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 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 17. Field Tips to Take Better Panorama Photos: 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 18. How to Create HDR Photos 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 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 you're gara doesn't have a Bracketing option, low stress at all. You can simply use the exposure compensation Button and you just dial one exposure, step up, one Exposures stopped down and have one normal exposed Photo. First, the view that I will give intaking better HDR Photos is using a tripod. Now also just as a Panorama, you don't Effect neat one. You couldn't just take HDR Photos handheld, but obviously, using a tripod will results in way better results. The chance that gives 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 a way better HDR Photos. The next thing 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 animals. There are some photos of some portraits with some old people where there are some HER 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 Blaine, when you're taking photos for a board threads, yeah, it doesn't look too great on people or animals. The last step here that I would give, don't overdo it. Now, I would say go on Google and type in HDR overdue. And you will see a whole range of images of ACR photos that are just overdone because you have so much information into one file now, you could pull things to the extremes, but 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 overdue, and look how to not do it. Now, I'm not saying if that's the stylet you actually like. I'm not seeing that you shouldn't do that, but it doesn't look very natural anymore. Alright, so here we just have seen now how to create panoramas and HDR Photos in light room. And one thing that I want to add to all of this I've already said is about panoramas. Also, just as with HDR, I don't create them in Lightroom and Effects. Hdri 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, they're 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 gum to go over panoramas and Digital Blending and tell you all are 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: Now the Liquify tool is located by going to Filter. And in here you see Liquify. Let's go and click on that and let me just explain a few overdose sliders here. The size is obviously the size of the Brush here, the pressure on 100%, which is a lot. It's how much it will push. If I would put the pressure on 100%, he will push a lot, right? If I will put this on ten per cent, E will not push that much. So that's the pressure. So try to have this not that high. The density scan like the feathering, I can just have this off 50%, but the density, it will push less on the sites than it would in the inside. Now, in here, the first one is for Warp tool, which is in fact the tool that allows us to push and pull the pixels in a Photo. With the Reconstruct tool, we can go and reconstruct those changes that we have made, which is very handy. Next we have the freeze mask tool. And with this will allow us to do is we can draw a mask around an area. So let's say, let me draw a mask around here. Now. If we will go to the Ford Warp tool, we will not change anything where the red mask is on. So it's a good way to kinda leave the rest untouched and just touch upon the things that you want to move. If you want to go and remove the mask, you just go through mask tool, which is like an eraser for removing the mask here. Now let me go and lower the shoulder here of are just gonna show you more how to scan looks all in action. So are you and freeze some of the parts here that I don't want to move. So about this here, I will go a freeze. And then I will go and take the form Warp tool and be sure that you have a big one, gives you one again and move more pixels than just if you have a very small one, you're just moving a few pixels, right? But if you've got to try to lower something, it's best to have a bigger brush just so you can kinda move them all smoothly altogether down. So let's just go and push this now, inwards. Bridges to over here as well. And Lemmy with the mask, let me remove over here some of the mass because you can see we are in fact not moving into pieces over there. And well, that has to kill him with the rest of the shore of course Tool because now this looks a little bit. So let's just go and reconstruct a little bit ear. And let's just push that a little bit more down. Let's just try to fix this your first. Alright. Let's just put a little bit even now to, and now we can go and make it a little bit bigger and push them all at once. Now a little bit more down. Let's just see it go a little bit more down. And I think that's about good. And down here on Preview, you can see a preview of a before and after. This kind of shows you how to stools work. But it takes a little bit of time trying to perfect. It definitely can take up to a few minutes. Now, one more thing near about the Liquify tool. You can also, in Photoshop here, specifically already go and select an area that you want to use the Liquify tool on. So we take the lasso tool and let's go and make a selection here of the shoulder that we wanted to pull down LME, be sure to include that part over there NO2 by making that selection and then go into Filter and then going to liquefying. We are now just loading that selection in the Liquify tool. This is very handy because now we just have that 1 bar loan to work on. And the rest is even already masked out by Photoshop. So here we've now just come to see the incredible retuning tools of Photoshop. And we've come to see now a better and more in-depth tour on what they are and the power of what they can Zane. And in the third section, while that's where we've come to use them a lot and where you will come to see them more fluently inaction. And we'll listing that I want to see as well as tuition can take a lot of time. It can really take a lot of time trying to perfect something. Now, what I want to add with that is you don't always have to go and try to perfected, perfected. Because many times it's very hard and very time-consuming. Tried to have in mind that you should try to aim to make it as believable as possible. Because the true it is that when you zoom out, it's because it happens so many times that I'm working on a Photo when I'm zoomed in and I'm trying to fix something in there. And I'm trying to really perfect it. But then we use zoom out. You don't really see it. And that happens a lot. Just when you zoom out. It should look believable. It doesn't have to be completely perfect. With that, let's move now to the next lesson. 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: 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 30. How to Retouch for Flawless Skin with the Frequency Separation: 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 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: 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 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