What Makes a Good Photo: A Beginners Guide to Editing in Lightroom

1. Introduction: We've all been there. You see a photo, you like the photo, you decide you want to get in on the action, maybe take a few photos yourself. So you get a camera or pull out your smartphone, both of which are great choices for photos. But you start shooting and the photos are not matching up with the ideas you visualized. It seems like something is missing, and it could be one or a combination of many different things. Well, that's where this class comes in. What is up beautiful people. My name is Daniel Nwabuko, and I'm a photographer based in the Canadian prairies. My work focuses on showcasing the beauty in people through different styles of portraiture. In this class, we're going to be talking photography. More specifically we'll be diving into some technical tips of what makes a good picture like the lighting, subject framing, and the composition of the photo. We'll also be talking about how to take a raw photo from good to great using different editing tools in Adobe Lightroom. Now, for those of us who may not know, Lightroom is a photo editing software that has both a desktop and a mobile version, both of which we're going to be exploring in this class. This class is for anyone who has any interest in photography, whether you just want to capture memories of your family, friends, pets, or the great outdoors. Whether you've tried it in the past or you're a complete beginner or you're maybe somewhere in-between, there's something in here for you. I know some of you are probably thinking, "But I don't have a camera, this class may not be for me." Well, if you have a smartphone, we're still get to go. Most smartphones released in the last couple of years come with really good cameras on them, so if you have one of those, you definitely can already begin creating some great photos. Without taking more of your time, I'm going to stop talking about it, let's jump right into it. 2. Class Project: Thank you for joining me for this class. Now, before we get right into the lessons, let's talk a little bit about the class project. The class project is basically a quick and easy exercise that you can practice along with as we work our way through the class. For this class project, we'll be editing a photo in Adobe Lightroom, and whether you choose to do it on the desktop or mobile version, it really doesn't matter. We're going to be working our way through both of those and they can achieve quite similar results. I've included a couple of photos in the project folder that you can choose from, but you can also edit any other photo of your choice. The photos included in the project folder are the same ones that I'll be editing in the lessons of this class. You can follow right along but I also highly encourage you to experiment with other different editing tools in Lightroom. I'd really love to see what you come up with after editing. Please do share your before and after photos in the project gallery section of this class, so we can all see what you've been up to. I really look forward to them. Now, let's jump right into our first lesson and let's have some fun together. 3. What is Photography?: What exactly does photography mean? You see, most people only understand the results of photography, which is a photo, but most do not understand the actual meaning of the word photography. Let me break it down for you this way. The word photography is comprised of two different words. One being photon, derived from the Greek word phos, which means light, and the other word is graphy, and graphy means to write. The word graphy, you can actually define using other words like biography, which would literally translates to writing of life. As you probably know, a biography is simply a writing about a person's life. Anyway, lets not digress too far. From my definitions, we can see that photon, graphy, photography means to write with light. What does this mean? Simply put, as a photographer, this means to me that light is a very important factor when it comes to photography, and it is something that should be a major consideration when you're looking to take a photo. That being said, let's talk a little more about light. 4. Lighting Breakdown: Still on the topic of light, let me break down the lighting you are currently seeing in this video. Now, there may only be two lights that are apparent in this video, but the reality is there are actually about five different lights that are lighting up the scene right now, and now to go ahead and draw your attention to some of them. There is a main light source placed on this side of my face to light me up, and that is why you can see that this half of my face is more lit up than the other half of my face. Another light source that you can probably see in the frame is the one that is right behind me there. That is a practical light that was placed there to light up the background a little bit without drawing too much attention to the background but leaving focus on the subject who in this case is me. Hello. Now, the third light source you may or may not notice until I draw your attention to it is the hair light that I actually have above me, and I put it there to give me a heavenly glow. No, I'm just kidding. No, it's really there to separate me from the relatively dark background and that's why you can see lights up my hair and my shoulder, it's just a little bit of separation. Just for example's sake, I'm going to go ahead and turn off the main light source on my face so you can see what we're left with. This is what it looks like. I'll turn it right back on and this is what it looks like with the main light. Now, you might ask, "Daniel, why are we talking about the lights in this video? I thought we were talking about photos?" Indeed, you are very correct to point that out. But in fact, the reason I tell you about the lights in this video is that the technicalities of light is the same both in photos and videos. In fact, I can turn this video into a photo just by saying, "Cheese." There you have it. 5. Everyday Lighting: I mentioned in the previous video that I had a few different sources of lights that are currently lighting up the scene. But I'm pretty sure not everybody has a bunch of lights just laying around somewhere. In fact, I only do because I use them for work. So I'm going to turn this over to Everyday Daniel so that he can help demonstrate how to work with just one light source. Over to you, Everyday Daniel. We are outdoors right now, and we were going to do some examples out here. This was not supposed to be any sort of weather report, but as you can see right now, this is happening. I think we're going to take it inside right now, show you examples inside instead of outdoors. I'm indoors now, and it definitely feels better than being out there. Anyway, let's jump right into our first photography tip. Now this one obviously involves light. Here's a myth, "The brighter the lights, the better the photos." Not true. See, that's not always the case. Don't get me wrong. There are times when bright is what we need, but in most everyday situations, a big soft source of light is usually a better option. You can use it to create images like these ones. The reason for this is that small bright source of light creates really hard shadows, and hard shadows are not always very flattering to look at. As an example, here you can see in this video that I have a very bright source of light. But you can also see how hard the shadows are. One half of my face is really lit up, while the other part, not so much. I should mention, there's a time where hard lights or shadows is what we're aiming to get. Here's an example of a photo where that is the case. But in this case, it was very intentional in the sense that the shadows were used to add some drama to the photo. Now I personally may not use this for a family photo or a group photo. So tip number 1, find a big soft source of light. Question. So where exactly can we find a big source of light? Here, windows. Windows are an amazing source of soft lights, whether you just want to take some selfies or more selfies or the occasional photos of your friends. The next time you see a window, maybe try a selfie. It's good. Thank you Everyday Daniel for showing that to us. Now let's move on to some other tips for taking good photos. 6. Identify And Isolate Your Subject: Another thing that has to be considered when shooting is the subject of the shot. Basically, the subject is the main focus of the photo. It is what the photographer is trying to draw the viewer's attention to whenever they look at the photo. The subject can be a person, a place, a thing, or in some cases, a bunch of things. Now you might ask, how do you as a photographer tell your audience what the subject of the photo is? Well, that's a great question. In fact, there are a few different ways to do that. Let's talk about those. The first one would be light. By varying the amount of light on the subject relative to the amount of light on the background, you can separate the subject and let the viewers know what they're supposed to be focusing on. In this example, you can see that our photo generally has a dark field to it, but you can also see a ray of light from the background hitting the subject of this photo, which in this case is a bottle of whiskey. So view responsibly. The light that comes in draws our attention right to the subject. By separating the subject from the background using a different light intensity, we're able to know what to focus on. In another example, we have the same idea, a generally dark photo with a ray of light coming through and hitting the chair, as well as a table in front of it, of course. In this case, you can probably say there is more than one subject. I mean, the light ray is pretty dramatic itself, so that by itself could probably be considered a subject, but also a table and the chair. Those two feel like a really good subject because there's such a great pair. But again, the light creates a very beautiful contrast between the subject and its environment. Color is another way you can draw attention to your subject and separate them from the background. In this case, instead of the contrast in the light intensities, we'll be looking at contrast in the colors between the subject and their background. What that means is both the subject and the background may be evenly lit, but the difference in colors separate them. Now here's an example. As you can see in this photo, the subject and the wall behind them are pretty evenly lit. But as you can also see, the subject, in this case, pops right out as the colors, mostly that of their t-shirts, separates them from the background. Another factor that could be used to point out the subject in the photo is the size of a subject in the frame or the size of the subject relative to the background. I jumped right into an example here to help explain exactly what I mean. Now in this photo, we can see that we have a subject who's really small relative to the background. Although the subject is really small, they still stand out as a subject. Now there are a few different ways that the subject in this photo could be interpreted by different people. For me, the first thing that comes to mind is how small the subject is compared to the grandiosity of the environment where they're in. Now if we take a closer look at the subject, we notice that they are also carrying a sand board. Someone else may view this photo and interpret that as a fun ride down the dunes, or an adventure, or the endurance it takes to climb up those sand dunes. Really, there are lots of ways that we can interpret this picture and the subject in it, but let's not get too carried away. All we want to point out is that the subject is noticeable and our attention is drawn to that. In this other photo, the case is quite the opposite, as the subject actually fills in most of the frame. Of course, the viewer's eyes are immediately drawn to the subject. This photo also uses a shallow depth of field to further emphasize the difference between the subject and the background. Basically, a shallow depth of field is where you have the subject in focus, while the background is out of focus, or vice versa. Here's an example using this pencil I have with me. Now while the pencil is right by my face, it is perceived as being in the same depth as I am in relation to the viewer, which is true. But when I move it closer to the camera, you can see that the pencil is now in focus as compared to me. I'm out of focus. This is how the eyes perceive depth, by blurring out the unnecessary stuff and focusing on the subject. As you can probably already tell, separation of your subject is almost a sub-art within the actual art of photography. With all of the different methods we've talked about, I must say there is no one size fits all method of separating and drawing attention to your subject. In fact, most photos will usually have a combination of different methods of separation. Like this photo, it has a combination of both light and color contrast separation. We can go through just about any group of photos, and we'll definitely find a few different subject separation methods at play. The next time you take a photo, when you're deciding your subject, make sure you isolate them so the viewer knows where to focus on when looking at the photo. So far, we have been focusing our attention on some technical tips on how to create a good photo. But every good photo can use a hand from some good editing to make an altogether great photo. Let's talk about editing. 7. Before Diving Into Lightroom: For editing today, we're going to be using a software called Adobe Lightroom. Now Adobe Lightroom is a photo manipulation and photo editing software. It is also a photo management software, but most people know it mainly as a photo editing software. That's what we're going to be using today. Now you've probably heard of the word Photoshop, and that is the older sibling to Lightroom, is the more popular sibling, but they're from the same parents, no sibling rivalry though, which is good. Lightroom has both a desktop version for desktop computers or laptops, and it also has a mobile version for mobile phones. Today we're going to tackle both of them, and I'm going to show you how to work with both of them. Now the thing is, the desktop version is slightly more complicated. Well, not complicated, it just has more features than the mobile version. But we'll go through both of them and we will see how we can take a photo and turn it into a better version of itself, which I think is going to be a great exercise for us today. I will be sharing my computer screen with you as I work, that way, you can see exactly what I'm doing, and you can follow along the process. Without saying anymore, let's jump right in and take a look at what we have. 8. Lightroom Desktop Importing: So right now, we are in Adobe Lightroom. This is what you may get when you just open it. If you're opening it for the first time, you might probably have to set up a few things. It will ask you to set up a catalog because since it's a file management system as well, it wants to arrange things in catalogs. You might have to set that up as well. Now I have set mine up already and the name of my catalog is awesomeness. You can see that right here, Awesomeness.lrcat. Lrcat simply means Lightroom catalog, but we're not worried about that today. Now, the first thing we want to do is we want to bring our photos into our catalog. How do we do that? We go to our library module here at the top right. It says click the "Import" button to begin. Where's the import button? At the bottom left. So if we click that, it opens up this dialog box for us. What it's asking us is, "Hey, where would you want to select the source?" What source? Where are the photos on your computer, on an external hard drive, on an SD card, where are they? Please select the source. Right now, you can see here it gives me the option of the Macintosh HD, which is my computer. It gives me the option of the Backup Plus, which is an external drive that is connected to my computer currently. Mine are actually contained on my computer and I'm going to go ahead, and it's under Awesome Photos right there. When I click on "Awesome Photos" you can see that it shows me all the photos that are contained in that folder, but I do not want to import all of them, I'm just going to import what we need. I'm going to go ahead and click "All Photos" here and it's going to uncheck all the photos because if I have them checked, they will be imported. I'm going to go ahead and select the ones that I want. I'm going to click on this one, that one, and that one. I'm going to check them right there. Now you definitely don't have to click on them individually first before checking them. I was just trying to show you which ones I'm going to be importing. That is what we have. Now for the sake of another example, I'm going to take this one off. Here we have two of them. I'm going to go ahead and click import. You can see here it has imported both photos. That's what we have currently. Now there is an easier way or relatively easier way that you can import photos, through the drag and drop method, by simply finding the photos on your desktop by yourself or wherever it is on your laptop, whatever device it is, and then just dragging them into Lightroom. I'm going to do that here by opening up my explorer on Mac. It's called the Finder window. I'm going to do that and Windows is called Windows Explorer. I'm going to do that. Here I have already opened up the folder. These are the photos that we saw. You can see that this one beach is right here. I'm going to drag in the Clr wheel and drop it right here. You can see it goes back to the dialog box and tells me, "Hey, you selected this photo. Is that the one you want to import?" The ones we've already imported are grayed out. That means we cannot select them again. Yes is my answer. I'm going to click "Import". You can see what it does here. It shows me just the one photo. This is because Lightroom prioritizes your newest imports. But at the bottom left here, if you click, you can select that you want to see all photos as compared to just the previous imports. That is how you import a file or some files into Lightroom. Next up, we'll be talking about how to develop them or how to edit them. 9. Develop Module Basics Panel: After you've imported your file, you can go ahead and click on the "Develop" module right here, and for this session, we're going to be dealing with just the Library and the Develop. To a certain extent, we're mostly done with the library because we just use that for importing. We are going to be using the Develop module, and I'm just going to take you around the Develop module for a moment, I'm going to go ahead and change this photo to the actual photo we're going to be editing. On the Develop module, you can see to the right-hand side, there are different tabs that we can open up, we can expand, and they have different options. You see that and we're going to be working with some of these today. In fact, to be specific, we are going to go the Basic, HSL, and ColorGrading is what we're going to be using for editing this photo today. I'm going to click on the "Basic" and see the options that it has. Every tab has different options and I'm going to run right through the different options. Again, I want to be able to give you something where by the time we're done this, you're able to go ahead and edit a photo by yourself. Under the Basics tab, we have the exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks. Those are the majority of what we have under the Basics tab. [inaudible] ball ahead and explain what these mean. We're going to start here at where it says WB. WB means white balance and the white balance basically controls the temperature and the tint of the photo. Temperature going from cold to warm. Now, the temperature has a slider here and if we go to the left, you can see that it's colored in blue, and each slider gives an idea of what it does. This one is colored in blue on the left and yellow on the right. That means it will pull the slider over to the left by clicking on the little notch there and dragging over to the left. The photo becomes more blue. Now, this looks hideous as it is and if we go all the way to the right, we can see it goes really yellow. This actually does look better than the blue, but it's still a low overboard in my opinion. I'm going to double-tab on the slider there, I'm going to double-tab on the knob on the slider and that brings it back to the zero points. Now, the number is not necessarily zero, it just brings it back to 5,250 Kelvin which is the temperature at which the photo was shot on. Double-clicking on any slider would bring you back to its zero point. For the tilt, so you can see that if we shift left, we're going green, and if we shift to right, we're going more magenta. Again, double-click and we'll bring you back to the zero point. That is what the white balance slider does. I'm going to go ahead and go down further and let's talk about the tone. Under the tone, we have the exposure and the contrasts. Now exposure, you can see that on the left it goes darker and on the right, it goes lighter. That means if you drag your slider to the right, we're going to be adding some more lights into the photo. If we go left, we can see that we're going to be taking out lights. You can see we go all the way right, we've pretty much blown out this photo and it's quite useless. If we go all the way left, there's still some details that we can see but we really cannot see what the photo is really about. We don't get to get the full story of the photo. Again, I'm going to double-click, reset it back to zero. Try out the same thing for the contrast. We go right, we can see that the darks, the shadowy parts of the photo, and the blacks become darker and the light, we can also see that those parts become lighter. Basically, if you increase your contrast, your darks become darker and your lights become lighter. If we go the opposite direction with the contrast, we can see that the darks are becoming lighter and the lights are becoming slightly darker. This is flattening out the image and that is not always what we want from our image. I'm going to put the contrast back at zero and let's take a look and see what the highlights do. Now for this one, I'm actually going to go ahead and click this other photo that I just made just to show the example. Now highlights are colors that are in the white range or in the 50 percent gray range coming towards whites. If I turn up my highlights, you can see that both the whites right here and the grays are affected. I'm going to go ahead and turn it up, the whites become brighter and the grays also become brighter. I'm going to double-click that to set us back at the zero point so we can see that again. I'm going right, I'm going lighter with the highlights and you can see what happened. Now, I'm going to go the other direction with the highlights, and you can see that both the whites and grays go darker. I'm going to reset that by double-clicking on its shadows, shadows are in the dark regions or from 50 percent gray. Fifty percent gray is basically the color in between complete black and complete whites. From 50 percent gray all the way towards black. One of the things about 50 percent gray is 50 percent gray has a 50 percent of white and 50 percent of black, so both the highlights and the shadows will be affecting the 50 percent gray region. I'm going to go ahead and play with the slider here. You can see that when I reduce the shadows, the 50 percent gray goes darker and the black is already really black. It can't get any blacker. When I go all the way to the right, you can see that it adds more. This is the same idea with the whites and the black sliders. Whites are whites and blacks are blacks. That is that for the sliders that are contained under the Basic Panel. Let's go ahead and see how we will edit our photo using the Basic Panel. 10. Editing With The Basics Panel: Back here in Lightroom we do have our photo. Now one of the things I like to consider when I'm looking at a photo is what exactly do I want from that photo? What do I want it to look like in the end? Now, I may not know the exact answer but I need to have a place where I want to start from. Now when I look at this photo, I think it's a really beautiful photo. It's very light, very airy. But looking at it, I just think that we can have a little more color in the sky because I think the sky there's a lot of colors going on, it's quite radiant. I want to put those colors back in there, not by trying to bring in strange colors or anything. We're not going to be doing that here, but the colors that are already there I'm trying to accentuate them so that they look really good. By looking at it, I can see that we have blue and purple hues in the sky right here, and right down here in the sunset we have some reddish, orangish, yellowish hues in the sunset right here. Now, those are usually the colors that are contained sunsets; red, orange, yellow. Now some days you get the sky being really dramatic with the blues and the purples and, or the pinks sometimes. But that I know is what we have in this photo. How can I do that? Is there a way I and bring back the colors here? Well, one of the things that I know from experience is that if I drag down the Exposure Slider, and that's usually where I start most of my photos from, the Exposure Slider just to see what we can get out of it. If I drag that down, you can see that we're already recovering some colors in there. Now, that is good for this part of the photo, the highlights and the whites, but it darkens everything really in the shadows and the blacks. I don't necessarily want that. I'm going to put the Exposure back to zero, and I'm going to make this more specific changes. I'm going to darken the highlights by reducing the number value for the highlights, and you can see that we are getting something out of it. I'm going to put that back to zero. I'm going to put it a negative 100, and you can see what we're getting out of the highlight slider. I don't want it as extreme as a 100, so I'm going to go maybe somewhere in the 59. I think that's fine. Now, I also want to put some lights in the shadows. Let's see how that works. If I go right with it, and you can see how that looks. Now we have some definition in the rocks here, and you can see the sky. Now, not to forget our subjects. Our subjects are mostly silhouette, but they're still there. We're not completely leaving them out of this, but because there are silhouettes and because they're not being super colorful here, I think they just blend right into the background even though they're separated so we can see exactly what's happening with them. Remember we talked about separation of subjects. This is a good job of separation of subjects. By the way, I just clicked on the photo and it zooms right in and that's how we can take a look at the subjects. If I click on the photo again, it zooms right out. That's just a quick tip right there. I want to take a look and see what we've done so far. I want to see a before and an after of this photo. How do I do that? If I hit the backslash key on my keyboard, you can see what it does. It shows me a before, this is the before, this is what we had, and it says it right there at top right of the photo, it says before, and if I hit that key again, it sees nothing. But that means that is a current state of the photo. This is exactly what we have right now. I think we're doing a good job so far. Now, you can play with these sliders back and forth. The fact that I've gone past the exposure and gone further down does not mean I cannot go back to it anymore, I still can. Now, I'm going to go back to my exposure and I'm going to reduce that a little bit to see what I get, negative 0.2, that is fine. I don't want to go too much. I'm going to increase my contrast to see what I can get out of that. That's good. At plus 16, and you can see. Again, I'm going to hit my backspace key, before, after. Another way you can take a look at the before is on the history panel right here to the left side. If you click that, it literally shows you every step that you've made on the photo from the import. If I click on "Import" here, this is what the photo looked like when we imported the photo and if I go all the way to my last step, this is what it looks like right now. I think we've done a great job with the basics panel. I don't know if there's anything else that I want to play with. Let me take a look. The whites, I don't want to play with the whites much. Let me take a look at the blacks too, put some lights in them. That's not too bad. Play again with the contrast. I think that's good. I think that is really good. I'm going to try warming up the color to see if we can get anything out of it. Just to slight little bit, and I think that is fine. Before we go ahead and jump into the HSL sliders tab, let's go ahead and do a couple more examples still working with the basics tab so that we're able to solidify the information and the knowledge that we've gotten from the basics tab. It's just a little more practice. Now looking at the photo, the first thing I notice, I notice two things right off about with this photo. One, the photo is very cool. What I mean by cool is you can see right here on the ground where the subject is standing on, you can see that there is a bluish hue. That means instead warm, it is cool in that sense. Another thing is if you look around the photos like right here, you see that we have some magentas same thing as it is in the subject's face and in the subject's hair. I want to go in and we want to try to make these adjustments. The first thing's first like for me, I personally like to start off with a tint. In this case, I'd like to start off with a tint. As we know, the opposite of magenta is green. By the way, for anybody who's wondering, the basics tab deals with color correction which I talk extensively about in my other course on color grading and Photoshop. Feel free to check that out. Back over here, we can look and see that I'm going to be pulling in the greens, a little more green. Now you can see that we're going slightly overboard. I usually like to go overboard and then come right back towards a magentas to see where it would be a nice fit. We started off at plus 36, ended up at plus 17. I'm going to do that again and see. I think plus 19 is a good number. Now, everything is not as it should be. As I said, you can see that the ground here where the subject is standing on is still blue. We're going to go ahead, add some yellow to that and see what we can come up with. Now, you can see that we seem to be slightly going overboard. I'm going to pull that right back a little more towards the blues. Like I've mentioned earlier, you just want to play with this sliders. Just go back and forth of the sliders, see exactly where you want it to be. Here is a before, I'm going to hit the backslash key, before, after. You can see how much of a difference we've already made in this photo, before. Purple or magenta-ish, and very cool, but now it's a little warmer. You can see that skin tones are even better in this photo, just from the tiny little adjustments that we've made. Now let's go ahead and see what we have for the exposure, contrast, we'll deal with all of those. I've just increase the exposure a little bit. Going back, I don't want to do that. You can see the effect that it has. I'm just going to right of the exposure to add some more lights, I don't want to add too much. Let's see what we have with the contrast. Slight increase there, and I always like to check my befores and afters just to see where I'm coming from and where I currently am, that way I'm fully aware of what I'm doing, so I do not go overboard. Here we have a before and like I said, you can see right up here at the top right, it says before, and if you hit the Backslash key again, you can see that it gives us our current states, which is our current after. That's what we currently have. Now, if we look at this photo, there's a few highlights and midtones in shadows, you can see the obvious shadows. Shadows would be what she's wearing, midtones would be her backpack or the greens in the backgrounds. Obvious, highlights would be the skin tone here, some parts of it, as well as the ground the subject is standing on. Again, these are things that I've identified by just looking at the photo, but I can come in here and I can play with the highlights slider, and you can see that is exactly what is happening when I go high on the highlights, you can see that the ground goes really, it gets almost blown out. When I go back down, you can also see on the forehead, on the nose and the hands of the subject. Now for the highlights, you might want to turn it down a little bit to see what we get, because I do not want too much attention going towards the ground. Our subject is the person in the photo, and that's where I want to keep our attention. Very slight change, I have it on negative 21, and again, these numbers are numbers that you can change, it doesn't have to be the exact same. Now to our shadows, let's see, I don't want to darken them because we get a very grungy effect, but that's not what I'm looking for. I'm just looking to correct the picture and get it to a nice normal color corrected state where we can just look at it and appreciate it. Shadows just add a little more light into it, we can play with the whites and see what the whites are. You can see where it says that there are whites, again, right here with the highlights and the skin tone of the person, and as things get brighter, it's considered to be white. I think we've done a good job here, I don't want to do too much. Now lets take a look at the Vibrance and Saturation. I'm just going to go ahead and explain those since they are also contained in the basics tab. The saturation actually deals with the color intensity in the photos. Now you can see on the right, you can see that it gets quite colorful, and on the left of the slider, it gets just gray. We're going to start by moving to the left of the slider, and you can see that our picture has lost all color. Now if we take the slider and go all the way to the right, you can see that every color in the picture is starting to just increase in intensity. It doesn't look very great, but now you can see the blues very well here. You can see how they are really out there and you can see all the different colors. You can see here we have greens, and some oranges, and some yellows also containing the greens, and you can just see everything is right out there. Now, I do not want it as much as that, we might increase it a little bit right after I explain the vibrance. The vibrance is a type of saturation slider, again, you notice that going right, you see it becomes more colorful, and going left, it also will de-saturates the photo. Let's try that with the actual slider. But now you can see that in this photo we still have a little bit of color right here, and we also have some more color just a little bit. It doesn't take out everything, that is because the vibrance slider controls the midtones, it controls the saturation of the colors in the midtones of the picture. I hope that makes sense. If we go all the way right, the midtone colors really start to pop. You can see that in this picture. This picture is one that has a lot of midtones in it, because we just have the shadows right here and the highlights right here. But most of the picture, most of the other parts of the picture is contained in the midtones. You can see, and you can still see that we have some magenta still in the hair, and you can see that we still do have some blue in the ground. These are things that those sliders can help us expose, and I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to try to see if we can make it any better. Right now our magenta tints or a tint is on plus 19. I'm going to see if we add some more green, what happens, and so we are currently at plus 13, that's not that bad, we're coming from plus 19, so that's not that bad at all. For here, I'm not going to add too much more warmth to this photo, because we can see that the warmth is contained just in the ground here. We can deal with that later when we talk about the HSL slider, and I will show you exactly what I do to make it a little different. I'm going to turn my vibrance down because I do not want it that much, but we can have it at 43. Let's take a look at the before, Backslash key before this, where we started this photo from, after, and you can see that the colors in this photo are more natural. All this we have derived just by moving around the sliders contained only in the basics panel. Still on the basics tab, let's go ahead and take a look at one last photo. Again, as in our previous photo, you can see that the subject of this photo, is also a person. Now, like I mentioned earlier, one of the things, the moment I see a person being a subject in the photo that I'm looking at is making sure that the skin tone of the person is coming out correct. The reason for that is, if you had a skin tone, say that looked blue, you would feel that something is weird here, and which is because our eyes notice right away that skin tones are not blue and they're not green, this is not a Marvel character. I'm going to Double-Click, reset the temperature. I notice the skin tones of this photo, and one of the things I notice about this is if you go a little closer, you can see that there is a green addition to this photo. You can see from right here, the green from the leaves are probably, you have a reflection of lights going from the leaves and the vegetation around this person on to the person's skin tone, and we want to adjust that. We're going to be adjusting the tint by going towards magenta. Before I do that, you can see here that we have a tint at plus 10, this is because when, the photo was shot, either in camera settings, was at some tint that was giving it a tint plus 10, which is tending towards magenta. But this photo definitely needs some more magenta to it. We're going to go ahead and drag that slider right, and you can see that we're already making some corrections. Backslash for the before, before, after, before, after. This is why it's very important to take a look at your photos first, that does matter. It matters that you are able to see what is currently and picture where you are going with the photo. Now another thing about this photo is it's slightly cool, very slightly, you may or may not be able to see it. Now, I do see it, to my taste it is cool, so I'm going to go ahead, increase the temperature just a little tiny bit. You can see that the skin tone of this person is making way better. Look where we're coming from, this is where we're coming from, very green and slightly cool, and you can see it's more reddish, more orange. It's warmer, it's more skin tone-ish, there's more life to it. That is immediately what we're able to pull up from this photo, and we haven't done much of this photo, but just by changing the white balance, just by changing the temperature and the tint under the basics tab, you can see that we've done so much already to this photo. Now, moving further down the basics tab, I want to go ahead and increase the exposure for this photo, just so that we can see the person a little more, and you can see that we have accomplished that. I'm going to go ahead and also increase the contrast. Let's try decreasing it first, and you can see that when we decrease the contrast, as earlier mentioned, the darks become lighter and the lights become darker. If we increase the contrast, the opposite happens. The darks right here, you can see they become darker, and the lights right here are trying to become brighter even though it may not seem that way. But let's go ahead, I'll just click out of the photo or zoom out of the photo so we can see the whole picture. This is what we have currently, contrast's at plus 11, not much has changed. Now I do see that there are these dark spots here which would be under the shadows of the photo. I'm going to go ahead and play with that, and you can see the difference its making, and you can see that by increasing the shadows all the way to the top, you can see how much detail we get back in the hair of the person, but that's not exactly what we're looking for, for this particular photo. We're just going to increase it just a tiny little bit, and here's our before, here's our after. Again, our before, and our after. All these just from tiny changes that we're making from the basics tab. We're still going to go ahead and play with this just a little more. Let's see what we have in the highlights, I do not want to blew up my highlights because as you can see, it comes right here at the top of the photo as well as right down here. I'm going to click out of that, I'm going to reduce my highlights even more than it was originally. Right now I'm at negative 36, that looks fine to me. Let's take a look at the whites. We can see what the whites to bring. You can see that when we increase the whites, you notice that we're getting our greens back here. I'm going to go ahead, increase my tint again, going towards magenta even more, and then I'm going to go ahead and decrease my whites. There we go. I think this looks way better than where we started from. You can see the total green cast, you can see that it's very green, very moody, but you can see what we're getting out from the photo now. Again, we are doing some color correction, getting this photo just up to standard, making sure it looks good for anyone to just take a quick glance and be like, "Okay, that's an okay photo." That's all I want to do with the highlights and the shadows. Let's take a look at the vibrance, see if I want to change anything there. Increase the vibrance just a little bit, and that is all I would personally do under the basics tab for this photo. I think we've done a good job with the basics panel. We're going to start talking about the hue saturation illuminance panel. 11. Editing: The HSL Sliders: Right here underneath the Basic, I'm just going to go ahead and shut off the Basics, and I going to expand the HSL, Hue, Saturation, Luminance. I'm going to explain this by bringing up tiny little makeshift color wheel that I just created for the purpose of this. The hue is what we call color. Red, is a hue. Orange, yellow, green, those are all different hues. The saturation is how dense the color is, is it really saturated? That makes sense. The luminance is how bright it is or how dark it is. That's what the luminance measures. Let's take a look at the red color here. With the red colors, we can shift the hue and we can go right, and you can see, I'm just going to double-click and set it back to zero. On the red hue slider, you can see if we go right, we're going towards orange. If we go left, we're going towards pink. If I go right, you can see that the red has become orange and you can see that the orange here, orange here, but remember we started this off as red. I'm going to double-click that, go back to red. Now I'm going to go the opposite way with red and you can see it's sitting at pink right now. I'm going to double-click that, go back to red. The same idea for every other color, every other hue saturation slider. You can change the different colors to different colors. Here's what we have right now, but remember, we started off at red, orange, yellow, green. We want to take those back to what they were originally. I'm going to do that by double-clicking. If we've made so many changes, changed the red, orange, yellows, and greens, and we want to reset all the sliders, what we can do is, instead of double clicking on each individual slider, we can just double-click here where it says hue and it takes everything back to regular. For the saturation, almost the same idea. We go right with a red or orange and we can see that they get relatively more saturated. Now, these colors are already really saturated as is, so it's difficult to see any change, but if we go to less saturation, we can actually see the change even better. You can saturate them on different levels. All the different colors are changing in saturation. Again, we want to reset that, double-click and everything goes back to normal. The luminance, same idea except we're playing with the light intensity levels here. If we take red to the right, you can see it gets brighter. Take it to the left, it goes darker. You can see that the orange is also changing with the red. That is because there are some red components to orange. Red, orange, yellow are three different colors that are really close to each other. In fact, just the way they are in the rainbow, red, orange, yellow. Yellow has a component of orange and yellow also has a component of green because green comes right after yellow. These are all things and this is under a subtopic called color theory. We'll not dive too much into that today, we'll just leave it for the purpose of what we have going on here. I can make some changes to these and you can see that it's changing the colors. But let's go all the way back to our actual photo. I'm going to reset this, double-click again, reset, and we have the normal photo back. Let's go back to our actual photo and we're going to be using the HSL sliders as hue, saturation, luminance sliders to make some changes to this photo. We're back with our photo and we're going to make some changes here. We've identified that there are some blues and some purples here. We can visibly see that. We know that in sunsets we have red, oranges, and yellows. If you're not sure about what colors are contained, you can go ahead and play with the sliders. As we play with our read slider, you can see right here, there's a little glow that is happening, not really a glow but a color shift. You can see that and we can do the same thing with our orange, and that one is way more visible than the red. That simply means that the orange content of that sunset is really high. Double-click to reset. Let's take a look, yellows and you can see that the yellows, it's also changing. Let's go down to the greens. I do not see any visible greens in this photo, so if anything changes, that will be a surprise to me. We're going to go ahead and change that. We really do not see any change. Double-click reset that. Aqua, they might be, but it doesn't look like it. Blues definitely or you can see that shift. You can see and it's very prominent right there. Let's try the same thing for purple. We definitely will have some purples and you can see it right there. We have some changes to make here. We know that we have some reds, we have some oranges and yellows, and we have some blues and we have some purples. I mentioned that for this particular photo, I wanted to bring out a more saturated sky. I wanted to bring out the clouds and the sunsets and just bring out all the beauty that already is in this photo. For that, I'm going to be saturating. I'm going to be using my saturation sliders for a start. Saturate both the blues and the purples here because that's really why I just want to start. I just picked that randomly and that's what I want to do, blue and purple. I don't want to overdo that. You can see if I overdo them, it's not as good. I'm going to dial that back, blues and purples. It is looking nice. I also want to change my blue hues to slightly more purplish hues. I'm going to drag that, not all the way. I do want that separation between the blue and purple. This is what we have currently and I like that. I'm going to drag the blue back and these sliders, you can go back and forth with them. It doesn't necessarily have to be just a one move or you can really go back and forth with them. That's what we have for the blues. Let's see what we have for the purples. If I go right, I'm taking purple towards magenta, and if I go left, I'm taking purples towards blues. I do not want to do too much of that. So I took the blue towards purple and purple slightly towards the blue. I'm going to draw that back a little bit. Let's take a look and see what happens when we decrease the luminance down here. I do not want much of that, definitely not. But I think this looks good. Let's take a look at the before by hitting the backslash key "Before, After." You can see how much color we've put into this picture. I think, this looks great, before, after. The other colors that we're going to be dealing with are the red, oranges, and yellows. I'm going to go ahead increase my orange. That's where I just decided to start from, you can decide to start from any color at all really. I like that. Let me see what happens when I increase the reds and the yellows. That looks amazing. I think, that looks amazing. This is just a beautiful photo. I think, we've done a great job coming from the before. We've definitely put some more life into this photo. Moving onto the HSL sliders for our second photo, I'm just going to pop the HSL slider. Here you have the sliders just open up this way. You can also hit the "All" button and then you have your Hue, your Saturation, and your Luminance, everything is on display. For this photo, what are we're looking to get done? Well, this photo is technically a correct looking photo as it is right now. We have good, okay skin tones. They can be better. We have the greens looking green, so we can stylize with our HSL sliders. Let's take a look and see what we can do. For me, I really like to start with the skin tones because being a portrait photographer, the thing that matters the most in a picture where a person is the subject, is the subjects. The skin tones of the subject, our eyes are very quick to notice whenever skin tones are off. You want to know that you are getting that right. Like I've said, skin tones are always contained in the red. I'm going to play with that. You can see the skin tones, double-click to reset, orange. You can see what's happening with the skin tones and yellow sliders. This one, not too much yellows, but you can see some yellows in the background. Again, I covered this properly in my color grading course for beginners. Check that out and you get a lot more out of that when it comes to colors. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to start off with my saturation actually. Instead of having all of them open, I'm just going to click on saturation. I'll start there and I'm going to go ahead and increase the orange that we have. You can see what happens when we increase that. I'm not going to go too much. Plus 30 seems to be good enough for this photo or maybe 33. We're playing with the sliders. We'll go back and forth. I'm going to go ahead and keep adjusting just for the skin tones. I'm going to go to the hue. I think, I like the hue the way it is because if we go left, we're going more red. If we go right, we're going tinting towards green. I think, I'll like it where it is with the skin tones. I'm going to go to the luminance now and see what we get. If we go down, you can see what is happening. The skin is becoming more dull, but if we go to the right. It just gives it that tiny little pop and that's all that I want from this photo. That's all I'm looking for at least for skin tones in this photo. I think, skin tones are good. If you want to see what we've done just with the HSL slider on the left, right here, you can click the button and it shows you what has been done. It toggles it on and off. Right now, it's off. As you can see, everything is grayed out. We go again, we click that and we're good to go. Another color we know that is in here, we said that there was some blues in the ground. We also want to tackle that. You can also see that we have blues in the outfit of the person. If you look closely, you will see that there are also some blues in all the blacks. So we want to take care of that. Let's go ahead and see our saturation for blues. Let's play with the blues first. Look, that is incredible, what we're getting out of that. We go right with the blues, and you can see how much blues we have. It's contained in the blacks, it's contained in both the shadows and the blacks and the highlights, and it's contained right here in the camera. We're going to go ahead and turn that down. You can see that we're going towards pure blacks now when we turn that down. These are actually pure blacks, but it doesn't have to be that way. Let's leave some color detail in them. We're going to have the blues at about negative 42. I think that's a good number. Let's go ahead and toggle the on-off button of the HSL sliders. Can you see the difference? See that difference. We've turned down some blues and I'm not exactly sure if we're going to leave it there. Let's check out the luminance. If we increase the luminance, you can see what is happening on the ground. It's going all the way up. We can turn that down, all the way down. You can see that we have these little leaves here that are creating some weird effect. We don't want that, so we can reduce it just a tiny little bit, negative 17. I think, that's good enough. Again, I'm going to check my before, my after, see how far we've come. Another color that is present in this is green. We can go ahead and tackle the green. Like I've mentioned earlier, there are some yellows contained in green. I'm pretty sure if I play with my yellows, I'm going to just play with the hues of the yellows. You can see in some parts where you have green colors, like right up here, there are just tiny little bit of yellows contained there. Just playing around with these, I've moved my yellow little more towards the green. For the greens, I'm going to decrease the saturation. See that effect. If I go all the way down, you can see what we have. It's very muted at this point, but we're not going for that, so we just reduce it a little bit, and I think that is fine. I say that while I still changed the number. I think that is fine at negative 46 for the greens, I'm going to go to luminance, increase that, decrease it, increase it, see the changes that we're getting. I'm going to go back to saturation and turn it down. I think I preferred it this way. At this point, we're just working with preferences right now. This is my preference for what the color should look like. After color correcting with the basics panel, it just is based off of what you want to create, your creativity. This is what we have for the greens and these what we have for a skin color, it's not looking bad. We do have a little bit of red in the lipstick here so we can play with the red. You see what is happening when I move the red sliders around. I'm just going to bring this subject to the middle and so you don't want it to be over excessively at plus 100. No. I think having it at maybe plus 12 is good. Check out the luminance and we see what the effect is. Plus two, and I think that's good. That is good. The picture right now it looks good. Let's do a before and then after, and you can see how much difference we've made in this photo. Again, you can still go back and forth with the photo. I'm going to go back to the basics tab, see what I can do to increase the saturation, and that is good. When you're still moving back and forth with the photos just to get the best out of the photo, the fact that I've left the basics and gone to the HSL does not mean I can't go back to the basics tab anymore. That's what we have for this photo under the HSL sliders. Coming back to the HSL sliders of our third photo, I'm going to go ahead and open that up. Again, if we're looking at the photo and just identifying colors, we can see that we have greens from the leaf blades here. We can see that we have greens in the background, and the other color that we would have is red, orange, yellow. That is correct because, skin tone. Let's go ahead on the luminous slider right now. What I usually do with these things is I can pretty much start anywhere. If I have something exactly in mind that I want to carry out, then I know exactly what I'm going to start from. But in a forum like this where I'm not exactly sure where I'm going, I'm just trying to get something good out of this photo, you can really start from anywhere just by identifying what you already have. We can see the reds and we can see where they're present, by identifying what you already have, you can start from anywhere and just work your way forward or backward from there. That's what we have for the red under luminance. Let's take out the orange and we can see where the oranges are. You can see it right there. I'm going to go ahead and increase the luminance for the oranges for this particular photo. I'm also going to go ahead and check out what we have for the yellows. I'm going to turn that up. You can see, as I previously mentioned, yellows are also contained in the greens. What we see as visibly green has some yellow components to it. I'm not going to increase the luminance of this one too much. In fact, I'm going to go over to the saturation and see what it looks like decreased. I'm going to decrease that just a little bit. Not too much. We're going to decrease the saturations of the greens as well. See what we have. If you can tell, I do like to decrease my green saturation. I don't know why it's just the way the color works for me. If I increase the orange saturation, not too much. Let's see, maybe at a plus eight. It's a relatively muted look. Nothing too crazy. I'm going to hit the before backslash key, this is where we started from and this is where we currently are, before, after. It's nothing too crazy, it's just a picture that looks like a picture. Obviously, if you wanted to tell more of a story with this picture, that would affect the mood, that would affect the coloring. If you went back to the basics under Treatment, you hit the Black and White. You could also do that. Things like that. I'm going to hit the color button just so that we can get color back. This is what we have for this particular photo under the HSL slider. You may have noticed that we have not touched the purple or the magenta. That's because I don't see any visible purples and magentas in this photo. You can see that we have this tiny little spot here where, it shows that there is a presence of a purple, but you can see how many it is, you can how small it is. I won't be playing much with that. We do have magentas here, but they're not super visible. I'm just going to go ahead and reduce both purple and magenta and click out of the photo to zoom out of the photo. You can see that this is what we have. I changed my mind, I'll increase the green saturation just a little bit more and go over to the hue. See what happens if we changed the hues of the yellows and take them closer towards the green. It might look nice of the leaf blades, but you can see what is happening to the skin. You can see right here and going down here you can see that the yellows there are not responding very well to that. It even looks way better if we go in the opposite direction and take the yellows a little more towards red. You see sometimes you might find these things by error, which is exactly what has just happened right now. That's what we have for this photo. I do like where we are with this photo. I really do. Before, after. Again, before, and then after. Feel free to play with the different sliders. Feel free to just play around with them and you can see what I've done with the greens, taking them a little more towards yellow. Let's see what happens. No, I don't like taking them a little more towards turquoise, but yes, and you can see what we have. I think this is a very beautiful photo that we have considering we're coming from something this simple. This is the before, and this is the current state of the photo, the after. We do have something good and we're going to move on from here into seeing if we can make any difference through color grading of the photo. 12. Editing: Color Grading: Right underneath the HSL sliders, I'm just going close this up, is the color grading slider, and I'm going open that up. You can see that this one has shadows, highlights, midtones. Basically, whatever I push in each color, so I'm going to move the midtones, and I'm going to drag that to yellow. You can see that in the midtones of this image, it is pushing the yellow color. I'm going to go ahead and reset that by double-clicking on Midtone. I can do the same thing for highlights. You can see that the highlights in this picture are going green. I'm going to go ahead and double-click. I'm going tell you what I'm going do to this photo. What I want do here is the colors. I just want to accentuate them a little more. We have already done that because remember this our before, this is our after, but I want to do that even more. So what can I do for that? In the highlights I see we have a lot of blue hues purpleish colors, as well as some yellows. But I also see that we have some yellows down here in the rocks. I should mention color grading is a topic. It's like a full blown sub topic under photography. So don't fret if you're not getting it at first, it might take some time. For this one with the colors we have, I'm going to be adding some colors to both the highlights here and the shadows here. My pick for those is I'm going to try to add some blue hues. So I'm going pull the little ball slider thing in the middle towards the blues, and you can see what it's doing. Now I don't want to go this far, so I'm going to draw that back closer to the center, and you could see what happens, and I think that is good. I think that is fine. Now for the shadows, I'm going to be pushing some yellows. I'm going to try that here. Yellow and orange is colors into the shadows. Let's take a look at what that brings about. So this is what we have currently. Now, I kind of do like this. I'm going before, after and this is the change we've made. Now from the color grading, if you want see what one particular Effect tab has done, on the left of the tab here, so where it says color grading on the left here, you can turn it off and turn it back on, and you can see what happens. It's back on now. I can see that I seem to have lost a lot of purple. I'm going back to my HSL. I want see if I can get some more purple. Now for this one, because I turned some blues into purple, I'm going to be turning those back into blues to just take a look. This is what we have right now. I think this looks really good. I'm going to close the Color Grading tab with HSL tab. Go all the way back to basic where we started from. I'm going to increase the highlights just a little bit because right now they're very saturated, which is what we wanted, but making some changes along the way that is completely fine. I think this photo is good as it is. I think we've made ourselves a beautiful photo here. Of course, there are many more tools that we can use inside of light room. But this right here, I think we've done a perfect job of taking this photo from here before all the way to this point, the after. One of the things I just think that we can do is if we turn this into a black and white image. I click at that, it's beautiful. I did that by hitting the "V" key on my keyboard, V turns things into black and white in light room. Another way you can do that is go to the Basics tab under Treatment and you can click instead of color that is selected, you just click "Black & White", and you can see it does that for us. So back to color. I think we've done a great job at editing this photo, and yes I will leave this photo at this point. I think we've done well, let me know what you think. Before we move on to our second color grading example, I'd like for us to take a closer but quick look into color theory. That way no one is left completely in the dark. By now, you've probably heard me talk about color theory. So let me explain it a little further by saying this in its simplest definition. Color theory deals with how you can mix different colors together to derive a certain visual effect in both photos or videos. A question one might ask is, how do we know what colors go together, and this is where we introduce the color wheel. We have a color wheel on the screen right now, and this is Adobe color wheel. You can see it right here. I got here just by Googling Adobe color wheel, hit "Enter" first thing on Google that comes up Adobe color wheel. Click that, it will bring you right here. Now you may have noticed that our screen has gone dark around the corners. You can go ahead and change that on the top right here, if you wish switch at theme and get yourself a lighter theme, whichever it doesn't really matter. What we are going to be focusing on is more on the left-hand side. So very quickly we're going to talk about color harmony. Now, color harmony simply explains what colors will go together and what different kinds of rules. So these are different rules right here. Analogous simply means the colors go together because they are very similar, on the color wheel they have found in very similar areas. You can see that we have all different kinds of greens here. If we start shifting over going rightward, we are mixing in some greens and some yellows, and if you remember, I did mention that there's a yellow components to some greened, and there's a green components to some yellows. That would be, for example, right here in the middle. You can see some people might see this as a greenish colors, some others might see it as a yellowish color. That is what the function of the color wheel is to show us different colors that go together. These colors that are being displayed here are analogous colors. But we can switch that off to monochromatic. Monochromatic means it's the same color, the difference is going to be the saturation and the luminance. For example, in this case, let's take green for example, we are on green, and we can see that the difference between this green right here and this green right here, that is A versus B is, B is lighter, so that means it has more luminance and A is darker. It has less luminance, but they are all the same green. The difference between B and C would be that C is more saturated than B is, it's more intense of a green then B is. But all the colors are green. All greens go together. If it's one green here and one green there, they go together. What we're going to focus on for this class is the complimentary, and you can see that there are more different options down here. So feel free to play around with them and see how they work out for you. But today let's focus on the complimentary colors. Complimentary colors are simply colors on the opposite spectrums of the color wheel. For example, in this case, you can see that green is opposites to read on the right, green on the left. You would find this in nature, example a rose flower with green leaves and the red rose and they look nice together, or the classic teal and orange look. You can see right here as we go closer towards teal, we have tealish colors and orange or the other extreme. You can vary the luminance or the saturation of the orange, and you can do the same with the teal. You can bring them in and see how different colors reacts together. So this is just to show how different colors reacts together. You would notice that whenever I'm color grading, I'm likely color grading with colors that are close to opposite each other on the spectrum, or I'm going with more analogous colors like, oh, they're all greens or they're closer greens and yellows. So in the further examples, just be on the lookout to see how I mix a different colors together using different color harmony rules just to get out, a feel from them, a feel from the pictures, a certain kind of vibe. That's what we're aiming for when we do color grading. For this photo. I think I'm going ahead and just add some. Let's try yellow to the shadows first. Let's try that. You can see it gives you that very warm tone. I think I do like that, this is actually orange not yellow, I should say. You can move this around by clicking on the dots here if you just want to cycle through some colors to take a look at what other colors might look like. I think I like where we started from, from that yellowish orange, that looks good to me. For the highlights, I am going to try a couple of different colors. Maybe let's try and little bit of blue. It looks okay, I'm not filling it. We just took out some blues from the ground, and we're throwing them right back in. I'm going try some other colors. Let's see what we have. I've added in some magenta. Remember we took out some magenta from this photo at the beginning. So I'm not really feeling that at the moment. Let's try some green. I'm just dragging the little ball here, and just moving it around to see what we can find. That doesn't look too bad at all. That doesn't look bad at all. You can play around with these sliders, see what you find. If you want to warm up the photo, add a little bit of yellow, you want to cool it down, add a little bit of blue. That's how it works. I mean, there is more to it on the color theory, but he cashed a drift. So that's what we have. Let's take a look at the before and the after. For this photo maybe I'll just leave it by adding just into the shadows of the photo. You can see we have a slightly moody photo. So here's the complete before of the photo. Here's the after, before and after. I think this looks pretty good. I think this looks quite nice. We can leave it here. Feel free to experiment for your project. I want you to experiment. I want you to come up with something different than I did. Feel free to be creative and don't forget to put that in the project gallery. For our third photo, we're going ahead and close the HSL sliders and open up our color grading. See where we can get from this. Again, I'm just going to be picking relatively random colors to see what we have. I'm going to throw some green into my highlights just to take a look and see what that looks like. Right now we're not sitting at its perfect greens. We are more in between blue and green, which is cyan, and it's not bad at all. I'm going to move closer towards green and see what we get. I actually did like that cyan color, so I'm going to leave it right there. I'm going dial it back slightly. This is what we have from that. I'm going to go ahead and try another color in my shadows. So far I have been using just the highlights and the shadows. Now the midtones are slightly, I wanted to say more complicated, but because most or a good amount of foals are made of lots of midtones, playing with that you have to be very subtle when you're playing with it. But feel free to play with that. I'm just trying to show you what the different sliders do and it is all up to your creativity to do the rest. You can see right here, I've added some magenta to the shadows and you can see what we have. I think I like this. We can rotate around and see, try out different colors. We don't want blues because it's just killing everything that we've just done. We don't want greens in the shadows. Again, we knew the shadows is taking us closer towards where we started this photo off from. So I think I do like that magenta feel, it's just a good amount of color separation. Again, which I talk about in the color grading class. So this is what we have right now, and I'm fine with this. It didn't take us much time. It doesn't have to take much time. Plus overtime you get used to moving these things around and getting what you find, your style and finding out what you think is best for a given photo, and you get faster and quicker with this. So for this photo, let's see what difference our color grading made. We're going to toggle it off here, toggle it on. Let's try that again, off, on. It made quite a significant difference. We're going hit the backslash key to see a complete before of this photo, before and here's our after. You can see how much change that we have made in this photo. So next stuff, we're going be talking about exporting your photo. We've created a photo. Let's show the world. 13. Exporting Your File: We are done editing the photo and once we've done that, we have to share the photo so that people can see and admire our work. Now, in this case, we're going to be exporting it from Lightroom, that way we are able to share the photo with our friends, family, on our website, whatever your heart desires. For this photo, there are two ways to do that. The first way is I can Right-click on the photo, go to exports, and hit Export... You can see that it opens up a dialogue box, and it's asking me on location, where do I want to export this photo to? The second question is, do I want to have this file named differently? Yes, I want to do all of that, but for the sake of example, I'm just going to cancel all of this. Now the other way you can export this, is by selecting the photo down here, go into File, and go into Export. It brings up the same dialogue box. Now I've selected where, Export to a specific folder, or a specific drive in a file, and then rename it with some custom text that says, "Awesomeness", and I'm going to hit Export. Maybe let me write ''Awesomeness1'', and I'm going to hit Export. There are many different options that you can still have but for the sake of this class, for the sake of this session, I'm just going to keep it really light, and hit Export, and we are done. Wherever I've sent it to on my hard drive, or my external hard drive, the photo is right there waiting for me. 14. Editing in LR Mobile: Now that we're done with the desktop application of Lightroom, we're going to be jumping right into the mobile version of Lightroom. I would say it's very, very similar, it's just on a smaller device. I'm going to be sharing my screen with you again so you can see exactly what I'm doing. I'm just going to go ahead and open up Lightroom. Now, when you open up Lightroom, you do have to create an Adobe account for the mobile version, you don't necessarily have to subscribe because there is a free part of it, but some tools in it are premium version, so you may be limited, but in all honesty, I think you'd be able to get most of your work done. I'm just going to go ahead and show you what it looks like after you've done that and you've opened it. As you can see here on the screen, it just tells me this is the current arrangement that I have. You have my Albums, you have my People and Trips album. Then you have where it says, "All Photos", which is where all my photos are. Now, if you do not have any photos yet, you can hit the blue buttons down there. One has a camera, one says, "Add a Photo." If you want to add photos from your device, all you have to do is click that and it would ask you where you want to add them from; from the camera roll, from files, from wherever your device has photos stored on. For me, I just click "Camera Roll" and then it shows the photos in my camera roll. That is one way. Another way is you can hit the camera if you want to take a photo immediately. In fact, that is actually a really good option because the camera is very customizable, it gets to use all the power on your device in a professional manner, so that's a very good option. For our example today, I'm going to go ahead and click on the photo that we're going to be working on today, and you can see that it's already giving me some tips. I'm going to click away from that and the tips disappear. I'm going to go ahead and start editing this photo, let's jump right in. Very quickly, I just want to point out what we have on the screen. At the bottom of the screen is where we have our tools, and I'm scrolling right now. That's where we have our tools that we are going to be using to edit this photo. At the top of the screen is where we have our share options right there. If you need some help, you can click the question mark. The third icon right there is simply Adobe Cloud, which is a Cloud service where you can store your pictures. I'm going to start off editing this photo right away. Now, at the bottom left, you can see it says, "Selective" and "Healing". I'm not going to use those two today because they are only on the premium version, and I want to keep this as simple as possible. Just in case there's somebody who doesn't have the premium version, I just want to show that you can indeed work your photo without having those options. I'm going to start off with the crop tool because I can see that the line of the horizon is not completely straight. It doesn't bother me, but it bugs me. I'm just going to go ahead and try to correct that. Now, you can see that when I click on the crop tool, it gives me a little dial there at the bottom, you can see it's says zero at the moment, until I've changed it, of course. If you take that wheel and just scroll it, you can see it's turning the picture around, and so that is the thing. It has these grid lines to give you direction as to how straight lines are in the photo. Now, another thing the crop tool lets me do is it let's me crop the photo. I can either do that by pinching into the photo, and I'm zooming into the photo at this time, or pinching out of the photo, and you can see that I'm zooming out. I could also control that by using the anchor points on the photo, and you can see what that does. The different anchor points are for different methods or different angles of cropping. I'm going to go ahead and adjust the horizon line just to try to get it as straight as I can. I'm also going to crop in a little bit to our subject, make our subject the center of focus. Right there. That's what I want to do. Now, once I've done that, I just tap on the screen, it gives me all my options back. At the bottom right, I'll click the check mark. You can see that we have made that adjustment. Now, if you press and hold on your photo, you see a before and after, and you see at the top there it says before. But in this case, since we've not made any color or light adjustments, because this would only show color and light adjustment, it doesn't show anything. We've just corrected the horizon line. I'm going to go on the Profiles now. Profiles are what you might call presets or filters. Some people, I should say, would like to begin from a filter, and I'm just scrolling through the different filters. Some people might want to begin on a filter and then continue on from there. For this image, maybe we start off with modern 2 or modern 4. Or you know what? We're just going to go no filter for this one. We're just going to do everything manually, just so we can explore all the options that we have. So I'm going to cancel out of filters, and I did that by clicking the "X" button at the bottom left of the screen. There we have it. If you hit the "Auto" option, what it does is it does an automatic correction for your white balance as well as you exposure, whatever their artificial intelligence, the AI systems think it's correct, it will do that. Now, we're not going to do that for this video, again, just so we can run through the different options. I have already hit it, but I'm going to go ahead and undo that, and I do that by simply hitting the "Undo" button at the top of the screen. I'm going to do that right now, hit the "Undo" button, and it just undid the settings. Moving further into our options, we can go under the Light section. Light section is the part where it was the basic section under the desktop app, which we used a lot of. Here, what I want to do, I want to play with the exposure, so I'm going to go up with the exposure just a little bit to see what we can get out of this. I think I like that. Let me see what contrast will do. That's not bad, that's not bad at all. Now, if you want to take a look at the photo itself to see what changes you want to make, just tap on the photo, just a little tap on the photo, and it will show you just the photo. Now, if you tap right back on it again, it will bring back the options. I'm going to go ahead and reduce my shadows in this, and we'll see what we get. Reduce my shadows and maybe some of my blacks. Let's see what we get. I'm going to increase the highlights, and these are all decisions that I'm making just on the spur. I have not really done this before to know what would be the best options, I'm just looking at my photo and making these decisions. Again, some of these things come with time, some of them come with experimentation, and like I said earlier on, you can push buttons or move sliders back and forth and if you change your mind a minute later, you just come back and redo it. That's exactly what I'm doing right now. I'm going to take a look at our photo by tapping on the photo, and it shows just the photo. Now, I'm going to press and hold, and it shows it before, after, before, after. I think I'm liking this photo right now. I think I'm good with the light. I'm going to move on to color. For this photo, I think I want it a little warmer. Again, we have the temperature slider here. Move right, and we're going warmer and you can see we're getting some sunset vibes. The photo was taken at sunset, so might as well get some sunset vibes in there. I think that is fine. I think that looks good so far. Let me know what you think. The tint, we can reduce the colors of the tint, let's see, go the other way, and I think the tint is okay at zero. I don't want to put in too much of that tint. Now, the vibrance and saturation, let me explain that really quickly. The vibrance option increases the colors, the saturation in the mid tone. Vibrance is a type of saturation, but is designated towards the mid tones. I'm going to go ahead and pull that slider all the way to the right. You can see that there's a lot more color in this photo. Now, currently, it's a little too much for my taste, so I'm going to dial it back and leave it pretty much close to zero. I'm doing a plus four at the moment, and the saturation, it will just increase the colors in the whole photo, so I'm going to go all the way to the right. You can see that it's not very tasteful, at least not to my taste right now. I'm going to turn that all the way down. I don't want to decrease the saturation either. I'm just going to double-tap that "Slider" and put it back at zero. That's what we have right now. I think we're good with this. Now, at the top of the color panel, you can see that we have the option for B&W, black and white. I'm going to click that for a moment, and you can see the photo on black and white. I'm going to click on it again, and it's just going to bring it right back now. Black and white, you have the option of making your photos black and white. Another thing is the grading and the third thing is the mix. The mix is what we call the HSL sliders in the desktop version. I'm going to go ahead and click on the "Mix". From this photo you can see that we have red, yellows, oranges, which is part of the skin color of the subject, as well as the person's hair. Then we have some blades of grass which are in the green/yellow hemisphere. I'm going to go ahead and try to play with our reds and yellows, and see what we get. I'm increasing the saturation for red. Now, you don't want to do that too much. You also do not want to decrease the saturation too much. I just pinched to zoom into the photo. When we do that, you can see that we lose color in the person's lips. We don't want to take it all the way down, just maybe increase the saturation slightly, right now we are at plus four. I'm going to try to increase the luminance as well, just to see if we can bring some more lights to the lips. You can see that there's some reds containing the cheeks as well. I'm going to do that. Plus 33, that's good. Again, these numbers, I'm basically going by sight. You do the same with your photo. I think that's good. I do not want to change the hues of the red. I'm going to go back and just take a look and see what the red hues do. I do not want that, so I'm going to double-tap that, get it back to zero. Let's try some oranges. Let's try increasing the saturation on the oranges. Now, all the way at 100, you can see what parts of the picture are affected by that. I do not want it at 100, but I do want to increase it just a little bit. I think plus 25 is good. I do not want to change the hues for the oranges as well. Let's try the luminance. I think that's totally fine. I think we're good here. The yellows, let's see what we have. You can see that in the greens, which are the grasses, you can see that there's a lot of yellow contents. I'm going to reduce that a little bit. I'm going to go ahead and desaturate the yellows. I'm also going to go ahead and increase the luminance of the yellows. You can see that right now, I'm just going to tap on the "Photo", right now our photo is made of two major colors. We have the red, yellow, oranges, which I just bundled together as one color, and the greens, which is really interesting. This is the before. This is the after. Tap and hold for the before. Just take your thumb up, or whatever finger you're using, for the current version of the photo. I'm going to tap to get back into the photo. I'm going to play with the hues of the yellows. You can see that we're getting a very fall-ish vibes when we move to the left. I think I like that. I'm going to leave that there. Let's experiment more. Let's try out the greens, see what we have for the green hues. Move that up, move that down. That's fine. Reduce the saturation to match the yellows. Increase the luminance, and see what we have. I think that's good. I'm going to tap and hold to see the before, after. We've completely made this photo look like a very fall-ish photo. Now, based on the changes I've made, I'm going to hit Done. I'm going to go ahead and go back to my Light. I want to brighten up the exposure slightly more, increase my contrast as well. That's looking good. I'm going to go back to Colors, and see what happens if I increase the temperature a little more. Tap on the "Photo", and you can see it looks very fall-ish. The colors are not as popping as summer, but we still have a nice little sunset here going on. That's what we have. I'm going to go onto my Grading again, and I'm going to do the exact same things that I did in the previous photo. Right now it say shadows. I'm going to go into my Highlights and see what happens if I throw in some blue. Blue doesn't seem to be the right color for this photo. I'm going to try throwing some green. That's not too bad. I'm going to go into my Shadows and throw in some yellows. Let's take a look and see what we can get out of this. I like this. I basically just experimenting with the colors and I like this. It has a very filmic vibe to it. I like it. Here's the before, press and hold, and you can see the before, after. I really like this photo. I really like it. One more change I'm going to make back to the Lighting, down to the Shadows, and the Blacks. Let's see with all the Blacks down again. Look at that. We have a very filmic looking photo. Let's see if there's anything more that I want to change. So far from the other effects that we can put on, there really isn't anything more that I want to do to this photo. I'm going to tap on the "Effects". Mostly you have here the vignetting, dehazing. Just a couple more sliders that I don't usually play much with, but I'm going to show you what the vignetting does. You can see that the vignetting, it has this halo effect all around the picture. We're not looking for that for this picture. Go the other way and it's putting another halo, it's just black this time. Double-tap, get that back to zero. The other options underneath the vignetting are, for to control the vignetting. We're not going to be using those. Grain, if you want to add some grain to the photos. I'm going zoom in to the photo, so that you can see what the grain does. I'm going to go all the way to the max, so you can see that. We're going to dial that down. Let's take a look at the photo. This does not look bad at all. I'm really liking this photo right now. Let's see what other options we have apart from the grain. I'm going to turn it down a little bit, just put it down at 27. I think that's nice. The size and roughness again are to control the options for grain. You decide based on your taste or your feeling. That is mostly it. These are all sliders that you can play around with. Zoom in if you're not seeing the effect, to take a look and see what is going on. I think this picture, I think it looks great. I'm going to press and hold, and let go. Press and hold, and let go. You can see the before and the after. I think we've done a great job. The optics, I'm not going to worry much about. This is for photos that are mostly shot on DSLRs. Sometimes the lenses would have chromatic aberrations, and the lenses will also distort the picture. You can go ahead and turn them on, if you're not really sure. It doesn't do any harm to have those turned on. I'm going to go ahead and turn those on. Geometry, I'm also not going to play with because it's also a premium option. But it's basically you can play with the angles in the photo. You can basically just skew and distorts the photo, that's what that option does. We're right about done with this photo, very easy. The options are not difficult to run through, and you can just quickly run through everything. We're done with this photo. This is the photo that we have right now. Here's a before, and here's an after. There we have it. What do we want to do next? We want to export the photo. At the top there, you'd see the box with the arrow coming right out of it, that's the share icon on most devices. Tap that and it's asking you where you want to share it to. I'm going to export mine to camera roll. When I hit the button, you see that it will just go ahead and export to the camera roll. That sums up our little session on editing with Lightroom mobile. You can see it's a very versatile tool and it can help a lot in your work. That's something to consider whenever you are on the go, and you just want to edit a photo really quickly, or you just want to practice something, or take a picture of what you're seen around you and edit that quickly. I think it's a very useful and powerful tool. You should definitely give it a try. 15. Conclusion: We've come to the end of this session and I just wanted to say thank you so much for joining me here. I hope you've been able to learn something new out of it. If nothing else, I hope I've been able to demystify a little bit of the process of how a photo rostrum is completely raw state to a more presentable version of itself, of course, without losing its story. I hope you've been able to have some fun through the session as well. If there's one thing I'll leave you with, it's this: don't stop taking photos. I know it gets busy and things get in the way sometimes, but from time to time, feel free to take out your camera and shoot something, just have fun editing, whether that's done completely on your mobile device like we've talked about today or otherwise. This has been fun for me, and I thank you so much for your time and attention. My name is Daniel Nwabuko, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. Cheers.