Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Lucas and welcome to simplified
portrait photography. You knowing these
controls, get drafted. This micelle and that's it. Now, this is what's
called hard lights. And once you get to
pose it, you're happy with just play with
different angles. Let's see how that
instantly looks better. This course is just going
to teach you those one through three steps to
then go off and credits. However the heck you want to
make any body look better. If you'd like to learn this, then you're in the right place.
2. What is Photography?: Hi, I'm Lucas and welcome to simplified
portrait photography. Photography is light. Writing. Photo means light. Graphy means writing. Photography is Locke
is writing with light, using light, not a paintbrush, not a pencil, but light. Photography is the creation
of images made with light. Portraiture. Or a portrait is, is an image or a
picture of a person. Portrait means to portray. Portray means to show. You're showing a person
using photography. This course is simplified, meaning there's no BS night. Alright? This is to save
you a lot of time. Scouring the Internet
and hearing 20 get Julian different opinions on what a good photo is
and how to do it. Alright? The problem with
that is that you get so many different ideas
and you don't actually know what the heck. It equals a good photo, except different peoples own ways that they've developed
to create a particular style. But photography is an art, meaning there is no set style. You can do it any way you want. Well, you need to know
is the simple steps 123 of how to take a
photo that looks half decent and then the
rest you create yourself. Okay, so this course is
just going to teach you those 123 steps to make a decent photo and then tell you what your options are to then go off and credit
however the heck you want. I'm not here to trap you into
some way of taking photos, which is what so many
**** schools do. Okay? I'm just gonna teach
you what works. Then the rest is up to you. If you'd like to learn this, then you're in the right place.
3. What is a Camera?: All right, friends. First thing we need to know is, okay, you want to create
photos in the first place? Photos, yeah. So how do you create a
functionality to begin with? Well, you use this
thing called a camera. You heard of a camera before? Yeah. It's this thing which none
of us know how it works. It's super-complicated. It's apparently expensive. And yet no one can use them. Which is why we usually stick to a phone because quite simple. Press a button, takes a photo. Okay. Let me just quickly explain to you what the heck is
actually going on. So you have some understanding of why you're using this
in the first place. Good. The word camera to begin
with, supervising. The word camera
itself means a box. A box. The first cameras in
the world will literally wooden boxes with little hole in the front and the light
would come into the hole. This looks nothing like
the original cameras, but it's still actually a box with a hole
in the front of it. And light will go
through this hole. And having a box with a hole in it literally
does nothing. But inside the box
you would have something which would
be able to magically, like, magically, It's like
crazy how I discovered it. But it can capture an imprint. It can capture what the light, they can capture the
light in that moment. And then it saves it in the box. Isn't it crazy? Cameras have come a long way. But basically what a camera is, it's a box with a hole
in the front of it. Then some some thing inside which can capture
the light and save it. Okay, I'm not gonna give you
a whole history lesson here, but that's what a camera does. It's a box with a
little these days, cameras use computers
to do all this stuff. In the old days, they used
this thing called film. If you've heard of film, film is a stuff on
a piece of paper. It was like a chemical which
would react to the light and it would save an imprint
of the lights in it. And then that will
be kept a new box. And then you take
that out afterwards. And you would do some
other Jeanie stuff with some other chemicals and
you would literally get on a piece of paper a copy of
what this box was pointed at. That's how a camera works. Okay. These days, it's
using computer stuff. So literally inside these
cameras these days, there's just a little sensor. It's cold, which senses the
light, saves that light. Then afterwards, it saves it to this thing
called a memory card, which will then put
in your computer. And you can put on
your Instagram. Amazing. Good. So that's what a camera is. Now this other
thing which goes on the front of a camera
is called a lens. Little lenses is, is
basically a bunch of glass. It's basically a bunch
of glass all lined up and it's like it's
different kinds of gloss. It's like magnifying glasses and losses which squeezed the lights and expand the light and lower. And the purpose of
that, the light will literally before
it goes into the box, it will travel
through this lens. And that lens will change how it looks before it gets recorded. Purpose of a lens. You can change how the light looks before
it gets recorded. What's, what's,
what's some examples of how it can change the light. It can show a wide
view of something. And now the kind of
lens could show a very zoomed in view, very magnified view of
something very far away. All that is is different
kinds of glass, which is changing, bending, manipulating the light to look a certain way more
zoomed in or zoomed out. More blurry, more blah,
blah, blah, blah. And then that light reaches the actual inside of the
box and gets recorded. And then you see that
picture certain way. Isn't that amazing? That's a camera. Okay. Alright, that is
what a camera does. It's actually very simple. These buttons and
everything else we just added to over time because there's like two different
ways you could change it. But forget about
this stuff, man. You don't need to
know that stuff if you want to get confused. Like I was right
from the beginning. It's like persons never
taken a photo in their life. Let's buy a camera. Hi, Mr. Cameras to oh man, what would you recommend? Were allowed recommend literally the most
advanced cabinet. And then I would take
this and I'm like, Where's the on button? Oh, I give up. Oh, I give up. God, I hate that. I hate hearing
stories like that. Photography is not complicated. Unless you skip
the learning curve and try to learn 20 gazillion, different things which
you don't need to know to take a good sharp. So let's just keep it
simple here, friends, okay? This is a fun which actually has all these
features of a camera, or most of them built-in, but everything's
kept automatic so you don't even have to
think about these things. The purpose of
having a real camera is that you have more control over what
the camera is doing. And that's the only
difference is trying to find a real camera. Okay, so let's learn the
three controls of a camera.
4. The 3 Basic Controls: All right friends. Good. Now we look at a camera, like I was saying before, and we think, My God, I want to jump off a bridge
because it's so complicated. There's only three things
you need to know about a camera, three controls, okay? The rest of the soil through a little bit of practice
and all that bomb be bias. They might be nice to
have an on-off button. Yeah, I guess. Might be nice to know how to take out a
battery and charger. Yeah, that's pretty good,
too. Pretty sweet. I say. There's three things that you need to know if you want to, if you want to have control
over how your photo looks, There's three controls of a
camera that you need to know. Okay? And it's all to do with
how it captures the light. That's all. That's all. That's all. Okay. When you take a photo
with your phone, your phone is
apparently doing it. Apparently just you
press a button and it captures what it sees. Your phone is actually doing these three things
automatically. But with a real camera, you can control those
things individually. Thus, you can control better
how your photo will look. How many times have
you taken a photo with a phone and it didn't look
how you wanted it to look. God, that ****** me off. Thus, I bought a real camera. Let's learn these
three controls. Now. You know this is a box. Yeah, good. So the first control is to do with the thing inside which is
recording the light. And all that control
is doing is changing. How sensitive that thing
is, that recording thing. I'm not going to
use fancy words, say it because it's
not necessary. But how sensitive the
sensor is to the light. So let's just say you're
in a dark place, right? If you took a photo in that dark place, it
would look dark. But let's just say you want
it to look a bit brighter, then you can increase
the sensitivity of the sensor so that it would
look brighter. Alright. This setting is called ISO. The word ISO means idiocy because it doesn't
actually mean anything. It's the name of a company
that invented this. Iso is literally
just a measurement, like millimeters or inches, or kilograms or miles. It's just a measurement. Iso. Iso is the name of the company that chose
this measurement. It's really fancy and you
should be confused right now. But ISO is just the
sensitivity of the sensor, the thing that's recording it. Okay? Thus if you don't
have much light to record, because remember for
capturing light. And if you have no light at all, you'll picture will be black because no light was recorded. So you can change
this ISO setting and every camera is different
on how you change it, but you can crank it up
or you can crank it down. Okay. Iso is measured in
one hundredths. And say the lowest ISO setting
would be 100, ISO 100. Then if you up the ISO setting, it would then double to 200. And what that means
is that it is now the sensor is now
twice as sensitive. This would then
double again to 400. That means it is now twice as sensitive at 400
that it was a 200. And these numbers keep doubling. Alright, and all
that means is that it's twice as sensitive, three times as sensitive, four times the sensitive
blob over, over run. So if you're in a dark
place, you just turn up the ISO to make it brighter. Alright, good. It's just controlling how
sensitive that is to the light. Good. Second thing is, is the thing we've all heard that when a camera
takes a photo, that that's called a shutter, alright, this, you
can see this little thing flicking in there. That's the shutter. It's called the shutter because it shuts. It opens and shuts. Okay. Now, if this box always had
a hole that was always open, then you would always just
have light pouring in there. And it wouldn't control exactly what moments
you wanted to capture. Because light would just be constantly coming into the box. And the end result
is just a mish mash of as if you just mixed all
your paint colors together. That's what you'll
photo would look like. Because it's just yeah. Because there's no
there's no control over what period of light
it is capturing. That's why shutter exists. It opens it up, let's in the light for a certain amount of time
and then it shuts again. And that's the moment
that you've captured. And this shutter
can be adjusted. The speed of it can be adjusted. And then you get this word, the second control of a
camera called shutter speed. Shutter speed can be very fast. If you just want to capture
a fraction of a second, set is a falling object. You just want to capture
it perfectly in mid-air. You use a fast shutter speed, so it will just capture
a fraction of time. Or it can have a very
slow shutter speed, meaning the door stays
open for a long time. Light's coming in,
then it stopped. Alright? If you want to capture something
like a moving object, and if you've ever
seen a photo of like a car driving or streaks
of light at nighttime? That's because there was
a long shutter speed. The shutter speed
stayed open so it captured that car driving on the road the whole time it was traveling down the road and then recorded this streak of light. That's shutter speed. That's the longer the door is
open, the shutter is open. It's capturing light
that entire time. Okay. Good. That's
the second control. Again, it's it's
controlling light. It's controlling how long
light hits the sensor. So you have the first two, how sensitive that sensor is delight and how long
the light is allowed to cases and record it on
it. That's the two controls. There's one mole and then with the third one is to
do with your lens. Now we already know
that the lens controls how the light looks
when it goes through. You want to see like a wide
view as zoomed in view, you want to have a
blurry background. Different lenses allow you
to have these effects. That's the lens that does
that, not the camera. So that's why you have a
lens and it goes on there. And if you want
different effects, That's why different
lenses exist. Problem with basic cameras
and even phones is yeah. You're stuck with the
thing that's in there. Or as if you had a
professional camera, there are hundreds
of lenses you can buy for different effects
and it gets very cool. You don't need to
know that right now. We're doing the basics. But that's what you can
expand into lifestyle, which makes it very
cool and very creative. Anyway. Third, control. The control is, is how open the lenses you can
actually change this lens. That hole inside it can get it can be big or
it can be small. Work that hole. That hole has a fancy name. It's designed to confuse you. That fancy name is
called aperture. Aperture literally means a hole. They couldn't have
just used whole. Kept as simple for us. No, they had to use aperture. Aperture just means a hole. And the aperture setting is how big or small
that whole list. If it's if it's open, if it's very open, What's that going
to obviously do? It's going to let more light
come in to the camera bulks. At one time. If
it's very closed, it's going to lead you
to tiny metal ion. Thus, these three settings
all control the same thing. The light sensor is how
sensitive it is to the light. Shutter is how long it's
landing in the light for aperture is how much light is going to let him at one time. Now aperture has one other
little special cool effect. Don't ask me why. This is like complicated
scientific stuff, but we don't need to know this. We just want to
take cool photos. Okay? So the more open, the more wide open
your aperture is, the less if your picture is
in focus, meaning clear, clear, and the rest of the rest of the photo
goes out of focus, means it goes blurry. You want to have a portrait of a person and have the background
behind them, or beautiful and blurry
and softer Baba. That's what it means. You have your aperture as wide open in your lenses
as it can go. Okay, that will give the,
give you that effect. Oppositely. If you want to take a shot of a landscape or you want to see everything in focus
and nothing blurry, you would make
your aperture much smaller and that would
get more in focus. Okay. Friends, you've just learned the three controls of a camera. Alright? A phone is doing these
things automatically. All cameras, when
you buy them using control these things
by themselves. Or they also haven't
automatic mode, which will just adjust them. By itself. The computer decides what
these three controls do. But you knowing these controls and being able to
change them yourself, you can get the photos
that you brought. Okay. So let's start taking some photos and
let me explain more.
5. Practice Photos: I got a good welcomed
outside where there's drafts and foreign
people everywhere. So let's just take some
shots now and show you how the different settings in the
camera work. Alright? Now if you just left
your camera on fully automatic or say
you had a phone, What's happening is
the computer in it is deciding for you what
the shutter speed, aperture, and ISO should be. Okay. If I just take a
photo of anything, flowers, Hello, take a photo. In automatic. It takes this shot. That's not half bad. Alright. But what's happening
here is the computer, without me deciding anything, is deciding what the
shutter speed, aperture, and ISO it should be to get what is called the
correct exposure. Exposure just means brightness. Okay? We know that these three
controls all adjust brightness, how much light is
coming into the camera? Okay? And so if I point this
out into the sky, it's going to, it's going to adjust the brightness
automatically. So at the sky can be seen. But then you've got a problem
because look at the trees. The trees are all black. Or if I pointed to the ground
right now it's like a shot. It's adjusted it so the ground
looks correctly bright. And no matter which
way you pointed, it's going to change the settings as needed to
get the brightness right. That's, that's the problem
with using automatic because you don't know what settings the
computer's going to choose. Let's just say you wanted
the background blurry. Well, that's not going to
work when it's an automatic because the computer
doesn't care about that. It just cares about getting
the brightness rise. There's another
mode you can use, very simple if you don't want
to use fully manual yet. There is another mode called a V. Av means that the a
stands for aperture. And what that means is that the only control you are
controlling is the aperture. Then the computer will
change your shutter and ISO automatically so
that you can just focus on what aperture you want. And let the computer
decide the brightness by adjusting the ISO and
shutter speed by itself. So we can choose this, like say, say with the flowers, we wanted the background
really out-of-focus. Alright, I'm going to
change it into AV mode. Whereas IT AV mode. And I'm going to open the
aperture up way all the way. And look at that. Gorgeous, gorgeous
because we have control. But then we don't have to worry about whether the brightness is right because we're still letting the computer do that. Let's say we wanted all
the background in focus. So I'm going to close
down the aperture, taking the same photo
again of the flowers. And look this time so
much more is in focus. Okay? That's you controlling
your aperture. Alright? But the two other controls
is still automatic. If you want, just
leave it at this. If you want to take a
portrait of someone, use this AV mode. Alright? Then you control the aperture,
you can control the focus. Then everything else.
Don't worry about it. Alright? Similar with shutter speed. Alright? If you want to
control how much time the camera captures, alright? But you don't want to worry
about all the aperture. Well that's doing all the ISO. You don't really care. So
you put it on shutter, shutter mode, and then you can choose your
shutter if you want a really fast shutter speed so that it will capture just
a fraction of a second. Okay, it was a very
fast shutter speed, or we can do it really slow. Then if I want some motion and I just go and move
this little flower, look, your slow shutter
makes the thing blur. Okay, good. And then if you
want fully manual, you go into fully manual mode. I'm not showing you
exactly how I'm changing the modes because
every camera is different. I don't know what
camera you're using, but now you will allow me
to choose shutter speed, aperture, and ISO all by myself. Which if you don't know
what you're doing, you could just take
a shot like this. And it looks terrible
because you need to make sure keep in mind
how bright things are. Okay? So I'm gonna change my shutter speed to
something average. Then my aperture to what I like. And I put that in and the focus looks good, but
it's a bit too bright. So I can either make my shutter speed faster
to let in less light, or my ISO bring that down to make the camera
or less sensitive. So I can do either actually, alright, take the same shot. Okay, and now that's
correctly exposed. But also it's got the aperture and the blurriness that I like. Alright. So if that makes sense, I want you to just go outside, take some shots via self. Play with these three
settings, okay? Alright, aperture,
shutter speed, ISO, play with the
different modes. There's fully ordered,
this fully automatic mode where you own control anything. There's AV mode where you would just
control the aperture. There is, it's called
TV mode than I want, is called TV mode, but you
just control the shutter. There's m, which
is fully manual. We will control the
aperture, the shutter, and the ISO all by yourself
just like a big boy. Ok, so give us some practice and then come
back for the next lesson.
6. Posing: Alright, so with what
we've covered so far, I've tried to keep it
as simple as possible, but that's what a camera
is and how to use it. A camera, and it has
these three controls. The ISO, the aperture, and the shutter speed. Okay? Now let's talk about people. It's those three controls. You're still, you're still
sort of learning then, okay? Just leave it in automatic. And then later on when we're going to play with
the light a bit more, we can go back to
manually controlling it. But let's talk about people now. Yeah. How the heck do you take a
decent shot of a person? Well, people were basically, if we make this very like kindergarten
style, very simple. If you look at a person, there's a certain way that any person doesn't matter
what they look like, how they can be made to look
good in a photo of them. Okay? And it all has to do
with this thing called posing. Posing. The word pose means to place. You're putting something there and you're putting it there
in a certain way, okay? Now, there's so many ideas of what looks good,
blah, blah, blah. But I've simplified
it down here. What will we need to know? You think of a person
as a stick figure, okay, here I am as
a stick figure. Alright? Now, the
only rule you need to think of is straight lines. If we think of a person has a stick figure, a straight line, a vertical straight line is boring to look at
look at me right now. Is that just the worst thing
you've ever seen? Okay. It doesn't matter whether
I'd be fat then supermodel, ugly doesn't matter if I
was standing like this. That is the lameness way you can take a photo
of someone. Okay. Similarly, if I
had like my limbs out like straight like
this or I was lying flat. Again. You know, basically that
that's not when did you ever see a good
photo of someone who was lying straight or
standing straight? Okay. The tip here is that if you think of
someone in terms of lines, a diagonal line is
much more appealing to the eyeball than a vertical
line or a horizontal line. Let me show you right now. Okay. So I'm standing here like this. This is the worst kind of photo you can take
if someone, okay. Now using the environment
or not using it at all, you can improve it
simply by making the body have diagonal
shapes to it. What's the simplest way? I can put my body on a bit of a slant. Okay. Can you see that
looks slightly better than if I was standing straight. Again with the arms. What if I just fold
them iambs like that and put a little bit
of weight on one leg. Bend the other leg. If you look at my
body right now, you will see there are
diagonal lines and my limbs. Okay. If you have something
to lean on, you could just get
someone to lean and then bend the
leg a bit like this, just this sort of thing already. You can tell. That looks more interesting than if I was
standing like this. The reason behind it is
just simply diagonal lines. Okay. So like just
sort of a thing. Have you ever heard
of photographers? I just tilt your
head a little bit. It's because it gives a
diagonal to the head. That's what posing is all about. That's what works in posing. I don't care what
you say about it. This works every time. And if you look at every
interesting photo of someone, you will see these diagonals and use the environment
to your advantage. If I was in a seated position while I was over here,
how could you sit? Sit in an interesting
way? Well, good. If I was set like this, good Lean diver, diagonal
lines in my back and my legs. See, that's more interesting
than if I was like this. You ever wondered why
school photos look so bad? They're not letting you
do anything interesting. They're letting you
stand like this. That is lying, bro. But add some diagonals. Using the limbs, using your
arms, your legs, leaning, this sort of thing makes things look so much better. Good. C, come over here. And you just think, how can
I diagonalize the person? Put a dam leg up. Look at that. Hey man. Instantly, it's
more interesting. And that's what it's all about. It's about diagonals, okay? So play around with
it. Stand in front of the mirror and just
make yourself look better by introducing diagonals. And not just in a
two-dimensional way. You can even just
putting someone on a, on an angle to the camera. That's the diagonal as well. You can see the shoulders here. Leaning forward
gives you diagonals. Leaning back gives
you diagonals. Okay? Depending on the type
of portrait you have, whether it's far
away or close up, use diagonals to make
any body look better. And that's all
there is to posing. Some practice.
7. The TWO Kinds of Light: Alright, Hello. Now let's talk a little
bit about light, okay? Now, all you need to know in this amazing world
of lights and blah, blah, blah, and that's that
none of it makes sense. But there's two kinds of light. The first kind of light is this ugly stuff I'm in
the middle of right now. Can you see how
unattractive my face looks? You've got these shadows. That's because where we're
out here in the sunshine. Okay? Now, this is what's called
hard light, as in light, which is very sharp and creates these really distinctive
shadows. Alright? Now, in photography, actually the best times of day to shoot a when the sun is
behind the cloud. Or if the sun's out, then walk under a shadow
so that you don't have this direct harsh light coming on your face like this, because these shadows can
make people look ugly. Alright? If you have to shoot in
the direct sunlight, then do this. Come over here. Get the light behind the person so that it's
hitting them in the back. So then they face,
as you can see, is not being struck by
ugly shadows. Okay? And then you might
have heard this thing called the golden hour, which is basically
just the sunrise and the sunset time of day. During those times of the day, the sun is low in the sky
and actually it's okay to shoot in the sunshine because the shadows don't look so
ugly on a person's face. But when it's high in
the sky like this, it just looks terrible and
it's really difficult to get a nice, pleasing soft light. Okay? So if you just simply
move into the shadows, you will find the light in outdoors looks a lot more
pleasing for your photos. So get out of the sun
and get into a shadow. And it will make
your personal look a lot better that
you're photographing.
8. 3 Steps to a Portrait: Alright, so now let's
finally shoot someone. Now, this is the three
steps to a portrait. First one is posing, second one is lighting. Lighting, and camera controls because that controls the light. And the third one you're
going to find out about now. Okay, good. So let's go through
these steps one by one. This is my model, Alina. Hello Alina. Now. Now, the first one is you pose the person you choose
where they're going to be. Okay? So I said Alaina, stand there and then I'm just
thinking with diagonals. Yeah, I gotta to lean a little
bit and legs like that. It makes it more interesting. Can you just stand like
this for me for a second? See, even though she's
very good looking, that pose itself destroys it. So now it relaxing to the
thing, lean into the thing. That's it. Beautiful and a
little bit of leg. That's right. Beautiful. See how that instantly looks better now that we've added
some diagonals into the pose. Okay? Now secondly, we look
at the lights, okay? Now the sun right now
is behind the cloud. It could come out and destroy
everything in a moment. But right now, let's
just take some shots. I've got my camera
on full manual, so I take a first shot, I see what it looks like, and then I adjust
the settings as I need to take a shot like this. Beautiful. Good, Jesus, that's quite nice. And then you can just try different different
angles with the camera. And just move around and then just try and capture
different angles. That's the third step. The third step is this
word called composition. It sounds complicated,
it's actually simple. Composition. You break it down. It comes from the word compose. Column means together and pose. We already know what
that means to place. So composition is everything that's your camera
is actually saying. Okay, now the thing with
composition is you want to include in your
shot the good things. And you want to not
show everything that might detract from what you're trying to
say in the photo. Okay? Now before I get carried
away in my enthusiasm, I want to quickly fully explain this thing called
composition. Composition. If you break it down, comes
from the word compose, you break down compose. And it has calm. And pose. Com, means together. Pose means to place. So compose or composition means
to place things together. Now, what that actually
means in a photo is, well, the reason you could
take a photo in the first place is
because you want to, you want it to say something. You wanted to communicate
some ideas or some message or something
like this, okay? It's not words because
it's a picture, right? But still that picture in
the way it's been composed, put together, should
say something. If it's going to be effective. Composition is about everything
that is in the picture. And everything that
is in the picture. Should all these pieces push whatever idea or message
you have for the picture. For example, you
watch an old film, everything in that
film that people that cause the buildings much
must match together. If it's going to say something. I say this. I mean, like if it's
an old film sets in, you know, 200 years ago,
you need everything. The people, the cars, the buildings, how they talk, everything in that must be
from 200 years ago to give the message that
all this is a film about people 200 years ago. If there was some piece of that that was not
from 200 years ago, such as, I don't know, a cartoon character or
the chick from frozen. It would not it would break the composition
because it would not be it would not all be together and
saying the same thing. So composition is just everything
that's in your picture, which is going to push the main idea that you're talking about. So we've got this takes
some shots beautiful. See I can include
just the top half of the shoulders and the head. Or if I wanted to show
more of it, buddy, you can go like for
a full length shot, that sort of thing. You can change the angle. And then you'll notice
how the environment, notice how the riling, the ledge there itself
has a diagonal to it. Diagonals don't just have
to be in the person's pose. But the environment,
anything going diagonally actually
looks more interesting. So it's just a matter
of playing around. Okay. Now, with these cameras settings
that I've got right now, the shutter is 1 thousand, the aperture is 2.8, which means it's quite
wide, which means. We're seeing the background
go lovely, out-of-focus. You say, if I change the
aperture and made it much, much more closed, then we would see that more of
the background is in focus. Now because I closed it, the photo is now darker. So I can compensate
for that by making the shutter speed slower
or the ISO higher. So then I still get
the correct exposure. There were correct brightness. But now you see that
more is in focus. Now, there is no
exact perfect way to take a photo every time what you judge it
by its composition. And forgive me if I'm
speaking too fast, but this is important.
Composition. It's not just where
you're pointing a camera. Composition is everything
that goes into the shot that is
going to give it that message or that
idea that you want. Say we're photographing where we want it to look as
beautiful as possible. So a blurry background. So the plants and everything
just goes blurry behind it. That gives the
idea, wouldn't it? Of softness, of elegance, of angelic minus whatever. So thus, I would, I would just rationally have a wide-open
aperture because I just want to see
here in focus. And then everything
else can just blur away because they
don't care about it. Again, I've opened the aperture again, it's gotten too bright. I'm going to compensate for that by making the shutter
speed faster. Still a bit too bright, I
can bring that ISO down. Beautiful. Do you get the idea? And then usually
unless the sun is coming and going and
changing your brightness, you can just leave
these cameras settings and forget about the camera now. So then you just repeat
pose, light, composition. So let's try another post. Alright, Alina, come down here. I want you to be like
sitting like this, okay? Something like this.
Have a great day. When you posing someone. It's very easy to force someone to some kind
of uncomfortable thing. It's gonna be
comfortable for them. Okay. So you can guide them
into some way of sitting. But if but if they don't
feel comfortable with it, then you're going to see
that in the photo because their face would be like,
am I doing it right? Okay. So you don't like you don't control them too much.
It's just like guiding. Beautiful. Look, look, look. She
knows what she's doing. She's already got a good idea of some kind of pose with
plenty of diagonals in it. I mean, look at that. Then.
Here's another little trick. Yeah. Just by way your camera, the angle of the camera. Again, we can include what we want and remove
what we don't want. So for this one, to me, the pants because they much
brighter than the top of her. It's a bit distracting
to the eye. And I'm going to go
in a bit closer and just make this like a
head and shoulders shot. Beautiful. She can look up like
that. That's nice. Good. And then Lena looking
towards me, That's it. Beautiful. And then just just tilt
your head a little bit. So looking at me and
then just, that's it. Beautiful. Wonderful. Like Hey, you get something
like that. Now try lean forward a bit
on your neither. That's it. Good. Let me see what
this one looks like. Lovely. The sun is changing. So it's now it's
gotten a bit brighter. I'm going to adjust
the settings again. Unless I just put it on, say in fact I might
do that right now. If I just put it on AV mode, I'm just going to set my
aperture and the camera is going to work out the brightness. So I've just got my
aperture on what I want for the right
amount of blurriness. And then even if
the sun changes, the cameras just going
to keep changing. And then all I do is you just go around once you get to pose
it, you're happy with. You just play with different angles and you
get these different Lemons. Oh, that looks awesome. Looking at that one, see
the stairs just going off. That's awesome. And even don't try to
control them too much. I find that if you
tell it Hall Buddha, I want you to do exactly this. It can kind of make
it uncomfortable, give a herd of being people being uncomfortable in
front of a photographer. I hate that. Okay, So just give
the person some spice and just try and capture these little moments
even when the person is not paying attention
to the camera, because those are often
really good moments. Now as we can see here, the sun has come out and
you can see the shadows on her face of change is now
getting these dark shadows. Okay, so let's run away from
the sun, come over here. Let's try and find some shade. Now, the sun is not
attacking us all the time. And you just look for objects in your environment that are going to work for
your composition. Okay, Elena, I'm not sure, but can you do Can you
try and like lean into this tree, something like this? Go in there and try and
make yourself comfortable. How would you do it or even
if you've got a leg in there, I don't know what what
would you like to do? Something like this? That's it. See, good diagonals. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. She knows what
she's doing. Okay. Great. I'm going to check my settings. Good, and that looks lovely. Nice. Good. And then when
you're thinking of composition, I can see those in
this last photo. From this angle, There's a big
tree coming out of a head. Try to avoid those things. Okay. Dislike that. Lovely. Now try this one. Lin, I
want you to disconnect. Just sort of crouch down here,
just like crash down here. That's it. Oh, lovely. Good. Beautiful. Stay like that. That's lovely. Good. Beautiful. That's lovely. We're getting some great shots. And then I just change the
angle again and I can now see more of these flowers
in the background. Good. Make sure there's no trees
coming out of the top of a. And then another cool thing. If your aperture is wide open, you can get like some
object in the foreground. Foreground meaning closer
than where the person is. And blow that thing by
not focusing on it. And then you get this cool thing in the foreground like that. She liked through
objects like this, fall. That is great. Now for females.
If I shoot from, if I stand up here
and I sit down, this makes the face
and the looks that makes the body
look a bit smaller because it's more further away. And the head, it
brings that out. Stuff like that says Beautiful. It's just like that. Very appealing. That is awesome. Good. See. And that's, that's
the basic idea. You pose them, you
check the light, which also means you check
your camera settings so it's the right brightness. And then you make sure
there's no ugly shadows. And then finally,
its composition, it's what is being seen
in the final camera. It's called the frame, which is the box that you
see the photo ID. And this is kinda like you add things into that
box that's going to make the person
look better and you remove anything that's
distracting from us. Okay? And anything can
go into that box. Anything can be composition. It all depends on what kind of effect your chronic trying to create from the start. Okay? If it's beauty,
you want softness. This even includes things
like what they're wearing. You think about this beforehand.
Do they need makeup? Do they need their hair done? What kind of outfits are going to add to whatever message? If you're taking
like a grungy shot, you want things like
leather jackets, you on things like brick
walls in the background. Here we're doing like lovely, like we use flowers
and he's mama, mama. You think about what
you want in your photo. And that's, and that's
your composition and then just pose, light. Compose. Does that make sense? Good, I'm taking a break and
we'll use them all.
9. Basic Photo Editing: Alright, welcome friends. Welcome to a computer. This is a computer. This is my computer, actually. You're invited. Now. Good. Let's talk about, I want to
show you some basic editing. How do you edit a photo? Alright, would you like to know that you want this photo
in the background? By the way, I took it. I took it using
the same settings as what you've just
seen, the shoot really. And then using editing, I made this look a lot better. So let's talk about
how you edit. Now. There are many editing
programs out there. You can even edit on your phone. I'm going to show you what I consider to be the
best editing program. It's not the simplest, but it doesn't have
to be complicated. And as you learn more later, you will be able to expand
and try new things. But if you've got this one, which is adobe Lightroom, is the little fella. Sick, makes no sense. But Adobe Lightroom, this
program, just get it. Just get it. All right. You can get on subscription. You can get a free
trial for 30 days. Try it out. I'm going to show you
basically how to use it. There's a lot to it. I'm not going to
show you 90% of it. I'm just going to show
you what you need to know to do some cool edits. First step, when you've
got the program open, you will have this first window. The program is broken
up into sections. The sections are
along the top here. There's only two sections
you need to know. First one is library. This is where you going to put all your photos so
you can choose them. And the second one is develop, which is where you go
into edit your photos, develop, it means to make
something even better. Okay, good. So first we check our photos. So I've saved my I've taken the photos out of my camera and put them into this folder. Alright. We've got all the
photos that I took of Alina. I'm going to
select them all. And then you just drag the
fellas into Lightroom. Now it's going to come up
and try to confuse you. But that's okay. You just go import and
all the problems go away. Good. Now it's going to
import everything. Now you can see all
your photos here. Alright? You see them all here. If you'd like to see a
full screen of each photo, you press this
little button here. Okay. All right. Thanks. The full-screen. Now down the bottom,
it same thing. It has a list of all the photos you've taken and you
can just click on each photo and thus you
can view each photo, okay? So the first step, the first
step is pick your photos. Now, I can just use the
arrow keys if I want on my keyboard to just go across
and go through the photos. And then ones that you've
decided to pick for editing. You press on your
keyboard the letter P. When you press that, it's
going to say flag as pick. Alright? And then
you'll see down here, it's just highlighted
the little box. And there's a tiny, It's so hard to see, but there's a tiny little flag right there. That means you've
selected that one. Okay. So you can go through
and you just go pee, pee, pee, and it will select
all the ones you want. If you made a mistake,
you want to unselect it. You press the button, you on your keyboard. It will unselect it. Okay, good. Now, what do you think with
when selecting photos? Well, it's exactly the
same as composition. Alright? The reason why you take
a bajillion photos in a photoshoot is because you don't expect every
photo to be perfect. But then later when
we're in this program, we're going to pick the
best photos which give the composition of
a beautiful girl. Okay, so let's
literally we just, we glance through them and
we just run through them. And we just say, okay, which
one has the best lighting, the best pose, the best
expression on her face. These sorts of things. Which
one gives you the idea? Best of, you know, how how I judge photos. I will just go through
them and the first photo which which hits me, which gives me this
effect like what does that it makes me interested. Makes me like, oh, there's
something about that. Even if you don't
know what it is, it's just like the
reaction effect. It's just like which photo gets a reaction from you
when you see it. That's the photo that would
be one of your picks. This one, for instance, this
is one of my favorites. I'm picking that I'm
picking that one. Okay. Good. And then you just continue. Can you see here the
difference in the lighting? What I was saying
before, this was when the sun was
behind the clouds. So the light appeared
software interface. And then suddenly
the sun came out. And you can see here that
the shadow starting to come. You see, that's why you try and avoid what's called hard light. Alright? So if you just have your
light nice and soft, either by sitting
in the shade or shooting only when the
sun is behind the cloud. By the way, it seems illogical, but overcast, cloudy days are the best
days to take photos. You would think of bright sun, shiny day would be good. Actually with people photos. That's not always the best. Okay. Good. I'm gonna go through it. I'm going to pick what would
be my absolute favorites. Okay? And I'm going to tell you why these are my absolute favorites. Now look, we took a whole bunch here and then I change
the angle a bit. Well, that's interesting. Or C, I really like the
thing when I was talking about I could get an
object in the foreground. It makes it more 3D. It's like, it's like
you put this object and it's like This
is closest to you. And then you look past that
and there's the person. And then there's like
three layers to it. There's the foreground,
the middle ground where your subject to your personas, and then
there's the background. So it's like three
layers of a pancake, foreground, middle
ground background. If you can get really good, especially when you're making blue backgrounds and
stuff like that. You blow something
in the foreground, you blow the background. And the middle ground
where the person is, Isn't beautiful. Clear focus. That tends to
look really nice for people. That is, what do I like? Like if you find the
photos on the side? Okay. How do you do it? You can right-click
on the thinking. Where's this? I'll rotate left. You can straighten up
your photos like that. My mom, bom. Bom, bom, bom. Ok. Now look again,
looking at shapes. If you look at a leaner
just as a shape, when she's looking
straight at the camera, her hair is hidden and her face that
appears quite rounded. But these times when
she was looking off, you see it gives so much
more shape to her face. So the jaw line
there that knows. I actually prefer these shots, which is another reason why
I really liked this one, because she's looking
off and you see this beautiful shape of the face. Everyone's faces are
different, okay? So really you might
find someone looks better when they look
straight at the camera. Some people look
better in profile, which means looking to the side. But usually if it's like a really nice one
is just like soda. It's called three-quarters. This sort of like
looking at an angle. They're not looking
totally to the side. They're not looking
totally at you. But they've just turn
their head away slightly. Alright, so this is my
favorite. What do I like? Anything else here?
These ones look good. Now you'll notice a hair was
a bit like sort of frizzy. This is something that you
can handle in editing, which we can go into our good. Whereas another shot here
that I really liked it. I got the body pose
looks perfect. You can see slight
diagonal there. The leg up there
gives you diagonals. Use lean back, that's diagonal. I just wish in this shot she
was sort of looking away. So then a head would
look a bit more shapely and not just
so much of an oval. Did it? This is just the little
things that you learned. See, look that Oh, that's a beautiful the way she was
just looking off of that. That really shows
more shape interface. Actually this one. And then even look
at things like the expression like
this subtle changes in expression as
somebody lookout for he or she looks
interested in the person. It's like, Oh,
hello, Who is that? Is that my future husband? I don't know. Here. It can be very subtle. It from shot to shot. And you just look
for the expression that's going to match
the composition that you have in mind. Okay? I really like these ones, which is looking like I'm
going to pick that one too. All right, where we
got this down here. What's kinda interesting
to, let's pick that one, say, Okay, good. I have my three that I've
picked. Just for the record. Even if you might think that a professional
photographer would never take a bad
shot and no man, it's like you could take
a hundreds of shots and then you get like five
that are like really good. You're just looking
for the really stand out banging images. That's a UK word I
learned from the UK. Banging in that country
just means like awesome. That's awesome. Okay. Good. All right, great. So now let's just say that
I pick these three photos. These are the photos
I'm going to add us. Alright? So you can see that
it's a lot of practice. You take a lot of
photos and then you just get the absolute best ones. And then if you only
post those ones, people think you're amazing. Because it looks like you
only take good photos. But they didn't say the amount
of work that goes into it. Okay. So that's that's the buttress. Now down here where
it says filter. This is, this is how we'd just going to select out
the ones we've picked. You click on this little
thing, you click flagged. Now it's only,
it's going to hide every image except for the
three that we've picked. You see that? God is
why I use Lightroom. It's just very easy to organize things and pick what you want. So I have my three
favorites here. Now we're done with this one,
we're done with library. Let's go on to develop mode. This is where we're
actually going to edit this beautiful,
beautiful people. Let's start with
my absolute value. This would be my top shot of the Shoot, not only because
she looks lovely, but also this background and
that beautiful diagonal. It looks so interesting to me. I'm just like,
Wow, that is cool. It makes it impact the scale, the size of all these steps drifting off in the background.
And then here's this. It'll go, what is happening? What will be my future? This sort of a thing. To me, look, everyone's
got different viewpoints. But to me, this one,
I really like it. So that's why I chose it. Now, let me just very simply show you the Hilda's
program is okay. In the left side of this thing, you will find they will come with some free ones
and you can download more. But this is literally, if you know Instagram filters. The easiest way to
edit a photo isn't a, not edit it at all. Just choose a filter and
there are stacks of them. You just click these
little things and they're just filters, filters,
filters, filters. And if you'd like a filter, you just click on
it. And then boom. Okay, if it looks
perfect to you, Okay, you're done. You're done. You can literally
go File Export. You choose where you're
going to export it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you want to
change the size of it by aligning your export, that would be if
I was super lazy, you just chuck a filter on it. Save the photo, done. I'm going to undo this. Okay, Good. But that's
that's, that's the thing. It's like, man, if you
want Instagram filters, if you want filters, it is Filters go lower
on this program. Okay, so that's another good
thing that you can just play around, find some things. But these filters are
like next level man, because on the right side
here are all your tools to customize every filter exactly how you want or create your
own filters from scratch. Okay? Literally all these
filters here. I just these settings over here saved into a name and a file. But if you don't want to do any work on
whatsoever over your photos, you could, you could
just find filters here that work for you or go on the Internet and search
light room presets. It's the trend these days to sell these things
called presets. The photography community
because it just makes people, it makes it easier for them to be lazy and don't
ever do any work. But here, here's what these
filters are actually doing. In this whole side. This is all you're
editing tools here, okay? You get the picture
in the middle. You've got filters here, and you've got
your editing here. Okay, That's it. That's the three parts. Rest of this program is just
you don't need it. I never use I've never used
anymore of this program, the nice reports and
of course the library. Now, let's go through this and I will just try and
simplify this as simple. Lee is simply as I can. Now up here, it's really cool. It actually shows you it knows somehow what your
cameras settings where you can always check here, That's the aperture that was your shutter speed,
that your ISO, it even tells you what
lens you are using. If you don't know
lenses, the millimeter, the higher the number, millimeter just means
more zoomed in. If it's a low number
with a millimeter, it means it's really zoomed out. Okay, that's what we need
to now balances right now. Okay? First thing you can do here is you already know
this word exposure. If you grab this slider here
and bring it to the left, it will bring the exposure down. It will make the photo darker. If you're bringing to the
right, it'll make it brighter. If you think your photo is
a little bit too bright, little bit too dark when
you took it, no worries. Breath. You can adjust the exposure later by using this
little slider. Don't go ridiculous because you will completely
ruin the shot. But you can see how far you can adjust
each of these things. The next one is contrast. Contrast is the difference, is how different the brightest and darkest
parts of the photo are. So if the contrast
is really high, you will notice that docs get really dark and the
bright skin really bright. Or if you go the other
way, it will make, it, will make less
difference between the brightest and the darkest. So now they look more similar. So if you want something
soft or whatever, if you don't want the docks to look to dock with the
Bryce, look too bright. You can lower the contrast
or you can increase the contrast if you want more of a punchy boom effect
with the brightness. And now these next four things, it's amazing the detail to go into in this program
because literally these next four things
are all exposure. But you're adjusting the
exposure in four parts. For example. The whites here. If you bring this, it will
only make the brightest, most widest parts of the
photo brighter or darker. See everything that was,
that was the closest to white is being made brighter
or you can make it darker. It will make, it will make
the brightest parts darker. But notice how the darker parts do not get affected,
only the bright parts. There's the blacks which
will make the darkest parts, the most blackest parts of
the image brighter or darker. And you'll notice the
blacks get brighter. But you're, the widest parts don't necessarily get
affected that much. Okay. Then highlights and shadows
are sort of in-between. Highlights would be the
lighter parts of the image, but not the absolute
whitest, lightest parts. Okay. And then the shadows are
the dark parts but not the absolute blackest doc
is depths of **** parts. Okay. And this is where you're
cooking comes in. It's just a matter of how
much salt should add, a little bit of pepper. Let's just mush bit of
extra glutenin there. Let's just look at emotion
around. All look at that. Oh, yep, yep, yep. Yep. Boom. You say, I've just
played around with that. You're doing something
totally random. And this is the effect
that it's given me. Now, if I go reset, it will take it all
back to the star. And you can see.
Now listen, listen. There's no exact rules
on how it should be. It is what you think
is going to give this picture the
strongest message. That message being, well, why were you taking the
photo in the first place? What do you want
this message to say? Alright. Okay, Good, good. Now, next part down here, these ones, if these
four lines here, we're subdivisions smaller
parts of exposure, then these next three, a sub paths of contrast. And that is really
difficult to understand. But let me show you texture. Texture will increase
the contrast in the smallest parts of it. If I bring out the texture,
you will notice it. This is like, this is dangerous. If you bring up the texture, it's going to bring up
all the facial features. Old little bumps that might
look good on a brick wall, makes the brick wall
look a bit more grungy. If we were going for grungy,
we would use texture. But knowing my friends,
because this is beauty, we want to actually load the texture and look what
happens to his skin. Angelic all look it just soften everything because you
removed the texture from it. You remove those
little contrasty bits. And now look at that angel, angel wings. You say. Now I think I've
overdone it because now it literally looks unrealistic. It looks too unrealistic. So you just, you just
play with it until it, it's like it's just gets
the thing you want. But it doesn't like
go totally crazy. I would like because, because I want this
to look realistic, but I don't want it to
look like, of course, you can always over edit
something and then it's just like that's not
how that person looks. Understand. You just do a little
bit, alright. And it's just kinda her face was soft before now it's just
like, oh, that's awesome. Alright, This next one
is going to increase the contrast on a
slightly bigger scale. And I cannot describe
that in words quite well. So I just got to show you, you bring this up
and you'll notice the contrast changes like that or go softer like that,
older that all like that. Say you can overdo it
in both directions. You don't even have to
touch it if you want. But I just bring it up. This is going to bring
a little bit more all year, a little
bit more pensioners. And this one, this last one. This can sort of, we'll just look at it. You bring it to the
left. It's going to make it a bit more
hazy and foggy. Bring it to the right. It's going to delete
haziness and fogginess. You don't have to use these controls if
you don't want to, but they are there. There's so much detail
in this program. You don't have to learn it all. I'm just trying to just show you some of
the basic things. And then yeah, you
just play with it. I want you to play
with this stuff. Okay. Please. For the love of Sainsbury's, just play it, play with it. Alright, I need a quick coffee. You do too. Let's take a break. Okay, welcome back. Good. So you enjoyed yourself. Now, let me show you
some other things. I'm now up the top here. You will see these two
little thing is this can adjust the color if the colors in your
camera, we're not right. If it looked a bit
too warm or too cold. Like if there was
some strange colors happening in your photo
when you took it, you can use these
color things and it will slightly adjust the colors. This will make it a bit colder. So make it a bit warmer. Again, you don't overdo it, but you can just make
slight adjustments if you want it to be a
little bit more warmer. Warmer colors tend to
give the feeling of joy, happiness, but block
holders bit more like, oh my God, my life sucks. You know, depending
on the effect you want to give to the photo. And then down here, it can adjust the colors
in a different way. Now, also you had this
little thing here. If you click on this and you click on something in the picture that's
meant to be white, then the computer
will try and adjust the colors for you to get it
perfect, the perfect colors. It's called white balance. It tries to get the
color white is looking perfect because of the
color white looks white. Every other color in the
photos should be correct too. Because every other
color comes from white. That's yeah, don't think
about that too much, but that's what that is. So you click on here. I can get can you not interrupt
me while I'm talking? Good. Now. Great. See, just by clicking
on something white, it's adjusted the
colors very slightly. And now his skin
looks a bit more pinkish like it should
be more realistic. Good, That's what
these two colors day. Good. Down here. You can adjust the colors. How much color there
is in the photo, not what color it is, but how much it is. Saturation will just just, just pour in the color. It will up the colors. Or you can go in the other
direction and it will take away the colors even to complete black and white if you'd
like it in black and white. This other one, vibrance,
it's similar to this one, but just to, just
only certain colors. This one is a bit more subtle. Notice like known
as, known as much. It's a bit more of a smaller
effect that it does. Literally this dictionaries
on this stuff. But really you just look at it and you see if you'd like it. Does that aid the composition? Does that take away from the composition
you're trying to create? That's the first section. Alright, well done. I hope you've survived. And as you can see, there
are all these other menus. I'm not gonna go
into all these other menus because they just, they get super advanced and
you should explore them peas self and literally
just play with it. Just play with it. One of
my favorites is this thing. This is called the wiggly worm, because you click on this
line and you wiggle the line. And as you wiggle it,
if you bring it up, it will make things brighter. If you bring it down,
it makes things darker. And depending on where on
the line you're wiggling. See I can bring this down. Then if I let go of my mouse, it will keep it like that. Then I can click again on it some other path and
wiggle and other pot. And as you can see, all this is doing is adjusting the exposure. But in a different way to just the slider
thing is, you see, you see how much, you know, how, how many options
this program gives you. You don't need to know this. But as you just keep practicing, you will just try new things and you would just
discover, oh, that's cool. Or know, that sucks. Never touch it again. If you don't like any of
these effects that you created in a certain menu, you can just click this
little on-off button. It will turn off the
effect just for that menu, but it won't disturb
anything else. Okay, this other
one is really cool. This is colors. As you can see. This is all breakdowns
of this same **** thing. Okay? So this worm thing here, this was another way to adjust your exposure and your contrast. This next menu here is just
adjusting your colors. But now there's
even more detail, because here you can choose how much of each color
is in the photo. Oh, I just want I want to take out all
the orange and the photo. That will only take out
the orange or I want to increase the Red Sea, you can really destroy it. But if you just tinker
with it a little bit, you can just like round and
you can see what it can do. This other one luminance, this adjusts the brightness of
each individual color. And literally these presets
and these filters are just different combinations of all these settings
being tweaked. You can see why there's
so many different presets and so many different
filters possible. Because it's, it's, it's, it's all the possibilities when combinations of all
these settings. And this program allows
you to do it all. You don't have to do this, but I'm just showing
you what is possible in this cool program detail. This one is important. If you
find it looks a bit soft. I mean, or the focus
wasn't just quite right. You can go to this thing
sharpening and turn this up and it will make the photo
sharper more clear. Okay? If you find that there's like little spiky
bits of noise and gross. You can pull this
one noise reduction and it will smooth out. It will smooth out things. I don't know if
you can see this. Are there we go. It's made everything smoother, including the skin,
which is lovely. Of course, don't overdo it because then it
starts to look fake. But again, you can, if you want full effect,
just go full effect. Hey, hey, look at that. I'm perfect now it looks
literally like a painting. You say the amount
that you just smooth out all the imperfections. Okay. You can use that too. And there's other ones which
I'm not gonna go into, but it's just like just, just see what happens, just see what happens again. Another one affects, affects. This gives you the
option to, um, you can, you can, if you bring
this down to the left, it darkens all the
sides of the picture. This might be useful
if your composition, if you want to put more
attention on the middle of the photo and not pay so much attention
to the outside. Because one thing with
brightness is that your eye, when you look at
something, your eye tends to go to the brightest
parts of the image. So if the sides are really
bright, when you look at this, the first thing you see is your attention
goes to the sides, is so bright, it's
distracting from her. We want the attention
to be on her. You can use this to just all
this doctrine little bit. And then the eyes
sort of guided to bump that sort of
thing. All right. And again, you can
just like this is just all little minor settings to adjust the same **** thing. Okay? One grain if
you want to add some, some cross genus to it to
make it look like it's like an old film photograph. Then you just turn up this green thing
and then you get this effect of an old photo. So that sort of thing. I'm just, I'm just breezing over these things very basically. Because because you
can write a book about all these things and that's
what the manuals for, but I don't read the manual. I just like to figure
things out for myself. So I'm just showing
you this is here. Play with it. See what you can
create with this. And then, yeah, and then if you want
to learn specific tools, man is tutorials every
search on YouTube. Alright. Photo editing is a whole
nother level of photography. But the thing is really if you take a good photo
in the first place, it doesn't need as much editing. Because really it is in, came about in the first
place because someone was a bad photographer and they had to fix something up later. Just saying, I'm just going to reset that back
to the first image. And that's basically
what you would do. You just play with these things. Another useful thing is let's say we want to cut
down the image a bit. There's this tool
here called crop. Alright, when you click on this, it brings up the edges
and you can pull these edges and if you
wanted to crop it down, you don't want to see so much of the background if you wanted to just more focused on her,
that's sort of a thing. Okay. Also in this little thing
where it says custom, you have different
ratios which are basically the size of one
edge compared to the other. As in one-by-one
would mean a square because both sides
is equal to one. So if you want to
instant square, you could choose that one and give you the square and
move it around how you want. And then just press Enter. And there you go,
you've cut it down. You can get back into here. I get here again if you didn't
like it and click Reset. Also, if you hover your
mouse near the edges and click and pull, you can, you can rotate it. If it was a bit like off to the side and you wanted to just straighten it up a tiny bit. You can just rotate it slightly. Let go, press Enter and it
straightened out for you. Okay. Good. There you go. Now, let's just talk about a
little bit about retouching. Retouching means to touch again. Okay. Let's just say you want to remove something that shouldn't
be there. Okay? Now, if you zoom in further, up here on the view, there's the zoom in, zoom out buttons. Or if you hold
Control or Command, if you're using a Mac user command and press the
plus and minus buttons, you can zoom in. Let's just say I want
to get rid of some of these little tiny
spots on her face. Go into this thing. It's
called Spot Removal. It's a little
band-aid, can you say? Alright. Then basically you choose
the size of the area that you want to fix and you will see it adjusts the
size of this circle. Okay? So you get this circle about the size of an object
you want to remove. And then you just click and just paint over
a little spot. And when you let go,
what it's doing, how this actually
works is it copies another part and puts
it on top of it. Now if we just de-select this, you'll notice the spot is gone. It's taken another
patch of skin which didn't have a spot on it
and it's copied it over, but it makes it look like
it wasn't copied it all. And it just makes it look like it was never
there to begin with. And then you just go
through this process. I'm just going to click on that one and click on that one. Click on that one,
click on that one, click on that one, click on
that one, click on that one. And you see, you could spend, if you wanted super
perfect skin, you could just sit
here for hours. This is why they
have retouching as a profession because most of us, we don't want to sit
here forever and remove every spot
on the **** face. But you can do that say and
then look at that escape. It looks clearer. But usually I'm a bit lazy
and I would just say, oh, okay, because I know there's this texture thing. To
pull the text it down. It's just going to
soften most of it. Okay. Alright. Let me show you one more thing. Let's say, let's say, okay, I want to make I want to make an area of the
photo darker. Yes. But I don't want an old dark. I just wanted to say. Docker will the background
DACA go into this thing? It's called masking. Called masking because
you create like a mosque or a covering
over something. Then click on this
thing, gold brush, which means you can paint, as in with a paintbrush. You can paint an
area that you want. Again, choose the size of it. Now click and drag. I wanted to just,
I wanted to just, I'm just going to paint this red thing doesn't
mean anything. It's just helping you see
what areas selecting. Say I wanna select
all the area around her and just make
that area darker. So I just paint Taranto. Then let go. Good. Now you'll see what pops up here is a second set of all the controls
that we've seen before. But when you adjust this set, it's only going to adjust the
area that you've selected. Say, now if I go too far,
it doesn't look right. But if, if I just brought it down a little bit,
something like that, see now the background around
has gotten a bit darker, but she's still bright. You can. And then again, play with any of the settings and see
what it does. Say. The color I could take
out all the colors. So then around it
goes black and white. Now, I wasn't very careful
with my selection. So you can see some of
this is still in color, but you can just
continue painting. And then we'll look at that. It looks like she's in a
black and white place. If you hold the space bar, it brings up a hand and
then you can move around the picture and can
keep painting while. And then you can get in real close and get really
detailed if you want. Get around here and get it
nice and perfect, Okay? And just like you get the idea, say look at that. Good. So that's the magic and that's this other tool masking. That's another thing you can do. Alright? That's the basic use
of the controls. If you, if you find that you create and edit that
you really like, and you want to save
that as your own filter, your own preset, which you could just click
on again and it will come up in this
list and you can click on it again
to apply it again, you click on this little plus, Create Preset, call
it what you want. Make sure these
are all selected. Because you can, you'll notice these are each of the
different settings here. So you can save some settings or not all of them or whatever, and then give it a
name and go to Create. And then that will save
it into this list. And then the next time
your other photos, you can just click on it
and it's already done. You've created your own edits. Or in other way I
have this edit, I want to apply that
to this other one. If I have this one selected, then I hold Control or Command
and click on another one. It will select them both. And then you click this
button sink and it will sync. It will copy all these
settings to the next photo. Click on sync. And then it will copy it over. It did not copy our little mask thing because when I had
them both selected, I didn't have the
masking selected, but if I do select
the mask sink, then it should copy
the mask over. Now as you can see, the mask was in
this area of her. And because this photo is not she was not
positioned the same. The Mask is off
to the side here. But you can go into
the mask again. Select my mask that I'd created. Here it is. Select that mask. And you can just,
let's just say. All right, I'm going
to fill in the rest of this so the mask is there. Okay. And then if you press
and hold the Alt button, this will No, thank you. Sound effects. This will then if you
hold the Alt button and then paint the mask, it will remove the
mask so you can just have it where you want. See what I'm saying. Okay. I'm not trying to
get too complicated, but this is just all
the fabulous world of this program that you can get into and spend a lot of time. And then in the
end you can create something really beautiful. Understand? Okay, good. I want you to play
around yourself with these photos
and this program. And let me know if you
have any questions. Much love.
10. The NEXT LEVEL (Using Flash): Okay, Good. So now if you want to go completely
to the next level, let's just say you've
had a lot of practice in natural light outside, right? But there's this thing. You want to go to the
next level with lighting. Alright? The problem with always
just using natural light is that you can't
control that **** sun. It might be behind the cloud, it might move different
times of day, the shadow is going
to look different. You always running
away into the shadows. Now, to go like super pro, you want to learn how to control not only your camera and what
your camera is capturing, but the light itself. Hence, you use something
called a flash. Alright? Have you heard of
a flash before? It's this thing
that blinks, right? And then you have
this little thing on the top of your camera
called the trigger. And basically it's kinda
like you just like a spider and the thing will go off at the exact same time. If you can't see this
going up in the video, it is going off. Definitely. Sometimes the video
doesn't capture the flash, but basically the
flash allows you to control your lights yourself. Okay? So once you've got a
flash and you've got your trigger which
will connect it so you can be firing this
flesh from your camera. Then you just get your model and you get someone to
hold the flash over here. My bad us, mofo, Russian. Daniel. Okay, good. And then I'm going
to take some shots of him using the flash. Now I'm going to show
you the difference. Okay? Now I need my my
just leave that. Just leave that as you
come over here, Masha. Now, you get yourself either a stick or if you don't have a stick, you
get yourself a person. Okay? This is called a vowel, VALS, voice activated light, as in I say, Hey, Misha, come over here and he
will magically go. I could get. So now let's say I want to photograph
him. Yeah. Okay, Good. So first of all, when
you're using Flash, you first of all want to adjust your camera settings
so that first of all, you see what it looks
like without the Flash. Okay? I'm going to just take
a shot like this. See what it looks like. Okay, good. It looks kinda dark. I'm just going to
adjust my settings until it looks how I want. Okay, we got that one. Now the thing, because I want the flash to be the
main light on him, I want to deliberately make
all the natural light look darker so it's not so
distracting in the shot. So what I'm gonna do,
just my settings. I'm going to take my shutter
speed up really high. And that's going to
make him nice and dark. Now I'm going to add
my flash into it. Alright, flesh man, you come stand here and I want you to
point it right there. Alright, like that, like
a good, Let me just test. This flash goes off. Beautiful. Now if I take a shot like this
with the flash going off, you'll see now in the shot
the flash is lighting him. And what I do is I can adjust the power setting of the flesh
to how powerful I wanted. So I want it to be not so
powerful. Good like that. Now if you look at
this shot, right? It looks, it looks kind of bad. It looks like the sun's
in his face, right? So remember how
we want to shoot, like when the sun's
behind the clouds. Well, how do you get
that soft light? You get that soft
light with this thing. It's called a soft box. It's basically it's basically
two layers of clouds. The go in front of your son. And then what you do is
you take your flash. You stick it in the hall and
it feels real good about it. Now. Comitia, come and hold
that right about there. Now, let's see what the
difference looks like on here. Look at that. That is soft. It is soft light. It's almost like you've
got the sunshine here behind the cloud, but it's nice in front
of his face like that. Okay. Now I'm going to increase
my shutter speed. So it's much faster. So it's going to kill more
of that natural light. Now you notice the
flesh gets TO, but that's fine because we can then increase the
power of the flash. And I've got this cool
little thing where I can wirelessly adjust
that, which is epic. Now let's just take
some shots like this. You see a look, and here we go. I'm going to make
it even brighter. And now what it is, C, As you can see, it's
like DateTime here, but in the shot it
looks almost nighttime. That's because our
camera settings are not capturing much natural light and only capturing the flash. Now you can be totally
creative about where your lighting
is coming from. So Misha, come around to this
side now, go about there. And then you play your
creation of your composition. You use the light to decorate the person to make them look
how you want them to look. And just by playing with
different angles of the light, you see you can get
a totally different effect on the person. And now to make this
even more dramatic, I'm going to change my camera and put it into black and white. So now we're gonna get
Ultra that us see. Now you're getting like that is like gritty. Let's change it. Opposed bro, come
on to this one, put a leg up, maybe
something like this. Beautiful and make sure
you come in a bit closer, lifted up high, and then sort of sort of angle
it down a bit. That's right. And take another step in closer. Perfect. And then you look at me just like you don't
care about anything. Look at that. And then you get to some
really interesting shots and you're creating
your own light here. Okay, good. Let's
try another one. Come over here, my
man. When she'd be like just like Jill
here or something. Again, try with different poses, standing, leaning, sitting,
these sorts of things. But now you've got this extra thing
because now you've got this portable lights that you can just put
wherever you want. Let me check it there. Yeah, the fall. And then the idea I have in mind for these shots
is I want him to look like crusty and like
Gridium were berber. No smiles allowed. That's it. Perfect. Nice. And so then you include in
your composition things that are going to add
to the message of, hey, just don't care. Come around this way a bit more. So that's it right down my man. Beautiful. And then you
also think of how can I, how can I increase, get closer to that idea that I want to
communicate in my photo. Placing these BRAF, like we want to let you add things
into it that is just like, Oh yeah, the birth of this idea. We're gonna give him a lot off. Okay, good. So get that fancy. I'm just like thinking,
Hello everyone, This one now, I want you to be like down
here on that thing. So take a pause there. Yeah, That's it. Good. Let me see you come
in here like that. I want you to get real
close with the thing. That's it. And let me just see
what this looks like. And you just be chilling
that that's it right there. Nice. I'm just going to
change the angle a bit. Good and then gets
like a drag for me. And you see this this
is just like this, just like M&M ship
going off, MAN. It's like freaking awesome. So and it's quite simple. Like, like if you
practice the basics, we just posing, camera angles,
these sorts of things. But now you have
this extra rocket of just like soft light, which is totally portable. I mentioned, Let's try
another one. Just come over here and get it really high. And come into bit
closer. Almost have it like a lamp over
his head like that. And then let me see
what this looks like. And now you can try
the exact same pose. You don't have to move the pose, but just try with the
different angles of light. And you will be surprised
with how many variations of the same shot you can get without actually
having to change much. Okay, bring that thing
closer to your mouth again. That's it meant nice,
nice idea there. Hold that. Awesome. Beautiful. Take a step back a tiny
bit. That's it Right there. Good. One more time. I want you to come on this side. Try and keep the light on
roughly a 45-degree angle, whether it's to the
left or to the right, that creates the nicest
shadows across their face. That's it. Stay. Nice. Good. You got the idea. Good. If you have
access to a flash, I want you to do this. I want you to just
grab a person. Once you've done it a few times, It's actually quite simple. Just get the person. Well actually the
first step is you have the idea in mind of what kind
of shut you want to create. You find the person you want, you dress them, how you want. You give them accessories
and things like this, which are going to promote the message that you
want from the shot. You find an area that also
fits the composition. See bricks like grittiness. Then you'd like
pose them around. And then for the final pot, you control your light and you just like you just
play with that man. It's like your playground. Mess around with these
things and you'll be amazed with how much cool
stuff you can create. Okay, so try it out.
11. More About Editing: Okay, Hello, welcome
back to editing again. Alright, I want to show you a few additional things
in this video with the latest shoot which
we've done to show you some extra little features which might come
in handy later on. Okay, so we have a shoot
here with the Neil. Alright, I'm in the
library mode of Lightroom. I've just dragged and dropped
the photos into here. And if I click on here, I
can just sort of go through them in full size and
this sort of thing. Okay. We've got some very cool shots, just playing with the light. As you can see here. Like we adjust that
camera's settings, we get the angle we want. And then just by
having now control of the light and having
this soft light, we then just play with
the angles and we can create all sorts of
different effects. Just with the angle
of the light. And you can see that
you can create some really interesting, impressive shots just
using this light. It looks like it's,
uh, you know, but it looks like
it's quite high-end, but basically this is it. This is how the pros do it. You have a flash, you have a soft box,
you have your person. You just add decomposition
environments, the type of person, their outfit, what
they're holding, these sorts of things all
to create, in this case, the composition of a bad
*** look and do. Okay. Now let me show you
something here. Now, we took these shots
in black and white. And the standard types
of photos that you'll camera will be taking,
what's called jpegs. Jpegs, JPEG. That's jpeg unit, and you don't need to
know what that is, but jpeg is basically just the normal picture file
which a camera creates. Jpegs when you've got it
in light room like this. Of course you've got your
controls and you can, you can change it how you want. And just by making, playing around
with the settings, you can take this and you can, you can push it, you can, you can create more
than what was there in the original photo to better
enhance your composition. In this case, using this
little section here, which is playing
with the contrast. We can make this look
even more awesome. See just by pulling this, just by playing
with these things. And then you get this really
like really intense effects. I mean, look at that,
that was just playing with a few of these
little sliders here. And all of a sudden he's gone. This might be a bit too far, but you can see how much
cool stuff you can create just by tinkering with a
few of these settings, you see this little wiggly worm. You just pull this around. You just, you don't even
have to know what is doing, but you just play with
it and you can see, you'll be amazed the kind of like cool effects you
can create light. Look at that. Alright, and then I
think I'll just add some grain to this is going to make it look even more crusty. My goodness. So it's from that. And then I click the reset, like that's the original shot. You see, it's very cool. Now there is another
type of file, another type of photo file. In terms of what your camera
is saving the picture as. When you take the photo, which can help in the
editing later on, it doesn't help when
you're taking the photos, but later on in the editing, if you use this type of file, you can push things
even further. So you got JPEG and
then another type of file you have is called rule. Okay, I've separate these out. I drag these off the camera and put them into two
separate folders. So these are the normal ones, the jpeg pictures,
the ending there, we'll say JPEG or
JPEG or whatever. But then there's
another, you can go into your camera settings and change the type of file to roll. Now rule will have a
strange little ending here so that you know
that it's wrong. Now, RAW photos when you take them on the camera and
they look identical, there is no difference. But you will see if we
look at a jpeg shot, say this 17261, if we just want to check
the file size here, It's about five megabytes. About five megabytes. Then we got the
exact same photo, which is here, it's taken a
rule version of the photo. Your camera can be set to take a JPEG and a rule at the
same time if you want. But then look at the
size of this one. This one's almost
twice the size, more than twice the size of it. Now, what's the difference? If the picture itself
looks the same? Will you see that
difference when you put it into your editing? I get back to the library here. I've got the JPEG
folder in there. Now I'm going to bring in
the raw files as well. Let's just delete this one because it's not letting
me for some reason. Okay, I'll put in the
rule versions. Rule. Okay, go Import. Now, one thing, for instance, that R4 does, it captures much more data than you
actually see in the photo. For instance, you took one of these black
and white shots. What if later on you
wanted it in color? Will rule, contains
all the information. So then if you pull up one
of these raw versions, you will see that it's
put back the color in it. It's saved the color. And now that it's
in the editing, you don't see this normally, but now in the editing program, you can pull back the color. You can, you can, you know, you haven't lost that
color information because it saves more information
than what you're just seeing. The raw version
allows you to edit, edit it even further. Like things like the color, it will save much
more information about the color
so you can change the colors actually more than you could in
the JPEG version. Like, like this was originally the black and white show up and now we've got it in color. Now we can just mess around
with it and we have It's, it's, you just play with it. But basically, in editing, if you shoot in raw, you can edit your photos to a higher degree than you could
if you just had the jpeg, That's all you need to
know about it, okay? If you don't care much about your editing, doesn't matter. Just shoot JPEG and you, the file size will be smaller
and easier to work with. But if you really want to
push things and really like have maximum
flexibility in your editing, then if you shoot in RAW, it will allow you to do
much more than you could in the editing than you could
if it was just a JPEG, then you can get some really, really crazy degrees of editing. It's all the same controls, but you will notice slight
differences between the two. Okay. And again, I'm just doing
that, I'm just messing around. I'm just creating the
same sorts of things. Just by playing with this. And it's just, it's
just like there's unlimited flexibility
you have here. You can create something
that looks really nasty or really good. And you just, it
just gives you more. Okay. So roll. The next level after JPEG and editing with them is to
shoot your photos in R4. And then you can
just edit to them, edit them to the maximum degree possible and get
something really cool. Okay, so that's it. That's it. And I want to
show you something quickly here. Let's go on the Internet. I wanted to show you
something very interesting. I'm gonna go to my
website right now, my actual business website, where I have my portfolio
and things like this. Now, I want to show
you something. These are these are photos that I've taken over the years. Look release photos. Now I want to show you, I want
to take some interesting. This course that you're
watching has ten lessons. And I'm telling you right
now and I'm not kidding. But all these photos
which I've taken here, they just applying
the exact same steps as in these ten lessons. As in I just pose the person. I lit them with the flash
from a certain angle. And then with the camera, I just included what I wanted
and hit everything else. Like there might
have been some other strange person
sitting next to her. But now I know that doesn't
contribute to the message, so we just cut it
down like that. And then I put it into Lightroom and I just
played around with it. The contrast, the
exposure, the colors. Until I got something
that really, when I looked at
it was impactful. And that was how I decided
the photo was finished. When I got the effect of
this photo in the end, that just said, Wow,
that's impressive, that attracts my intention. That's beautiful,
or that's intense, or that's that's lovely. And it applies to everything. Okay. All these photos, I've just
applied the same steps. Pose them, liked them, and then composition
with the camera, and then some editing. Alright, I added some
extra grainy craziness here to make it
look like old film. That was just
through the editing. I played with the brightness, I played with the colors. And friends. Believe it or not, that's
all there is to it. There's of course, more
advanced things you can get. But hey, if you want
results like this, then everything
you've watched here is exactly how you do it. So get going, practice, and show me what you can do.
Luke Ayers, Pro Photographer and Filmmaker
