Mastering Post-Processing & Editing: Exploring the Digital Darkroom

1. The Ultimate Photography Course in Post-Processing & Editing: Hi, Welcome to the Ultimate Post-Processing and Editing Course for Beginners. My name is jellis fast and I am a professional travel and adventure photographer, and I hope that you are ready to take your photos from this to this. My first successful course, the Ultimate Photography Course for Beginners, where we covered all the theoretical and technical aspects of the therapy. I'm super excited to invite you on a brand new adventure where we will explore the other half of the whole that makes up photography, Post-Processing, and Editing. This course is designed to teach a show you all of fundamental techniques and tools of Lightroom and Photoshop. Now, I've divided this course into three sections. The first one will explain how Lightroom works. The second one will explain how Photoshop works and all the different techniques and tools that we will need. And in the third section, that's where the actual Post-Processing and Editing or gum to happen and where we will go over various different Photos, all from start to finish, applying all those different techniques and tools that we've learned in those previous lessons, where every photo that we will come to edit in the third section, we will come to learn a whole variety of new skills and techniques that altogether will come to Make Your okay looking photos into stunning and dramatic looking photographs that will take yours and everyone's breadth away. Now, I hope to see you soon as I for one gateway to be your teacher and to show you exactly what's in store for you, There's a lot of PFK-1 to be had in taking this course. So hop on boards. And I'll see you soon. 2. Watch This First: Hi, Welcome to the Ultimate Post-Processing and Editing Course for Beginners. Super-excited that you decided to embark year Whitney on this adventure. And I can't wait to show you all of the cool things that are waiting ahead of us. Before we do the into all of that, I just want the dimension, a few small things about discourse to ensure that you will have the best experience. First of all, let me start off by saying that if throughout the course something is not 100% clear to you, or if you count the stumble upon any more questions on Editing or Post-Processing after the course. Don't be afraid to ask me a question. Creating this course, I am trying to do more than just these videos alone. I'm trying to be here for you as a teacher. So don't be shy if you have any questions on Editing or bus processing beliefs, go ahead and as them, it might take me a day or to come back at you, but I will assure you are welcome to answer your questions. Secondly, if you don't already know how to operate your camera correctly, if you don't know how to work with ISO aperture, shutter speed, and all the other technical and theoretical aspects of your camera. I would highly recommend you to check out my other course, The Ultimate Photography Course for Beginners or mirrorless cameras, such as aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. But we will also cover various composition techniques, the process of workflow, and even dodge on the basis for Post-Processing and making sure it has received on lots of great reviews. It's a very FUN and engaging course, and it doesn't take like 10 h long to finish it. It goes down into the true essentials of all the theoretical and technical aspects that you need to know. Now, the reason why that I'm mentioning this here in this course is because both editing and Post-Processing, knowing how to correctly operate your camera, both of them go together. Both of them are needed to take good photos. The first one serves into knowing how to Take a good photo on the spot. And the second one, this course serves into knowing how to edit your photos to make them afterwards look incredible. Boat discourses, boat, this one and the Ultimate Photography Course for Beginners serve as a very strong base ground into photography. So if you don't already know all those theoretical and technical aspects, I highly recommend you to check a learn that first. Last but not least, now, I've already mentioned this in the intro video, but if for some reason you didn't watch it, let me just mention here one more time. I've divided this course into three sections. The first section, we will come to see how Lightroom works. The second section, we will come to see how Photoshop works and all the tools and techniques that we will need. And in the third section, that's where the actual editing and post-processing will come to happen and where we'll go over various different photos from start to finish applying all those different techniques and tools that we've learned in the other lessons. And each photo that we will come to edit, we will also come to learn a whole range of different techniques and tools. Now, if you already know how to work with Lightroom and Photoshop, you can affect jump straight to the third section. I could however, still recommend you to check out the first two sections because you never know there might be still some tricks and tips or tools and techniques that you don't know yet will benefit a lot in knowing. So it's entirely up to you. I've created this horse in such a way that the freedom is completely yours now, for everyone who is very new to Lightroom and Photoshop, be sure to check out the first two sections, of course, because they will explain very well how Lightroom and Photoshop work. It will give you a good base grounds how to work with us, do programs. Now, I think I've done all my talking at least so far. Thanks again for taking the scores. I appreciate it a lot, and I'm very humbled that I can have you as a student and I can share some of the knowledge that I have about photography. You, I'm sure we'll come to have some great funnier in this course. And without any further ado, let's get started. 3. SECTION 1 - Histogram, The Quick Develop Mode, Keywording, Keyword List: So here we are in the first lesson and in Lightroom. And I'm going to explain to you all these steps here and what each one of them does. In Histogram, we can kinda see what's going on in a Photo here. It's like a very quick and easy way and a more in detail way of seeing the things that are going on here in a Photo. What I mean with that is if all these stones are more to the right side, we will have a more overexposed photo. If all the tourists would go more to the left side, we will have an underexposed photo. Here in this folder right now, you can see there are a lot more tones here, like there's one big peak here. This is probably coming from the clouds here. We have a lot more information, go into the whites and highlights and in a bright areas in this photo and a lot also of tones in the mid tones. So let me just quickly show you how those stones will look like. If we would have an under exposed and an overexposed photo. If I would slide this here all the way to the left, you can see it a don'ts are all moving to the left side because we're putting a lot more information into the darks. And you can see our Photo is becoming darker. If we would slide is Photo all the way to the right side. Now, you can see our Photo is becoming brighter and the tones are also going here to the right side. Histogram is very helpful tool of showing you what's going on in Your Photo. Now in this Histogram tab, we also have the rest of the information what happened in our Photo. We have the ISO that we shut this photo with. The vocal lengths, the aperture, the shutter speed, pen, the formation, all your stored in the histogram that The Quick Develop Mode is basically the Develop module here, but just a quick version of it. You can increase the exposure like in a quick way through it. Or you can add some clarity or vibrance Panel. You can explore a bit through it, but there's not much used to meet in using the Quick Develop Mode. Basically Keywording, we can give keywords to our Photos. Lightroom actually comes with already some presets with some keywords in it. So right now I have outdoor photography selected and we can see some outdoor photography keywords, landscapes, spring, fall, macro, summer, winter. We can also have wedding, bright wedding party. I can set landscape to this photo because it is landscape. Flowers and plants I could add it to. But of course we can enter our own keywords in it. So I can put, for example, red, because I'm wearing a red t-shirt over there. Now, if you go here to Keyword List, we can see First of all, the keywords that we've used on this photo here. And then here you can see all the photos that we have with that keyword on. I could click here or landscape. And if we click on the arrow here, and then we go here down to the grid view. Each photo that you select the landscape Keyword to will then show up. Here. It's a way of filtering out certain Photos. I guess if you are working with a lot of models, it could be helpful in giving each Photo Keyword with that model or something. I don't find any real or not too much used to it for me at least because it's just like an extra thing that I have to do for me too much work and it's not really helpful in any way for me to finding my Photos back. Again. I use different ways in locating and finding the photos that are once. And I will explain this later in some other lessons how I do it and it's a much faster and quicker way for me. But again, this can definitely be something very helpful for some people. Explore a bit with it and see if it is helpful for you. Now that we're here in the grid view, let me just click on None. Having all these photos, we have some other wastes of filtering out. Our Photo is Effect 4. The Library Filter Tool and More About Metadata: Having all these photos, we have some other ways of filtering out. Our Photo is Effect on top here. Right now we have none. But if we would go to Metadata, you go down here, you can select a preset of Filter, preset of how you want the fielder, your photos. So if we go to camera Info, right on top here, camera, we can go and Filter each camera model. So I could click on Nikon and all the photos that I took with my neck and D 810 are showing here right now. And also we can go into lens, which lens we used. We can filter out all the photos that we took with that lens, the vocal length, and the flesh state. Now, the cool thing is that we can customize this. Let's go to lens. And if I will go, let's say on the filter with aperture and ISO here, and shutter speeds there. I can customize these steps. And if I want, I can click here on no Filter. And I can save this as a preset. So I can save current jellis files, Filter. Click on Create, and each time again, if we want to use that Filter preset, which is go down here and click on that one, and this one will show up once again. So now we can filter out each photo that I took with F1 eighths. Or I could filter out with a certain ISO that at Zurich or with a shutter speed. It's a pretty in-depth way of filtering out specific photos that you're looking for. Also, you can go to attribute to Filter all Photos with one Rate starting that you gave, or with five Rate starting on the color that you gave them. The color label, a red one, or let's say you want to look for green one. And also on the flags that you selected, a flag on them or the rejection flag. So that's also a way of going at filtering out some Photos. And then also you can go to text. And you can just go here and type being landscape. And then those photos with all with landscape Keywording will show up. But basically you could just like go and click on here, which is an easier way. Actually, Let's go further on here with the next step, the metadata. The metadata ease the information that is stored within the file itself. So if I would go and right-click on this and go to Properties and then to details, which is the information of this Photo. What's showing here is exactly what it's showing here too. This is the information that is stored within the file, within the photo itself. Now, the thing is, you can actually store your copyrights into your photo, into the file itself. The reason why that's very good thing to do is because when you're sharing your photo on the Internet and someone is downloading and using it for himself without you actually wanting that person use it. Your copyrights are within the file, they're stored within the file. So you can claim that that photo is yours. And this is a very important thing to do. So let me show how you can do that. So you have to go here to presets. I already have made one copyright jellis files. And you can see here, all of this here is fill in because of that. But let's go down to edit presets and scroll down to EPD, see copyrights. Now, I would suggest you to pause this video and write those things over the following things that I'm going to mention now. So right over copyrights and then the copyright symbol, your name. Obviously, all rights reserved. Also be sure to have this box checked on copyright status. Copyrighted Rights uses, usage terms, all rights reserved, no reproduction without prior permission. Copyright info, URL. If you have a website, you can write it there. If you don't, don't worry about it. Go down to the next one. Ept see creator, creator. Yellow is fast. Your name. And then create an e-mail. You can enter your email, their career website. Again, if you have any website, you can put it there and then go down to the last one here that we need to fill in EPEC status, credit line, and just filling your name again. And if you have a company or your website, you can also fully next to it and then source, once again, your name. So those three, EPEC, copyright, EPT see creator And EP disease status. Those three boxes fill them in with this information. Once that's done, you go to preset here. You click on it a, you click on Save Current Settings as new preset. In here. Name your preset as jellis us. Copy Rights. And let me just put two because I've done this already. And click on Create Preset, showing on top here and click on Done. Now, when we click on the preset here, this will load all into that file now, all into this Photo. Right now, it's only this photo that has this Metadata. So what we need to do is we need to select that Photo, select that photo, and we need to synchronize that Metadata with all the other Photos in our Lightroom catalog. Go on Shift and click on less photo that you've all Photo, select that you want to synchronize the Metadata. Now, go down here on sync metadata. Click on it. We will now this preset, we, from that photo that we have selected, we can now synchronize all this by clicking on synchronous. And all of your photos will have this Metadata. Now. Now there's one less thing because each time that you will import new photos into Lightroom, they will not yet have that Metadata. We can tell Lightroom to Load this Metadata presets each time when we're importing a Photo. And the way to do then is to go down here to Import, click on it and go to apply during imports. Go down here. And by Metadata, select the jellis far copyrights, select that. And when we will come to Import now Photos, each photo that we import, that one will be applied. Now, one more thing, because when we will be done, this will be done again, like we will have to select that again. What we can do is we can make a preset of this Settings, all of those settings here. So we can make a preset, having that setting check done by going down here to Import Presets. And we click on none, and we click on Save Current Settings as new preset. So click on their religion was presets example. Click on Create. And you can see now Import Preset, jellis fast preset example. If you are doing this right now, while not importing any Photos, you should Import just one photo because if I will click on Cancel now, not having important any Photos, lightroom will not remember it is, it's only when you will apply just one steady will keep this preset. So if I will go and click on Cancel now, and I will go back to Import. The Import Preset is not there anymore. Select it again. This is preset example and just Import. I don't know any, any photo, just a random Photo. Let me just click here imports. Let me just important for a moment. And if I will go back now to Import, you can see Import Preset. The preset stays now 5. Sync Settings, Catalog, Folders, Collections, Publishing Services: First of all, the sync metadata, we already covered that. But the sync Settings, It's a very useful Button in Lightroom and it works just the same as sync metadata only we're not sinking the Metadata, but we're sinking the Settings from the Develop Mode on the different changes that we made into a Photo. I made some adjustments to this photo, right? Let's go back to the Library Modes. And let's say that I want to sync those exact same settings to Another Photo. Instead of having to go into that photo and trying to put those settings that way. Again, an easier way is by synchronizing those settings from that photo to this one. So you just select the photo that you want to sync those settings from. And then hit Control or Command and select the photo that you want, a single sentence Tool. And then go down here to sync Settings. And in this step, we can affect even choose what we want to synchronous over. So if you only want to sing the white balance or to color Balance those changes that you made in color. You can check none off. Process version. This always has to be checked on. But you can go into Color and you can sync, synchronize only the colors alone if you have made some adjustments on this photo as well, but you don't and on that one too, but you don't want to synchronize everything, but just the chorus alone. You can do that and that's with everything. But in this case, we can just check on, if we click on sync, you can see those exact same settings that we had that we made in that photo are now synchronized to this Photo. Now, where this gets really handy or helpful is if we, when we have more than just one photo that we want to sync the same settings Tool. We can just make those settings and adjustments on just one photo lawn. And now we can go ahead with Shift. Click all the photo. I'll Photos where we want those settings synchronous to and then just click on sync Settings and then synchronize. Alright, so let's go over now to the left side and let's see what those steps over here do. This shows the current Catalog that you're using an dose Photos in that Catalog. And I'm going to talk a lot more about what exactly a Catalog is later on. But for now, you just need to know that in this step, you can see your Catalog that you're using and the Photos in that Catalog. In this Deb here, you can actually see the folders that you using in your Catalog and where they are stored. So this is actually the Folders where your original photos are stored and they are here on my hard drive. But if you have an external hard drive, you will be showing an external hard drive. And the places where these photos over here are stored. And if you actually want to see where exactly they are, you can just click on them. You can go right-click and then go to show in Explorer. This will show you where that map is stored on your hard drive or on your external hard drive. And you can do that also with a Photo. You could just right click on the Photo and go to show in Explorer. And it will show you the original place where that photo is stored. Now, let's say that accidentally you move that photo somewhere else away from the original place. Lightroom will show now an attention Mark because it doesn't know where that photo is anymore. Now there are two ways of fixing this. And the first one is just by placing that Photo back to its original place. You see the detention Margo's away are the other way of fixing that. Because sometimes it is your attention to actually move your photo to another location. And if that's the case, then you just need to update. You need to let Lightroom know where that photo is now. You just click on the attention Mark. You click on Locate, and then you go to where you have placed that photo. And you just click on Select. So you let Lightroom know where that photo is now and that's the same if you have a folder, Let's take this folder here showing Explorer And if it is somewhere difference, let's say this one. You fix it just a way as you do with the photos. You will now see that Lightroom. You will give this question mark because it doesn't know where that folder is. So again, you can just right-click on the folder, click on Find, missing folder. And then you go to where you have placed that folder and then select fuller or else you just replace that followed back to its original place. And all is fixed again. In the collections. You can actually, you can create Collections sets. So for example, if you would like to create a collection of all your landscape photos, another collection of all your portraits, Photos, and articulation of volume wildlife photos. You can create that in here. Let's say that you want to create a collection of landscape glacial. Then you click on the plus sides, plus sign, you click on Create Collection and you give the collection the name. Landscape will have this unchecked. You just want to have a collection on its own. And then click on Create. And now we have here an empty collection. And if we go to our Folders, to our photos, Let's just select the few landscapes. That's Alinsky I'm going to do or at one. So let's just select them and let's drag them to the collection folder. And when we go in this year now, you can see we have a collation of our landscapes. We can create Galatians in anything like in portraits, wildlife, like I said, you can create as many Collections as you want. Another type of Collections that you can make, E, smart collections. And these are different type of Collections. If you click on a plus sign and create smart collection, what smart collection is, it's basically you can give it rules. So let's say you want, well, let's leave. Rating is five stars. So when I would create this rating is five-stars if I would create this collection now, every photo to my Catalog that I've read it with five stars will come to appear in that collection. Now we can make more rules by just clicking on the plus sign here. And let's say Label color is green. So now I've added another rule on that collection set. So every Photo there in my catalog that high afraid it would five-stars and if labeled with green color, will now appear in that collection set. And what you can keep making all these rules here, you can make some kind of a smart collection that could be useful. In here. You can connect Lightroom to a few Services as Adobe Stock, Facebook, Flickr. You can basically, if you connect your Facebook with Lightroom, that you can just take this photo and you can drag it. And it will both step further than on your timeline on Facebook 6. Learn How to Import and Export your Photos: The last two buttons over here, the Import button, if you want to Import Photos in Lightroom, First of all, connect your camera or your SD reader to Lightroom and then click on imports. And it's going to show now those photos from your SD cards, obviously. And here you're going to import those photos from your SD card into your Lightroom catalog. So I'm moving this from my SD reader or the SD cards, copying it to there. So I'm copying those files on my hard drive. Now, you don't have to do actually much. Normally Egypt after Import, I think this is already checked on for everyone. But if it's not, I would have that once you import it and the import is done, lightroom will automatically recheck your SD reader or your camera. So it's already safe to just remove it again. Just click on imports. That's it. Now Lightroom is just importing those Photos. Now, the Export button, Let's say that we want to export this photo over here. So click on Export and you will have all this Settings here. First of all, you can click on export to, and then you can choose where you want the export, the file to our just have it on your desktop. And you can also choose, once it's exported, that it should place it in a folder or not. The file setting. Basically, if you want to have the highest amount of quality than you slide it through 100% quality, be sure to have the color space to sRGB and the image format on JPEG output Sharpening, you could apply in general, if you are exporting it with the highest quality is, then this shouldn't be needed when I'm using the output Sharpening, however, is when I'm trying to resize it and I'm needing to put the quality bid down. Then the output Sharpening will just add a little bit of extra sharpness to, to photo because I'm trying to decrease it in other ways to get a smaller file size, bleak on exports. And your photo will go into the sub folder that you created. Or it will just come to show on your desktop or wherever you choose that you want it to have it. One more thing, when you are exporting, you can in fact create presets IF year three user presets. One is the high-quality JPEG, and the other one is with a watermark, also the high-quality JPEG. And then one is for WordPress where I'm, where I'm trying to decrease some of the file size to put it on my website to create a preset out of some setting, you make some adjustments and you click on F, name your presets. And you can choose in which Fuller I would just put in user presets and create a. You can see now you have a preset. So each time you don't have to go through all those settings again, you can just click straightaway on that preset. Alright, we have just seen all of the steps in the Library Modes. Let's go over now to the Develop Modes 7. Spot Removal, Graduated Filter, Radial Filter, Adjustment Brush: What we can do different here now in the histogram is we can show where the shadows are clipping or where the highlights are clipping. So if we will click on here, now in the shadows, There's nothing really clipping. But if we will click on the highlights, you can see my highlights are clipping here in a Clouds. Now, what that means is this information here is lost. If we would increase the blacks by turning to the left here you can see the blue here. This is all lost information in the shadow details now. So it's important to not have too much go into there because then we're gonna just losing retrieving information away. So let's reset that again. And you can turn this off by just clicking on those arrows again. Next thing is we have some very, very handy tools in Lightroom here. And the first one is the crop tool. Drag from the top. And you can crop the photo that you want. And if that's what you want to crop out, you just click on Done. If you want to reset all of this again, you just click on View reset here, the straighten tool where you can draw a line, destroying your horizon. So you have to make a straight line and then let go of it and then it will crop through there. The strain your horizon mostly when I want to straighten my horizon, I just click here on the top and you see all of those extra lines running through it. I just try to like line one of those lines. And I tried to just look at the Photo to just strain it through my eyes and by aligning it up with one of those lines in here, you have the Clone, any heal with the heel Brush. It's more like a smarter Tool. Then the clone brush with the clone brush, if you click, lightroom, will just Clone something exactly from that Photo are from this, the outer circle, that's where it took it from. It will just Clone exactly that on there. Not do anything with the heel Brush II will also Clone something, but it will try to blended better in. Right now. We would not see any kind of hard edge here, like a lot better. So I could definitely recommend to use the heel Brush instead of the Clone one. The next thing that we have here is the red eye correction. Now, if you have any red eyes in a portrait that you shot, have the red doll into the eyes and you just click on it. And lightroom will correct that this can be used both for humans and pets. Even. The next tool that we have is the Graduated Filter. And this tool at an extra tools are some pretty powerful tools in Lightroom. Now, the way to use this is we just click and drag down to Create a Graduated Filter. Now, we can go in here and make some adjustments to this area alone. So let's say that we would like to bring the exposure down. We just bring the exposure down. And you can see we're only affecting that area alone. If you want to have a better perspective of which area exactly you're affecting, you just click down here on show selected mask overlay. And as you can see everywhere where there's red, that's where we are affecting the Adjustment. Also, if you drag this one up, if you drag it more to this line closer, you're making the farrowing stronger. But if you're pulling it out, you're making the transaction a lot more softer and a very cool thing that we can do is, for example, you would say, you didn't want to have the tree effective, but you didn't want to have the sky affected. You can go down here to Brush. And you can have a Brush. And if you click on Alt, because right now there's a plus sign. We can even add some more of that effect if you want here. But if, let's say that you didn't want to have that effect on tree. You can click on Alt and you can paint that away on this area. So it's just now blight on here. But you could been away areas where you didn't want it by hitting on the Brush. The Radial Filter is very similar to the Graduated Filter. Here you are creating a circle or Oval. So we can drag and drop this anywhere where we want. If we would increase the exposure or decrease it, you can see everything outside of the circle is now, has been decreased with exposure. We can also invert that if you want to have the effect inside of the circle, you click on Invert Mask. And now that effect is applied inside the mask. So if we wanted to have it outside, we just leave it unchecked. If you want to incite, click on Invert Mask, exact same as the Graduated Filter. We can also take the brush here, and we could either add some more where it didn't affect it or we can remove some of those areas where we did not impact, wanted to have the effect on. The next tool is the Brush tool. And with the Brush tool, you can make individually, make adjustments on one spot or one object alone. So let's say that we just want to bring the exposure up in this tree here. We just put this control point down. We increase the exposure and we start painting here. We are only affecting that where we are painting. You are kinda, kinda feels like you're some kind of been done when you're doing this. It's pretty cool. And also you can go down here to show selected mask overlay to see where exactly you are applying or where you are painting. A cool thing here is the auto mask. So let's remove this control point by hitting delete. If we click on auto mask, Lightroom will separate contrast and will be aware of the contrast difference. So if I would start painting now, I will not be too much outside of the lines. Now. I can go very fast and not being too much outside because Lightroom is being aware of the contrast difference. So let me explain here this Settings of the brush, the size, well, that's the size of the brush that you can either increase by dragging the slider here or by just hitting the control, your scroll wheel, by just scrolling up and down the feathering. So to explain this, let me just put the exposure all the way up and let's put the feathering to then present. The feathering is the hardness of your brush. You can see this dot here is becoming, It's just one circle alone. Now, if we put the feathering up, there's this other circle appearing and we can just brush a lot more softer with it. The edges are much softer with the feathering more higher. So I always got to leave this to 60%. So the flow is actually the amount that you're letting out when you're painting. Because right now I am, I am painting with 14% of the flow. And each time that I go over it, it will get more and more and more until it actually hits 100%. But it starting from 14. So if I would go now to 100%, I will let out 100%. Mostly I also keep the flow low to kinda build up the Effects and density. That's actually how much you can set limits on how much you want the paint with the flow. Now, I can go to 100% with it. If I would set the density to 50, I can only go to 50 per cent. I can go to 100 per cent with it. At some point it will just stop. But F of put into 100%, I could just keep going until I hit 100% 8. The Basic Panel, Tone Curves, the Powerful HSL Panel, and Split Toning: Alright, let's go over here to the Basic Panel. And the first slider here is to affect the temperature. So if we increase it, we increase worms. If we decrease it, we make our Photo look more bluer or cooler. And the outer slider is to affect the deans within our Photo. The next slide is that we have here is the exposure one, and we've seen there's a few times now already. But this is like the general brighteners that you Effect in your photo. So if we go down, we Effect, well, we make it generally all of it darker. If we go up, we make it brighter all of it. And by the way, if you want to put this back to zero, instead of dragging it to zero, you could just double click on it and it will reset on its own contrast. You can say that you can sing the darks and lights with guns rest where you're increasing. And this can definitely helped to Make Your Photo bought more out. Don't overdo it. You might have been in. Don't make your photo look that much better when it. Just use it like a little bit to make your photo, maybe a little bit pop-out many Photos. It's actually also very nice to decrease the contrast. Now, it's definitely not in this photo, but in some other photos that we're going to edit, I actually decrease the contrast in many photos that I added because it gives you scan and more film is look to your photo, the highlights, that's where we decrease or increase the highlights, the shadows. That's for the shadows decrease, increase the whites. That's where we increase the whites or decrease the whites. And the Blake's, that's where we increase or decrease the Blake's clarity. It's similar to contrast, but like a smarter contrast, clarity only affects the midtones. It might seem when you add clarity that you're sharpening your photo, but technically you're not. You're just increasing the mid tones. A little bit of clarity can also give like an extra punch in your photo. The next two sliders, most people don't actually know the difference between them, the vibrance and saturation. So if I will put the vibrance all the way to 100%, let me put it back and let me put the saturation all the way to 100%. For many people, it's like, alright, both of them seem to do the same. They're both just increasing dollars saturation. It just increases every color. Vibrance is like a smart tool. Fibers will just affect the colors. We're just not that much color in it. So it's like a smart tool in putting more color into areas where there's not enough or whether it's scholar lacking. So let's go over here to the Tone Curves. Tone Curves you can use to fine-tune more your settings that you did in the basic adjustments here with the highlights, shadows, whites and blacks. It's more like a fine-tuned way because you have more control actually in the Tone Curves, you can, First of all, adjust them just by clicking in them or you can go in here. This is basically just the same. It just kinda depends what you got to that you like more of. And also, you can adjust Tone Curves by dragging this control point into a Photo. So you can take this and you can put it in here and you can drag and drop any will affect what it's reading in there. But where do you scan? It gets more powerful is when we go down to here where we can actually edit the bond curves themselves. So now we can get to make some Curves, some points in it. And we can really going to bend this in any kind of way that we want a, we can add as many those points as we once. If you want to delete those points, just right-click on it and delete control points. Or you can also right-click on it and you can click on flattened curve and then it will just flatten everything. You can also edit or affect different channels. Now it's affecting RGB, which is red, green, and blue. So it's affecting all of them at once. But you can just Effect read. And if you drag down now, if you go down, you're affecting the reds and you can kinda Effect in very specific areas. You can do that also with green, blue. So let's go on here to this panel here. First of all, you can see HSL dollar be in white, which is black and white. H and L stands for you, saturation illuminance. Now, this step and this step are exactly the same. The layout is just different, but they do exactly the same. Mostly I use this layout for me. I find it a lot more of a better overview, but just know that those two tabs do exactly the same. Now, first of all, with you, we can change the Colors of the yellow. The situation that's where we increase the color and luminance. That's the brightness of the color that we can increase or decrease. One extra thing that the age as L tab here has than the color dozens is we have this also control points and you can also anywhere where you put it, it will affect that color. So you can see now we're affecting the blue. If I will go down here than we are affecting more, the yellow on here should be more like the greens. We can see the slider. It's sliding there. I always use the color layout here. I individually go over each color and see what they all do and then see which one I like in the Photo. And also here in a black and whites were still affecting in some way to Colors. But we're just doing it in black and white now. That's the HSL panel here. Split Toning is probably one of the most ignored panels in Lightroom, although it's a very powerful one because we can separately give a call to our highlights and to our shadows, and we can dramatically impact the mood in our photos through Split Toning. Now, the way this works is when we click on here. And right now we are affecting the highlights. We're giving a color to the highlights. And let's say that we want to make, we want to make it a little bit warmer, something we can or we can go and make it cooler. But we're putting a color into the highlights now. And using this slider over here, you can either decrease or increase the strength that we are applying into the color. This step here. And this panel is exactly like the color and HSL, they both do the same, but they're just, you can choose what you prefer more. The US, but they just do the same as, so you can choose a color more here and then put the saturation maybe a little bit less. And then here in the shadows, we can affect just the shadows alone. The balance one is scanning to here you can see to balance things more out. So it's kinda like fine tuning those scholars a little bit. So let's put it like something like that. But let's reset this again. Let's go on to the detail panel here. 9. Detail, Lens Corrections, Transform, Effects, Camera Calibration: In the detail panel, that's where you put more details through your photo and more Sharpening. Now, let me first of all tell you that if you have a Photo that is not in focus or not sharp, the detail panel will not make your photo. All of us are magically sharp again, you have to be sure that you've taken your photo already in-focus and sharp. The detail bell will just help you increase that sharpness, but it will not make an unfocused photo in focus. Again, that's something that you can fix. So we get in here in the detail panel and extra window. Here in this screen, I zoom in somewhere different than here. Here I would go into more of a finer item like me over there. And the amounts that's where we can increase our Sharpening and how much we want to apply. Now, don't overdo it is because you can see in here those little dots that are appearing, that's noise and we are breaking our Photo now. So you should definitely not overdo it at and just like increased a little bit the radius that's kinda like the edges of your photo that you are increasing or decreasing. The details that's D role the details that you're increasing off everything and in a masking, masking illuminance. Those two, That's where you can fine-tune things again and bring things back into balance with masking. If you hit Alt and you slide this up everywhere where there's whites, that's where all those settings that we have just made into, the Sharpening, that's where that will be applied them everywhere where it is blank. It will not be applied on there. And generally, we don't want any Sharpening really in the sky. The sky shouldn't really have any sharpening applied to it. So we can kinda like fine tune and the site where we just want to have all of those Sharpening Blend on. Let's say something like this. Luminance here we can reduce the noise. So let me just put the details and the Sharpening. You can definitely see those Scanner little dots of noise in here with the luminance. We are flattening those out, but be aware because using it 100%, we're also trading that for detail. So we are in fact losing details in our photos. So never really use this too much. I would only use it maybe maximum to den or something, but I wouldn't go crazy extreme with it because then we're just losing detail. All of the other ones here, I wouldn't mind too much about them. They're also a way of reducing the noise and fine tuning things, but generally just masking and luminance dose two sliders, we will help you into balancing everything out. And I also have to say that I don't apply any Sharpening in Lightroom in Photoshop. And we will come to see this in the Photoshop section. Photoshop has a lot better tools of Sharpening your photos. And I sharpen my Photos in Photoshop because it has better tools and also because I can more individually obliged Sharpening to certain areas where I want Sharpening on. Here, I'm kinda like Sharpening. Generally everything right with the masking is of course can kinda shoes more or leave out where I don't want it, but still, I'm still affecting things here that I might not want to effect. If you are just loan editing a Lightroom, then definitely use this right? But if you're also going on for, in Photoshop, then I would say, don't use the detail too much. Sometimes I use it a little bit too. If there's like a lot of noisy my photo, I would like put the luminous just a little bit to smooth that a little bit hour but not much. And then I will go into Photoshop afterwards where I would use a better Sharpening thick nice to sharpen my Photo. Alright, so the next step that we have here is the Lens Corrections. I would always have both remove chromatic aberration and enable profile corrections. Our always have them checked down. In many Photos. You, you will see that there's this kind of weird color distortion like happening over here. You can see like there's some purple showing over there, which shouldn't really be there, right? If we click on Remove Chromatic Aberration, lightroom will go and remove all that. And you can see it's all removed. If I click on that off again, it's back there. If I click on it again, it's all being removed. Definitely be sure to always have that on. Even if you think there's nothing really needed, it doesn't hurt to have it on Enable Profile Corrections. This will, you can see it was not like a lot, but you can see here he can correct some distortion that your lens creates. So those two always have them checked down on each photo. I fix brown or make my photo better. Alright, the next panel here is the Transform panel, the buttons over here. You can First of all, autocorrect your photo and you can just let Lightroom gonna guess what will be best to level up your photo here. Sometimes level, if you click on it, you will correctly Level, the vertical will be correct. The vertical perspective and Fool Rule. Greg boat, the horizon and the vertical perspective. Alright, so going on next year to the effects in this year, we can create a Vignette in our Photo. So if we go to the left, we have a dark vignette before you to do the right side, that's where we can make a white vignette. The midpoint, that's where you can choose from, from where it starts, roundness. You can kinda create the shape. It, you've got to make it more round like this. And if I increase the feathering here, sorry, decrease it. You can see like this, It's a very Route one. I like this is more like a square, going to an oval and then going all the way to run circle. The feathering, you're making things more softer this way. This is like just a very hard edge Vignette. And here you are making it all softer and softer. With green, we can add green to our Photo. If you want to make your photo look a bit more older, size is the size of the grain and the roughness is Ghana, how hard the grain is like right now it's really rough, It's very intense. And amar, that's just how many grain that you want. The haze sometimes when you have like a miss the photo, you can you can actually correct dehaze within this. Now, this is not a Photo with any missed or something. But if there will be just like up, you can take that dehaze away. In this step here if you're shooting Rob, I'm sure that when you were reviewing your photo on your LCD screen, it looked a lot more colorful than when you are putting it into Lightroom. Many times it looks like very kind of grayish more. Put that photo in Lightroom. But I actually happens is because when you are taking a Photo and you're reviewing it on your LCD screen in your camera, your camera will already oblige and Post-Processing that Photo, or at least it will Post-Processing a preview of that you're seeing on your LCD screen. And then when you're importing that Photo into light room, it will remove all of those colors and all those adjustments that it meant into that preview. You can go in here or you can bring back that picture profile by going to profile. And you could choose here between these different profiles, you can choose between Camera, Landscape, Camera, Neutral, Camera, Portrait, Camera, Standard Camera Vivid. And here you actually bringing back in those profiles what you're seeing in your, your LCD screen. Now, of course, you can also go in here and minimally make a profile yourself or make some adjustments in their profile that you selected here. I just leave it to the default here. I just leave it to add up standards. And I sometimes use the shadows slider, the shadow slider here that brings some things into my shadows. For many Photos, this looks pretty nice. Or sometimes it gives a little extra punch in my blues here and increase the saturation 10. Presets, Snapshots, History, Collections, Copy and Paste Button: Alright, so let's go over now to the left side here. Presets are basically Settings here, and you can save them into a preset. So if I will go and click on here, I'm loading this kind of Settings and sometimes they're going to scroll through them. Just not really to use them, but more organic to see in which can away, I could go with my Photo. It's going to like a quick way of just seeing all of possibilities. What you do, or two Catalogs that you could go for. But of course we can create our own presets. First of all, you need to have some adjustments. So let's, I'm going to make just some crazy adjustment here. Just to show or something like that. If we go and click here on the plus sign preset name, we can a be the crazy effects. In fuller. Let's choose User Presets and check all and then Create. And now in user presets, the crazy effects or any kind of reset that you make will appear in here. So if we click on, reset, the reset our Photo again, and we click on the crazy effect that will automatically loads if there is some kind of a setting that you've made and that you felt like, wow, that looks pretty good. I would love to Ghana, save that to see how that could look on another Photo. Then making a preset from it is a good thing to do. Movie style. Let's go like that. And let's Create. And now we have another presets. So crazy Effect wherever the movie style. And we can go and apply this now to any kind of Photo. Let's just take another one here. And if I would play the movie style or crazy effects, we can use this preset now on every Photo. Let's jump now to snap shots. Let's say that you are editing your photo and you like it, but you still kinda want to explore a little bit further with it, but you're afraid that you won't remember again how that setting, how disliked like you could just go here to Snapshots then and create a snapshot by clicking on the plus sign and you can give it a name or you can just keep it with the time and the dates, and click on Create. And now you can go on and edit further on, explore a little bit further into some other settings. And you also liked that one. You can also then again, make a snapshot from this. You can go ahead and kinda compare two, which style you like more. The history. You can see all the adjustments that you made and you can go back in time and undo certain things. It keeps track of everything. The reset button, and you've already seen me use it a few thumbs. The reset button does what it says. It resets everything, all the changes and adjustments that you've made. When you click on reset, it all goes back to the default settings of the Photo. Now, if you accidentally breast on the Reset button and it wasn't actually, you didn't actually want to do that. You can just go back to your history and just go one step back. And everything is all again, the previous button over here. So we've made all these adjustments here, right? We decrease the blacks a little bit, maybe increase the whites. I've done some things with the shadows, highlights the contrast. We've done all these settings here in this photo. If we will go in our library and we will go to another photo, Let's say this one, and we click on previous. What the previous button does is it applies the previous settings that we use in the other Photo, we ablate now in this photo. So if I would go and make some adjustments in this photo, and I will go now to another Photo. Well, let's say this one. And I will go on previous It's bring the previous settings that I applied or that I used in the previous Photo, do this one. So that's what those two buttons over here do. List two buttons here. When I will explain to you what they will do, you will be like, alright, I feel like I've already seen a few functions to do to the exact same with Gabby. We can copy all those settings here that we made. And we can copy that and we can base that onto another photo. Let's go to this one. And if we click on based, we are basing all those settings onto this photo. The difference between Copy and previous, because you could say like we're all the previous scanner does the same, right? And in a way, it definitely does where you're making adjustments to this here and there you go into another Photo and you click on previous, you're just applying the previous Settings from that photo onto this one. What you could do we copy that you can to with previous is you can selectively select what you want the Gabi with previous, you're just applying everything 11. How to Organize Your Photos Effectively: Workflow of how I organize my photos. If you want to use the same one, then it's very important that you have your camera, that you have the date and time and the year correctly set into your camera. So each time that you're taking a photo, that date, that time in the year will be written in the metadata of your photo. When you will upload are important into Lightroom. Lightroom will read that and we'll create a map with the year that it reads when that photo was taken. Now let's import the rest of the photos here that I had on my SD cards. Alright, so we've everything here important now all the photos that were on the SD card, and you can see it categorized all of them already by the years that those photos were taken. So first of all, I organize my photos by the year. That's the first step. And then by the gantry. So in 2013, this photos here were taken in Australia. So what I wanna do is I want to create a map in 2013 with Australia. And a way to do it. This is you can either right-click it, Create Folder inside 2013, or another way is clicking on the plus sign. And you can click on add sub folder and you can name it then Australia. Australia. And that folder is now the, that empty folder is now here into 2013. Now, I will take this folder here, which is the day that those photos were taken. And I will just drag that into the Australia map. And you will get this moving files on disk because we are in fact moving those files on our computer into this map now. And of course I want to do that, so I click on Move, and that is now here in Australia. And if we would go to the 2013 folder, words stored on our computer, and I will click on that folder. You can see we have also that folder in Australia because the changes that you make here are also the changes that you will make your changing this here. So that's how I order my photos. I have a fuller of the year. Then within the year, I have the countries that are within the countries. I just leave the dates. Let me just go over to 2014 here. And those photos were taken in Germany. I just creates a folder inside 2014, Germany. And then I just drag and drop that. I click on Move and I put those photos into the Germany folder. Now, I also went in 2013 to New Zealand. I just creates a map with New Zealand's. Then I would take the photos that I have. I would just take the dates when those photos were taken and I will just put them into the New Zealand fuller. And that's it. Making things more complicated. It's not always more efficient. So that's why for me, I tried to make it as easy as I can because it's more efficient for me. One less thing that I would say, if we're in a grid view, we can only see the Photos now that are just went on a selected map. But we can't have all of them shown all at once. And what I would suggest if you would like to have that, and I definitely like to have like an overview of just all a Photo is in here. We have to create one lead full or one main folder, and we have to create those Folders, make a sub four of them. So the way to do that is let's just go to where our followers are. And let's right-click. And let's create a new folder in there. And let's call it Lightroom Photos. Now, let's just unclick that and click here on the plus sign and you click on Add Folder. Now, go to that place where you created that folder, which is in our picture form and Lightroom Photo. Select that map, select folder, click on it. And now we'll go now into our Lightroom catalog. Now, let's take all this Folders and let's just drag and drop them all into the Lightroom. Photos folder. And lightroom will do its thing. Now, if we will click on that top folder, all of the photos that we have are now in a grid view visible. And of course we can go in individually if we select the years CDOS, but if you want to go and see all of them at once, we just now can do that by creating that one, your main folder, and creating all the years as a subfolder in that folder. So I can highly recommend you to do that because once your library of Photos gets, got along, It's sometimes just nice to browse through them instead of having to go through all of them. Each one individually. I like doing that lots. And also in the picture folder, it makes things more organized. You can just go here to the Lightroom Photos a, you know, that all the years or the maps, however, you are categorizing your folders here are all in just one main Fuller 12. How to Rate & Label Your Photos, and How to Filter Through Them: Let me tell you how I Rate My Photos and How I select the ones that I wanted to edit. And also with that, I'll will show you how I locate my Photos, not using the keyword, keyword lists, but the way how I do it, it, Let's go year into the 2013 and into the Australian. So first of all, of course I will go and double-click on the Photo and go look to them. And mostly I always tried to. If I have photo that I can alike, I would go and zooming and see if it's sharp. And then if it is an allied to Photo, I put the flag speak because I picked that photo as a photo that I actually want edit. I give it just a star rating, but the star ratings are just more of feeling like, alright, I, this photo, I find it kinda like three stars. Like for me this is like a three-star can have photo that I have with this. And then I will go on to the next Photo, would go and zooming and see if it's sharp. And if it is sharp, then I select from alright, I pick it. And then I give it sort of kind of feeling. And then I sit like, alright, I find this is like four-stars or something. Mostly I don't go like that high, but I would also say like three stars. The next thing that I drew, if I have set a flag and I have given it like some rating, I use the red color label for photos that I still have to edit. Now, let's say that we did already edit this photo. I use a green color label for photos that I have already edited. The purple color label. This I use when I have edited photo, but I still want to revision it. I still want to look at it the next day or I still want to leave it like for a couple of days not looking at it, then I give it a purple color. This are the three colors that I use. Now, let's say that I don't like this photo. I give it a rejection flake. Actually, when you press X, that's the Shortcuts for rejection leg. And if you press on the B button, that's the shortcut for the white flight year. So I would press on the X and set that as a rejection. And if you go out here, you can see that Lightroom made that photo a little bit them. And that's very helpful, honestly, because you can select are the ones that you don't like. It makes things more clear as, as an overview. The way how I would Filter my Photos is very easy. By going through the attribute in the Library Filter, I will go to the attributes. And let's say that I want to filter out and I want to know all the photos that are still wanted to edit. I just go here to the color. I click on the red color and I can straightaway see like, alright, I still want to edit those photos. If I'm looking for all my finished Photos, Our just unclick that and I will click on the green label and just have one finished photo here. And I would see all the finished photos that I have. Now at the moment there's, of course there's one. But once you're Library starts building up with a lot of Photos, It's a very quick and easy overview of all the photos that you've finished. And then of course, if I click on the purple one, I can see all the photos that I still had to revision. Again, I've just shared here to you how I categorize my Photos and organize them and how I Filter my photos. Now, this is honestly very personal for the worst workflow, work style, how I work, it might not be for the type of photography that you do, that this could be efficient. You can have just now a good understanding of the possibilities of how you could create your own workflow, and how you could create your own structure and how you could feel throughout your own photos. You've seen all the options, and now it's just about picking one and not making it too complex and using all of them. Oh yeah, one thing, of course, the flex with the rejection flake and those are actually photos that I want to delete off my hard drive. So afterwards, when I'm done through everything, I just go and select those Photos. And I will just click on bleeds. And lightroom will either ask me to remove it from the Catalog, but then a photos will still be on your hard drive or to delete them from disk and deleting them from the disk is while removing them from your computer. And obviously, that's what I want. Those photos with rejection flag or photos that I don't want anymore. So I just leak ON delete from disk. Now, be very sure. I mean, you can still dig them out of your bin. But once you click on this, those photos will go and be thrown off your hard drive. So I just want to click on that. So be sure that you want to delete and actually 13. In-Depth Explanation of the Catalog and the Various Options: Alright, so one less thing that I wanted to talk about, and I already, I started talking about this in the beginning of this lesson, is what exactly a Catalog is. The Catalog is the database of all the information. So first of all, know that what you editing here in Lightroom are not the actual Photos or two files that you took your camera. What Lightroom is doing when importing those Photos? It's building a preview from the original file. And that preview is sports within your Catalog, all the things that you do here, selecting the label, giving it started rating, setting a flag on it, the key awards, or all the adjustments that you make in the Develop module, all of those things are actually being stored in the catalog. The catalog is like the database of all the adjustments and all the things that you do on the Previews from those original files. They always say Lightroom is a non-destructive program, which means that you're never actually really touching the original files. And that's the real beauty of Lightroom because you can always go back when you make a mistake. There is no way of destroying your photo in Lightroom because you're working in a non-destructive way, you can in fact create more than just one Catalog in Lightroom. First of all, if there is no need for you to do it in the following things that I'm going to say why it can be handy, then I would not really suggest to Create another Catalog. And reason why is just, like I said, I tried to simplify things a lot and creating another Catalog is just making things harder. In fact, an easier, but you could create another Catalog. And the reason why there could be handy in some cases is if you really want to separate. So let's say that you want to separate your work Photography and your personal photography onto to hold different Catalogs. The Catalog that I was using before, that was the Catalog for these scores. But all those photos are not being used here. All that information and all the things that I use, all stored on the other Catalog. So if I will go to File and open the other Catalog again, I would first of all, need to locate it, which is in a Lightroom map and an in Catalogs. And then you can see the Ultimate Post-Processing and Editing Course Catalog. And if I will click on that file here and I click on Open, Let's you will ask me if I want to open this Catalog at because I have to relaunch Lightroom. And so now it's opening that other. Good luck. And as you can see, now it's loading the folders that we have here in this Catalog and all the lay of the color labels, the flags, the star ratings that we gave to this. It's all loading that information of those photos that we have imported into this Catalog. Now, if you want to Create a New Catalog, the way to do that is very simple. You just go to File and you click on New Catalog. Now, you will go here to the Catalogs where the Catalogs are stored. Give it a name that makes sense, Of course, for why you want to Create a Catalog and click on Create. And Lightroom is going to go and open that Catalog now. And now we have a whole new Catalog where we can imports Photos which are only stored within this Catalog now, and where we make adjustments, that information will all be stored within the Catalog. And if you want to open the other Catalog, you just click on the open Catalog. And then you go back. And let's open This Catalog example. And then relaunch. Now, like I said, honestly for me the only reason now that creating another Catalog was handy was to separate this Catalog here. And the Catalog that I've already showed you from the course is not my Catalog that I use where all my photos are stored. So in this case, it was handy to Create a New Catalog to separate those things. So I didn't have to show you all of the other footballers of my photos. It was a better overview for me, honestly Beginners, I could have done that, but he was a better overview for me to just create a new catalog and just Import, import the photos that I needed for this course. Besides that, I never really felt the need to create another Catalog. There's some rumors orders, some people saying that creating another Catalog after having like that or hundred thousands of photos in the Catalog, that he could slow down your Catalog having that many of them, but Lightroom is so created and I've done research on this that your Catalog will not slow down. If you have like hundreds, thousands of photos in it, it will not slow down. So there are not really that many reasons. Instead, if you really have to separate your photos from each other, if you don't have to really do that, then I would not Create another Catalog to go and switch between an all time. It's just making things more complicated. If you want to divide your work and your personal life Photos, then you can also just create a map in here, right? You can create one with work. And then one with personal life. You could create some structure in that Catalog as well. The bottom line is, you can do a lot of things with Lightroom, but don't make things too complicated and try to make it as simplistic as you can for the workflow and for categorizing your photos, try to make it as simplistic as you can 14. How to Import a Catalog to Another Computer, How to Merge two Catalogs: Now, one less thing about Catalogs. Let's say that you have a brand new laptop and you've been using the current left of the whole time in editing your photos and you've Lightroom on there. But you wanna go and start using the brand new laptop yours, you will have to move photos to your new laptop. Of course, if you want to go and use them, they're just moving the Photos alone will remove all of those things here. All the edits that you've made in Lightroom, and all of the flags and ratings and labels that you've gave it. It will it will not be in there when you Import just a Photos alone in Lightroom. That's because you're not importing the Catalog from the other computer where you've made all those adjustments on and where that information is stored them. So if you want to move your photos from one computer to another, let me show you what you need to do. I've had a lot of trouble with is actually I've messed there's a lot of thumbs up and not in a way that I've deleted Photos or something, but just that I've ended up with duplicates and then I had to go and delete all those in. But Effect is very, very easy to do it. So I'm going to just show you the tree things that you need, a tree files that you need. So let's go to the folder where we have our photos stored that we want to Import over. And that's the Lightroom photos, that map, we want to move that met over to Another Computer. So first of all, have that one. So let's just Copy that on our desktop. Let's put that here. The next thing that we need is we need to go into the Lightroom photo and we need the Catalog that we're using here. So go into the Catalog folder and the Catalog that we're using here. If you don't know, you can see up here the Catalog that Lightroom has opened and this is the Catalog to so we need that folder. So let's copy that nap as well. And let's close that. And this are the two things that you need. Those two things we need to transfer over on our USB stick and then put it into our new computer. So let's say that we have just move this now onto our new computer. So you either have like no photos on there. That's the first case. Then we just go to File and we go to Import from another Catalog. Click on there. And then go and select that Catalog, which is Catalog to choose. And then you can see here all those Photos. And then we just go and click on imports. And then those photos are being imported into our new Catalog onto our new computer. And here we go. And everything is just as it was before. Now, obviously, we don't want those folders just on our desktop, so let's just go and move them into the Lightroom folder here. You might have to close Lightroom for that. So let's just put the Catalog folder into the Catalogs and the Lightroom Photos. I just copy them so they are still there. Let's just delete that one then. Another scenario could be that you want to Merge two Catalogs together. So in this laptop you have Lightroom and you have some photos on there. But you have another laptop and you have Lightroom on there as well. And you want to merge the Catalog from this laptop onto your laptop into Lightroom there, and you want to Merge that Catalog together. The way to do that is very simple. It's very easy as well. And you need the same the exact same files. You need, the Catalog itself that you want to move over, then the photos that you have on the computer that you want to move that are in this Catalog, dose to Folders. Have them again on your USB. And let's say that we have transferred them now here onto our other computer, you just go to File and you go to Import from another Catalog. You locate the Catalog which is here on our desktop. And you go to the Catalog file, you select Catalog, and then choose are photos from that Catalog appear there actually a few things that we can do with the Photos because I think on default it's just on File Handling Antony Photos to calloc without moving. I think on default it's on that. But the best thing, and this, by the way, it will add those photos to this new Catalog. Beauty will leave those photos over there untouched. If we go to this setting here, copying you photos to a new location and imports, we will copy this Photos and when we imported them, we will move those photos to another folder. We can already select the folder that we want. So I would go and copy that Fuller to the picture for where we have our photos. If you want another one, you just go and click here on choose. You could choose another folder, but in this case we just leave it to the pictures to that folder. So once all that's done, you just click on imports. And lightroom will go and import those Photos and merge those two Catalogs together very, very smoothly. And so here you can see that we have these new folder now into our Catalog. And if we go and locate that folder on our computer on a hard drive, we can see this folder gut move now to the pictures. So now you basically you could just go ahead and delete those files. Because if we go to pictures, you can see the folder is in here. And the Catalog, we don't need this anymore either because that's now merged together with our Catalog that we have open here. So you can just go ahead and click on Delete. And we have just successfully Merge two Catalogs together. And you've seen now two scenarios on how to do that. So there you go. I hope you enjoyed this lesson. Let's go on to the next lesson. 15. Lightroom Shortcuts: Lightroom comes with a lot of Shortcuts and mastering those Shortcuts will increase your workflow tremendously. I'm going to go and explain you a few very handy and useful shortcuts that I use a lot and are my favorite ones. And I have also attached documents in this course that you can download. And in that sheet, I wrote down all of those handy Shortcuts, download it. It's either printed out or have it on your computer and have it like next to you and learn them while you are going through Lightroom. Let's start here with the Shortcuts. Hitting the Tab button, we will remove the side panels here, the left and right one. So tap. We remove those two panels here, hitting the shift plus death, we will remove the site panels and the top and bottom panel here. So shift step. You can see side panels, top and bottom panel removed and hitting Shift and tap again will make them appear. Again. Hitting D Button year, we'll make the toolbar appear or disappear. So hit D and we removed the toolbar, now hit it again, D. And we make that appear again. And by the way, those shortcuts, because we're in the Library module now are exactly the same. They will do exactly the same in the Develop module. So let's go back to the Library module. So if we are in the Library module and we have a Photo selected hitting D, we opened that Photo into the Develop module. Hitting D. In the Library module. We open up Photo into the Develop module. And if we are in the Develop module, hitting G will bring us back to the Library module into the view. G stands for grid view. So D, we open our Photo E to the Develop module hitting G. We bring that will go back here to the grid view. If we press on IE, we open that Photo into the loop view. So let's go back to the grid view. Hitting G, hitting C. The C button is for compare. If we hit that, the cyclic photo that we have that will go and compare to the photo next to it. If you only select that photo alone and you hit C, then it will compare to the photo next to it. Sometimes it works like in this case now, if I hit C, Those are the to save photos but just differently edit it. But if I will be on this one here and I would hit C, that would not make too much the sentence, right? So sometimes you might have to, and let's take this photo here. You have that photo and you want to compare it to that photo. You have to hit Control for Windows or command for Mac and click on that one. Although the photo that you want to compare it, that Photo Two, and then he'd see to compare it to that photo. So let's go back hitting the G to the grid view. Next on, if we hit N, this will open the survey Modes. Now, if you just have one photos like the survey mode doesn't do its function having one photo, the survey Modes, so you need to have multiple photos selected for the survey mode. So let's select three photos here, and let's hit N. And you can see now the survey Mode opens all those Photo and gifts, kinda like an overview for us. And we can even hit the Tab button here to get a better overview. And this is a very bunch and actually way you shot a photoshoot with a model. And you have like 20 photos of that photo shoot that you have to compare to each other. In the survey mode, you can lay them all next to each other and you can click away the ones that you don't like. So I would say like this one I don't like too much to compare to the other ones. So I click here on the X and that one goes away. Now it doesn't remove it or something, it doesn't delete it out of Lightroom, it just removes it out of the survey Modes. Also in the survey mode, you can set a flag or you can send a rejection flag, or you can give it a color label, or you can also give it a star rating. So let's go back to the grid view. Let's bring back those side petals hitting the tab. When we hit L. Once we dim the lights, right, you can still see like a little bit of the site panels here. If we press it again with him out everything. But we're just seeing the photos in there. So let's press L again and we go out of it. So pressing one, pressing L once will limit just little bit. Pressing it again will deem out everything. And pressing it a third time will bring us back Let's select the photo by hitting E in here. You can also do that. So if you press L once, twice to get a nice to see, kinda have an overview of what your photo looks without all the other distractions going on by the side. Hitting the F button will give us a full screen of the Photo, which is also a very cool thing. And then if you press on the arrows, you can kinda scroll through your photos. Kinda see in fullscreen what is going on and how you like it in full screen. So let's hit again. So let's take this photo here. If we press the V button, this will turn the photo instantly to black and white. So let's press V and it will turn into black and whites. And if you want to bring those colors back, press V again and it will bring those colors back again. It's like a very nice Button to have if you want to see where you're going through your photos in a grid view. And you're gonna like going through your photos and you're like, well, let's see you that loose in black and white, you just hit V and it will turn it on to black and whites. The next shortcut is actually a very handy shortcut that I use lots if you hit Control or Commands plus E, And I'm not going to do it now. But what this will do is it will open that selected photo into Photoshop. If you're also going to work with Photoshop, this is like a incredible handy shortcut. Just hitting Control or Command plus E will open that selected photo straight into Photoshop. Hitting the B will bring up the white flag. Hitting the X will set the rejection flag. So B is for the white flag, X is for the rejection flag. The numbers one to five are for the star rating. So Hair well, this will be very severe complaining, but one is to give it one rating, two for 234545 stars. And if you hit the zero, you will reset it back again to zero. The six to nine, those numbers are forgiving a Color Label Your Photo. So six is four, red, seven is for yellow, a green, and so on to the next dollar. There's one more shortcut that I'll want to show you and that is hitting Control or commands and then the slash sign. And this will open the Library Shortcuts, because there's a lot more Shortcuts to Lightroom that I've just showed you. And they can all be found within the Library. Shortcuts have a look through them. There might be some shortcuts that I have not mentioned that you actually by unhelpful. But I've taken a look through them to and the one that I explained to you now are for me, really the ones that are the most helpful and handy shortcuts to know 16. How to Create Panorama Photos in Lightroom: In this lesson here, I'm going to show you how to create a panorama and an HDR photo in Lightroom. It's not very complex at all to do in light room. Now, let's jump straight into it and let's start with how to create a panorama. Minimally, you need, of course, two photos to create a panorama, but you can go up to as many as you want. Here in this example, we're going to use those two photos and stitch them together into one big panorama photo. Now what I always do when I'm selecting the photos out that I want to stitch together in a panorama, I rate them, and that's the numbering that I'm giving them. That's the first photo and that's the second photo and then I put them into a group, which you can do. You can put photos into a group. If I would click this now down, it's into that group here, you can do that by just clicking on those two photos, control or command, and then right clicking it and going into stacking group into stack, and so you have them into a stack. Now, obviously, you don't have to do this. It's not going to make the panorama look better or anything. It's just going to make it easier for you to find the photos that you want to stitch together. There are a few things that you might have to do first because you can see, looking at this photo here and the other photo, the exposure is very different, right? This one is more going to the overexposed and this one is more going to the exposed photo. So if we stitch those two photos together, we'll have a little bit of a weird photo. Now, what we want to do is we want to match the exposure from this photo into that. Photo. We have to go into the developed module and have the photo here selected that you want to match the exposure and click on here, and this is from the library module, a tab, and just select the other photo. Here's why it's easy to have them sorted out. This is the first one, this is the second one. If there will be a lot more photos in this folder, it's easy to just locate them where they are, the panorama photos that you want to stitch together. Select those two photos. And you go down here in settings and you go to match total exposures and just click on that and you can see we go to the other photo, we match that exposure. Lightroom automatically read this exposure and match that exposure into this photo. Now, another thing because sometimes the white balance might be different in this one than in this one, in this case, the white balance is exactly the same. You want to match that as well. Otherwise, you're going to have also one photo and the other photo that you stitching together. They will both look different into a complete photo that you're actually trying to create. So you want to match that as well. And the way to do that is by clicking here on the refers view, and we have this photo here that we have selected here and drag and drop a photo from the film strip to set the refernce photo. So now we want to set a refers photo. So we just go down here and we drag and drop the one photo that we also want to create a panorama with. And here, we can make some more room. The active one, that's the one that we're editing. So if we're changing, and the reverse one is the one that we use as a reverse board. So that's the one that we actually want to match the white balance with. So in that way, you have an overview, and you can kind of see how close you're coming to matching the white balance into the other photo. Now, if that all is done and you have corrected the exposure and the white balance, the way to stitch two or more photos into a panorama in Lightroom is very, very simple. Just go ahead and click the two or the more photos that you have. Click them on, right click on it, and go to Photo Merge Panama and click on that. And our lightroom is going to build a preview of that panorama. So here is the preview that we have, and we have some projections that we can create our panorama. Now, I would say, just go through all three of them and kind of see which one looks best on this panorama. I'm going to go with perspective for this photo. And we can have the auto crop unchecked or checked on, and the auto crop will already crop off the white of the canvas here and we'll crop that away already. Boundary warp, you can feel some more of the canvas, kind of warping it, you see. And kind of fixing some more parts. But of course, you might end up with some dissortions if you're going too much over it because we're kind of, like, bending things a little bit. But a little bit of it would actually work fine. And then let's auto crop the rest of it. And let's click on Merge, and that's really all there is to it in creating a panorama in lightroom. Like I said, it's very, very easy to do. So once Lightroom created panorama, we can go and see that we have the panorama here, and I would just give it an extra rating, like three ratings. So that's the final one. And the cool thing is that this is still a raw file. It's a DNG, which is a raw file as well. So we can go still in the developed module and edit it as a raw file. We still have all the information here from the two photos now, you know, we can go bring the highlights down, put some vibrance in there, which is maybe too much. Still have all the information is still within there. Now, you can see in this photo that the sky is very overexposed. And that happens, of course, because I wanted to have the foreground here correctly exposed. The sky is completely over exposed because of that. Now, I could definitely go into the graduated filter and maybe see if I can bring, you know, some exposure down to kind of bring that information a little bit. But yeah, this doesn't really look good in here, right? That information is pretty much lost. It's too overblown in there. Now, let me show you the finished photo that I have of it and let me go into full screen. You can see the sky is beautifully exposed, and the foreground is also beautifully exposed. Everything is correctly exposed, compared to this photo where the sky is just overexposed, but the foreground is correctly exposed, though. How I did this, I took one correct exposed photo, one over exposed photo, and one underexposed photo and I merged them together in light room into an HDR photo. What you're doing basically is you're gathering all the information from the over and under and correct exposed photo and you're creating one photo from that. That way, you can have a correct exposed photo in the sky and a correct exposed photo here in the foregrounds. And I did exactly that with this one too, and then I just took those two and I merged them together into a panorama, and that's how I ended up with a correctly exposed photo like this one. Now, before I'm going to go and show you how to create HDR photos, let me just give you a few tips in how to create a panorama photo in the field when you're taking the photo itself. Let me first of all, tell you that I don't use Lightroom for creating panoramas. I use Photoshop for them in the photoshop section, I will come to show you how to create a panorama in there and all the tools available are way more and way better. The reason why I'm already showing you how to do it here is, first of all, if you're only using lightroom, then you know how to do it in lightroom and like I said, we're building steps up here, so you already know now what a panorama is plus the following tips that I'm going to give you will also teach you some more about how to take panoramas. 17. Field Tips to Take Better Panorama Photos: One of the first tips that I would give to you is to shoot in manual mode, and 90% of the time I shoot in aperture priority and I would say most professional photographer shooting in that mode. But one of the times that I would switch over to manual mode is for creating a panorama photo. The reason why is if you're shooting in one of the priority modes, your light meter will adjust itself the whole time. Each frame that you're taking, your light meter will try to read the light that is happening in the scene and will expose itself to how much light it needs in that photo in manual mode, it will not do that. Your light meter will not do anything. I will just completely listen to you. That's very helpful if you don't want to do all the work in light room or in Photoshop, correcting the exposures in there. Now, you don't per se have to shoot in manual mode actually. There is also an exposure lock button on each DSLR and mirrorless camera. The thing is just you can just press that down, and then it doesn't really matter that you're shooting in aperture priority or any other priority modes. The light meter will not adjust itself when you're framing for another scene. The thing is just that you need to remind yourself to press down that button. And in man mode, you don't have to remind yourself of that anymore. So it's kind of like, well, what you find the most easiest if you know yourself that you might forget that now and then, then maybe just use the manual mode. But if the man mode is a little bit not working for you, then use the exposure lock button. Another tip here is set your lens in manual mode. Now, this is very important and the reason why if you shoot in automatic focus and you would frame here for this shot and you're focusing more in the far distance. Well, that will be in focus, and this will be a little bit more blurry. If you will go up here and you would focus more in here, then this will be more in focus, but the far back will be blurry. If you will go and stitch those two photos together, you will just as with light meter, end up with two very different things in focus. Now, if you put your lens in manual mode, your lens will not adjust itself. That's just again with light meter, it will not adjust itself. So it will just do what you put it to and it will take that photo. If you have problems with manually setting your focus, something that I do many times is I framed the first shot that I want for the panorama. And I half press down the shutter button with the lens still in automatic focus. Then I just switch it off. So my camera, put the scene in focus, and then I just switch it off, and then I don't really have to adjust my camera anymore, and then I just go on and frame for the other shots. Next tip is use a tripod. Now, you don't per se need a tripod. You can take panoramas handheld as well. But obviously, using a tripod will give better results and will make things a lot easier. Now, this tip here is very important for creating successful panoramas. Be sure to overlap in 30% with the other photo that you want to stitch together into a panorama. Because basically when Lightroom or Photoshop is trying to stitch your photos into a panorama, it is reading off from the other photo where you can stitch things together. But if there's not enough information that is also on the other photo, then it will not result always in a correctly stitched together panorama. 18. How to Create HDR Photos in Lightroom: A let's go and see now how we create HGR photos in light room. I've already explained a little bit when we were going over how to create a panorama photo, what an HDR photo is. But I'm sure that it happened to you that you wanted to have your foreground well exposed and that they the background was completely blown out now, and I'm sure it also happened the opposite that the sky was beautifully exposed. But here, the foreground is completely underexposed. Now, the way to go and fix that is by merging those two into an HDR photo. Now, commonly HDR photos are out of three photos, and that is an overexposed photo, a normal exposed photo, and an underexposed photo. You can, in fact, just use the underexposed and overexposed photo. You can just use two files as well to create an HDR photo. But you're just giving light through more information here by having three photos to create an HDR photo. Now, the way to go and create an HDR photo is just like a panorama photo, very simple. Let's just select the first photo and then shift click to the end photo. Also here, as with panorama, I number my photos, one, two, three, and I put them into a stack staging group into stack, and like I said, you don't have to do this. This is just something that I always do because it just gives me a nice overview of everything. Let's go and select the photos that we want to merge together. Right click on it, go to Photomrg and click on HDR. So here we just merged our photo now together in an HDR and well, it doesn't look like there's much really happened, right? Now, when we merge it together and we're into the developed module and we start pulling on some adjustments, you will see there will be a big difference. Now, let's go over the options here. Auto align, I would have that choose checked on. There might happen a little bit of slight movements. Auto align will just auto align those three photos while it will align them. So that's nice to have checked on. Autotone it will already give you some kind of starting point of the HDR. I don't really have that check on. Dghosting, let's first of all, just check on show DghostingOlay, where we can see some of the fixes that Lightroom did. Now, degosting it might happen and you can see why it's doing some degosting here that there might be some different movements in one of the photos and degosting will kind of fix that with low, medium high, we can set how much we want light room to try to fix that degosting. In general, I would try to set it as low as you can go with, and the reason why is because you might end up with some weird dissortions in your photo. Set either none or low or the amount that you need, but don't overdo it because there might have been some weird dissortions. Let's go and click on Merge. Alright, so once you've done your waiting for Lightroom to create your HDR photo, we can see it here. And let me also give this now four stars. And let's go into the developed module, let me just show you now what we can do here with the sky. So if we would just bring the highlights down, you can see we are completely pulling back or pulling out now a well exposed sky and now we can go and just make some other adjustments in the shadows, try to expose this now also a bit better in the blacks as well and some contrast and some vibrance or something and maybe a little bit Oh, of temperature. Anyway, I'm not going to go and fine tune all this, but I'm just now trying to show you that we have a lot more information to work with. Now we can pull out a lot more shadow information and make this well exposed, and we have a lot more information into the whites and highlights and pull this completely out. Because if I would now use a graduated filter and would put down, some of the exposure on that graduated filter, you can see we can even take all this information out of that. So there we go. That's how you can create an HDR photo in Lightroom. Now, just as with panoramas, let me also give you a few tips on taking better GR photos. But let me start first of all, by addressing how you can create bracketing exposures with your camera. 19. How to Take Bracketing Photos & Field Tips to Take Better HDR Photos: So for those who don't know how to shoot multiple photos with different exposures, many cameras have a bracketing function which allows you to set different exposures. All you have to do is press down the shutter button afterwards and let your camera do its thing. Now, if your camera doesn't have a bracketing option, no stress at all, you can simply use the exposure composition button and you just dial one exposure stop up, one exposure stop down and have one normal exposed photo. So the first dep that I will give in taking better HDR photos is using a tripod. Now, also, just as a panorama, you don't fact, need one. You couldn't just take HDR photos handheld, but obviously using a tripod will result in way better results. The chance that because you have to take multiple exposures, the chance that you will move a little bit while taking those different exposures is pretty high. So there will be some shakiness in your photo, and using a tripod will just without a doubt, 100% will result in way better HGR photos. So the next tip that I will give you is know when to use HDR. HDR doesn't look great on everything. In general, it doesn't look nice on people or on animals. There are some photos of some portraits with some old people where there are some HDR techniques applied on it, and that can look nice. But in general, it looks horrible on people or on animals. HDR works best on landscapes or in architecture photos or man made objects as a car or a plane. When you're taking photos for a portrait, yeah, it doesn't look too great on people or on animals. The last tip here that I would give, don't overdo it. Now, I would say go on Google and type in HDR overdo and you will see a whole range of images of AGR photos that are just overdone because you have so much information into one file now. You could pull things to the extremes. It's very easy to do that, honestly. So be sure to not overdo it, and I would definitely suggest you to go to Google, check HDR overdo and look how to not do it. Now, I'm not saying if that's the kind of style that you actually like. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do that, but it doesn't look very natural anymore. All right. So here we just have seen now how to create panoramas and HDR photos in Lightroom. And one thing that I want to add to all of this, I've already said this about panoramas. Also, just as with HDR, I don't create them in light room. In fact, HDR, I use digital blending, which is HDR, but it's the manual way of blending photos together. But you can only do that in Photoshop. In Photoshop, there are just better tools and more techniques into having better results. And Lightroom has limited options in doing that. In the second section, the Photoshop section, that's where I will also come to go over panoramas and digital blending and tell you all the techniques and tools in how to do that in Photoshop. 20. Optimize your Catalog, Camera Raw Cache, and Graphic Processor: In this lesson here, I'm going to show you how to optimize the Speed and Performance in Lightroom. Plus there's also a few other additional things that are very good to know about Lightroom. And let's start here first of all on how to backup your Catalog. I'll default lightroom does this automatically, but there are a few settings. And if Lightroom for some reason doesn't do it automatically, let me jump and show you where you can find those settings. So we go here to edit. We go down to Catalog Settings. Now, down here, you can see Backup, backup Catalog, and then you can read once a week when exiting Lightroom. So once a week, this is setting that IF once a week when I exit Lightroom, lightroom will asked me and I will show you just in a minute how that would look like to back up the Catalog. And I would highly recommend you do each time when that shows to do that. Because while you're backing up your Catalog, but there are, there's something else that lightroom does at the same time as well. Now, let me show you because you can choose you could choose once a week, once a month, once a day, or every time Lightroom exits. So let's just click on every time Lightroom exits to show you what will happen now. So just click on. Okay. Let me exit Lightroom. Now again, I would honestly have this just on once a week, which will be more than enough. You can see here backup folder, where you can choose where you want Lightroom to backup your Catalog. And on default small, the default setting is fine, but if you choose or if you like them, it's somewhere else. You can speak another location by this here. So first of all, Lightroom will do treat things. Now, it will back up your Catalog, which is great. It will store it here. But also it will test integrally before backing up and optimize Catalog after backing up. So those two things will help run Lightroom a lot smoother once you've done them. First of all, test integrity. Basically what lightroom does, it goes through your Catalog and checks for any corrupted files. So, you know, definitely have that checked on optimize Catalog, however, that is where lightroom will optimize your Catalog. So lightroom will be able to read your Catalog much easier. You're just putting things back in order for Lightroom through to Rate your Catalog much faster. So definitely go and have those two things checked up. And then just click on Backup. And there you go and have it on once a week. And I'll default. I do think it does that, but when this shows up, when you're exiting Lightroom, then don't just go and click, click that away. It's a very good thing to do. So just go ahead and click on Backup. The next step year that I have on increasing the speed in Lightroom, built one-to-one previews. Now, I have already touched upon this in a previous lesson. But if you've not watched that lesson, let me just quickly explain again what one-to-one previous are and let me also show you how to build one-to-one previous upon importing. So I'm sure you've noticed when you go to a Photo, you click on it and use Zoom in that it is loading. Because what it is doing right now is building. Or it's loading a one-to-one preview because we're now zoomed into one-to-one. Now, if you really want to edit your photo, is this can be kind of annoying because you have to weight each time again, for that preview to be built by Lightroom. You can in fact already have those Previews builds, so you don't have to weight each time for Lightroom to Load. And the way to do that upon importing is you click on imports. And by File Handling, you can see Build Previews. And at the moment it's set on minimum. If you click on it and you go to one-to-one, and you go ahead and import your photos. Those photos are being built with a one-to-one previews. So when you go and zoom in, you don't have to wait at all for the photo, the render over Lightroom to render that one-to-one preview. It is already built. So you could just fastly go to all your photos without having to wait all the time. Now, if you have already photos in your Catalog that you want to make or that you want to build a one-to-one preview on as well. It's very easy to do that. You just select the photo or select the range of photos that you want by just shift click and you go down here to Library. If you go here to Previews, you can click on Build one-to-one previews. And then Lightroom will go ahead and create a one-to-one previous from this. Now, you can also discard those one-to-one Previews, PQRS, the thing is building one-to-one Previews takes a lot more storage on your hard drive than just building minimum Previews. That's why in general, I only built one-to-one previous about photos that I'm needing to edit at the moment. But the rest I only important with just the minimum good setting to have checked on. Because shear you can always go after you're done and discard the one-to-one previews, but the chairs that you might forget that it's pretty high. An easier setting where lightroom will automatically discard this one-to-one Previews after X amount of time is if you go here to edit, you go to Catalog Settings. If you go to File Handling, you can see here automatically discard one-to-one previous after, one week, after one day, after dirty days. I do think on default is set on after 30 days. You can set on after one week. Because generally, I think after one week, I pretty much done after what we because I've made those previous on them because I'm definitely going to work on them. I don't have to think about this anymore to remove those one-to-one previews, because lightroom will already automatically do that for me. In order for Lightroom to read the information of Raw file, it needs to access that file information and that file information is temporarily stored in something called Camera Raw gets going you to edit. And then down here to preferences. And up here in File Handling, you go down here and you can see Camera Raw Cache Settings. Now by default, Lightroom has this OH, 1 gb, which is not a lot. Bump this up to 10 gb. And basically you allow Lightroom to read more in the Camera Raw catch. This can definitely improve the performance of Lightroom. Now, don't overdo this. If you go too much, this could actually do more harm than good actually because you're just asking a lot more of your hard drive. So just bump this up for 1 gb to ten gigabyte and they should do a lot good Lightroom. The next step here that I have. And for this, we go back into edits, into preferences, and we go to Performance this time. Now in here you can see use Graphic Processor. Now, what I would suggest is just check this on restart Lightroom. And this could either improve the performance of Lightroom or you can just make Lightroom buggy. So just restart Lightroom, have that checked on. And the effects are only in the Develop module. So in the Library module, this doesn't really do anything on that. It's in the Develop module that you could either see some improvements of performance or that Lightroom just Stars being weird and bugging. If that is the case, then just check that off again. But just go ahead and check it on going and Develop module. And go to your photos and do a little bit of view edits and see if it is actually improving the performance of Lightroom. If you have a fast video card, then checking this on shooting facts, improve the performance of Lightroom 21. Smart Previews Explained & How to Build Them: Let me Dean through smart Previews right now because they could First of all improve the performance. Your been editing your photos in the Develop module a lot. But there's another function to smart Previews. And let me explain that first before I dig into how Smart Previews can improve the process of editing in the Develop module, you can see here or original photo what this means. Right now, we are editing the original photo, or at least a preview of the original photo. If we click on that, you can see smart preview for this photo and you can also have some information on here. Now, let's just build a smart preview. And you can see one Smart Previews was built. Now in year. You can see original plus smart preview from this photo we have right now the original, but we also have the smart preview. So to explain what Smart Previews our weekend, let me just go and locate this Photo, show in Explorer. So the photo that we're editing right here is this one which Smart Previews. I could remove the original file, but still go and edit that photo in a Develop module because I created a smart preview from it. So we could keep on editing our photos without actually needing your original files. Let me just go and remove this photo here. And let's go back in Lightroom. You can see now that it's switched over to smart preview. So right now we have the smart preview here, but we can still go ahead in the Develop module and we can go and still do our edits. In this photo, you see we still have all this and we can still go ahead and do our edits here. Now the reason why that could be very handy is when you are traveling, so well, let me first of all just put the smart preview, the original file back here. And you can just see that lightroom automatically updates this again and also the edits that we've done. So if we remove the original file, the edits that were done in a smart preview, and we put the original file back again, lightroom will automatically come to update our original file too. So all the edits, we don't have to go and redo them again. Lightroom will synchronize them together with the original. Now, if you're traveling, creating smart Previews could be very handy because you don't have to transfer over all this big Raw files onto your external hard drive. You can just create smart Previews from a selected range of photos just by selecting all of them and just clicking on this side now and just clicking on that, we can build seven Smart Previews from those Photos. Transferring those Smart Previews over on our external hard drive and traveling with them can be very, very handy because we don't have to transfer all these big files. Now there are a few things that you can do with Smart Previews. I can't open the smart preview into Photoshop for example, I need the original photo for them. Also, I cannot make HDR Photos which Smart Previews. I also need the original photo for them. Also, a Panorama. You cannot make that with a smart preview. You can do with a smart preview is just in the Develop module and the metadata changes. If you set a flag or star rating, you can do all those things. Now to show you where the smart Previews are located. They are in fact located in your Catalog. So you go down to where you have your Catalog on your hard drive. On default, it should be in the pictures folder. And you go down to Lightroom and you see Catalogs and click on here. You can see this Catalog here, the ultimate boss processing and editing course Catalog. And if you have more Catalogs and you don't know which one you have to choose. You just go here and you can see on top here the current Catalog that we're using, which is in fact this one. You are about to go and travel and you want to move those Smart Previews onto your external hard drive so you can move those files onto your laptop so you can go and travel. Way to do it is very, very easy. You just go and take the Catalog, Copy that galbi onto your external hard drive. So we have that map in here on our laptop. We just go into Lightroom and we go now and just load that Catalog. So we go to Open Catalog and we go where we have stored that which is on our desktop, which is here. This is the fuller. We double-click on it and we click and open this file here. We just go and open that Catalog and relaunch what Lightroom with this catalog, we have to relaunch Lightroom for that. So we just click on it. Lightroom will go and relaunch. And the photos that you've created a smart preview from will now be available to edit on. So you could just go and edit and do all your things. Once you're done, Let's say that you are back from your trip. Go and dig this file here. You can just go and replace it. You can just go and delete this. And we just take our Fuller here and we're just blaze that back and a bunch opening Lightroom now, those Smart Previews, those areas that we've done on those Smart Previews on our other laptop will now Lightroom will just synchronized dose adjustments that we've made with the original files. Let me come now to the bone how they could in fact also optimize the performance on your desktop, having them 22. How Smart Previews can Optimize the Performance Speed in Lightroom: Smart Previews day because they use a smaller preview size in a Develop module, we get edit or faster with it. Now we don't have to go and remove the original file and take it offline or something. We could in fact go here up to edit. We go to Preferences. And in performance, you can see use Smart Previews instead of originals for Image Editing. And then also this will allow increased performance but may display decreased quality while Editing. Final output will remain full size squatting. So what that means is the Smart Previews, the quality of the preview, because the file is also smaller, the quality of the preview will be a little bit less than the original preview. But if you export the file, it will actually use the high-quality of the original file. So it's not like it will decrease in quality or ending. Upon having this checked on, you, Smart Previews, stuff original for Image Editing and we click on Okay, and you might have to restart Lightroom for that. If we go to Develop module and we start editing, we are in fact using the smart Previews. So we go to develop this should definitely increase the Performance. Be aware that also building smart Previews, they do take also extra disk space, not a lot, but if you will go and make from all your 10,000 photos in your Catalog, Smart Previews definitely builds up. Definitely builds up and will become a lot. Oh yeah. And if you ever want to delete your Smart Previews, select all the photos in your whole catalog that you have. Then you can see here all the photos that are made as a smart preview and all the photos that are not as a smart preview. And now you can just go and click on it. You can say discard three Smart Previews. And then Lightroom will just go and discard those Smart Previews. Less steep that I will give you here is be sure to optimize your hard drive, right? At least have about 30% of your hard drive free of space. Because if you're using 90% of your hard drive, the performance of lightroom will, will drop down a lot. So if Lightroom is very slow for you and your hard drive is very full, reason why is because of your hard drive, tried to free some space up from your hard drive, you will dramatically see an increase in performance and Speed in Lightroom. So there we go, these steps will definitely help you improve the Performance Speed of Lightroom. If Lightroom is working very fine for you than maybe apply a few of them, but you definitely don't have to go and do all of them. But if Lightroom is working or running very slow on your computer or laptop, go and apply those steps and you will see an improvement of Speed and Performance in Lightroom 23. SECTION 2 - How Layers & Layer Masks Work: Welcome here to the second section of the course. And in this section we're gonna go and explore Photoshop. I just want to say that if you're jumping into the course is now because you have skip the first section, then I just want to say welcome here to this section and much FUN here, learning about Photoshop. Now, if you're, if you gain from the first section, are your progress all the way now here to the second section, then I want to say congrats to you, you've done a pretty amazing job and I hope you've come to learn a lot in the first section about Lightroom, and I hope that you're ready here now to learn more about Photoshop. Now, in this lesson we're gonna go and touch a bond, the basics of Photoshop and the tools that we will need to edit photos. Let's jump into Photoshop and let me start off by explaining Layers and Layer Masks. Because Layers and Layer Masks are what Photoshop work surrounds, you will use them all the time in Photoshop. And I will explain to you the basic around one or layer and the Layer Mask is and the difference between them. And don't be afraid if it doesn't make sense too much yet. It can be definitely a bit confusing or unclear in the beginning. But in a third section where you will start editing our photos, you will come to see me use Layers and Layer Masks all the time. And you will also start understanding more and better what exactly they do and what they are for. Let me explain what layer is. Right here. We can see a blue layer, and here at the right side we can see Layer one, which is the red layer, layer two, which is a blue layer. Now, the best way to explain Layers, you can see them as a piece of paper. Right here. We have the red layer, that's the bottom piece of paper. And we have the blue piece of paper there. That layer, we have just put that on top of it. So right now, we can only see the blue layer. We can always see the blue piece of paper because the red one is at the bottom. It is there, but we just can't see it right now because it's just governing the blue paper, discovering red paper completely. But if we will click here this eye, which will reveal an unrivalled, you can see the red layer appearing, right? So it is there. If we click on that I again, we're putting that piece of paper bag. Now, if I would take your eraser tool and we're going to touch upon all those tools in a minute. And I will go and guts with my eraser tool, true it you can see we are, actually, we're cutting through that blue piece of paper and the red piece of paper is now revealing. So that's basically how layers work. So if I drag this, the red layer on top, you can see now that the red layer is on top. And if I would take my eraser tool now, you can see the blue layer appearing because we're cutting through it. Now we have three layers on top. And again, you can see this or explain this to the piece of paper. We have the red piece of paper, the blue piece of paper. And then all the way on the top we have the green layer, the green piece of paper. Now, if I would take my eraser tool and select degree layer and I would go and guts. We are now cutting until the blue paper. Now, if I would select the blue layer here and let me just go a little bit more here. On the green one, if I would select the blue layer, and I will go now with my eraser to it. Where do you think we're getting to? We're cutting through the layer underneath it. So then the red layer will appear. Now, let me go and touch upon what Layer Masks are and what they are for. This here are the layers. And when we were working with the eraser tool, we wanted to reveal some of the red layer here. We are in fact working destructively because right here you can see we are in fact damaging our layer. We don't want to do this because we're damaging our original file here using layer masks. We can in fact work non-destructively in Photoshop and leaf our original file untouched, but still do edits on it. Let me show you how to do that. Creating a layer mask is very simply done by hitting here, down here on the square with a circle in it, you will see now a white mask, a beer, and that's a Layer Mask. Now we have the slag that we have to select that the work on the layer mask. And here the colors, black and whites, they are very important Colors. We need to use the Brush tool for this. And a Brush Tool is over here. Or we can use be Shortcuts for the Brush tool. And again, I will go into those tools in a minute and also touched upon Shortcuts and everything that's in another lesson, we need to use the Brush tool to work on Layer Masks. And we need color set to black and white. And on default, it is set on black and white. If you've been playing around and you've got some weird colors going on. You can just press on the, which will reset those scholars is the shortcut for resetting the wide and a Blake color. Again, now, what you need to remember is white reveals black conceals. So white reveals black hides. If I will paint now with black in this Masks, now, we are in fact hiding away. The blue. We are Effect hiding away from this mask here. The effects, if we want to bring that back again, hitting the X, which will switch it over now to white, we can reveal that mask again. You can see. So hitting X black conceals, we hide, we hide the blue now. With the exon whites, we reveal the blue. Now, you can see here, Let's make your face from it. You can see here that we are making those adjustments on the mask. And if we look here on the layer, it's completely untouched. Nothing happened to it, but here on the mask, you can see the smiling face. And if you hit Alt and you click on it, you can see exactly those adjustments that you've made on there. So we are working non-destructively when we are using layer masks on the layer 24. The Various Editing Tools in Photoshop: Now let me go over here and show you some of the tools that we have in Photo shop and the ones that we will use for editing photos. And I'm just giving you here a base understanding of what they do. If this slide a real first time that you are seeing Lightroom and all the tools available. Some of them will not make a lot of sense maybe at first, but we will come to work a lot more with those tools all individually. And I will go on to explain them a lot more in-depth within those lessons. I'm just giving you here now a base understanding of the tools that we will come views. The first Tool here is the Move tool. With the Move tool or you can move things. So if we go here to this layer, we can just move this layer now around. With the move tool. You give me move this. Down here we have the Elliptical Marquee Tool. And if you click on it, you can open up some other shapes. And what this does, we can make a selection from that store. So if we just drag it and we make now like a circle, we have a selection here. A lot of times you will come to see me use this a lot to Make a Vignette in a Photo. Also, if you making a selection but you're not happy with where you started. You can just click on the Escape button and then you can start over again. And if you want to have a straight circle, because now you're like, Yeah, it's a little bit hard. Hitting the shift will make that completely straight. So hitting Shift while you're dragging, it will just hold the shape of a circle. Now, down here we have the lasso tool. And with the lasso tool, It's also to make selections. But here we can just drag a lasso around something and we can make a shape, and then it will make a selection from that. Here we have the Quick Selection tool. With the Quick Selection Tool, we can make a quick selection. So let's say that the blue here is the sky. Now we have here the ground, and we want to make a selection from the sky. Healing, The Quick Selection Tool, we can make the selection from that very easily. It's Photoshop is calculating the contrast between them and separating them. You can see now we have made a selection from this and if we add, we want to add more. You can see photoshop is very smartly seeing the contrast between the two and making a selection alone from the sky. Here. Here we have the crop tool where you can crop your photo with it. It's like we have in Lightroom, the crop tool. If you want to cancel it, you just go down here to this sign and Danny will cancel it. Or if you want to have this crop that you just click here on the yes sign, and then he will make that crop for you. So next we have the Eye dropper and what this does, let me just been a couple of colors here with the eyedropper, we can read that dollar. So if we go now down here, that was already selected, but if we go down here, you can see now being selected over there. Let's go to read. And it will be selected now in there and to the blue. Now, if you go into the Brush tool hitting the Alt, you can have the shortcut for sampling of color, but this only works in a Brush Tool. Hitting Alt. We are selecting that Color and we can go and quickly already color with that. Let's thing that you see, we are sampling the color with the sample Tool. So the next tool here that we have here is the spot Healing Brush. And if we right-click on those icons here, and that's for all of them. There will come a whole range of other options open. Now, I'm only digging into just a few of them, the ones that we will can and need them most. But there is a whole lesson in the Photoshop section touching upon the retouching in Photos and all the tools to make Retouch us in a Photo. And then we'll, we will come to explore In-Depth all those other tools here and some other tools as well for retouching a Photo. Now in here I'm just going to show you the spot healing tool. We can just remove some spots. So if we just bend it than light, you will calculate in reading what would be best-fit in here on the red. So probably it will go and replace it now with some blue. And as you can see, it didn't replace it with some blue LME, just do a before and after. So it yield that now and fixed it by replacing blue on it. Now, like I said, we will come to explore those tools a lot more in-depth on Photos where they actually will make a lot more sense to use on. Let me explain the Brush tool because there are a few things here, a few settings here, opacity, Flow. And then if we right-click having the Brush tool, we also have size and hardness. Let me start off by explaining size and hardness of the Brush tool. Now first of all, we can increase and decrease the size by just right-clicking and going here to size. And now we increase or decrease the brush size. Now this is a very clumsy way of doing it. An easier way is hitting the button. And then just right-clicking and dragging to the right side, we will increase the brush. And if we drag to the left side, we will decrease it. So that's a much better way than just right-clicking and going in here. So that is Paltz. Right-click, drag to the rights to increase directed left to decrease. Now with that, if we hit Alt right-click and we will drag downwards, we will increase the hardness of the brush. And if we go up, we will increase, decrease the hardness of the brush. So again, if we drag now down, we increase the hardness drank of decrease the hardness. So about that, the hardness is the hardness of the brush. So let me white color here. Let's decrease the brush here. And let me go to 100% of hardness and let me just make year. Now this, you can see it's very strong. If I would go all the way to zero and I would do it. Now, you can see we have a very soft brush. Now. The Lord is the softer brush will be, and the higher is, the harder our brush will be. 25. Opacity & Flow, Dodge and Burn Tool, History, Blend Modes: A let's go and see now how we create HGR photos in light room. I've already explained a little bit when we were going over how to create a panorama photo, what an HDR photo is. But I'm sure that it happened to you that you wanted to have your foreground well exposed and that they the background was completely blown out now, and I'm sure it also happened the opposite that the sky was beautifully exposed. But here, the foreground is completely underexposed. Now, the way to go and fix that is by merging those two into an HDR photo. Now, commonly HDR photos are out of three photos, and that is an overexposed photo, a normal exposed photo, and an underexposed photo. You can, in fact, just use the underexposed and overexposed photo. You can just use two files as well to create an HDR photo. But you're just giving light through more information here by having three photos to create an HDR photo. Now, the way to go and create an HDR photo is just like a panorama photo, very simple. Let's just select the first photo and then shift click to the end photo. Also here, as with panorama, I number my photos, one, two, three, and I put them into a stack staging group into stack, and like I said, you don't have to do this. This is just something that I always do because it just gives me a nice overview of everything. Let's go and select the photos that we want to merge together. Right click on it, go to Photomrg and click on HDR. So here we just merged our photo now together in an HDR and well, it doesn't look like there's much really happened, right? Now, when we merge it together and we're into the developed module and we start pulling on some adjustments, you will see there will be a big difference. Now, let's go over the options here. Auto align, I would have that choose checked on. There might happen a little bit of slight movements. Auto align will just auto align those three photos while it will align them. So that's nice to have checked on. Autotone it will already give you some kind of starting point of the HDR. I don't really have that check on. Dghosting, let's first of all, just check on show DghostingOlay, where we can see some of the fixes that Lightroom did. Now, degosting it might happen and you can see why it's doing some degosting here that there might be some different movements in one of the photos and degosting will kind of fix that with low, medium high, we can set how much we want light room to try to fix that degosting. In general, I would try to set it as low as you can go with, and the reason why is because you might end up with some weird dissortions in your photo. Set either none or low or the amount that you need, but don't overdo it because there might have been some weird dissortions. Let's go and click on Merge. Alright, so once you've done your waiting for Lightroom to create your HDR photo, we can see it here. And let me also give this now four stars. And let's go into the developed module, let me just show you now what we can do here with the sky. So if we would just bring the highlights down, you can see we are completely pulling back or pulling out now a well exposed sky and now we can go and just make some other adjustments in the shadows, try to expose this now also a bit better in the blacks as well and some contrast and some vibrance or something and maybe a little bit Oh, of temperature. Anyway, I'm not going to go and fine tune all this, but I'm just now trying to show you that we have a lot more information to work with. Now we can pull out a lot more shadow information and make this well exposed, and we have a lot more information into the whites and highlights and pull this completely out. Because if I would now use a graduated filter and would put down, some of the exposure on that graduated filter, you can see we can even take all this information out of that. So there we go. That's how you can create an HDR photo in Lightroom. Now, just as with panoramas, let me also give you a few tips on taking better GR photos. But let me start first of all, by addressing how you can create bracketing exposures with your camera. 26. Photoshop Shortcuts: In this lesson here I'm going to show you some very handy shortcuts in Photoshop. Now, just as a date with Lightroom, I have attached a PDF file onto the course here that you can just download or print out. And all those handy shortcuts or just written all nicely on there. Knowing those Shortcuts will improve and increase the speed that you're able to work in Photoshop a lot. So let's jump straight into it. The first shortcut that we have here, and let me just zoom in, is the age and all the shortcuts are attached to something that makes sense. Actually. The H stands for hands and we get the hand tool here. And the hand tool just allows us to go ahead and move around in our Photo. The next one is the B, which stands for Brush. Next on, we have the E, which stands for eraser. So again, that is E for eraser with the button. That's the shortcut for zoom. Next time we have the J. And that is for the spot Healing Brush. So the J or to spot Healing Brush. Then on we have the S, which is before the Stamp Tool. Next on with Control or Command plus D, we enable the Transform tool, which allows us to transfer our image here. So that is control plus D, very handy shortcut. Next on we have the lasso tool and that we enable with the L button. With the L button, we enable the Lasso Tool. Next on, we have control or command plus G, which allows us to group our layers or any adjustment layers. So let me just quickly copy those layers here. And weed control or command, we can just check on our select those layers that we want to group. And then hitting Control or Command plus the G will put that into a group. Next all we have the shortcut D, which will reset the colors to black and white. Again. If you start working with layer masks, black and white will be two colors that you will use a lot. So just heating the D, reset that again, which is very handy when you're working with colors and onto debt with the X button, we can switch around the black and white. So hitting X, we can switch the white one that we're using, the white-collar right now. And then hitting X again, we can switch again to Blake. On top here we have opacity and Flow. We can change that by clicking on it and dragging this down. That's one way of doing that. And we'd Flow just the same. We can increase and decrease it that way. It easier way of doing it is by hitting one to zero. So one, we hit Then percent, 20, 20%, and so on. And then zero is 100%. Now, if you want to make, let's say 11 from that, you just double hits one. And you make 11. If you want to make 12 from that, you just hit 12. And that will make 12 of it. If you want to make 15, one-five, you just hit it like fast effort shutter. Then if you want to go back to just press on the zero button for flow, we hit Shift plus the numbers. Shift plus one will make it 10%. Shift plus 30 will make it 30. And then Shift plus zero will make it 100. And just also with opacity, as I said, if you hit Shift and then doubled that one, you will make 111212. You press it faster after each other. So Shift plus the number. Next on hitting the F button, we can cycle between some screen Modes. So hitting F1 once will do something like this. We're hitting F twice will make it all black around. So it's kinda like a nice way. If you want to look at your photo a little bit and I'm hitting F again, will bring us back in to well, with all our steps here, hitting the Tab button. This will remove the sides panels here. If you ever need to do that, hitting the Tab button will make them disappear and appear again. So let's say that we've been working here a little bit here to, here to, here to your, to about that last one. You, you're not happy about it. You can hit Control Z or Command for Meg plus Z, and it will undo one-step. If you hit it again, it will redo it. So you can use it also. If you just want to compare something, you make a little bit of adjustment there. And you just want to see like does that fit, does that black spot there fit nicely on the bush there? You could just say Control or Command Plus set. And just kind of see like, yeah, looks better without it. So that's just undoing one-step or redoing it again. Now, if you want to keep going, you hit Control or Commands plus Alt and then set. And if you press on Z, now, he will undo all the steps until he can go any farther. So next time here are a few Shortcuts on Layers and Layer Masks, creating a stem visible layer, hitting Control or Command plus Alt plus shifts plus E, L. Let me repeat that again. Control Alt Shift E will make a stamp visible layer of all those adjustments. Let's just put a mask on here, hitting Control plus the I will invert the mask. So Control Plus I will invert the mask. Very handy shortcut as well to know that now emerging Layers Control or Command plus E, and having the selected layers and then hitting Control plus E will merge them down. So these are shortcuts that I use often. Now if you want to go, and because there are so many shortcuts, if you want to go and have looked through all the shortcuts, hitting Control, Shift, Alt plus K. We'll open the keyboard shortcuts and menus in here. You can go and see all the shortcuts for file. You just opened it up and you can see the Shortcuts here. And if you want, you can even make another shortcut from it. So just have a go and read through them, see if there's something else that you find handy to know as a shortcut 27. High Pass Sharpening Filter and How to Create Actions in Photoshop: Welcome here to the next lesson. In this lesson here I'm going to show you to Sharpening techniques and to blurring the techniques to apply your photos. Let me beat something here that I've mentioned in Lightroom section as well. You cannot make with this Sharpening thickness, unsharp Photo sharp if your photo that you've taken, if that is out-of-focus, Sharpening techniques will not fix that. This techniques we'll just add like an extra bunch of sharpness to your photos, but they have to be sharp First of all. So that's just to say be sure that when you are in the field taking your photos, be sure to review them. Zooming to your LCD screen with the zooming glass with the plus sign, so you can zoom into your photo at 100%, uh, be sure that your photo is in focus. Now having that set, Let's move now to the first Sharpening Technique, which is the high-pass. And the high Pass I only use on a few specific areas in my photos that are really wanted to pop out, applying it on the whole photo, it also creates a lot of noise. So I don't use that technique. Apply it on my whole photo. I just use it on very specific areas like on a portrait, on giving more a bunch on the lips or on the eyes. Or here in this photo, I would use it here on the house or maybe on a few areas in the mountains to kinda make them pop. So that is what I use the high-pass sharpening technique for now, creating it. Let's say that we are hearing the adjustments that we've been editing our photos a little bit. Let's just do a few things. And don't worry, we will come to cover all of those adjustments. In the third section. We have here some adjustments going on because it's mostly afterwards that you want to go and apply those Sharpening techniques on your photo once you've made your adjustments to your photo. So what we need to do is hit Control or commands plus Alt, plus shift plus E. And this will make a stamp visible layer. And basically what a stamp visible layer is, Stamp visible layer just makes a new layer with all those adjustments on it. So if I uncheck this now, if I click this on it and off, I'm hiding the adjustment now. In this Stamp visible layer here, I'll, if I will go and uncheck now all of them, all those adjustments are now made into that layer. So make a stamp visible layer hitting Control Alt Shift E. Now what we need to do is we need to desaturate that layer by hitting Control or Command Shift plus you. And now we just desaturated that. And afterwards we have to go here on top to Filter, go down to other. And you can see here High Pass. And we get this image here. Now, you can see some of the edges are a bit more out. There are a bit more out. If we would increase the radius, we can see it's pumping out a lot more. Now, you don't wanna go that far. Mostly you just got to want to have it that it's just appearing out. But this can vary from Photo to photo, of course, and how much you want apply on it. But for here I would just go with 2.9 here. We just click, Okay. And now our Photo looks just weird, right? What we need to do next to make our Photo look as normal again is go down here to the Blend Modes, click on it, and go to overlay and click on that. And you can see our Photo is now back to normal. And if I zoom in here now, and I would just click this off and on, you can see dramatically how much more our Photo just got sharpened up. Now, obviously, you don't want to create all those things all the time. Again, right? What I'm going to teach you now is how to create an action. And when an action we can, we can save this pretty much. But we need to record those steps into how we created that, and then we can create an action out of it. So let me just go and delete the high-pass filter for now. And for me in my toolbar, the actions. If you don't have it here, then just go down here to Window and locate Actions and click on it. Now to create an action, we have default actions, but they're not really that great honestly. But I would say go and create your own actions, your own map, what your own actions IF year, jellis files, Actions. And a way to do that is going down here to this map and just name You are said to your name and then Actions. And within that folder, just click on it. And what we're gonna do now is we have to click on this new action here, and we're going to call its high Pass sets in jellis fast Actions. And if you want to give it a function key, you can even do it at so that you just press F2, for example, to make that action happen. So let's click on records. You can see now it is recording. So let's go and do just the exact stem, same things as we did before. Go, click on Control Alt, Shift E to make a stamp visible layer. And you can see by the high-pass Merge Visible, that action just got recorded. Now let's go and hit the next step that we did Control Shift you the desaturated and something that I actually forgot to mention in the first time that we did this. We can create a smart objects from our high Pass. What Smart Objects allow us to do the first time when we created the high Pass. Once it's greater, we can really adjust the radius. And if we wanted to have it a little bit more of a Sharpening, we have to redo everything again. Creating a smart object actually allows us to go into those adjustments again and change the Sharpening. Now, let me create it and I will show you in action. So just go to the layer here, right-click on it and go to Convert to Smart Object, which is also recorded here. Now, the next thing we have to go to Filter, just go into otter and high Pass. And in here now we can go and big the radius, which now because of the smart object, once we have done everything, we can go back and adjust that again. So let's just leave that on the same apply. And let's go and change our blending mode now to overlay. And there we go. Now we just click here on the stop sign. And we have now all of those actions here. Just click on high-pass and click on play. And there we go. Let me explain or show you the Smart Object. Now. We have here are high Bess, but down here we have smart filters. And you can see here high Pass. If I would double-click on that, it will in fact Load the high-pass filter again. And we could go and adjust it now. So let's say that we are now want to have it to five. We can just go and not having to redo all those steps again, apply that. So smart objects, we will come to use them in one of the blurring techniques as well because they are very, very handy. So let me go now and remove the high-pass filter that we have created. Let me run the action that we have made to show you. So just take all of that and just put into it again or the trash can. And we go here now to Actions. And we select High Pass and we click on play. And Photoshop is now loading all those steps again. And you can see it is applying all those steps now. And there we go. We have the high-pass filter by a touch of a button here. I would definitely recommend you to do that if you don't, each don't want to go and redo all those steps over again. 28. Smart Sharpen Technique, Tilt-Shift & Gaussian Blur Filter: I taught you that I don't use the high-pass filter on my whole photo right now what we can see is it is applied everywhere right now. Don't wait to just use it on specific areas is by adding a layer mask on it. So we have the high-pass filter here. Now let's just go and click on the Layer Mask. And now we have a layer mask on it. What we have to do is we have to invert that mask and we do that by hitting Control or Command plus I. And now you can see a black mask. And now you can all see are the high-pass filter is not applied anymore. What we do now is by taking our Brush tool, by hitting be, selecting whites. We can go and start painting here. You can see now that we are painting that sharpness bag, but just on specific areas that we want. You can see it. Let me just redo that. So we are just applying it now on specific areas and I'm not going to do this all photo, but you get the point. What I mean, we have to go at invert or mask to black and then go and hit whites with our brush, and then go and paint where exactly you want that effect to apply on. Let me go and show you now the second Sharpening technique called smart Sharpen. Now, I use this technique more for Sharpening everything in my photo or at least more things than I would do with this high-pass filter. And the smart Sharpen Tool is really a smart tool. He is more final way of putting details in Your Photo. Let's create first a copy of our ground. Let's make a smart object from it. So right-click on it. Go to Convert to Smart Object. And now we go to Filter. And we go to Sharpen, and then to smart Sharpen. Now here we get the smart Sharpen Panel, and here you can see the amounts is obviously the amount of Sharpening that we are applying on it. The radius is the Sharpening, the thickness of the edges that you are increasing and then reduce noise. You could in fact reduce some noise with the smart Sharpen Tool. Remove, I would just leave it as a Lens Blur. Now, you could also go to motion blur. If for example there will be some motion happening in your photo, you could in fact got to fix it with putting the angle here where the motion is coming from. But I would go and just leave with a Lens Blur. Now you can also go into shadows and highlights and go and add some Sharpening into the shadows and highlights more individually. But I just use here the amount, the radius and reduce noise. I just use them. So let's go and click on. Okay, Let's zoom in here a little bit and let me make that invisible and visible again. And you can see that we have put some details, some extra Sharpening here into our Photo. This word to Sharpening techniques that I use a lot and you will come to see me use in third section when we are editing photos. Next thing that I want to show you now is some blurry techniques because a blind, some blurriness through a Photo can really give it some depth and really some cool effects. I'm going to start by showing you the Tilt-Shift blurry Technique. We go and create that by first of all, copying our background here. And by going and creating a smart object from it. So right-click on it, Convert to Smart Objects. Now, we go up here to Filter. We go to Blur Gallery. And down here you can see Tilt-Shift. And let's go and click on that. Now, the Tilt-Shift, it gives blurriness on adapt on the bottom. Now, you can see here this circle. If we go and increase that, we increase the blurriness of our Photo. And obviously if we decrease it, we decrease the blurriness. Alright, let me just go and do it a little bit more. Here. You can adjust gun how the blurriness kind of fades in and out. So if you go More up, it's stronger. If you drag it down, you can see kind of fades more smoothly together. And that's also here as well. And then of course here you can set the range from where the blurriness kind of starts. So let's go and do something like this here. Now we can just go and click on, Okay, over here. Now also here, Let's say that you did not really wanted to have the blurriness too much here. We can put a layer mask on here by just selecting it and clicking on Layer Mask. And in this case, we don't really want to invert it. We just want to keep it like this. But now we want to switch to our black dollar, the Brush. And we can put the opacity like to 40%, a little bit more, less. And then we can just start brushing away here from where we don't want the effect actually. Moving on now to the less blur technique that I want to show to you. And that is the Guassian blur for here. Also we go and just copy, make a copy of our backgrounds. And the Guassian blur will apply on the whole photo. But we will also go and invert the mask to a black mask. And Gaussian Blur is more if you just want to specifically put some blurriness on some specific areas. So let's go and create this Smart Object from it. And let's go up here to Filter. Let's go down to Blur, Gaussian Blur. And here the radius, That's the amounts of blurriness that we're giving to our Photo. Let's just put it on seven and we click on, Okay. And what you can see that we have the blurriness now on our whole photo right now, we obviously don't want that. So we go and create a layer mask on there. Like I said, we hit Control or Commands plus I to invert that layer. And now Healing the Brush, going to the whites weekend and go apply some blurriness on specific areas. Let's say we want some blurriness over here. For that. We wanted some over here in the backgrounds. We go we can go into that now. Just anywhere in a Photo, just very individually or specifically where we want that to imply. On. There we go. We have just now seen some good Sharpening techniques to use in Your Photo and some cool blurring techniques to apply in your photo as well. 29. Spot Healing Brush, Healing Brush, Clone Stamp Tool: Photoshop comes with a lot of very powerful touching tools. We're going to touch upon some really cool things here in this lesson. So you're able to go and correct and do the fixes in your photos as needed. Let's start off with the spot healing brush, and spot healing brush can be found here on this patch. Or the shortcut for that is the J. Let's start here because if you're right click on it, we have spot healing brush, healing brush, and then you have patch tool content to wear Move tool red eye tool. Now we're going to touch here upon the spot healing brush tool and the healing brush. Let's start here with the spot healing brush. Let me just zoom in here on this lovely lady. And let's go ahead and remove here this little bump. And it's done very easily. You just zoom in and you make it big enough that it covers the dot here and just click on it, and Photoshop will go and fix that. That's the spot healing brush tool. That's to kind of fix the kind of dots very easily. Now we have here on top the type. We have proximity match, create texture and content aware. Proximity match with this, and this is probably the one that I use the most proximity Match and Content Aware, those two. Proximity match, when you use it, Photoshop will actually go and use actual pixels from the photo and we'll go and blend them together to fix that spot. Content Aware uses image content close to the law of the image. I would say if you have trouble fixing a dot or spot or something, then just try to switch between content aware to proximity Match and the same if you have trouble with proximity Mach, try to just switch over to content aware because sometimes the other techniques that are being used by Photoshop in them might have better results. Also, one thing on this, many times when you are fixing a spot, but it does a horrible job, right now, it does really good job there. But if it does a horrible job, just using it twice, right now, this doesn't look too great, and maybe making it a little bit smaller. This looks already a little bit better, right? So sometimes just using it a few times because right now, this is pretty good. You actually give Photoshop another chance to go and calculate better pixels or something. And then if the proximity doesn't work at all, just go and switch over to the content where and that could, in fact, have better results as well and switching between them. I do mostly if it doesn't work. Let's just switch over to another photo here so I can show you better and let's zoom in here to the letters here. With the healing brush, what we're doing, we have to sample from a location in our photo and then we're going to brush over it, and then Photoshop will come to fix those things. Heating alt we get this little circle here and that's a sampler so we want to fix this here, we're going to sample close to here. So let's just go and sample over here and let's just make this a little bit smaller. And you can see we are, in fact, if I make this bigger now, you can see we are in fact cloning because if I would go and sample from here, we can see the zero now appearing. But let's go over here and let's go and paint this in. And I'm not going to do it all the way, but just until you can see you see we're very nicely fixing that. But each time we have to sample again from here around it to go and fix it. You can see with a little cross, that's where we actually are painting from at the moment. You can see now we're all fixing this very, very nicely. And if I would just do before and after, in a fast way, we made the zero disappear pretty well and if we would zoom out, you would not really notice that, right? The clone stamp tool and you can use the shortcut S for that. The weight to use, and I will explain just in a minute the difference now between a healing brush and a clone stem tool. Heating Alt, let's see the zero or let's take the five now. You can see we are also copying what we sampled. The difference now between the clone stamp tool and the healing brush is that with the clone stamp tool, we're just copying what we just sampled from. With the healing brush, what Photoshop does, it will actually come and blends in the pixels together so it blends smoothly into one. With the clone Stem tool, Photoshop doesn't do that. I just completely copies what you sampled from. And in that way, it can be useful if you want to recreate or create something in your photo. If I would say I want to another of those boxes here, if I want to do that, I could just completely clone it over by sampling that. Now if I start painting, you can see we're just 100% painting another container here now. We can just make another roller completely cloning over what we're sampling. Now, let me go and learn you a very powerful retouching technique called frequency separation. And in frequency separation, we can go and smooth out the skin of our model while still maintaining the texture of it. We need to go and make two copies of our layer. Make a copy and let's go and rename them one to low free frequency. And one to high frequency. The high frequency is for the texture and the low is for the skin. What we need to do next is we select the low frequency. 30. How to Retouch for Flawless Skin with the Frequency Separation: I the high frequency is for the texture and the low is for the skin. What we need to do next is we select the low frequency, and we need to put some gaussian blur on it because we want to smooth the skin now out. So let's go here to filter. Let's go to blur and go here to gaussian blur. And let's just go and select the face over here. And what you want to do now is you want to smooth out the skin, so we want to make those blemishes almost invisible. Now, don't overdo it and it's completely just blurriness. You still want to see some texture, but like barely. I would say about six is pretty fine over here. Of course, this will difference this number different for your photo because everyone's skin is different. We go and click on o, and we've just put the low frequency. Now, we've just made that part now. Next on for the high frequency, select the layer and we need to go to image and go to apply image. Click on there and in here, layer, we want to go and set that to low frequency. Blending mode, we want to go and click on that and go and set that on subtract. Now, you need to put scale to two and offset to 128 to 182. These are calculations that well, I've not made up or something. Someone has made that to create this here. So scale two, offset 128, now we go and click Anoka? And what we have now is a photo that looks weird where you can see some word sharpness coming out, and then just a photo that is blurry. That's good. If that's the case, that's good. Now with the high frequency, we need to go to the blending modes and change that. So from normal, we go here now to linear lights. And let's make a group of them now of the high frequency and low frequency by just selecting Control and then Control plus the G to make a group. And if I will make this visible now unvisible then you will see that it will just be the same now. If that's the case, then you have done the right things. You have followed the right steps. So our photo just looks exactly the same. Now, let me go and show you the low frequency and how the high frequency work and how this frequency separation thing works now. Let's zoom in here, and we want to smoothen the skin e now because we have some blemishes here. We want to smoothen the skin a bit. So we do that by the low frequency. That's for smoothing the skin. Select that layer, and we take the lessotol now, which you can find it on here. Or you can just hit the shortcut L for that. And we're going to make now a selection what we want to smooth out, and you can kind of make a big kind of selection. So let's take this sear. Let's make that selection. And on here, we're going to go and apply Gagen blur now want it. So we go to Filter, Blur, Gagen blur. Let's now just see how we can make this nicely smoother. The numbers also will vary in depend on each photo. Here I'm going to go with just 11. I'm going to do a few more and then I'm going to show you before and after, you will actually see that we are really smoothing the skin. Let's go and smooth this part over here as well, by the way, if you don't always want to go up to filter blur and Gaussian blur, you can actually make a shortcut. And the way to go and create a shortcut of it is by going to edit and by going to keyboard shortcuts. And in here, go to filter and then just go down until you find the Gaussian blur, and then you can set it shortcut. I have here Alt plus shift plus Control plus G. It makes things faster. So let's go and apply some here too. All right. On here as well. And let's just see on her cheeks select. That's not a good seltion. Let's select them as well. You want to see for spots that you want to well, that you want to soften out or that you want to smooth out. All right. Let me go and zoom out now and show you before and after now. So you can see you can definitely see that the skin got a lot smoother, right? If you look at this area here, you can see got a lot smoother if you look here to the cheek. Got a lot smoother, too. And her nose got a lot smoother as well. So that's really what you do with low frequency. You go and make a selection of the part that you want to make smoother, and then you hit Gaussian blur on it, and it smoothens out the skin really amazingly. Now, let's go and use the high frequency, and the high frequency you can make some texture corrections. And many times for under the ice, these are some big or some pretty good results using the high frequency there. To use the high frequency, we need to go to the stamp tool. So go and click on the stamp tool or click on the and be sure that you have sample on current layer. We're using the texture of this layer and not of any of the other ones below. So have that on current layer, and let's just zoom a little bit in and let's take the clone stamp tool and let's sample over here because we want to fix that over here a little bit. Let me just I kind of hit her eye. So let me just redo that. All right. Let's do that also with the outer eye, which is gonna smoothly go over there. All right. Let's also fix a little bit over here. Let me just show you a quick before and after that. So as you can see, we made the texture. We fixed it a lot better here and over here too. If I show you before and after, looks way better. Also skin because of the low frequency looks way smoother. Now, these kind of techniques, just seeing them for the first time is like, holy it's a lot to take. I definitely get that. That's why in the third section, we're going to go and use that technique again. It's many things here in the course. Don't worry too much if at the moment, you kind of feel overwhelmed, many of the things you will come to see again in the third section where we will go and apply them while we are editing photos. The next tool that we're going to see here is the liquefying tool, and the liquifying tool is a very powerful tool in Photoshop that allows you to pull and push pixels in a photo. Now, let me just say something first here about the liquefying tool and even about all the retouching techniques that we have seen so far. You can definitely go and change the person with them drastically. I'm just giving this as a warning to you because you can overdo it very easily with those techniques. So let's just go and jump now into here and let's go and explore the liquefying tool. Now, I'm going to go and make a copy here so you can see it before and after of the changes that we've done because I would say her shoulder, we could pull that a little bit up or down and her arm a little bit in and her legs here, we can also push that a little bit in there and we can all do that with the liquefying tool. Now, the liquefying tool is located by going to filter and in here, you see liquefy. Let's go and click on that. 31. Body Shaping in Adobe Photoshop with the Liquify Tool: Let's go now and learn how to create the Star Brush in Photoshop. And we start the exact same way as we did with the Snowflakes. We create a new document first. So hit Control or Command Plus the end to Create a new documents. And also here have the width of 500 and the height on 500. Equity gun Create. So for the stars, we're also going to create two dots, but quite small ones actually compared to the Snowflakes. Let's go and creates the small dot here in the left corner. Let's try that Just one more time. Let's create an even smaller one in the top right corner. Now, let me just state the bucket to fill that more in with some black. This. But you can see these are quiet smaller dots then Snowflake once, and now we go into edits. And we also go and define Brush Preset. So click on that. And for this we're gonna go and name it Star, Brush and click on. Okay. And now we can go into our Photo here. So the same thing we have to do now as well. We have to go and customize our brush. So we go and do that by going to Window and go into Brush. What we wanna do first is we want to go and check on Shape, Dynamics and increase the Size Jitter all the way to 100%. With the Angle Jitter, the exact same all the way to 100% scattering. Have that checked on as well and be sure to have bought access on. And let's increase the scattering to about free at the gowns. Let's bring that up as well. And the gowns, we'll just, we'll just make more stars as you can see here in the preview. Now I wouldn't go and bring that all the way up, but I would just kinda go up to six Transform or transfer and the opacity jitter. Let's go and bring that up to about 49. And that's basically going to make some of the stars more visible than the other ones. That's all the settings. And now go and click here. And let's save that as well as a Brush. Let's click on, Okay, if we right-click now, we have next to our brush, Star Brush that we started with our final Star Brush now, so we can go ahead and delete that first one. So yes, Click on Okay. And if I will go and paint now, you can see we have infects some stars appearing. Now, just as we did with the Snowflakes, we're gonna go and create a new layer, an empty one. And also here, I'm gonna go and do it in three different steps. So we're going to start with some very small ones. And let me go and creates a second layer. Let me increase the brush here. Now, another layer here, and even bigger stars. Now, let me just already go and remove the stars were I don't want them. So let's just make those first two layers invisible. Let's stay the eraser tool here. Let me just go and brush that off from the tree here. Let's do that with the second layer as well. The third layer. Now the final touch you that we wanted to, to our Stars is we want to give them some glow. In a way to do that is by going selecting the layer here with just like the other ones off first, selecting the layer here and go into the FX down here, and then go into Blending Options. What you can do as well is just double-tap here on the layer, and then you open up the same menu, whatever you prefer. Let's go down here to outer glow, and let's select that. Let's go and select the color here. And this will vary from any Ghana's Sky, right? So it will be more kind of a bluish color that I want to go to. I would go maybe for something bluish like this. Let's click on Okay. And we want to go and increase the opacity to 100% the size. Let's go and increase that as well to nine. So let's go and click on. Okay. Let me just zoom in a little bit. You can see there's like an extra glow around it now, which is with the other ones. It doesn't have that yet. So now let's go and apply that on there too. And let's just double-click on that. Let's go to Auto Glow. We can just go ahead and apply the same one. Let's click on, Okay. Let's do that with less Layer, just the same. Double-click on it and outer glow. And let's go and click on OK. We could in fact also go and apply a blur on the Stars. Let's take the layer, the third layer here. And let's go to Filter Blur. And we can put a Gaussian blur on it. Now, obviously, not much at all, but just a little bit. Because the stars are never that sharp while you're taking a photo, of course. So you don't want to alert them a little bit though. So let's click on Okay for that. And let's go and blurred the outer layer as well. Gaussian Blur. Let me just make the other two invisible first. So Guassian blur, Let's go and make that a little bit more blurry to speak. No gate. And the last one here. Let's go and make some blurriness in there to Gaussian Blur. Let's just do like 3.6. And a less thing that I will go and do is put a little bit of motion in the stars. Because the stars are never going to be as perfectly in focus as here would Photoshop, right? So there's always a little bit of motion going on in them. And the way that we do that is by going to Filter blur and then motion blur. Now, for this, we obviously, we don't want like that much, right? But we just want to go and have like a little bit. So let's just see. I would probably be like about six. Let's go and hit. Okay. And I'm gonna go and apply the same kind of motion blur on the other two here as well. Up here we're just applying the filter with the same effect. Let's go and have them there. And let's go up to the other one now and click Filter motion blur. There we go. We have just now seen how to create two brushes out of nothing. Also, like I said in the beginning, go and have look on Google and check for some free Brush Packs because there are thousands of different things like what you've created now, they are very handy to Create like an extra Khurana depth to your photos, like here with the Stars and with the Snowflakes? 32. How to Load Brush Packs & How to Create Your own Snowflake Brush: Welcome you to the next lesson. And in this lesson we're gonna go and learn how to create our own Brush. One that will allow us to Create Snowflakes, and another one that will allow us to Create Stars. In a Photo. There are thousands of brushes, all for different purposes. Some that allow you to create dust, others that even will help you to make eyelashes for the eyes or leaves or Clouds. I would say go and have a look on Google and just type in Brush Packs for Photoshop. And you will find thousands of very cool Brush bags that you can go and use in Photoshop. Let me just quickly show you if you have downloaded a Brush bag, how to go and load that into Photoshop. So let's go into a Photo shop. Well, that's the photo where we're going to go and apply some snow flakes on. Now to go a lot of Brush back, you just right-click and having the brush selected, of course, you right-click and you see this little gear here. You just go and click on that. Now you go to Load brushes. And when you've downloaded the Brush, just go where you have downloaded on. So maybe your desktop or maybe in your download folder. And then just go and load that Brush. And you will go and find your brush then all the way at the bottom. But there are thousands of different brushes. They're very cool. And here in this lesson we're gonna go and learn how to Create to hurry cool brushes. So let's go and start with the Snowflakes. So the first thing that we want to do to create our own Brush is we need to make new documents. And we do that by hitting Control or Command Plus. And it doesn't have to be a big one. So I would just say Go on five onwards to 500s and then just go and click on Create. And what we need to do, put the hardness to 100 per cent. So a small.in the left corner. And the bigger dots here down below. And the dot here is scanner, not completely Blake, Blake. So you can just go into the bucket ear. You can just gonna fill that in the black color. I will show you in a minute why we are doing this, because right now it might not make a lot of sense, but in a minute it will make sense. So we need to make now a brush from this new documents. And we do that by going to edit and go and click on Define Brush Preset. Now you can see here we are in fact making a preset from this year. We're making now are our own brush from it. Let's go and name that snow flakes and click on. Alright, are okay. If we go now to our Photo and we take our brush hitting the beam, we have already selected. Now, now, of course, if I would go around, this does not look like Snowflakes. There's just two dots just going around. What we need to do now is customize our brush. So we need to go now in our Brush Settings, and we do that by going to Window and then Healing Brush. So the first thing that we want to enable go to Brush Tip Shape. And let's increase the spacing to about 40. Let's go and hit 40 here. So we're making the dots a little bit more space, spacious from each other. Now let's go and enable Shape, Dynamics and increase Size Jitter all the way to 100%. And you can see when we do it at, on the preview here, our preview is changing and you can see we are getting some kind of shape already, Right? Angle, Jitter you and put that all the way to 100% to and we're candlelight just now, more randomizing the patterns of the dots here, roundness, jitter, go and put that up to about 95. And that's kinda like we're chasing the shape now of the roundness. So go and put that to, let's say 90, minimum roundness will increase that to 85. So we're gonna bringing some roundness bank again at five. And if I will go and Brush now, the patterns are already gotten more, going, more random around. And it's Luca little bit like Snowflakes, or at least a little bit better already. Now let's go and click on scattering. And have both axes, have that checked on and bring the scattering all the way up to, let's say about like 900s. So let's bring that up to there. And in Transform, go and have opacity, jitter, go and have that checked on all the way to 100% as well. So that is it. What we need to do next is of course, save this because if we will go and unclick that now, we'll start over again. So go down here, click on there. And let's just now go and save Snowflake course. We can do that. And if we go now down here, we have in fact, the Snowflake Brush that we've just created. And then in here we also have the other one where we didn't do all those changes, which we could in fact go and delete if we just right-click on it, click on Delete Brush. So yes. Now how we want to go and start is we want to go and create an empty layer. And let's go and make our Snowflakes look white. And let's make first, because now we're going to make some depth first. And in a second once we have created the Snowflakes in here and we've created the depth. Then we're gonna go and turn them into more real-life Looking Snowflakes. The Snowflakes that we're going to Create now are all the way in the bag over here. So obviously our brush doesn't have to be very big for that. Let's go and make some Snowflakes. We could just go. And being a little bit here all the way over it. Definitely kind of forming the bag with trees. So that's my first layer that's like the Snowflakes all the way in the back ground. So obviously they are going to be smaller rights because the next layer that we're going to Create. So let's go and click on that one. We're going to make the second Snowflakes falling closer to the lens this time 33. How to Make Realistic Looking Snowflakes in Photoshop: Let's go and make now our next Snowflakes who are already a little bit bigger now. So I would stop you with this. So that is our second layer of Snowflakes. And now I want to Create a third one, which is Snowflakes that are falling the closest to the lens. So let's go and create one more empty layer here. Let's increase our brush size even more. Voila, you see what we have done? If I would just go and make that invisible student. We first created the Snowflakes all the way that are happening all the way in the backgrounds. And like I said, they are obviously smaller because they're further away than we have gone and created the second layer, which are falling midway from the lens. And then we created the Snowflakes falling all the way closest to the lens. So let's go and make the first two layers here invisible for a moment, L is focused on this one here, what we wanna do is we want to apply Gaussian blur on this to make it a little bit more blurry intake of the heart edges. So let's go up to Filter and let's go to Blur and to Gaussian blur. Now, let's go and look. You definitely don't want to overdo them because then you just make them disappear. So about 13, I would say is good. Now let's go and make the second layer here visible. Now let's go to Filter blur and Gaussian blur and make, let's make them also a bit more blurry. And here for them I'm actually like 15, looks like a pretty good one. So I'm going to select 50 here. So let's select that. Now. Let's go and enable or made the last layer here, or the third layer here visible. Let's go back to blur, gaussian blur, and let's see. And actually Effect I'm going to make them more blurry than the ones happening in the backgrounds. Just like dirty floor 34 loose. Looks pretty cool. I'm gonna go and hit on. Okay. There. This looks quite a lot more like real Snowflakes right? Now we're gonna go into one more thing and we're going to put some motion into the Snowflakes. Now I'm just going to do that on the second and third layer. Let's go to Filter blur and go to Motion Blur. And in here we can put motion. Now the angle here we can see the words pointing, that's where the snow is falling. And obviously the snow is falling, falling more to that way, right? Or that would make more sense to the composition here. I will put a -45 for this Photo. If to see for your photo, of course. And with the distance here, if I would put that all the way, we can see if we put that up more, you can see the snow already kinda falling down, right? So let's put a little bit of motion in here. Something about like 100 year would go for. And click on, Okay, let's do it as well with the third layer here. Let's go to blur, motion blur. And let's see how much looks appropriate here. And I'm sort of going for 100. And then for this, what we can do, there could definitely be some more snow in here. So we could infect you and just guppy that the layer here with the Snowflakes that we want them for me, the middle one, I kinda want to direct some more Snowflakes out of them so we can go and drag that down and make a copy of that, having that Copy now that layer selected hitting Control plus T. We can go and move those Snowflakes around. And we can even go and and position, make them a little bit more larger so they look different. So let's go and try to blend that a little bit nicely in here. I'll kind of like put something like this. So let's go and select that. So that apply a few more Snowflakes in there. And I will copy just the second layer one more time. And I will move some more over here as well. Let's just made them a little bit bigger. And Let's hit K on that too. If you don't want those Snowflakes over there, we can just easily remove them by hitting the E for eraser tool. And let's just make all of them invisible. And let's just look at the first layer here and see where we don't want the Snowflakes to come on. Let's zoom a little bit in. And let's hit the E for eraser. And I don't really, let me put that to 100 opacity. I don't want it too much over there and over here. So let's just brush that off. And that looks again, let's go and check on the second layer, which looks to me. Okay, Let's go to the copy of the second layer. And that looks okay to meet to Layer, to copy. The other one. Looks alright. Two layered tree. Looks good. Okay to maybe I could just paint off here a little bit. But looks or I2. But you can easily go and just remove the Snowflakes. Much more easier than if it will be real Snowflakes in fact. So let's go and check all of those things on again. And I would have probably applied a bit more Snowflakes over here. But you get how it works and how we create the brush, and how we create these Snowflakes to Realistic Looking Snowflakes 34. How to Create your own Star Brush to Make Realistic Stars in Your Photo: Let's go now and learn how to create the Star Brush in Photoshop. And we start the exact same way as we did with the Snowflakes. We create a new document first. So hit Control or Command Plus the end to Create a new documents. And also here have the width of 500 and the height on 500. Equity gun Create. So for the stars, we're also going to create two dots, but quite small ones actually compared to the Snowflakes. Let's go and creates the small dot here in the left corner. Let's try that Just one more time. Let's create an even smaller one in the top right corner. Now, let me just state the bucket to fill that more in with some black. This. But you can see these are quiet smaller dots then Snowflake once, and now we go into edits. And we also go and define Brush Preset. So click on that. And for this we're gonna go and name it Star, Brush and click on. Okay. And now we can go into our Photo here. So the same thing we have to do now as well. We have to go and customize our brush. So we go and do that by going to Window and go into Brush. What we wanna do first is we want to go and check on Shape, Dynamics and increase the Size Jitter all the way to 100%. With the Angle Jitter, the exact same all the way to 100% scattering. Have that checked on as well and be sure to have bought access on. And let's increase the scattering to about free at the gowns. Let's bring that up as well. And the gowns, we'll just, we'll just make more stars as you can see here in the preview. Now I wouldn't go and bring that all the way up, but I would just kinda go up to six Transform or transfer and the opacity jitter. Let's go and bring that up to about 49. And that's basically going to make some of the stars more visible than the other ones. That's all the settings. And now go and click here. And let's save that as well as a Brush. Let's click on, Okay, if we right-click now, we have next to our brush, Star Brush that we started with our final Star Brush now, so we can go ahead and delete that first one. So yes, Click on Okay. And if I will go and paint now, you can see we have infects some stars appearing. Now, just as we did with the Snowflakes, we're gonna go and create a new layer, an empty one. And also here, I'm gonna go and do it in three different steps. So we're going to start with some very small ones. And let me go and creates a second layer. Let me increase the brush here. Now, another layer here, and even bigger stars. Now, let me just already go and remove the stars were I don't want them. So let's just make those first two layers invisible. Let's stay the eraser tool here. Let me just go and brush that off from the tree here. Let's do that with the second layer as well. The third layer. Now the final touch you that we wanted to, to our Stars is we want to give them some glow. In a way to do that is by going selecting the layer here with just like the other ones off first, selecting the layer here and go into the FX down here, and then go into Blending Options. What you can do as well is just double-tap here on the layer, and then you open up the same menu, whatever you prefer. Let's go down here to outer hello, and let's select that. Let's go and select the color here. And this will vary from any Ghana's Sky, right? So it will be more kind of a bluish color that I want to go to. I would go maybe for something bluish like this. Let's click on Okay. And we want to go and increase the opacity to 100% the size. Let's go and increase that as well to nine. So let's go and click on. Okay. Let me just zoom in a little bit. You can see there's like an extra glow around it now, which is with the other ones. It doesn't have that yet. So now let's go and apply that on there too. And let's just double-click on that. Let's go to Auto Glow. We can just go ahead and apply the same one. Let's click on, Okay. Let's do that with less Layer, just the same. Double-click on it and outer glow. And let's go and click on OK. We could in fact also go and apply a blur on the Stars. Let's take the layer, the third layer here. And let's go to Filter Blur. And we can put a Gaussian blur on it. Now, obviously, not much at all, but just a little bit. Because the stars are never that sharp while you're taking a photo, of course. So you don't want to alert them a little bit though. So let's click on Okay for that. And let's go and blurred the outer layer as well. Gaussian Blur. Let me just make the other two invisible first. So Guassian blur, Let's go and make that a little bit more blurry to speak. No gate. And the last one here. Let's go and make some blurriness in there to Gaussian Blur. Let's just do like 3.6. And a less thing that I will go and do is put a little bit of motion in the stars. Because the stars are never going to be as perfectly in focus as here would Photoshop, right? So there's always a little bit of motion going on in them. And the way that we do that is by going to Filter blur and then motion blur. Now, for this, we obviously, we don't want like that much, right? But we just want to go and have like a little bit. So let's just see. I would probably be like about six. Let's go and hit. Okay. And I'm gonna go and apply the same kind of motion blur on the other two here as well. Up here we're just applying the filter with the same effect. Let's go and have them there. And let's go up to the other one now and click Filter motion blur. There we go. We have just now seen how to create two brushes out of nothing. Also, like I said in the beginning, go and have look on Google and check for some free Brush Packs because there are thousands of different things like what you've created now, they are very handy to Create like an extra Khurana depth to your photos, like here with the Stars and with the Snowflakes? 35. How to Create a Sunlight Effect in a Photo: In this lesson, I am going to teach you four different sunlight techniques. One of them is a sunlight flare and other one is a sunset technique. Another one is sunlight race. And then we have a general sunlight's effect. And let's go and start with a general sunlight effect. First. We have this beautiful coconuts, which I took in Vietnam. Soda way that we want to start is by taking the Elliptical Marquee Tool, which is right up here and the feathering. The chance that this will just be zero is quite high. Let me just put it on zero. And with the Elliptical Marquee, we want to make a selection where we want the sunlight effective urine. We want to go make it somewhere over here and probably a bit more. Let me zoom out. Let's take that again. Probably more somewhere like this. Now we have here the selection, and now we're going to work a little bit with some adjustments already. So let's go to the adjustments tab. Select you and saturation and just click on it. And if we will increase this, we can in fact see that we are making something happening there. Now, I've taught you that I put the veteran to zero because the chance that for you it will be on zero, it's quite high. You can see what it does. It is giving a very strong February, right? This is not very nice. We want a very, a much softer bettering that is more, more flowing smoothly over everything. So go to feathering and put that 2000's, so just 100, so we have thousands. Now, let's just go and do that over. So let's remove the adjustment. Now. Let's go up to the mark key tool again. Let's just make that selection here again. And it go now back to adjustments. And click on hue and saturation. And if we will drag that now up, you can see the effect is much more subtle. We don't have that hard edge now here. You can see that now there are few things that we want to do. Now, we want to make this look realistic. We want to go and change the blending mode of our layer. So go here to normal, click on it. And we're going to play with a few different blending modes. So let's check overlay. Let's see how that looks. And in the meantime, you can go and play with the saturation. Put it a little bit, I'll go play with you where you can go and change the color and saturation. You just increase the color and we'd lightness. You can make it brighter. Which we bolt want to play with those three sliders here? Overlay? Yeah, let's shake screen. Let's just play a little bit with it. Maybe the lightener is a little bit more down. Let's see what kind of color we want to put on it. Let me just make that invisible and visible. Screen could infect work. Let's go and check soft light. Let's just make that visible and invisible. Let's put lighteners a bit more up. The saturation. That could work too. So I am going to go with screen and let's put the saturation now up. And let's just go and look now for something that kinda looks good. Let's put with the lighting a little bit. Let's see before and after. So that looks alright. We can go and move this adjustment. In fact, if we go here to the move tool, we can go and dig it. And you can see we are now dragging that effect around so we can go and put it more where we want. And let's go and see where this looks better on. Somewhere over here. What we also can do to help you with this is we can click on Control or Command plus T for transform tool and be sure of course to have the layer selected. So Control plus T for the transform tool, you can go and drag this affects the adjustment a little bit more out. You can even go and move it up and down I will go and put it somewhere more like this and click on the sign over there. So that's a very simple sunlight's effect. Now, what we can do to make it a little bit more realistic, but we can copy this layer here by just taking it and dragging it down here to the layer here. So we have now a copy of that layer. And we can go and change the blending mode now to a different one. And I will go for soft light in this case. And in here, we can also go and adjust the contrast. Let's just go and move it a little bit around. And let's go and increase some of the lightness. Let's play here with DU and with the saturation. Let's just quickly see how that looks. Let's click on Control Plus command to Ghana. Stretched is a little bit out, a little bit here. Now, as we know, with layers, we have the possibility to go and take our brush and kind of paint on areas where we don't want that effective theorem. So go and he'd be for the shortcut, for the brush. And let's go and make this layer here invisible. Let's just go and work on the first layer that we created. And let's kinda go and spend a little bit where we don't want that effects to appear on, be sure to have it on the black color. And the opacity. I would put very lowly on 20. And let's go and paint here a little bit. And let's make the outer layer now visible. And the other one, invisible LSC. How much we are affecting with that. Let me maybe go and change a little bit of saturation and do make that a little bit more orangey. So let's go and see where we don't want to have that. And be sure of course, that you're painting in the layer. And let's put them both on now. Now in general, I would say this is the sunlight effect is strong ish. Still. What we can do is we can go to opacity and we can go and click on it. And if we drag it down, we are decreasing the opacity of the effects. So let's play a little bit with that and let's put a little bit more down. I will go to 74, the first one. Let's select the other one now and do the exact same for that. And let's put that in a little bit more to 50. So let's group dose to. So this here is just a quick before and after of the sunlight's effect that we just created very easily by just two layers. You have to know this photo is unedited. So right now it's kinda flat looking to photo because I've not really drawn out of the shadows and everything in here 36. Learn How to Create Sunlight Rays in a Photo: And this ear is one of those kind of Photos that is just begging to have some sun rays coming out of those trees here. We got like the sun here behind, shining a little bit down here, true the trees. But with the following techniques that we're going to learn, we can bring out those, again, a Sunlight Rays, a lot, lot stronger. How we're going to start Your witness sun rays is we are Effect gonna go and create also a customized Brush. And we've already seen now how to do that. So we're already a bit familiarized with that. So just click on the B for brush. Now, we don't, for this one-half to Create a new documents, we just go and take our brush here and go up to Window and go to Brush in here, what we wanna do is we want to go to Shape Dynamics and click and drag the Size Jitter all the way up to 100%. If the minimum diameter is somewhere on another percentage, go and drag that up to zero because we want there that aren't zero. Now let's go and click on scattering. Scattering scatter. First of all, have both axes, have that checked on and scatter itself, go and drag the all the way up well to it thousand-year, all the way to the maximum. And you can see we are scattering everything apart. Next, let's go to the brush tip shape. And you might want to put the spacing. You want to space those little dots here a little bit around. Let's just take the brush here and let me do a few dots already. And let's go and put the spacing a little bit more up so we can space those dots a bit more to at, and that's it. Now we obviously want to go and save this here as a Brush Preset. And a way to do it that is by clicking down here on this little icon and let's call it sun lights race. And I'm putting a two there because already have one. And click on, Okay. And now if we right-click and we go here into where all our brushes are, we can go and see now all the way our New Sunlight Rays Brush. So we have that selected. Now let's just click all this off. And if we go on Brush, we have some cool that's flying around, which is good because this will eventually become our sun rays. Now, the way we want to go and start is by creating an empty layer. So go down here to this icon to create an empty layer. And we want to sample here some of the color that is going on here. And we go, well, be sure to have in the Brush been a Brush. And then if you click on Alt, you have the sampler here. And let's simple here are coming nice, a nice color here from the sun. And I'm kinda wanna go with that orange color here. That's going to like hitting the tree. So let's zoom out now. And what we wanna do is we take our brush, is also we'd like the Snowflakes. We're gonna go and make multiple layers. So one guy, a small one and then another one, a bigger one with bigger sun rays coming out of it. For this one, I'm gonna go with a smaller one. And I'm just going to paint from here down below. And from here. From here. I will just deliberate around there. Do a little bit of them over there. From years, well, from here to and from here down to. So now we have just a whole range of dots flying around, which doesn't look like anything at all rights. What we've learned to do is we want to go to Filter. We want to go to Blur and go to Radial Blur. In here. What we want to do is we want to bring the amounts all the way to 100%. And we have here blur method. We have spin and zoom. Now we don't want spin, but we want to go to Zoom. Now. We don't want to go and hit in the middle. But we can move this box here. And we want to move that box from where the sun is coming, which is from here. So now you can see like this preview here is an exact sample of what is going to happen and click on Okay. And next thing what we want to do is we wanted to change the blending mode. Let's go and see which looks better here. Many times, screen overlay, soft lines and linear light could affect look very nice Tool. And in this case, linear light thus looks. It looks pretty nice. But let's go and check screen as well, which looks very fine to Color Dodge. Does it look better? Yeah. I actually Color Dodge looks pretty nice. Overlay is a little bit darker. I'm think Color dodge, she's a nice one to have here. And I'm just gonna leave this now. And let me just make that invisible. And let's create another empty layer. And let's create some more sun rays, but some bigger ones in this time. And let's just maybe that's a bit too big though. Let's just go over here. Down from here, down and some here to down. I'm not going to make that many from this Here, we go up to Filter and we can just go and load the same effect, the same Filter here by just clicking here on the top. 37. How to Blend Sunlight Rays More Realistic in Your Photo: Let's as well a go and change the Blending Mode of this layer here. So let's go up here on normal. And let me also make the first layer visible because we could also go straightaway for Color Dodge here on the second layer. But sometimes mixing another Blending Mode together with the other one that we had, Kuti IV bag, be nice. So let me experiment here with soft lights. Let me go and check overlay. Let's see screen, which looks validator. And let's also just check Color Dodge, which we're done here. So screen is a bit warmer and Color Dodge. I might infect, go for overlay because it's giving a bit more, makes it a little bit more dramatic over here. So I like Overlay. Now, let me make this invisible. And the thing what we want to do is we want to also create some blur onto those light rays here, just to take some of the heart edges of them. So let's go up to Filter. Let's go up to Blur and go to Gaussian blur. Now, you obviously don't want much. So I would just apply like 1.5 and you can Hartley maybe see it. But it's just taking some of those hard edges off. So just click on. Okay, let's do that as well with the outer layer. So let's just go to Filter and just go on top you on Gaussian Blur. Let's go now and position our sun race a bit better because they're okay, but overhear they could be a little bit more blended in. So I'm just going to make that first one invisible. And let's take the first one and let me zoom a little bit out and hits, let's hit Control or Command plus D, transferred Tool. And we can go and move this a little bit more. Let's move that more there. And let's click on Yes, Alice do the exact same Fourier other one, which does in fact look fine to me. But let's just see, Let's pull it a little bit more up. The next thing that we want to do is we want to go and Blend our sun rays better into our Photo. Because you can see over here that will, This doesn't look like to Realistic and asleep. We want to go and blend that a bit more into our Photo. And we could in fact just hit the E for eraser, put our opacity down and go and change that way as I've thought in the Stars and with the Snowflake, that nice while we created that Brush. But that's a destructive way of doing it. In here we render want to go in a non-destructive way. So we do that by creating a mask layer, mask onto our Layer. Have the layer here selected and click here on the layer mask. And we have now a Layer Mask here. So if we hit the beat for the brush and we have our color set on the black color. We can go. And we'll definitely be sure to right-click and have a different brush. The just the standard Brush. And now we can go and blend this better in together. So let's zoom in here because this year is definitely too hard. Let's take the brush and let's set the opacity to 20%. And let's just been here. The blend that a little bit more nicer in. Alright, so let's move over to the next layer here. Let's just go and click down here to add a layer mask on it. Now let's make the other one invisible. And let's see, we're, This is hitting where we don't want it. And honestly, this is pretty fine to me. Now. This is probably a little bit too much. But we can go into, if we have the layer selected, we can go and bring your best deal a little bit down. And I would in fact bring the opacity of the second layer here a little bit more down. Let's bring it just to about 20. And let's see, with our first layer, first layer I would just keep up. So that is a very, let's just group them together. Let's click on Control bleeds gi. Let me just show you. That is a way to Create SCN race into our Photo. We can also now go and change the you and the saturation of those SCN race. So let's make one of them invisible again and just have one layer selected. I click on Control or Command Plus you. Here, the hue and saturation that will go and appear on. And we change the you in here, do a different color. It's not changing tremendously a lot. But it's changing a little bit easier because you can see over here, it's getting a little bit darker. And let's make it a little bit darker. And saturation, Let's just bring out a little bit up. And let's click on. Alright, let's do the same with the outer layer. Let's just click on Control Plus you. And let's see if we can also affect that a little bit. And let's bring these a little bit more to the blue are sites. Now let's click on OK. And there we go. A very easy way of making some SCN race a beer into our Photo 38. Learn How to Create a Sunset Effect in a Photo: Moving on, we will learn how to create a nice Sunset Effect in Photoshop. And we will go and start down here to the gradient tool. And maybe the paint bucket might be there. But we need the gradient tool. And we are going to Create now our own gradient. Just as with the brush, we can make a preset of that. So we just have to do it once, we just have to set it once and then we're good to go for always. So we go on top here having the gradient tool selected. And let's click on that. This year is a Sunset Effect that we want to Create. Go and select here one of the gradient filters, and click here down on the left arrow. You can double-click on it and you get the color picker. Now here on the left side, we want to set that all the way to white. So pick white and click on Okay, here on the right sites, we want to set a red color and you can just click it once to Ancic, click on color as well. And let's set that to a red color. About this. Let's click on, Okay, now in here in the middle, we want to have also an arrow, so you can just double-click on it. And then another one will appear. And let's just click on that as well. And here we want to Create, we want to set a nice orange. So let's speak about this kind of orange, which looks nice. And let's click on Okay. And we want to go and drag here to left arrow a little bit to the right side. So let's just take that and let's drag that little bit to the right site. And with the middle won't we won't drag that a little bit to the right side as well. About this. Let me just take this color here, the red one, and let's make that a little bit more lighter about this kind of color. And now we want to go and save this obviously, so we don't have to recreate it all the time again. First of all, we can name it, so we'll its name, it's Sunset Effect. And then we can go and click on New. And now we clicked on it. We have here the Sunset Effect. Click on Okay. And we have that here. Select that now. Now on top here, we have a couple of possibilities. Now, obviously for the sun, which is round, we want to have around one. So we click here on this one, which creates now a nice round circle. What we want to do first of all, as we want to Create a new layer. So go in down here and click on layer. We want to drag this now and then drop it to Create our son. And of course, the bigger you may get, the bigger it will be, right? So we don't want it like enormously bag. So let's go by this. So that's fine. We should debit around in the middle, because what we need to do next is we're going to mask this out. And the way to do that is we go to the mark key Tool here, the Elliptical Marquee, and a nice little thing here that I'm going to teach you now. You can select it going from here and then trying to find like a forum, right? The goal around it, which scanner? It will take a few tries. A very easy way to mask this out is just go into the middle. Don't do anything yet. Hit Alt and then click down. And circle will appear from where you click down. Now, this is still like going like that. If you click on Shift at the same time, it will keep that forum. So this way we can select out nicely our son. So let's just go and create a little bit like this. We still want the red in there too. Because we have put the feathering to a thousands. If I were made this in a mask. Now, let me just do that. We can see here, it's very, very, you can hardly see the sun now. So what we need to do is we need to go and put the feathering down. So let's just create a new layer here. Let's just put this down again. And let's take the Marquee tool and put the feathering to zero. And now let's go you in the middle, click on Alt plus shifts. So it holds. And if we Create now we go down here having that selection and we click here, we make a mask of that. And we have this nice round circle now, which is in fact our Sun, where you want to go and change the blending mode now. So go to Blending to normal Alice desk would screen. Let's test with overlay. Let's see soft lights. No Let's see, Let's see linear lights. If I could find it. Linear lights here, I would select either screen or heart lights, which is over here. But let's go with screen for now. Let's take screen, Let's make the blending mode to screen. And let's, because now what are some very hard edges over here? We want to put some blur on there. So let's go here, up to Filter, go to Blur, and go to Gaussian blur. And let's drag this up. And let's see now until it is SCANA going a little bit more smoother out. So you can go pretty high with that in fact. And I will go about 180 tree for them. So I click on Okay. And if we, with the move tool, we can go and move this anywhere around. Now, this looks a little bit more like a Sunset, right? Obviously, again, you want to place it somewhere where it makes sense. Putting it over here doesn't make much sense as putting it over here because the sun appear from there. So let's put it more here. Hitting Control plus D, we have the transfer Tool. And with the transfer Tool, we're going to go and drag this little bit more routes and even more. Let's make it a little bit more smaller. And let's see where we're going to place that. But let's drag this a lot more out. Something like that. Let's click on DES sign. We want to go and take our brush now with B. And we want to blend this Sunset Effect more nicely into our Photo as we did with all the other effects. And in here are also take opacity 20 and go and brush a little bit of that away. And we can also Hugo and heat on Control or Command Plus you. And be sure to have the layer over here select that and not the mask. And we can also go now and still change the lightness, the saturation, and even you of our sun. We can correct it a little bit more. Saturation. We can, well, we could play a little bit with that to lightness. We can play with that as well. But let's put that just a little bit like that. So let's click on OK. Now as I said, I would've spent a lot more time perfecting this. Because here it doesn't look too great yet, but you get the buoyancy of how it is done. And in the third section we're going to explore way more in-depth applying a Sunset Effect like this. And where I will in fact thick all the time into perfecting it as best as I can. But in the year I'm just showing you that the techniques, so you know how it's done. But in the third section you will see just how you can perfect it a lot more into blending it in altogether more with the whole photo. So it does look more like a real Sunset Effects. 39. How to Create a Lens Flare in a Photo: We want to go and put a nice sun flare effect because the sun is coming from year. And it's kinda like picking up a little bit and it will be very cool. They're like a sun flare effect gum out of there. So the way to start, we want to Create a new layer and we want to make that layer like. So click on Control plus deletes and you are in fact applying the color what is selected here now, now draw up to Filter. Go to Render. Here you can find Lens Flare. So click on that. And here you have a little preview of the lens flare. We can position it where we want to have it, and we want to have it from down here. So let's take it about here. You can also choose the brightness. You can make it brighter. You can make it into a crazy explosion of lights, which will not do. Let's put that to live it like this. And you can also delights Lens type. So just a little bit of different Sunset Flare Effects and movie prime, which is some weirdness. But let's just take 52 to 300 millimeter. And let's set that over here. And let's click on Okay. Now here we have this Lens Flare, right? And our Photo under it. So the next one, what we need to do is we need to change our blending modes. And again, you're seeing some more of the possibility is that Blending Modes have. So we need to change our blending mode to screen. So click on that. Here we have our Lens Flare appearing and our Photo coming through it too. Now we want to add a layer mask to it so we can in fact go and brain tissue airway. So have the layer selected and click here on Layer Mask and with a black brush. Now we can go and paint where we don't want it like here, the dot over there. I don't want it on their nose. So let me just bring that all the way off. Now, the edges here are quite hard, right? So we went to put some blur on there to make it a little bit more softer. We do that by going to Filter, go into blur and go into Gaussian Blur. And in here, that's, well, let's go and see what looks appropriate for our Blur. And the mistake that I'm making here is that I have selected my mask. So we need to select here are Layer, go to Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. Now, 183 is way too much. So let's just see here how much we once I am about going to seven, which is alright. So let's click on Okay. The great thing we can do now as well is we can click on Control plus D to have the Transform tool, and we can now go and transform a little bit more. Sunset Effect. This is good. Alright, let's click on Yes. Now again, this is an unedited photo. So the colors here, I would in fact made them a lot warmer because now it's an unedited photo. We have not applied any coloring or ending to it. The lens flare looks scan ridiculous to me in this photo because it just doesn't fit really. In the third section, you will really come to see also how working with colors really changes the mood into your photo and where we are editing there, we will work a lot with Colors. Now, also here we can go and click on Control plus U. And we need to select the lens flare, so Control plus U. And here we can also go and change the you, the saturation and the lightness. Now, I am not going to do anything really too much with it. But we can make some small adjustments more into blending everything more nicely into our Photo. Let me just do a before and after. And this is very bright over here. Also over here, it's quite bright. But we have very easily just made a Lens Flare into our Photo 40. How to Stitch Photos Together to Create a Panorama: Welcome here in the next lesson of the Photo shop section. In this lesson here, I'm going to show you how to Stitch Photos Together in Photoshop in your Lightroom section, we have also seen there was also a lesson on panoramas in general, I would say I would always use Photoshop to create my Panorama because it's just much more powerful. There are much more tools in it. There are two ways how to import the photos that you want to stitch together into Photoshop. And the first one is true Lightroom. So let's jump here into Lightroom and you just select the photos that you want. So you just go and click on one and then click on Control and click on the other ones that you need. In this case is just to Photos. And you right-click on either one of them, you right-click on it. And if you go to edit in, and then you go down here to Merge two Panorama in Photoshop. If you click on that, those two photos will open up in Photoshop and you will start stitching them together in a Panorama. The next way is to import it directly from Photoshop. So the way to do dad is you go here up to File, and you go down to Automate, and then you go to Photo Merge and click on it. And in here you have to go and click on Browse. And you have to go and select the photos that you wanted to stitch together. So we just go and select the photos that you want to stitch together. You click on Okay. And then they are loaded in here. So the first one layout, the first one is the other one, I would suggest to kinda start with the auto one and then go through the other ones and just check which one might look better. But in general, the autobahn does a good job, but I would still suggest just make a few other ones. Just go to perspective, cylindrical and go to all the other ones and just see which one will work the best. Now in here, we have Blend images together which you want the F checked on. So Photoshop is blending them nicely together. Vignette Removal, sometimes you have some distortion, some Vignette distortion, some blackness right around the corners of the Photo. Having Vignette Removal on Photoshop, we'll go and fix that geometrical distortion correction. Having that shakedown, It's like a Lens Correction Photoshop, we'll go and correct some lens distortions in there. And then we have content aware fill transparent areas. Now, I will just make an example how it looks without Content Aware, Fill Transparent Areas on and then when it checked on. So this is here now how it looks with photoshop. Trying to fill the accountants in here. First of all, the auto function didn't work. Photoshop didn't do really great job on it because it's pretty rounded up here, which we can fix though, and also the content where it didn't do a really good job in here. However, on the outer parts, it did some pretty good jobs here, like overhear it at to fix it to now. I also made one where it didn't do the Content Aware. In this one here it looks a lot more straighter, right? It still looks a little bit weird, but we can fix it a lot easier than this one over here. Now, you can also see that we have here the white of the canvas. So we have to crop that out with the result that our Photo will become smaller right in here you can see in the sky Photoshop went and go and fix that pretty nicely just over here. It didn't do such a good job, but we can in fact figs that a lot easier with just the Healing Brush or the Clone Stamp Tool. We can easily go and fix that. Also here with the snow. And here he did a very good job. Like right here is there's nothing on it right here. It did, it did a pretty good job though. But this is just to show that the Content Aware, it feels pretty good at times. And many times I always save that check down for the first try and just see how well the results are. And like you can see here, it did very good job in general. Now, let's move here to the photo where I didn't add the Content Aware Fill. Let's mentally go now and see how we can go and fix that here in Photoshop. So first of all, we're going to make this a little bit more straight. We go to the crop tool here and go into the top corner. And let's make this a little bit more straighter. So that's about this here. And I will also crop now a little bit off areas that I don't want. So I wanted about this year, this I want about here. And let's grab this a little bit in as well. So it's about this to me seems like very nicely. And I feel okay. Made it a little bit too much like that. So this looks good. Let's click on Yes, We just now have those transparent areas here in the corners that we want the fixed and we can fix them pretty easily. Now, what you want to do first is we want to create a stamp visible layer of this. Here we go and click on Control Alt Shift plus E to create a stamp visible layer over here. So the first part that I wanted to fix here is in the left corner. And we're going to use the spot healing brush for this. So let's zoom in here and let's go to the spot Healing Brush on the batch here and then Healing Brush. So not the spot Healing Brush, Healing Brush. Or you can also click on the J for the shortcut of that. So let's just click on Alt now to tell Photoshop where it needs to sample from. And we want that close by. Of course, Ellis, just start painting here 41. Fixing Incorrect Stitching: So all in all, we made this here appear or disappear pretty nicely. So double-click now and make this invisible and visible again. We've done a pretty fast, very fastly. We have filled that gap in here. I could also go to the Clone Stamp Tool hitting the S, because now we're just going to Clone, then Photoshop is not going to go and blend the pixels together. We're just going to Clone from one location. And I would always have the opacity a little bit low. If you want to try to smoothly blend things together. And we can go here a little bit of the whiteness. And some of those colors over here do not look really good. Here on the top. About this. If I would zoom out, now, you will look here on the left corner. We have made that very, very nicely together using the Healing Brush Clone Stamp tool. So let me make that invisible and visible again. Now, here on the right corner, I would do the exact same. I would just go and hit J for the Healing Brush, go and sample. And this one will be a lot faster and it does a really good job right now. Yeah, that's that looks honestly very, very geared. Maybe here it looks a little bit weird. So hit the Clone Stamp tool to go and blend that a little bit nicer Together all. And this looks very good. If we go and zoom out, click on visible, invisible. So let's go down here and fix this corner now here, which we can also just go and he'd the Healing Brush. And it did a very nice job here. This looks a little bit. There we go. Very nicely, very well done. So less parts or well, here we also have a little bit of this. Now here I would do something different and Audi Effect Warp the photo here. And the way we do that is by going here to the rectangular Marquee tool, Rican make a selection here. So let's make a selection of this part here. And if we click on Control or Command plus D And just having this and just moving it out a little bit. We can in fact just very nicely fixed that. So let's click on yes on there. And let's also go and make it a little selection here, little bit bigger. We can control plus D and just drag that down and click on yes. So we can now, of course still see here some hard edges because of the selection that we have made and because if we drag it down, now we can easily fix that by just going to our layer and adding a layer mask on it. So just click on that and have the brush selected heavy down black. And then just go in here. And let's go and bring some of the original bag. And let's smoothing that out again. There we go. Now we have created a fixed that very nicely. So let's just make that invisible and visible. Over here. I, we use now the combination of both of them. I would use the Healing Brush to fix this over here. And then I would also just daily free transform tool and just Tool that a little bit more down. And then with the Clone Stamp Tool, I will go and make those little Corrections to make it look nicely. So it let me go and do that now over here. So let's hit Alt and assemble over here. Do be sure because you're switching now between your Layer Mask and your layer. If I would sample now, nothing will happen if this is the case for you as you're, and you're like, alright, what, nothing is happening now is because urea fail, you have the Layer Mask selected. So be sure to have the layer selected because now we are working on the layer 42. Rectangular Marquee Tool, Healing Brush, Clone Stamp Tool: Let me go now and go over here. The rectangular Marquee Tool. And we can just make a selection over here. Now what I will do is hit Control plus T for the Transform tool. But if we right-click on it, we can also go down here to warp. And I want to go a warp now a little bit. So we are stretching out, but we're warping our Photo. So it still has to make a little bit says of course, but we can use this now, worked a little bit. Keep it like that. What's more easily bit more down. Click on Yes, and we have to do this in, sort of in small parts. Let's go and correct this already a little bit over here. Let's go and play a little bit now with the Clone Stamp Tool. Now it's really about just trying to blend all those things more nicely together. Selecting from the snow, from an outer bark. Now, we can declare it with the healing brush. We can try to heal some different patterns. Now, in here, as you can see, we are now trying to heal those things more nicely to fill that empty hole in here that we have made. This looks pretty good. I mean, if I would zoom out, make that invisible and visible. We have done a pretty amazing job. I think. Let me put the lighting of year of let me just put it like that. We've done a pretty amazing job of fixing all those transparent areas here. We have used the Healing Brush tool for that, the Clone Stamp tool for that, the Transform tool for that, and you warp tool for that. If Photoshop did a horrible job with the content aware, then I will go and mentally fixed dose areas like debt. And after awhile, once you start mastering those tools, you can go very fastly 43. How to Match Total Exposures: There are two problems that pretty much can happen in creating panoramas. One of them that the exposure of one Photo and the other photo is Difference. And the other problem is that the color is a little bit different than in the other one. The way the duties and How I have explained this in the Lightroom section with panoramas and HDR, but I just want to explain it one more time here. If we go, we have to be in a Develop module for this. And we click down on this arrow up and we have this toolbar here now of the Library module. And we select the photos of the Panorama. So we have this one and just click on Control or Command on the other Photos. But be sure the photo that you want the daily exposure from is mainly selected. And then we go up here to Settings and you can see Match Total Exposures. Now, the other photo that we have, I've made the exposure a lot darker here, so we will see a difference. And the other photo is the exposure that we want. You will come to see here in the second way, we click on Match Exposures that this will change now. So go to Settings, Match Total Exposures. And you can see it just changed. If I'll click on it, it matched the exposure of this photo. So this is a very, very easy way of matching the exposure and it's very important to do that. Otherwise, you're Panorama will look very, very weird. You've won dark area, one bright area. So be sure to match the Exposures in all your photos. The match the colors. We have to do that in Photoshop. And we can do that even after we Stitch Photos Together, which is pretty amazing to me. So from here on, once you've matched the, the Exposures and you've made all the adjustments in the Develop module, then you just have all the photos select that you want to Create in a Panorama. You right-click on it. And we just go and edits in, Merge two Panorama in Photoshop. And in here you can see however, that here it is a bit more warmer and here it's a bit more bluer. We have difference of color here. Now we want to go and correct that. How we can go and fix this now is by going to Image and go to adjustments. Now in here, if we go to Match Color, if we click on Match color, here, we select the source. So we want to have one of the pieces selected as a source where we want to Take it from. And the layer is the other photo that we want to give it to. So you can already see, because on the preview, if I click on preview, off and on, you can already see it's now gradually like all the same. We have matched the color now very nicely. And now we can just click on Okay. And you can see it did a very nicely job. 44. The Difference Between HDR and Digital Blending: So let me first of all, start off by explaining the difference between HDR and digital blending. Both HDR and digital blending requires the same kind of way of working. You both need more than one exposure because you're blending both of the exposures together. So both HDR and digital blending are the same in that aspect. You need one normal exposed photo, one underexposed photo, and one over exposed photo, or you just need more than just one exposure and then blend them together. So that's the same the difference now between HDR and digital blending is, digital blending is manually blending the exposures together. HDR, you will need a software like here in Lightroom, or you have another software called photomatics. With HDR, the software is blending those two photos together, or those three or five or the X amount of photos that you have. The software is blending them together. All you can do is you can fine tune. You can fine tune more the exposures and everything. Like we have seen in light room section in the panoramas and HDR. We have seen there how with Lightroom, we're selecting the photos that we want to blend together into an HDR, and a light room is just doing all that for us. It's not giving us the opportunity or the possibility, I mean, for selecting exactly where we want to go and blend those exposures together. So that's the difference between HDR and digital blending. Now, let's jump here into Lightroom, and let's see the three photos that we're going to blend together in Photoshop. So we have here an underexposed photo. The next one is a normal exposed photo, and then the third one is an over exposed photo. And we want to go and expose them together, and the result will be this. A nicely well exposed photo, both in the sky and here in the foreground. With the sunlight effect that we have created, we can then go and create something like this out of that. Here is the sunset effect that we've learned in the sunlight techniques lesson. We want to start by selecting the photos. So just take select one and then Shift plus click on the last one that you want to take. And if you right click on either one of them, and you go to Edit in and you click on Open as Layers in Photoshop. Lightroom will open now those three photos in Photoshop and we'll put them as layers under each other. So just go and click on Open as Layers in Photoshop. 45. Learn the Powerful Digital Blending Technique - Luminosity Masks: And we'll put them as Layers under each shutter. So just go and click on Open as layers. In Photoshop, there are more than just one Digital Blending Technique to go and Blend Are Photos Together. I'm going to show you the most powerful one and that's Luminosity Masks. I could go at DDS, you all the other ones do, but it's better to just know the best one possible and to really mastered that one instead of learn all the other wants to, how we make Luminosity Masks is done in the channels here. We have Layers, beds, and channels. In here, we have to make a whole range of Luminosity Masks. So we have to make each Luminosity Masks for targeting the bright areas, all the bright areas, Luminosity Masks for the dark areas, and then also Luminosity Masks for the mid tones, the areas here, this takes literally about 20 or 30 min, creating all doors, Masks. And I could go and show you how to create them. The thing is, it's just not practical to go and do that. So here is a very great solution. It's a plugin and it's called the easy Panel and it's 100% free. And it's here. I haven't here with just one click of a button, Create Luminosity Masks. We create the Masks, all hearing the channels, and we can do that on any photo. So I would recommend you to go and download the easy Panel. It's 100% for free, and it will show you in a minute how to do it. It's very easy to. But let me also explain. If you've never heard of a plug-in and you're like, What is the plugging? The way to describe a plugin. So let's say you have a smartphone, right? And let's say that Photoshop is the smart phone. Your smartphone, or your smartphone. You have all those functions here in Photoshop. You, you've all those functions. But you could download apps or your smartphone too, can expand the whole experience of everything. Apps that are dedicated to doing something in Photoshop plugins are the exact same or very similar to that. So the easy Panel is like an application either It's like it has its function and it can expand Photoshop and a lot of different plugins. And I have attached documents or PDF file here to the course where I wrote down some great recommendations of plug-ins to can expand your experience or the possibilities in Photoshop. Now, how to download the easy Panel? Very easy. We go to Google, just search in Google easy Panel and then maybe plug-in and then click. And it is the top one, the easy Panel for Photoshop. What you need to do to get the easy Panel is you have to enter your email address. So let me just put an e-mail address here and then you get the easy Panel sense to your inbox. Now, like I said, this is 100% for free. So we get this email than he would just need to click on Click here to confirm your subscription. And if you click on that, we get to another page. This is just well that you have subscribed to the newsletter. And we get now another e-mail. And in that email, the easy Panel is here. You can see link to the easy Panel. So just click on that one. And here you can have download easy Panel. Now within the file itself, there are tutorials in a boat for Mac and both for Windows on how to install it. It's very well explains. It's very straightforward and it doesn't take too much time and once it's installed, you don't have to do anything anymore. It's there forever. Unless you go and avenue computer. Now, if you've followed all the steps and you have put the plugin into the right map and you're following the tutorial, you need to reset, just exit Photoshop if you were still in it. And the next time that you open it, if you go here to Window and you go to Extensions, you will now hear, see Extensions, the plugins. So you will now see the easy Panel and click on it. And the easy Panel will hear a beer on it. And I would just put it next to here on this toolbar because it's a good panel. So we have the easy Panel outlet. Now. We have it in Photoshop. We have our three layers in Photoshop as well. Let's start now and actually start using Digital Blending. Here, we, First of all, how we want to start is we want to arrange our layers here. The bottom one is the normal expose photo. That's kinda the basic grounds. And then how you want to put the outer to the overexpose one and the underexposed one doesn't matter really too much. You can also go and make the top ones now invisible. And let's already adds a layer mask on them. And this is just practical already. So let's add a layer mask, and let's add another layer mask, and let's invert them. So hit Control or Command C plus I to invert control, boss command plus I to invert the other one. Once we have made the selection with the Luminosity Masks, we already have the Layer Mask on there and we can start painting where we want. Let's now go to the easy Panel And let's just simply click on Create Luminosity Masks. But be sure to do all this year first and then click on Create Luminosity Masks. So let's do it at, and this will take just a few seconds or a few minutes depending on your computer. Once you've done that, you can see we have here this selection in our Photo and we can just click this away. And you can just unclick this selection by hitting Control or Command D to deselect selection. If we go now from Layers bets two channels here. First, we just only had the RGB, red, green, and blue. But now you can see we have all these other ones here. We have the brights, right, to retrieve, write four or 56, and now we've the darks, and now we have the mid tones. So if we mentally had to do this, we had to go and create all those Masks ourselves, which it takes a lot of work. So just to easy one-click, just did all that. And here, if I would just click on brights one and then go down to brights two. Each time again, we're more and more specifically healing the bride's area where more and more going through them. So bright three is even more. We're more and more masking out the dark areas here. Bright for more and more specifically, bright 56. And then if we go over the dark, we don't have the bright areas. Now we'll select that we have the dark areas selected and each time or dark to More specifically the dark areas, dark tree, dark for dark five each time more and more to the dark areas. And then we also have the mid-tones. You can see where hitting the mid-tones now, each time more and more hitting the mid-tones, each time we're going up. If this is the first time that you ever hearing something about this, you're probably like, whoa, like no, I know it might be a little bit confusing and everything, but you will all make more and more and more sense. Let me start bringing some more sensitive to this. The way this works, Luminosity Masks is we will make a selection. Now. We are going to make a selection of the bright areas and the dark area will just be untouched. And what we have to do is just simply look at which one 1-6 is targeting the brights that we need. So if we start with one, this is obviously not enough bright to already Better bright tree that, that could do. In fact, for will be two as well, right? Five is too much because we're also targeting the clouds here now. And we are when we will go and made that selection. And we will start painting here, the dark parts will not reveal. So I would go down a little bit too tree or maybe to four. Let's see. Let's go here with four for now and hit Control or commands. And then just left mouse click on that Luminosity Masks. And you can see now a selection appearing here. We have just now made a selection. And if we go back to our layers 46. Blending Exposures with the Luminosity Masks: And if we go back to our layers and we go to the first layer here and we go to our layer mask now because we've done that, and go to your brush and have it on white, obviously, you pass Well, you can have that on 100. If we start painting now, we are bringing back from that layer, our sky. And the great thing is now if we start painting over here, we are not affecting that area because we have masked that out. We can just easily just go and paint very smoothly out here. If I would now go here over the layer mask and I would just hit on Alt click on that. You can see we are each time more and more, the more we're painting over it, bringing the sky here from our underexposed photo. More and more we're blending that now together. Let's just keep on painting here until all of that is pretty much gone. You can see we're not hitting anything here because we've masked that out with those luminosity masks. So we have made it pretty much all the way bright now. And the sky the clouds here, that's because we have also, well, we hit some of the there was some darkness in the clouds over there, so we also kind of mask them. So we're not really affecting them too much. So that's why maybe the bright tree could have been good. Now, of course, here, there is some bright in here on the mountains there because they are appearing back. If we could just switch back to the black and we can just easily kind of paint them a little bit back if we did not want to have them in there. But all in all, we have pretty much hit all the areas now. And if we would just switch over to the photo here and plus also if you are painting here because you don't have to go into the layer mask itself. Of course, you can just do that in here. But hitting Control or command plus the H will just hide the mask. If you click on Control plus H again, it will show it again. Control plus H will hide the mask. And you can see we have very nicely, very smoothly made that sky appear into our photo. We've nicely blended that in together. In here, there might be some weird areas which we just have to fix by the brush and then go into the black again and maybe go into a lower opacity and just blending that a little bit together. Sometimes those edges too look a little bit weird. But just having the black brush and with a lower opacity as 40 that I'm using here now, we're making that all nice and good again. So let's do that. So let's zoom out a little bit. We can also always lower the opacity if for some reason you want to have that a little bit less. You can always lower that a little bit. Now, let's go on and let's do the exact same with the overexposed photo and let's blend that into areas where we want. Now, here in the photo, I want from the overexposed photo, I want some of it here. If I would just invert that mask again to make our layer here visible, it's very, very bright though. I might look definitely weird with such a bright overexposed photo once we start painting a little bit in. But I will show you how to correct that. Now let's invert that again and let's go to our channels. Let's go now through the darks and let's look for area, a nice selected area of the darks that we want. Let's just scroll through them. I would say with this maybe Let's try dark four. We hit Control or command and then just click on it to make that selection and let's jump back into our layers and let's click on the layer mask now to hide the selection, hit on Control plus Let's go here on our white brush and let's start painting this does look very weird. But let's just start painting a little bit more. We might in fact have to go a little bit higher Now, this obviously looks very weird. But if we go to the opacity and lower that down, a little bit. We are bringing some of those highlights back, but just not that crazy effect. Now, I might have to go and take another luminosity mask. This might happen. We can take the layer mask here and we can just drag it down into the trash can and just click on the lead. Be sure if you have to redo that to click on Control plus D to deselect the selection because even though you hide it, it's still there. Let's just make a new layer mask. Let's invert that, and let's go here to our channels. And let's try a dark tree. Control, click on it, and let's go through layers, click Layer Mask, click on control plus H to hide that. Let's try here. Let's try this. Maybe with lower opacity of our brush. So it definitely might happen that you have to change between another luminosity mask and try that one again or something, use this one does give better results. Now, let's just take our black brush. Let's lower our opacity of the brush to blend things a little bit more smoothly. Let's just brush some of those spots where we did not want it too much. Once the blending is done, you can just hit Control Alt Shift plus E to make a stamp visible layer out of it. And now we have just merged all those masks or all those layers together. Still have them here though. But we've merged them now into one master photo from here on, we can just go into the adjustments and now we can just make our adjustments to our photo so we can go and put some real form into the photo and make it afterwards into something that looks like this photo here. 47. Optimize Photoshop Speed & Performance : As we did in the lightroom section in this lesson here, I'm going to show you a few things that you can do to optimize Photoshop and to make it run faster. The first thing that we want to do is we want to go up to edit and go all the way down to preferences. And in here, you have performance and click on there. We go here to memory usage. Standard, this will be set on 70%. So this is the amount of RAM that Photoshop is using from your computer. Now, standardly, like I said, it's 70%, but you can increase this because this will dramatically improve a lot of things in Photoshop. So I would bump this up to 75%. And that's for the standard computer, 75%. It will improve things, definitely. If you have a lot more available RAM, I have here in my computer eight gigabyte of RAM, which is the minimum amount of RAM that Photoshop requires through run smoothly. But if you have a lot more, then you can bump this up even, I don't know, to 80 or 90 or something. But see because what you're doing, you are asking Photoshop to use a lot more RAM on Photoshop, but it will slow down other programs. And if you use too much, then it will slow down the whole computer. So overdoing this to 100% will not per se, result in better performance. So use to 75 or if you have standard eight gigabyte frame. But if you have a lot more, then you can also use a lot more, then you can definitely bump it up each time I would say increase it with 5% and then just click on Okay. You definitely want to click on and then exit Photoshop and then go back and see if it runs smoother, but standardly, 75% will do a lot better. Next year to graphic processor settings, leaving this will be right for most computers. But if Photoshop runs extremely slow, you could check this off. And basically, Photoshop, there will be some tools that you're using will look weirder than if you would have this check. The next thing here that we have is the history states, and this is just right down here. Now, this is on default set to 50, which is way too much. Now, the history states is here in the history. Each time that we do an edit or some adjustments, Photoshop will save that step. And so each time we can kind of go back in history to those steps that we've done before, and Photoshop will save 50 of those steps, which is a lot, and it does take up a lot of the performance speed of Photoshop. So decreasing this two to 15 steps that you can go back will dramatically change the performance speed of Photoshop when you're editing your photos. You have to know we are editing non destructively because we're learning to work with layer masks. Basically, we don't need history that much because we can each time go into our layer masks and undo or redo what we have done on the adjustment there. The history is not per se, something that we need that much and especially not 50, set it down to 15. The next thing that we can do to increase the performance of Photoshop is by turning the font preview of, and we do this by going to type and here font preview size. On default, this is on medium, but if you turn into none, this will, in fact, increase the performance of Photoshop. Now, of course, if you do one day want to go through the font, then you can just click on medium again, and then you can have here the examples once again. When we are editing our photo, we are working with layers and adjustment layers. We have our background. We might have a copy of the background. We might have some adjustments on it that we have applied and some more. I'm just doing some random stuff here now, we have all those adjustments on here. But each one of them does increase the file size of this document in Photoshop. And each time we add more and more Photoshop will come to slow down more and more because it's becoming bigger and bigger this file. Here is where merging down those layers is an important thing to do. And to merge layers together, you just click on the first one or the one that you want to have and then hit shift and then the last one that you want to merge together, and then Control or command plus E and all those adjustments are now merged together into one layer. They're all iner now. Now, if you merged it together and you're like, Oh, corp, there's something I still want to do right away, just Control or command plus the z to just undo that one step. But after a while, you can't anymore. At some point, you have to be happy what you've done to merge them down together. This might be a very obvious one for some people, but a less obvious one for some other people because you just haven't thought about it or something. Be sure to have any background programs that are enough. For example, if your Internet, you have your web browser open while you are editing your photos and you have some other map open in here, those things they do take RAM from your computer. Also any other programs running in the background here, I have flux open. Try to exit them, try to close them because they're all taking RAM from your computer or have Google Drive open, quit that. Photoshop is using a lot of RAM from your computer and the more programs that you can close, the more you can let Photoshop use that RAM. Next, be sure to have your latest video driver up to date. Now, if you have no idea how to update your video driver or where you can find what video driver you have or whatever, I will put down a link here in this video right now and just go to that article here and it will explain very easily where you can find the manufacturer of your video driver and also where to go and install it. Having your video driver up to date does help a lot in the performance of Photoshop and also helps a lot that Photoshop doesn't crash or something too many times. The last thing that I would add that you can do to improve the performance of Photoshop, like I said in the beginning somewhere, you need eight gigabyte. The required to use Photoshop smoothly is eight gigabyte. If you are buying a new laptop, then be sure to have at least one with eight gigabyte or more. If you have a desktop and you can put more RAM in it, adding more RAM to your computer will dramatically 100% improve the performance speed of Photoshop. Here were just some tips on improving the performance speed of Photoshop. I hope they help you. There are many more small things that you could do, but these are just a few of the bigger things that will more have a big impact on improving the speed of Photoshop. I do hope that they help you. 48. SECTION 3 - LEARN TO EDIT YOUR PHOTOS LIKE A PRO: Welcome here to the third section. I have to say, I'm very impressed that you've made it all the way to here. Now, if you've just shown it in there, I'm just very glad that you've journey in here in this section, here in the third section, here is where the actual editing, a bus processing will happen in the first and the second section. That's where we've learned all those techniques and tools. And here in the third section, that's where we're going to go and apply them really. So we're going to take photos from start to finish. We're going to use all those tools and techniques. But of course we're also going to learn a whole range of new techniques and tools on each photo that we're editing. So in the end, your toolbox of tools and techniques will just be incredible. Big. I'm going to take my time with each photo because we're really kinda think from the start of into Lightroom and then take them into Photoshop and a really apply all the adjustments and everything. And I'm really going to try to make the photo as best as I can. And one less thing that I want to add here is each photo that I'm editing, you don't have to go and edit your photos the exact same way as I do. The thing what I'm just doing is I'm showing you the adjustments. I'm showing you the possibilities. I'm showing you the tools in the end, the techniques. I'm not asking you to go and edit your photos the same exact way as I do. That's not the point of this. The point is that you just, I mean, you definitely might take some things that you like what I do, of course. But the point is that you just go when we're editing those Photos, just look how I edit. And I want you to really think about it, what I'm doing, our, and I want you to really say to yourself like, alright, I like this, what is doing? But I don't like that. I would do that differently and I would do this and this differently. So try to really be an observer here. Tried to really see what I'm doing and try to really think about what you would do differently. So that's the whole point now with this Editing and Post-Processing here and the third section, I'm showing you at all, but you have to go and think as an individual yourself of what you would do to Create your own style. And having just all that said, let's go and jump into the third section. Let's start editing and Post-Processing are Photos 49. Editing in Lightroom – Basic & HSL Panel: Here we are. In the third section. You have gum an incredible long way if you've started from the first section, two, the second section, and now to dirt section, you've come to see so much information. So many things here, they're section now we're going to get all those things that we've learned in the Lightroom section and Photoshop section, we're going to see all of those things again, but now we're actually going to really apply them in editing and Post-Processing a Photo. If you're just joined in here in the third section, then I just want to say, welcome. I hope you are ready to learn quite some cool things here to edit a bus process Your Photos. Each photo that we are editing has some kind of a reason, a purpose of why we are editing that, to learn some specific, that nice and the touch upon some specific tools. So in this photo here, I just want to go and cover some very Ghana all around techniques and tools. So let's jump here into a Lightroom. Now, we're going to edit these two photos here. What we're gonna do is we're going to blend them together. And the reason why is because I took this photo here at a shutter speed of 80 because I wanted my friend here to be in focus. But I kinda wanted to have the kind of magical smooth effect that we have here. But in order for this to do, We needed a longer exposure of 1/5 seconds. So we're going to blend those two photos together. And it's very easy to do. But that's for your Photoshop here in Lightroom right now, we're going to bring out the most information that we can from those two photos. Mostly always Rate My Photos. So this is the first distance second Photo, and then I can stack them into a group or just right-click on either one of them. And we go to stacking, group into stacking. And I always put a red label as we've seen in the workflow lesson of Lightroom. I always label them ready for the ones that I wanted to edit, green for the ones that are finished, and purple for the ones that I want to revision. So here That's why they are both rents, because I want to edit them. So let's go here into the Develop module. We can just either click on here or hit the D for Develop. I want to start here with the Lens Correction. I always check on Remove Chromatic Aberration, Enable Profile Corrections for Correcting the sum over the lenses origins. And you can already see that it did do some changes. And then we go here into the Basic panel. So let's see. I might bring up the exposure because we are more in our Histogram leading to a darker underexposed photo. So let me just play here with the exposure and C. I want, I would like a little, a little bit more warmer. Let's just decrease that a little bit more and thin. Let's see. So a little bit of a greener dense. The contrast many times putting it down can look at some pretty cool mat resolve. But here I might just add a little bit of contrast to the Photo, like about six. The highlights, Let's see. Don't want to overdo them. I kinda want to just put them a little bit down. And like I said, and I want you just want to repeat it again. But Lightroom for me is just to draw out the most information of everything. That's why I wanted to put the exposure a little bit more up to have the most information from this photo. That's why I want to have the shadows nicely. Because I want to have the most information of the shadows. So let's put the shadows a little bit down. The whites, Let's try to put them a little bit more up. The blacks see my what kind of put them old little bit more to clarity. I don't use much, like just like maybe three or four. Not too much vibrance and saturation. I don't use. And the reason why is because I go down here to the HSL panel and I individually go through those scalars. The vibrance you just affecting every color here, right? You're effecting them all at once. Hsl, you are as well doing the vibrant, but you're just separately going through each color. And I like to do this a lot more. You're doing the coloring more manually with the HSL And the color and the HSL panel, they are like I've already went through. They are just the same. They're just a different overview, but I like to use just a color here. So let's go and let's just play with the luminance, which is the brightness of the colors. Let's play with you and see if we can put some cool thing with that. Live it down. And this iteration, Let's maybe see not too much, There's not too much kind of a red colors in here. Orange, there will definitely be some orange in here. And that's also from the rocks. I might afterwards, once we're done with everything else that we're doing, I might go back to the color here. In Camera Calibration, the blue primary, bumping this a little bit up and thus give a lot of times are very nice effect honestly. He kind of reaches a lot of be a lot of the colors you in a Photo. So I do want to increase a little bit. Let's see. Let's just go through the Basic Panel a little bit more. Maybe. Maybe I do want to put the highlights a little bit more. But all of that thus looked pretty good. We have Moreover, well exposed photo now. And let's just go. And maybe in the yellow, I kinda want to do a little bit of changes here. Because I just feel like we have a lot of really green green now. I too want to decrease it a little bit, gives more like so many different kinds of colors through it all. Now, let's just play with the greens and a little bit to increase the luminance a little bit, maybe. I don't know how deceleration. That looks pretty good to me. Now, the other photo that we are editing is just the same. So I don't have to go and do all those changes and adjustments that we've just made into this photo here, what I can do is we just go to the Library to Create and just have that one photo selected that you've made all those adjustments to. Click on Control or Command to select the other photo and just go here to sync Settings. And let's click on that. Now. Let's check, also have all the settings here checked on, and let's just click on Synchronize. This will be now just synchronized over to this photo with pretty much the same things. Now, I just want my friend to be well exposed. Let's see just with the highlights. That looks great. With the exposure, I could maybe do a little bit. And because I took this photo and an ISO of thousands, 600s, or there might be some, some grain here in this photo. So I might go and like you see, there are definitely some grain here. So let me just go to detail 50. Detail, Split Toning, Camera Calibration: So let me just go to detail and lens just click on the masking. And let's just nice to try to just mask some things out here. And let's click on the luminance. And I will just increase that with them. The illuminance don't overdo it because then you are trading details for that, for smoothing does all out. So I don't really tried to overuse it, but just try to see that it's like removing some of the green than everything. And they would masking just hit Alt and click on it to get these kind of view here. If you're gonna go a little bit true it to smooth out those things just where the widest, that's where the Sharpening year of Photoshop lightroom is being applied and all where the black is, that's where it's gone away. So it's just more of the edges that we once it's pretty good. Many times, once you're done with the coloring and doing the adjustments seen here, the go and just maybe go to the toilets for a moment or just go for small walk and just stepping away from it, from it all just for a few minutes and then coming back to it all, you just have like a fresh look on product, look upon all this. So that's why it's very good when you're editing to take multiple breaks, and especially when you're doing the coloring. I might go into the color here though, and to put yellows even a bit more stronger, Let's just play with you here. Because I want to have it more than the greens are sort of Gamelan get more out. Just see what the orange. Yeah. I would say that's pretty good. The Split Toning, I do use many times as well. And let's just sit a little luckier because maybe there is some cool thing that we can do it with the Split Toning. Little bit of a warmer one. Let's just decrease that a little bit. Will be cool. And we're doing this edit many. You don't have to go all the way to 100% because that's just a crazy effect. But having more like a subtle effect of like 6% in it makes things a lot more realistic. So let me just add a little bit of orange in there. Now let's go into the shadows. And I would go for a little bit of a greenish color, but very subtle, like five or something of it. So maybe less. Just go here into this, the highlights again, let's put a little bit less to in the shadows. We can put some kind of a thin in there too. And let's just see. Because this does give some very cool effects to, let me just do a little bit more here now. It looks very nice. In the greens, I would go more this side. And also very subtle though. Like just five. Be sure if you're making some adjustments to one Photo, you are working with another photo that you want to blend together, that they, that they match, right? So let's just synchronize that again. And both photos are done and are ready to go to the next phase, which is Photoshop. Let's open that. So the way to do that is we just go to the grid view, we just hit the G. Or we can also, if you are in Develop module, you can also just open this tab here by clicking on the arrow and then just having the photos here, selecting that you want to have, control Plus Command to select them. Right-click on it, and then you can click on edit in and then add it in Photoshop. Now, in this case, because we want to blend those two Photos Together, we want to open them as layers in Photoshop. But if you're just editing one photo, you just click on edit in Adobe Photoshop. And that one Photo will open in Photoshop. So here we are in Photoshop. Let me first of all already started by saying something. If you open your photos into Lightroom and you keep Lightroom open while you are in Photoshop. Let's say that what you've done some editing here on our Photo. And I'm just going to overdo it very much now. Let's make that darker. If you click on Exit while you are in Photoshop and you still have Lightroom open. You click on Exit, you click on save changes to the Arab Photoshop document. That photo with all those adjustments will be here now as a separate file, it's automatically being brought into Lightroom, which is a very, very handy thing. In this case, I want to have those two photos into Photoshop, but I am going to exit Lightroom because lightroom does use RAM and Photoshop will be running a lot slower. And this doublet here on this laptop, it doesn't have that much RAM that I have on my desktop. So that's why I'm going to close Lightroom. But for you it might be as well that your computer, your laptop is not that fast. Clicking on exit of Lightroom and then having Photoshop open, then you have to actually go and imports the photo. So we have now here our Photo open in Photoshop again, and let's just exit Lightroom. Now, if we would be doing our edits, Let's make some weird thing here again. And we would click on Exit. Photoshop will always automatically ask if you want to save it or nuts, which you obviously, if you have done your edits, you do want to do that, right? So you just click on Yes. If we go now into Lightroom, that file will not be there because lightroom will just not updated like it does when you have Photoshop open and Lightroom 51. Editing in Photoshop – Saving Your File, Auto-Align Layers, Cloning: Where we were last time and then just click on imports. So you just want to go into the file or folder where your photos are stored on your computer. On default, for maxim, for BC, you will be in your pictures folder. So for most people would be here. But if you've put your photos somewhere else that are in your Catalog, then you have to go to there. And then you can easily see the ones that are already imported in your Catalog and the ones that are not. And in here we can see R1 Photo and we can just click on uncheck all. And that's the one that we have just edited in Photoshop. So we just go and click on that one and we just click on Import. And then that one, we'll just end up here on the top. And we can just move that then to the Photo one folder where Eligius delete that folder then removed. So that will be in our Photo, one older. So in many ways it's a lot easier where you have Lightroom, opening your Photoshop open while you're working in Photoshop. Because when you exit, lightroom will automatically already just going to import that into Lightroom. Alice now go and actually edit them. What we wanted to start first with is, so I feel like there's two photos are not completely a line. And we can align them very easily. Just click on the first one and just like The other one by just hitting Control and go to Edit. And on Auto-Align Layers. And then just have auto on because Photoshop does a very good job on. It kinda runs through all the other ones here and then just sees which one works the best. So now we want to blend my friend in this photo here. Also. We want to remove the people hiding here in the bushes. We want to remove them. And I also, I find this this bar erode the bridge gallon distracting. And also the just the wire that the scanner just sticking there. I want to remove that too. Let's add a mask layer, mask onto our top layer here, Let's hit the B for brush. And we now can just smoothly go and paint him in. And this is very easy one to do. So you can just paint a mean. We've aligned our Photo, so that's great. We can also see now if we just increase the opacity or decrease it a little bit, where rest of his body needs to come. Alright? Also the shadow, of course. The shadows here on his hands. We do need as well. Those shadows don't think we have really. Alright, we have them. And we have just very easily successfully blended him in to the photo that we want it. So that's great. And now we don't need the outer layer anymore. We just needed that layer for the purpose of having him. So I want to make a stamp visible layer out of this by hitting Control Alt Shift E. This will make a stamp visible layer. So we can just make those invisible. Actually, we have just, we have now one photo on its hole where he is in a where D nice effect of the water is in there. Not too different Photos now anymore. That's our base photo. So that's just like the background photo that many times Photoshop has. And we can just go back ground and we can put this little safety lock on there. And that just means that we can't edit this photo. So let's just make a copy of that Photo and, and click on that safety lock. And here we can now just go and do all of the rest of the adjustments. But in case we ever have to go back to the original one. It's on here, it's down there. The rest of I wanna do is I want to remove the tree. People here. We have went through those tools already in the Photoshop section. If you have not watched them, I could definitely recommend you to watch the tuitioning lesson where we go into Healing Brush, Spot Healing Brush the Stamp visible. So let's just use a combination of the Clone Stamp tool and the Healing Brush to to fix this here. Now, let's see. And I want us, sorry. Yeah, with the Clone Stamp tool and you opacity, Let's have that on, let's say 70. Let's Clone here hitting Alt. And let's just start, you know, colonial little bit in year. So this to me looks more than fine. Like this is pretty much blended very well in let's just do a before and after. Here they are. And you're never done. There is not too much that you can see anymore. And especially if we zoom out, they're pretty much all done. So that is fixed. We don't have to perfect it. You have to make it believable. And this, to me, it looks very believable. It just looks like there's force coming out of it now 52. Healing Brush, Clone Stamp Tool & Customizing Workspace in Photoshop: Let's continue on and let's remove now the wire out of here. One thing that I might also do because we have our background layer now, which is this one, and then the copy of that layer. But the two bottom layers here, we don't need them anymore. They are in fact just making our firewall bigger, also lowering the speed of Photoshop. So I'm just gonna go and remove them. So let's go on here and let's continue on and remove this wires here, which will not be too hard. And let's do that with the combination of the Healing Brush and Stamp Tool and the wire. Let's job before and after. As been very successfully been removed. Let's go and make this bridge here disappear. And we also will do that with the domination of the Healing Brush and the Clone Stamp Tool. Let's just use the Healing Brush for here. We have made the bridge disappear very nicely. It's not perfect, but like I said, it has to be believable. And I know in the end process what we're going to do with this. This will be okay. I will not need to go that much more extreme. With that. I want to go to the crop tool here. And I want to crop it a little bit. So let's go up and let's crop it. Say about this year. And also I want to crop that a little bit more. Let's just scrub it a little bit more. So I want to have more the intention going to this area here. That's what we're gonna do. I have touched upon this here in another lesson in Photo shop off the Canada tabs that I would recommend to have. And they are the Color tab, the Adjustment tab, and then the Layers. And if any of them is not there, you can just find them here in window. You have the adjustments, you have the color, fill layers, have those checked on, and you could customize them. You can put them, put one over here or wherever. You can just do all that. That's the cool thing of Photoshop. You can just really customize your workplace. Now, here in the adjustments, I will start with the Selective Color. And in a way, we have done something similar in Lightroom, they will affect our Photo a lot differently already, like this. I want the ink or decrease that a little bit. Here we have some very nice scholars and I do right now and just want to increase, decrease it like a little bit. But in a minute, I'm going to make another Selective Color Adjustment layer here. And I will explain it. Once we're doing that, Let's see the magentas. Alright? 53. Dramatize Colors with the Selective Color Tool: Let's see the magentas. So we have added a little bit more, although scholars in here, which leaves very great, I'm gonna now go and make another one of these Selective Color. Let's go here to select the color. And here I want to touch upon some very specific area. And especially when I went to the yellows. And let's just choose that ear to more of the orange or two gallon more magical orange. I don't want that everywhere, but I do want in on a couple of spots. Now let me just play a little bit more with the orange. One that can or is in there. Alright, so the way to do that, we just have our layer mask here, just click on Control or Command plus I. So we inverted that. And let's take our brush by hitting the B, have the white selected. So he'd on X if it's not on whites, to switch that around. And let's just have the opacity very low, very low so we can build up. And I want to paint adhere around some areas. So I am just going to leave that for now and I will return back to this later. I want to bring green's a little bit more out. So maybe I go just here back to the first Selective Color that we add. And let's bring the green's a little bit more out. Nice thing is if the effects can too strong, you can always lower the opacity by just dragging that down. And I might drag that down here to add on that one ends on the other one that we did. I want to go to the adjustments and do another one. Let me lower the opacity of that little bit to about 86 or so. Great. I definitely will come back to the scholars again because I do want to separate a little bit more on the orange and green here. But we can go and make group from this. So just have the first layer here, select it and just click and Shift on last one. Hit Control or Command plus the G. And we have your group and we can even name it if we want. So we can name it Colors. And you don't have to do this, but I do this a lot of times it's just kind of organizing and making things a little bit more easier to know where the layers are. And let me save this as well by just going to save. Or you can also just easily do Control or Command plus S, which stands for safe ALS adjustment that I'm going to apply here in terms of affecting the colors, is the color Balance 54. Color Balance, Dodge & Burn Tool: So here, let's go into the color Balance. We get here the don't, we can get the mid tones, shadows and highlights. And we're just going to see true all of them. So let's just go through it and see what kind of looks nice. Very subtle effects, but it is in there. And let's even lower the opacity of all this to about 80, or let's say 90. I still want to retrain some of the original Ghana information. So I always, many times I do lowered the opacity just like a little bit. So I will stop here with the colors, and I would recommend you to do that as well. I always add my colors at first before I am doing other adjustments due to Photo. So that's why we're going to take a break here. And well, for you it's in a minute, but for me it's in a couple of hours tomorrow we are going to continue editing on this photo. So here we are for me. It's the next day for you is just two or 3 s later. Let's jump into Lightroom. And here is our Photo that we have been editing or that I've been editing yesterday and we're going to continue on editing with it. So I have here the purple mark on it, the peripheral Label, because that was the label for revisioning it. That's what I use for that. And I'm gonna open this photo in Photoshop, just hitting Control or Command plus the E. And you can just click here on edit original. The next thing that I wanted to do is I wanted to go to brightness and contrast here. And here. I want to draw out some of the shadows and some of the highlights. So I here by brightness, just slide this down and make it darker. And we can name these too dark. And let's invert that mask, hitting Control or Command Plus. And then I'm going to make another one. So go to adjustments again, go to the brightness slash contrast. And here is for the brighter areas, so we want to increase that. And he'd also control plus I to invert that. You can also put them in group. Now just clicking Control plus the Jeep. And we can name that dark slash, dark slash. Let's start and let's go a variety as well. Let's start with the darks. And I want to draw out the darks here a little bit more and the scanner gives more of a three-dimensional feeling to everything. And here we are. A little bit like a painter trying to paint like a nice 3D effect out of everything. So we want you opacity on, on then, because we want to build things up here. And let's just make this a little bit smaller here on the edges where the darkest, I am going to start being dean and trying to bring them a little bit out to Create a dream 3D effect, be sure to have your brush on the whites. And let's just start painting a little bit. 55. Creating a Vignette and Using LUTs: Alright, so let's switch over to the Brights now. So here we would have liked to flex, right? And here we have the brights. So I want to draw them a little bit stronger out as well. So Doris, litigious, Bucky opacity, little bit more down to about 70. And the brights. So far they're not like that many, many areas that I want to write more hours. But maybe when we are editing further on, there might be a couple of more areas that I will see that I wanted to draw a little bit more. But so far, Let's go on with the next things here. We want to make it Vignette around here. An easy way to do that is going up here to the Elliptical Marquee Tool. Let's put the filtering up here to 1,000 searches, 100 2000s. But this, we have made a selection in here. And if we go to the adjustments, we go to our curves. We drag this down. That what we selected, the insight will now evil effect now with the Curves or any kind of adjustments that you have in that selection, just click on Control plus I to invert this. And then you can see it's inverted. And a very nice thing. And let's first just adjust here to Curves a little bit more to something that looks a little bit more applying. I would say this. Now over here, bringing this up. You can give like a nice feeling to the shadows. So let's bring it a little bit up. And that looks very nice. This is a layer mask. So obviously if we hit the B for brush, we can go and paint out in areas where we don't want it. Because I've now made my friend over a year a little bit darker too, which I don't want because I want the attention going to him. And now we scan, I'm just going away. So let's do the opacity to 40. The brush on whites are on dark. And let's just been Them year, a little bit more back again. And let's just see. Maybe we just want like a little bit over spotting your lighter to and that's maybe too strong. Let's put that to 20. That looks great. Let's see. Helix get just do a before and after. This already sets a lot more of the moods and everything in a Photo. And I've got to want to just bring this a little bit more lighter out again. They want to think a little bit OD Effect off here on the rocks as well. Because this I do feel it's like very dark now. And be sure to once in awhile ago to save here. So your document is being saved in case if Photoshop crashes. Never happens. Next thing that I went to add you on the photo. And this are golf glutes. And they are used a lot of times for videographers in their movies. It's sort of like a preset that you apply your video, but you also have that for Photos. If you go here to Color Lookup, you have here tree, the root file, load 3D, good File. And in here you have a whole range of lutz. Now on the Internet you can download a hundreds of different loads. I have attached a PDF file in this course here with some loot recommendations. Now I can show you where to go and install them. You want to go to this computer, to your hard drive and program files. And then you want to locate Adobe and then go to Adobe Photoshop CC 2017, or which ever one that you're using. And in here you want to locate presets. So click on that. And then if you've downloaded your lutz, you have downloaded the files, you have to put them into the tree dilutes file. So this kind of files, you have to put them into here. Now for Mac users, you to your applications and you have to go to Add OK. And you basically have to find the same ones. You also have to go to Adam Photoshop, CC, or the diversion that you are using. And then also the presets. And then also to treat the glutes. And then you also just boot disk files into the folder 56. How to Make Your Photos Cinematic using LUTs: Now I'm going to check a few to see which one loose, nice. And you can see now that it's sort of like a preset that we're applying. Andiswa loose. I don't know. Don't do wow, fade outs. Let's check that one. Now, I would never really use just everything like that. I would still put the opacity like Dow or, and, and Ghana make a few adjustments here and there. So let's just check a little bit further. Maybe if we put the opacity down of this one, this good luck. Maybe nice. Yeah. This one I like as well. And this one I like a lot. Let's just check a little bit further. And this one I like even more. And there's just one more that I wanted to check over here. Alright, that's just a weird one. But this one over here, I like lots. And I'm going to use that one. Now, like I said, not like 100%, but I'm going to bring the opacity a little bit down to see to 40%. Alright, now this loop, we also have a layer mask on it so we can go and being deliberate overdose things a little bit Beck year. So I wanted to paint some of that green back in here. Now, this has dramatically changed the whole photo, right? If we were just and if I would do a before-after, you can make all of them like you visible, right? But you could also just go into the list I here. And I click on Alt and click. And that's done shaking all of them off. Ls, just click on that again. Having old selected. Now we can have like a fast before and after I've everything that we've done. So let's just see again and yeah, the whole mood of the photo. It looks a lot different. So I'm gonna go to adjustments again, going to go to Color Lookup. And I'm going to look for another loop that we can load, which look nice on here. Well, let's make the first one that we have made invisible. So we can just see the whole effect of the next loop that we're loading and then we're going to blend them a little bit Together. Yes. So this one was a good one, I think. Let's also just bring it a little bit down. And let's enable the other one again. And the other one kind of brings things a little bit brighter. And this one makes things a little bit darker. So it's kinda of a nice contrast that it's making. Now let's just adjust this now too. Can a little bit more nicer. So let's move our Color Lookup or lutz. Let's also move them hearing the colors because they are as well dollar that we've been changing. So let's just select them and let's drag them and draw them here in the Colors. By the way, this is also a very cool thing. So we have here the group now selected and all those adjustment layers in here. If we would go We week, we can actually impact at a Layer Mask on that group. And we can then go and adjust all of those colors here now. So if we will go to black, we are now affecting all the colors of that, that are here in our map. Or might just wanted to take a little bit here off the rocks. But like just little bit of the Color. I feel like for the most part everything was pretty nice. Maybe I can go here in the brights and add a little bit more brightness on the leaves here as well. Maybe I would add little bit of brightness, scan it to some parts of the water here. The photo is pretty great. I think. It looks very nice. The next thing that we're going to apply it on the photo will even make things more dramatic. I wouldn't that make like to some sun effecting here because there's sun coming from there. And we're going to also add little bit of a blur in there 57. Applying a Sunset Technique in a Photo: I am going to create here a Sunlight Effect. And we have seen all these Sunlight Effect possibilities in the Sunlight Technique lesson. So if you've not watched that one yet, I would go and see watch that one because there I explain more step-by-step, each one of those techniques, I think I'm going to go with a Sunset Effect Technique. And we do that very simply by going to the gradient tool. And in here, Let's make a layer. And on that layer we're just going to put down that gradient. So let's just drag and drop that. Now, let's go to our Elliptical Marquee Tool and the filtering we want to have on zero. So let's just put that on zero and hitting Alt Shift while clicking in the middle. You can very easily, Ghana, slipped out this sunsets. And then just click here on the layer mask, the mask that out. So here we have our sun sets. Let's Plays it a little bit where we wanted. Of course, doesn't look like sun at all. Now let's go to the blending modes like I've showed in the Sunlight Technique lessons. And let's just check screen. Let's go with screen. Looks most of the time pretty good. And let's put a Blur on this now. So let's go to Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. Let's see, we can go pretty much pretty high with this. So 156 seems good to me. And hitting Control or Command plus D. Let's move the Sunset Effect here. Let's spread out a little bit more out. So let's just drag that more. Let's see about this, maybe about this here. Let me just click on Yes, and I would say about this loose, fine. Now I am seriously going to put a lot of Adobe the way here, go in the Layer Mask. And I am going to go through the Blake. And with the brush. I'm just going to paint away some of this year because I don't want it that strongly. And I don't a lot of this is going to disappear. A lot of Sunset Effect. I just wanted a little bit in some areas, I am going to add another Selective Color. And I'm going to play a little bit more here now with the colors. That looks very nice. Now I'm not going to apply that everywhere. I'm going to invert that. And we can also just drag and drop that in color folder here. And let's switch over to whites. And here it's way too bright still on the rocks. It's just, let's put the opacity a little bit higher here, which just make it a little bit more off. Let's see, corners. So that looks already way better to me and it Colors looks nicer to. We got some more variety now we've got the greens a bit more stroller out and some of the orange to, and we have two different Ghana. Orange is more like a yellow one and More like a stronger orange. We can apply a little bit more in some parts. Let's see over here. Over here, little bit more stronger in there too. And here in a bag, There's a lot of things going on here too. So let's just with some variety in there as well. That one too. So let's now, because we have all these adjustments now, if we make a stamp visible layer of that, we can go and remove all of those adjustments, do Control Alt Shift plus E to make a stamp visible layer. So what we can do now is just take all those adjustments and just put them in the trash can. I am just going to Make a copy of that one. And we're going to go and edit now on this layer here. So we have that one just untouched. So this one, I want to change the blending modes. So we go here up to normal. And let's just see, I have some ideas of maybe soft, light. Good look nice, and definitely not 100% of opacity. But if we change that a little bit down, it does make things a little bit more darker again. But let's just see through some other ones. Leiden, fix things. Lighter. Screen makes things more like that over lay. Alright, let's just change the opacity a little bit. Even like 10/10 percent of it does take quite some nice things around. Let's check. Heart lights. Do much difference, linear lights. So I would say, let's see soft light again. Do the opacity a little bit more down. Now, if we make a layer mask on that and we would invert that, we are inverting the blending mode into that layer now. And I want to bring out here those trees in a bankrupt more Ghana, bringing out some of those shadows a little bit stronger. You can definitely see, especially like here, we have given it like some Separation sort of, you can see now a difference between the trees in the far background and the, the branches of trees they're bringing going a little bit more out, which is very nice to see. And I am effect just going to duplicate that layer once again. And I'm going to change that blending mode as well. And this time I'm gonna do with the screen. Because I just want to thank the waterfall a little bit. 58. Working with Blending Modes & Sharpening our Photo: And of course we don't want the opacity 100% either here. So let's just see, is there something else as Color Dodge looks pretty nice too. So let's use Color Dodge in this case. And we probably the opacity quite low for that just like a little bit of a bump in there. So like 8%. And let's also use a Layer Mask on that. And here it lets also invert that. And let's take the brush and let's have the white color and let's just apply it on a few areas here where we want it. So just to bring a few more things and we can also use it even here to bring a little bit more sun beams or something from here. Just to lighten up a few more things. Analysts would the opacity maybe to send and just kinda lightening up a couple of areas here. You're trying to just highlight the better parts. Like here is another waterfall, but it's not that obvious, right? So just highlighting it that little bit. It's very nice because E, you're drawing out every kind of detail in the Photo, which is scanning your job here to do that. And also like little, little water coming from here. If we regrouped those two together here with the Layer Masks, it is definitely adding a little bit more of depth through everything. And we could also, for the opacity of all of them together a little bit down. And maybe I will just do like -10% or something. If I'm happy with this year, I'm just going to click Control Alt, Shift E, make a stamp visible layer of that. And I'm going to remove the group here. And I can also remove that one here, Layer two, because that was our first Stamp visible layer that we made. And we can make now a copy of that layer here. So let's first of all, make a smart object out of this layer here so we can always go and adjust the sharpening that we have applied. So just right-click on that and Convert to Smart Objects. So this is now a smart object and we will go down to Filter, do Sharpen and to smart Sharpen. And let's just put this over here because we don't want to over Sharpen him. But the great thing is we can add a layer mask on that ends. We can just mask them out. So we, he is getting a lot of noise. Now. I'm more going to try to see just at everything a little the photo because we do have to remember he was taken at an ISO of thousand 600. The rest of the photo was taken at an ISO of 200s, so he will not be any noise really. So we can go and increase that a little bit. So I'm just going to do that on 170. And let's just see before and after clicking on it. Alright, that's a lot sharper, definitely. Let's click on Okay, creating a smart object also already adds a layer mask on it so we don't have to go and create one anymore. Go on Layer Mask on here. Let's go on. The black analysts take the brush and let's been that off from him. That's the nice thing. Layer Masks that you can just so easily mask things out. And let's maybe put the whole opacity of everything just a little bit down. Like about 80 or so. And the next thing what we wanted to do is add some blur now to 59. Blurring our Photo, New Sunlight Technique and Final Touches: I'm missing something over here. And I want to bring some kind of a, this is also some sort of Sunlight Technique that we have not seen though. But it's very easy one. And I, we just go to layer here. So we're creating just one layer. And we are going to sample here by clicking Alt, a little bit of the orange color here. Okay. Let me just made a big and we just make like a dark in there. If we go to our Blending Modes and we would change that to screen, for example, or over Lake. And I think I'm going to go with overlay. And if we would go to the Move tool, we can affect move that still around. And let me just bring your opacity a little bit down. So something like that kind of looks nice. And if we click on Control plus D, we have the transferred Tool. So we can still go and transform that and expand that a little bit. Move it up just a little bit to there to hear a little bit to let's just click on Yes. And it's not like much, right? But it's kinda like a little bit more of a goal or feeling in there. And we could Effect do here with water. I kinda wanna have some kind of a missed or something coming out of it. So let's create another and the layer. And let's take the brush. And let's also just assembling here to kind of blue collar of the water. And we're just going to make a.in here. Now let's just move that a little bit nicer over here, a little bit more down. And let's change the blending mode as well too. Let's see screen. My goal for screening for this one, but let's check over a delay. Yeah, So I'm gonna go with screen Blemishes, bringing your best it even more down to about five or so. So it's not much right? But he kinda give some more extra mood in there. And we can still got to move this a little bit around. And let's transport this a little bit more down here as well. So we can also now just go and merge them down into that layer. And then we have than we are finished. That is the final touch that I would do on this photo. So now that we're finished well, let's go on to the next Photo. 60. How to Turn a Terrible Photo into a Good-Looking One: This photo, it's not a photo that I would put on my portfolio or something. It's all in all horrible photo taken in the worst scanner condition. And I'm not talking about the girl here, I'm not talking about her. She's a beautiful looking girl, beautiful person, but I am talking about the condition that is photo was taken in. First of all, this was in the middle of the day. There was no cloud at all in the sky like you can see here. Just perfectly blue, beautiful dado. But it's not the time to go and take photos in because it creates like very harsh shadows. Also, we were climbing up on a mountain in Barcelona, so her skin was a lot redder. I'm going to show you a before and after the after photo, you're going to say like, wow, this is the before photo, D after photo. So you can see this one compared to that one. It's just a huge, huge difference, right? I mean, in this one, It's well exposed. You can see her eyes, which you can see in here. We have Clouds here in the background, which we're going to learn how to do as well, which is just very easily with a brush and then you're trying to blend it nicely in the backgrounds. I would still not use this photo in a way as a portfolio Photo or anything. But this, compared to this, is just a huge, huge difference. And with that, I'm just showing you, first of all a whole range of new tools and techniques. But secondly, if you have a Photo that you can elect, but it was not taken under good conditions, but you really liked it. There are still a lot of things that you can do it to go and save it because this photo is kinda like, Yeah, This photo is a lot more usable. So let's go and start editing and Post-Processing. So first of all, we're going to start here in Lightroom where we are as always, taking out the most information that we can from the photo. So let's just play here a little bit with the exposure was already. But that a little bit of contrast in this photo. I might in fact bringing it down instead of up because there's already too much in there. So with the contrasts, we can flatten the photo a little bit out. So let's bring that a little bit down. Highlights. Let's just see. Don't want to overdo that patella down the shadows. We can already recover some nice information from her ice with that. So let's put that up. Maybe not that much. The whites, Let's just see, we don't want to go too crazy with that eater. So let's bring that a little bit down. The blacks. We might want to put that a little bit up to with the temperature. I am not sure if I'm going to play much with that in here. I might leave that to Photo shop, but in general, I would maybe warmed up Photo little bit up. Let's just maybe a blight. Now let's leave that clarity. Let's just put a little bit in there. A little bit of a bunch of clarity. The kinda make things a little bit look sharper. Tone Curves. I'll leave that Photoshop in a color. We are going to play here with the color and we're going to go through all of them again. So with you here in Lightroom, obviously to read, so going down will be just making it worse, right? But going up, if we are in fact nicely fixing a lot of her skin color again. And obviously if there's too much if there will be like orange or something in her skin that you would like to fix. Then you have to play with the orange hue. Or if there's like hello like yellow that you have to play with you. The yellow tab here. But here because of her Redskin, We have to play with you. So now let's go on and let's see Lens Correction. I probably should have enabled that at first. So just to get reminder, Lens Correction, tried to always have that at first because as you can see, it is Enable Profile Correction. It's influencing again how our Photo loose. And in this case, I might in fact not applied because of are heavier. It's just can almost scuttling around there. And I'll like to just have a little bit on there. So I am just going to click on Remove Chromatic Aberration. Most cases Profile Corrections is to have on Camera Calibration might put up the saturation here, as it always gives a nice overall blue influencing every where and it definitely does the didnt. Let's just see if we can bring a little bit of a nice thin in here. Maybe the green one looked pretty nice. What like too much, but like five, looks pretty nice. Let's pages look at you for a moment here. Maybe we can put some kinda cool color in here as well. Just like minus one. Minus one looks, doesn't do it like a huge amount of difference, but there's something in there. It's always good to go back to the color in the nth and still go through everything again. Let's just play with the thing over here. Let's just have like one look at it. And I might just put like five or something on there to like it a little bit about the loose nice to me and that is everything that I would do it to this photo. Now, I am just going to walk away, take a little break, gone back to this, and then see if I'm happy with the colors. Because like I've said, it's always best to just walk away once you're done with playing with the colors and then come back a few minutes. Don't have a fresh look at it. So that's what I'm going to do right now. 61. Fixing Hair, Removing Blemishes, Correcting Skin Color: All right, Becky, again, a width, how chocolates. Let me just look at this photo again. I would say that this looks alright. So I'm going to open this in Photo shop by hitting Control plus E. I am just going to start here by making a copy of our backgrounds. And I'm gonna just do a little bit of intuition work here. So for example, this error here, which is just going to fly around. I want to trim a little bit out and let's see if there's some kind of a little Blemishes which all in all, she doesn't really have. But let's definitely remove this here. And let's try to his with the Healing Brush. So let's just sample here. Don't go for perfect, always go for believable. And especially if you know that there will become some blurring there and a Vignette which will just make that a lot more less visible. I could have ever spent a lot and lot more time on perfecting this, but there's not really that much of a neat of it. And her hair looks a lot better. There's less things just sticking out of there. So let's just see if there's some kind of a Blemishes on here. We can fix that by the spot Healing Brush. Just have to click. Let Photoshop do its thing. And the rest we will fix very good with the Frequency Separation. So let's just zoom out. All me, just start off by explaining the one technique that I wanted to show it to correct the red skin or any kind of Skin Corrections. But in Lightroom we can pretty much do the exact same. However, I will still show you how to do it here in Photoshop. Now, we go to adjustments and we go to you and set duration. Here. We want to go up to the master and select the color that we want to fix. In this case, it's red. So we're affecting the reds now, bring up the saturation to 100%. And I know this looks weird, right? But that's just scan it. This is just to see where we are targeting. So we will bring this down in the end again, but bringing it up to 100% here down, we also can affect our colors right? Now we also have these arrows here that we can extend as well. And we can also kind of squish them more in and outs and the arrow as well. And we can drag and do that too. So now the thing is we have to just look. We have to focus. We have to see that we are just targeting the part where we want the retinas to disappear. So that is scanning the phase over there. Now we just have to squeeze all of that in here too. So we're really just targeting the phase over there. Let's just see if we can move even more down. So it's about this here that we need. Now the hundred per cent, we can bring that back to zero because this was just to see where we were targeting. And if you play now with you, you can just adjust that dark in that area. That is in fact how you can go and fix the retina IS or any kind of Skin Corrections in Photoshop. Now, you know how to do it in Lightroom and in Photoshop, It's definitely more easier in a way in Lightroom, however, in Photoshop, you can target more specifically where you want to go and apply it on 62. Dodge & Burn Tool, Photo Corrections: Let's start editing this photo. Let's go up here to the adjustments. I will also start with the brightness and make one a little bit darker. And invert that one with control plus I and then make one brighter. Going to draw out some of the highlights a little bit. Let's invert that to. And we can make here, if we doubled that, we can name that. So let's name that bright, and let's name this dark. And let's just Control plus G to put them into a group here. Let's start with the dark. And I kinda want to bring some more shadows in here in Hair. It's not like that much as we did with the previous photo, but there is still some of that that I definitely want to bring in here. Let's just put the hardness to zero per cent and the opacity to 20%. And with a white brush, we can just start painting here a little bit in. Maybe 20 is even too much. So let's go to then present. And let's start here. And let me just see again. This is just again to bring out the shadows. And the bride's to Ghana give that kind of tree DIE feeling in a Photo. So I'm not a blindness every aware, I'm just going to doing this on some edges here, like on the hair here to make that little bit stronger. Now. And I'm just seeing here, I might want to trim the hair over here down as well. So let's click on our background layer. Now let's just take the Stamp Tool. This here. Let's try to fix that as well. So let's just keep going with the dark here. Let's give a painting. Unless we go and see something else that I might have to fix, we will jump through that. So let's go on. Okay. So with the darks, I feel sort of heavy. I'm going to switch over to the brights. And let's start any little bit of riots in some areas, like in the hair here, for example. To Ghana, draw that a little bit more outs. So let's just bowed groups and turn them on and off. Let's just see. And let me just do that again. Alright, maybe we darks, I will just pull them a little bit more down. A bit more subtle like at. But all in all, so far I feel pretty heavy with this. And I'm gonna make a stamp visible layer out of this. So let's hit Control Alt Shift plus E. And then I am going to put that out of the group. Of course, if it wants to do that. There we go. I'm just going to remove now the rest of those layers here as we don't really need them anymore. So we have now our before and after, after already sorted. Next thing that we want to do here, I'm going to play with the colors here in Photoshop. Let's play here with the Selective Color, and let's go through all of them as well. 63. Enhancing Colors, Selective Color & Color Balance: Let's play here with the Selective Color, and let's go through all of them as well. So that looks fine. Let's go a to D, color Balance. And let's play in here a little bit with the midtones. Alright, so this is like a very subtle effect that we are applying on here. Now, let's just group that together. But the end result is definitely there if we do a before and after. So I might just go here to the adjustments one more time and go to Selective Color and see just if I can have some nice color in the hair more. And I think if I go to the yellows, Let's just have a look here. Let's just play a little bit. Like making it a little bit brighter is already sort of a nice thing. That looks got a nice Lazarus just only looking at the hair now, I would definitely go and apply that. So let's invert our mask. Let's take our brush and have it on whites. And let's put the opacity, maybe 40%. If you wants to do that. Let's just bend here a little bit of that. Hair like that, that looks very, very cool. Adds a little bit more of different colors in our hair. On my just bring the opacity. Just a little bit done. But not like too much. Alright, so this are the killers. And I feel pretty happy with them. So we can in fact make a stamp visible layer out of all this and remove those adjustments just to keep our file size a little bit less, we can just go and delete them. So this already a before and after. Let's go to the adjustments and let's go to the color lookup to see if we can load any kind of cool lutz on here. And let's just go to the list 64. LUTs, Cropping, Enhancing Eyes: So I am going to use this for water. So let's just invert that. You don't eggs to the whites Brush if it wasn't on white already. Let's just bend here a little bit of that. So let's go back to the adjustments. Let's go back to the Color Lookup and let's load another alludes to like the effect that this loop getting gifts on the water as well. So we might just apply that a little bit on there too. Let's maybe just play with brightness. Little bit more down. Alright. And the blue. Alright, I do like a dad over there. Alright, I don't think I will apply any kind of lutz on her. So I do like dosed once a year that we've made now, let's just group them. Let's just see before and after. Yeah. All-in-all, it looks pretty nice. I'm just looking at the horizon here, which just doesn't will Lucasfilm at all? So let's just go to the crop tool here and let's just grew up that. So that to me it looks already a little bit better. Now here it just looks good to know because we have taken out of her hair too. I'm just going to make this a little bit more. I mean, this to me, it looks like I've done a horrible job of taking your photo and just not was able to put her head on there. So we're gonna do it that it's more done on purpose. So I'm just going to got a little bit more off. And with these two, just a little bit, not too much. So it's more also now becoming sort of a Panorama. Can a feeling on there too? Maybe even a bit more or maybe a bit less. I don't know. Let's just cut that a little bit more. So that was one too much I think. Looks alright. Although I think let's do that again, because I don't want I don't know. I was taking too much of you. I think two. So let me just only put the top one here. And maybe like know, maybe like very, just, just a little bit too much Dorothy. Alright, I am now going to work a little bit more on ice because they're just black. I mean, they did came out already a little bit better, but they're just you can see them really, right? I mean, they're just dark eyes and also yield a hard shadows. It's not easy to really remove that completely above. There are definitely some things that we can do to fix that. So let's go to the adjustments and maybe let's just make a stamp visible layer from all this. So we can just remove those things here because I feel happy whatever dean here and I'm going to take the adjustments here, gonna go to the Curves. And I'm going to pull them up. And I do have to put down on top. Just going to pull that up. Let me just zoom out a little bit more. So just kinda fixing a little bit more. All right, Let's just made up brighter. And let's invert this now. And we're just gonna been on here. I'm a little bit more brighter. With low opacity though. Let's just bring the opacity down our Taconic, correct, until where it looks good ish. About this. And I do not want any year. Just put out more down on the eyebrows are the ones that give them dark. And here on the top. Maybe, let's just do that with 20 of opacity. This is sort of darker. Alright, Let's use the Stamp Tool. Now. It's counter and move the hard shadows over here. Let's just try to fix it with that a little bit. And I do want to make a copy of this layer. So I'm not working on that layer, but on this one in case if it will go not that good, I can just delete this then let's hit the S. Now, the cool thing with the Stamp Tool is here. If you go to top, you see normal. But if we click on it, if we go to Leiden, if I would sample now from a dark area and I will try to paint that it does not do anything. If I sampled from a Latin area, it does. You can only sample from a light source and then it will paint, but not from a dark one. So if I go to the Modes, to the Blending Modes and I would change that to darken. Here. It's the opposite and doesn't ones like that. Here's the opposite. If I sample from a dark area, it will paint that. If I sample from a light area, it will not been that this is helpful in areas like this, because now I can just get to work more specifically. So let's just sample here. From there, Ellis, just see if we can try to fix this. Alright, looks nice. You can definitely see though the difference here, and let's just use a lower opacity. This one worked pretty well. I like this a lot. That looks very nice. All-in-all. It looks very nice here. Could be a little bit better, but yeah, let's do that with the Frequency Separation. Now, let's brighten up her eyes 65. Brighten Pupils & Change Eye Color: Let's take the curves again. And now we're just going to try to just focus here on the eyes. So let's just bring them up. Like quite some because we can always reduce it. And let's take the brush here. And let's zoom in here. And let's just start just painting on the ice. But that's way too much though. Let's just take like 30. Let's just give a little bit of some strokes in it. Not like just the whole everything, but also the white here. Very low opacity right now. And let's go to the adjustments again. They can other girls. And let's pull them down now to about something like that. Let's invert data as well. And this is a very nice thing to do. Let's take the brush again, make it small and just go a year making this here bit darker. Like around her is, and that's maybe a little bit too much. And let's make the pupil also a little bit darker, just little bit stronger. And the eye delicious. Just a little bit soup. Let's take a look at it, is let's group them. And these definitely a very good effect, right? I mean, you can definitely see it's very much strongly drawn out everything. So let's change the colors of the eyes and try to match them because this will lose different than that one. Which looks a little bit weird. So let's match them and it's in fact very easy to do that. Plus the following technique will allow you to just create any kind of coloring. The is like green eyes, purple eyes, red eyes, orange is whatever you want. We can do that. So let's go up to the Lasso Tool. You can also just click on the L. And lasso tool is just another way to make a selection. And we don't have to be perfect, of course, but let's just draw a line along the pupil here. And if you click on Shift, you can see this plus sign next to the lasso. And this just means that we allow to take, to draw another selection because i've, I would now go make a selection without that. That's just going to be removed. So just click on the plus sign and go and make another selection to the eyes and go up to the adjustments and go to UN, saturation. Now, this made a selection of that, or you can see that selection here. If you click on Alt and on the mask, you can see the selection. And if we click here on the adjustment now, click on colorize and you can already see the colorize, the ice. Now, if we take the you, we can change the color of the eyes, like you can see. We can just make it into any can range of colors. Now, for this one, I read or want to have sort of a blue color. So let's put it to apply to hundreds. If it's too strong, then just go with the saturation and just drag that down. The color is going off now on the areas here which we don't want. And we just go to our Layer Mask. And as we've done so many times before, we just did the white color. And in year, Let's zoom in. They got Brush, have the opacity on a hundreds. Not do that. They can be black color. And let's just paint that nicely off. And we have matched Colors. Now, first of all, this one is a little bit brighter before. But in general, they do look very nice and we can always go in the Curves here, or it was in here, right? He was this one. We can always just made that a little bit more brighter now. And now I'm thinking of this here with the, with the, is that we have done the blending modes where you want the effect dollars just to Load, just changing it from normal to color will only work on the Colors itself. And it's lighting up a little bit right from normal. This one here is a little bit dark. Lighting up. That's different. One sliding it a little bit differently, a bit more up, which actually loose. But now we're just loan affecting the colors and not anything else that we have touched even though we have painted that off. But now it's really just affecting the colors what we've put on there. So that to me, loose good as well. Let's just group all of those things here, just Together. I'm going to stop for today and edit tomorrow further on. But it might be good for you to also just take a break and maybe continue on in a few minutes or even tomorrow as well. Because then you also have a fresh look upon all this. Again. Now 66. Adding Realistic Clouds to a Sky: Welcome back here and let's continue on where we left with this photo over here, having a fresh look upon all of this. Again, the eyes, there is definitely something to strong here, the color of it. And that should be this here. Hello, It's not even the color. There we go. So let's just lower that, or let's just see and play with that until it looks a little bit more appropriate. I am going to leave it with that. I'm gonna make a stamp visible layer out of this so I can remove everything of those changes over here. You just delete that. Let's put some clouds in there. And they are Effect very sort of easy to make. And we just do that by a customized Brush. Now, this is a customized brush that you can download. And I've attached a PDF file here, which some Brush recommendations that you can just download for free. And you can just go, if you right-click when you have your brush and you go here on the, the little gear, then you just guilt to Load brushes. And the brushes that you've downloaded, they block, you just select them then unclicking Load brushes. And they will appear here on the bottom of all your brushes. So here we have to kinda Difference Clouds or different cloud shapes. And let's just start with this one over here. And we want to make just the layer here. We do want to have the color on whites. And let's just make this a little bit smaller. And if I will just stamp it, you can see it's making a little fluffy clouds. Now, this does look a little bit like a fake Clouds, but we will do a few things to make that look a lot better. Alright, so let's start here by just, I don't know, we do want to make it better. It looks realistic, right. So I'm just going to make one leg over there and maybe one over there. The great thing here on the layer is we can go to the Move tool and we can move are here, right? Sorry, I made a mistake. Just have one Clouds, right? So just F1 cloud over here. Make another layer and I'll go and paint another Clouds. So each time we can go and separately move that Clouds. Right? Now we can move this piece over here. We can position it a little bit different or hitting Control plus D, we have transferred Tool where we can transfer this a little bit, which is always a good thing to do. So this looks like a good thing already, those Clouds. And let's just continue on. Let's just make one over here for a moment. Let's go to the Move tool and let's no. Let's see. Maybe if you hit Control plus D for the free transform tool, having that select it and right-clicking on it, you can flip it horizontal. So you're just flipping it to the other side. Which is nice because now we have like a different kind of shape over here to work with. Now, we can just go and select the one, click Shift to have the bottom one, and click on Control plus E to merge them into one layer. So now we can also try to just work with all of them if we just still want to do some adjustments. But all in all, I think their position pretty good. And if we go to Filter and we go to Blur and to Gaussian blur. Here we want to, this photo is just, just her. She's in-focus, right? All the rest Jew in the background is not in-focus. The tree is not in focus. Here. Down there, the harbor is not in focus, so we want to match the Clouds as the photo in there. We also want to make it non in-focus, right? So we don't want to make them sharp. And then over here it's not sharp because that doesn't make sense. She should be a focus all Arish should be unfocused. So let's just make them sort of almost. There should be visible, but not as visible. And is also takes off the hard edge of those call-outs. And then they do look a lot more like some More Realistic Clouds. And I think a go about like this here. Let's just see a preview. Because this does look like it's going to matching in the background. So I go, let's go down. Click on OK. And there we have just pretty easily made some clouds in our background. This is one thing more than we've done on a Photo 67. Smoothing Skin with Frequency Separation: So let's start with the Frequency Separation. Now, let's make a stamp visible layer. First of all, it Control Alt Shift E. So we can go ahead and really all this here. For the Frequency Separation, we wanted to make two copies. Let's make 12, and let's call this one low free Quincy. And let me add to this before I'm starting all with Frequency Separation. If you have not seen in a Photo shop section, the reducing lesson, that's where I In-Depth Explained the Frequency Separation and what exactly this and where I take my time much more into explaining it to you. So here I will still do that, but less in-depth because that lesson is specifically made that the issue, this technique, please go ahead and watch that so that you know, what I'm doing here. The low frequency is for removing any blemishes or any of the sweaty spots here. And the next one, you want the name high free Quincy. And that's the correct any texture. Let's make the Frequency first, which is the easiest. So first of all, check of the first one. So we can see this one here and what we're doing on that one. Then let's go to Filter. Let's go to blur and Gaussian Blur. And 78 is way too much. And mostly between the radius between two and Zen should be somewhere there. It just depends on the person and the skin. Of course, by just tried to eliminate the texture. Not too much like this. It's too much and not to feel because now we can still see pretty much a lot of it. So let's just gonna go, I think probably like about six or so. Will be a good spot. Are about eight. So about eight, so we don't see all the textures in there. So we're gonna just blurring them out. So let's do that. Let's click on. Okay, and with that, we have just made the low frequency. Now let's make the high frequency. So let's select that one and just click visible again. And for this one, we go to image. We go to Apply Image. And in here, you want to select layer, you want to select low frequency and then blending. This is probably just on normal. So take that from normal and go to subtract. And now we can see here the slide, the high-pass filter. Because we can see all these Sharpening now there, right? The scale set that to two and the offset set that to E122 hundred and 82. With that, we just click on, Okay, so now we just have this here once we come back. So we need to change our blending mode from normal to Linear Light. And now, if we grouped the high-frequency and a low-frequency, it could draw plus G to make it into a group. So nothing has changed. Now. If we made it visible and invisible, and if that's the case, then you have successfully made the Frequency Separation here. So now how this works, Let's select the low-frequency because it's best always start with low-frequency. First, just remove those Blemishes and everything. And let's zoom in here on her face and let's remove those highlighted spots. We do that by the Lasso tool. So the lesser tool, which is located over here, which you can just deal with the shortcut L. And we just make a selection. So let's make a selection of this here. And now we go up to Filter and we go to Blur, and we go to Gaussian Blur. And you said it a bit higher, like 48 here. And you can already see before and after. Alright, and we apply blur now on there. Now let me just do a few more and then show you before and after. That looks very nicely, right? Looks like we fixed some pretty good spots in here now. So that's really the amazing thing ever Frequency Separation be cool, because now with the low-frequency, we can correct this fleshy areas. And with the high-frequency, we can just correct some texture. And the way to use the high-frequency is by selecting it Going to the Stamp Tool, hit the S and have the Blending Mode of that, a normal sample have that on current layer. So we are sampling from that layer, although in the, so, let's go and sample here. Let's put the opacity maybe a little bit lower. And we are really keep the skin detail, but we're just making some nice correction on here. And that's really the beauty year, the Frequency Separation. Alright, so let's try to use the yellow Frequency little bit more here. Let's write the correct that overhear more. Let's go to Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. Alright, so we have the Clouds, we've done the Frequency Separation. Let's just make a stamp visible layer from this. So we can go ahead and remove those things here just to make things run faster in Photoshop. Now, Let's see. I would say, let's do a Vignette in here. Like a Tilt-Shift blur or something in there as well. Let's start with a Vignette maybe. So let's just go a year to the Elliptical Marquee key. Let's just make a selection in heater like that. There's maybe a little bit too small, but we can correct that. And once this lecture is here, Let's go to adjustments and have the Curves. Let's go to the Curves. Let's drag this a little bit down. Now, this is going from the inside, so we want to invert that. So we're doing this here. And let's just zoom out a little bit. And let's just note, see how much we want to apply it. First of all, in a nice thing year that will work very nicely. In the other Photo, I didn't do this, but if we drag this up here, we get this kind of fill Mish look, right? And I think it looks very cool. So let's just play more with that. Kind of see. This makes the whole Photo kinda look more filled niche. Don't overdo it because then you make your photo look horrible. But just some of it gives a very cool feeling too. All right. Looks great. And I don't want it like here in our ICE. Obviously we're interface. So let's not go with the Clouds, but let's go and select just a regular brush here. And let's switch not too wide but to Blake and maybe even a lower opacity, just be enough. Hear from her face. Looks nice. Alright, so next time, let's do a tilt shifts 68. Blur, High Pass Filter and Finishing Touch: All right, Next, let's do a Tilt-Shift here in the sky and here on the bottom as well. Now let me just take another look because I have not really looked at everything new what's happening now with a Vignette. I really liked it over here. My just remove a little bit over there. So let's just select this layer here. Right-click on it, Convert to Smart Objects. Once that's done, let's go up to Filter, Blur, Gallery and through Tilt-Shift. And let's see what we want to do here. I don't want her eyes to be affected. Let's increase the blur. See. Yes. Something about that. Let's click on Okay. And let's see how that looks. Let's go here. Layer Mask, and let's have the opacity on about 30. Let's Blend his little bit nicer to get her. Right, cool. Let's make a stamp visible layer out of all of this here. Now, let's remove all this here. Let's just go and try to correct this here a little bit more. I don't know how well that will work with the Clone Stamp tool, but let's just try a little bit more. Maybe over here, some of it. So let's go to the Clone Stamp Tool. So I will jump to look at just one more time on this Photo tomorrow and then just have a final look on it. Alright, so let's take one last look here at this, a Photo. And one thing that is straightaway coming to my mind's already is that I have not applied any Sharpening through this Photo yet. So I'm going to oblige the smart Sharpen on the whole Photo and also the high-pass filter. And just a little bit here on the ice and maybe on the eyebrows to the Ghana, make them pop out a bit more. So let's just make a copy here of this layer. And let's convert this into a Smart Object. So right-click it. Go to Convert to Smart Objects. Once that's done, go up to Filter and to Sharpen. And let me just zoom already a little bit more in here. So Filter sharpen and smart Sharpen. Now let's go and here to the ice. And let me see here. Let me just zoom out a little bit. And if you click on it, you have a new have the before and where you unclick it, you have the after. So this is the before and this is the after which is already applying quiet, a lot of Sharpening on it, which looks pretty good. Let me just see. Maybe I'll put a little bit more down to about 130. Let's see. Make it a little bit more subtle. That looks good to me. So let's apply that. Let's click on. Okay, let's just do a little bit before and after. So that's nice subtle effect here of the smart Sharpen. Now, let us go and duty high Pass Filter. Now, I'm just going to run the action that we have learned to Create. I'm going to go into window and just body or the Actions panel. And here the high-pass filter. Now, if you have not watched the previous lessons in the second section, if you have not watched those lessons, there is a lesson that teaches, it's the one about blurring and Sharpening techniques. There I also explain how to Create Actions in Photoshop. So I'm not gonna go over the whole process of doing that again. So if you don't know, if you've not watched that lesson, go back to the second section and watch the one with the Sharpening and blurring techniques. So here I'm just gonna go and run the high-pass filter. I'm just going to click on Play. Alright, so there we go. We have here all the things that we need for the high-pass filter. And let's zoom in here now. And I obviously want to invert that layer. Let me just see if all the settings are good. And if I don't want to decrease or increase the high Pass, but I would say that's about right. So let me hit Control plus I to invert that layer. And let's take our brush and have it on the white color. And only me just zoom a bit more in. And let's put the opacity a bit more down to about 30. And let me just hear some more of a high-pass. And that should just give kinda of a nice little extra bunch in there. So let me just group that here. And that's pretty much the Sharpening forward is photo that I would apply. I'm not going to do too many crazy other things on these all here. So I would say just to Sharpening techniques that was less gotta thing here that I wanted to do. This Photo. Now, let me show you the before and after of everything that we've come to learn here now on this Photo