Transcripts
1. Introduction: Have you ever felt frustrated
with photo editing? Never sure where to start with
all the sliders and tools and options that you have
in Lightroom and Photoshop. Hi, I'm Meredith, pro
landscape photographer in Denver, Colorado. And through my
tutorials and courses, I have helped over
1,000 students improve their landscape photography
and photo editing skills. Imagine having a simple step by step workflow
that you could use to transform every photo that you take into a work of art. In this start to finish landscape photography
editing course, you will learn how
to do just that. As I walk you through
how to edit a photo of stunning Dream Lake
here in Colorado. From start to finish using Adobe Camera Raw and
Adobe Photoshop. Throughout this
course, we will cover a variety of basic
photoshop techniques that every landscape
photographer needs to know in order to
create amazing images. First, you'll learn
exactly how I shot the photo that we're
going to be editing, including the settings, the
composition techniques, and the story behind
how it was made. Next, I'll introduce you to my two part framework
for planning edits, ensuring that you'll always be able to make
adjustments that have purpose and bring a scene to life exactly as you
experienced it. We'll work through global
and targeted adjustments where you will learn
how to use light and color to create
strong visual flow that guides the viewer's
eye through your images. Throughout this
course, you will learn essential editing
techniques such as how to balance dynamic
range in your images, how and why to use
smart objects, how to use adjustment
layers in Photoshop, and so much more. With practical tips and
clear instructions, you will quickly learn
how to bring out the best in your
landscape shots. Everything that you learn in
this course can be directly applied to the raw photo editing
software of your choice, whether that's light room, Adobe Camera Raw,
or capture one. So whether you're new to photo editing or looking
to refine your skills, this course will help
you confidently edit your landscape photos
and bring them to life. If you are ready to bring
your landscape photography editing skills to
the next level, then I look forward to seeing you in the very first lesson.
2. Story Behind the Image: Talk a little bit
about the story behind this photo because I really
think that the story or the context behind when and where a photo was taken
and the experience, what you felt when you were
making an image should play a really important part in the editing decisions you make throughout the entire
editing process. What we're looking at here is a classic Colorado
Rocky Mountain scene of a lake called dream Lake. This is a very famous, popular lake to hike to in Rocky Mountain National Park
in northeastern Colorado. And any given day you might find a handful of photographers lined up on the lake's edge taking photographs
of this image. You do have to hike up there. It's not too far,
but this lake is 11,000 feet or so in elevation. So it's quite high, and these peaks back here
are close to 12,700 feet. What we're looking at here is a perfect reflection of two
peaks in the background. This is Hallet Peak on the left, and this is flattop
Mountain on the right. In the middle, there's a
spectacular valley that was carved by glaciers hundreds
of thousands of years ago. The glaciers created these really magnificent jagged peaks. If we swing over to the map
of what we're looking at, we're looking at
a topographic map here of Rocky Mountain
National Park, and Dream Lake is right here. And where I took this photograph was at the
edge of the lake right here. So we're looking directly west and the peaks in the image, Hallet Peak is right here. If we look back, this is
Hallet Peak on the left, and then flattop Mountain
is on the right. And right in the middle, all these contour
lines indicate we have this massive valley running all the way from the
peaks to Dream Lake. So we're looking west through
this valley at these peaks. We can see that it was a very calm clear morning because this perfect reflection, the water is very still. This was taken at sunrise,
the first light of the day. The first light of the day
is hitting these peaks, and it was just this
spectacular morning. Now, in order to
create this photo, I actually camped out
the night before in the park and probably woke up
around 334 in the morning, drove to the trailhead, and
then hiked up to this lake. You can see that it was
definitely worth it to go to all the effort to
make this photograph. Now, some of the
other things we can tell about the story behind this image just by looking at it is a little bit
about the ecosystem. We have some pine trees, we have some spruce and fir, mostly trees that grow
at very high altitudes. You can see a lot of trees
on the left here are dead or dying and that's because of
the mountain pine beetle, which is just devastating, ravaging the pines in the Western United States,
especially in Colorado. You can see in the back
some of the geology, what we have here
is metamorphic rock that is close to 1.8
billion-years-old, a massive expanse
of geologic time that we can see in
these mountains, and the mountains
themselves were uplifted around 70
million years ago. We have this huge
geologic timescale that we're looking
at in front of us, this whole story
of the history of the Earth on top
of the history of the ecosystem and then this
one particular morning, this one particular
point in time. So we're going to use this
story and we're going to use the emotions
that I personally experienced photographing
this scene in our editing decisions as we move forward
throughout this course.
3. Camera Settings and Composition: Going to learn the
basic settings and composition techniques that
I use to create this image. We're looking again
at the raw file before I've done any
edits to this photograph. First, let's cover the settings that I chose to
create this photo. I used a wide angle
lens because I wanted to capture this
entire grand vista. This is a expansive scene
and a wide angle lens at 21 millimeters was the
perfect focal length to get everything that I
wanted into the frame. I used an F stop of F 11, and 90% of the time I use an
F stop of F eight or F 11, especially if I'm using a wide angle lens at a
short focal length like 21 millimeters because
that ensures that you'll get the entire scene and focus from the foreground
to the background, from the reflection in the foreground all the
way to the background. I focused this scene
at about a third of the way into the foreground,
about right here. I knew by using my equipment because I've
taken a photo like this, many times before, I knew that if I used a short focal length, which has inherently a
very large depth of field, and I used an aperture of Flefn which also ensures
a large depth of field that if I focused at about a third
of the way into the scene, that I would get
this entire scene sharp from the foreground
to the background, which we're usually
trying to achieve in these expansive grand
landscape scenes. Those three settings ensured, I get the entire depth of
field in this scene captured. I used a shutter speed of one 13th of a second
and I didn't have to worry too much about shutter
speed here because the water was so still that there
wasn't really any movement. If I want to make these
clouds even sharper, which for me, they're
sharp enough. I could have used a faster shutter speed and in
order to do that, I would have raised my ISO. But the shutter speed wasn't very important because
nothing was moving very much. I used an ISO of 64, which was the base
ISO on my camera, which ensured there was no noise introduced into the image. I used a white balance
of 7,550 Kelvin. The reason I chose that particular white balance
is I just tried to match the white balance
that I saw with my eyes with the white
balance on my camera. I would recommend you set
your white balance on your camera to Kelvin,
if it's not already, and just dial the Kelvin up and down so that it matches
what you see with your eye. When you go into Photoshop or you go into Lightroom or ACR, you have as close to depiction
of reality as possible. You're really working
with a clean slate. You don't have to make major adjustments
with the temperature. If you're a little
confused of how and why I chose all of
these different settings, I cover this extensively in my exposure
fundamentals course. That is all broken
down in that course. But hopefully, this makes
sense to you at this point. Let's talk a little bit about
the composition techniques that I used in this photograph. The one that jumps
out immediately is the horizontal symmetry. You'll notice that this was such a calm clear morning
and the water was so still that I have a
virtually mirror like reflection in the water of
the peaks in the background. This type of horizontal
symmetry just means there is a perfect reflection
across a horizontal axis, which would be this
horizon line right here. Symmetry, such as radial or vertical or horizontal symmetry
like I've used here, is a really fantastic composition technique
that you can use to create balance and harmony
and stability in an image. Whenever you find any type of symmetry in your composition, I highly encourage
you to use that to your advantage because
you don't necessarily find it very often in nature when you have
a very chaotic scene, like in a forest scene, but in a scene like this where you have a very clear
calm warning and a perfect reflection can create a really
strong composition. In addition to
creating more balance and stability in a composition, symmetry can also simplify
your composition, which is often desirable
in landscape photography, which can be overly chaotic. These types of
symmetrical compositions can reduce distractions and help you to focus
your viewer's eye and attention to what you want
them to see in the scene. In this case, like we've
talked about previously, we want to draw the
viewer's eye to the reflection and the
peaks in the background. We don't really want a lot
of distracting elements around the margins of the frame or in any other
areas of the frame. This simple horizontal symmetry really simplifies this
composition overall. Once we crop out these
areas right here, it'll become even more symmetrical and even
more simplified. The other composition technique
that I use that I want to point out is how
I use leading lines. You might typically think of
leading lines like trails or rivers or anything
winding or you know, logs, things that might draw you from the foreground
to the background. But here, the more subtle leading lines
that I've used are these lines that come from the outer edges of the
frame from the left side. This line moves from here, from the outside in towards the really center of attention, the direction that we want to move the viewer's eye toward. We have leading lines
that move from here towards the main subject where we want to lead
the viewer's eye. Also, this horizontal
line moves us inward. This line from the right edge moves us in towards
the subject and also from the right corner
towards our reflected subject. These types of leading lines, if you really pay attention, if you really start
to look for them, you'll start to find
them everywhere, even if they might not be a physical object in
the foreground. They can also be reflections
and shadows and horizons, ridge lines, things like. Understanding these composition techniques and the settings that I use to create
the raw file that we're going to be editing
will hopefully lay the foundation so that you understand why I made the
choices I made in the field, so that as we move forward
through the editing process, everything makes sense from what I did starting
as I set up my camera in front of this
scene all the way to the final image
that we're going to be saving in Photoshop.
4. Planning the Photo Edit: Lesson, we're going
to plan out how we're going to edit
this photograph. I'm going to show you my
two part planning framework that I personally like to use so that I have an idea
of what I want to do before I go into Photoshop
and start making my edits. I found that it
really helps to have an overall plan or general
sense of what I want to edit and how I want to make those edits before I jump
into my editing workflow. Because if you're like me, when you look at a raw
file straight out of the camera and you open it in Adobe Camera
Raw or light room, it can be pretty
overwhelming because it's staring at a
blank canvas and not knowing where to
start because you have virtually unlimited
amount of tools, sliders, things that you can
use to edit a photograph. We're going to simplify all of this into a two part framework, and I hope that helps
you out and take some of the overwhelm out of the
whole editing process. So let's jump right
into this framework. The first part of this
framework is the questions. And we're going to ask three specific questions
that are going to help guide us in the editing decisions that
we make moving forward. The first question is, what is the photo about
and how can I show that? Another way of
thinking about this is what is the point
of this photograph? Why did you even take this
photograph in the first place? This is really something
that you should answer in the field when you are
creating the image, such as when you're setting
up your composition. It's very important
to ask yourself, why am I taking this
photograph? What is the point? But we can emphasize this
in our editing workflow because there's lots of
things that we can do to help the viewer understand
what we were trying to say. Again, another way
to think about this is what is the idea behind the photograph or what is the
story I'm trying to tell? Is are some other questions that go along with
this first question. The second question is, what emotions do
I want the image to evoke and how
can I evoke them? This is extremely important,
at least in my opinion, because I think when we help the viewer have more of an emotional response
to the photograph, it helps them connect on a deeper level to
the photograph. I find this is one of
the key elements of what makes a photograph a
piece of fine art. It's partly it's the idea, but it's also what is
the feeling behind it? What do you feel when
you look at this image? A good place to start in order to answer
this question is, what were you feeling when
you took the photograph? What were you feeling
when you made the image, when you were standing there in front of a beautiful scene? What did that feel like? What
was the experience like? How can we translate that to the viewer of the photograph
once we finish our editing? The third question
is what journey do I want to take the viewer on
and how can I guide them? This is a question
that somewhat overlaps with what is the story
you're trying to tell, we talked about in
the first question. But this is where I want
you to think about, where do you want the viewer to look throughout the frame? What do you want the viewer
to pay attention to, and where do you want to take
them throughout the image? Do you want to take them
from the foreground to the background like we often
do in a grand landscape, maybe from the outer edges, towards the center of the frame? Where do we want to take
the viewer on a journey? And we can do that through these several editing techniques that I'm going to show you
here throughout this course. The second part of the
framework is the tools, and the tools are
what we're going to use to answer
these questions. You'll notice these questions before I move on to the tools, these are all two
part questions. We're first answering the what, and then we're
answering the how. And the tools,
there's three tools that are going to help you answer the how of the questions. This will all start
to make sense as we look at an example. These three tools
include light, color, and contrast, and that can
be tonal or color contrast. We're going to use
these three tools, like I said, to answer the
how of these questions. How do we tell the story? How do we evoke emotion? How do we take the
viewer on a journey? And the way you can
think about this, summarized this in
this table here. If we look at this
table, it breaks down how we can use light color and contrast to guide the
viewer's eye through the image, to create visual flow, and to either create an area of an image that
we want the viewer to be attracted to or an area that we don't want the
viewer to be attracted to. So starting with light, the most important thing to understand about
light when you're adding light or darkening
parts of your image, brighter parts of a photograph are going to attract the eye. If you think like sunrise, the sun on the horizon, your eye is going to be
immediately drawn to the sun because it's the brightest part
of the photograph. On the other side of that, if we have a very dark shadowed area, the eye is not going to be
naturally drawn to that. If you want to hide
a part of your scene or make it of lesser
importance in your photograph, then one way you
could do that is by darkening it down or
keeping it darker, maybe in a more shadowed area. The second tool, color is another way we can move the
eye and create emotion. Now, the eye is attracted to saturated, vivid, bright colors. You think of direct light
hitting a mountain peak like we're going to see as
we edit this photograph. That's where the eye is
going to be strongly attracted to these
very bright colors. The eye is also going to be
attracted to warm colors. Reds, oranges, yellows, warm colors are going to be the first thing that the eye
is going to want to look at. We can use this to
our advantage to draw the eye towards what
we want them to see. For example, in the image that
we're going to be editing, we can emphasize the peaks or
the subject of the image by introducing some yellow orange warm colors into the peaks. On the flip side of
that, colors that are muted and desaturated
like grays, pastels, they are not
going to attract the eye. We can draw the eye away from certain parts of the frame
by desaturating the colors. To go along with
that, colors that are cooler like
blues and greens, they are also not going to
attract the eye as much. If we have darker shadows, we can cool them down a bit, again, to draw less
attention toward them. And our third tool contrast, tonal and color contrast. Objects that have more contrast are naturally going
to draw the eye. That can be tonal contrast, a big difference between
bright and dark tones, or it can be color contrast. Colors that are on the opposite ends sides of the color wheel, for example, orange and
blue or red and blue. When those two colors
are next to each other, they're going to be very
attractive to the eye. The eye is going to
want to immediately jump to that contrast because
it looks interesting. On the other side of that, when you have very low contrast, or more muted tones, if you have a very
even distribution of tones or you don't have very
bright and very dark tones, or if there's very
little color contrast, if most of a color in a particular area is
a very similar shade, for example, a similar
shade of green, that's not going to be very
attractive to the eye. So using all three
of these tools, we can create movement
of the viewer's eye and attract attention and emphasis
on parts of the image, like the subject
that we want to draw attention to and tell
the story about and away from certain areas
that we don't think are interesting or don't support the story that we're
trying to tell. If we look at this
two part framework, as we move forward, we're going to answer
these three questions, and then we're going to use these three tools to
answer those questions. Let's look at the
photograph that we're going to be
editing throughout this course and walk through this framework
so you understand the process and
how I work through this process if I were to sit
down and edit a photograph. First, let's answer
the first question. What is the photo about
and how can I show that? To me, this photo is about the beauty and the
majesty of this scene. This is just such a spectacular,
awe inspiring scene. It's almost surreal. It's almost
overwhelmingly beautiful. At least when I was
there in person, it felt overwhelmingly
beautiful. You were almost dreaming this up and that's
likely why it's called Dream Lake and why it's such a famous location
because it is so incredible. This scene in terms of subject matter to me
is about the peaks in the background and
the valley and this beautiful morning light hitting the first light of
the day hitting the peaks. This extremely calm
morning because we have this perfect
mirror like reflection, the water isn't moving at all. I'd also say that
it's about optimism, transitions from dark to light the beginning
of a new day. These are elements that I
want to incorporate and think about as I start to edit this
photo as I make my edits. Now, how do we show what
this photo is about? How do we show this? Second
part of this question. Well, we can show
that through light, so we can draw attention
to these peaks by lightening them up
a little bit more. They already are naturally lighter than the
rest of the scene, so they already naturally
draw attention, but we can add to that to
create even more attention, more emphasis of what's
already occurring. We can also lighten up the reflection to show
how clear and how calm the water was and brighten
the reflection in the peaks because I
think that's really a central part of
the composition. It's really a central part of the story that we're
trying to tell. I would also add some warmth
and saturation to the peaks, both in the background
and in the reflection, just to again draw attention by creating that
warmth and that saturation. Remember, the eye is drawn to those warmer more
saturated colors, and then cool down
the shadows a bit. There is a little bit
of a warmer color cast, in my opinion to the shadows. So we can create a little
more color contrast and depth by cooling
down those shadows. And finally, for contrast, I would add a little more
contrast to the reflection, especially because the
reflection is closer to us, naturally, it would be perceived as having a
little more contrast, maybe a little bit more in
the background, but again, not too much because I don't
want to look too unnatural, maybe bring out some of
the detail in the shadows, a little more contrast without brightening them
up too much again, because these areas
on the sides, they're not really playing
an important role in what we're trying to show what
this image is about. All right, our second question, what emotions do I
want the image to evoke and how do I
want to evoke them? Well, I made a list here
of all of the emotions that I personally associate
with this photograph. They may or may not be the same for you and
that's okay because emotion is really one of the most subjective
parts of art, in my opinion, what you
feel looking at this, might not necessarily
be what I feel or felt, but that's okay. That's part of what
makes art art. Just to briefly run through
some of these emotions, I'd say awe, amazement. There's lots of drama. The same time, it's balanced by this serenity, this
calmness, tranquility. And finally, there's like
I mentioned earlier, there's a dreamy aspect to this. It's almost surreal. I want to add an element
of this image being ethereal and we can do that using certain editing
techniques, as you'll see. For example, we can add light. We can add some softer
light to the peaks, maybe some warmer light to give it more of
that dreamy effect. We can add bolder colors. Because we're trying to
emphasize the drama and the awe inspiring magnificent
aspect of this scene, we can add some bolder colors, especially into the subject, the peaks in the background. In terms of contrast, we can reduce the contrast
in certain areas. I would say maybe in the
clouds a little bit, can bring out some detail, but I don't want it to
be overly contrasty. I want it to have a
little bit of a glow, a little bit of a dreamy look, especially where the
light is hitting. One technique we can use to do that is called the Orton effect, as you'll learn about
later in this course. But we want to maintain
the drama while also introducing some of this
dreamy tranquility effect. We can do that
using these tools, three tools in these
particular ways. Finally, what journey do
I want to take the viewer on and how do I want to
guide them on that journey? Well, typically, in a grand
landscape scene like this, I almost always try
to take the viewer from the foreground
to the background. We don't have any necessarily
physical foreground here in the sense that
we have rocks or trees. This is a reflection, so it's a little bit different
than if you had maybe the shoreline or some
plants or flowers in front. But I do still want to take the viewer from the reflection, which I do think plays a central role in
telling the story here. From the reflection all the
way into the background. I want the eye to
essentially move from down here all the
way to the back here, and then maybe explore some of the detail and the shadows. But for the most
part, we just have this line from front to back. We also have some of
these leading lines moving in you know, from the reflection moving us if we look leading line here, from the outer edges in. Perhaps a journey as well, we can anticipate the
viewer might be drawn from the outer edges of
this photograph to the middle and then
up and then down. Because this is a nearly perfectly horizontally
symmetrical composition, I'd say that there's
more than one way that the viewer might
approach this scene. But for the purposes
of laying our edits, I'm going to focus on drawing the viewer from the
foreground to the background. All right, so how do we guide the viewer on this journey
using our three tools? Well, again, you'll notice
that this is a lot of overlap, but we're going to add some light into the areas we
want the viewer to focus on, again, to draw attention. Warmer colors to the peak desaturate some of the
colors in the midground and the shadows and we can add some more contrast
to the reflection, maybe a little more contrast in the clouds in the
peaks back here, again not overdoing
it so that we still maintain that
dreamy soft look. But overall, the tools
that we're going to be using to answer the how of each of
these three questions, they're going to
be pretty similar. Adding light warmth to
the main subjects and desaturating and
darkening and cooling the areas that we
don't want the viewer to focus on the shadows. That's the basic
framework that I use. This will give us a
foundation as we step into our editing workflow of what we want to
focus on first. We don't feel overwhelmed with all of the
different tools and sliders and techniques
we can use in Photoshop. We can just focus on answering
these questions and using our answers that we
just answered in this framework to guide
our editing decisions.
5. ACR vs Lightroom - What's the Difference?: In this course, we're
going to be using three Adobe applications to
manage and edit our image. We're going to use Adobe bridge, Adobe Camera Raw,
and Adobe Photoshop. You'll notice in
all of my courses, including in this course, I prefer to use ACR as my photo developing application
instead of light room, but they operate
almost identically. If you are a light room user, everything that you learn in this course when I'm going
through Adobe Camera Raw, developing the image
in Adobe Camera Raw can be applied to Lightroom. They operate on essentially
identical processing engines and all of the tools and sliders are in almost the
exact same places. But in this lesson, I just want to walk you through
the differences and the similarities of
light room versus Adobe Camera Raw and introduce bridge if this is an
application that's new to you. I cover all of this in my Photoshop course where I walk you through step by step
how to set up bridge, my entire workflow, moving from light room all
the way to Photoshop. If you watch that course,
you'll see that I use Light room specifically to
organize my photographs. I don't use it for editing. If you are a light room user, you're probably familiar
with the Develop module. Adobe Camera Raw essentially works as the same thing
as the developed module, but it's Photoshop's version. In other words, Adobe Camera Raw is a plug in that Photoshop uses because we can't edit raw files
directly in Photoshop, like we can in Lightroom. We use Adobe Camera Raw so that we can make
all of the edits, all of the developing
settings in Photoshop without having to
actually be in Photoshop. This will make a
little more sense once I walk you through
how this works. Right now I am in Adobe Bridge and if you don't
have Adobe bridge, then you can just
download it from your Adobe Creative Cloud. If you have Photoshop, you likely have the ability
to download bridge. If you go, for example, this is my Creative Cloud
here and you go to Apps. These are all of
the apps that are included in the subscription. If you have Photoshop
and you have light room, you should be able to go
into the applications and Creative Cloud and find
bridge somewhere in here. Here is bridge and you can install that clicking
the button here. I already have it installed,
as you can see here. Essentially what bridge is, it's a way to view
images, to view files, it's particularly
useful for viewing raw files that you want to
open up into Adobe Camera Raw. You can see here I have
all of these files that I've actually exported
out of Light room. I have this file on my
hard drive where when I'm done organizing my photos and importing them
into Lightroom, I will export them into this awoler exported
Raw files folder, and I can just view
them in in bridge. If we go to folders, these are just my favorites. If I go to folders, these are all the folders on
my hard drive and you can select the folder
where you have your raw files. I like to export them
because I like to have them separate from my
entire raw catalog because I don't want to create
the risk of accidentally deleting or permanently
editing any of my raw files. I export them a duplicate
out of light room, put them in this
raw files folder, you can see it's my favorites. These are all of
the files that I want to edit in
Adobe Camera Raw. Here is the image
that we're going to be editing in this course. Like I said, bridge is just a way to view
all of our files. Once you have the file in
mind that you want to edit, in order to edit in
Adobe Camera Raw, if I double click
on this thumbnail, this raw file will open
up in Adobe Camera Raw. Now we can develop this Raw file before we
open it in Photoshop. Again, this is just a
Photoshop plugin because we can't edit raw files
directly in Photoshop. Now, if you're a
light room user, all of this might
look pretty familiar. These are all of the nearly
identical adjustments that you can make on a raw file that you can make in Lightroom. You'll see that there
are different panels or modules on the upper right
hand side of adobe camera raw. We have Edit, we have
crop, we have heel, and then we have mask and
you don't have to worry about the ones that are
below the masking panel. We'll cover all of these
throughout this course, crop heel and mask. What I want you to pay
attention to here though, if you are a light room user is if we swing over
to light room, what we have here
is the image that we're going to be editing
in Adobe Camera Raw. This is just this raw file of Dream lake that I have
open in Lightroom. Again, Light room I just
use to organize my photos. I don't use the developed module because that's what we're
going to be using ACR for. But if I go over to
this developed module, you'll notice that if we
are in the edit panel, all of these panels here are
the same or almost the same. We have basic tone
curve color mixer, color grading,
detail, and so on. We compare that to
Adobe Camera Raw, it's nearly identical. If I open one of these
panels, for example, light, you'll see we have
these exposure sliders, all of the light
adjustment sliders, very similar to light room. If we swing back and
open the basic panel, we have exposure contrast, highlight shadows,
whites, blacks. They are divided up a
little bit differently. If you want to access
vibrant saturation, texture clarity,
we'll find those in Adobe Camera Raw
by going to color, so we can find the vibrant
saturation slider effects, we'll have the texture
clarity dehaze, so if you can't find something, if I'm showing you something
in Adobe camera raw and don't immediately
see it in light room. Just start to open your panels and you will likely
find that slider. For example, the tone curve, we open the tone
curve in Lightroom, and then we open
the curve in ACR, it's all very, very similar. Hopefully, as we're
working through this, if you're using Lightroom,
it'll come to you very easily. I would highly
encourage you, though, if you are very
serious about becoming a more experienced a more
skilled photo editor, I would encourage you to use Adobe Camera Raw in
Photoshop instead of light room just
because it will give you more flexibility
in your editing. I'll give you a little
bit more control, and we'll talk about some of the advantages of using this
method of using bridge, ACR and Photoshop
instead of just using light room and then maybe opening up into Photoshop. We'll talk about some of those advantages
throughout this course. We'll start to see why this method is beneficial
in a lot of ways. If you want to start
learning this method, definitely go watch
that Photoshop course where I teach you how to set all of this up and how to walk step by step
through this workflow. All right. Let's close
all of these up. The next thing I wanted
to briefly show you is how these different modules
are the same in Light room. We have crop. We go
over to Lightroom. We have this cropping
module here as well. We also have the heal module. We can use all of the
different healing tools which you'll learn
about in a little bit. We click on this eraser, we have access to
these healing tools. Finally, the masking module. If we click on
this little circle with the dots around it. This is how we're going to
make our targeted adjustments. Don't worry about this for now what all of these
different things mean. Just understand that what
you're seeing here is going to directly apply to
what you see in Lightroom. When I go into the
masking module in ACR, you just go into the
masking module in Lightroom and you will have
all of the same options. As a review, I use Adobe
bridge we cancel out of ACR. I use Adobe bridge
to view my files, my raw files that
I want to edit. Then I use Adobe bridge as a access point to get
into Adobe Camera Raw. I double click on the
image I want to edit. I use ACR to develop
the image and then once I'm done developing
the image or mostly done, then I open into Photoshop
by clicking this button. Then this image will open
up into Photoshop and I can make my further adjustments
into Photoshop. As a final note here, as you probably know, Adobe updates their software
quite frequently. This course was filmed
in October of 2024. If you're watching
this course in the future maybe a year
or two into the future, some of this might look
a little bit different. It would be impractical
for me to go and re film every course over and over every time Adobe
made an update. But the important thing to
understand is that they, all of the concepts
are the same. For the most part, all of
the tools are the same, the icons are the same. And nothing changes that much. But if you do have questions, send me a message, let
me know in the comments, and I will help you work
through any confusion that you might find when you're trying to figure
out what tools are where, if maybe something has changed. But hopefully, Adobe doesn't
make a huge update where it just changes
everything completely and it makes it
confusing for everyone. With that, we'll get
to the exciting part and start to edit this image.
6. Global Adjustments: First thing that we're
going to do to edit this image is make some
basic corrections. We'll start by going
to the optics panel. If you click on
this little arrow, this panel will open up and
you'll see two check boxes. The first is remove
chromatic aberration, and the second is use
profile corrections. We're going to check
both of these. I'm not going to
go into too much detail about what these do, but they essentially remove any lens distortions
in the image. You'll want to check these for virtually every
image that you edit. We'll close this optics panel back up when we're
done with that. We'll go up to profile. For profile, I almost
always choose Adobe color. If you click on this box, you'll see other options of different profiles
that you can use. I would suggest using one
that is relatively flat. You can start from a
pretty neutral state before you start
making your edits. You pretty much
have a clean slate. Adobe color works pretty well
for what I visually like. Once you choose your profile, we'll next go to our
crop tool here and I just want to make sure that the horizon line is
perfectly straight. If the horizon is not
exactly straight, you can use this angle tool to tilt your image
from side to side, line it up with
one of the lines. It looks like
something like that, just a slight adjustment, something like that, looks
a little bit more level. If you have trouble determining if your horizon is
perfectly level, you can use this straighten tool if you click on this
straighten tool, you click on one side
of your horizon. If I click here on the left
side and drag it all the way across to where the horizon
ends on the right side, you'll notice that it tipped
it to the left a little bit. I rotated it left. That made the horizon
horizon perfectly level. Once you level your horizon, you click Enter and you'll be taken back to
the main controls panel. Now our horizon should
be pretty straight. The next thing we're
going to do is jump into our light panel. We're going to make
some global adjustments on the exposure. We open our light panel, you'll see all of these
different options here, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows,
whites and blacks. Now, these different
sliders are going to adjust all of the different
tones on the histogram here. We have the whites,
the highlights, the mid tones, the
shadows, and the blacks. The first thing that I typically do when I am adjusting
the exposure in an image is I pay attention to the darkest
parts of the image, and then I increase
the exposure so that those darkest parts
look natural to my eye. If I lift these up somewhere about right here
looks pretty natural. But you'll notice the
problem is that we are starting to overexpose the sky, actually significantly
exposing the sky and we're even blowing
out certain parts of this image where you see red. If you don't see the parts of your image that are
becoming overexposed, Adobe Camera Raw
and Light room will tell you if you're blowing out your image by coloring
the parts that are overexposed
that are blown out. The way to see that
is to click on these little arrows on the
top of your histogram. This indicates that
the lightest parts of your image have been
overexposed and this will indicate the
darkest parts of your image are
underexposed or clipped. You can see here
there's a little bit blue in this section
of the image. Zoom out a little bit there. Right here, I have
underexposed the image. I've lost some detail in the darkest parts of this photograph and
that's really because I couldn't capture the
entire dynamic range of this particular scene
and just one photo. I almost did that little bit of clipping in the Blacks
isn't that big of a deal. Now, one thing I
want to point out a lot of photographers when they're editing
a scene like this, instead of increasing
the exposure, we're going to fix the
sky here in a minute. Instead of increasing
the exposure, they will lift the shadows. You'll notice if I
lift the shadows, the shadows don't look quite as natural as when I
lifted them with the exposure. The reason for that is
because in the shadows, we don't just have shadows. The parts of the
histogram right here, we don't just have shadows. We do have some lights and maybe even some
highlights that are occurring in the regions that
the slighter is adjusting. So one way we can see this is
if we go down to our curve, if I click on this
little parametric curve targeted adjustment tool, wherever you hover in the scene, you will see what category
the tones are in. Right here we're saying these
are shadows, right here, we're seeing lights, right up here, we're
seeing highlights. We can see where these sliders are targeting when we
lift them up or down. Now the shadows, if I lift them all the
way up like that, again, it doesn't look natural
because we aren't touching the highlights and
the lighter tones that are in this region. It's just going to
look a little bit odd. At least in my opinion,
it does a little HDR ish. What we can do, like
I showed you earlier, I'm going to lift the
shadows by increasing the exposure something
to keep in mind here too is that light
room and Camera Raw do a much better job at recovering shadows than they do recovering the highlights. If you have a choice
when you're in the field to either overexpose
or underexpose, either blow out the highlights
or clip the shadows, always clip the shadows because it's much
more difficult to bring back these
highlights than it is to bring back the shadows. How do we recover the
detail in the sky and reduce this overexposure, some of this clipping in the brightest
parts of our image. What I'm going to do
is take the highlights down significantly. In this particular image, I might bring them all the
way down to negative 100. Doesn't always work
in every scene, especially if you're shooting
directly into the sun and the sun is in
the background, it'll make the sun look
very odd and fake. If you bring the
highlights all the way down, but in this scene, it brings back all the detail
and it looks quite nice. We're not seeing
any overexposure. I think a little bit in
the background here, just a tiny bit, but
that's in the snow. That's pretty negligible
at least in my opinion. What I'm going to do next is I might increase the
shadows just slightly. I'm going to bring the
shadows up just a hair, looking at what looks
most natural to my eye. My goal when I'm doing
these global adjustments is just try to make the image
look as natural as possible. If I lift the shadows
up to about 25, it does give them a
nice little lift and nice pop and it doesn't
look overexposed. Something around plus 25
looks pretty good to me. Typically, I will start to
bring the whites up as well. What the white slider
is doing is it's essentially setting the
white point in the image. In other words, it's looking at the very brightest
point in the image, which we can see at the very
tail end of the histogram, and it's brightening that brightest point and
essentially stretching out the histogram to account for that increased or
brightened white point. As we increase the white point, I really like what it's doing to most of this middle region. Is giving the trees and some of the snow a little more depth and dimension, a
little more pop. But it is causing this part of the snow to become blown out. It's clipped up here. We're losing some
detail and it's probably not very noticeable. We turn this clipping
highlighter off. It's not very noticeable, but it's really not ideal. I don't want to pull the
whites up here really at all. When you're making an
adjustment like this and it's only you like how it
looks in most of the image, but there's parts where
you don't like it. That's the main indication that this should be a
targeted adjustment, which we'll learn about
in the next lesson. That should not be an adjustment that's global that
affects the entire image. We're just going to leave
the whites at zero for now. And finally, the Blacks, this works virtually the
same way as the whites, but we're setting
the black points. We're looking at the
darkest parts of the image, which look like are
right in here and are indicated on the histogram right here at the
left end of the tail. We're raising or brightening
that black point, that darkest part of the image. I tend to personally like to
lift it a little bit, maybe Something in the range
of seven, eight, it reduces a little
bit of contrast in the shadow and the
darker ranges of the image. But I do like that softer, less contrasty shadow look. Personal preference, if
you want more contrast, I wouldn't suggest going
further than right here, the black point
is pretty much as low as it should go
without losing detail. In here, you start to
see the highlights here, indicating we've lost detail
in all these blue areas. Another trick you can do is if you hold down Option on a Mac or Alt on APC and you slide
the slider left to right, you'll start to see
where you are clipping. If we go to about right there, we're not clipping anymore. I would raise the blacks to
somewhere around plus 16, so I don't have any pure
black in this photograph. Now let's move on to our color. Again, color is something that I want to match with what I saw with my eyes and ideally want to do
that in the field, but sometimes you don't
always get it right. In this particular image, I think I did an okay job. I think I would cool it
down a little bit because originally this
area right in here looks a little bit too yellow. It's too much of a yellow cast. In order to neutralize
that yellow cast, I'm just going to slide this
to the left a little bit. I am losing some of
that nice warm color in the sky here or the peaks, but I am going to
bring that back when we work on our
targeted adjustments. Something around right
there looks pretty good. The shadows don't look
overly warm anymore. Typically, you want shadows
to have a cooler look, more of a blue cast to them, it looks much more
natural to the eye. Now for the tint slider, I personally tend to push the
tint slider more magenta. Often in these landscape scenes, there can be a little
too much green. Obviously, there's
lots of green going on because there's
lots of trees, but it can be overwhelming
to the eye for there to be so much green to neutralize that a little bit. I like to push the slider
a little more magenta, just to neutralize those
greens a little bit. Again, we're going very easy. We're making very subtle adjustments because
it's very easy to go overboard and make
the photos look unnatural. That's probably one of
the most common mistakes people make is they overdo it, especially on the color. I'll move that to about plus
three looks pretty good. For the vibrant, the vibrance is going to saturate the colors that aren't
already very saturated. Vibrant I usually push
again, not very high at all, but keeping an eye on the scene, we're just adding in a
little bit of color. These rahiles come
out of camera, very flat, introducing color
is important, but again, overdoing it like this, you see a lot of photos are very overdone with the vibrance
and the saturation. This is way too much. This is way too colorful,
does not look natural. Somewhere around
there looks okay. And then saturation
saturates colors, pretty much all the
colors in the image, so we want to go even
lighter on the saturation. Really, anything
more than plus five looks like it's too much. Again, trying to maintain a
subtle changes as possible, especially because we
can go back in with our targeted adjustments and add in color as we
feel is necessary. That's about it for color. Let's close our color panel. With our curve panel, a lot of times the whites. I like to lift the whites, I like to lift the lights. The curves just gives you more control over which parts of the histogram you are
changing the exposure of. We're really focusing on whether we're
increasing, this part, you can click on the curve and lift and that will increase the tones that
you are hovering over. We can click on this
side and drop to add a little more contrast
if we make a subtle F curve. But I do not like that
contrasty crunchy look. I'm going to control Z
and do all that stuff. Usually, I only lift the lights just to give
it a little more pop. But again, before we're losing
that detail in the snow. I'm just going to
bring that back down and we'll come back later and introduce some whites and some lights without losing
detail in the snow. We'll close our curve down
for now for our color mixer. This just allows us to target specific colors in the image. Really, what I'm
paying attention to is the colors that I
want to emphasize. We can do this with our targeted adjustments and we are going to. But sometimes I like to use these sliders just to
target a specific color. Here, I really want to emphasize the warm colors like we
talked about earlier. I want to make the colors
a little bit bolder, a little bit more dramatic. I want to draw the
eye to these peaks with warmer, more
saturated colors. I'm just going to
increase the orange. You can see here that there's quite a lot of orange
in those rocks, but again, very
subtle, very subtle. And I'm not going to touch any of the
other colors for now. The other thing you can
do is go to luminance and perhaps brighten some of the other colors
like the greens. You can see that
we are lightning, creating a little
bit more detail, a little bit more pop
in these trees here. I do like that look I will
sometimes reduce some of the saturation of the yellow because there is quite a lot of yellow in trees and foliage, even though it they
look very green. Sometimes reducing
some of that yellow might reduce some of that
yellow color cast and neutralize the yellowy cast to the green parts
of the photograph. Something like that
looks pretty good. For color grading, color grading is going to allow us to
tint our highlights, our shadows, and our midtones. I won't go too much into
color theory in this lesson. We're going to cover that
in additional courses. I don't always use the
color grading panel, but I'll briefly show
you how I would use it in this photograph if
I wanted to use it. Now, the first thing that I'm looking at are the highlights. Typically, the highlights, especially if there are parts of the scene that are being
hit by direct sun, they're going to be
warmer in color. The way that you can warm
those colors up a little bit more is by going to this
highlights color wheel. You'll just grab this little dot and bring it to one
of the warmer colors. Usually, bring it to about somewhere between pure
orange and pure yellow. This is just indicating the hue or the color
that you want to choose. Then you'll click the circle
in the center and start to drag it out to the outer
region of the color wheel. To avoid that little circle
from jumping around, you can press Shift and it'll keep that on a straight line, bring that back to little bit more between orange
and yellow shift. Then as you drag it out, it's going to increase
the intensity or this saturation of that color. For this, I'm just going to
warm it up a little bit. I'll tell you, as I do this, notice what's going
on in the sky here. It's starting to really warm up the sky and I don't
like that look. I really just want the warmth
to be on the peaks and maybe in some of the in
some of the clouds up here. I am actually not
going to use this. All you have to do is
double click in the center. We can try it out on
the shadows as well. Typically, the shadows
like I mentioned, are cooler in color, have a little bit of
a blue color cast. We'll experiment to see how our shadows look if we add
a little blue to them. Hold down shift and start to
drag this little circle out. And I actually do let's see, maybe a little bit,
maybe a little bit. It is reducing some of
the warmth that I like. I really want to have more
warmth in this image. But it does take some of that warm cast out
of the shadows. I'll keep something like this. For the mid tones, this is one you're just going to
have to experiment with. The mid tones might look
better, a little warm, a little cool, really just
depends on the scene. Usually. I found that they look better when
they're a little cooler. So something like
this might look okay. Ideally, we're trying to create
color separation between the warmer tones and the
cooler tones and this image. If we try adding a little bit of warmth to these mid tones, I don't think I'm a fan of that. If I were to use this, I would probably do
something like that, but I think I'm going
to remove this for now. I'm not really liking how that's affecting the image,
and that's okay. We're going to look at
other ways we can create color separation, warmer tones, cooler tones without
using the color grading in Adobe camera
raw or light room if you're using light room. We're going to skip
detail for now. We're not going to worry about sharpening or anything
like that for now and I did skip over effect. If we jump back up to
the effects panel, we have texture
clarity and dehaze. Generally, these sliders and
we have Vignette as well. We'll come back to
Vignette later. Generally, texture clarity and dehaze do not look good
as global adjustments. We can use these when we're creating targeted
adjustments to create more depth and to create more visual flow movement of
the eye through the image. Again, in our
global adjustments, we are going to
ignore these for now. And finally, there's one
glaringly obvious part of this photograph that
I want to correct. We have this bush right here. Also this rock down in here and this little
rock right here. These are incredibly
distracting. These are what I often
call eye grabbers. These are really distracting the eye from the main subject, the main area of the image that we want the viewer to look. What I want to do is
crop these out this is something that you can do as the first step in your
photo processing. But just before we move forward, I want to make sure that
these things are removed. Something like that
looks pretty good, but I don't like
how the balance of this image now it looks like our main subject is a little
bit far to the right, especially because
there's so much symmetry in this composition. It looks a little
bit off balance, so I'm going to go back move
this over a little bit. Let me crop this in a
little bit more and I don't want to lose too much of
this interesting sky. It looks like in order to create the centered
balance that I want here, we're still going to have
some of this bush here. We can fix that if I click the Enter button
and we crop this image. We're going to be okay
with this for now. We're going to come back
later when we touch up this image and I'm
going to show you how to remove this
distracting bush because arguably it's even more distracting now that
there's just parts of it. That is it for now though, those are all of our
global adjustments in the next few lessons, you are going to learn
about targeted adjustments. I look forward to seeing you
there in the next lesson.
7. Local Adjustments: Light: Now we're really going
to start to bring this image to life and get a little more creative
with our edits using local adjustments. You'll sometimes hear this
called targeted adjustments. Really, what that means is we're going to focus
our adjustments on just specific areas or
regions of the photograph, rather than making
adjustments that affect the entire image like we did in the last lesson on
global adjustments. These local adjustments
will allow us to modify particular
aspects of the photograph, such as color,
brightness, contrast, and will give us more control
over the editing process. This will help us
do many things, including guide the viewer's
eye through the frame, create more visual flow, and help us move the viewer's eye
to the regions of the photograph that we
want them to look at. So we're going to start
this process by making targeted adjustments of
the light in this scene. And we'll start to make
these adjustments by going over to the
masking area right here, you'll see this icon for
masking. Can click on that. You can also click on your keyboard to access
this as a shortcut. The first thing we're
going to do here, this is usually what I do first is create a linear
gradient mask. Masking, if you're
new to masking, definitely go check out
my Photoshop course where I explain
how masking works. But essentially, what it
does is it allows us to show certain parts of an edit and hide certain
parts of an edit. I'll show you what I mean
here if you're new to this. If I click on linear gradient, we'll start to see this box pop up where we have
our different masks. As we create masks, this
will start to populate with more and more masks as you'll
see throughout this lesson. So for our first mask in
this linear gradient, we're going to start from
the bottom of the scene. I'm just going to
click on the bottom of the frame and you'll
see as I click and drag and pull up that I create this mask indicated
by this red here. We can hide this overlay
by checking this button. This goes for all of the mask, but it'll just help us see
where the mask is for now. We can move this gradient
around up and down depending on where we want
it to affect the image. Now we haven't made
any edits yet. We're simply just placing where we want this
gradient to be. What I want to do here is
darken down the foreground so that we can push the viewer's
eye back into the frame. As the viewer looks
at this photograph, we want them to be directed
from the foreground to the background typically in these big grand
landscape scenes. In order to do that,
I want to draw attention away from the
immediate foreground. And I'm going to do that by
darkening down the exposure. You'll see as I darken
down the exposure, the foreground is
getting darker. We can adjust this
linear gradient mask. We can drag this down to make
it a little more narrow. If we want to concentrate, squeeze that linear
gradient together so the gradient becomes less
feathered or less soft, you could say, at
least along the edge. I think for this gradent
because we have the peaks here are now so close to the bottom of the frame
because we cropped it, I'm going to push it
down a bit so that we're not really darkening
the peaks down too much. We can fix this as
well when we start to lighten up this area
in a few moments. I'm just going to drag
this, play around, see what looks good to my eye, and I'm going to
hide this for now so I can really see the adjustment. And I'll bring this down maybe something
about right there. If I feel like I've
gone too much, which for the most part, it's so easy to
overdo these edits that I almost always
bring the amount down. This is just going to
make this adjustment more opaque or it's just
going to reduce the intensity or how much
you see of this adjustment. So I bring that down
a little bit and we click on this eye icon
to toggle our visibility. You can see before and after. We've darkened down
this foreground and it does draw the eye away from this immediate
foreground and more immediately
towards these peaks. That's what I want to happen. Another way you
can view this mask is if you just hover over
the mask right here, you'll see the red overlay pop up when you
hover over the mask. And when you're looking at this thumbnail for your
mask, what it's showing? Again, if you're new to mask, definitely go back to that Photoshop class
and learn about how mask work because they're extremely important
in photo editing. But as a review, what
we're looking at here, the black part of this mask is the part that is not
affecting the image, and the white part is the part that is
affecting the image. So white reveals black conceals. That's a way you can remember
and think about that. Now the next thing that I'm
going to do is I'm going to create another linear
gradient mask for the sky. We're basically going to do the exact same thing for the sky. If we go up to our plus
button to create a new mask, we can go back to the linear
gradient and a pro tip here, it's really good idea to
memorize these shortcuts. K for the brush mask, G for the linear gradient, and J for the radial
gradient because we'll be using all three of these and when you're doing
this on your own, it'll make your
editing workflow much more efficient and a
little bit faster. So let's just for now, we'll just click on
linear gradient. I'm going to do the same thing. I do like to tilt
it a little bit, so it looks a little bit more natural rather than
just a straight edge. If you wanted to
make it straight, you could just click
Shift and it would line it up with the
horizontal axis. But I don't mind a little tilt, and we're just
going to drop that down somewhere around there. And you lift it up again
to keep those peaks, not too affected by this, maybe shorten it up, it has a little bit
of a harder edge, maybe a softer edge. These are one of those things that you're
going to want to play around with because the more
you practice with this, the more intuitive it'll become. If it looks a little bit
confusing to you right now, just start to create these masks and see how they
work for yourself. Now, just like before, I'm just going to bring
that exposure down. I don't want to make
it super obvious the best edits are
really not obvious. You're not going to
look at this image and know exactly what I did if I edited this
properly, in my opinion. I'm going to bring that
down a little bit. Drop this down just to darken
the sky a little more. And maybe bring that amount down just so it blends a little bit better and we'll look at before and after,
before and after. Now that I've darkened down the sky and the foreground
and I've guided the viewer's eye towards
the center of this frame or at least away from the top
and the bottom of the frame, I want to next focus
on the parts of this image that I want to
draw the viewer's eye to. Now, that part of the image would be the peaks
and the reflection, we've talked about before
earlier in this course, where parts of this frame
that we want to direct the viewer's eye
would be in this area right here in this area
back in the peaks. This is really the main subject, the most important part or at least what this
image is really about. How I'm going to do this
is I'm going to start by creating a radial gradient. You could do this either with the radial
gradient or the brush. I find the radial gradient is a little bit better
because it has, as you'll see, softer
edges than the brush. I can really feather
it to make it really smooth transition as I
make this adjustment. Sometimes the brush can look
a little bit too obvious. There are ways to fix that. But just for the
sake of simplicity, we're going to start
with the gradient. What I'm going to do
is I'm just going to lift the exposure up a bit. I just want to
lighten this again, just to draw the viewer's eye to these really incredible peaks. The other thing I want to do is take the whites and lighten this so that we're really creating almost
like a luminosity mask. We're taking the
brightest parts of just this region and we're creating a little
bit more dynamic range. It gives this section of the
image a little more pop. Again, draws the eye to
this part of the image. But you'll see here that we are starting to clip this part of the snow in the reflection
and we do not want that. There's a simple
solution for this. If you find that
you want to just remove a part of the mask
that you've created, we can go to subtract and we can select the brush
this time because we just want to subtract a
small part of this mask. We can use this just
like a brush tool. We use the brush
tool in Photoshop. We can change the
size of this brush. If you right click and
then scroll left to right, you can reduce the size. You can also use the
open brackets on your keyboard to make that brush bigger and
make the brush smaller. Very quickly, how this brush works is that the
adjustment is going to be made 100% in the small circle and then it's going
to be feathered out in the larger circle. So we're going to make this
brush pretty small here. The other thing is
you want to make sure that you have feather all the way up to 100 and flow
all the way up to 100. We make this entire adjustment to this particular part
of the photograph. I'm just going to click and brush that region that
has gotten too bright. What that's going to do, as you can see from the mask here, is it's just going to remove
that section of the mask. The adjustment that we made, this exposure adjustment and the whites adjustment
is not going to be made to the part that we
subtracted from the mask. If I feel like I went
a little bit too far with that brush subtraction, then what I can do to
remove the brush or a brush stroke is go
to this eraser icon. If you click on the eraser icon, and we'll take that
brush size down. It looks like I subtracted
too much in this area. I'm just going to
bring that back, subtract that
brushed subtraction. Essentially, we are adding the overall edit back in if
hopefully that makes sense. I did go a little bit
too far with that. I'm going to go back
to the brush and then remove that section
again because again, we're just trying to prevent
this little patch of snow from becoming
blown out or clipped. We don't want to lose
any detail right there. Something like that
looks pretty good and we can look at before and after before after really
brightening up these peaks, again, drawing
attention to this area. The other thing to
know about these mass, if you're new to these, you can click and then drag them around. If you feel like you
want to move this over a little bit this way or
a little bit this way, makes it extremely easy to adjust where you want this adjustment to be made or to move around
this adjustment. We can also widen or make
this radial gradient larger. And we can take down the
amount that's being applied, the amount of these
adjustments that are being applied. Maybe
something like that. I really don't want
this to extend that far into the
middle of the frame because I really just
want this to be about the reflection in the water. We'll keep that
somewhere like that. This will counteract
some of that darkening from the linear gradient in the
foreground right here. The next thing that I
want to do is essentially the same thing that we did to the peaks in the reflection. I want to lighten up and draw more attention to the main
star of this photograph, these big peaks and the
valley in the background. I'm going to go and
create another mask. We're going to create again
another radial gradient. I'm just going to click and drag that gradient across like so. Somewhere like that
looks pretty good. I'm going to remove this overlay and we're going to do
pretty much the same thing. I'm going to lighten
this background again. You're going to see, again, we're going to
blow out the snow, but we will fix that. We
will correct that soon. I don't want to go too heavy, but something like that
looks pretty good. The reason I want to do
exposure in addition to the whites is because I want to lighten all of the
tones back here. I don't want to
add extra contrast in the back, at least not yet, because that wouldn't
look natural, especially because things
that are farther away from us have less tonal
contrast in them. And we'll talk about that
when we start making contrast adjustments
in a future lesson. But for now, I just
want to make sure that the shadows are lightened and
the lights are lightened. Pretty much all the
tones are lightened. I'm going to lift
that exposure up a bit I might lift
the whites as well. I always lifting the whites just to add a little
more dynamic range, a little more pop, and it's
really blowing out the snow. I'm not going to go
too far on that. Again, we can remove this by creating a
subtraction brush mask. I'm just going to click first
subtract and then brush, and we're going to brush out or remove with our brush any parts that have been over exposed or clipped
and blown out here. Something like that
looks pretty good. So the next thing I want to
do is I want to make even more specific, more
localized adjustments. What I want to do is bring out a little more light in some of these clouds because
these clouds are just really beautiful and
just add this element of atmosphere and beauty
to this photograph. I'm going to create a new mask. We're going to create a
brush mask and we can click this or we can click K. Now
we have a new brush mask. I'm going to
increase the size of this brush because I
really want to use the feathered portion of this brush and I'm I'm not going to
increase the exposure. I just want to
increase the white, so we're adding a little
bit more tonal contrast, a little more detail
in these clouds. I'm just going to click
around in this area here. Again, if I see something
that's blown out, then I will command Z or
Control Z on APC, Command Z, if you're on a Mac,
and maybe take the brush down a little
bit, something like that. I'm really just hitting those clouds where I want them to lighten up and maybe we can hit some of those
peaks a little bit too, that's a little bit too far. Again, if I start to see some of those white parts
getting too bright, maybe highlight these
peaks right here. Again, I'm just
going to subtract those parts that
have been blown out, subtract brush, and then just hit those overexposed areas. Looks like I got
most of them there. Let's see. I zoomed out a
little bit too much there. If I just zoom in here, we can get a little bit more
targeted with this brush. It does look I have overexposed just a few parts of this image. But let's just
ignore that for now. You're not really
going to notice that in the super
bright snow patches. There isn't really much
detail on these spots anyway. I scroll around and see if we got everything here a
little overexposed, let's see, move
some of these guys. Okay. That looks
pretty good for now. Let's take a look at all of the edits that we've done in
terms of the masking so far. If we go to the
mask panel and we can toggle this visibility
button on the mask panel, we can see before and
after, before, after. We have made quite a
significant difference here and we can
actually look at what the original image
looks like if we hit the backslash button right here is before,
and this is after. We have come a long way since we started
editing this photo. The final light adjustment targeted adjustment that
I want to make here is I want to lighten the midground up a bit
because I want to give the illusion of depth by lightening the background in
relation to the foreground. As in nature, if you
look at a scene, you'll notice that the
darkest parts of the scene are in the foreground and as we move towards the background, because of atmosphere,
it's going to get a little bit lighter
and a little bit lighter. By lightening the midground, it's going to create more depth and separation in this image. So what I'm going to do is, I think I'm going to use
the brush this time. We'll create a brush mask. We'll go to brush and I'm going to make this
brush much larger here. I'm just going to paint in the midground
something like that. It doesn't have to
be very accurate, a rough brush around
this midground. Then what I'm going to
do I hide this overlay. Is I'm just going to take up the whites
at least to start. I did over brush this, so I'm going to remove
this brush stroke. When you're using brush strokes, instead of having to create a separate brush mask
to subtract the brush, you can just use
this erase tool. I'm just going to
erase this again. Let's go back to our brush and I'm going to take this down. Something like that
looks pretty good. Keep hitting that snow there. Let's take a look at the
changes we've made here. You see how that really lightens up the lighter
tones in the trees. It gives it a little
bit more pop, makes it a little
bit more dynamic and I really like the effect of seeing more detail in all of
these trees back in here. I did clearly overdo this. Again, I'm going to erase
all the later parts that I somehow hit just to make sure we're not
overexposing that snow, just really targeting the
midground of this photo. I think I'm going to bring
the shadows up a little bit as well, not too much, we want this to look
natural, but again, creating some separation from this region towards
the midground. I think that looks pretty
good to my eye so far. Again, let's take a look at before and after, before, after. I think I'm going to
take the amount down a little bit just so
it blends together. And that looks pretty good. That is about as far as
I'm going to go right now with these targeted
lighting adjustments. As a quick review,
what we did was we darken the foreground and
the top of the image, and we lightened the
parts of the image that we want to attract the
viewers attention to. We lighten this area,
we lighten this area. The goal is to create some visual flow
from the foreground, pushing the eye back through this part that the eye is
naturally going to want to land on first and then pushing the eye back towards these
peaks in the background. In the next lesson, we are going to make more targeted
adjustments, and we're going to
focus on creating some color adjustments. I will see you there
in the next lesson.
8. Local Adjustments: Color: Lesson, we're going to continue with our local adjustments, but this time focus on our
localized color adjustments. Really the idea here is to
create more color contrast and color separation so that we can create more interest and
depth in this photograph. But the overall goal, again, always is to guide the viewer's
eye through the frame, create more visual flow. If you remember from earlier in this course, warmer, brighter, more saturated
colors are going to attract the eye and
less saturated, more muted, darker colors are going to be
less distracting. They're going to really draw
less attention in the frame. We're going to use that again to our advantage and
we're going to start by looking at the areas of
this photograph that again, we want to emphasize. Like we've talked about before, we want to draw attention to this area of the
frame, the reflection. We want to draw the eye
towards the back of the image where we have these
really amazing mountains. Now let's start from the
bottom of the frame. Again, I like to
start from the bottom up just because that's
the way we want to direct the eye from the bottom towards the midground and
then into the background. One thing that I noticed and which happens when you lighten parts of your image is that as you lighten
and reduce contrast, you will desaturate the color. If we look here and
especially in the background where the colors were
lightened quite significantly, they look more washed out. If we look at what this
image looked like before we added those
light adjustments, localized adjustments to the
lighting in this photograph, we had a little bit more
saturation, not much, but it does look more
washed out when we lightened the mountains in the back and also a
little bit here as well. I don't think quite as much. But what I want to do is introduce some of
that color back in. I want to create a
little more saturation, a little more warmth, again, to draw the eye into these parts we
want to emphasize. Again, let's start
at the bottom, instead of creating a new mask and an entirely new adjustment, what we can do is go back to the mask that we created
in the first place. Again, if we hover
over this mask, we can see that this is the masks that we created
for the reflection, the peaks and the reflection. We can click on this mask
and it will reactivate it. All of the edits that we make
moving forward once this is clicked will be affecting
this part of the image, where we have created this mask. If you remember, we just lifted exposure and we
lifted the whites. But now what I want to
do is I want to add a little more warmth I don't
want to go too high on this. We always want to make those really subtle
adjustments and really just maybe
plus two is enough. I think once we start
getting up here, it is really quite overwhelming. We don't want this to look fake. Maybe something like plus three. And then we can play around with the tint
a little bit too, maybe adding a little
bit more magenta. We have a little more
color contrast between maybe slightly more magenta
in the peaks and the green, which would be an
opposite color here. Maybe a little more
magenta and we can look at before and after, before and after. It's extremely subtle. We can add this a little more. You might not even be able
to see it on your screen. But if you are doing this
at home on an image, then you will notice those changes on your
screen hopefully. If not, maybe start to add a little bit more color there if you are not
seeing those changes. Something like that, again, maybe we can take this down. We've already taken this
down, so that's okay. That's probably why we're
not seeing it very extreme. We can bring that up back to
100 and see before, after. Now it's more noticeable. I'm going to bring
this back down to 80 so it's more blended. The other thing that
I'm going to do here is add in a little
more saturation. We added more warmth,
we added more magenta, it's warmer colors, but I want
to add in more saturation. These colors are
a little bolder, they stand out a little more and I think something
around plus five, let's look and that's really
starting to look nice. I'm going to do
similar adjustments to the background up here. If we hover over the mask, this is the mask that we made for the peaks in the background. Again, I'm going
to add some warmth I could probably go
a little stronger. I really want this to stand out without looking too overdone. Something like that,
we'll check out the magenta and we will
add in some saturation. I think that looks pretty good. We've really added some
nice color in there. If we look at before and after, you can see how much
warmer those peaks are. You can really see this
warm morning light when we talked about at the
beginning of this course, we really wanted to
tell the story of this beautiful morning,
this pristine, calm tranquil, awe
inspiring morning, and this first light of
the day hitting the peak. I do think that this color is
helping to tell that story. I think I'd like to add a little bit more warmth into the clouds because the light is reflecting directly off of the clouds, there should be a
little more warmth. We'll click on that mask. We'll start to add in that adjustment
similar adjustments, adding a little warmth
to those clouds. If we really go heavy, you can see what a
difference that makes, and you can see how
it's just touching these clouds up here. Another thing to
notice here is we're creating some color
contrast between the oranges in the clouds and in the mountains
and the sky. Orange and blue are
complimentary colors. Not going to get too much
into color theory here. It's definitely something
that you should study and learn about in
your photography. But these two colors here
really complement each other. They really look nice. Emphasizing them
is going to make a more aesthetically
pleasing overall photograph. I might bring those
down a little bit more. You can see what
the magenta does. I do like that magenta
a lot. Add a little. I want to add the saturation too much because
it is saturating the blue as well and that
looks a little bit weird. We'll take that
amount down just to blend it in and
then we'll look at before and after
before and after. Let's check out the color after. There's some nice
warm tones going on in these clouds right here. Okay, so let's move
on to the shadows. So we've warmed and
added some color, some more saturation
into the areas we want to attract attention
to draw the eye. Now let's take a
look at the shadows, kind of the areas that the
eye is going to move through, but are going to be less
demanding in terms of attention. And we do want to Make sure that these
shadows are cool enough. If you remember, shadows
are typically cooler. They shouldn't really have
a warm color cast to them. If we can cool those
shadows down, again, that'll create more
color separation between these orange
peaks, the sky. And the midground. I
think that does look quite nice to pull
those shadows, tint them a little
bit more blue, maybe a lot more
blue. I like that. Again, we're using
this mask that we created for the midground. I do think I want to desaturate the midground colors a little bit too, not too much. But any areas that are not
being hit by direct sunlight, those colors in nature, if you're out taking photographs as
you're out looking at a scene with your eye, objects are not hit by direct light are not
going to be as saturated. The colors aren't going
to be as saturated. If, for example, you were to really saturate these colors, one of the reasons that
wouldn't look good is because it's just not how colors
operate in physics. It just wouldn't look
in the real world, these colors would be
really saturated just because light isn't
directly hitting them. We're going to take
that saturation down. I would like to make a
little more contrast, a little more pop in the trees. You can see here how we're lightning These lighter
tones in the trees. I really like that effect. Let's see. We can maybe tint that green a
little bit, see what happens. I don't think I want to mess
with that one too much. Let's take a look at what
we've done to the color. Before and after
before and after, you can see we've removed a lot of that yellow
color cast that really wasn't helping in terms of the shadows in this
scene look natural. That does look much
better to my eye. We can again look at the overall adjustments
that we've made, the overall targeted
adjustments that we've made by toggling the mask visibility. We're going to look at all
of the changes we've made using our targeted or
localized adjustments. After before, after, and that's looking
pretty nice so far. I'm really liking how this image is developing, how
it's coming along. I think I'm going to stop
there in adjusting the color. Again, color is one
of those things that it's so easy
to go overboard on. I'm just going to
leave it at that so I don't start to
overprocess this. It looks very natural so far. We're going to move on, start
to look at how we can make localized adjustments
to the contrast in this photograph
in the next lesson. I will see there.
9. Local Adjustments: Contrast: We are going to continue
with our local adjustments, and this time, we're going
to focus on contrast. Like light and color, we can use contrast to create more depth
in a photograph and also guide and direct our viewer's eye through
the entire photograph. So let's jump back
into our edits. And again, like we did
in the previous lesson, we're not going to create
any new adjustment mask. We're not going to make
any more localized mass. We're going to use
all these masks that we already have in this panel. So again, starting from
the bottom of the frame, we're going to go back
to where we want to direct the viewer's eye
in this reflection. We'll select this mask. And what I want to
do here is add in a little bit more contrast and maybe a little
bit more texture. The reason for that is that when you're
looking at a scene, when you're out in the
real world out in nature, objects that are closer
to you are going to have more contrast and texture naturally than objects that
are in the background, say, for example,
in this scene here. It's going to look
more natural and it's going to create more
depth in the photograph. If we have more contrast and texture in the
foreground or in objects that are closer to us or
at least perceived as closer to us than objects
in the background. Starting from the reflection of the mountains in the water, we're going to start by looking at our effects
panel on the right. This is the first time that we've come to this
effects panel. Remember, in our
global adjustments, we didn't touch this because
texture clarity and dehaze typically only look better as local adjustments and they
do global adjustments. I'm actually going to close these down because
we're not going to be using color at
this point anymore. We'll focus on the effects. Really, when I'm using
texture clarity and dehaze, I'm more so experimenting than doing this as
an exact science. First, I'm going
to start by just rocking this texture
slider forwards and back, noticing what
changes that makes. I can see a little bit of change and what the texture
slider is doing is it's increasing the
appearance of texture without going into all the technicalities of
how texture works. It's just going to make
all of these textures and the rock here appear
more textured. If we zoom in, going to hoops. To these peaks, so
we can just see what the texture slider is
doing a little bit better. We have a lot of texture. Even though this is a reflection because this was such
a still clear morning, so the water was so
still and mirror like, we can still really
see the texture. And this part of
the image is still closer to us than the
peaks in the background. Even though again,
it's a reflection, it's still going to have
the appearance of having a little bit more texture than the identical peaks
in the background. If we look at our texture, we can see as we increase and I'm just going to overdo it
here just to make a point, you can see it gets
really crunchy. Really see that texture. Again, I don't want to do this like all of our
other adjustments. I just want to make this
adjustment very subtle. Something like that
looks pretty good. We can experiment a
little bit with clarity. What clarity is doing is
it's adding more contrast in the mid tones and you can see how it's brightening
up the lights there a bit. I don't hate it, I might
add a little bit more. Dehaze, I'm not going to touch. I really don't use
Dehaze very much. It's one of those that
it's really easy to mess up and cause an
image to look fake. What Dehaze does
the name implies, is it just reduces
the appearance of haze in the photograph. If you have image,
maybe it's a smoky day, it'll reduce that
hazy look or if maybe you're using a
telephoto lens and you're photographing something that's really far
in the distance, that dehaze can sharpen the image a little bit as not
technically sharpening it, but it can make it look less hazy because there's so
much atmosphere that causes the illusion
of haze in between the lens and the subject
that you're photographing. Dehaze definitely want to
be careful with this one. Don't want to use this in
this particular instance, especially because I'm not
dealing with any haze at all. Let's go back. Let's
zoom out here. And let's look at A before. And after. I added a
little bit of texture, a slight bit of contrast
to the mid tones. I think that looks
okay, like that. The other thing I'm going
to do is I'm going to add a little contrast into this
region using the tone curve. The tone curve, like we discussed
earlier in this course, it allows us to
more specifically target the tones that
you want to adjust, the brightness and the
darkness of the tones. We could spend an entire lesson on how to use the tone curve. But just to summarize, we can target the brighter tones by lifting the line
on the tone curve. We can brighten the
lighter tones or we can darken the lighter tones. We can also go to the left
side of the histogram. You can see the histogram
in the back here and it shows you what
tones you're adjusting. We can lift the mid tones, we can darken the mid tones, lift we bring this
back to the center. We can lift the shadows and
we can darken the shadows. I'm just going to Command Z
to remove this because this is a terrible edit to
remove these points. The way I'm going to
use the tone curve to introduce a little
bit of contrast is, I'm just going to grab
the upper portion of this line where we have the light tones and I'm just going to lift
them a little bit. You can see how slight
that adjustment is. And then I'm going to
drag the shadows down. Again, we're going to
do this very subtly. You can see we're creating
a little bit of an S curve. This is a very simple
yet effective way to add contrast into an image
or a portion of the image, since we're just focused
right here is to create this S curve on the
curves adjustment. If we look here we
have before and after, before and after,
definitely more contrast. You'll notice as
we did that that these colors became a
little bit more saturated. And so because of that, what I'm going to do is I'm
going to go back to color, I'm just going to desaturate
them a little bit. And maybe bring that yellow down a little bit,
the warmth down. That looks a little bit better. That's something to remember as you increase saturation or, as you increase contrast, you will introduce more
saturation into these colors. But we wanted these colors
to be more saturated, so I'm okay with that for
now. We'll move along. We'll move back to these peaks, and I am actually not going to make a similar adjustment here. The reason is like we talked about in the beginning
of this lesson is that Objects that are farther away from you should
have less contrast. I don't want to introduce
more contrast using the tone curve or any other method that you
can add more contrast. But what I want to do is
actually the opposite. I want to soften the
background a little bit. I don't really want to
remove too much contrast, but I want to give
it a little more of a lighter, glower feel. One way we can do that is we
can go back to the effects. We make sure this
mask is selected. We can go back to
the effects panel. And we can reduce clarity. Remember, increasing
clarity increases contrast in the mid tones, decreasing some of
that clarity will soften some of those
mid tones in the back. Something like that,
we can try dehaze. By bringing the
dehaze slider down, we're actually
rehazing increasing the dehaze dehazes trying to remove what might
be haze in the photo. If we bring it down,
it rehazes it. This can again give
a little softer, more glowy look to a background. I don't think I want to do
too much of that at all, maybe just down to five. Let's look at before and
after, before and after. We've softened up
the background, we've reduced a little
bit of the contrast, give it a little
more of a brighter, let's say areer
look, you could say. I think I want to do the
same thing to the clouds. I think I want to soften
those a little bit. We can try to
reduce the clarity. I don't want to lose too
much detail in the clouds, but we can bring that
clarity down a little bit and then see what happens if we rehaze it looks like because that mask is
moving into the peaks there, like it in the clouds, but I don't really like
it in the peaks. We could make another mask to dehaze those
clouds a little bit. But I don't think it's really
adding that much more. I don't want to make an edit
just for the sake of it, so I'm just going to leave
it about right there, maybe. Maybe negative two. I'll
just leave it at zero. I don't want to add it if I really don't feel
like I need it. Let's look at before and after, before and after, very subtle, but I think I'm going to
keep that adjustment. Because we reduce the contrast a little bit in these peaks, I do think we've
lost a little bit of the saturation that
we added back in. We go back to our
mask of the peaks. We can take a look at the color. Again, it does because
we lost that contrast, get a little bit
more washed out. I'm going to add a little bit more saturation
just a little bit, and then a little bit
more of the warmth. And a little bit more magenta. We really want to this
scene is so incredible. We really want to emphasize how spectacular and how really
awe inspiring this is here. With that color, that
looks nice to my eye. After before after this point, I've really made the
main local adjustments that I want to make
to this image. I could continue to
make a few more mass, a few more refinements
and I might do that. But hopefully, at this point, you understand the mindset or the logic behind why I've chosen to edit
what I have edited. I don't just want
to go in and start editing all these random things just because they look cool. I really have more of a systematic way in
the back of my mind, what I want to edit and how I want to edit
it in a way that creates more depth and more visual flow
throughout the photograph. Now that we've done the majority of the local adjustments, the next step that I want
to walk you through is the cleanup and the
refinement stage of the photo editing process. Well, we'll start
to remove all of these distracting eye
grabbers and things that really draw the eye away
from the subject and we're going to make
this image have a really professional,
more polished look. We'll talk about
that in the next lesson and I'll see you there.
10. Cleaning Up the Image: In this lesson, we're
going to start to remove any unwanted objects
from this image, particularly paying attention to anything around the margins of the frame that are
really distracting to the eye that draw the eye
away from the subject. Like we've talked about
in the previous lesson, we've got these tree branches here that are really
catching the eye, maybe a little bit of the rock
that we tried to crop out. Remember when we were making
the global adjustments, I crop this image to crop
out most of this tree, but I couldn't really get
all of it in the crop. So we're going to
use some tools to be able to remove this
parts of the tree. We're also going to use some of these healing tools to
remove any imperfections, such as dust spots or anything that can really catch the eye and make this image look less
polished and less refined. We'll start by going
to the healing panel and you can find that where you see this little Band Aid icon. You can either click on this
or press B on your keyboard. Once you're in the
healing panel, you will see three
different tool options. You'll see the content
aware remove tool, the heal tool, and
the Clone tool. Going to focus on using the
content aware remove tool. The way this works
is it's basically a brush and you just
brush over the object that you want to
remove Photoshop will look at what is surrounding that object and try to
fill in the blanks. It's essentially going
to create the pixels to fill in what it thinks the image should look like
without that object. If this particular
tool doesn't work, usually I start with this
tool and if it doesn't work, then I move on to the heal tool. The heal tool will
sample part of the image near the object
you want to remove. It'll sample it
and then just use that sample to replace the object that you
want to remove. Without going into all
the technicalities of how these tools work, let's just jump right into how this content aware
remove tool works so that we can start to
remove these tree branches. I'm going to zoom in here so we can see this
a little bit better. Once we grab our heel tool, I'm going to take it
down a little bit, the size down a little bit, right click and drag to the
left, you're using a mac. Then I'm just going to paint
over these tree branches. In this type of object removal, it can take a little
bit of trial and error. Photoshop might not always get it right on the first time. We'll see how it does
and that's okay. We can start to go over the spots that
don't look natural. That looks pretty
good. If I go up here, that looks pretty good as well. When you're using
this, I would suggest just going over the parts that Photoshop doesn't
get quite right and it will keep trying
to figure it out. Once you feel like it's done
a good job figuring it out, then you can move on to different parts to
edit or to remove. We'll try to remove
that rock a little bit. The goal here is
just to make it look like the photograph was supposed to look like
without that object. It looks like there's
a little bit of a distraction in the corner. Let's see if we take
that brush size down. That looks okay. We can always crop out
that little bit of color for being extra
picky about this. Let's go up here a little bit. I just want to remove some of these little branches and twigs that are pointing
into the frame. These are the types of
things that if you're looking at this
photograph on say, your phone or a
really small screen, it's not going to
be that obvious. But if you print your photos
or if you enlarge them, look at them in a
really big screen, they're going to be extremely obvious and you're going
to be really happy that you took the time to remove these little distracting
objects or eye grabbers. So let's try that.
Looks pretty good. I could spend quite a bit
of time doing this too. I'm going to go
relatively quickly making these healing
adjustments. I go up here. I think that actually looks
pretty good for now. I probably go over this. This reflection in the rock right here doesn't
look quite right. I'm going to go over
this a little bit. That's a little bit better. I think I'm pretty happy
with that for now. Now, the other
thing that if I was going to print this photograph
and this was going to be a photograph that I wanted
to put in my portfolio, I would spend the
time to remove all of these little dots on
the surface of the water. These are just little
pieces of debris, sticks, maybe bugs, all kinds of little things that are floaters on the surface of the water. I would actually remove all
of these little floaters here and this would be relatively time
consuming thing to do. I'm not going to obviously do
all of that in this lesson, but I'll show you really quickly how you would get
started with this. You could use the
content aware fill, the content aware remove. But for these little
dots like this, these floaters, or if you have any dust spots in
your photograph, I like to use this
heel brush and I will bring this down to about right there
and you'll just literally click over
those little spots and they will disappear. We can go through a few of these you can see that this would be
pretty time consuming. But if I wanted to make this photograph look
really professional, really cleaned up, then I would
take the time to do this. For now, we're going
to just ignore all of these little floaters and assume that we took the time
to remove all of them. I could take up to an hour
or so to do all of that. We don't want to
be here all day, at least for this lesson. What I'm going to
do next is Again, I'll do this relatively quickly. But what you're
going to want to do when you're in the
cleanup phase of your photograph is really
scroll through zoomed in. Here we're zoomed in and about
let's see, we're at 122%. We could zoom in even more. But I just want to look
for any dust spots, anything that doesn't look like it's supposed to be there, and even if it is
supposed to be there, little things that
might be distracting. Paying particular attention to the corners and the margins. And we're just going to
quickly run through this. I'm not seeing any dust spots that are popping out
at me very obviously. It's much easier to
see them in the sky. If you don't see any in the sky, then you're most likely
going to be okay. The ones in the sky
are really the ones that will just ruin your photo, especially if you want to print
your image at some point. Definitely pay attention to
any dust spots in the sky. We've got tons of these little floaters in
here when we really zoom in. Again, I would Oops, let's go back to our healing, and I would really knock
a lot of these out. We could even take
that brush size down a little bit smaller. We're really just targeting
those tiny little dots. If you're really OCD like I am, you will make sure you get every single one of these little dots, but you might not be quite as particular and
perfectionist as I am here. That is the basics of how you can remove
unwanted objects. If we zoom out and then toggle the visibility on our
healing adjustments, we can see what a big
difference this has made. This is before and this is
after before and after. And it really makes a big difference to see all
of these tree branches gone. It's much less distracting
and you really don't notice how distracting it is until these elements are gone. These things around the
edges of the frame, dust spots, little
floaters like that. Sometimes it's little twigs, it could be a little
piece of trash. It makes such a huge difference, especially if you
enlarge this photograph. So once you get to
the point where you have cleaned up
the entire image, what I like to do is let the image sit for at
least a few days. It's good to let it
sit and marinate because when you've been
staring at a photograph, editing it for hours or days, it can be harder to determine what you need to change or what's
bothering you. You might think
something's bothering you, but you might not
really know what it is. The best way to remedy that
is to just put the photograph away come back to it with fresh eyes and anything that needs to be changed like color, contrast, lighting,
anything like that will likely become
much more obvious. What we're going to do
is just click Done. What'll happen is all
of the changes that we've made are going to
be saved automatically. And this photograph, this raw file is going to be saved right back into bridge. You can see the photo right
here and if we double click to open it back up
into Adobe Camera Raw, you'll see that all of our
adjustments have been saved. For example, if we go
back to our healing tool, then toggle all of the
healing adjustments. You can see before,
after, before, after. And if we click here, we could always remove any of these adjustments
if we wanted to. We could click and then delete and that
would be removed. I don't want to do that. But the important
thing to understand here is that everything
has been saved in a way that all of these
edits are non destructive. We haven't permanently
changed the raw file. We can always come
back and tweak it, delete any of the
targeted adjustments. We can go back to our
main global adjustments and maybe tweak
something like exposure. We can even reset the entire raw file if we
wanted to and start over. None of these changes are permanent and destructive
to the raw file. That's something really
important to keep in mind. So what we're going to do is
we're going to save this. We're going to come back
to it in a few days, and then we're going to
open it up in Photoshop to make some final tweaks and edits before we save
it and export it. So that's it for now, y'all. I hope that helps you out,
and I'll see you next time.
11. Opening in Photoshop + Adding Adjustment Layers: Let's say that we've stepped
away from this photo for a few days and
given it time to cool off and marinate and now we're coming back
to it with fresh eyes. We're going to make some final
adjustments here before we open it into Photoshop and make our final touch
ups and edits. Now that I come
back to this image after letting it
sit for a few days, the first thing that
stands out to me is that I think that
the corners and the edges are too bright because my intention here is to draw the eye into the
center of the frame, mostly from the foreground
to the background, what I want to add
here is really my final edit in
Adobe Camera Raw, at least at this point,
is to add a vignette. What I'm going to do is
go to the effects panel. And we're going to
go to vignette. If you start to take this down, you'll see the vignette occurring around the
corners of the frame. I don't want to go too
far with this vignette. The vignette, by the
way, is something that I add to most of my images pretty much after I've done all of the edits that I want to
do in Adobe camera raw, something like that
looks pretty good. Again, don't want to go too far. If you go way too far, it looks extremely unnatural, but you want it to
be so subtle that the viewer doesn't even notice
that there's a vignette. Something like that, I
think, looks all right. Let's look at before and
after before and after. That's pretty
dramatic difference. Maybe I'll bring it
up just a little bit. Before after before
after really draws the eye into the reflection in the areas that we want
the viewer to look at. Let's say, at this point, I'm done with all my
Adobe Camera Raw edits. I can always come back into ACR, as I'll show you in a moment, even after I jump
into Photoshop. But for now, let's
say this is done. The next step is to open this photograph as a smart
object into Photoshop. And if you remember,
Adobe Camera Raw is just a plug in for Photoshop. So once we click Open Object, this will open into Photoshop. Now if you don't see
open object here, all you have to do is click on this link at the bottom of ACR. This will open a dialog box. You want to make sure that
this checkbox is checked, the open and Photoshop
as Smart Object. I also have the color space
set to Pro Photo RGB. Won't go into all the details of why I do this at this point. You can check that out
in my Photoshop course. I explain all of this,
break all of this down. But for now, we'll open this as a smart object into Photoshop. I'll give this a minute to load. Now we have our
edited photograph opened in Photoshop
as a separate window. One thing I want
to point out here, this is really the main reason one of the main reasons
why I prefer to use Adobe Camera Raw is because now that we've
opened it as a smart object, we can double click on the thumbnail and ACR
will open right back up. If we wanted to change
something, for example, if I wanted to adjust that
vignette I just made, I can go back and do that and it's completely
non destructive. I can literally jump in and
out of Adobe Camera Raw and never worry about permanently never being able to get back
in after I make my edits. All right. The beauty of being
in Photoshop now is that I have all the tools in
Photoshop at my disposal. These include tools
that I would not have been able to use in
Adobe Camera Raw. There are certain things that
I like to use in Photoshop, particularly the
adjustment layers. I will add a few
adjustment layers here to show you the steps that
I like to go through to finalize and polish the photo that I just
edited in Adobe Camera Raw. First, I'm going to go to this little circle it's a
little circle at the bottom, it's half solid, half empty. Those are our adjustment layers. Again, I go over all of this
in my Photoshop course. If this is all new to you, definitely go check
that out where we learn about mass
adjustment layers. All of that stuff I'm
going to be showing you here in the next few steps. But the first adjustment
layer I'm going to add here is a curves
adjustment layer. This will bring up our
curves adjustment. What I want to do here
is add a little bit of overall contrast
into the scene. Not very much, just enough to bring out a
little more detail, a little more pop, make it
just a hair more dramatic. So I'm going to make an S curve like you saw
earlier in this course, we're using the curves
adjustment in Adobe Camera Raw. I'm just going to click and drag up where we
have the highlights, the brighter parts
of the histogram. I'm going to click on
the shadows and pull the shadows down a
little bit just to make a very subtle S curve. I really want to go super light on this because you can see how overly dark and crunchy,
that looks terrible. I'm just going to
bring that down slightly then I'm going to drag the white
point to the left, so I protect some of
these highlights. I don't want to blow out any
of these highlights here. I'm going to protect the
brightest parts of this image by pulling that to the
left a little bit. Then I'm going to bring
the black point up just to bring up some of those really dark black
tones in this photograph. I like that more muted
shadow look there. I only want to do this, so
the output is really no more than I'd say five at the
most, maybe two or three. But you can see
here how going too high on this will really
destroy the image. Something around four
or so like that, just to soften those
really dark, blacks. If we look at before
after before, after. We've added a little
bit of contrast. I think I'm going to bring the black point down
a little bit more. After before and after. I'm not loving how this is
affecting the midground. I think I'm losing
a little bit of contrast in the mid
tones and the midground. What I'm going to do is
first, let's bring this back. But I do like what it's doing to the peaks and the reflection. I'm going to bring
the opacity down this contrast adjustment is having a little
less of an effect. And I think that's going
to do a good job on that. I like the overall
effect of that. Let's move on here. We're not spending
too long on this. Again, you can see how
you can just tweak all of these adjustments for
as long as you'd like as it doesn't make
you too crazy. But let's add a hue
saturation adjustment layer. Again, remember, these are
non destructive edits. If I ever wanted to remove
that contrast layer, I could just click and drag and then that adjustment
is completely gone. I'm just going to bring
that back by undoing that Command Z on a Mac
or Control Z on a PC, let's tweak the
color a little bit. I think I'm going
to add a little bit of saturation overall. And I could go back into
Adobe Camera Raw and do this. Usually when I'm making
these adjustment layers, or adding these
adjustment layers, it's to make
targeted adjustments to specific parts of the image, which is sometimes a
little bit easier to do, in my opinion, in Photoshop
to get really precise. So let's go to let's add a little bit more
color into the peaks. I'm just going to add a
little more saturation very subtle and then I'm going to essentially mask out everything except that
adjustment that I made. What I'm going to do
is I'm going to go click this layer mask,
click Command I, if you're on a Mac or
Control I if you're on a PC, I'm going to select
my brush tool, which is already selected. You can press B
on your keyboard, bring the opacity
all the way up, flow to 100, going to take
the size of that brush down. Now the entire hue
saturation adjustment is hidden by this mask. The black mask hides
that entire adjustment. By painting on at 100% opacity where I want
that adjustment to show, I'm going to reveal the
saturation that I increase, but it's only going
to show in the peaks. I'll add that to the
reflection as well. I might add a little
saturation in here to the sky. You can see in this mask where I've allowed that
adjustment to be shown. Everywhere in white is where that hue saturation adjustment, the increase in vibrance
is going to be revealed. Let's take a look at before
and after, before, after. It's very subtle. Again, you might not be able to see that on your computer. I could increase the saturation
a little bit more just so you can really see how it's only affecting those
areas that I painted on. That's obviously terrible, but I'll bring that up
to about there, and then oftentimes
I reduce the opacity of the layer just to let's
make sure we have that click. Let's bring the opacity down so we ensure that we
didn't overdo that. What I might do is
add a little bit of saturation to the
midground as well. What I'm going to do
is I'm going to make a new hue saturation layer. And I'm going to keep it on the master saturation to
increase that as well, something like that, just to add a slight bit of saturation
into those grains. I think they are a
little bit too dull. Then I'm just going to click Command I to turn that
mask into a black mask. And then just paint over, making sure we have
that white brush. I'm just going to paint
it in the middle here again because I just want to
draw the eye to the middle. Don't want any of the greens to be really heavily
saturated on the margins, especially, add in a
little saturation. So before, after before,
after, very subtle. Again, make sure that adjustment layers clicked before we bring that opacity down. And that's looking
pretty good overall. If I go down to our
original image, the thumbnail of our original
image and I hold down Option or option if you're on a Mac or Alt
if you're on a PC, if I hold that down and toggle the visibility
button at the bottom, you can see before,
after before, after. Very minor contrast adjustments, very minor color adjustments. We can continue to work
with the color separation, contrast saturation,
things like that. Again, the important thing
here is to not go overboard. I'm going to stop right there
with my adjustment layers. Hopefully, you get the idea depending on the photograph
that you are editing, what type of adjustment
layer you might need to add or tweaks you might need to create once you're in Photoshop. But right now I want
to stop myself from going too far on this edit. The next thing we're
going to do is add a little bit of dodging and
burning into this photograph. We can create a little
bit more dimension. This is one of the
last steps I take in Photoshop when I'm
editing a photograph, we'll work on that next
and I'll see you there.
12. Simple Dodging and Burning Technique: In this lesson, you are
going to learn one of the easiest ways to dodge
and burn in Photoshop. That's going to be
the next step in this editing process
that we're going to do here on this photograph. Dodging and burning,
if you're unfamiliar, is a technique that allows
you to create more depth and dimension in a photograph by brightening tones
and darkening tones. Dodging means to brighten
and burning means to darken. Let's take a look
at how we're going to do this here in Photoshop. The first thing we're going
to do is add a new layer. You'll do that by
clicking this button with just a box with
a plus sign inside, and we'll create a new layer. The second step is to
change the blend mode. The blend mode is just the way that the pixels
that we paint onto this photograph are
going to blend into the pixels below the paint. So we'll switch
this to soft light. Again, if you are unfamiliar
with what blend modes are, that's all explained in
the Photoshop course, but this is just the
simplest step by step if you just want to jump right into doing
this straightaway. We've got our new
layer. We've set the blend mode to soft light. The next thing we need to do is rename this layer to
what we're going to do. If I double click on this layer, this is going to be
our dodge layer. I'm just going to type Dodge. We know that all of the
adjustments that we make on this layer are
dodging or brightening. Then we're going
to grab our brush. We already have the
brush selected here. You can press B on your
keyboard to select the brush. The next step is to select the color that you
want to dodge with. We'll go over to
our color squares. We'll click the active color and this will bring
up the color picker. We're going to choose which
colors we want to dodge. In my mind, what I want
to do is I want to create a little bit more dimension
in the midground. I want to make these trees a little bit more
three dimensional. What we're going to
do is we're going to dodge some of the brighter
parts of these trees. What I'll do, I'll have
the color picker selected, I'm just going to click on
one of these green colors. Now, once we have
this green selected, what I'm going to do is
I'm going to brighten that green I'm not going to saturate it by
dragging it to the right. I actually might desaturate it a little bit
because remember, these are the shadows. We don't want them to
be very saturated. But when we select this brighter,
more desaturated color, this is not only going to brighten the tones that
we want to lighten, but it's also going to slightly introduce some of this color into the areas that we dodge, as you'll see here
in just a moment. We'll select this brighter color and then we'll click Okay. Now we want to make sure
that our brush is ready to go for this dodging process. We want to bring
the opacity down. If we click and
drag the opacity, I want to bring that
down soup or low. I'd say something like 7%
can keep the flow at 100, you can keep the rest of
this as I have it set here. I'm going to bring the
size of the brush down. The next thing I'm
going to do is if I zoom in just so you can see
this a little bit better, is I want to paint over the areas that
I want to brighten. Really just the margins around this tree where
there's some soft light, indirect light
hitting this tree. Because we're using a brush
with such low opacity, it's going to be a
very subtle change. But if we look at the before, you can see already
we've already made somewhat of a
significant change. You can really see
that difference. Before after, you can see how this tree stands out
a little bit more. It looks like it's a little
bit more three dimensional, maybe a little bit closer to us compared to these trees
in the background. I'm just going to keep
going with this painting over the outer edges of the trees where I
see some soft light. With the intention of helping these trees stand out
from the background. Again, at first, this isn't
going to be super obvious. But as we keep layering on these adjustments
little by little, and bring this brush size down, they will start to become
more and more noticeable. I bring these trees out a
little bit from the shadows. We do have so many trees here, so I'm not going
to go over all of these individual trees. Again if you're a
perfectionist like I am, you might want to really zoom in and subtly go over
some of these trees. I don't know if that's
really quite necessary. They do start to become
a pattern towards the back and a
blend in together. I would spend a lot
more time with this, especially with the trees in the foreground that
have more detail. Separating them from
the background. I just painting over the outer edges just to
make those details pop. Let's take a look at
before and after. Yeah, you can really see how
those trees come to life, add a little bit more here. We are introducing a little bit of this color into those trees, but we're also brightening them. The blend is so subtle
and it's really not extremely obvious because
we have it set on soft light and because we're
using a brighter color, the soft light is going to brighten the tones that
we want to brighten. I'm going to stop there for
now brightening the trees. You can see that that
looks pretty nice so far before, after. Because these are
so easy to overdo these dodging and burning
edits like most edits. I'll bring that down to about 75 just to blend that layer in. That looks quite nice to my eye. The next thing that
I want to do is add a little bit of
dodging to the peaks. Introduce a little
bit more soft light. What I'll do is the same thing. I'll go over to
the color picker. I'll sample this orangish color. We'll brighten that color up. Then because this is being
hit in direct sunlight, this is an area that we
are okay saturating. I'm just going to saturate
it a little bit more by dragging it to the
right of this box. And I'll click Okay. Just
make that brush much bigger. Really, what I want to
do in this situation is to create these big
bright beams of light. It's the appearance of light coming in from the side here, illuminating these peaks,
which is already occurring. We're just emphasizing that. I'm going to make this
brush really big. I just covers a large area. Then I'm going to come
in from the right corner and I'm just going to drag across the areas
that we want to lighten, that we want to add
this warmer color too. It is going to add some
of that to the sky. I don't really mind it
being added to the clouds, but it is going to blend and bleed into the
bluer parts of the sky. There are more refined ways of dodging and burning where I
could avoid hitting the sky. But really, this is
the simplest way to dodge and burn without having
to use luminosity mask, have any more technical
skills in Photoshop. Especially if you're a beginner,
if you're new to this, this is the easiest way
to go at this point. If you want to learn
how to make these more refined dodging
and burning edits, go check out my dodging
and burning class and my luminosity mask class while
I'll show you how really select for certain areas of the scene that you want
to dodge and burn for without having this edit affect areas of the frame that you
don't want it to affect. For example, if you didn't want this adjustment or edit
to affect the sky, we could do that with luminosity mouse and other techniques. But for now, I don't
mind it too much because it's a nice warm beam of light that looks somewhat natural and I don't
want to overdo it here. I don't want to really paint in this fake looking
beam of light. Let's look at before
and after before after. I did hit the midground, the shadows here, which
I do not want to do. I'm just going to command Z, remove some of that and just make sure I'm
a little bit more careful with that
coming in like that. Let's see. After, before, after. That looks pretty good. And what I'm going
to do at this point, I've taken the opacity down, might bring it down a
little bit more here. Let's see, before after we've got some of that nice
glowing light coming in, hitting the clouds, a little
bit more warmth again, a little bit more saturation, a little bit more soft light. I might come down and add
a little bit more here. Because this isn't direct light, I'm just going to
make some little taps along the edges of
where I want to dodge, where I want to brighten. I can just add some of that
warm soft light in here. Painting along where
I want this to go. Let's see, before,
after before, after. That's okay. I might take
this down a little bit more. It's so easy to go
overboard on this color. We'll keep it at that for now. I want to show you how to burn, how to darken certain areas. We'll do this the
exact same way. We'll add a new layer and
we will go to soft light. Then like before, we're going to go back to
our color picker, we'll select the color. Let's say we wanted to darken
the areas around the tree. We brighten the areas of the trees that were
receiving soft light. We can darken the
shadows around the trees again to create a little
more three dimensional look. I'm going to select one of these darker green colors you can play around
I think something like that's okay. We have
a really dark green. This is already pretty dark. I want to darken and desaturate by pulling
it to the left. As we move left, we
desaturate the color. So somewhere around there
I might bring it down. I don't want it
to be pure black. I want it to have still a
little bit of that green color. We'll click Okay and
go back in here, bring that brush down. Like before, I'm going to
sculpt around the trees. But this time, I'm not
trying to go on the trees. I'm trying to sculpt
over the shadows. Really the areas around
the trees are darker. Again, you could go as far
with this as you want. Working your way might darken
back here a little bit. Back in these shadows, paying attention
to color contrast. For example, these trees are darker than the trees
in the foreground here. Let's look at what
that looks like. So before, after before, after going in between these brighter areas before,
after before, after. We swing over here, we
can do the same thing to these trees along the
edge of the lake. Just take your time with this. This is something
that you can again, put aside and then come back to let's look at before and
after, before and after. If for example, didn't like
the changes that you made, if you just wanted to
scrap the whole thing, you could just click and drag and remove all of those edits. I'll command Z, bring that back. Something to remember
as you're dodging and burning is that the
shadows that are closer to you are
going to be darker than the shadows that
are further away from you just because
that'll create a more accurate illusion of depth throughout
the photograph. We could also sculpt these
clouds a little bit more. Et's go back to
our color picker. I'm just going to select one of these gray bluish
colors and I'm going to bring it down to darken
and then desaturate. It's a dark bluish gray. I'm going to zoom in here, bring that brush a little bigger then just hit some of those
darker areas of the clouds. Somewhere along like
that before, after. We could do the same thing for the shadows back
here in the peak. We could grab our color picker, select for that shadow, darken it to more of
a darker brown color, somewhere like that, bring
that brush a little bigger. Hit those shadowed areas
and trying to create that three dimensional effect without making them too dark. Let's take a look before
after before, after. See those shadows are
a little bit darker. Then if we wanted to, we could go back to
our dodging layer. We wanted to add a little
more dodging back in. We can maybe dodge a
little bit of these rocks. I think this rock right
here might look nice, if we lightened it
up a little bit, has a little bit
of pinkness to it. Let's increase that color and then desaturate
because we are in shadows, bring that brush
down a little bit. I'll just hit some of the areas where there's
some soft light coming in. You have a little soft light and there we could darken it down that color and then
go back to our burn. We should probably label
that layer so we know what's going on
there so we can burn some of the back side
of the rock here. We'll be looking after
before and after. Hopefully, you get the general idea of what's going on here. Not going to dodge and
burn this entire image, but if I were to
continue with this, I would just continue
to sculpt the trees, sculpt the rocks, maybe add a little more dimension in the clouds and in
the foreground. Paying attention to
the areas that I want to attract the eye as well, going back to the very beginning of this course where we planned out where we wanted to attract the viewer's eye
and how we wanted to do it. That's it for
dodging and burning. We're going to do
one last effect in Photoshop called
the Orton effect, which will add a little bit
more glow to the background, a little more of a dreamy
effect to this photograph. I will see you there
in the next lesson.
13. Adding the Orton Effect: In this lesson, you're
going to learn how to create something called
the Orton effect. Which is a post processing
technique that you can create in Photoshop that
will create a dreamy, glowy look in your photos. I don't do this on most
of my photographs, but it works in
certain situations, including this
particular situation, where I really want to emphasize this dreamy ethereal surreal
effect in this image. If you remember we
talked about earlier in the planning stages of this
post processing workflow, I wanted to create this
dreamy glowy look. The Orton effect is a really
fantastic technique in order to create that or
add that to your images. The first thing
we're going to do to create the Orton effect is we're going to create
a merge visible layer. What we'll do is we'll
click this top layer. If you're using a Mac, you'll press on your keyboard Command Option Shift E. And that will create a
merged visible layer. If you're using a PC, that
will be Command Alt Shift E. What this does is it creates a pixel layer that merges
all of the layers below it. Next, we'll rename this to Orton effect so we know
what we're working with. It's always good to name your layers so you know
what you're doing. Then we'll go up to filter blur, then over to Gaussian blur. You'll be presented with this dialog box and what we're concerned with
here is the radius. You're going to want to change the radius to a
number that matches the number of megapixels on the camera that you
shot the image with. This photograph was
taken on a camera that had about 45 megapixels. I'll leave that at 45. If you're creating
the Ortin effect on an image that was shot
with a 30 megapixel camera, then your radius will be 30. If the camera's megapixel
megapixel count was 60, then you will make
the radius 60. Once you set your radius,
you will click Okay. Then we're just going to
bring the opacity down. We'll click on the opacity and I'm going to
bring this all the way down to it's going to be pretty low, something like 13%. Anywhere 10-15% for
your ortineffect when you're bringing
down the opacity of that gaussian blur filter, you'll generally
be safe with that. The thing here is that
I don't want this to be applied to
the entire image. I just want it to be applied to the background and
the soft light hitting the peaks
and the clouds. We really want that
dreamy effect to be in the background and maybe a little bit in the
reflection in the foreground. What I'm going to do is I'm
going to create a mask. I'm going to go down
to our masking button, just the square with
the circle inside, and I'm going to
hold down option so that this will
create a black mask. That'll be option on a
Mac and Alt on a PC. When we create that mask, we're going to
create a completely black mask that is going to hide the ortin effect
that we just created. Now we're going to paint
that ortineffect back in. If you grab your brush tool, which we already have selected, we want to make sure we have
a white brush selected, I'm going to increase
the size of this brush. I'm going to make
sure the opacity is going to bring
this up quite a bit. I'm going to paint
over the area, make sure the mask is selected. You'll see the box
around the mask highlighted if it's
selected, around the mask. We're going to paint in this Ortin effect
or we're going to reveal this adjustment that
we've made right here. I'm just going to paint over
the clouds and the peaks. There's something like that. That is really all
there is to it. I'm going to add that into
the bottom peaks down here. If I felt like I overdid
it in a certain area, I could switch to a black
brush if I switch to black. Then I could just go
back over the areas that I want to remove
the Orton effect. Let's say maybe I don't want 100% of that effect
added to the reflection. I could bring that down
to say something like 50% and remove about
50% of that effect. It's showing a little
bit through there. So now let's look at before
and after so you can see, we zoom in here to
see a little bit better what this
effect has done. Let's look at before and
after, before and after. It's very subtle, but it's just another one
of those tweaks, those little subtle
changes that you can layer in to really slowly develop
the overall effect, the overall general
feel of what you want to create in
this photograph. That's really all there is
to it with the Orton effect. In the next few steps, we're
going to wrap everything up, maybe make some
final adjustments, clean this image up
just a little bit more, and then we will be done.
14. Saving the Image Properly for Future Use: In this last lesson,
we're going to wrap up the entire editing process
and you're going to learn how to properly save
your images in Photoshop and also how to make any
final last adjustments to your images in Photoshop
before you call them 100% complete and save
them into your portfolio. Let's jump back into Photoshop. If you remember, the last
adjustment we made as we added this Otoneffect which added just a little glow
to the background. At this point, I would call
this image nearly 100% done. But what I like to do as a very last step is save
this Photoshop file into a holding folder where
I can again let it sit for a few days and then come
back to it with fresh eyes. In order to do that, I'm
going to go to File. Then I'm going to go to Save As. I'm going to save
this Photoshop file into a folder called
PS currently Editing. This is just where I save all of my Photoshop files
that I'm currently working on that
aren't 100% done. They might be 50% done or more. I just want to keep them
here so I know that they're not ready to be
moved into my portfolio yet. What I'll do is rename
this to something that I can remember pretty
easily. Dream Lake. Then you want to make
sure that Photoshop is selected as the file format, and then you want to check embed color profile if
it's not already checked. The next step is to
just click Save. This will go ahead and
save in the background. At this point, I could
close all of this up. I could close Photoshop, and what I would do is, like
I said, I would let it sit. I could reopen this file from my Photoshop holding folder and it would open up
exactly like you see here. Photoshop would open this image. All of your layers would be
here in the Layers panel, all of our adjustments,
everything would pop open just
like we see here. Now that I'm looking at
this with fresh eyes, assuming we've come back
to this a few days later, I could immediately tell if there's something
I want to tweak, maybe color, maybe lighting. I could add any additional
adjustment layers such as brightness, if I think this image needs to be brightened just
a little bit more. I really think this
image is pretty much done one last thing I like to do is I want to make
sure that any dust spots or any slight corrections, anything that needs
to be cleaned up, little pieces of grass, anything that could cause
distractions around the edges. If you remember, we worked on cleanup in Adobe camera raw. But sometimes you can miss
some of these things and this would be a
really great time to make sure you
didn't miss anything. I don't think we
have any dusk spots or anything major going on here, but just to demonstrate
how I would do this is if you say there's something like a desk
spot you want to clean up, what I'll do is
just zoom in here. Just for demonstration purposes, let's say I wanted
to remove this rock, this was just something I wanted to clean up in this image. So the first thing
I'd have to do is I would select the top
layer and we're going to have to make a
merged visible layer again like we did
previously in this course. In order to do this, we click on Command Option Shift
E on the keyboard. That's if you're using a Mac. If you're using a PC, that would be Command Alt Shift E. Then it will create
this merged visible layer. I'll just call this cleanup. Now, what you'll select
in order to clean this up is you'll select this
spot healing brush tool. This is virtually the same thing that we used in
Adobe camera raw, but this is how you
access this in Photoshop. If you don't see this tool, it should be above
the brush tool, and if you don't see it, click on the tool square above your brush tool
and just right click. You'll see all of these
different options, all these different
tools that are just hiding and
access these tools, you just right click
on the visible tool. H that spot healing
brush selected. Now I'll just zoom onto this rock and you can
change the brush size. I think something like
that is pretty good. I will just paint over this rock and you'll see it
just disappears. Now, I don't want to remove this rock because there's
really no reason to, but if it were a dust
spot or a piece of trash, something like that,
then that is how you would do those final
cleanup adjustments. Now let's say this
image is 100% done. I don't want to make any
more edits to this image. The next step is to
select the top layer, you will hold down Shift, select the bottom layer, right click on your layers, and you will go
to flatten image. Now, this will turn all of your layers into a single image. This combines all of the
edits that you made, and we're looking at the final completed layer that's just in a single layer now. At this point, we can't get
back into Adobe Camera Raw. Once we save this image
and close Photoshop, we won't be able to get back
into our layers anymore. You do want to
make sure that you are done editing this photo. Now what I'm going to
do if I'm ready to move this photo or this file
into my portfolio folder, then what I'll do
is I'll go to file. Save as, and I'll
go to PS complete. I'm going to keep the name the
same just for consistency. Instead of saving this
as a Photoshop file, we're going to save
this as a TIF, which will maintain all of
the quality in this file, so this will be a very
high quality file, maintaining all of the
information, all of the data. We can use this TIF
file in the future, if we want to print this image, if we want to save this image for the web, whatever
we want to do, we're going to use this TIF
file as our portfolio file. We'll always have it, we'll
always have access to it for anything that we want to do with this image in the future. Once you have this saved
as a TIF file, again, keep embed color
profile checked, and then I will click Save. Now we have this image saved in my Photoshop Complete folder. That's really all
you need to do. As a review, the
final steps here, are we just let it
sit for a few days. We come back make any
final adjustments by maybe adding an
adjustment layer or using our cleanup tool, then we merge all
of our layers as a flattened image and then
we save it as a T file. With that, we finish our
entire editing process.
Meredith Fontana, Landscape photographer & educator
