Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Tabitha. In this photography class, we are going to talk all about Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom is such an incredible intense program. There's so many things that you can do in it, to really take your photos to the next level. I never share images that I haven't edited and Lightroom is king. We're going to start with how to call a session, all the different developing tools that I use and the cloning, exporting settings, and a little bit about presets and everything that you might want to use when you are editing in Lightroom. This class is targeted toward beginner library users, so if you've never use Lightroom before or you've only opened it a few times to run some stuff there, you don't know what all the tools are, you're in the right place. If you're very seasoned Lightroom user, you might get a little bored, but who knows? Maybe I do something differently than you do when you find it interesting. Yeah, just so we're on the same page there. For the class project will be sharing photos that were our Rafael's next door edits, maybe a couple of different edits and maybe you can't decide between the light and airy edit or a darkened airy edit. We can compare edits to our originals and see what we did, hopefully showcasing tools that you've never used before. My name is Tabitha. I am a lifestyle photographer, a content creator, and a teacher here on skill share. I had been using Lightroom for about eight years now and I finally feel like an expert, so hopefully, I can convey these tools and tips to you in a way that makes sense to you and helps you grow as a photographer. Yeah, I'm really excited. Let's do this.
2. Catalogs Explained: In this section we're going to be talking all about catalogs, what they are, why you use them, everything. I'm going to interrupt myself really quickly just to cover some Lightroom basis here for you. I am using Adobe Lightroom Classic CC. If you have the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, I have the whole suite. If you just have the photography version, which is Lightroom and Photoshop, that's great. But you'll notice there's Lightroom CC, which is the Cloud-based photo service, and there's Lightroom Classic CC. This class is all about Lightroom Classic CC. I am using version 7.5. It is September 26th, 2018. If you're accessing this in the future, consider that this is current today but it might not be current in the future. When I first started using Lightroom, normally set me down and explained like this is what a catalog is for and this is why you should have more than one. I just thought, wouldn't it be convenient if I had a place where I could view all my photos from beginning of time and I very quickly over a year realized that, that wasn't going to be sustainable because the catalog stores the information about the photo. It doesn't store the photo, it just stores what it looks like when you've edited it ad so if you have hundreds of thousands of photos that one catalog is trying to store, its going to get bogged down, it's going to get really slow, it's going to make every edit really, really slow. If you feel like you've been using Lightroom and it's super slow it could be because you have too big of a catalog and you need to start a fresh one. It is a little annoying to have to organize layer catalogs like here's all the photos I took in 2015, that's its own catalog. Here's 2016. Pretty much at the beginning of the year, if I haven't started one recently I'll startup a fresh catalog. New year new Lightroom catalog. Then obviously if I have some Christmas sessions leftover from the year before, I have to close my current catalog and go and open up an older catalog, edit those and then switchback until I get fully transferred over to the brand new catalog. But it's nice because now I'm not opening every photo ever all the previous from the beginning of time, I am just looking at what I'm currently working on. Because my computer is 500 gigabyte hard drive, I can't keep everything on it all the time. I've got my 20 most recent sessions that I'm editing and then as soon as they're done and delivered to the client, I delete the pictures that I don't want to keep or ever look at it again. Then I will move everything through Lightroom from my computer's hard drive to my long-term storage drive. I can show you how to put your storage drive in Lightroom so it's viewable and then make that transfer really easy. From my previous Lightroom catalogs, everything has been transferred over from what my computer recognizes as the hard drive to my long-term storage and then that's how I keep everything organized. A catalog is, I like to think of it as like a scrapbook. You don't want to have all of your memories in one scrapbook because if your house burns down, there goes all your memories. Lightroom does not store your individual photos. Basically, Lightroom knows where your photos are because you tell it when you import them and then it basically just makes a map for you. Basically, Lightroom keeps all your edits on a little transparency and then all it stores is the transparency. You have your original raw file and then you have your transparency that goes in front of it and when you export a photo, it glues those together and sends it on its way. That's how you get final photos in Lightroom. But Lightroom only stores the top data. It only stores the edits that you've made and so that's how you can look at so many pictures all at once without it getting bogged down is because you're not looking at the actual photos you're just looking at a preview with a screen in front of it, if that makes sense. Lightroom stores the transparency, the edits that the screen and then your computer is where your photos are and then the process of exporting it, sows them together and then you have an edited photo that you can't remove the edit from. But if you haven't sorted together yet, or if you want to do another copy, you can change the edit and then sow it together, a thing. That's how I like to think about it. It's a little confusing because when you're editing in Photoshop, you are editing the image. Lightroom you just editing the idea of an image and then when you're done, it's like okay, let's grab the image and then stick it together. Lightroom catalog's super awesome. It's important that when you're working on a catalog you have a backup of it. Lightroom automatically backup over time, you can set it to remind you every couple weeks. Then that just stores the edits that you've made and it just remembers those that way. Then when you're finished with the Lightroom catalog and you want to start a new one, it's important to put the old catalog somewhere that is going to be safe. I wouldn't just keep it on your desktop forever because if your computer crashes and has a huge traumatic error, you could lose your whole Lightroom catalog and then you would just have to re-edit all the photos that you edited that you didn't export. Keep your catalogs in a safe place. If you're accessing an old catalog on a new computer or if you haven't accessed the catalog in a really long time or you don't have the backup folder that goes with it, it's going to take a really long time for a Lightroom to remember what your edits look like and so your photos will look all raw until they load the edit. Just keep that in mind, especially with larger catalogs, that over time it's going to be more of a pain basically. Let me just show you my Lightroom catalog how I keep them and how many I have and what my organization is for that. I want to warn you ahead of time, I'm not super organized. A key thing to think about when you're having multiple catalogs is to change the name of the catalog so that you know what they are. I would even go beyond like 2016 catalog. I would just say what computer it was, maybe if you just did a bunch of Christmas sessions all at once, you can have one catalog for your Christmas sessions. I'm sure some people work with much smart catalogs than I do. But anyway, I'll show you the catalogs I have and why I named them what I name them and how it helps me make sense of it all. Let me introduce you to my Lightroom catalogs. This is my Lightroom folder. It automatically creates this folder in my pictures. If I go to my pictures, Lightroom is in here and this is where my catalog is and my backups are and all the Lightroom settings and everything. This is where my other catalogs are. I keep these on long-term storage because I don't need to access them all the time. These are external hard drives. Keep in mind they won't launch off of the external hard drive. If I ever do need to access these files, I drag them to the desktop and it's annoying and I have to click and open them but they're safe over here on my long-term storage. You'll notice that with each catalog it has a corresponding data folder. This is important because if you're running an old catalog without the data folder, it doesn't know about all your thumbnails. This just keeps your thumbnail data so that when you go access an old folder, it might feel a little dusty but you'll still be able to see everything that's going on. You can still access a Lightroom catalog that doesn't have a corresponding data folder, it just takes a lot longer to load is all. These catalogs from my past, obviously there named, this one's named 2015 Basement Dwellers. This is when I lived in my parents basement so I had a different computer at that time and so it had a different catalog. This is my Dawn of Time Lightroom catalog and it's exactly what it sounds like. This is all the photo ever before I realized I was supposed to have more than one catalog. You'll see this is 2.28 gigabytes. For context, my basement one is only 281 megabytes. Do not let your catalogs get this big this is insane. This is my biggest catalog and I will never let them get that big again. This is a bad example of what to name your catalogs. This is called New Catalog, clever. I updated it eventually to say that it was March 2015, which is good because now I have some contexts. This is a tiny catalog, 85 megabytes. These are just, I guess my reference catalogs. In here in my current folder, I have my backups. These are all the different folders that have backed up. It has my current 2018 iMac Cat that's what I'm running right now. It has two different data folders. This one's called 2018 iMac Cat Helper, and this one's called Previews. This must be new because I don't have the helper folder for my other ones. I'm guessing with the new update in Lightroom, 7.5 it added the helper folder, which probably makes our lives easier. This is called Lightroom Catalog Previews. This is before I renamed my 2018 iMac catalog. You'll see in my old backups, it's still called Lightroom Catalog, but in the backup I just did it's called 2018 iMac Cat. I have a lot of backups in this folder. If I look at my info, it says this is one gig. You do not need to keep a whole gig of backups. I'm going to keep my two most recent backups and I'm going t delete the rest. We're going to move those right to the trash can and empty that. I don't need old backups, I just need the most recent backup. Here we are back in our Lightroom folders. If I launch Lightroom right now, it's just going to pull up whatever catalog I access to most recently. If you accessed an old catalog and then close Lightroom and then you go to open my room again, it's going to go back to that old catalog. Make sure that if you switching back and forth, you click on the actual catalog. But this is the one I was in recently, so I know if I launch Lightroom, it'll pull up my 2018 catalog. Here's my 2018 catalog and it has quite a lot going on. I'm actually going to start a new catalog with you guys this. Is going to be so exciting. You have to have Lightroom opened to start a new catalog. We go File, New Catalog. What are we going to call it? We're going to call it Autum 2018. 18, and then maybe I'll start a new one the beginning of the year. We're going to add a wow in there just for fun. Wow. Okay. At saving it in my pictures folder with the other one, so we're going to hit "Create". It is opening. Look at this first catalog you guys. It feels so clean in here, this is so exciting. We're going to start by adding some reference photos. I'm going to hit "Import". I'm talking a lot more about import in the next class, but I wanted to show you what it feels like. Right here we have my hard drive on my computer and everything ever forever in my 2018 folder, these are all my sessions that I've taken. Lightroom keeps it nice and organized for me. This is today 9:26. I'm going to add today's folder. Today's folder has two videos that I took which you already saw. Now what we have over here in our folder section says Macintosh HD, that's my computer, that's my hard drive, and that has the one folder that I have imported so far. Lightroom does a really good job automatically organizing things. This says 2018-9-26, that's today's date, and it is in my Macintosh HD folder. This will tell me how many gigs I have on here, so it says I have 73 of 500 free. That's nice, I love that it tells me what's going on so that I know if I have enough space to import more photos. If I want to transfer these two videos to my hard drive, I need to have my hard drive in my folders list. I'm going to press this and go "Add folder", and then I'm going to click on my shared, which is this guy, we want a new folder, I'm going to call it 2018 part 3, "Create". Here it is, I'm going to click "Choose". Now it sees that I have this drive, it's called Tab, that's my drive that sits on my desk, it's my external hard drive which I plugged in. I have 2018 part 2 has nothing in it right now. When I am finished with this session, I can move it. I just click on it and drag it right into that little folder, moving files on disk, this will cause the corresponding files to be moved if you proceed, blah, blah, blah it can't be undone. That's a lie. It can be undone. But anyway, I'm moving files from my computer to my external hard drive and this is how I do it. It takes a minute because videos are big. Lightroom is not meant to process videos if you click on it, it's like, "No preview available." It's not a video processing program, I just picked this folder because it was small and it was recent. It moved one of my videos, it took a minute there and moved the second one. Now, I can see these two are on my other drives, so this is a big drive, this is a computer, that's how I keep those organized. Let me show you what it looks like when I do that in a full session. Okay, I switched back over to my 2018 catalog so I can show you what this looks like. Normally when I go through a session, I one-star the pictures that have potential and I two-star the ones that are actually going to be finally delivered. If I come down here and I sort them, I can see these are the pictures I liked. It's saying that it's greater than or equal to one star, so if I click reading as equal to one star, then I'm seeing just the one stars and if I click on one star again, it's showing me just the zero stars. What I do when I'm done with this session is I filter to my zero stars, I shift click all the photos, and then while I'm hovering over a photo, I right-click, I click "Remove Photos". It's like, "Whoa, did you want to delete these from the disk or just from Lightroom?" I say, "Delete them from the disk." I do not want these, they are gone. They get shoved right into my trash can and then before I empty my trashcan, just for sanity, I check rating is greater than or equal to. I still have my eight photos right here, so that's good, that's what I want and I empty my trash can. Yes, I want to empty my trash can, bye. That clears up space on my computer. These eight photos that I want to keep, I want to move to my other drive. I'm going to close this navigator really quick so I can see. This session right here, and you're just going to drag it right over 2018 part 2 because that is my long-term storage and it's like, "Moving files?" Yes, move them. That's what I want. It's going to move this folder of eight photos to my long-term storage, and that's going to give me a little bit more space here on my computer to edit some more. That's how I clear out my space, I've got my Macintosh HD, which is my computer, and I have got Tab, which is my long-term storage and then this actually also access to my previous long-term storage drive so let me close this so you can see. NAS Share is my old long-term storage. This has a directory that can access photos all the way from the very beginning of 2018. The first half of 2018 is on my older set of drives which I have since moved out and upgraded, and then that's why this little thing is gray. It's gray because it can't access these. If I were to try to access these, it shows me my preview file. It's like, "Yeah, here's what it is." You guys to remember my backdrops class. These are the videos I took for my backdrops class. It's like, "Yeah, we know what these photos are because we have the previews, but we can't access them." If I wanted to export these, I can't. If I go into develop, it's like, "Oh, this file couldn't be found," and it's true because the file is no longer connected to my computer, it just has a reference, so it remembers that it used to know where this was, but it doesn't know where it is now and you can see that's what the little exclamation point is. If this ever happens to you, you can click on that exclamation point and it tells you, "We can't find the original file. Do you want to locate it?" You can press locate and you can dig through and find the actual files. This is what you have to do if you move a folder, not through Lightroom. I recommend if you are moving files around, do it through Lightroom because then Lightroom is going to know where it is. If you are moving files through Finder, it's going to get lost and you're going to have to redirect everything. Usually if you redirect the one, it can connect the whole session and sometimes it can do multiple sessions, but just to keep things simple, move your files throughout Lightroom. Okay? I don't do anything special when I name my file, so when I click "Import", it just adds automatically this date of the session and then a count of it. In my Macintosh HD, I have a 2018 folder. Let me just show you that. Here in my pictures, I have 2018. This is all of my raw files right here, and Lightroom knows where these are. See, that's one NEF. This is a whole folder of NEFs and some movies. The NEF is my original raw file and Lightroom knows where that is. See, it knows it's in 2018 and it has the dates and so this folder I do not touch. I leave this here, I don't mess with it because this is what Lightroom needs to have to know where all my photos are and then everything else that you see in here is sessions that I have exported. These are exported photos of my sister basically, and so she has her own folder, Brenna. These are jpegs, they're not raws anymore because they've been stitched together with my Lightroom edits. Okay? This is just how Lightroom natively organizes things, which is super nice because now I have a record of everything. This also helps me with my taxes because I can click on a session and see, okay, I drove to Tunnel Springs Park for this session so I can calculate my mileage when I do my taxes and that's super nice. I hope this makes sense on how I've got things organized. I have my hard drive on my computer and my two external hard drives, one of which is currently active and the other is inactive, and when I started a new Lightroom catalog, you saw that I had to add those manually. If you don't have these showing up, you just need to import a photo from the source basically. I could add Kingston, this is a USB stick that's plugged into the back of my computer. I could add this as a drive if I add one of these folders to it basically, so it's going to automatically know if I add this mystery folder, it's going to add Kingston above it and then mystery folder and then whatever happens to be in that mystery folder. In the next section, we're going to talk all about importing files.
3. Importing and Library View: All right, this section we are talking about importing. Basically how do you get your photos into Lightroom? You use the import tab. When you're importing a photo, you can change the location. You can add metadata, which is super helpful if you ever want to search for specific photo and you don't want to keep track of dates. If I'm doing the photo for my dad, he has a wood turning business. I can type in double turning and I tag anything that I've taken of his that way if I'm like, Oh, he needs some pictures real quick. I'm going to email some over, but I can't remember when we did that shoot, instead of like hovering over trying to figure out what date we did that shoot, I can type double turning, it pulls up his wood turning stuff from all of the folders that this Light room catalog has access to, and then I can easily click on them, export them, and get them on their way. Here in Lightroom, I will show you how it goes. Typically, I would just stick an SD card right into my SD card reader and then Lightroom should automatically prompt the import. Yes, here it is. If it doesn't automatically prompt it, you can press the little Import button and then it should detect your memory card. What we're seeing right now is a memory card that has lots of pictures on it and they're starting to disappear. That means that they're already in Lightroom. You can wait for them to all disappear, or you can uncheck all photos and then scroll to the bottom to get just the photos that we're here for. It looks like it already filtered out everything from before. I'm going to click on my first picture. Click on my last picture with the Shift button highlighted so that it highlights all of them, and then I'm going to press the Check mark and it will check everything, and then I can hit Import and it will import it. Before I import, I want to just double check a few things. Right here, we have copy as DNG or just copy, I will just have copy selected. Basically it's going to make a copy of the photos on my SD card, and it's going to put them on my computer in a new location and add to catalog. Over here is where we figure out where exactly that is. Right now it has the destination drawer open. I can see that I have it to organize by date, and the date format is parent folder 2018, child folder, date of shoot. You can verify that by looking, this is my computer, users, me, pictures, 2018, and then it will make a folder within the 2018 folder, which is exactly what I want. It automatically does this for me. I never have to touch. It's super nice. The rest of these drawers, I'll breeze through really quickly. File handling, I never touch it, always says, don't import suspected duplicates checked, which is good. File renaming, I never rename my files, but you can apply during Import. This is like if you wanted to apply a bulk sharpening to all your photos while they're being imported, you can adjust that. You can come into here and click Sharpening and you can add a bulk sharpening or whatever happens to be in these little check boxes. I have never used this. Down here is the keywords section. This is helpful if you want to be super organized. For example, I would put small cat and then comma, and then I put plants, so this session has small cat, and plants. I'll assign that at the import and it will automatically add those tags to the photos when they end up in my catalog. Now I am ready to go. Again, keep in mind I never have to touch anything. I usually just stick my card in, and press Import and it does all the work for me. While these are importing, they will slowly trickle in. I do not recommend editing while it's importing because it'll use up lots of RAM on your computer and it'll make things really slow. I always just wait for them to end up here and then edit. Right here is the sort, it's currently set to capture time, but sometimes it's added order and then the pictures will be all mixed up. If that happens to you just know, you can just sort it to the capture time. All right, it said ejected card after import, that means these are all done. My little progress bar disappears. That means that my session is here. If I scroll to the top over here, it shows my catalog and it has previous import highlighted. Right now it's showing me all the photos that were previously imported. If I scroll down to where my photos are categorized, I can go down to the very bottom, click on it and it shows me everything that was taken today. These pictures were not in my previous import, these videos, these were from earlier today and you'll see this little exclamation point. That means they're not here, remember, because we moved them from my previous catalog to my long-term storage. We have all these photos and they know where they are. We are going to just start at the top. I wanted to just talk to you a little bit about this library tab and just show you around before we dive into the culling process. Right here is our navigator. This is showing you anything that is selected. If you click on it, it will make this photo full screen. If you don't want this to be full screen, you can click down here, you can toggle back to the grid mode or press G, and it will show you the grid again. You can adjust the size of the grid using this little thumbnail slider. You can make it so that you can see all of your photos all at once, or you can only see a few at a time. This is helpful if you wanted to just snap a picture and send it to someone and go like, "Hey, which one do you like better?" Instead of adjusting the grid, you can also go to this xy. If you click on this, it will show you the image that's selected next to a candidate. If you were trying to decide between two, you can look at them side to side. You can say no to this one, or flag one, or star one, or star the other. I don't usually use this feature. Let's say you have five or six photos selected and then you go over into this survey view. This is going to show you them all at the same time. Then this is helpful if you're trying to decide between several photos, you can be like, oh, I don't really like this one, x and then it will resort. Maybe I don't really like this one either, we're down to four we're going to take this one out down to three, and then it just leads you through till you find like the one, essentially, I don't use this feature really either. This little personal space, this is if you have people mode setup, people view, I don't have people view set up, I've never used it. It detects faces and then you can build an index. I've never used it. I'm going to go back into grid view. Next up we have this catalog drawer. This catalog drawer is where it tells you what's happening in your catalog. Right now if I click on All photographs it's going to show me everything, and it's telling me I have 10,954 photos in this catalog. That's a lot, that's intense. Next up, we have all synced photographs, looks like I don't have any photograph synced with Light room CC, which is normal, I don't use Light room CC. Quick collection is an awesome little feature. Let me show you about quick collection. If I go back into my into my photos and I click on this one, there's a little tiny gray circle in the top corner, and it only shows up if you're hovering over the photo, if you click that little gray circle, it adds this little box down here, which means that the photo is in the quick collection. You can also right-click on a photo and then go down to Add to Quick collection. Then it will put it right in your quick collection. Now if I scroll back up, I can go into my quick collection, and these are just an assortment of photos that I happen to put this little dot on because I wanted to look at them altogether. Maybe you're building a portfolio, and you save your portfolio pieces to the quick collection. But if you don't want a photo in the quick collection anymore, you can just click that dot, and then they disappear.. I honestly don't use the quick collection very much. Sometimes I use it if I'm trying to collect photos for my website, I can put just my favorites in the quick collection, and then see them all at once, and see if they're going to be cohesive. Next step, we have previous import. This is where it's going to take you after you import photos. This is just showing you everything that came in the last time you imported. Next up, we have the folders drawer, this is where we keep everything organized and I went through this earlier. It has all your different folders, and sections, and has it all organized nicely. This is a collection section, you can build collections. Let's say you wanted to have a collection that was just your portfolio. You press Plus, you click Create collection, and you say portfolio, and then you create it, and it will take this selected photo I had that check. This puts it in my portfolio collection. If I wanted to add more photos to this collection, I would scroll to my desired, I would go in and find the photo that I wanted, and then I would select it, and then scroll down to my collection that I wanted in, right-click and then say, add selected photo to this collection. I can make my own portfolio collection within my collection section, you can see that because it only has the one I just created, I don't actually use the collections feature, but it's here if you want it. Published services, I don't use any of these either, but I think you can set them up to publish via Flickr, or Facebook, or whatever. Again, I don't use those sections. Starting at the top over here we have our histogram. It's going to show you the histogram of the photos selected as well as some settings that you had when you took it. The quick develop tab is a way to edit pictures pretty quickly, but I honestly never use this. I have my keyword list here, you can see I have these photo tagged with plants and small cat, and this photo does not have any keywords. We have a keyword list. You can see those are the only two keywords that I have, plants and small cat. Then this is the section for metadata. This is the only part that I use over here in the library section because the metadata is actually really useful. You can see exactly what time the picture was taken, you can see what your settings were, what lens you used, and what camera you used, and it's really nice, especially if you have someone who's like, "Oh wow, what are your settings for this?" You can just pop right over here, look at your settings and you know exactly what is happening. That's pretty much it for importing your photos and the library tab. In the next section, I'm going to take you through my culling process.
4. Culling, Starring, and Color Labels: This section is all about culling. Culling is so important in the workflow of a photographer. It's where you decide what photos are good enough to actually edit, and which ones are trash. As a photographer, I'm sure you know, we take a lot of trash images. We take so many garbage images that no one ever sees, we just get them out of the way, mark them, delete them, nobody has to know they exist. It's safer to not delete anything until after you've delivered a session but if you've ever really terrible picture like get that out of there, no need to look at that. The reason you might want to save stuff is if you have some background elements that are good in the photo, and then you're missing it in the good photo, you can clip edges out of bad photos, and paste them on the good photos or you can use data from some to fix others or if you're doing a head swap, and one person's face is like this, and then in the next photo it's beautiful, but the other dude's face is weird, you can head swap, so don't throw away all the bad images before you start doing any head swapping because it might be a piece of the perfect photo in the end. But yes, so culling. When I first import a session, I go through and mark all the one stars, and so basically, if it's any good at all, if it's a photo that has potential, I'll mark it as a one-star. If I've taken 300 photos, I probably will have 101 stars. About a third of my session, I would say is good enough to think about. Then once I do that, I go through and mark them two stars if they're good enough to edit. Then I can really fine tune. Usually it means I've selected multiple of the same pose, and so it's like happy, and then just slightly turned happy. They're like almost identical, and I switch back and forth trying to decide which one is more strong, which one is better, or just pick one, because they're not going to want both. They're going to want one of each pose or one of each dynamic angle. They think they want all 100 pictures, they don't, and you really shouldn't give them all 100 unless every picture is dynamically different showing a different mood and excitement to them, and they are a blogger, and you've done an incredibly dynamic session. They're not going to want all 100 pictures. They're going to want 30. Yes, basically we go through, and we pick out our absolute favorites, and then that takes it usually down to like 50, and then from there, I actually do my edits, and I decide 50 is good. If I can take it down to 40 or 30, that's even better. While I'm editing, if I come across a photo that has interesting lighting, that's just not working, I'm trying to get it to edit, and it's just, the colors are coming out weird, and I'm just filing it and filing it, I just one star. I'm like, nope, I can't deal with you right now. I'm just going to keep going. Unless it's like a such a striking photo that it's worth the work. I usually just say, "Hey, we don't want that," or maybe the third time looking through, I'll be like, "Oh, you can see her double chin there. She's going to hate that." Then I just take it out. It takes a while to go through your photos, and then if you have less than you promised. You, "Oh you got 30 pictures," and you've got 28, you're like, "I got to find two more," you can go back to your one stars, they're already sorted, and then you can pick from those. Then at that point, I will deliver the files, and then I will filter it. It shows me only the photos that have exactly 0 stars. These are photos that I didn't think were worth even thinking about editing, and then I will highlight them all, and I will delete them. Then I know if they're like, "Oh, hey. So did you happen to have any other photos that are just, I'm thinking maybe a slightly different angle of this pose or my hair's doing something weird," you still have all your one-stars, you've got 20 more one stars that you can still go through, and be like, "Yeah, how's this one or yeah, how's that one," but you know that the rest of the stuff isn't any good, and so you've deleted it. It made more space on your computer. Yeah, and then once I'm done with this session all the way, then I will just drag that folder into my long-term storage, and then that clears up space on my computer so that I can get to editing more sessions. This culling process, I can usually do it in one setting unless it's a wedding. Usually for a wedding, I'll do like 100 photos a day. I'll cull through 100 photos at a time because I end up taking like 800 pictures or 1,000 pictures for a wedding, and it's very daunting to have to sit down, and edit a whole wedding. I'm like, "Okay, if I can just do 100 photos today, I'll be happy." I'll go through cull 100, and usually I get caught up in it, and end up culling 200 in them like, "Okay, I'm done, I'm going to stop," and then the next day, I'm like, "Let's do a few more." By breaking it up, it helps keep you focused so that you're not like hating it, pulling your hair out. I also like to use color labels. Color labels are helpful if I do multiple sessions in one day. Basically, Lightroom organized is my photos by day, and so if I'm doing a chocolate shoot in the morning, and then I have a family lifestyle session in the middle of the day, and then the evening I go for a drive up the [inaudible] with my sister, I have multiple sessions to keep track of. I don't want to just use the starring because then if I've stared some from the chocolates, some from the lifestyle, and some from the drive, I don't know how many pictures of each I have, and so usually I'll go through before I even start anything, and I'll click on the first photo of the morning session, and the last one in the morning session, and I will turn them all one color. I like to use all the colors except yellow, for some reason I don't really like yellow, but I do use yellow as a delete marker. If I mark something seven, that's yellow, that means I should just delete it. Then if I'm feeling like I need to hurry and get some space out of here, I can just filter out all my yellow photos because I know I don't want them. I'll do like a green session, next to a blue session, next to a purple session, and then if there's any yellows throughout the whole day, I will just delete them because I don't want them. That's why they're yellow. I don't like you yellow. Sorry. Now, that I've talked to you through the process, I'm going to show you how I do it here in Lightroom. You can see that I am in the Library tab right now, we're going switch over to the Develop tab. The reason I do this is because it makes the photos nice and big, and you can really tell if they're sharply in focus, and it helps figure out what's going to be best. I start off at the beginning of my session, and what I'm going do is I'm going to use the arrow keys to navigate to the next or back. Then what we want to be able to notice here is this filter section right underneath the photo. What we have here is little flags, and then we also have stars, and color labels. What I'm going to be doing is applying one stars and a yellow filter. I put the one stars on the photos that have potential that I might want to edit later, and then I put yellow labels on any photo that is just completely bad. Basically, that to me constitutes photos that are like mistake shots, like where I accidentally press the shutter or maybe the picture is completely blurry or out of focus, or it's super overexposed and way too bright, and there's no way that I can fix it, or if it's in a portrait session and the person got one of those half blinks, we don't want half blinks. I just get rid of those right off the bat to help clean it up a little bit. We are going to start here, and I'm going to use the arrow keys, and I'm going to press the "1" key, and I'm going to press the "7" key. One will apply one star like this, and then the seven key will apply a yellow label. That is so that I know any photo that's labeled yellow again is a photo I don't want. I'm going to press "7" again to take that yellow label off, and I'm going to continue. This photo I think is okay, but it's a little confusing because it feels like maybe it's sideways, so I'm just going to skip it. I like this photo, so I'm gonna give it a one star. This photos really pretty, but it's very similar to this one, and I personally think that I like the tall crop better but I'm going to click on the photo to zoom in, and just double-check that I'm super sharply in focus. Let's look at the previous photo again. Yeah, this one, it's got really good focus right in here, but up here it's a little soft, so I don't know. I think for now I'm probably just going to one-star this one, and then come back to it if I need a different alternate. This one's a really cool shot. I'm just going to kick up the exposure a little bit just to check it. We've got some focus in here, but because this point right here is out of focus, I'm going to say it's probably not the best. Then this shot is interesting, but I don't know, if I like it, so I'm just going to leave it not rated. Next up, we have this shot. This one is super dark, you can tell I was still trying to figure out my exposure as I was going along, and so I might keep that one, but probably not. Here is a perfect example, so her face is out of focus, and her hand is reaching. It's interesting, but she looks like she's struggling. I think that this picture is probably not the best, so I'm going to go ahead, and mark it as seven. This one's pretty decent. This one's cute. I wish that her nose is in focus. I'm using a super shallow depth of field. You can see over here underneath my Histogram, I was set to 1.8, that was my aperture. It was really wide open, which is why there's only like a pillar in this picture that's in focus. It's really narrow. Let's see, that one's cute, but it's mostly blurry, so I'm probably going to delete that one. That one is an off shot. My hand is way overexposed. It's not really capturing a good expressions, so that one's gone too. I'm sure I got a good one. There we go, that ones' cute. I'm going to one star that one. She bit me. I'm going to one star that one too. She's so cute. I love that. We're going to one star that one. That one's a seven. I love this cat. That one's a seven. It's totally blurry. I don't want that. We've got something else going on here. This picture is interesting but there's so little that's in focus. I'm just going to get rid of it. That ones' okay. These ones, I wasn't really in love with. This one I do love though, so I'm going to give that one star. This one too. This one almost looks completely blurry, I'm going to pass on it, and not get rid of it though, because it's kind of artistic. Now, we need to figure out what exactly we have going on. I'm going to click on this first one star here in the filter section, and this is going to just show me all the pictures that I think were a one-star. It says eight out of 58 photos, so eight pictures I decided were good enough to keep. I'm going to uncheck the one star, and then press the "Yellow" label so it sections out the photos that were all marked yellow. These are the ones I know I don't want, so I'm going to hold down. I'm going to select the first one, and hold down shift, and select the last one. I'm going to right click, Remove photos, and I'm just going to Delete them from the disk. It's going to check those in the trash can, and then I can uncheck the yellow filter, and check the one star filter again, and see my one stars. At this point, I would now go through these, and pick out my favorite two or three that I would share on Instagram, and then edit those. Let me show you more about the color labels. I'm going to hop back to my library, and go to a session that I know has a lot of color labels going on, right here. I'm going to sort this by green, blue, purple, and I sort them by two stars just so there's less photos here. You can see this day, I had three individual different sessions going on. I had a product session in the morning, I had a miscellaneous moody session during the middle of the day, and then in the evening, I took a drive with my sister and her friend. I have labeled all of the first session with the blue, the second with the green, and the third with purple. Now, if I'm like, "Oh man, they want me to send them pictures from our drive." Let's look at only the purples, and we're going to look at all the one stars. Now, I've sorted out, so I have 63 of the 300 photos that I took and kept that day. I can go to the top, I can click on the first one, scroll to the bottom, shift click, click on the last one, and then I can export these, and just send just these ones over. It sorts it out for me, so it makes it really easy to just send the photos that I want. Then lastly, I wanted to show you that you can add key words at this point. If I go into the Keywording section, I can type in here, Brenna, so I'm adding a keyword. You don't have to add it just at the import, you can add it anytime. All of these are selected, and I typed Brenna, and I clicked "Enter." Now, all of these have a keyword tag, and they're all under the Brenna category. Then if I want to go to my keyword list, I can check small cat, and then press this little arrow. It says there's 42 images. If I press this "Arrow", it'll take me to sorted page where it's all photos with just the labels small cat. It looks like these ones I didn't remove that small cat label. I can go in here, and click these, take out small cat keep plants, and then that will resort it for me. Perfect. Yeah, that's all my small cat pictures, and that's how you would use the keyword link. In the next section, we are going to talk about how to make our adjustments in the Develop tab.
5. Develop Sliders: All right, in this section we're going to talk about how to actually edit a photo in the develop tab and this is part one of that. This is just going to be all of your basic slider adjustments, and then the next section we're going to talk about our spot tools. All right, so to start editing a picture, we are going to switch over to the develop tab. This is where all the editing and fine tuning happens. I would like to edit. I want to edit this picture, I think it really has a lot of potential and I like the feeling that it is. Let me just show you around a little bit. We have our histogram at the top, and if you don't know what a histogram is, it's basically just a mountain of colors that lets you know what your picture looks like as data. Down here is darks, in the middle is your mid tones, and then up here is your highlights. It will tell you that if you hover over, you can tell, see how this little mountain in the corner, this little triangle is blue. That means there's some information in my photo that is so dark, it's getting clipped. If I click on this, it'll mountain and then pull my exposure way, way, way down. You'll see that parts of the image start to turn blue. This is where the picture is 100 percent black. If I do the opposite, if I take my picture all the way up and then I click on this other triangle or hover over it, it will show you in red anywhere that is 100 percent pure white. That is any place like if you were to print this out, that's where no ink is going to go, it's just going to be paper that shows through, there's no information there. A happy histogram is one that is somewhere in the middle that hopefully doesn't clip off any of the top or the bottom. But, every photo is different so it does not like an ideal histogram, it just depends on the photo. Next up we have, again, these are the settings that I took for my picture and then these are the spot tools which I'll talk about in the next section. We have our different drawers and I'm going to close all of these so I can show you what they are called. There's a few, okay. In our basic and our tone curve drawers, these are where we are going to do the bulk of our light and contrast edits. This is where most of the magic happens. We have different exposures and shadows and everything as well as temperature and then in a tone a curve we have more of the same. We have highlights, lights, darks, and shadows. This is where most of your editing is going to happen. In the next two, this is more fine tuned color edits. We have the hue saturation and luminance on this site and then you can click color and then this is where you can fine tune your coloring. We have different hue saturation, luminance. We'll go over this more, but this is where a lot of color adjustments happen and then also in the split toning section. Split toning is a little strange. It's more for like affects afterwards and I don't typically use it, but I'll still show you how. The rest of everything in here is basically fine tuning and corrections. This is where you sharpen pictures or smooth pictures, fixed lens distortions, add vignettes, etc. We are going to start at the top. This is how I would edit most of my images, is I'm going to start here with exposure. Looking at this picture, I need to decide do I want to do a moody edit or a light edit? We're going to start with a lightened area edit and then we'll do moody after. I'm bringing my exposure up a little bit I don't want my highlights to be too bright. Usually my raffles straight off camera lack a lot of contrast, so I find myself adding quite a bit of contrast when I'm editing. I pull up the slider, the contrast slider, and then from there on, I think that I've already made quite a lot of a difference in this photo. Over here on the left side in my history drawer, you can see everything I've done so far in order. If I click import, it'll show me what the photo looked like at the very beginning and what it looks like now. I can see if where I'm at now is better than where I started. Next up we have our highlights shadows, whites and blacks. You'll notice that these four sliders are pretty similar to these ones down here. It's a game of playing with both sets of sliders to get the photo to do what you want. Typically I'm bringing my shadows up, so that I get more information in the darks and then I'm going to bring my blacks down. This is going to add a lot of contrast. I can see this little blue section popping up that means I still have my triangle clicked, I mean I unclick that so it doesn't show up in my image. Again, bringing some blacks down and then whites, I'm going to bring up a little bit. The best way to know what your photo needs is to play with the sliders. If you don't know what's happening, click it up all the way or click it down and see what's happening. That's the best way to see what you think a photo needs. Right in here I can see that, the highlights on this leaf are pretty, pretty hot. I'm going to bring my highlights down a little bit to help bring some information back into this area. You can see what that did, it's super, super bright in here. You can't really see what's going on and then when I bring my highlights down, I can start to see more in those areas. Next up, I mean I just jumped down really quick to my tone curve and do a little more fine tuning here, I can see a lot of the image has a lot of dark areas and for a lighter area edit, I would want to bring those up. I'm going to bring my darks up a little bit and this reduces the contrast. I'm going to be my shadows down, I'm going to bring my lights up just a little. I feel like this lights slider in the tone curve section is very sensitive. It'll really like wipe out your photo if you're too heavy with that one. Then the highlights here do something different than the highlight slider in the basic section. I feel like they add a lot of gray like look at that, I don't think that looks good at all so I barely ever touch this highlight slider. I just control my highlights with the one up here. Then once I feel happy with my tone curve, which by the way, you can edit it directly in this photo, if you click and drag around, you can actually edit with the curve. But that's confusing to me, so I don't usually do that. I'm going to go back and then and come back up here and do the rest of coloring adjustments from here. Up here we have our temperature and tint sliders. These ones are so important, these are going to dictate the color of your image overall and so I shoot with my auto white balance. My camera is always set to auto white balance, I don't ever touch it. I feel like it does a really good job nailing the way balancing camera, and it's one last thing that I have to worry about messing with my cameras. If I ever have white balanced discrepancies with my images, I edit them here in lightroom's. What we can do is we can adjust the temperature. If I had to adjust it right now, I would say maybe a little bit cooler. I would take it up a little blue, so that took a little bit of those warm colors off. Then I would say that my tint is probably right on. This is the picture of lily, it's really green foliage and so I don't think it needs to be any greener or pinker. Yeah, if you start to do pinker, it pales out the green and then it makes the background purple, so I'm going to undo that. You could make this a lot warmer because we've got some sunshine in the back and so really anywhere between these two temperatures, I think you'd be golden. Another fun thing that I like to do is use this eyedropper tool. If I've got a section in my photo that is white or gray or black. I can usually get a pretty good reading. This little picker tool, this eyedropper, this will pick a target neutral, it brings up this little grid. You can go over different parts of the photo. If you pick a neutral color, so like good gray or white, and then click on it, it will turn the photo assuming that, that is target neutral. This is really helpful if you're actually using like a gray card or a color checker passport, you can click that spot right there in the photo and know that this is what the real life toning would be. You can see my white balance changed ever so slightly. It got a little warmer and then my tints got a little more to the pink side. I think I like how this looks, except maybe it's a little warm for my taste, so I'm bringing that back down. If you want to do some super fine tuning, you can drag the slider like this, but it's like very abrupt. You can also hover over the number and you get a little hand with an arrow that pops up. You can click on the number and then drag it up and down, and I feel like it's a lot easier to get more fine tuned results that way. Once we're happy with our temperature, we've got a few more things to cover in our basic tab. We have clarity. Clarity is adding a lot of crispness and contrast. I think if you overdo the clarity, it really makes your photo seem unrealistic. Like this picture has just a lot of intense contrasts going on that I think detracts. Sometimes I'll use the clarity never really on people, I'll use it a little bit on like products or plants, but usually I don't need to touch that. The Dehaze slider is perfect if you're shooting with a lot of sunshine and backlighting. If your picture looks really grayed out, you can use the Dehaze to add more contrast. I usually save the Dehaze slider for situations like that but in this particular situation, it actually looks cool. Probably because this is a backlit photo. If you go all the way down the other way, you've got this really glassy looking photo. But anyway, we'll add a little bit of DAs just for fun. vibrance and saturation are exactly what they say. They're basically the same thing. But a lot of people find that the vibrance has a less intense look. This is 65 in the vibrance, you can see it's pretty green and pretty intense, and then here it is in saturation. It's a lot more like neon looking with the saturation. I usually do a combination of both. I'll pull up the vibrance maybe like A and then I'll saturation will be like four just to add a little bit more like juice to the picture. That pretty much covers it for our basic and tone curve. At the very top it says treatment, it's selected to color unless you click black and white, in which case it will make your photo black and white. Then the vibrance and saturation status don't work anymore obviously because those are colors specific sliders, but everything else should work and you can still do a combination of those. If you want to go back to color, you just click color. We are going to scroll down to the HSL color drawer and split toning. HSL color is where you can really fine tune your colors and an image. In this picture I've got some blue colors in the background, if I wanted to make those completely gone, I would adjust that here. In my saturation section, if I go over to blue, I can drag this all the way down and it takes the blue hue out of that little section right there. I'm going to undo that so I can show you this little tool right here, it's tiny. You might not have ever noticed it before. But if you take this guy, you click on him you pick him up. He's a little bit of a selector, so you can select a spot in the photo that has, I don't know, maybe you're not sure exactly what color this is. You can click on it and then drag it. Then you'll notice over on my sliders that they are adjusting. I'm dragging it down and that pulls the colors out. Then if I drag it up, it puts more color in, and so I can fine tune parts of my image just by doing that. If I did it to the green section, I'm clicking on the green area and then dragging down, it will take all the green out of my photo. I can also drag it all the way up and add a tone of green, and you can see that it is adjusting my sliders accordingly. If you don't want to use this little tool, you can always adjust these letters by hand, but again, that's great for if you just have a weird color in the picture and you just want to take it out. You just hover over it, take it out. Now we have a lot cleaner looking of an image because we don't have as much of those weird blues in the background or that weird spot of brown. That's just a fun little tool that I like to use. The Hue section. If I click over to the Hue section, maybe let's say that I think these green plants or too yellow, I can go to my green slider and slide it more toward the blue. It'll turn anything that's green, more blue, or I can do the opposite and turn things more yellow. You can really fine tune the look of your images and adjust the colors this way. Then if you want to take your slider back down to zero, like maybe you can't get it quite close enough, you can just double-click on the word and it will reset it for you. That works for any of the sliders. Double-click and it just cleans it all up. Next up, I want to talk about luminance. Luminance is the lightness or darkness of a particular color. Here we have all of our green. If we take the luminance up, it adds a brightness to that particular color or a darkness and so it just is how much light is in the color particularly. Then same thing goes for this guy. You can take the little hand selector and you can turn things down or up or whatever you want. The all tab is going to show you everything all at once. If you want to edit them altogether, you can do that. I pretty much just keep it at saturation and do minimal edits here if needed. Next up we have the split tone section. The split toning reminds me of some of the old school Instagram filters. You can add different toning tear image that gives it a specialized look and feel. I don't usually mess with the split toning, but when I have in the past, I'll bring my highlights up to like a warm color. I have it set to 51, and then I'll set my shadows too like a blue color, so that's 242. Then right now you'll notice nothing happened because my saturation is set to zero. If I pull up my saturation, it's going to add this yellowy orange color into my highlights. That adds a warmer feel. I'm going to tone it down just a little. Then in the shadows, if I tone this up, this will add some lose in the shadow. You can really just fine tune and tweak your photos to get a vintage feel. With my saturations turned up right now, I'm just going to scroll through the different highlight colors. You can see all the different fields that are available to you. If I did the opposite, if I did a blue highlight with a warm shadow, it's going to give me a completely different look that way. This is a way to add a really stylized effect to your photos, and then you can always turn down the saturation if you just want a touch of it. Sometimes I'll use the split toning if I'm shooting on a bright day and a big grassy field and I've got a ton of weird green colors reflecting onto the people. If I adjusted in a split toning sometimes that helps take the edge off of that. But anyway, I'm going to take the saturation back down to zero which negates any of those effects, and then it's back to normal. Those are our two color drawers that really fine-tune the color. We're going to go down to the detail drawer. This is where we would sharpen images or reduce the amount of noise. Noise is going to show up a lot in your shadow areas. I was able to use a really low ISO, and so that means that my noise isn't going to be very bad at all. This picture is about example of noise. But if you did want to use the noise reduction slider, if you turn it up, it just blurs and softens any of the area of the photo that had a lot of like pixel looks to it. This picture doesn't really need the noise reduction, so I'm going to take it off. Sharpening is essential. I always sharpen my pictures when export them, especially if I'm going to share them on Instagram or the web, because those have a tendency to make your photos look less sharp, a lot softer, especially when compression happens. I like to add some sharpening. It already comes default with a 40 sharpen. I usually take it up to about halfway in the slider and then the masking is what I will adjust also. I typically just drag it up like this, but if you want to see what's actually happening, you can hold down the Alt/Option key and you can see things change. Then if you drag up your masking, it starts at white. So basically white is anywhere that the sharpening is applied. As you mask anything that comes dark, that's stuff that's not being sharpened. You can fine tune exactly what you want to have sharpened in the picture. If I just want to sharpen the edges of these plants, I would put my masking up to 54 or if I want to sharpen the whole thing I would bring it down. Typically I just bring it about a quarter of the way, so I have halfway and then a quarter of the way, and then that applies enough sharpening that I feel like the image is really, really clean. If I come back. Yeah, you barely can tell the sharpening here, but it makes it a little bit of a difference. Next up we have lens corrections. This is what you're going to want to use if you're shooting portraits and you are using a really wide angle lens, this distortion is going to either bring things closer or further away. If you were shooting wide angle, your picture's going to look like this and so you would want to fix it. Then if you're shooting really close to someone's face, you're going to want to do the opposite. You're going to want to pull this back so that the picture appears nice and flat and your horizons are straight. My picture is pretty close. It's not really a person, so I'm going to undo that distortion. One more thing about distortion, you'll notice it adds these white boxes to the outside. You're going to want to crop those off so that they don't appear in your final photo, which we'll be using the crop tool up here and we'll talk more about the crop tool in the next section. Distortion is pretty much it for the lens corrections section that I use. I don't mess with the defringing or the vignetting here. I'm going to close that and open up the transform. This is where if your horizons not straight, which you can see, this is not exactly straight, I can adjust it in my rotate. I can just turn that an adjusted a little bit. You can also adjust this in the cross section. Let's say that I am shooting a building and I wasn't standing perfectly in front of it. I would want to transform using the vertical and horizontal to really help bring my photo so it looks a lot straighter. These tend to be a little too strong and so I would just go easy on them, only use them if you really need to. There's a lot of fine tuning in here that you can mess with to help. But for the most part, most times my photos don't need a transform unless I'm shooting straight against a wall and it's distracting if I don't. I'm going to undo those. The effects section is where we are going to add artificial vignette. The amount of vignette here, this little adjust, if you bring it down, it brings a dark circle around the outside. and if you bring it up it brings a light circle. You do not want to go all the way on these, I just think that it's really distracting. If I add a vignette, I usually keep it somewhere between zero and negative 15 just to bring your eyes into the center of the frame and you can adjust the midpoint. I'll put it on heavy so you can see what's happening. You can make your vignette bigger or smaller, adjusting the midpoint, the roundness will adjust whether your vignette is oval or tall, and then further will adjust like how sharp the vignette it is. You can add a really Dewey soft vignette or a really harsh vignette. I'm going to undo this. Next step we have grain. Grain is a film effect. I'm not super familiar with it because I don't typically like the look of grain, but you added some grain, you can see if I had a lot, it's going to add this really pixel we looked to the picture. You can add more of a dated feel to it using the grain sliders. You can add like 50 grain and then you can change the size. If we wanted really chunky grain, we would bring that up or if we wanted really fine grain, we would keep it down. Then roughness like right now, maybe they're all really circular and then if we add a roughness, it makes them more jagged yet, or if we take it down and it makes them a lot more fine. Playing with those figuring out what grain that you like, that is something that you can mess with also. The calibration drawer, I never touch. That's what's happening with our sliders. For this picture it's not bright area and it's not really moody either. But if you wanted it to make it really moody, we would take our exposure down just a little bit, maybe our shadows down a little bit. We would have just a lot of contrast. Some things that make a moody photo work is having the photo be predominantly dark and then making sure that our bright spots are bright enough that they give the photo contrast. Then typically moody pictures are a little bit cooler, so I'm going to take my temperature down a little bit, and then I am going to throw a vignette on here just to darken it up a bit. Then I'm going to take my saturation down because I think that right now the colors are a little bit too like happy and vibrant, and so I took the saturation and vibrance down to portray more this moody feel. Then I might take the clarity up just a little bit. I might even bump up my highlights just so that I get like a nice stark contrast. That might be the moody edit that I decided to choose for the picture. Then if you ever decide you don't like something, you can go back in the history and then jump back and you can get back to where you were or all the way back to the beginning. Just jump between to see where you started to where you are now. Next up we're going to talk about how to use all of these fancy spot tools.
6. Cloning, Filters, Cropping and Brushing: All right. This little bar up at the top is where our spot tools are. This includes our spot healing brush, our adjustment brush, our radial filters or gradient filters, red-eye removal, which I have never used, and crop tool. I'm going to show you what each of these do and when I use them and how it makes my editing so much easier because I don't have to pull everything into Photoshop to do these fine-tuning edits. This is the photo that we are going to be editing today. I chose it because it's got some shadows and then there's also a couple of blemishes that I'd like to remove. I'm going to start out just by doing some edits on this picture. I'm bringing up the exposure and the contrast, taking the blacks down. I'm going to bring up the shadows, it's a little too bright. I'm going to bring the exposure back down and then more information in the shadows. I'm going to drop down to the tone curve, bring the darks up, bring the shadows down. I think we're pretty close. I feel like it's still lacking some contrast. Yeah, I like that. Then temperature, it feels a little blue, so I'm gonna bring some warmth back into her skin, and then I'm going to up the vibrance and saturation because this picture has a lot of feeling. Then I think we're pretty much there. You just tweak a few more things. I think I like that. Now, at this point what I would do is begin using these fine adjustment tools. The first one on the left is our crop tool. This is completely adjustable. If I hover my mouse inside the picture, inside the crop, I can drag and create my own custom crop. I can also bring my cursor outside of the picture and I get this little up and down arrow. If I click and drag, it'll adjust the angle of that for me. It's set to accustom crop and it's unlocked. That means that I can move it freely. If you wanted to set this to a certain size, maybe one-by-one for Instagram, you can make it a little bigger. There we go, make it a little bigger. Then if you want to adjust within like adjust one of the crop is you have to grab inside the photo and then move it around. You're, actually moving the photo. You can choose a bunch of different crops like eight and half by 11, you can choose 16 by nine. So 16 by nine is what I use for these skillshare videos. I try to make my pictures like this so that there's no black borders on the top and bottom. Once you're happy with your crop, you just click out of the crop, it selects it for you. You can always go back in and readjust your crop. It's never final until you export your image. If you hit the Reset, it will go back to original. If you wanted to crop to an eight by ten, but you wanted it tall instead of wide, you just shrink down your crop a little bit and then go against the angle. If I go try to force it to be tall, it'll snap and be tall and the same thing goes the other way. If you come diagonally down, it'll snap and be horizontal again. Next step, we are going to be using this spot tool. So this tool is awesome for removing blemishes and stuff. So for blemishes removal, I like to come in nice and close. We'd go full screen here. She's got this little blemish right here that I want to get rid of. I grabbed this spot tool and right now it's set to this size circle. If you scroll up or down, it adjust the size. You can also drag the slider. I usually adjust it so that it covers the whole blemish and then you click and it will automatically sample from a spot that it think is going to be good. I usually have to move this around a little bit. I try to pick a spot that's pretty close to where it is because down here, her cheek skin is a little bit different and it's a little closer to the camera than right here. So I'd just like to make sure and keep it so it looks as realistic as possible and nobody ever questions it. She's got a lot of water droplets on her face. This one seems a little bit distracting. I try and remove the ones that don't really look like water droplets. Then right here she's got a little hair that's distracting. I'm going to adjust my brush to be really small and then I'm going to draw with it. I'm just going to draw and follow this little hair and then when I let go, it sampled from directly above and I can hover over it to see this sample. I think that that was a good selection. She's also got a little tiny purple hair right here, must have been from her towel, I think. I'm going to get that and remove that one too. So you can see like going through fine-tuning, bringing out all the spaces that are distracting. It really just helps bring the focus into the portrait rather than any of the little spots. Another thing that you can do with the clone brush is change the opacity. Let's say that instead of this being a blemish if it was a scar or a birthmark or something that they want to be there, but maybe just not quite so distracting. You can adjust the opacity. If I take it down halfway and then clone it, it's still there, you can still see it's like a faint shadow. It doesn't remove it completely, but it turns it down. It's not quite so blaring. That's a good way to go around if someone has a spot that's really intense or if you feel inauthentic removing someone's acne completely, you can just do that. I personally feel like I'm totally good removing people's acne because I think acne is temporary. So unless it's like a birthmark, I usually just remove it completely. Next up we have this Red-Eye tool. I'll be honest with you. I never use it because I don't use Flash. Flash is what creates that red-eye look in people and so you can click on the eyeball and it will detect the red-eye and then fix it. Because this doesn't have any red-eyes, it's not really sure what to do. There's also a section for Pet Eye which does different things because animals' eyes photograph differently than humans. So we're just going to skip over that. This is our graduated filter. So this will apply an Edit over a section of the image. So for example, if I thought the sky was way too bright, I could darken it up. So in the effect menu, if I change it to darken, so right now it's set to dark and so my exposure is set to negative 0.30. I can just click and drag straight down and it creates these three lines. The middle line is where it applies and then the other two is the fade. If I hold over, you can see where exactly that's being applied. It's hard to see what's going on. So I'm going to bring the exposure down just a little bit more and I'm even going to kick the highlights down too. Right now we can start to see some more information in the sky. You can see that it actually was a cloudy day, this date. You wouldn't have gotten that information without bringing this filter in here. If we move it and adjusts it, we obviously wouldn't want to put it halfway through her face because that looks really fake and bad. We want to put it just to the point where it makes an effect, but it's not distracting to the image. If you feel like this gradation is too quick, you can grab the outer two lines and it will stretch it so that the fade is a lot more gradual, then you can fine-tune it there. I think that one's on a little too heavy. So I'm going to bring it down just a little bit and then take it. Another thing you can do with the graduated filters is, down here you can see she's got a lot of blue light reflected from her swimsuit and from the pool. If I felt like her skin looked really cold on this half of the photo, I could bring in a graduated filter that is the temperature slider. So right now it's plus ten on the temperature which warms it up. Then I can bring this right in here and then I'll bring this up just a little and that will warm up her little chest. I can see what my two filters did by clicking here. This is before with no filters and then this is with the sky filter and the warmth filter on her chest. It's a subtle adjustment, but it's enough that we'll really fix your photo if needed. You can apply as many graduated filters as you want. Just know that if you're selected on a filter, you can't. If you try and change it, it's going to change what the filter is doing. So you have to make sure you're not selected on a filter or you go over to the new tab to add another one. If you're selected on it, it'll change it, and then if you hit new, you can go ahead and pull in another one. Lastly, is the brush setting. Let's say I have this filter selected, but I feel like this corner right here is a little too dark. With it selected, I can go to the Brush section and then I come down to Erase. This is going to erase anywhere that it's added. I'm adjusting my brush so that it's big and then I'm going to erase it out of this little poll right here. Now, if I hover over my filter, I can see the filter is applied except for in that corner. That helps take off that little harsh shadow right there. That's pretty much it for the graduated filters. Let's go to the radial filters next. These are very similar, but it's doing it in a circle pattern. So if I wanted the emphasis to be on her face, I want it to be nice and bright and saturated, I'm going to add a Dodge and then draw a circle. So it's a little hard to tell, but you can tell my circle is dark, so right now it's adding light in to the edges. It's bringing the edges brighter and it's bringing the center darker. That's the opposite of what I want. I'm going to come down here underneath my radial filter settings and check this invert box. This is going to change it, so now it's bright in the middle and dark on the outside, and I can really just tune this in to be the same size as her face, if I move it around, there we go. If I wanted to apply something just to her face, if I wanted all the emphasis to be there, I can bring this up and then I can close this and bring the exposure down. It's a way to bring everything else in the picture of dark but leave her face bright. You can kind of see here is before and then here is after. It really brought a lot more emphasis right in the middle of the picture rather than the outside. Then lastly, we have our adjustment brush. This is where you're really going to go in and hand paint things that you don't like. What I typically do with the adjustment brush is I brighten people's eyes and I smooth their skin. I'm going to zoom in. Since I have the brush selected, I need to press the space bar that will give me the zoom tool and then I can click and zoom, and then let go and I'm back to my brush. Right now I want to set my brush to skin brightener. This is a preset that I made based on the softens skin. It's just a little more subtle. I have this often skin selected and this is my brush. If I scroll up or down, it changes the size of the brush. There's two circles. The inner circle is where it's applied and the outer circle is where it fades to. I usually like to size it so that it fits right underneath her eyes, and then I will go ahead and start drawing. I'm clicking and painting in these dark shadows on her face around her mouth, and then maybe a little bit underneath her nose, and then I'm going to get her other eye, and then right between her eyebrows, and then some of the crevices in her forehead. Let me back out and zoom out so you can see what we did. I'm going to back up. This is before and then this is after. It's subtle, but it helps lift some of those shadows so that they're nice and smooth. Next up we're going to do her eyes. I'm going to go back to this brush and I'm going to select iris enhance. This one comes pre-loaded with lightroom. It adds a little bit of exposure, a lot of saturation and some clarity. I'm going to adjust this so that it's a little smaller than her eye and then I'm going to color in, in little circles. This one is more subtle on this image. Sometimes it's intense and it looks crazy. Usually I'll up this saturation, sometimes I'll even add a color. I know her eyes look kind of gray here, but they're really blue in real life. If I click this little color x, it'll bring up the color selector and then I can choose to add a color. You could make them have super blue or you could make them purple, but we're going to just do like a little tiny bit of subtle blue. Just enough that it's like there. I think that's good. Then I think that they're a little too light, so I'm going to bring my exposure down just a little bit, and then we're going to close that and see what it looks like. Yeah, super cute. It's subtle. It's not too much. It's just enough to kind of bring some interests to there. Then other things that I could do with my adjustment brush, I like to take clarity and then apply this to the eyelashes. This really helps eyelashes kind of adds a little bit of darkness and contrast and it makes them look really sharp and pointy. It's a little strange on here because her eyelashes or wet, so they're already kind of dark, but if that's the effect that you're going for it, there you go. The adjustment brush has a ton of different things that you can change. Then if you wanted to make your own, like let's say I wanted something to be darker and also bluer, it says I'm using darken, but it's edited. I can save the current settings as a new preset and then give it a name and then I will always be able to go back to that. The one that I made myself as skin brightener and I use this one a lot. The teeth whitening I think is a little bit intense. I'll show you what that looks like. Her teeth already really white, so this is just going to be overkill. But what it does is it adds lightness, so adds exposure and then it takes down the saturation. If you get any of their gums, it's going to be really gray. What I like to do is I painted on nice and strong. Then you see that my little brush has a plus sign. If I press Option, it turns into a minus sign and then over here you can see it moves from brush A to brush erase, and so it's going to erase stuff. Right after I paint, I go into my negative brush and then I go in and erase where it's applied to her gums. You can really fine tune where it's hitting, and then I also hit Option and then hover right over the dot to get my upper down, and I click on it and drag down. This is going to drag all of my sliders that are being applied all at once and it's going to give it a more subtle application. You can see my differences. This is full strength and then this is subtle, and then before that is this which is more natural. Anyway, that's the teeth whitening and if you want to get rid of an adjustment, totally you just right click and then click "Delete", and then it's totally gone at that point. Those are the spot tools. I'm going to show you on a product photo what I have to do with these tools. Here is a super clean, crisp product photo of this chocolate. It looks so smooth and delicious. If I click on my clone tool, you can see just how many little clone tool circles I had to make to get this chocolate to look this smooth. Let me show you what this looks like without any of this cloning. If I hit this little "Reset" button in the clone window, it will reset it back to what it looked like before. This is typical of chocolate to just have like all these little specks all over it, and it's fine, it looks okay. But I know that for a really clean professional look, they are going to want me to mark all those out so that it looks really, really just smooth and clean. I'm going to click the brush tool and I'm just going to sit and clone this out. I'm going to speed this up so that you don't have to watch it as slow as it actually takes, but you'll get an idea of what goes into cloning on this intensive level. I've gotten this much done so far and I wanted to show you a little trick with what to do when something appears on an edge and you want to get rid of it. If I make this the right size and click on it and it samples, what it likes to do, let me zoom in, is create a weird blend of a shadow that's coming in and I hate when it does this. So one trick that I like to do if you're getting this weird shadow blended in from the edge is dragging your picker to the edge. If it's grabbing from an edge, sometimes it will figure it out and then it will make it clean and then it will clean it up so that it doesn't have that shadow in it. If you're also just having a huge issue with this, you can adjust your crops so that it isn't even in the picture and then you never have to know that that was a thing. One thing that I like to keep in mind when I'm cropping is not to bring something right to the edge of the crop. I feel like this crop where this comes right to the edge, people's eyes are drawn to this little spot and then this little edge takes them off the photo, and then they're not looking at the picture anymore. I like to give things a little bit of breathing room, and if things are too close to the edge or they're distracting, they're falling off, I'll just remove them. This guy I think is a little bit distracting, same with this little dot that's super close to the edge, I'm going to take him off too. Just a process of cleaning, and shrinking, and adjusting the size and making it so that it looks nice and perfect. Here is where we're at and I think that's pretty good. In the next section, we are going to talk a little bit about lightroom presets.
7. Lightroom Presets: Import, Create, Share: This section is about Lightroom presets and I want to start this off by letting you know that I don't have presets for sale. I don't even use Lightroom presets. I think that I am a black sheep in this area because I understand that they can make your workflow so much faster and they can help your images all look the same, but to me, like every session, there's no way that the light could be exactly the same in every session unless you're using artificial light. Because I am a true natural light photographer, I use natural light for nearly everything that I do, I prefer to hand edit all of my sessions using no presets whatsoever. Basically I will edit the first picture in a session and then I will copy those edits and paste them across the board, but I'm not going to just click through a bunch of edits till I find one that looks nice, because I feel like when you do that, you might miss out on what the photo really needs. I would rather just teach you how to use the "Develop" tab more fully than rely so heavily on edits. Do what's going to be best for you. If that means buying a bunch of presets and being in love with the process like "Amen" do you. That's what's so great about being a photographer. You can do what works for you and it works and we're not all the same and that's amazing, and the fact that we can all do this our own way is what it's all about. Do what works for you. For me, I'm going to handle it, and that's okay too. For the sake of being thorough, If you want to play the preset game, here's how it goes. Here in Lightroom, in the "Develop" tab, over on this left-hand side, right underneath the preview is our presets menu. You can open and close this drawer, but right in here is what is preloaded with Lightroom classic. In here we have our different color presets. If I hover over them, they will show me a preview on my big image so you can see what it feels like and then if you click on it, it applies in your history, and then this is what's added to the image. You'll notice over here that some of the sliders have changed. Basically all a preset is, is instructions that tell the sliders what to do basically. We have different creative presets, we could just do really wild and crazy things to our pictures if we want, we've got a bunch of black and white presets, so feel free to go in here and play with these if you're interested, and then if you want to download some presets from the Internet, I'll show you a couple of different sites that I like. This first one is called filtergrade.com. They have digital assets for creative professionals. We are going to go to the photo section and right in here it takes us right to the Lightroom presets. Here is just a bunch of different collections and individual presets that you can download. You can browse through these to figure out what exactly is the look and feel that you want, and then go and click on them and download them. You can see they have the prices here and everything. If you are looking for a specific pictures like here's the travel section, so these are targeted specifically toward people looking to improve their travel photos. This is the Mast-in Labs website, and they have different preset collections and these ones are highly acclaimed. Everyone loves these presets. They definitely are pretty accessible to people who want to get their photos to match their film or just have this particular style. Next up we have the Heck Yeah Presets. These are by Ben Sasso. He's an educator that I've been following for a really long time. He has his different preset packs. These are Sean Dalton's presets. He's a Skillshare photography teacher just like me. He does such an awesome job and he has a totally different look and feel than I have, and I love how his packs came together. These are pretty, I think they're pretty recent, but definitely give him some support if you like his look. This is Presets For Good. These are by Wyn Wiley. I've been following him on Instagram for a while. He is an educator and he just is so awesome and has such a great personality. He has presets for sale. He's got mobile presets, and then he also has a set which comes with a preset pack and workflow tutorials. Then you can also get just the presets or just the tutorials, and then 50 percent of the money toward his presets goes toward a non-profit, which he describes here. If you want free presets, I just did a quick google search and came up with Greater Than Gatsby, I've heard of them before. They are big part of the industry. They have a ton of Photoshop actions and presets and overlays and things that you can buy from their website, but they also have free presets that I wanted to show you how to at least download them. We're going to go to free Lightroom presets and put our e-mail in this box. Once you put your e-mail in here, you're basically signing up for newsletters. But when they send you your presets, they will appear as a zip folder in your downloads. We double-click on the zip folder to get our open folder, and then in here we have, these are Adobe Camera Raw presets, and then these are our Lightroom presets. You can see this file says Preset Lr. This is a Lightroom preset file. They have now changed how Lightroom presets files are. You'll see later on that we have a different file to deal with, but they both work. Here's our little folder. There's instructions here, but I'm just going to show you a quick and dirty way to get these into Lightroom. We're going to hop over into Lightroom, and then right in this little presets title, we're going to press this little plus sign. This brings up a menu where we can hit "Import Presets." Now, normally it's not going to take you right to the presets folder. It's going to take you to your downloads and you're going to have to press "G" and then you're going to have to scroll and find them. But once we have our folder, we highlight all the presets and then press "Import." Lightroom creates a user presets folder for you and then dumps all your presets right in here. I can scroll over these and it'll give you an idea of what to expect. Each of these are labeled, they're the Greater Than Gatsby presets, and they have different names and they tell you what collections they come from. If you really like one specific preset, you can go and buy the rest of the collection. Yeah, these are different Greater Than Gatsby presets. Basically, if you wanted to apply a preset, we're going to click on Florence, so that puts this preset here. These two ones at the bottom, this is a Bonus Film Grain, which applies a film filter to the top. It's just film so you can add it on, and then they also have a Bonus Soft Vignette, which adds just a dark circle around the outside of the image. That is another add on, so you can stack these. Next up, I wanted to show you how to create your own presets. Let's say you have been doing editing for really long time and you just want to have your own clean classic preset to use for all your images. What we want to do is start out by editing a picture. I'm going to clear the edits off this picture by clicking on the "Import" in the History. This is my basic photo where I started. I'm going to go through and edit this picture. Keeping in mind that our exposure and our temperature and tint varies wildly, we want to leave these alone. Don't touch your temp, your tint or your exposure. These three are off limits. These are what you're going to have to edit whenever you apply a filter because you don't want to. If you add a bunch of exposure, it's going to add that exposure to anytime you click on the preset, and so because our exposure might be too dark or too light, it's just going to be too tricky to try and fiddle with that, and so we're just going to not touch the exposure and not touch the temperature or the tint when we are creating a preset. We are going to up the contrast, we're going to add some shadows. We'll not add shadows, we're going to add light in the shadows. Were going to up our lights and take our blacks down a little bit, maybe even more shadows, more whites, you got it nice and bright, and we're going to take down our highlights a little bit so we have more information in the skin. Then at this point, I'm going to add some sharpening, so I go up almost halfway and then almost a quarter on the masking, and then I'm going to add a vignette just for fun. I'm going to pull this down up about 10, and then I think that looks really good. I'm going to make it a little brighter, so I'm going to adjust my tone curve a little bit. I'm going to bring up the darks, bring down the shadows, and maybe kick up the lights a little tiny bit. I might pull my highlights down. I really like how this looks so far. I'm going to go over to this History and click Import, which is just undoing my edit. I'm showing you what I did. This is where I started and this is where I am now. I really like this edit. What I would typically do if I wasn't using presets is just copy, copy, and then go to the next photo and paste. Boom. But if I turn this into a preset, it does essentially the same thing. Going to the photo that I just edited, I'm going to go over to my presets menu, press this little plus sign again, and I'm going to say Create Preset. This pulls up this dialog box where I get to name it. I'm going to call it Rich Forest. Okay, and it has all these things checked. If I were to do some cleaning up on her skin and stuff, I wouldn't want that to be part of my preset and so I would make sure to uncheck things like that. But it looks like those things are even included. It looks like graduated filters, radial filters are included, but they're not checked here. So, it's going to copy the exposure and it's going to copy the white balance, but I didn't touch them, and so it shouldn't do anything there. It's still says as shot, and so it's not going to copy these numbers, it's just going to remember that there was nothing done to those and so it's going to leave them. But if you're just not sure you can uncheck white balance and you can uncheck exposure just to be safe. But anyway, once we have a name, we can click create. This photo I'll preset down here at the bottom of the user presets menus. This is our little rich forest presets. Let's see how it works. We're going to go to a different photo, and then we're going to click rich forest. It pasted it right on there. It looks awesome. Let's see how this preset plays with some other sessions. I'm going to go to another session with completely different lighting and we are going to edit this picture. This has no edits on it, so we are going to hit rich forest and that paste it there. It cleaned it up a little bit, you can see it brightened it and added a lot more saturation stuff, but it's still really dark. This picture was underexposed when I took it. Now I'm going to hand at it and adjust the exposure to my needs. Taking it up, just adjusting the exposure, fixed that. Then I do think that his skin is a little blue, so I'm going to add just a little bit of warmth in there. Then from here, I really like how it's looking, but I would want to do some fine tuning. So, I'm going to go into my clone tool and fix his cute little chapped lips, and then do the same thing on this side. Then I also like to go into my Adjustment Brush and I would pull down to skin brighter. This is one that I made myself, it's basically the same thing as soften skin, but a lot less intense, it's just adding 0.06 in exposure and taking clarity down 30 and so on the adjustment brush and then paint. I'll show you the track that I take when I paint. I just basically want to soften out the shadows here, and then just make sure that there's no like harsh lines on his face. I tend to edit with a lot of contrast and so I like to make sure the skin is not super contrastive. Then if I hover over this little black dot, it'll show me exactly where I painted and you can see where I usually target, and then I'm going to go into iris and hands. This is a filter that comes with the Lightroom, and then I'm going to paint in his eyes. Then I think this filter is a bit strong always, and so instead of trying to tweak all of these sliders, I just hold down the ALT slash Option key and it pulls up this little arrow when I hover over the dot, and then I can drag down to bring all the sliders down altogether. I usually do this just so that I can add just a hint of brightness in his eyes, but not like a ton, not so it's overwhelming. Then from there I would call it good. Let's do one more picture real quick. I really like this photo and I want to keep it. So, I'm going to right-click and I'm going to create a virtual copy. This does exactly the same thing, but in our history it doesn't show any of the edits. My slaters have moved, but I can't go back in time unless I right-click on the photo, go to develop settings and hit reset. This takes us back to a clean slate. I'm going to hit my rich forest preset and boom, my picture is done. You can see my original photo, it's similar, but not quite the same. I've got her hair nice and dark about nice, dark rich shadows here, and then this one is a little more light into there. But honestly, both are great photos, and so I like that this is preset that I just threw together is super versatile. Next, I want to show you how to make a Black and White Presets. We're going to go back into my library, we're going to pick this folder, I've got this photo that I want to edit for you. Here is my basic photo, I'm going to throw my rich forest preset on here, it does a little bit of edit for me, you can see that's just adding contrast and stuff. Now, I'm going to go from here, change it black and white add a lot more contrast because I love contrast, especially in a black and white photo. I want to have a lot of just like, really stark highlights and lights. Yeah. I think that looks good. I only did a little bit of edits here and they're actually, let's add some film grain just for fun. We're going to add just a little bit of grain here. Yeah, that looks nice. Now, I want to save this preset. So, I go back up to the presets, hit the plus sign, create preset, and I'm going to call it; "BW Moody", create. Here's my BW Moody preset. Let's see what this looks like on a person. Here. I've got this less smiley photo, it's really cute, I love this shot. But we're going to throw our BW Moody preset on here. So, we have a really dark edit here, we have lots of harsh shadows, super deep blacks. From here I might take up the exposure just a little bit to soften up his skin. But it's a really moody clean crisp edit. I love how this looks, and I think that it's awesome that it works apparently on people and on food. Once you have presets that you absolutely love, how do you share them with your friends? To share them with your friends, you're going to go over to your presets, you're going to right-click on it, and you're going to say Show in Finder, and it's going to find your presets for you. This is where I mentioned before that the files a little bit different. Nowadays, Lightroom uses XMP files. So, basically here is our two presets. If I want to send these to my friends, I'm going to put them in a folder on my desktop. I'm going to shrink Lightroom down, and then I am going to drag these presets onto my desktop. So, I highlighted both of them and I'm dragging them, but before I let go, I want to hit the ALT slash Option key. This puts a little plus sign so that I am copying them to my desktop, not moving them, if that makes sense. If you move them, Lightroom will no longer know how to access them because it won't know where the files are. So you got to make sure you copy them to desktop. Here they are on my desktop. I'm going to create a new folder called presets for my friends on skillshare. I'm putting these in here and I will right-click, compress; this zips up my file for me, so this is a zip file. I am going to upload the zip file to the project section on skillshare. So yes, you can download the presets you just watched me make. Because wouldn't it be annoying to have to sit and make them exactly like I made them now? You can just have these. I'm not selling presets or anything, maybe someday, probably not, but you can have the presets that I made for this class and try them out on your photos and see how they go. So, yeah. In the next section we are going to talk about our export settings.
8. Export Settings: Welcome to export settings. We're going to talk all about export settings. I remember the first time I ever tried to export a photo. I was greeted with this giant dialogue box with all these checkmarks and options, and I was just like, "I don't know, I just want to have my photo. I don't know what to do." I'm going to show you what I do, and why, and different use cases. Obviously, if I'm exporting a photo that's going to be printed into a giant wall tapestry, I have different settings than the ones that I size for Instagram and AirDrop to my phone. Let's do this. Once you have the edits that you want on your photo, and you're ready to export it as a file, you can either right-click directly on the photo or on the photo down here in the timeline. We're going to toggle over to export, and we are met with a bunch of different options. In most cases, you're just going to hit Export dot, dot, dot. This will bring you up a dialogue box. I'm not sure what exactly this looks like the first time you open Lightroom, but it's going to save the last export settings that you had previously. For a traditional Lightroom export, I like to choose export to the Pictures folder, that's where I keep all my photos. I'm going to check Put in Subfolder, and I'm going to put it into the subfolder Instagram. If you don't have this folder already, it's going to create a new one. If you do have this folder, it'll just add it right to it. We are going to check Rename To, because I like to rename my file, so they make sense to me. I go to Custom Name, Sequence, and then I change the name. This one will be ChocolateCake and then start with number 1. The nice thing about this start number is if I export two photos of this ChocolateCake and then I come back later and I want to export some more, I can change it to three because the first two will be ChocolateCake 1 and ChocolateCake 2. Then this next export will be chocolate cake 3 and 4. That way, I don't get this dialogue box that says that they're duplicates or whatever. Next step we come down to File Settings. I like to keep my files as a JPEG for Instagram, and then I move the Quality to 90. You can put it all the way up to a 100 if you want, but it makes the file quite a lot bigger. The difference between 90 and 100 is so minimal that I doubt you'll ever notice. I leave the Color Space at SRGB and I Check Limit File size to 1,800K. This is a size appropriate for Skillshare. I always just limit my file size to 1,800K, because I don't want to ever get to the point where it's like, "Oh, you can't upload this file because it's too large." I just always limit file size to 1,800K. You'll notice that when I checked this box, the quality slider disappeared, so it's just faded out. I always leave my quality at 90 because sometimes I uncheck this box if I'm exporting a full-size file. Those are just some two settings that I always have on. Next up, we have Image Sizing. I check Resize to Fit, and I set it to Long Edge. This means that if the photo is tall like the one I'm exporting, this is the edge that is counting pixels. Then if it's a wide photo, it's the bottom edge. If it's a square, it's both. I set Long Edge to 2500 pixels. I put the resolution at 240. This resolution is compatible with print and it just is always what I've used. I go to Output Sharpening, I sharpen for, I check this sharpen for screen, and I apply just the standard amount of sharpening. For Metadata, you can choose to include the Copyright Only or you can include All Metadata. It's just up to you. I think if you include All Metadata, it is just a slightly larger file size. I typically just include All Metadata for fun. I do not watermark the photos that I post on Instagram. Then in my post-processing menu, you can choose if you want it to just pop up, and Show in Finder, or do nothing, or if you need to do further edits, you can have it automatically open in Adobe Photoshop after it exports a copy. For now, we're just going to do nothing. Then we are going to hit, actually, for demo, we're going to do Show in Finder, that way you can see it happening. We are going to hit "Export", and wait for the magic to happen. Wow, here it is chocolate cake in my Instagram folder. You can see there's a lot of other stuff in here. Here is our photo. It looks so good. Even zoom, zoom zoomed in, and that is my typical export setting for Instagram. Then what I usually do to get photos to my phone is, I will open up AirDrop, and then turn my screen on. Then I can just drop this photo right onto my cute little face. Then it appears on my phone and I can share easily on Instagram. Let's say I want to export this photo and print it huge, so I need the original file size. I'm going to right-click on the photo, "Export", and then change a little bit of my settings. We want it to stay, actually, instead of the Instagram folder, we're going to put it in my Chocolate folder. Then we are going to keep this name. I think this name is fine, but I'm just going to edit it to say full, so I know that this is a full-size photo. Next up, we are going to uncheck this limit file size to 1,800K, and we're going to have at 90 as our quality. We are going to uncheck Resize to Fit, which means it's going to be the same size that it is when I took the picture. We're going to leave our sharpening on, and we are going to leave pretty much everything the same. Then we hit "Export", and it will show it to us. Here it is, in my Chocolate folder. This photo should be huge. It should be gigantic because it's the full-size photo. You can see, I can zoom in for days, and then it's just barely starting to get pixelated. This is a full res file and I can print this out nice and big. You can see that the file size for this is 10.6 megabytes, and the file size for my Instagram one is only 1.8 megabytes. As you remember, we had it set to 1,800K, which is 1.8 megabytes. What if you export things all the time and you don't like switching back and forth in your settings, you can create a preset. If I have everything set like this, is this is my full size settings, what I want to do is change this Pictures folder to Choose folder later. It says right here useful for presets. That means that it will prompt you at the Save where you'll save it. That way, it's not going to save everything to the same folder if you apply this preset. There's parts where it gets a little tricky. I'm not sure exactly what to do for this, but for File Naming, you just have to know that if you're using a user preset, you will have to go in and change your filename, unless you just don't rename your files, in which case that doesn't matter. If I wanted to save this as my preset, I'm going to go over here into the preset box, and hit "Add" at the bottom. I'm going to call this Full Resolution Photos. Then I'm going to hit "Create". Then it pops down under here in User Presets. This is my full resolution photos. I want to make another one real quick. I'm going to make one for my Instagram. I would do Limit File Size to 1,800K, Resize to Fit, change this to be Long Edge 2500, 240 Resolution. I could drop this down because it's full, I could put 72, and have a lot smaller files, but I'm just going to leave it. Sharpen for Screen blah, blah, blah, perfect. Now, I can add this one as my Instagram Preset, and then hit "Okay". Now, I can switch between my Instagram preset here and then my full resolution file here. Then I don't have to sit and tinker with everything if it's just convoluted and confusing. Lightroom has its own presets in here. If you were burning full-size JPEGs to a disk, you would select the whole session, and then go here. Then it can help you in here to figure out, we're exploiting it to a CD or DVD, or we're getting it ready for email. I have never used any of these presets. I always just control it myself in the user presets menu. If I wanted to edit this photo in Photoshop, let's see, we want Instagram Preset, we want to scroll down, After Export, Open in Adobe Photoshop export. It's telling me, "Okay. Where do you want to save it?" I'm going to save it, "Pictures", "Instagram", "Open". Great. It's exploiting the file there, and then it's going to open it up in Photoshop for me. Then from Photoshop, I can do the rest of my fine-tuned edits. Maybe I had a spot in the background that I really just couldn't get rid of in Lightroom, I could fix it here in Photoshop, or add another layer of sharpening, whatever I want, and then save the file that way. It's just nice because it saves you a step. You don't have to go into Photoshop, and open a file there. That's pretty much it for my export settings. Then the next section is just going to be the catchall with all the rest of the miscellaneous Lightroom tools and tips that might be helpful to you.
9. Miscellaneous Tips: All right. This is our miscellaneous tips and tools section. We're going to talk about what happens when you right-click and in the options, how to change the background, different things throughout Lightroom. If you accidentally hit a key and now something disappeared how do you get it back? That stuff. So let's look at Lightroom. By default, this background color is middle gray. If you right-click on it, you can change the color to white or black or somewhere in between. This is super helpful if you are editing a white background photo for Instagram and you want to see if your white is truly, actually a good white or if it's a little bluish or a little gray. You can reference it against this background photo here. I usually keep it at about a medium gray. Sometimes I go to white. It just depends on the session that I am working on. If you go to the Develop tab, you can copy the edits on a photo and then apply them to the next photo or you can highlight an edited image and then the next several images or however many that you want to apply the same edits to. You can press this little sync button and then hit Synchronize and it will paste the edits all across all of these. This helps if you have all the same settings in the whole session and you want to just batch edit the whole session. These have all had the same settings applied to them without me having to go in and hit paste every single time. There is a series of keyboard shortcuts that you can push to change your view or bring different information up, so if these things happen usually will tell you how to toggle it away. For instance, if I hit T, it brings down the toolbar. My toolbar is gone now I can't see that and if I press T again, it's back. So I could be able to change between these two. This toolbar isn't super helpful. It's just got a few things on it anyway. If I just needed more room, press T to get rid of that. Z is another one. Z is Zoom in. Y will take you to the before and after screen and if you hit Y again it takes you back to the loupe mode. Loupe mode is just basically a way of looking at one photo at a time. If you wanted to switch from loupe mode, if you're in the library tab, if you want to switch from loupe mode to grid you just hit G and then you see the grid. Then to switch back, you hit E. E is loupe, G is grid. Or you can just press these little icons down here. But in case things change or it happened you accidentally click a key, maybe that's what you did. If you hit F, it's going to full-screen. You can hit the escape button to get out of that or you can hit the F button again and it will take you back. If you hit L, it'll take you to lights out mode. I'm guessing this is what you would use if you were inviting people over to your studio to show them the pictures that you prepare for them. Lights out mode will dim Lightroom in the background and then if you toggle it again, it turns it completely off so all you see is the photo. Then if you press L once more, it takes you back to regular Lightroom view. I've never used that feature before, but there it is in case that ever happens to you. A lot of these toggle keyboard shortcuts are hidden in the View in the Window drawers up top. If you ever want to know if there's a faster way to do something, you can just pop through here and see what we have going on. In the Library tab, if you hit View and then go to View Options. It'll pull up a dialog box where you can change what you see. Right now in the grid view, I'm seeing these compact cells. I can change it to expanded its cells and it means it'll show me the star rating, it'll show me the file name and how big it is, what number it is. Then I can also change what it says by going into loupe view and I can show the info overlay up here in the corner. Then this will give me an idea of my settings right here and I can choose between different things. Like this one tells me my time and the size. I can control what is shown here by playing with these little toggle menus here. You can just really fine tune it to show exactly what you want up in this corner. Then if this ever shows up and you don't like it and you want it to go away, you can press I and that is the info display. I will show you info display one and then info display two if you tap again, and then it will disappear if you tap it a third time. That might be helpful if you really want a quick and easy way to see what your settings are, what time you took the picture, or you can just make it go away by pressing I. In this course, I never really touched on Map, Book, Slideshow, Print and Web and the reason is I never use these. I only use the library and develop tabs, but we'll just adventure over here just to see.The map setting I'm guessing is where it's showing you where all your pictures are based on your camera tagging geo-location. This could be cool if you do a lot of traveling and you're really interested in seeing a map view of where you've been, but again, I've never used that feature. The Book tab I'm assuming is going to have overlays on how to create a book. Yep. This is like prepping maybe a cookbook where all the pages are the same. But yeah, it looks like it'll help you build a book. The Slideshow tab I've never used. The Print tab I've only used to create a contact sheet so you can adjust how many grids you have and then you can select a bunch of photos and it will fill in. Then you can decide let's give those a little more space. We're going to space those up a little bit and maybe we'll add numbers and watermarks and everything. This is just if you are preparing something to present to someone, you print it out and they can choose which ones they like and circle what's working or what's not working. Then the web tab over here, it looks like it gets you ready to share your images online and you customize it and e-mail it to yourself. I don't really know what's happening over here. For the most part, as far as with what I do, Library and Develop are king. There's one last little trick I want to show you. Typically when I'm using this Clone tool, this heal brush, I have it selected to heal. If I wanted to get rid of this dot right here, it's just going to automatically sample from somewhere and make up what it thinks goes there. If you want to copy exactly what's there, you can toggle over to Clone and it will literally just copy exactly what's in the source spot and put it there. I've never really switched it to this because I feel like it looks really harsh and it doesn't blend well. Very rarely do I ever have to use the clone setting. I always just have it set to heal. Then that typically gives me a more natural rendering. If you adjust the feather size when you're using clone, it is a lot less obvious because you don't have this perfectly sharp circle. But again, I'm always using heal anyway. That's just one last little trick for the spot tool. In our navigator, I have it set to fit. That means it's fitting the page. There's one other of all these little icons that will switch tool if I use Zoom in. If I click, it Zooms to one-to-one. That means this is full size. I can also toggle it over to three-to-one and then it will give me a super Zoomed in view. Then if I zoom out, it goes back to fit and then if I Zoom back in, it should jump me back to 3.1. If it's Zooming too much and you just can't handle that intense massive Zoom when it Zoomed in to three-to-one, just toggle over to one-to-one and then that should give you a more comfortable Zoom. You can also use the fill and then it will fill your Lightroom page. Sometimes that's a little better. But again, it's whatever one is highlighted. If you change it from the highlight, then it will toggle between that and whatever else you had it on. I usually have it on fit and one-to-one. Then it looks like in here you can also fine tune this like 11 to one. That's insane. If you really just want to pick at your pixels, 11 to one is perfect. When you are sharpening an image down here and you see this little detail window, I usually like to click on the picture. It'll Zoom out. Then I pick a place in the image where there is going to be contrast and it's going to be in focus so that I can really make sure that the detail is working. If it were to automatically just select some of the blurry background, it would be hard for me to tell if the sharpening was making a difference. Sometimes the focus of my picture is not in the very center where this detail thing automatically defaults to. I have to click out to Zoom out and then I click again to.Zoom back in so that I can really just look closely and make sure that it's doing what I wanted to do. If you have a photo that you want to rotate, you can right-click on the photo and then rotate left or rotate right. It says CCW which is counterclockwise and then CW which is clockwise. In case you didn't know your lefts and rights which I can admit that I have problems with that sometimes. But anyway, I can rotate left and then it just fixes it there. Then if you have a bunch that are all sideways, you can highlight them all together and then click the rotate and it will rotate them together. That helps if everything is sideways and you don't want to rotate them individually. You can always just highlight the bunch and then rotate them together. Lastly, when you're rating images, this one has a one-star. You use the one through five to add the stars. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Then six adds a color label. Six is read, seven is yellow, eight is green, nine is blue and then to get purple, I think you just have to right-click Set Color Label, purple. I don't think purple has a number on the keyboard, which is sad because it's my favorite one, but it's fine. At long last I think that wraps up everything that I wanted to cover. Thanks for sticking around.
10. Final Thoughts and Project: That's everything. Thank you so much for taking my class. I hope that you're awake. I hope it didn't bore you. I tried to make this interesting. I know that computer programs can be kind of dry. Hopefully, you found something useful. You found something new that you didn't know about Lightroom. For your class project, I would love to see some photos that you've edited in Lightroom. So, if you want to share a before and after, I would love to see where you take your images and why. You can also do a couple of different edits. Maybe you're, "Oh, I can't decide if I like light and airy or dark and moody." What do you think is better and also some critique your way. If you have any questions or need help, make sure you post your questions in the community discussion section here in this class. That way, if anyone else has the same questions as you, we can answer them all in the same place. If you decide to share your images on Instagram, just tag me. My handle is @tabithapark. I love to come by and see what you are creating. If you have any suggestions for any future classes, you'd love to see, I always want to hear that. I'll see you next time.
Tabitha Park, Product & Food Photographer
