Using Lightroom Mobile: Edit Professional Photos on your phone!

1. Welcome!: Hi, My name is Jacob Lam. I'm a photographer and cinematographer living in Massachusetts. In this course, we're going to cover mobile Lightroom editing and how to edit professional looking photos on your phone. We're going to cover how to navigate the software, each individual tab for editing, and also how to do some cool tricks. And we'll cover editing photos that are too bright to dark or just write. By the end of this course, you'll be able to edit professional photos on the go, right on what's in your pocket, which is really neat, will go step-by-step, and there's no prerequisite to this course. You can come in fresh with a batch of photos for the end of the course. And our final project, we're going to have you edit one of your own photos and you can show us the original and show us the edit and exactly what changes you made. I'm really looking forward to starting with you. So let's jump in together today. 2. Navigating the Home Screen: Welcome to the first official lesson for Lightroom Mobile. Now, before we edit any photos, we want to make sure that we're comfortable navigating the home screen and the photo editing page. So in this lesson, let's take a look at the home screen. When we open Lightroom, we're going to be taken to a page that shows all of the photos that we've added into light room. Now, an important note, these aren't all the photos that are in your camera roll. So don't be nervous. If it says zero photos. These are photos we've specifically added into light room. We have a few other tabs. We can see people here and that's an option to actually automatically detect people in our photos. We also have an option to see deleted photos. If you accidentally delete a photo, you don't have to worry. It's right here in this folder and Lightroom will hold onto them for quite a few days. If we delete a photo from this deleted album, well then they're gone forever. Our other option is that we can see some albums that we've created. Now here, albums are totally manual. You have full control over what photos you want to add or not include in your albums. Here, I've included an album specifically for the photos that we'll use in this course. On the bottom here you can see four different options. All the way to the left. We have our folders are albums where we currently are. This is where the app will open you to. Now, next to it, we have photos that we've shared out to the web. Next to that, we're going to have a Learn tab. Here. We're going to be able to see tutorials, featured artists, what's trending and all that. Now, in addition to that, we have a Discover tab. Think of this as Adobe's own social media platform. You can connect with other artists and even see some of their edits that they've saved and shown. You could even save their edits as a preset, which we'll talk about in a later video. Coming back now to our library tab, we have a search function That's going to help us look through our photos. And there's a few ways to do that. We can give each individual photo a ranking, 1-5 stars. We can tag a photo with keywords, or we could even tag a photo with a color and then search through all of our photos by color. Of course, you could also look up the photo file name if you know that. Coming back from the search, we have a notification bar where Adobe can send you notifications. Or if you've collaborated with other artists, you'll see some stuff here. We have a filter tab, which is similar to the Search tab, but gives you more of a drop-down menu rather than a free for all search from the homepage. We also have our cloud. If you have Cloud Storage with Adobe, which I have run out of, you can see that here and sync it up with other devices also connected to your Adobe account. We also have an option in the top left to open a menu with all of your account settings which you may recognize from other pieces of Adobe software. Probably the most important part of the homepage is actually adding photos to our account. In the bottom right you can see the photo tab and we have two ways to add a photo. The first one on the left is adding photos from my own phone gallery. So if I click that, it's going to bring up all of the folders on my device. And I have a lot of options for bringing in just one photo or multiple photos if I click on all of them. The other option for adding photos into Lightroom on the right side goes straight to your device's camera. So instead of importing photos, you could take a photo right on the spot and Lightroom will automatically bring it in. 3. The Photo Editing Page: When I click on a photo, were taken into the photo editing page. Now here we have a whole new menu of options and you can see them all along the bottom of the page. Each of these tabs, we can drag along and see them all. Each of these tabs has got its own menu. And we're going to spend a video on each one seeing exactly why and how we would use all of them. Now, in the top here, when we click the word edit, we're taken to a few different options where we can rate our photo, see info about our photo including the camera and the lens, and even go ahead and see the activity on the photo. If we've shared it, we can see likes and comments. Now in the top right of the photo page, we have a Share button where we will also go ahead and save our photo to our device when we're finished. Or we have these three buttons all the way on the right. And that's going to give us a lot of options, again, for a slideshow. And make special note that this is where we create a preset which will come in handy later on in the class. Looking at the bottom tabs, again, we have quite a few. And we're going to start to the right of this little black line right there. I'm going to drag it over. And our first tab on the left here is an auto setting. And with the auto setting, that's where Adobe is going to try to automatically edit your photo for you. So I'm going to go ahead and click the Auto button and you can see it made very slight changes that look good. But they're not quite where we want it and it doesn't always do the best job. I always think Manual is a little bit better, but the auto setting is great. In a pinch, if you need to make quick edits to a lot of photos. So I'm going to go ahead and undo that auto setting. You see the Undo button and the Redo button at the top. There. We have a lighting tab where we can adjust the brightness, darkness, and a lot of nuance details about the lighting. In our photo, we have a color tab where we can change and color grade so much of our photo to invoke a certain mood or feeling out of our photo. The Effects tab where we can deal with things like texture and clarity and really bring a lot of our photo to life. Now the Detail tab can seem similar to the Effects tab, but it's got its own whole list of functions, including a noise reduction, which we'll see later can be very helpful. The optics tab is going to automatically correct some imperfections that your camera lens may have put in your photo. And then the geometry tab will help us to straighten our photo if we took something from an angle or too low or too high. Now moving to the right, we also have profiles versions and an entire reset button. Think of profiles as a half preset. The profiles are going to just give us a starting place that don't affect any of the sliders in those tabs. So e.g. I. Like my photo, maybe I want to change it to Adobe Landscape. And you can see edits have been made now a lot of the colors are richer, but when I go to my settings like the lighting, nothing has been changed and so I can edit still from a starting point. But I've also got some color in there that Adobe is done automatically. 4. Adjusting Lighting: We're going to take each of these tabs one by one. So let's start with the lighting tab. Now, as you may have guessed, lighting is where we're going to adjust things like exposure and contrast. But there are some other options here that we may not recognize, like highlights, shadows, whites and blacks. Let's start with the basics. Photos have three sections that we divide light into. The shadows, the mid tones, and the highlights. Now, with Lightroom, we can adjust each of these individually. Of course, the shadows are the darkest parts of the photo and the highlights are the very brightest part. So when we play with exposure, we're adjusting the overall brightness of all three of those settings. So if our photo is too dark, we can bring up the shadows, mid tones and highlights altogether and brighten our photo. Or the opposite way we can of course, make our photo darker. If it's too bright. The contrast is going to adjust the difference between each of those sections. So the brighter parts will get brighter and the darker parts we'll get darker when we bring the contrast up, something like this. When we bring the contrast down, we're squishing all of the brights and the shadows together to be on the same plane. And so it ends up looking a little bit squashed. Let's bring that contrast down. And you can see there's much less of a difference between the horse and the ground and its legs and it's face. So the contrast, adjust the difference between the brightness and the darkness in your photo. Then we move down into the highlights, shadows, whites and blacks. Now, what are the difference between each of these? Of course, we know the highlights and the whites are going to affect the highest part of our image. And the shadows and the blacks are going to impact the darkest parts of our image. But what are the differences between each of them? Well, highlights is going to impact the brightest part of our image, and that's its job. The whites change what the brightest part of the image is. E.g. if something is on the edge of mid tone and highlight, well, if we move the white slider up, it's going to bring that just into the highlight zone. And it's the same idea for the shadows and the blacks. The shadows will impact the lower parts of the image, but the blacks will really change what counts as the lowest part. So the black and the white is going to adjust what would be considered true black and true white. While the highlights and shadows are going to raise whatever it counts as a highlight or a shadow. Let's see example of that. If I adjust my highlights, you'll see especially something like the sky is going to get very bright, but the legs of the horse won't, because they're the darkest part of our image. So with this slider really impacting just the brightest part of the image, the sky changes a lot. The legs of the horse barely change. It's the same idea when I come to the shadows. Now, I'm affecting the legs of the horse a lot, but I'm not really touching the sky at all. But if I want to push everything towards the white side of the slider, I would grab whites here and I would push it all up and you can see anything that would be considered a mid tone is becoming much brighter and then would be impacted more by the highlight slider. In the same way, if I bring my blacks all the way down, a lot of the deeper parts of the image already have gotten even further down the rabbit hole. So that's the difference between whites and blacks, highlights and shadows. Something really important to point out in our light tab is the curve button on the top, right. Now, the curve button is going to give us this whole line here, which is the lighting curve. In the top right we have the highlights and in the bottom left we have shadows. Now we have an option to impact each of those just in a different way. I can take my shadow slider and bring it up or to the right to make it a little deeper. Same thing with my highlights. I can bring it down and squash those highlights out of there or to the left and really make them bright. Another thing I could do is add a point anywhere that I tap. Now, I can impact the lows and the highs in a very different way by making curves. Curves don't count just for the brightness either. You'll notice we have some color options down at the bottom of the photo, can impact the curves for the reds, greens, or blues as well. So now we're talking about a little bit of color dependent on lighting. Maybe I want to pull some of the reds out of the highlights, but keep them in the shadows. Well, I can tap in the highlights and pull it down. I can tap in the shadows and raise it up. Now I've got blue in my highlights and read in my shadows. This is a really interesting and unique way to make some color edits on our photo or lighting edits as well. 5. Controlling Color: We just took a look at a lot of the lighting options. Now let's take a look at the color tab in Lightroom Mobile. When I click on the color button, I'm going to get a lot of options and we'll start on the top left with the most simple option. It's a black and white button. If you're looking for a black and white photo, you don't need to make a lot of edits. You just need to tap that button. Now, if you do want to make color edits and you don't want a black and white photo. We have a lot more options available. First is going to be the temperature slider. Now, temperature adjust the overall warm or cool tone of your photo. So if I slide it out, you'll notice the feeling of my photo becomes a lot more warm as the warmer colors come out and maybe the cooler colors or took away becomes a lot more orange here. Like the sun got much brighter. If I take my temperature all the way down, well, all of a sudden it becomes winter and it's very blue. Something we have here is a dropper option. On the right side. What I can do is click that dropper option and then look for something white in my photo. What we're doing here is color correcting to make the photo as true to real colors as we can. So when I select something white in my photo, like maybe the top of this barn, then it's going to say, okay, that's meant to be white. And I'll adjust the other colors accordingly. I'll hit Save there. We've also got a tint option. Now, instead of going between what we'll call blue and red, now we're going between green and magenta. Oftentimes when I take a photo, it's accidentally way to green. I always think I've got it right, but I've always got something off. And so this slider comes really in handy. You can see we've got a green photo or a magenta photo. If I take my slider back to its original state, here, I think it actually looks pretty good. I might add a little bit of green in there this time around. Now we have Vibrance and Saturation. Just like the highlights and whites and the shadows and blacks, there is a nuanced difference here. The vibrance is going to set a cap of how strong a color is. And it's really going to help some of the weaker colors catch up to those other colors. You can push the vibrance much further than the saturation while still maintaining a good image. So e.g. if I bring the vibrance up, we can see a lot of the colors become richer, but nothing is overwhelming. If I bring the vibrance down, I'm going to lose a lot of color, but I can't bring it to a true black and white. Now, saturation, on the other hand, doesn't have a cap or any kind of protection. It just pushes colors all together. And so it's nice if you want to really bring out the colors in the photo, but it's also really easy to make a photo look cartoonish. So if I push saturation, well there's no cap, so now every color is incredibly strong. Typically what I like to do is be a little more liberal with the vibrance. You can give it a push there and then saturation, we're going to be really cautious with. Now up at the top here I've got two settings called grading and mix. Now color grading does something similar to what we saw when we were looking at that straight line with the color options. Color grading is going to allow us to adjust settings in the shadows, mid tones, highlights, and then the overall global settings. So just like we did in the last video, if I wanted more blues in my highlights. This time I'll go to the highlight wheel and select the color blue. I can decide what hue I want by going around and how strong that he will be by how close I am to the center of the circle or the outside of the circle. Now I've got blues in my highlights. I can adjust how bright those blues are going to be. I can adjust how well they blend with the photo or if I really want it to take over the photo. And then the balance as well as going to just adjust how strong it is. If there's no balance. Well, it's just going to look like my normal photo. If the balance is all the way, then once again, those blues really takeover. And so we have a lot of adjustments for putting colors in different lighting ranges of the photo. Then again, I can come over to my shadows and maybe I want those more red. And this is quite, quite the photo, but it's a silly example of how all these sliders work. Maybe I'll take all of these away. I'm going to go take a look now at the Mix button. Mix is a really powerful tool when we're playing with color. In the mix tab, we can select a color range and impact that color. Only. Now we can see there's a lot of orange in this photo. So if I select just the oranges now I'm impacting only that color. I could take them completely out, which you see impacts the bulk of our image, but keeps some of those other colors in there. And so oftentimes if there's a color you don't want, or a color that you want to isolate. The color mix is going to be incredibly useful. Not only can we take colors in and out, but we can adjust the overall hue here to make those colors, those oranges more red or a little more greenish, yellow. Maybe I want them to be a touch more red in this photo. Then how bright or dark just that color is going to be. You can see this doesn't impact something like the barn at all because it's just not orange. A great example of using this in a practical way is looking around the edges of our horse and seeing if there's any impurities in color that we don't want. Oftentimes, edges will have more of a purple or magenta tone to them. And so it never hurts to pull out some of those colors and keep the true colors in our photo. 6. Managing the Effects Tab: We're going to move away from the Color tab and take a look at the effects tab. Now, the Effects tab is where we're going to adjust a lot of the nuances of our photo. First of all, we have texture and clarity. Texture and clarity are both going to impact the sharpness of our photo, but in slightly different ways. Texture is going to go ahead and adjust the overall sharpness we can see on something like the horses fibers here, if I raise the texture, it become a lot more sharp and sometimes it's easy for this to end up looking fake. We want to be a little bit cautious with the texture. If I pull it all out, then I'm going to go ahead and get this kind of dreamy look here with almost no texture at all. So I'll bring a little bit of that in. Something I've realized in editing photos is that less is always more. We're making a lot of little edits and they tend to culminate to make quite the difference. So I'll add a little bit of texture and then we come up to the clarity. Now, clarity actually enhances texture, just like the texture buttonwood. But while texture impacts the overall photo, clarity is going to focus in on the mid tones. It brings those out. And how something you'll notice is when we adjust texture, it doesn't adjust too much about the lighting of our photo. When I adjust the clarity and you'll see a lot of the contrast change because of how I'm impacting the softness or sharpness of the mid tones. So again, if I've got a contrast I'm happy with, I don't want to push the clarity too much, but I will bring some in for the sake of that texture and sharpness. Now, D Hayes does exactly what it sounds like. Here. If we've got any haze or fog in our image that we don't want. It pulls that out for us. You can see it even adds a little bit in or drops the contrast. If I drop the dehaze, that is a good amount of haze. But if I pull it out, I'm raising that Hayes has gone. That haze is all gone now. I don't have any haze in my photo and I like the way that I've done the lighting, so I'm going to actually leave that one entirely alone. Now the vignette is an option that you may recognize from other photo editing apps. Here is where we're going to add it in black lines around the edges. And the purpose of this is a subtle effect that pushes our eyes towards the subject of our photo. So if I add a little bit of vignette in, I've got these black bars. I can be really strong with them or on the other side, I can make them white, but I'll add a little bit in in that unlocks settings underneath, like the midpoint feather and roundness. You may notice when I have no vignette, those three options are completely locked. So I can add some in and get the option for these three sliders. Now, again, these are all impacting the vignette. How much towards the center of the photo, it's looking the feather which is how severe it is, you can see those harsh lines of the circle or kind of blending in with the photo. And then the roundness maybe for some reason I want this to be more, I'll take feather out. Maybe I want it to be more of a square right there. Or I want it to be a circle right on my subject. I'm going to add a little bit in just to the corners here. I'll raise that feather up, take some of the vignette out. But again, it guides our eyes towards the subject of our photo. Now, we've got a green slider and you may be thinking grain is typically a bad thing. Modern photography has tried to get away from all the grain in the background of photos. And that's true. But this can be a really stylistic choice to make a photo look almost nostalgic to us. There are some photos where the grain has a really nice effect on the background of our image. So if I turn the grain all the way up, it doesn't have too much of an impact, but you can definitely see here where it comes in. Again, less is always more. So if you've got a nice clear shot, you can add a little bit of grain in, but that is hi early, a stylistic choice to give it more of a film. Look. If you don't like it, don't use it. Now, depending on what version of Lightroom Mobile you have, you may also see a split tone button in the top right of this menu. Now, the split tone has now become color grading. And when you click on it, Lightroom will let you know. The split tone button is the color grading that we covered in the last lesson. 7. Editing the Details: Now for the Detail tab, I've switched photos to ease your show what we're looking at. First of all, the first few sliders are going to impact a lot of the subtleties in the background. E.g. if there's any noise, we'll zoom in here. Well, the radius and sharpening is going to impact what that looks like. We can sharpen. And then when we raise the radius will notice it gets a little more cartoony. So all the sharpening looks different because of the radius and the detail buttons. We've added detail to the sharpening. We've added masking, which has softened it a little bit, but our photo now is starting to look a little bit silly. All of these can have a strong impact on your photo when you need sharpening and you want to adjust what Lightroom is doing with the sharpening. But most importantly in this tab is going to be noise reduction and color noise reduction. Now, this is especially helpful if you've taken a photo that ended up being just too dark. Something we may need to do is to raise the exposure on the photo. But when we do that, the background really gets just a little bit ugly. You can see all of the noise in the background and how poor this image turned out. Well, we can go ahead and impact parts of this photo with the noise reduction. I'll come back into detail. When I raise noise reduction up, it's taking away all of the grain that we don't want and smoothing it out. I've pulled up a photo kind of as an extreme example here because we've got a lot of black. And so I'm going to raise up the exposure until we can see the wall behind our subject. Bring up the shadows as well. And now we've got plenty of light, but a lot of noise. You can see all of that grain and each individual piece of it. So when I come into detail and I move my way down to noise reduction or color noise reduction and raise it up. A lot of that noise is going to vanish. And now it's incredibly clear. Compare it, I'll bring it back down. Raise a backup. So if we've got an image that's just too dark, those two sliders could save it from being a photo you need to trash to a photo you could actually post on social media or even turned into a client. 8. Setting Optics: Now we're looking at our optics tab. And the optics tab needs a little bit of setting up to work effectively. In Lightroom. You can put in your lens that you're using on your camera. So e.g. here in this photo, I'm using a Sony 85 millimeter 1.4. I can put that information into Lightroom. And then it's going to apply these sliders in the way that's best for that lens. Sometimes a lens might be distorted in a certain situation. Well, lightroom knows how to take care of that. Sometimes a lens adds a purple haze on the outline of a subject. Well, lightroom would know how to take care of that. If you've got a photo and you're noticing some purple around the edges. Well, you can go ahead and enable lens corrections. Here. You see when I tap it, I can manually select a profile. That's where I can put in the kind of lens that I've got. 9. Aligning Geometry: Now the geometry tab, this is where we can flip a photo upside down side-to-side, take it from the side, the bottom, anywhere. And especially if you're interested in real estate photography. Well, the geometry tab is going to get you some nice straight lines, which is really what realtors are looking for. So let's say I took this photo of a horse and I'm just messed it up in every way that I could. Well, there's a few options here. I can get my photo up right, Right away. I can adjust the distortion, which is going to impact the middle of my photo, the midpoint. I could adjust if I'm taking it from above or below my subject side-to-side. But you'll see, you'll notice it extends your subject in a way that's not always flattering. These are more corrections then artistic choices. We can rotate our image to keep it straight. We can change the aspect, how stretched it is, even the scale just keeping it bigger or smaller. Now finally, the x offset and y offset to slide our horse around, but we've come up to an issue. I've corrected the geometry of my photo, but you'll notice to do so, Lightroom's added a lot of white into my photos. Well, if I come up to the top of the tab, I have an option on the right side that says Constrain Crop. If I tap that, it's going to get rid of those white lines. Now, of course, this edit is ridiculous. But if we've got a photo that we have truly messed up the geometry when we were on the shoot. There's a lot of options here to fix it. Now, I'm going to undo what I've done here and open up a photo that looks at a room. Now, we can talk about the exposure of this photo all day and we will in a future lesson where we see how to save a photo with some parts that are just too bright. But at the moment, we've got a real estate shot. And so what I want to do is go to my geometry tab. And I wanted to click these two intersecting lines. These lines here are going to help me draw guides that will change the overall perspective based on Lightroom's AI. So I can say with my finger, this is meant to be a straight line in the room. And over here, this is also meant to be a straight line this corner. And then Lightroom will automatically adjust the perspective of the room so that in real estate, you've got these nice straight lines. And realtors really enjoyed that. 10. Versions and Previous: We've made a lot of edits on our photo and I think good edits. But there are a couple of options to help us. If we don't want to click Undo 1,000 times or we like a previous version of the photo that we made. Maybe even we want to start from scratch and so we begin editing again, and we want to reference both edits that we've made. Well, we have a couple of options here. First of all, I have the versions button. Versions is going to show me the original photo and the current photo that we've gotten. And you can see all of the edits that we've made so far. I've also got an auto button which is going to show me steps we've made from the original to where we are now. The previous button comes into play if I've got many photos from the same location, and I don't want to edit every single one. That would be a lot of editing for a day. Well, I can click on that button and I can say Move over the adjustments for the light and color or all of the options I've made from the previous photo. So whatever photo I've just edited, I can click the All button and bring those edits over to my horse. Now, if you'll remember with the geometry video, we impacted the geometry of the real estate shot by drawing lines that it automatically corrected for us. Well, by bringing this edit over, I've just corrected the geometry of this horse in the same exact way. Now of course, this photo was not taken at the same exact location. So that's not an edit that I want to make, but it goes to show the power of applying all edits from your previous photo. Now along with versions, I've also got a reset button. When I click that, it's going to allow me to reset my photo. The adjustments I've made, all of the edits that I've made including geometry and detail, or all the way back to when I first imported or opened my photo. 11. Using Presets: Now we're going to be looking at presets. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to scroll all the way back to the left side. And you'll see presets is the fourth option. Over. Now, with my presets, I have a few different options. Right off the bat, it's going to analyze and give me recommended presets that Adobe thinks would look best with my photo. I'll also have a selection of premium presets that Adobe has for me. Now these aren't recommended, these are just options. And finally, I have my own presets. And your own presets are also split into two different sections. Underneath from the second one down, you have all of the presets that you've downloaded personally. You're able to find them online. I've purchased some on Etsy and there are good one tap fix for our photo. Now, the very first column is going to be User Presets. If you've edited a photo and you like the changes that you've made, you can save that photo as a preset. E.g. let's say that I like what I've done with this horse. If I tap the three buttons in the top right corner, I'm able to hit Create Preset. And then I'll get to name my preset, whatever I'd like. I can also select which changes I've made that I want to be a part of my preset. The lighting, the color, the effects. Maybe I want everything to be a part of the preset. So I will name this Lightroom horse. Now that I've got that preset saved, I can go into my preset tab. And under my User Presets button, you'll see that I have Lightroom horse as an option. If I have other photos that I want to use these exact settings for, I can always open this up and I can apply Lightroom horse to those photos. Now, if I've selected a preset and I don't want it, all I have to do is tap the undo button. Once. You may have two questions in your mind, how is this different from the previous button that we just talked about in the last video? And how is this different from the profile button that we talked about near the beginning of this course? Well, this is different from the previous button because it saves the preset forever. The previous button is going to apply settings from just your previous photo. Here we're able to save the preset for good and then apply it whenever we need down the road. It's a little bit more permanent than the previous button. Now, as for the profiles, the profile is, remember our starting points that don't impact the sliders of our photo, everything is still set to zero, but we've got a different starting point for the presets. These do change the sliders. You're able to see exactly what changes were made. To get you this stylistic look. If I come into my presets and maybe I want a black and white one. So I'll go black and white. I'll select the preset and say that looks great. Now if I go into my light and color options, I'm able to see there's no vibrance and saturation under the lighting tab. Things have changed as well from what I set it as. The preset is not just a starting profile, the preset actually adjust the sliders for me. 12. Crop and Straighten: Next we're going to look at the cropping tab. Now, something important about the crop tab is that it's also where we can adjust the straightening of our photo, which is kind of like the geometrics that we talked about. So I'll click the Crop button and you'll see that we can adjust what part of the photo we're actually using. We have some presets on the bottom. So maybe I want a square and then it will adjust just to the square. I'll turn that back to the original photo here or even custom to get the whole photo in there. Then on the bottom, you'll see that we have a semi circle and here is where we can adjust the straightening of our photo to the left or to the right. We also have options under the crop tab for rotating, flipping vertically and flipping horizontally. Now we probably don't want an upside-down horse or an upside down subject, but if you do need those options, that's where they are. We also have a nifty button that says straightened. Now, just like the other automatic settings, it's not always perfect, but sometimes it does a good job if you can't quite tell if your photo is straight, the straightened button will try to do it automatically for you. So if I tap the straightened button for this horse shot, it's going to adjust it just a little bit and try to see where the lines in the photo are. 13. Healing Brush and Object Deletion: Next we're going to look at the healing tab. Now, the healing tab is where we're going to fix small blemishes in our photo or remove things that we don't want in the photo. Now, as a very silly example, I've got myself here and you've got a freckle down here that maybe I don't want in the photo. I'm going to open up the healing tab and then I'm going to just draw a little bit right over that. Now it's gone. Just like that. There are of course, options to remove larger items as well. Let's try this with the necklace that I've got on as well. I'm going to take our Healing Brush and I'm going to draw this line over the necklace. Now, you'll see Adobe is thinking and it's actually removed the necklace just like that. You've got a little bit of a color line there where the necklace was. But it does a fantastic job. Now, instead of remove, we can go to heal. This is where it's borrowing that shape. So if I wanted to heal a part of this photo, then you'll see we've got another shape here. And wherever it's over, it's going to borrow that part of the image and try to replace with it. So we've got delete, we've got heel, and then we've also got clone, which does exactly what it sounds like. So if I tap or draw an area, it's going to clone. Another part of the photo. Now, the difference between clone and heal is that heel tries to match what you're replacing. So when I put heal over my beard here, we'll bring this back. If I put heal over my beard, you'll see it's going to do some odd coloring things, trying to fix the lighting to match the spot. I'm healing. If I don't do heal and I just do the clone setting. Then I tap and pull over its cloning. Now what it's hovering over, it's not fixing any of the lighting settings. 14. Masking Your Photo: Now the last setting here is a masking setting. Masking is when we select either automatically or manually a part of the photo to make edits to we've applied a mask on top of it. So I can click my mask tab, and I have quite a few options. I can select my subject, which in this case would be the horse. And Adobe will try to recognize what my subject is and highlight it. I could also select the sky of the photo. So let's see how both of those work. If I select my subject, Adobe will think, then it will try to select the horse. And in this case, it's done a fantastic job. Now when I make edits to light or color, it's only going to impact the horse and not the rest of the photo. In the same way here, I could select the sky. And again, it's going to think, it's going to select the sky for me. This one is difficult because it's got a lot of blurred trees. It's still done a wonderful job. I also have an option in the bottom left here to reverse the option. Maybe I want to select everything but the sky, but there's not an option for that. Well, I can hit this reverse button and it's going to say, okay, I think I know what the sky is. I'll select everything except the sky, just like that. Now, I also have an option here to select a color range and a luminance range. These are ways to mask and separate parts of the photo based on the color or the light. So maybe I want to select just the highlights of the photo and edit those. Well, I'd click luminance range, and then I'm going to select what luminance I'd like to impact, whether the highlights or some of the deeper shadows and then only apply changes to that. In the same way here, I could select a color range and say, alright, I would like to impact the whites of the photo, so I'll select the barn. Then I can refine how strict it's being with that color. Very handy options. But our options aren't all automatic. We have some manual choices to make as well. In the middle section we have a brush, a linear gradient, and a radial gradient. We're going to start with the brush here. Really simply, as the name suggests, I can just draw with my finger and any edits I make will be right where I just drew. We also have the linear gradient, which is going to be a line. Top part or bottom part will be affected and the other side of it won't and it kinda feathers off. So if we've got a line right here, now we see the left side is selected, the right side is not. We can spin it to be top to bottom as well, and we can adjust in the middle the feather as well. Now in the same way, we can also do the radial gradient. This is going to let you select a portion of the photo with a circle. So I can draw a circle right here. As big or small as I'd like. I still have the option to select the opposite of what I've drawn. This is a great option to edit people's faces and make them just a little bit brighter than the rest of the photo. To draw attention to the face of your subject. 15. Saving a dark photo: Now we're going to edit three photos. One photo will be too dark, one photo will be too light. And one photo will be a good photo that we're trying to make. Great. We're going to start with the photo that's too dark. Here I have a subject in the woods. Whole overall tone of the photo is really dark. So naturally the first thing that I want to do is go into the lighting options. I'll open light and I'm going to boost some of the exposure. And right away you can see how much that helps from the origin. Now, I'm going to up the contrast which is going to bring the brights even lighter, make the darks a little bit darker. And here's how I'll do this. Let's see. I'm going to drop some of the highlights so they're less harsh and I can boost the rest of the photo. Raise up some of those shadows that are making the photo look so dark. Whites I like they do brighten the whole photo without blowing anything out. Blacks is more stylistic choice. It can be deeper or it can be lighter. I think what I'll do is raise the blacks and boost some of the contrast. Now, my subject is a very different tone than the rest of this photo. So what I'm going to do is probably mask around him or even just his face here. So I'll maybe brush around his head. I'm just going to enter the color tab and cool that off a little bit. And then because my photo is so dark and now I've just raised it up. What I'm going to do is come into save the masking. I'm going to come into the detail. I'm going to put in just a little bit of noise reduction and some color noise reduction just to smooth out the background in case I added in any noise by brightening it. Now, it looks a lot better than there's the original. And our edit. My subject still seems darker than the rest of the photo. So again, I'm going to go into masking. Now. A tip here when your photo is too dark or too light, masking is really going to be your best friend because it's safe to bet that not all of your photo will be the same brightness. So I've got a photo example here where my subject is darker than the rest of the photo and the overall photo is dark. So I've brought up some of the woods around him. Now I want to bring up him. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to brush kind of messily around him. And then I'm going to grab the eraser option. Use that eraser to get some of the leaves. Specifically, there is a branch in the foreground that I don't want to include with my subject. A little bit too much haze up here. Now I could spend more time selecting the mask better, clipping a little bit, but I think that this will do just fine. Maybe I will impact between the legs a little bit. Then I'll grab my light and I'll raise it up so you can see my subjects getting brighter. I've still got some of the leaves in there. So maybe I'll head back into the eraser. Erase what I can see now that I've brightened things a bit, that's not too bad. Then I'll set the light where I like it. Okay. Is this the best photo that's ever been taken? Know, could I turn the original photo into a client? Probably not. You might get fired or not get paid. Could I turn the after photo into a client? Probably. Now, as last edits, there's a lot of space above his head, so I'll probably crop out some of the woods, just make the image a little bit smaller and sharpen it up. Maybe even add a little vignette around the corners. Okay. There's our photo, There's our original. We'll take a look at the photo that's too bright. 16. Saving a bright photo: Here's a photo that's way too bright, especially because of the windows. Some of the insides don't look too blown out, but the windows really do. Now, a quick fix for photos that are too bright. We're gonna go into lighting tab. We're just going to drop the highlights and the whites. Now, if I dropped the exposure, it's going to flatten a lot of the image. You see. All of a sudden I can see out the windows, but everything else now that wasn't too blown out. It's way too dark. And now we've got a dark photo. What I'm going to do instead of dropping the exposure is dropping the highlights and dropping the whites. Now I can see out the windows a little bit without ruining the space. I will actually bring up some of the shadows. And maybe I'll drop the blacks for some contrast. Now, here's where things get a little messy. I'm going to select my masking tab, and I am going to put that over some of the windows. So I'm going to brush this window here. I'm going to brush this window back here. What I'm gonna do with that is I'm going to further drop some of the highlights and the whites. Now you can see they start to get a black spot when you push them too far. I don't want that. Come to the exposure a little bit with the rest of my image. Now, I'm going to go ahead and brighten it a bit. Maybe I want a little more exposure put in shadows and blacks look good. I'm going to take that linear gradient. I'm going to point it up and down. I'm gonna put it on the left side because the left side is actually looking a little dark to me. Now with that, I'm going to brighten the left side so it matches the rest of the photo. That's not too bad. So here's my photo. The windows aren't blown out. Anything that was a little dark inside is now fixed. We can take a look at the before. And now the after. We haven't even made any color changes yet. And color can really transform a photo. We can sharpen, we can color, but we've just fix some blown out windows. A little tip here is that when you're shooting a photo, if you have the option, always shoot photos in raw format rather than a JPEG, ra is going to give you much more dynamic range. It's going to save a lot of blacks and a lot of highlights, even if you can't see them in your photo. If I shot this photo in JPEG, I may not be able to save what's outside the windows. The camera sensor may only recognize that it's blown out bright and white. And if I drop it down, We may never see what's outside. But when you're shooting in raw, It's going to save all of that information even if you can't see it. At least I shouldn't say it's going to save that information better. There's also an option here called bracketing, where you take photos at a different brightness, all from the same place. So maybe you set your camera on a tripod and then it takes seven photos with different exposure. Then you have a lot more options to save your photo if it's too dark or too bright. Because you've got a lot of varying photos across this whole exposure spectrum. 17. Make a good photo great: Finally, we're going to make a good photo, great, and we're gonna do that just with some small changes. Let's go into the lighting tab. First. I like the exposure of this shot a lot and I know I'm going to have to brighten the face later on to draw attention to my subject's face. So what I'm gonna do since I have to brighten the face is I'll lower the exposure of everything just a little bit. Add some contrast in. The highlights. Look good. I'm going to drop the shadows and raise the whites and the blacks. The blacks. I'll drop just a touch for a little bit of contrast. The color I also like might make it just a touch warmer and asked for the tint. I'll make it a little more magenta to make his skin look more natural as opposed to greenish. I'm going to raise the vibrance but not the saturation. I don't want my photo to look cartoony. So far so good here under the effects, I'll give it some texture and even less clarity, less is always more. A little bit of a vignette around the corners. Just to draw attention to the center. With that, then I always like adding a little bit of noise reduction just to be on the safe side. I don't really notice any negative effects when we're dealing with noise reduction. But maybe there's something in the background I'm missing that it will actually fix. I don't need any optics or geometry here or presets because I've just impacted my photo, would I do need to do now is mask my subject's face. So I'm going to do the, well, why don't I do the radial gradient. I'm going to make a circle that fits his face. Now I'm going to take the lighting tab and boost the exposure just by a little bit. I'm also going to boost the exposure for my subject's eyes. So I'll take another mask. This time I will do a brush. There's one. There's another. I go into the lighting tab, boost them just a little bit to brighten the eyes. There we go. We've got the before. Right there. We've got the after. Now going back and forth like that, It's always good because I'm seeing some things I don't necessarily like that. I actually prefer here. I do like that we can see our subject's face better. I like some of the lighting decisions, but I think the face is a little too bright. I have the option either to drop the brightness in the mask that I've created or the overall photo. And I'm going to go for the overall option. Let's say, right, we go negative 50 here. So now I can go back and forth. There's my original, there's the edit. I like it. He seems a little too pale. Now. Some of the pinks, natural pinks and oranges and his face we've lost when we made these color edits. And so I'm going to go ahead and add some of those back in. If I come down to color, I'm going to go into the mix. I'm gonna go to the oranges and we can make some wild changes here. I boost the saturation all the way. Just to see what I think looks best, I'm going to bring that up a touch and then play with the hue just to give him some color. Alright, we've brought a little bit of life back to his face. So there's our very portrait looking photo now. Of course, we can play around with things and nuanced them, but those are generally the changes that I'll make to portrait photos just to bring some attention to the subject's face here, you're much more likely to look at everything as a whole, as opposed to our edit, where your eyes are naturally drawn in to the center. 18. Final Project and congratulations!: Now it's time for our final project. For this final project, I want you to pick a photo that you've taken that you're proud of. I want you to share the raw photo with no edits. And then I want you to share the edited version as well. Share with us some of the changes you made. Maybe some decisions that were difficult to make or that you had a hard time deciding between. Maybe you could also share some changes that you thought were obvious and easy it needed to be made. Thank you so much for following along with this course. I hope that you found it useful. You can always reach out to me at Jacob at lamb lessons.com or find courses at lamb lessons.com. I'm looking forward to meeting you and seeing you in the next one and seeing your projects submissions.