Photo Editing in Adobe Lightroom: How to Light and Edit a Range of Skin Tones | Idara Ekpoh | Skillshare
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Photo Editing in Adobe Lightroom: How to Light and Edit a Range of Skin Tones

teacher avatar Idara Ekpoh, Photographer

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro

      1:55

    • 2.

      Your Project

      2:02

    • 3.

      Color Grading as a Storytelling Tool

      2:38

    • 4.

      Understanding Skin Tone & Complexion

      3:59

    • 5.

      Outdoors: Lighting Your Subjects

      9:47

    • 6.

      Indoors: Lighting Your Subjects

      7:05

    • 7.

      Lightroom: Color Correction

      10:54

    • 8.

      Lightroom: Color Grading

      7:21

    • 9.

      Photoshop: Adjustment Layers & Finishing Touches

      10:53

    • 10.

      Conclusion

      1:25

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About This Class

As photographers, we have the ability to capture the world through our lens, so we’re tasked with the social and professional responsibility to properly represent people of color

As early as I could remember in my career, I wanted to make sure that people who looked like me were going to be properly represented. I remember a lot of my friends complaining that there weren’t any photographers on our college campus that were able to capture the way they looked. Despite having competent work, they struggled with photographing and editing people of darker complexion, for example changing their skin tones or in a lot of the cases, using presets that don’t consider the nuances in different complexions. 

In this class, we'll cover how to properly light, shoot, and edit a range of different skin tones and complexions.

You’ll learn how to: 

  • Determine the undertones of your subjects' complexions,
  • Properly light your subjects in both indoor and outdoor settings,
  • Select the best settings for shooting whether you’re using a DSLR or an iPhone, 
  • Color correct & color grade your images in Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop.

This class is suitable for beginners, but is also recommended for all levels. I believe that this is information that anyone can benefit from regardless of where they are in their photography journey. I even created a class guidebook that you can reference throughout the class, and use as a tool in any project moving forward. 

As a photographer, for the last 7 years, I have dedicated my work to ensuring that black and brown people are portrayed as the radiant people that I believe us to be. How I shoot and edit my subjects is extremely important to the confidence my clients have in me when we work together. Till this day, I often receive compliments on how I shoot and edit black skin.

   

 

My hope is that with this course, you will become more confident in honoring your subjects and fostering trust in the work that you are capable of creating

So let’s get started!

Meet Your Teacher

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Idara Ekpoh

Photographer

Top Teacher

I am a photographer, creative director, and educator who creates captivating visual experiences through my dreamlike and cinematic portraits. My art is centered around storytelling, healing, and identity. 

As a first generation Nigerian-American woman, I have always been interested in the topic of identity, which drives me to not only use photography as a medium to tell my own story, but to bring visibility to the stories of those within my community. 

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Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Intro: As a photographer, capturing my subjects in their most truest form is the most important part of my job. I want the people I photograph to look at the images and truly see themselves for who they are. My name is Idara Ekpoh, and I am a portrait photographer, creative director, and educator currently based in Phoenix, Arizona. I've been shooting for over seven years now, and my art is mainly centered around storytelling, identity, and healing. As early as I can remember in my career, I really wanted to make sure that people that look like me were properly represented. I remember a lot of my friends saying that there weren't any photographers on campus that were able to capture the way they look. Despite having competent work, they struggled with capturing people who have darker complexions. For example, changing skin tones or in a lot of cases using presets that didn't consider the nuances and different complexions. I want it to be the photographer that you could go to and trust that your image will be honored. In this class, we'll be covering how to shoot and edit a range of skin tones to ensure that your subjects are properly lit, photographed, and edited. You'll learn how to identify the skin tone and undertones of your subject's complexion, properly light your subjects in both indoor and outdoor environments, the best settings for shooting whether you're using a DSLR or an iPhone, and best practices for color correction and color grading in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. This class is suitable for beginners, but really is recommended for all levels. I believe that this information is so important regardless of where you are in your photography journey. I even created a class guidebook that you can reference throughout the class and use as a tool in your future projects. As photographers, we have the ability to capture the world through our lens. There is a social and professional responsibility to properly represent people of color. My hope is that with this course, you become more competent in honoring your subjects and fostering trust in the work that you're capable of creating. [MUSIC] 2. Your Project: [MUSIC] Today we're going to learn about how to edit different skin complexions. In the end, you'll be able to confidently shoot and edit your subjects to ensure that you're properly capturing who they are. So in this class, we'll cover how to use color grading as a tool in your storytelling, the basics of how to properly light your subjects, how to understand skin tones and complexions, and how to properly edit your photos through Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. For this class, you'll need any DSLR camera or even an iPhone, and then of course, you'll also need access to Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. You'll be tasked to go out and shoot with your own subjects or if you don't have anyone to shoot with, I will be sure to share all the raw images from my shoot. That way you'll be able to follow along with the editing throughout the course. Also be sure to download the class guidebook to make sure that you're getting the most out of every lesson. As a photographer, capturing my subjects and ensuring that their skin is accurately shot and edited has become a huge component of my work. I have dedicated my work to ensuring that black and brown people are properly represented and shot to be seen as the radiant people that I believe us to be. How I shoot and edit my subjects is really extremely important when it comes to the confidence that my clients have in the work that I'm able to produce. I remember in college that there were a lot of photographers that were not capable of capturing black or brown skin properly. I would have friends that would come to me and talk about how they felt those photographers made their skin look too orange or too dull, so I decided that I would step in and fill in that gap. I really made it my goal to make sure that regardless of who came to me, they were able to feel confident in the skills that I had, and making sure that they were properly represented and captured. Honestly, just wanting my subject to fully trust my ability when they booked with me. Until this day, I oftentimes receive compliments about how I capture skin. In the end, I hope that you're inspired to go out and capture the world and its people through your own lens. [MUSIC] 3. Color Grading as a Storytelling Tool: To go ahead and get us started with this course, in this lesson, we're going to talk about how color grading can be utilized as a tool in your storytelling. Now I won't talk about this too much throughout the entire course, but if you want more information, you can refer back to my past Skillshare class where I talk about color grading, color theory, and all of that great stuff as it relates to storytelling and photography. Color grading to me is an essential tool when it comes to storytelling in your work. How you edit a photo is going to directly impact how your audience is going to feel when they view that image. For example, if I want my image to fill moodier, I might go for a darker and more contrast-y edit or if I want my image to feel more airy, I might go for more of a bright edit. Understanding how colors and tones work in your photo's really important to the story that you essentially want to tell. To get us started, I'm going to go ahead and show you a couple of examples of my work and what I love about the color grading. In this first example that you see, it was really important for me to create a scene that I felt was dreamy and a big part of that was coloring the sky. I remember when I shot this image at the dunes, I didn't see much color in the sky and that was because at the time of day we were shooting at. I felt a big part of my editing was to focus on the sky, to have that whole dreamy aspect of the shoot that I was going for. In this case, when coloring the sky I made sure to include colors that made me feel most at peace. These were colors such as blue, pink, and purple. Adding these colors to the sky were to create a very peaceful and dreamy image. This next image I love so much because of the rich coloring. Green, for me, is a color of wealth and I feel like it adds so much richness to this image. I loved the depth that you see in the curtains behind the subject because it adds so much dimension to the photo and it also helps to really make sure that subject is popping up in the image as well. Lastly, I wanted to give you guys an example of what it looks like to color grade a portrait, especially as we talk about skin tones. In this image specifically, I really loved the richness in my subject's skin. For me, it's really important to ensure that when I'm editing my subjects that they look as rich and as beautiful as I see them in real life, and in this photo, I really love how vibrant the colors are, but also how the skin tone is very much true to life. Color grading is a powerful tool. It can change the way that your audience views your images. How do you think you'll utilize color grading as a tool in your storytelling? Throughout this course, we'll discuss different tools that you'll utilize to create powerful imagery while also maintaining skin tones. I'll see you all on the next lesson. [MUSIC] 4. Understanding Skin Tone & Complexion: [MUSIC] In this lesson we're going to talk about understanding skin tones and complexions. Like I told you all before, it is really important for me to make sure that I'm maintaining the skin tones of my subjects. A huge component of that is making sure that I'm prepping them for success when I'm first shooting with them. What I mean by that is understanding their undertone, so then that way I am placing them in settings that I feel like it's really going to bring out their natural beauty and ensuring that I'm capturing that properly. Understanding undertones is great because it can help you decide maybe what background you want your subject to stand by, maybe what outfits you feel like you want them to wear. I want to talk a little bit about that and how I utilize or identify undertones for my subjects and how that impacts the rest of my process and my shoots. When we talk about undertones, people can have warm, neutral, or cool undertones. I'll give you guys some examples of what that looks like. If somebody is more so warm, I don't want to cool them down in my editing or if someone is cool, I don't want to warm them up in my editing. I want to make sure that I am maintaining what their undertones and overall skin tones are so that way they are looking the same way they look like in real life. How do you know what someone's undertones are? One the ways that I've been taught is to check the wrist. If you look at your wrist and you mess around with your wrist a little bit, you'll be able to see some veins. If somebody has veins that are more so green, they're considered to be warm. If the veins in the wrist are more so blue, then they're considered to be cool. If you can't tell if this is more so green or blue, then maybe they fall in that neutral space. For example, my veins I feel like are more so green and so I tend to say that I have warm undertones, which is more so of that yellowish that I feel like I see my skin. Another great way to tell is what kind of jewelry do you feel like you look better in? I personally feel like I look good in gold jewelry because I just feel like it helps me pop more. Usually having warmer undertone, I tend to go towards gold, but I also know people who have cooler undertones that like to wear silver jewelry, so that's another great indicator as well. Here is spectrum that you guys can utilize to help identify if somebody is warm or cool or maybe they fall in that neutral space. Utilize that spectrum when you are going out and shooting with your subject so that you can really identify where they fall in that spectrum. Overall, take some time to identify what your subjects undertones are. If they are warm, you want to make sure that you are maintaining that warmth that they have throughout your editing. If they are cool, keep their cool tones so that way you're not adjusting them too much and changing the way that they ultimately look. You really want to make sure that overall you're just enhancing your subjects. I really focus this in my HSL sliders in Lightroom, so we'll talk about this later on. But when I'm editing in Lightroom, I focus on the HSL sliders because they tend to impact the skin the most. I'll talk about a little bit what I do in photoshop when I'm editing skin as well. But the colors that tend to really impact skin are red, orange, and yellow. When I'm messing around with those sliders, and I've put an example of what this can look like, as you're messing around with let's say the hue, the saturation, or luminance, I usually sit in that saturation or luminance space. You want to be careful that you're not making someone too orange or too red or too yellow or whatever the case might be. Be mindful, play around with those sliders because they're going to help you maintain your skin tones throughout your editing as well. Overall, understanding the undertones of your subjects are really going to help you understand how you want to shoot them as well as just making sure that you are maintaining the way they look throughout all of your editing. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about how I like to light subjects as well. We've talked a little bit about understanding skin tones, understanding undertones, but we're going to talk about how do you light subjects of different complexions as well. So I'll see you guys in the next lesson. [MUSIC] 5. Outdoors: Lighting Your Subjects : [MUSIC]. Now we're going to talk a little bit about how to properly let your subjects for both outdoor and indoor settings. We're going to break this up into two different lessons. I'll also show you all a demonstration of how I shoot in both of those settings. Lighting is a huge component of photography. In this lesson, we're going to cover a few things that you want to keep in mind when lighting your subjects. First off, you want to determine what source of lighting are you going to use. Do you want to use natural light? Do you want to use the diffused light? Do you want to use artificial lighting, maybe more so if you're shooting in a studio? You want to identify what you want to shoot with. Now, I personally, I do a lot of my work with natural light. I think I just find it to be a lot easier. I like to use the sun and even in my last Skillshare course, I talked a lot about natural lighting just because the sun is free and accessible to us all. If you're going outdoors and shooting your subjects, that's likely going to be the source of light you're going to use. I love to shoot with natural light because depending on the different times of the day that you're shooting, you can get different types of looks with your lighting. If you're shooting maybe early on the day where the lighting is more so even you get that soft, even look on your subject if you are shooting when the sun is more so out and harsh, you can really get some really great shadows in your work as well. I love to do that, to just play around with different looks in my photos. Or a lot of people love to do this option where they shoot during sunset, when the sun is going down because you get that really gold, yellow, golden hour look on your images as well. When I'm shooting outdoors, another thing to keep in mind is that you can use maybe diffusers or reflectors to play around with how the light is hitting your subject as well. The next thing you want to make sure that you're always doing once you figure out what your lighting setup is. You want to also make sure that you are properly exposing your subject in your camera. Make sure you're looking at your shutter speed ISO and f-stop to make sure your subject is properly lit. Then also paying attention to the white balance of your subject. You don't want to have your white balance too high and maybe it's making your image look more warm or cool. Just decipher where you want that white balance to fall. The other thing I want to make sure is well is that when you are exposing for your subject, you want to make sure that they are not overexposed, just so that way that you can make sure that you're capturing enough information. You can always go back and post and bring up the exposure, bring up the shadows, whatever you might need to do to properly see your subject. Now that I've shown you guys some examples of my work, I also want to show you what this might look like in person. For the last portion of this demonstration, I'm just going to show you guys, I'm sorry about all the cars [LAUGHTER]. But I'm just going to show y'all how I shoot outdoors. We have a lot of light today. I'm going to focus more so on my exposure and my ISO and I'll show you guys what those settings are. Because I have the sun, I have to match my settings to that. I'll show you guys what the settings are and yeah, cool. [BACKGROUND] Let me see where I can come closer. It is way too overexposed and these are the settings that I had in the studio. I'm going to first bring my ISO down to 100. That's already better. Because it's a porch, I am going to bring the f-stop to let's do 3.5. I don't need it to be a two. Then I'm going to come here to my shutter speed and I'm just going to bring that up until I feel it's where I want it. I'm going to start with 640 and then if I make any changes, I'll let you all know. We're making hella changes. It's too bright [LAUGHTER]. [NOISE] Too bright here. [inaudible] [BACKGROUND] Yeah I'm ready for you [NOISE] and that's perfect [BACKGROUND] [NOISE] right there hold that. What I actually [NOISE] ended up doing. My ISO still 100, my f-stop is at 5.6, so I ended up bringing that up because of all the sun, and then my shutter speed at one of 1,000 right now. [MUSIC] One thing that I'm doing when I'm shooting, especially outside, depending on where the sun is, I usually like to have my subjects facing the sun if possible, if it's too harsh like this right now, you can try to see if you can move around or you can use my diffusion, you have one as well. One of the things I want to show y'all is. I'm going to have you turn in a circle and I'm going to follow you. You'll see how right here in the center faces side how bright she is. She's turning let me follow her. You'll see how the light is now changing. Now half of her face is lit, now she's backlit. I can actually work with her being backlit as well. I probably would adjust my settings for her and then try to take care of the rest in post. I'll take some examples of that actually and I show you what it looks like, with direct sunlight and backlit [BACKGROUND] let's do this [inaudible]. Stay here [MUSIC]. I also wanted to show you guys an example of what this looks like on my iPhone. The great thing about an iPhone is that my settings are already really taken care of. I'm not really exposing my shot here as you can see already it looks really good on the screen. All I'm going to do is just make sure my subject face is in focus. The way that you are able to do that is by looking at the yellow box that is surrounding her face and you'll see that she's now in focus. Then at this point, I just focus on my angles and how I'm shooting. These are the before and afters of these shots [MUSIC]. As you can see with the examples that I showed you really they're both compelling images regardless of the tool that I was using, whether I was using an iPhone or DSLR. It's not necessarily the tool that you're using, but more so paying attention to the lighting, the composition, how you're setting up your subjects essentially before you actually shoot them. Then of course, how you decide to edit them and post. Understanding light is a key component to setting yourself up for success as a photographer. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about how I like to prepare for shooting in studio. I just show you all a quick demonstration in this lesson about how I shot outdoors. But I also want to show you all how to shoot in studios one, how I like to prepare my lighting in those cases. I'll see y'all there. [MUSIC] 6. Indoors: Lighting Your Subjects : [MUSIC] Although natural light is great, there are also other options when lighting your subjects. Let's say you are in a studio space and you want to use artificial lighting. I have done that as well. It tends to be well, I won't say it's scary. It's scary for me because I'm new into this lighting world it's just really another thing to learn. You just really have to understand lighting and understanding the tools that you're utilizing. If you're using maybe strobe lights, I love to use the pro photo lights because they are a lot easier to operate I personally believe them to be. I love to shoot with those and sometimes I'll even mix artificial light with natural light if there is a window in the studio that's bringing in natural light as well. I'll go ahead and show you guys some examples of what studio lighting looks like in my work. This is a bit of a teaser for the rest of this lesson, but I wanted to quickly also share that when I'm going to go into the studio shoot I am going to shoot with a green backdrop just because I find that green is a really good color for black skin in my opinion. You'll see that when I'm shooting my subjects, that the backdrop is very good with each of those skin tones, their complexions and tones, etc. I just wanted to point that out before we go ahead and get started with this lesson. You also want to be mindful of your ISO shutter speed and aperture while you're shooting in the studio. I tend to have a higher aperture when I'm shooting and then I adjust my ISO and shutter speed according to each image, and then also focus on the color temperature. I usually keep my color temperature between 4-5,000. You can manually do that in your camera or you can go ahead and just put it on an auto editor will pick the best setting for you as well. With all that being said, let's go ahead and hop into our demonstration. Hey you guys. We are here today to shoot with a couple of friends. I'm going to talk you through a couple of my lighting setup, so shoot indoors and studio and then outdoors as well. Today we have Shantel we'll settle her first she's sitting here [LAUGHTER] and what we're going to do is I really personally loved to go for earth tones so we're going to use this olive green backdrop and then we have this Einstein light, that's going to be our main light and then we have this continuous light in the background just to light the back. I'm going to go ahead and just take some portraits of her. As I'm shooting I'll show you guys the different settings. Right now I'm at 1/200, F of eight and ISO of 400. I'll shoot with that. I will give you guys a warning. I'm not a studio photographer. I barely know what I'm doing with these lights, but [LAUGHTER] play around with them until you get some that you like and then once we go into editing, I'll show you guys how I manage to keep skin tones throughout the entire process. Let's go ahead. [MUSIC]. Right now I'm going to go ahead and shoot our second model. I'm not going to change anything with our lighting. I actually really love the way it looks with the test shot. You can see how beautiful and rich your skin is just like in real life. [LAUGHTER] We're going to go ahead and just keep shooting and then if I should make any changes, I'll make sure to tell you guys on the screen. [MUSIC] I'm going to go ahead and shoot with our third model here. The only thing that I did because it was a little bit bright I did bring down my ISO to 320. It was at, I think 400 before. I brought it down. But I'll make sure the settings are on the screen so you guys can see what it is accurately. Perfect. Let's go ahead. [MUSIC]. We're on our fourth model. The only thing that I changed, actually, let's see what I changed. I brought the ISO back to 400 the range I think between the last two have been around three 40-400. F-stop is still 6.3 out of 1/200 and then this, I cannot really tell you what this is set to. Just play around with the light settings until you get something that you like. This is right because I'll show you off. I feel like that's very accurate to what she looks like in real life. Beautiful. Let's go ahead. [LAUGHTER] [MUSIC]. For our final shot, I'm going to take some group photos. I'm not changing much of my settings. I'm going to go into that right now, but I will share the screen what my settings are, and yeah. [MUSIC] 7. Lightroom: Color Correction: [MUSIC] We're going to go ahead and talk about color correction. To go ahead and get us started, I really always start utilizing the Basics tab. Color correction before we start actually, it's just really prepping your image for all the editing that you want to do. So you really want to make sure that your image is fully prepped, and that you have a solid foundation, that your exposure is where you want it to be, your contrast's where you want to get, your temperature as well. That's what we're going to go ahead and get started with doing. I want to go ahead and also show you guys some certain areas when it comes to my color correcting. One tool you can use that I don't use often is the tone curve, and this is really great to go ahead and add colors and remove colors from your image. Here you're seeing that if you add more science, you're removing the reds, if you add more reds, you're removing science same thing with the purple and green. That can be really good with color correcting in your image, especially when it comes to correcting the colors in your skin, but I don't personally use it because it's a little bit complicated, but I do use, like I'm showing you here the saturation sliders, which are really great to just focus on the colors in the skin, which are usually red, orange, and yellow. Oftentimes I'll look into the HSL sliders and I might go into luminance like I just did reduce the orange to add some depth into the skin and maybe touch the saturation a bit. You can already see that before and after. We're going to go ahead and start with this image and go ahead and color correct it from the beginning. The first thing I'm going to do is pick my color profile. I usually oftentimes look at faithful, standard, or neutral. So for this image, I believe I'm going to go ahead and look at adding neutral. I really like the way that that looks on the skin. Then I'm just going to go ahead and make some adjustments in my basic tab. I'll start with exposure, look at contrast, maybe the whites, blacks, and just really, like I said in my previous Skillshare class, just mess with the sliders until you get what you think looks good to you. You can always refer back to your before and after to make sure that your image, especially the skin is still looking the way it's meant to look. I might increase a little bit of the temperature, but that's about it. I think this image for right now should be solid. I don't think I have anything else I want to add. I like the color of her skin and the way that she is exposed. I'm doing the same thing here. Just going to go ahead and add my color profile. This is really great to hover over and see what the effect is and compare it to the original as well as you can see me doing. Let's see what I'm going to pick. I really liked the way that standard looks. We're going to go back to my Basics tab and go ahead and adjust the temperature to slightly look at the exposure, contrast. I usually add a little clarity for sharpness, not too much because it can become a lot. But just make your adjustments here. Again, compare the before and after to make sure that you like the way the image looks. I'm also going to do this for this image as well. I think for this one, I'm going to go with faithful. I really like the way that looks on her skin. I'm going to reduce the exposure just because I feel like her skin was a little overexposed. You can see as I'm doing this, the depth and richness of her skin is really coming back into the photo. I'm making the same, similar adjustments that I was doing before, just tailoring it to this image and you can already see what her skin is looking like it I think it's really nice, deep and rich. Just zooming in so you guys can see that. I'm going to go ahead and leave that for now. Then we also have this group image for this photo. I'm going to do the same prep work. I'm just going to pick my color profile after I decide what my color profile is, I am going to go back to my Basics tab and adjust the exposure temperature. But this one is a little tricky when we get into some further steps of what I will do because we have multiple people I want to edit for each individual. Lightroom is really great and I might be getting ahead of myself. I'll compare it to the screen recording, but Lightroom is really great because you can create a mask for each individual process. That was the before and after. What I'm doing right now is I'm going in and I'm clicking on mask then people and I am adjusting each individual person. This is really great to have a bit more control. You can see that I just took care of a Person 1, I'm going in for Person number 2, and I'm just going to go in for each individual and just make edits to their skin to make sure that they are exposed correctly and that the image is looking how I want it to look. You can see what the third individual I did feel like she was a bit overexposed, so I brought her down a bit and I also gave her a little bit of warmth as well because I feel her skin was missing that. All of this again is just by I. I just like to make some adjustments stopped where I feel satisfied and then also compare that before and after to make sure that I'm maintaining those skin tones. There's that before and after for you guys. Let's also try this on one of our outdoor images. I'm just picking my color profile. My process is not change whether I'm working on an image that's indoors or afterwards. I still pick my color profile and then go in with the Basics tab. Then here I'm going to go back to my HSL sliders and edit those slightly as well. Same thing with this image. I want you guys to see how it impacts each photo. But the steps are still the same. Pick your color profile and then go into your basics tab, adjust your exposure, contrast whites, blacks, et cetera, your temperature. Then compare that before and after to see how that looks. You see what that looks like from this image. Especially when there's so much sun I find that I already like how the skin is looking. I don't want to make too much adjustments. But I'm going to go ahead. What I'm doing here is creating a mask. I like to target the background, especially if I feel that backward is a little bit too overexposed, I'll bring it down, so then that way it adds a little bit of depth to the image as well. I think you guys can see the pattern with my editing. Again, just starting with this color profiles and then going into adding those basics. Then the other great thing, this is just a bonus to Lightroom does have adapted presets, which are great to quickly whiten teeth, darken eyebrows, enhance eyes. I really like to add those because I just think it makes it easy to add the mask. Then here I'm adding a little bit of warmth to the background because I think it just really helps with her skin. It helps her pop a little bit more. Love it. There's that before and after, very subtle changes, but you can see again the deep and richness in her skin. Then our last image, this one I think will be fun to color correct because of that blue in the sky really love to play well with my blues. But I'm doing the same thing, adjusting my exposure contrast. I will say that again, it was really harsh lighting. I think that this is the shoot in such harsh lighting is a specific choice. I know a lot of photographers wouldn't want to do this. They tend to shoot when it's more so overcast so then that way you don't have shadows and you can see some shadows around her eyes, but I still think it will make for a great style photo. Awesome. Now that we have done that, the next step is to go ahead in color grader image. In our next lesson, we're going to talk about color grading and the steps I take for each photo. See you there. [MUSIC] 8. Lightroom: Color Grading: [MUSIC] Welcome back you all. In this lesson, we're going to go ahead and talk about color grading and the steps I take to color grading in Lightroom. We are really going to pick up exactly where we left off and talk a little bit about the different tools I use in Lightroom and really see how that image is really starting to progress. We're going to go ahead and start with doing some masking. What that looks like is usually I try to start with masking the background. I really find that adding color and reducing the exposure of the background really helps to bring out the subject a bit more. You can see that I reduced the exposure, I added a little bit of warmth. I'm just playing around with the other side just to see what that impact is going to be. I really like adding a little bit of contrast, because you can see what that is already doing to the before and after of our image and it really helps to have our subject pop a little bit more. I really love how easy it is to create mask in Lightroom so that is our first step. Then I'm also going to use those Adobe presets that I messaged in the last lesson. I'm going to go ahead and enhance her eyes and darken her eyebrows and you can see what those before and afters are. The AI in Lightroom is so good to where it just does that so easily and I don't have to struggle with creating mask at all. Now we're going to go down to our color wheels so this is where the bulk of color grading occurs. You can add colors to your shadows, mid tones and highlights. I just play around with the wheels and see where I want the color to fall. Usually I stay into that yellow, orange, red area, especially when it comes to skin, but just play with the sliders. If you feel like it's too much, you can reduce the opacity of that color in that certain area of the photo. Again, while you're doing this, just focusing on the before and after and making sure you're just maintaining complexion so you're not changing the way your subject looks drastically. That's what this one is looking about. I do find that she's a little bit too red, so we're going to fix that later on in Photoshop but I like that foundation for now. For this image, we're going to go ahead and play around with the tone curve to see if it helps to add a little bit more magenta to the photo which I like. They're very, very slight but just a bit. I think I'm going to go head and worry about this slide just real quickly so just some basic color correcting that I still wanted to do on this photo. You can see that reducing the saturation a little bit skin is not too orange and just playing around with those sliders a bit. Just like we did in the last image, we're going to go ahead and just color grade a bit and adding colors to our shadows, mid tones and highlights. Again, you can increase or decrease the opacity to see how it's impacting the photo as well. Like I mentioned before, there really isn't any science that I have behind this, I just like to go around the wheel and just see what my eye is attracted to. That is really nice and you can see the way that these wheels are just toning the overall image. I think I like the way that looks, so I'll move to our third image just like I did in the first one. I'm going to start with creating a mask for the background and just having my subject pop out a bit more, which you guys will see that already creates such a drastic change. Then I'm going to go to my color wheels and see what color I may or may not want to add. Like I mentioned before, you can blend or check the balance of the colors as well and that's our before and after so I'm really happy with all that right now. With this photo we're picking up where we left off and I'm adding a little bit of warmth to her skin. Again, just making some basic corrections before I go into my color grading. Like I did before, I'm going to start with the background, decrease the exposure, add some warmth, and you can already see how drastic of a change that is between what we had and what we have now. Just move next slide as you can see what happens to the background. I really like that. Honestly, I'm really happy with this image as it is. I don't have much more that I want to do. I might go to my color wheels but we'll see, I am going to reduce the luminance a bit so you can see that richness come back into her skin and I really love that so it's not too much highlights. Then we're going to also see what else needs to be added to this image as well like I mentioned. I might come down to the color wheels to see if I like to add any colors to my shadows, mid tones or highlights. I think that's really all I want to do. Yeah, I'm going back and forth between the two. Then I just want to show you one edit of the outdoors photo because the steps are relatively the same for all outdoor images I shot. But for this one I'm color grading the sky first because I love to change the hue and saturation of blues and then I'm going to just go in and I'm going to mess around with the color wheels to see how that adds a little bit more of style to the image. I think that when you have shots that are shot with harsh sun, those are really great opportunities to just create some images with a bit more edge and style and so I really like the way that edit is coming together. I think I'm actually satisfied with this, so I'm going to leave it as is and in the next lesson we're going to talk about any last-minute touches that I make in Photoshop. Some color grading that I do in Photoshop and some of the adjustment layers that I focus on. Yes so I will see you guys in the final lesson [MUSIC] 9. Photoshop: Adjustment Layers & Finishing Touches: [MUSIC] Welcome back to our final lesson. We're going to go ahead and talk about Photoshop and the adjustment letters I use in Photoshop and the final touches on these images. You'll see here that we're going to go ahead and export our photo from Lightroom to Photoshop. What I'm going to do do with some of the example images are going to be consistent throughout all of the final images that I'll show you at the end. Even if I don't go through it on my screen recording, just note the steps are the same. What we're going to start off by doing is, we're going to start with an adjustment later and I love to use selective color. I love this because selective color allows you to target certain colors in your image and add or remove cyans, magentas, yellows, blacks, etc. I'm just here starting off on my reds and seeing how this impacts my photo. If I don't like what it's doing to certain areas of my photo, the great thing is that because there is a mask on it, I can just take my eraser tool and erase the parts that I don't want that adjustment layer to show up on. I did that for the reds. I'm going to go to green, I'm trying to see what will impact the background and it's likely going to be yellows. Yes, so it's yellow. I'm just adjusting the colors in the background to see what I'm aiming more towards. Do I want more of a green? Do I what more of an olive color? You can see how that is looking with my subject. It did change a little bit of her skin so I'm going over with my eraser tool just to remove that mask from her face. That way it's only impacting the other areas of the photo and not her face. That's that before and after. I really love this image so far, so beautiful. I'm trying [NOISE] to see if I want to use the clone stamp tool to clean up the background a little bit. I might not do that because I find that it's creating more of an issue. Here I'm using the Healing Brush or what I think [LAUGHTER] is the Healing Brush. There I grab the round brush, I'm looking for the Healing Brush now. I'm I going to use that. You know what, I think I'm going to leave that for now and now I mess with that. I think the only thing I'm going to do in Photoshop is that adjustment layer where I did the selective color, and I'm going to go ahead and click "X", save the image, and it's going to import the image back into Lightroom. What we're going to go ahead and deal with this final image is just some finishing touches. You can work on editing skin, either Lightroom or Photoshop but for the purpose of time I'm going to utilize Lightroom, and I think I'm going to go ahead and use one of the Healing Brushes. I'm going to go in over the parts that I want to fix. You can see that it's just picking up from other areas of her face to fix the areas that I'm stamping. Now since I'm satisfied with that and I'm just going to go over a few spots on her face just to clean up her skin a little bit, I don't tend to do too much skin editing just a little bit especially if my models already have great skin, I really want it to look as natural as possible. I'm still going in stamping. This is actually the content aware tool that I'm using which is really great for other reasons but I do use it on skin just because wherever I stamp it's using AI content awareness to pick from other areas. This to tell me what the best clone is for that stamps. I'm just going in and cleaning all that up. She does have some small lines on her up face, so I'm trying to see if I like it. If I take those out I might not. I feel stuff like that are so natural and I don't want it to look unnatural, so yeah, I'm removing that. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to remove that from her face and leave that for now. Again, I don't want to do too much skin retouching. Then I'm just going back over with exposure, see if there's anything else I'd like to do but I think I'm happy with this image. That is the before and that is the after of this photo. I'm going to go ahead and export that and yeah, we're going to move on to our next image. Awesome. Here I'm going to take this photo straight into Photoshop where I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to go and utilize my adjustment layers, and I'm going to use the layer selective color. Selective color, we'll start off with my reds. See what I want to add if I want to add cyans, remove cyans same thing with magenta. All of this is really just for you to play by eye. [LAUGHTER] and so I'm just really focusing on my subject, I will toggle before and after on that adjustment layer just to see how it's impacting the photo to see if I like it. I'm solid with that, so I'm going to go back into Lightroom and see if I need to do any healing on the skin. I'm going to go ahead and enhance her eyes, whiten her teeth with those adaptive presets that are there and ready for you. Again, those are really great to use in Lightroom because you just see how quickly it worked on her eyebrows, her teeth, her eyes, and so that's a little before and after we ought to see. Then I'm just going to use the same content aware tool to go ahead and just clean up her skin a little bit. Helps to zoom in a little bit. I don't zoom in too much but just a little bit so you can see what you're doing. I think I'm okay, there's one spot that I want to fix. There we go. Awesome, so I'm pretty happy with that image just going to mess up the exposure a bit, see if I want to use that and there you go, that's the before and the after for us. Awesome, for this image I might just go straight into healing and just doing some final touches on our skin. I'm not too sure if I'm going to go into Photoshop for this photo just because I really love how the image is colored graded. We're just going to go in and clean up some spots on her face and those blemishes, and trying to find the right size brush and make sure you zoom out and zoom in so that way you can see what the edits are on your photos thus far. Actually I'm really satisfied with that, so I'm going to leave that photo as it is and that's the before and after such a drastic difference. No, I'm not doing that. Then our last photo, we're just going to go straight into healing and just taking care of her skin. I'm not going to use any adjustment layers on this photo just because I'm really happy with the color toning. Really I only go into Photoshop if I need to. If I'm going into Photoshop maybe because I want to target the colors a bit more, but sometimes I'm able to just do this fully in Lightroom. This just goes back-and-forth and sometimes my workflow will change depending on the image. You saw the first image where I need to go into Photoshop, the second images too and the last images, not too much just really happy with how they look like in Lightroom. That's the before and after. I'm going to go ahead and show you all of the before and afters of all the images [LAUGHTER] that we have edited today. I'm going to show you all the images from the first editing video because I know I didn't show all of the editing that I did step-by-step for each image because the steps tend to be the same. For the sake of time I wanted to just show some example images but here are the before and after of all of our images. We've focused on color correcting in Lightroom, color grading in Lightroom. Some edits and photoshops with those adjustment layers and final touches as well. Just to make sure that your image is fully finalized, good to go, you're ready to export. I really hope that you all liked this lesson. Again, looking at these before and after as you can see the drastic difference between the edits, but also see how their skin tones are maintained throughout the entire editing process. [MUSIC] 10. Conclusion: [MUSIC] Congratulations, you've made it to the end. We learned that understanding how to edit different skin tones will allow you to become a more competent photographer and ensuring that your subjects are properly represented in your images. We talked about different lighting techniques that can be used to make sure that your subject is properly lit. Lastly, how color correction and color grading can be used to enhance your image and help tell the story of your subject. If there's one thing I hope you take away from this course, it's remembering that there is a social and professional responsibility that we have as photographers. Although we have the ability to go out and capture the world, it's really important that we're making sure that people are properly represented in how we shoot and edit them. Really take the time to understand your subjects, understand their skin tones, their undertones, their complexions to really make sure that they're properly represented in your work. Now that you have completed the class, I do want to encourage you-all to do the following. Post the final images that you edited in this course in the project gallery. Leave a review on this class if you did enjoy it. Share it with a friend, as well as following me so that way you're notified of my future classes. Lastly, if you do upload your images, go ahead and tag me on Instagram @ohyeahitsidy as well as use the #IdyTaughtMe so that way I can interact with your post as well. Thank you all so much for finishing this course. I truly hope that you enjoyed it, and I hope to see you guys in my next one. [MUSIC]