Professional Photography on a Budget: Editing Techniques in Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom.

1. Introduction: Muhammad said, "Taking pictures is savoring light intensity." But how can you do that? How can you take mind-blowing images with not so good gear? Hi, my name is Ebuka Mordi. Ebuka Mordi. I knew he was going to say that. Ebuka Mordi. My name is Ebuka Mordi and I'm a Nigerian fashion and portrait photographer. I have been featured on both Italia and a couple of other magazines. I've also been featured on Mango Street YouTube page, I've worked with Adobe Lightroom as a resident. I found the startup era of my career, particularly difficult because I had to pull through without good gear. So having so many limiting factors pushed me towards being more creative with what I could put out there. With little money coming in at that time, I learned to set aside my finances towards getting better gear or improving myself in my career as a photographer. I'll walk you through the various techniques that helped me in my career and teach you how to use what you have to get what you want. I'll show you how to utilize Photoshop and Lightroom through your social media and build a repetition in your craft. These abilities will prepare you in your photographic career by providing with the knowledge you need to grow. Yes. How to use your available resources to create what you want to create and how to overcome the challenges you face with limiting gear, this will help you save up to get better gear eventually. This course is useful for startup photographers. Prospective photographers Yeah. I'm really looking forward to teaching this course. We are. Because these methods and techniques really helped me in my photography career. It helped me grow a brand, it helped me grow a reputation. Yeah I'm really excited to teach this course and I can't wait to see you in class. So he didn't mention that this class will teach you how to edit like a pro photographer, color grade like a pro photographer and also manipulate your photos like a pro photographer. I hope to see you in class, see you. 2. Class orientation: Waiting, you should be out shooting. Go out and get shooting. I'm kidding, well, I'm not kidding. Our class project for today is to get shooting or get familiar with the photos you want to be taking. I chose this project because it's important to know what drives your passion in photography and how you choose to express it. This class will compliment what is already existing in you, which is your passion. In shooting, we will take note of composition, natural lighting, and the basics of whatever camera you're using. The hardest part of photography for me, is going out to shoot. Once you can constantly gain a momentum to grab your gear, get your keys, make a few calls, get your location, and drive out and shoot, I feel like you've overcome the major obstacle in learning how to become a professional photographer. For this project, you're going to either need a digital camera or a phone camera and a diffuser or a reflector, depending on the time you're going to be shooting at. While shooting, you should take note of the composition, your model expressions, your lighting, and your camera settings. If for some reason you can't go out and shoot, I'm going to link a few photos to this class that you can use to follow up as we edit our images. Throughout the course, we're going to be utilizing Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. These apps are useful in understanding and following up throughout this class. This class is not a tense class as I plan to take you along with me in the most natural way way possible, so relax and follow up with me as I go do this class. I'll share my experiences and things I've been through in my career. Also, feel free to share your progress, so that you can keep track of how far you've come towards realizing your dream as a professional photographer. Are you ready? Let's go learn some cool stuff. 3. Photo correction: Hello. In this lesson, you will learn the basics of photo correction and how you can make your photo stand out. Great job going out to shoot. I'm proud to let you know you've done 50 percent of the work involved in becoming a professional, outstanding photographer. If you couldn't go out to shoot, don't worry, we've got you covered. You have sample images you can pick from to follow up as we edit these images. I'll show you how to fix your photos, remove distractions, add that background blur that you've always wanted but you couldn't afford because you couldn't just get that 85 mm lens or zoom lens to achieve it. We'll do that in Photoshop. The number 1 tool that we're going to look at is the patch tool. This tool basically replaces wherever you select with a points in the photo that you drag it towards. You can see it replaced that particular selection. The patch tool can be easily used to just clean up dirt or things that you don't, like maybe scopes are marks on the floor or even a shadow that you don't want seen, you can just use the patch tool to do that. That's the number 1 tool that you need to know. The number 2 tool that you also need to know is called the quick selection tool or the object selection tool as the update has made it. The object selection tool is used to select any objects in your photo that you wish to modify or pull out. For me, it's going to be the subjects here. Why this tool is very special to me is because you can easily select your subject and draw him out of the background in order to edit to the background and clean up stuff in the background, you understand. How I use the patch tool and the selection tool is quite easy. I just drag the selection tool over my model or anything I want to get out of the background. Then I click on Control J to select the selection out of the background. There you go. We have the model separates from the background. The next step I do is to click on the background click "Control J" to duplicate that background layer, and then I select the model again. This time around I go to Select and I go to Modify, and I go to Expand, and I click "Okay". This is just to expand my selection, to cover all the places plus points outside my selection. Then I right-click on the Selection, I go to Fill and I go to Content Aware. In content aware, we just select content aware and click "Okay", and all that does is get our selection out of the way. You can see now that we don't have our model again. The next tool we use is the patch tool to just patch up a few things in the background without interrupting our model's place in the background as well. We use the patch tool to just drag all this stuff and clean up the background without our model being there. As you can have it, we're now going to bring back our model into the picture. You have layers looking like this and like this and all we used was the selection tool and the patch tool. Those tools are really important to me because they can help you fix a lot in your background. The next tool is going to be inside our filter, it's going to be our blur tool. Now that we have our background, which is our plain background, this one, we're going to use our plain background to manipulate the image to add depth into the image. While making sure that background is actually selected, we're going to go to Filter, we're going to go to Blur Gallery, we're going to go to Tilt Shift. Now the tilt shift gives the depth. You just place the middle parts where you want your focus to be and then these little ones here help you to adjust how soft the focus is gone. Then we're just going to increase this a little bit. There you go. We have our tilt shift which just helped us create a blur. It makes that feel like we had an 85 millimeter lens to shoot this particular picture. That's the second tool, tilt shift blur. It help give you a photos that particular depth you need to get. Remember guys, the first step into changing your background or adding some background blow or depth is to select your model which is through the object selection tool. When you've selected your model, sometimes it might not be accurate, so you just need to change it over to quick selection and just select the portion you want manually. On select, you press your Alt key and just brush gently over that point, and there you go. The next step is to press Control J to duplicate that layer. Then click on your background layer and also press Control J to duplicate the background layer. The next step now is to re-select your model. I would advise going back to Layer 1 and just making your brush big and just swiping because that's already the selected model layer. Then you click on background copy layer and then we go to Select, Modify, and expand by 10 pixels. Then you right-click on the photo and you go to Fill and go to Content Aware and you have your model automatically scrapped out of the background. Here we go. This is what is left of the background. Now, what you're left to do is just to smoothen up the background by getting rid of some things and just using your patch tool to correct a few things that are already missing in the background. We're just going to use our patch tool to get rid of all these minor destructions and then we have our background. The next step now is to put your model in so that you can erase the blur. While background is selected, you go to Filter, you go to Blur, depending on what's situation or angle you shot your model at. If you shot your model in a point where you need to differentiate focus and the background, then you use the tilt shift. If there is no particular flow level to that, you can easily use the Gaussian blur. In using the Gaussian blur, you can see the background keeps blurring. You can add it, you can reduce it. We're just going to leave it somewhere around here. This is okay for us. There you go. You can easily add that depth to your photos regardless of what lens you used. This particular lesson is going to build your confidence whenever you should because you know that nothing restricts you. You can always correct what you've shot. You can change your background, you can blur your background, you can get rid of destruction so you're not limited whenever you're shooting. Now, with all of these, try and make sure when you're shooting, your set is somehow still near perfect because it reduces the amount of work you have to do in Photoshop. It's just reasonable to make your set as smooth as you can be. Remove out that trash, remove out that protruder in your shot, remove any extra dirt on the street. Try and get your ankles right because you can't really correct everything in Photoshop. Even if you can, it's going to be stressful, so as much as you can do, if you're able to do it, just get rid of all those distractions from your set before shooting, it makes you work a lot easier, trust me. Before moving on to the next lesson, make sure you use these techniques on your photos and see how it changes the look, see how it affects what you originally shot. It's fun, you should try it out. You will learn above photo manipulation in the upcoming class as well as getting your creative juices flowing. I was meant to have a juice box here to give an inward point. You're going to learn how to get the creative juices flowing. See you in the next class. Yes, I removed it. I know it bothered you throughout the whole class and you're like, get rid of it, scratch your face, I got rid of it. But I'm not deleting those videos, they are going to stay because we're human and you're going to watch them and you're going to like my whiskers. Now, I'm going to see you in next class. Bye. 4. Photo manipulation: [MUSIC] Hey guys. What's up? Today, I'll be teaching photo manipulation. I consider this the chemical X to the stand out recipe for me. I'II be demonstrating the use of some Photoshop tools and techniques that you can use on your images when manipulating them for them to stand out. Hi. The first tool we will be learning is cloning your shots. Or the first methods we will be learning is cloning your shots. We're going to use the object selection tool to get that done. The first thing you do is to get your selection made. That's by selecting your model or subjects and clicking "Ctrl+j" to duplicate the model or subject. Then the next thing we're going to do is we're going to duplicate our background layout and select our subject again. This time I'm going to select, go to modify, and expand. When that is done, you click on the "Selection", you go to fill and go to content aware, and you fill it up so that you have a plain background. The next thing you do is to go to the image you want to drag onto that photo. You select your subject out of that image and pull this down and hold onto "Control", and drag it. There you go. You have this image in that image. The next step we're going to take is to make it a little bit more realistic now, which is why maybe reducing the size of this and putting it on the layer tool so that it comes up as if it's behind the model. The next step is to reverse this or rather flip it. There we go. Perfect. We have something that looks like this. In cloning your shots, the next step also is to clean up a little bit. You have your layer tool selected. You make it a layer mask or you add a layer mask. Then you zoom in to where you have little interaction with the other background. You pick your paintbrush, you make sure it's all white. You increase your opacity. You increase your blur to 100. The next thing you do is to just carefully paint across these edges just to make it smooth to get rid of that white highlighted part of the model that gives it away. Yes. Just like that. We're good. That's an easy way to clone your shots. The next one we're going to do is we're going to check the zoom blur effect, and to do that we're going to still use the same image. I'm just going to move this a little bit. Then duplicate by pressing "Ctrl+ j" and "Ctrl+t" to resize. This is perfect. Then we're just going to flip it horizontally. Perfect. The zoom blur effect is just to give your followers or rather your viewers the feeling that focuses on your subject while zooming so that they feel like they're moving and focuses on your subject. It's a good way to get people to focus on your subject rather fast. What we're going to do is we're going to merge all these layers together into layer 2. We're going to press "Ctrl+j" to duplicate it. We're going to go to filter, we're going to go to blur, we're going to go to radial blur. In radial blur, we're going to click "Zoom" and we're going to click "Best". Then you position your blur center on where your focus is going to be, which is a little bit down here for me. Then you click "Okay". As you can see, the next step is to click on layer 2 copy and add a layer mask. Then go to your brush tool. Zoom in to your subject or your focus, and carefully brush your focus out of it. Amazing. Now we have a little problem, which is her legs. So we're just going to reduce our brush size and brush over with a reduced opacity. Just going to brush over her leg to make sure it doesn't come off as a distraction. Perfect. That's the zoom blur, makes you feel like you're moving in. You have your subject. The next effect we're going to learn is light flares. In light flares, I want you to see how beautiful your images can be with this effect. We're just going to add a little crop here. The next step is "Ctrl+j" to duplicate our layer, you always do this so that you can always have a background to go to. We're going to go to gradient and just drag it making sure your gradient is on circular. We're just going to crop it a little bit. We're going to click "Elliptical Marquee Tool" and hold "Shift" to make it a perfect circle. Then we're going to click on "Layer Mask". We're going to change this to screen. We're just going to drag it to wherever we see fit on the photo. Then you press "Ctrl+j" to duplicate it and drag the points to wherever you see fit on the photo and then "Ctrl+j" to duplicate that and drag this. You can increase the sizes of each of them. The next step is to shape them however you want to. You hold "Ctrl+down" and then you can click on this to just give it that shape you want it to have. This looks good as it's there. Then the next one is this guy over here. We're just going to shape him up a little bit this way. Perfect. This can remain a circle. The next step now is going to be you click on your layer 1, which is the first one here. Then you go to filter, you go to blur, you go to Gaussian blur. Then you can fit it off a little bit. As you can see. Perfect. The next step is the same thing. You go to filter, you go to blur, you go to Gaussian blur, and then you fit it as much as you want. This is perfect for that one. The next one, the same thing, blur, Gaussian blur, and then you fit it up however you want it to be. I think this is perfect. After this, we're going to change their colors. You click on "Layer 1", you click on "Ctrl+u" to bring out your hue and saturation tab for that particular layer. Then you can change its saturation, you can change its color like its hue. Just a little bit here, That's perfect. Then we go to layer 1 copy. We do the same thing. We just maybe change this to a little bit of blue. I think that's good. Let me desaturate it just a little bit. Then we do the same thing with layer 1 copy too, ctrl+ u. For this, we're just going to desaturate it because I think I like it as orange. There you go. You've added light flares. This give these [inaudible] of foreground that your viewers can look at and to see your model in focus. [MUSIC] Here's a tip for today. Except you want to go wild, keep your manipulation as simple as possible to avoid distractions or your image or your final products being too cluttered for anyone to focus on what you want them to focus on. Get crazy and go wild with the various techniques you've learned here. In the next class, I'm going to be teaching you the eye-catcher color grading. I'll see you there. 5. Color grading: Hello everyone. In this lesson, we're going to go through basic collaborating steps that you can use to create a unique view on your photos, and how to portray moods through color grading. Three different types of photos will be color graded in three different types of unique ways, to show you how color grading can change an entire look of a photo. You can have one photo and you can color grade it three different times and the mood will change in those three different times. That's how powerful color grading is folks. The first thing you do when you are about to color grade, is to import your photos into light room. I'm using this photo that we had the light plays in because I really loved it. Then you click on this tab and you start working. The first thing I do is I go through everything when I'm color grading, everything from the first to the last and see if I need it. I normally play around, it actually helps you understand color grading more when you play around. Let's see, exposure on this image. I think I would like my exposure like this, then the contrast in this image. Now it depends on the look. We're going to edit a particular look on these images, which is the tall. I'm just going to reduce my contrast like this. My highlights, I'm going to increase them. Shadows, reduce them. My wides, I think my wides are okay. The blacks reduce them a little bit. Then we have the point called. I'm just going to do this. If you wants to crush your blacks, you can do this, where if your photo has this particular look. If you want to crush your whites, you can do this, so I think we're just going to leave everything as it is. The next is the color. Most of the time I use a higher or a warmer temperature. But for this, I think we can stick to, warm temperature doesn't look that bad. Then we can increase our vibrance and then reduce our saturation a little bit. The next is the color mixer. In the color mixer, you can choose to change your hues. See how that was or you can increase or reduce the saturation, so I think I'm just going to increase the saturation because her skin is orange and then I'm just going to reduce luminance. Perfect. The next is yellows. I normally take out yellows from my images. But as you can see, one of the flares is yellow, so we have to be careful about that. We're just going to increase the luminance of yellow, so even if I reduce the saturation a little bit, it's not like hers if see. The next is green. We have a lot of greens in the background. We're just going to reduce the saturation or increase it, we'll reduce it and decrease the luminance. You can just be testing out a few things. I think I would leave the hue as this unlike what is given. Then blues, let me see. Is there anything you want to do with the blues? We just reduce the saturation a little bit increased luminance then we're good. I think that's about it really. The next is our color grading. You can decide to use this. You can decide to not use this, but I use it sometimes whenever I want to give it a cinematic look, you can see what it does to the photo. I'm just going to leave it at green and then my shadows, I'm going to play around and see what works best for my shadows. I'm thinking, this works in my highlights needs to be something else. This is not bad for my highlights. Just blend a little bit and then we try and balance it by this. The next effect is texture. Do we want to reduce the texture or do we want to increase the texture of the image? It depends on whatever feel you're trying to go for. As you can see, my model, her face is a little bit rough, so I'm just going to reduce the texture a little bit to give that dreamy vibe. I can go with the dreamy vibe and then clarity. But at the same time, I don't want to lose so much detail like the head detail on everything. I'm just going to leave that for my brush tool. Then we're just going to add a little bit of vignette, we're going to feather it in. Then we're going to add a little bit of green. We're going to reduce the size and increase the roughness of the green. Let's see, it seems that there's more green. This is perfect. The next step is sharpening. We're going to sharpen our image a little bit and you can just enable this, it helps you correct whatever your camera does. That's chromatic aberration and lens corrections. The geometric helps you position your images in case it wasn't positioned or if you want to give you a wide-angle view or whatever, you have that. We're good for now. The next step is your crop. In crop, I normally decided to maybe mirror horizontally just to change the view and I like how it's changed everything when I just did that. Rather than edit the photo like this, I'm going to edit the photo like this and leave it like this, I love it. The next is healing. You can choose to clean up a photo just by tapping on whatever you want to clean up from the photo. I don't do much with healing because I like the skin detail most of the time. The next is masking. In masking, we're going to click on "Brush", and we're going to carefully brush over the points we need to remove some texture from, which is this point. Then we go to texture and then we just reduced the texture, and maybe the clarity of that point. Perfect. The next is, we're going to add another brush layer and then we're just going to brush over her eyes. Then we're going to, first of all, go saturate and desaturate a little bit so that the whites pops out. Then we're going to add sharpness to make it very sharp. Our next step is also to go again to brush, and then this time we're just going to carefully brush over the highlighted parts of her face. The part that you think you would give depth and reality to her presence. I like to think of it that way. Then we're just going to do this, it's a little bit of this a lot on her neck. That is really perfect. Now we're just going to increase her highlights on those parts. As you can see, it gives it that traumatic vibe, really. Next, we're going to just go here, we're going to pick linear gradients, and we're going to drag it down a little bit. We're going to subtract and select subjects so that it doesn't affect our subject. Then we're just going to increase our exposure or reduce our exposure, really however you want it to be. But I think in this point I will increase exposure and decrease contrast and maybe decrease blacks so that it doesn't affect anything. Then we're good to go. The second field would be, so just let's see how we can do this. We're going to make it a little bit punchier. We're just going to increase our saturation, reduce our highlights a little bit, increase our shadows and reduce the whites, and then we're just going to make this a little bit here, I think this is okay. Then we reduce our saturation here or vibrance so that it doesn't affect the model. Then for our orange, we're just going to take it down a little bit. The next step is to, we're making everything punchy which includes our blues and then our yellows as well. Then our greens not so much, but let's keep the greens in there also. The next thing we're going to look at is just getting our midterms rights to give that punchy vibe. Be around yellow, then our shadows will be around. Let's see what works best, say blue. This is nice, it gives a vintage vibe really. Just going to blend that a little bit and balanced it up a little bit. This is how I have fun with color grading really. When you check different things and you know what a particular tool does, you can always play around and you have a different entire look from something else. Oh my God, look at this, he made the sun pop. It's giving her this silhouette vibe and I love how it looks. All you need to do in this photo is just to perfect it with the brush. You just brush over parts of her face that should be highlighted, I guess. That's so beautiful. Let's see what it does. Just increase our highlight a little bit and there, perfect. I love this image. The next thing is, if you want to make a black and white photo, I think your black and white photos need to be centered on your highlights, so we're just going to reduce the vibrance a little bit. As you can see, we already have this sepia tone, and that's because of our color grading. If we remove color grading, it gives this other vibe, then we leave color grading and it gives this vibe, lovely. I love what this does, really. All we did was just reduce our vibrance and then we're messing with the other stuff here [NOISE]. Let's start about color grading, really. Just experiment to look through, you know what every tab is about, and you could scroll you've made to become the star. That's color grading when you know what you want and you get it. [MUSIC] Here is the tip, make your color grading subtle and easy to look at. That it shouldn't be too shouty, too loud or too dull for the eyes, depending on what style works for you and how well you can keep to that style and perfect what you want to show through that style of color grading. Now you're ready to go into marketing and social media branding. This is where most of the work comes in when it comes to building your repetition as a photographer, I'll see you there. 6. Marketing & Social Media: Hello everyone. In this class, we'll be talking about social media and how to grow your reputation and your social media brand. Your three social medias are used and that is Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. You can use these particular applications to grow your brand, and to grow yourself as a professional photographer to your community and to other people. First one we're going to look at is Instagram. Instagram is a photo-based app that is turning into a video-based app. Well, Instagram has a very simple strategy which I use, I call it the hook strategy, where I try to make my page as attractive as possible so that once anyone steps into my page, they are hooked. What I do now is I interact positively with the community. I talk to people, I talk to fellow photographers and people who aren't photographers. I just try to interact positively with them and from doing that, they immediately go to my page and once they go to my page, the color grading that I use is like the hook because there's a similar pattern and inconsistency in the color grading pattern, they are immediately hooked onto my page. Instagram gives you the opportunity to use hashtags, to use stories and reels to sell yourself video. Using the reel feature, you can easily post like BTS videos, and maybe your edit processes and all of that just through the video application of reel. Then you can post your photos like normal with your color grading style, which we learned in the previous classes and you're good to go for Instagram just using the hashtags and consistency, and positive community build and really or gaining community building. Doing that consistently grows your Instagram. Next, we're going to move to TikTok. TikTok is a video application just like reels on Instagram, just that this whole application is video-based. On TikTok, you can sell yourself by just showing your before and after photos, your BTS images, your processes, you can try and join trends in a creative manner, showcasing your photography using hashtags for your page, for you page. Using photography hashtags using things that relates to the community you're trying to build as a photographer. Remember to link them to your website or your Instagram, which will have the hook technique waiting for them. The next platform we're going to move to is Twitter. Twitter is more of a community-based application already, where you have to actively build your community, you have to tweet, you have to respond, you have to join spaces, you have to interact with the community one-on-one, or even on a larger scale, just to build that name. Just to get yourself out there. When people get to know who you are through these interactions, you're good to go really on Twitter, you just remember put the link to your other portfolios, your website, your Instagram and you're good to go. The main thing in all these applications is consistency. Once you're consistently posting good content on these platforms, you're consistently posting videos, you're consistent with your color grading or the quality of the photos you put out. Once you're consistent with these things, basically you have the world in your palms because your community will grow fast. They see consistency, they see usual content, they see improvement also in whatever you're doing. Once you're doing these things and you're improving at your craft, you're going to flourish in the social media game. Consistency not only helps you grow your brand or your community, it also helps you as a person because you're consistently doing something over and over again. You're going to look for ways to improve yourself. You are going to look for ways to do it faster or better and you see yourself growing now as a person and a photographer also. Now in community-building, when it comes to your immediate surrounding, that is off social media. You can take your camera out for family events, friends hanging out. Just a couple of other things, you can just mention you're a photographer to friends. If your friends are hanging out and you're hanging out with them, you can just take pictures randomly, send them over maybe a family, wedding or something. You can just show them you are a photographer and before you know it, you see them referring you to their friend and colleagues. They're like, I have a cousin that is a photographer. My friend can handle this easily. Then you have your community building already just off social media. Doing this, you get clients that now book you through the referral they got to you. When you get these clients, you definitely deliver well, you do a good job for them. You check on them from time to time or you relate to them through whatever avenue they gave you to take their photos. That's basically it for social media and brand and reputation building. I can't wait to hear your names pop-up when you're talking about influencers in photography. Because I believe you would do well with all these techniques that I just mentioned for these platforms. There are other numerous platforms that you can also explore and get to know that about social media building, and I can't wait to see what's that get's you. Have a good day. 7. Recap: Hello. Today we are going to briefly go through the class and recollect our lessons. We learned about photo correction. In photo correction, there are three major tools we pointed out, the crop tool, the patch tool, and the background blur. These tools will make your images look more presentable. You can clear out dirt, you can clear out distractions from your images, and you can add a background blur to your images to give that effect that a prime lens would. We also learned on photo manipulation. The three tools or three techniques in photo manipulation, we pointed out, cloning, light flares, and motion blur. We covered color grading on Adobe Lightroom and we went through every tool. We pointed out the importance of this tool, what it plays on a photo, and how it affects a photo, how you can use it to edit your images. We then covered marketing and social media, where we talked about Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. We covered the techniques you can use on all these social platforms, to grow your account in an organic manner. We also highlighted that the most important factor in your social media growth is consistency. Be sure to post your projects and let me know what parts of the class you enjoyed the most. I'll be sure to give you feedback on those projects and I can't wait to see what you're able to create with these techniques. Cheers. 8. Conclusion: Congratulations. Let's celebrate you reaching this far [MUSIC] in your journey to become an amazing creative human being person. I can't wait to see you all conquer. It's informed this class and I hope to take many other helpful classes soon enough. I hope this class motivates you to get shooting and gets more intentional about building your career as a professional photographer. No one else does a better job than you as taking control of your life and becoming a success. Be sure to upload your projects so that I can check them out. I love you. I'll see you around.