked about the HSL slider. There's not a lot else that I will change from a code perspective. All the saturation is done within the HSL slider. So for instance in here, this one here I forgot to develop. Then if I wanted to change the saturation of everything here, I would do that within here. So if I thought okay, that's sunsets a little bit over saturated, which you probably don't want to be like that. Then I go into this and change the saturation based on a regular basis rather than changing it or pair on the whole image. I don't think that's a good way of doing it. I feel like it's much better. Changing luminance, saturation and the hue using the HSL slider. I hope that's helped. Next, we're gonna go in and edit some images using all these techniques. And we're going to go through from start to finish my whole process from three different images. 9. Broken - Example Edit 1: In this video, I'm going to be editing this image here, this woodland scene. And this is one of my favorite images. I'm actually going to edit it from scratch against I'm not going to copy the edits I did last time. And I find that it says they always end up just slightly different, but I'll obviously go through the same process. What I want to get through my thought process. So you can see how I think when I edit, which means that if I do it again, then I actually caught with a slightly different edit. But that's a good thing, I think, because it shows that your style evolves over time. So this is one sharp, there's no HDR in there, so it's just one shot that I took of this amazing scene. I really, really like this. There's a little bit of fog. I want to bring that out a little bit. There was a little bit of an issue with the light at the top right where it's bright. And obviously I've exposed. So don't blow that out. You can see the histogram Neo is got a long tail all the way to the highlights. Ideally I would have exposed, it's just a stop brighter, but I don't have to stop brighter. So this is the best of God. First thing I would need to do going through my workflow is just play around with the temperature. I'm just going to have a look at it and think about the right temperature for this. And I think it's probably going to be quite cool because I feel like I'm going to bring some of the warm tones out, but I won't list cool tones to stay in the image as well. So let's write about 6 thousand Kelvin. I think. I'm going to obviously most probably exposure and check everything. So I'm going to increase the exposure. I'm going to have a look at the shadow detail. This looks really good. The shadow detail in this trunk is really nice. There's no noise or artifact. Summer I took it, I save 64.52 second exposure to let a lot of Lighten. Now it's got a long exposure in the stream at the background so there's no noise to worry about. I've got lots shadow detail. I can pull it out and not worry about it. And then if we go all the way down, and now I've got highlight detail, the thing I've got to try and do here is I'm going to try and blend in that highlight with this. I think we're going to start by just increase the exposure a little bit. I'm just going to go about that. With all my images, I always increase the contrast. Or say all most of my images, I increase the contrast because I just want to pull out some extra vibrance and saturation in this color center is going to increase the contrast. And I'm going to counteract that with an increase in shadows as well. So I'm going to increase the shadows quite significantly. Then may be, might mess around with the highlights later, but we'll just leave those for now. I think I'm going to increase the whites and then maybe just drop shadows a little bit. I'm not too bothered about burning this out of here. The key thing to this will be toning it. It will be actually toning this color. When I get around to it using the color grading tools. I'm not gonna mess around with texture clarity at the moment. D. Hayes, I just wanted to see, I think probably a little bit negative dehaze on this just to bring those blacks a little bit, just a tiny bit and negative dehaze. And then on the curve I think I'm also just going to soften those blacks. I'm just going to lift it a little bit and put a slight bit more contrast on as well. That's my basic edits I've gone from before, which is that after which is this. Now I need to start messing a little bit with some local adjustments. I think the first thing that I want to do is I want to sort a much warmer color coming through here. I think what I'm gonna do is I'm going to try and select the luminance. So the luminance of this, this is going to select the lighter tones in the image. Perhaps what I'm gonna do is just tweak that a little bit. I don't want the tones down at the bottom here. So all these leaves, I don't want to change those too much. I think I'm just going to on that. I am going to subtract with a brush just on a low flow. I'm just going to take away some of the changes I'm going to make on this bottom area here. But we'll do that. First. I'm gonna do it and then we'll come in and work out exactly what I'm going to take away. So basically what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to warm up those lighter tones. Can you see how it's making quite a nice warm glow coming through from the top. Then I'm going to tone this as well, just like. Maybe just like want to overdo. It may be about about that. I'm gonna make this a bit brighter, increase the shadows a little bit. Then I'm going to go back to this luminance range and just tweak it a little bit. Can you see as I'm moving down its cone into the darker tones, I don't want to get too far, but a thing that looked good, but don't want that on this trunk of the moment thing. What I'm gonna do, this, I'm just going to brush it away from this trunk. I'm going to have a better pick a flow and I'm just going to get it off electrons. They're probably add that in later because I want to add some glow on that trunk, but I wanted to do that, just have more control over basically. That's okay. Again, we'll just do a before and after. This is the after. That's before. What I've just added that mask just added in some warmth there. Now, it may be that I just go in and tweak this a little bit from time to time. So before I add another mask, I think what I'm going to do is just get to the HSL sliders and I'm going to start tweaking the hue, saturation and luminance of the coolest hair. Because I feel like my yellow needs to be a little bit more orange and green needs to be a little bit more yellow. There we go. So I'm just going to pull those down a little bit. That's better. Then I'm just going to just mess about it. If I can sort this with aluminum, see if I can just see the leaves are changed a little bit there. It's just pulling out some of the Luminance. That's looking better. I feel like I'm starting to get a little bit more of a mood there, but it's still, it's still not quite right. I feel like the shadow tones, the darker tones probably just need lifting a little bit. I'm gonna do another Luminance Mask. I'm going to create a new mask luminance range. And I'm just gonna do this on the mid tones. And I'm going to just not much, but I'm just going to increase the exposure. You can't overdo it. That's probably just do it with a shadow pause of those mid tones. Just want to lift them a little bit. I just want to give those a little bit more clarity as well. That's good. So the next thing to do a thing is brighten up this tree trunk here. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to get a brush. I'm just going to put something down here. I'm going to do auto mask. And if you just click that and then click Shift, you can do a straight line. That'll do a straight line on that. What I wanted to do with that is I just want now under control this a little bit better. I wanted to just control the exposure and bringing out some of the exposure of this and some of the clarity of this edge of this tree trunk care. Probably similar wise as well. A little bit warmer. There we go. That looks pretty good. This is getting better. Okay. So I feel like I could probably go back and just lift the shadows a little bit more. Good. Now, I feel like I just need to tone the colors. Maybe I'm just going to just add some more saturation as well in the oranges, the greens and the yellows, just to give it a little bit more pop. That's good. I can probably just do another linear gradient here just to bring up the exposure of this side just a little bit fast, nice. I'm just going to measure the temperature of thinking is just a little bit cool. Getting good outcome from that. That is definitely improving now if definitely started to get more of the atmosphere, feel like low. I could maybe on that mask I did this one I should, I should name these masks to be honest. But I'm lazy and I don't, but I would recommend in this tutorial that you do name your masks, but I can use a towel. They often looking at, let's say this one here. I'm feeling like I can maybe just add a little bit more dehaze or reduce the clarity a little bit, just to give it a little bit more atmosphere, there's maybe a bit of both. Cannot just warm it up even more. I think that looks really nice. I really like that. Now I'm starting to just blend this bit in here. It's looking a little bit better up there, it's a little bit better blended. This is starting to look really nice. Okay, So let's go to the luminance and just see if we can. What happens when we pull out some more of these tones here? That's pretty good. That's really nice. I really like that. Okay, so the next thing to do is just do some color grading on it. So I always thought in this that I probably tone the highlights again a little bit warmer. I mean, I definitely wanted to be cool. I'm just going to tone the highlights warmer than tone the shadows a little bit cooler. Around about that, maybe the midterms as well. If I just switch this on and off, you can see it's just making the cool tones cooler. In the warm tones warmer, I'm just increasing the contrast between the cool a bit in the middle of the image and the warmer bit at the top of the image just to create a little bit more emphasis on that. And that's good. I feel like again, I just need to these branches here probably just need picking out a little bit more. So I could just try during a color range on these and see how that works. Yeah, that's too unreasonable job of it, hasn't it? Just let's just see if I just increase the shadows now. It's not going to work. I just want to pull out just a little bit more shadow detail here. I don't want to overdo it because we've got to have that contrast between the lights and the darks. But just by pulling out a bit of that shadow detail, I think, I think it helps quite a lot. I think we're getting there, to be honest, I don't think there's a huge amount more that we can do. What I would say though, is when I'm doing something like this, I walk away and then come back to it probably three or four times. And I'll probably do a few other tweaks as I do that. But I think that's probably it. I'm not going to change the sharpness because I know that default sharpness is fine. The one thing that I always do actually is just have a tweet with this just to see if that helps at all? Actually, I think he probably does if it just got just the shadows, just give me a little bit more of a purple tint thing that works well. The only thing I could try and this may or may not work is if I just do a radial gradient and just put it up here, have quite a big radial gradient, but just STI of feather it and just add a little bit more warmth across the whole thing. I think that's probably okay. I don't want to overdo it. It's just going to be quite a big raise your gradient, but not much on it rarely. Just to reduce the clarity a little bit. I think that was good. So we've gone from this to this. I think that's pretty good. I'm still not a 100% sure about the coolest ofs and let me just tweak that temperature again. Maybe just a little bit warmer color. That's pretty good. Yeah, I think that's pretty good. You can tweet this forever, but I think I've got something that's pretty good there. Like I said, I'd come back to it a lot. It'd be really interesting, wouldn't it? To see what it's like before, after. And my previous edit as well shall show you the before, the after in the previous edit. Now, I'll leave you with those three photos. 10. A Passage of Time - Example Edit 2: In this video, I'm going to edit this HDR image from Madeira of this amazing mountain scene in this tree. First of all, if you haven't done already, go back and watch the HDR video above, it's just a short video, explains just how I've combined these images. And basically I had these three images, different exposures, and I created this HDR image. And you can say that I've done some basic edit to it. So basically I've just reduced the highlights and increase the shadows. We're just going to have a look at it again. I'm just going to go back and have a look at the exposure again. So we've got a lot of detail in the sky here. I just chose guys level. Pretty much is, well, Nigel, after I get it level. And then in the shadows there is a lot of detail all in the rocks and little bit of noise, but not a huge amount. And we probably don't need to worry about that too much. I've reduced the highlights a little bit. We don't want to reduce them too much. We'll go down to about there on the basic edit and increase the shadows. Again, I don't want to increase those too much because we're going to change that in a different way, which I'll explain. Probably don't want to do much with the y's and the moment all the black. So we'll just leave those two. Okay, so the first thing we're gonna do is I'm going to crop this a thing because I don't really want I want the tree to be in the middle. I think. I'm not sure about whether a microplate as well because I'm not sure about this bit here. I might change my mind on that, but we'll leave it. Tell you off. We'll do about that. Felt like it needs a little bit more room from this side comment. Okay, so it's gonna be a little bit tricky this because you can overdo this. So if I just drop the highlights, we want this to be a bit of a glow. We otherwise it will look like HDR image. So that's where I'm just starting about that. What I'm going to do. In fact now what I'm gonna do is gonna drop the highlights too about that. Just, just just want a little bit cooler. So maybe I'll just push the whites. Just wanted to be a little bit of color there, but I want it to be almost blowing out and I'll probably alter that a little bit in a minute. The thing to do now is I'm just gonna do a very simple. This is like just as dawns coming, coming up. I want to the linear gradient on the sky to make it a lot darker. Because it was dark. It was just clean up the main, you can see Venus there. I'm just going to increase the warmth that then I'm going to add a little bit contrasts. Probably just reduce it. I'm ducking, that's probably good for the top of the sky. This bit is gonna be tricky. We've got to decide how we're going to deal with this path thing. What we're going to have to do is a radial gradient. I'm just going to do a radial gradient. I'm going to drop the highlights a little bit. That's not gonna work. You say, because it's got to be brighter here than it is here, because the sound is coming from over here. What I need to do is I need to drop the exposure a little bit more so I can do that on this. If I bring this down a little bit, can you see how it's dropping the explosion of the problem is that I'm darkening and all this and I don't want to do that. What I can do is I can do it intersect of that, of that term mask. Just go in here. They can do an intersect with select sky. And that should hopefully, it does a reasonably good job of selecting the sky. Think it has done. Then that means that as I'm changing this, it's not changing these mountains in the background, but it is changing the sky. Just want the sky to get a little bit darker here. Now I'm spending a lot of time doing this. As you can see, I'm gonna go a little bit further down because I'm obviously not affecting any of this now because I've done that intersects between, between the gradient and the sky. What is the next thing to do? I think now I can do radial gradient on this and I'm just going to see what I wanna do is I just want to create a bit more warmth coming from here. There we go. A little bit of white. Not too much. That's starting to look better. I think that sounds a little better. I don't want it to look to HDRI. I want, I want it to look like it is. The sunlight is coming from here. That's often quite tricky. I think that's not far off. I might have to come back to where I feel like it might just not, could be the quiet, the right hue. Just do a final adjustment on this and just I think that's probably better. So hard that what we're gonna do now is we're gonna try and select this green down here. But I feel like when I do a cooler range, mask is going to select a lot of areas. So let's just try it. We'll do a Color Range. We pick that green there. Now we can try and refine it. But you can see that if I try and then change the exposure is changing the exposure of all sorts of random things. So I'm gonna have to gain, do an intersect here with a brush. I can just brush on this effect. I'm going to increase exposure so we can see what I'm doing here. I'm basically going to go to this color range. Click option, click intersect. When we brush, then I'm going to do the brush with just about a flow of 79, something like that. I'm just going to brush on where I want this. And you can see as I do this, that all I'm doing is brushing on the areas that I think this color range mask needs to apply. I can dilate down or change the hue, etc, afterwards. But basically what I wanted to do, we just brush this on wherever I think it might work. Simply as the hat is really clever, then I can think, okay, do I want to make it greener? Or do I want to make it a little bit more warmer? We should probably do probably a little bit more clarity to it just to make it pop a little bit because it's just a little bit of sunlight coming on it. I really want this green to stand out, but I'm going to dial back the corners around here as well. I want the emphasis to be on this sort of central tree and the green around it. I think the next thing to do is just die or I can just see what I'm playing with. I'm just going to do a linear gradient bit rough and ready to S, but it might work a linear gradient there. And I'm going to just dial back the exposure. I'm going to just D Hayes and soften it a little bit as well. Dial back the shadows, highlights the whites a little bit. I just want to make this darker here so your eye goes to the tree, then this might be where I start to just crop it a little bit. Maybe crop up from the bottom. Crop introducing our tree central works quite well. But a problem is I've got this bit down here. What is really bad? I didn't really like it. I think I'm just going to spot that out. Now this might work. I might have to do this in Photoshop. I'm just gonna do something I gained valuable from ready here. I think I'll do because I don't think anybody will ever notice that because it's dark, but I just didn't want that highlight, that specular highlight just to catch your eye. Again in better now I think I need to brighten up the cloud here. Here. I said probably select that orange that and then Brian or some of the tree here. I'm going to work on the tree first. I'm just gonna do this with a brush. I'm gonna get to a brush. I'm going to make it warmer. And then I'm going to just add some whites, a little bit of shadow and a little bit of exposure. All I'm gonna do is just paint this on. I just wanted to just ever so slightly pull out this tray. I don't want to overdo it though. Looking pretty good. I think that's looking good, maybe a little bit there. Then you can make it as warm as you want really? I think that's, I think that's pretty good. And then I'll probably just add clarity on that as well. I just want to make this tree really pop if I can. Good. I think that's pretty good. Yeah, that looks really good. That's a lot better. The clouds behind the tree would be good to change a little bit. I think that'll be very difficult to do exhibit thing. I could try and select the color range of that and then intersect it with the luminance range of that. That's still a reasonable job, but it's also selected the tree. I think any change that they will now, now we're going to be reflected in the tree as well. So I probably won't change that thing. Probably do a little bit, just a tiny, tiny increasing wise on it. That's good. So we're getting there, We're getting there. I need to pull out some detail here. I need to sort these Clown Town solid Claros out first, That's fairly easy. I can just do color range on the clouds. Then intersect that with a gradient going that direction. I just got the clouds. Then I suspect if I do this, it's going to affect the clouds and not so much the sky. I want to warm us up a little back, a little bit more saturation, a little bit more clarity, just going to pull up my them pop. That's all I need to do. That's pretty good. The final thing and then I'd have to walk away and come back and look at it again and again. But the final thing I think he's just this bit over here. So again, I think this is best done with a brush. So I'm just going to dodge this. I'm going to get a brush increase the warmth, the exposure, the y's, and the clarity. And I'm just going to brush that arm here just to pull out some of the detail. I want to overdo that. I don't want it to pull the eye too much. I think that is not far off. I mean, I was pretty good. Let's have a look at it. Full screen highlight that there's obviously a little bit of tidying up to do, but at spotting, maybe I need to make that a little bit darker. I think on the whole, that's a good edit of that image, one of my favorite images that I took last year, really, really enjoy taking that and it's great to see it like this. 11. Glencoe Waterfall - Example Edit 3: Okay, For the last image, I'm going to be editing this one here from Glencoe and Scotland. And it's an interesting one actually because it seems on the face of it, quite simple edit, but there's a lot of this edit that helps to improve the composition of the shot as well. First of all, I just want to talk about the composition. We're gonna get rid of that spot of that I'm going on my sensor. But first of all, I want to talk about the composition. Use this tree here. Position myself in a place where if you draw a line down the center here, this tree is a certain distance away from that center line, has a certain weight to it. And these are closer to the center Y line. If this tree wasn't here, it would be very unbalanced. And if these weren't here, it'd be value in balance. These two being closer to the center line and this one being a little bit further away helps to balance it left and right. That's good. But top and bottom is just not balanced because this is real. This is really heavy and dark. Your age goes up to the top. By editing and darkening that top-down, we can create more mood, which is good because that's what I want to do in terms of creating the feeling I had when I was there. And then also, I also want to imbalanced the shelf. First of all, we're gonna get rid of that spot. I'm going to tell you a little trick as well. So obviously, when you getting rid of spots, we'll just zoom in on it. Then you use the healing tool, which is really complicated. You might go into Photoshop and do it, but usually you use the healing tool and you go onto something like this and we just go over, it's a pretty big spot, isn't it? And it would just get then choose a bit sky that similar and get rid of it. There's also something called when you are in the healing tool called visualized spots, which you may or may not know about, which is good. You can go and have a look at all the spots and find them. You can see here I've got a lot of sense as false. I like to do it a different way. I like to just watch the Dehaze up to a 100. And I find that then I can distinguish between some things sometimes not obvious at the spots and some things aren't spots. And also you can see I've not done a particularly great job of that. Then you can just go around and get rid of all the spots. I can just go and do this on all these. For some reason. This takes a lot of computing power. Always a slowest thing I find to do. I'm gonna do this just quite rough and ready. Now, you can say that I definitely need to clean my sensor. This is the problem. We've taken lenses on and off all the time. That's a pretty good job. One more lab top tip. Just do just move the Dehaze up to a 100, then we can move it back down. Okay, So that's it cleaned up. I've got a fairly clean sky now I can obviously fine tune that at the end. What I want to do now is I want to go and do the first basic edit on there. So if you remember what we do, we go and look at the exposure I want to see in here, I've got detail. There's no problem in the shadow area, can pull out shadows wherever I want. And then in terms of There's no blown out highlights, which is important. So down here there is detail in the waterfall. I've got detail within the image, which is good. So I didn't have to be careful about particular areas. I'm not sure this bit here, but I will live with that for the time being. As ln thing I can crop opening hire. The first thing to do is we're just gonna do a basic idea on it. So I'm going to just increase the exposure a little bit. Increase the contrast a little bit, reduce the highlights quite a lot, and increase the shadows because I want to pull out the detail here. That's probably appropriate. Just going to, again, just do tweaks. I'll make the blacks not quite true black. That's probably it for the tonal values. I'm going to just check the white balance. Do I want every cooler or warmer? Probably about there. I think. That's fine. Just as it was. That's pretty good. I just want to look at the shadow tint. I think I'll probably make it a little bit more on the purple side. That's the basic edit. Now what I need to do is I need to go in and edit the sky. So first thing we're gonna do is I'm just gonna try selecting the sky and see what happens. Um, I think it'll do a reasonable job of it. Yeah. I mean, it's just some weird things around here, so I've got to be a little bit careful about that, but I think I can just do just a very small editor on the sky. I'm just going to dehaze it a little bit because. I just want to bring out some of the texture. Obviously don't want to do that, but I want to bring out some of that texture without overdoing it. And then I'm going to warm it up slightly as well. When I start doing this, got to be very careful, don't overdo it. Now, what I'm probably going to do is probably just going to add, as I'm doing this, this linear gradient intersect, and I'm going to make it good quite a long way down. I just want to be careful these bits at the bottom here. I don't want to make those too bright. So I'm just going to do that. That's bringing up some of the detail in the sky. I think that's starting to look bad, but obviously we got this on balance. I need to darken down this top bit and make it look as natural as possible. I don't want to darken down this cloud here though. And in fact, I might want to Brian that I'm going to create another linear gradient mask and I'm just going to do it here. I'm not going to worry about selecting the sky again on this one. I'm just going to darken it down as much. And I'm going to also reduce the saturation a little bit just to get rid of some of that blue, I'm going to add some more dehaze on it. I'm going to darken the blanks, darken the shadows, and then reduce the highlights a bit. Okay, I've got a long way to go on this slide. I'm going to increase the warmth of that. Now, this bit here is a bit bright. I need to do something with that. So I might just do that with a brush for now. I'm just going to brush would use the highlights, maybe reduce the exposure and just painting some areas that I think might work better if they're just darker. Still don't like that. It's just not working quite right as tone this bit here. I'm going to go back to the original mask and see if I can just reduce the exposure bit more. Yeah, that's probably looking better. You just need to tweak a thing. I think that's okay. I might cheat a little bit and I might just clone that out. So I'm just going to heal that. You're just going to choose this a bit carefully. There we go. That's where it's pretty well. This is a bit sort of brown. I didn't really like that very much. So I'm going to add another linear gradient on this, this time a little bit further down. And I'm just going to reduce the saturation of this. You just, that's better. Then I'm going to make it black. So black. You can see now I'm starting to get darker. Top part to this. I think I just need to warm up the image a little bit too blue. I'm going to warm it up a little bit just to try and then a thing still a bit too much sky. So I'm going to pull down the sky now to try and get that balance between that dark a bit at the top, that's started to work. So I've got this dark a bit here. I've got this dark a bit there. I've got this and this, which are either side of a horizontal line. So I feel like the starting to be a little bit more balanced there from my ad, I think I'll come back to the sky. Maybe. I want to just look at the Weinstein here, except I'd like to make those a little bit whiter. So I think the best way to do that is just, I think I'd just a simple a linear gradient on the bottom bed and then just walk up those whites. And just make sure I didn't blow the highlights. You can always switch on the highlight thing. Yeah, I just want to reduce the blacks a bit as well. I just want to, I just want to give you a bit more punch. I think that's looking pretty good Really. Yeah, I think that's looking pretty good. Now you might want to just pull out some more of this detail. Can you see I've lost the detail now in there. You may just want to get a brush and just reduce the highlights on it. And then just again, a low flow. Just go over this. You're gonna do this really carefully. You just want to pull back the detail in this watercolor is really nice. I don't want to lose that detail or print really well. Thing that's okay. We could think about bringing breakfast, brought bushes well, a little bit. So again, I'm gonna do that with a brush and just taught yet, I'm just going to increase the exposure and the shadows there. And just again very carefully just pull out some of that bush there. I don't want to overdo that. I don't want it to pop. It's just gonna be subtle. I think. Lots of reasonably good at it. I'm not happy about the blues all that. So I'm going to go and edit this Main Mask and just make it even warmer. Reduces saturation a little bit more better. I think that's better. Okay, we're getting there. The next thing to do is just concentrate on the colors a little bit. I'm just going to go through and mess about with the hues. This hue at the background, background here. I don't want it to be green. I don't want it to be red, but I'd like it to be probably just a little bit towards the red. The thing with that. That's not really altering much. Any blues that we have in there. I don't want them to be towards the cyan aqua color. I want it to be multiples of blue color, so I'm just going to push them that way a little bit. And then I'm also going to just reduce the saturation again, a little bit of those blues increase the saturation of the yellows and oranges because I want those to pop a little bit. And then I'm also just going to pull out some of the got to be careful. Can you see that salter in this as well? I've just got a because that's got some yellows in it. I'm just going to be super careful about that. So nice if the HSL slider with a mask. So good to be so useful. I think we're getting there. I think probably going back to this and just maybe just pushing the y's a tiny bit. We've gone from that to that, that I think that isn't far off. May just do a vignette on the whole thing. So to do that, you should use a radial gradient. And I'm just going to just invert that radial gradient. Then I'm probably just going to just delete, just delete the exposure a little bit shadows and probably just reduce some of the clarity just around the edges as well, just so that the main clarity is within the main image. Looked at that before and after. I think that's probably good. Maybe just go in a little bit tighter. The only other thing I'm thinking is whether we can pull out some more detail in here. But I didn't think we need to. I think that's good. I really like that. I think that's a good edit. Again, as with all the others, I go away, have a cup of tea, come back and probably make some other changes. But yeah, it's about creating a mood, getting the cooler, getting that balance right. I think we've used a lot of the techniques that we learned in the other classes. So I hope that's been enjoyable and I hope you've enjoyed the whole class. If you've gone through it in order, then this is probably the last video. Thanks ever so much for watching. And probably depending on what you say below in terms of review to do, give me a review below, then I'll probably do some more. Okay, thanks ever so much for watching the whole class and I'll see you in the next Skillshare class.