Transcripts
1. Editing Silhouette Images in Lightroom and ACR - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class - Silhouette Image Processing in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. In addition to teaching Illustrator and Photoshop, the Graphic Design for Lunch series of classes also includes some photo editing and photo management classes. These are taught for both Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw as both applications share the same base code. This means that within one class, you'll simply focus on whichever application you prefer to use. Today, we're looking at editing silhouette images to create a more compelling image. In addition to applying basic edits, you're going to see how to enhance an image that has a silhouette feature in it, using the tools in both Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. I'm going to do one edit in Lightroom, one edit in Adobe Camera Raw and I'm going to give you both images so that you can download and practice with them. As you're progressing through this class, you'll see a prompt which lets you recommend it to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class do two things for me, give it a thumbs up and write even very briefly why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other Skillshare students to find my classes so they too can learn more about Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. If you'd like to leave a comment in the class comment area, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started. We're going to start in Lightroom with our first silhouette image.
2. Silhouette Images - Part 1: This is the first of the two images that we're going to process. I'm going to give you these images. Now, they are DNG images, even though when I shot them, they were JPEGs. What I've done is I've exported them as DNGs, which will allow you to open them automatically in a Adobe camera raw. Less of an issue in Lightroom because you can process them the same way a little bit more tricky in Adobe camera raw to open a JPEG in adobe camera raw. So me saving it and giving it to you as a DNG is going to help you just a little bit there. I'm looking at this image and it's underexposed. I'm going to start by winding up the exposure a little bit now. I don't want it to be fully exposed because it is a silhouette image, but I do want a bit more lightness in the sky, so I'm just going to adjust that a little bit. Having done that, I'm going to bring down the highlights because the sky is the highlight area and that's going to give me a bit more excitement in the sky. Again, I can just balance this out. Sometimes when you make one adjustment, you will have to go back and adjust something else just to compensate for it. Shadows, I'm going to bring down because these buildings are in the shadow area and I really want them to look like a silhouette, so I'm going to bring down the shadows. I'm going to look at my white and black points. I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key on the Mac and just drag on the white slider to see where my white pixels are. I'm just going to back the slide or off-sites just under where that light point appears. Now, with the Black Swan, not quite so concerned, we actually do want some blacks in this image, in particular because it's a silhouette. I'm going to bring the blacks down and really comprehensively bring some blacks into this image. I'm going to look at clarity and while I would really like to bring some clarity into this image, I just want to show you what the problem is that I see. When I increase clarity, I've just over done it here, see how we are getting some black haloing around this building here. It's less apparent elsewhere in the image, but it's really apparent here. I'm not really happy with that, so I'm going to wind up clarity as much as I can without getting that effect. As soon as I start seeing it happen, I'm going to back off. Vibrance is color in under saturated color area. I'm going to bring in a little bit vibrance because this image is all about the sunset. If I was working in Adobe camera raw, I would not be doing this step right now, but since I'm working in a lightroom, I can, I'm going to crop it and straighten it. I'm just going to straighten it up using the guide here and just click done. The reason why I won't do that in Adobe camera raw is that the image starts looking crooked on the screen and I find it a little off putting. Next we're going to look at the sky and the water. Let's deal with the water first and that's a graduated filter. I'm going to hold the Shift key as I just drag upwards to put the graduated filter in place here. It's going to sit right along the horizon because the horizon is really helping us in this image because we won't have to make really any adjustments to the graduated filter once we get it in place. Let's just bring down the exposure here to darken the lagoon a little bit. We're going to look at contrast. Adding a bit of contrast is actually going to help darken the lagoon. If we went the other way, we're just going to lighten it, so we want it to be a little bit darker here. Bring down the highlights and bring down the shadows a little bit. I also wanted to smooth this out so it's less attractive to your eye because your eyes are attracted to things that are in sharp focus. If we make the water in not sharp focus, then your eyes are not going to be attracted to it. Let's just do all of that. Before we leave, let's just add a little bit of color into it, just a little bit of temperature here. This is one indicator that you are working with a JPEG image that the temperature slider is set at zero. If you were working with a true DNG image, that would not be the case. Let's just click done here. Now, let's look at the sky and other graduated filter. This time dragging from the top down, holding the shift key drag from the top-down. You can see when I click on show selected mask overlay, that this is clearly the area that has been affected by this adjustment. In Lightroom, I can double-click on the word exposure just to zero out this slider. I'm actually going to add a little bit of additional exposure to this image, but a lot more saturation and clarity. But just again, watching this building here to make sure that it doesn't get those black surrounds. Let's look at contrast. See how that's going to help improve this. I think I'm just going to back off this clarity a little bit, I'm really concerned that I'm going to get some haloing there that I don't want. Let's just back off the exposure a little bit. Now, having made that adjustment to the sky, I'm looking at the top part of the sky now and seeing, I would like to adjust that independently. I'm going to bring in another graduated filter and this time I'm going to make a really big transition. So I'm opting for really wide spacing in these lines. I'm just going to affect this top area of the image. Let's just zero out the exposure. I'm going to bring the exposure down just a little bit and I'm going to kick up the saturation a little bit. What that's done is it's allowed me to create a seamless adjustment for the sky because these are so far apart these lines, we're really just affecting the top of the sky, picturing out the effect through these three lines and it's not being applied at all down here. But we're able to get some richness into the top of the image, and I'm really concerned about that. So down with the exposure, a little bit more contrast, perhaps, we've got our saturation, maybe even a little bit of clarity because we're well clear of this building, we're not going to add any haloing around the building by increasing the clarity at this point. Let's click done. At this point, I'm going to press the backslash key to see the before image. This is the image out of the camera and now this is the after image. We're now really drawing the viewer's eye into the center area of the image where the light is of more interest and the building detail is of more interest. There's our first silhouette adjustment. We've enhanced the look of the silhouette of those buildings, we've enhanced the sunset and we've produced an image that's substantially more attractive than the original out of camera image.
3. Silhouette Images - Part 2: This is the second image that we're going to process. Again, I'm going to give you this file in the class project area. Again, I have saved a JPEG image as a DNG image. That's going to make it a whole lot easier for you to be able to open this image in Adobe Camera Raw. Now, if I click up here in the top of the histogram, you'll see that I have a highlight clip warning for this image. What's happened here is that these pixels are blown out, and because it was originally a JPEG image, we don't have much latitude at all in terms of adjusting this image. I can bring down the exposure a little bit and I can bring down the highlights quite a lot. That will help this area of the image. But there is no image data there that we're actually able to recover from. All we're doing is making this a pale gray. That means that as we process this image, we need to keep a really good eye on this highlighted area to make sure that it doesn't go gray. This is the potential for it to go gray or I'm bringing it down so far that it's actually looking quite wrong. While I want to darken it, I don't want to darken it to the point of stupidity. I'm going to be really aware of this and make sure that it doesn't do the wrong thing for me. The rest of the image is underexposed, comparatively. It is a silhouette image, but we would probably want a little bit more lightness in the image. I'm just going to bring up the exposure a little bit. I'm going to bring down the shadows that's going to make sure and reinforce that these trays are in shadow, and also reinforce the shadow detail at the bottom of the image. As for a white and a black point, even if you don't choose to use them, it's a good idea just to check them. I'm holding the Alt or Option key. I'm just going to drag on the white slider and these are my whitest pixels. These are not a surprise to us because we saw that they were blown out earlier. I'm just going to back off my white slider until they have disappeared. That's allowing me to bring in a little bit lighter pixels into the image but without blowing out anything. Let's check the blacks. Note unsurprisingly, we've got some black pixels in this image. That's fine because what we came here to do was to process a silhouette image. So we expect to see some blacks. I'm quite happy with the black point there, so I'm going to leave it in place. What we need to do now that we've got our blacks and our light or white point is to focus on the sky because we want a little bit more action in the sky. Let's look at contrast. Taking contrast in a negative direction is going to flatten out the sky. That's not really what we want. We would like a little bit of enhanced contrast, bring a bit more detail into this wonderful thing that's happening down here and this really interesting area up here too. It's also enhancing the base of the clouds where there's actually some clear sky behind it. Contrast is really going to help us here. Clarity sometimes can be a double-edged sword. But we're going to try it anyway. Well, clarity is helping the image quite a bit in these areas that we're quite interested in. But it's also blowing out these highlights again. I'm going to back off the highlights just a little bit to try and ensure that they are not getting blown out. Now, I might not be able to back them off all away. But having that highlight clipping warning turned on, it's certainly going to make sure that I'm at least aware that I've got some blown-out highlights, even if I'm not doing a lot about them. Vibrance is enhancing undersaturated colors, so that's going to add some color into the image. If you look at what it's doing, it's really really helping this contrast the area up here. We're getting some really interesting sepia tones, giving us a real impression of what the sky might've looked like when I shot this image. I'm going to turn off that highlight clipping warning here now because it's a little bit in my face. I'm going to look at temperature. If I take it in a positive direction, I'm going to add some yellow into the image. That's actually really quite attractive. If I go the other way, I'm going to add some blue in. Not really quite so happy about that at all. I really think a little bit of yellow would help the image. Now, if I don't want to add yellow, but I'd rather add something like orange, let's look and see how we do that. I'm going to the graduated filter, and I'm just going to drag a graduated filter into the very bottom of this image. It's going to put it down. If I want to add orange instead of yellow, I can go through the color area here and click on it. This is going to allow me to add all color to the image, real and unreal color. Well, I'm going for a slightly more real than that. I'm going to go for orange. I'm picking up my orange here, which is this color here. Then I have a saturation slider so I can back off the amount of orange I'm adding to the image, and click "Okay". You can use that adjustment to add color into your image. It doesn't have to be the color that you can do here, which is effectively blue and yellow, and magenta and green. There's obviously no red and there's not a lot of other colors available through these temperature slides as well. You've got it through the color option here. I'm just going to click away from this because one other adjustment that I really want to do with this image is I want to enhance the shafts of light coming out of the break in the clouds. Well, I can do that with the adjustment brush. I'm going to click on the "Adjustment brush." I can zero out everything by clicking on this hamburger icon here and choose "Reset Local Correction Settings". Now, unlike Lightroom, you can't actually click and drag, and just apply an adjustment without having some settings set before you do so. This is where Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw are a little bit different. I'm actually going to increase the exposure here. Just do something. It doesn't really matter what you do because you can alter it in a minute. What you need to do is something, so that you can start putting down this fix. I'm just going to drag down and follow these light sources or these beams of light that are coming through the cloud. There's probably one about here too. Having put down my brush strikes, I can now finesse this adjustment. I can increase or decrease the exposure on these light beams. I can also add a little bit of color to them. If we want them to be a little yellow, we can add some color to them. We can adjust other settings in relation to them here. But we can also adjust the painting job that we've done. I'm going to bring it off the edge of the image here. By decreasing the flow a little bit, I can also make this a little bit more angled if I want to, making them flare out at the bottom. If I want to remove it from this area here, I can go to the "Eraser." I'm going to just adjust the size here, I'm going to bring it down quite a bit, and I'm just going to erase this effect here. If I add a bit of feather, I can soften the edge. These sunrise are being shot behind this mountain rather than in front of it. When I'm happy with that, I can click on a tool like the Zoom tool to move away from this tool and back to doing my editing. Let's now look at the before and after. I'm going to snapshots here and I'm going to click on the new icon here. I'm going to make one called Final and click "Okay". Now, I can go to my import snapshot and then my final snapshot, and just save the changes that I've made to the image. Of course, that doesn't preclude us from coming back into the basic panel and continuing to make adjustments to the image. But you've got the basics now of enhancing a silhouette image in both Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. This is very subjective stuff, so you could add more effects like this to your image or back them right off according to what make sense to you for your images and also your aesthetics. But you've got this image, so feel free to play around with it. Your project for this class is going to take an image of a silhouette and to enhance it in either Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. If you don't have suitable images or if you want to use mine, please, that's what they're there for. Feel free to use them. Post an image of your completed edit in the class project area. Now, as you're working through these videos, you will have seen a prompt to recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying this class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations really helped me get my classes in front of more people who just like you, want to learn more about Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. If you'd write just a few words, that would be awesome as well. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
