Lessons

Lesson Info

Long Exposure

Welcome to this full editing session. We are editing this long exposure photo. So if you want to follow along, make sure you open up the long exposure photo. This is one of the edits where I just look at it and I'm like, wow, this is the power of lightroom. Classic to the extreme, I love playing around with this edit. This is another great photo from we saturate dot com. Again, I'm not someone who is sponsored by we saturate or anything like that. It's just a great site for practicing edits. So we're taking this photo from the left, which is a pretty cool photo. Turning it into the photo on the right here is the full photo so you can check it out and then the original. Pretty amazing what you can do in lightroom. So let's dive into it. So the first thing we're going to do as always is to crop and rotate. So I want to make sure that our horizon is straight. I'm using the level tool just going to click and drag over our horizon and then I'm going to punch in just a little bit because I d...

o think that coming in on these rocks really using the rule of thirds. So that this first rock is at this intersection of the rule of thirds and then also cropping out this little part of the landscape over on the left hand side to me creates a more balanced photo, something like this. We can also play around with crop a little bit more. We're going to put this horizon right At that top of the 3rd line, Cool, so this is looking pretty good. Next, let's play around with exposure. So I'm going to automatically bring up the shadows quite a bit, bring up the blacks just a little bit and then we're going to play with individual parts of this photo in just a minute. One thing I liked about this photo is to create this sort of HDR style, look where everything is exposed and one tool that you can use is the clarity tool and so bringing up the clarity, brings up a lot of detail in these rocks, which I think is going to be really cool. So we're getting a little bit closer in terms of the overall exposure, we still have a little bit of a bit to do. But the next thing is to really play with the colors, were not playing with a lot of these other settings down here in the development tool, we're playing with specific parts of an image. So we're going to first use the graduated filters to edit the sky and the water down below. So first let's edit the sky. So I'm going to select the graduated filter, make sure everything is set to zero. I'm going to turn on mask overlay and I'm just going to click and drag down so we are selecting the sky right now. Now, typically what I would do with this is just go ahead and add some d haze. Now this would add a lot of detail to the clouds. We can play with the colors and things like that. But I'm actually going to do something a little bit more advanced. I want to select different parts of the sky to edit. So first I'm going to edit the clouds so I want to choose a range mask so I'm going to set the color. Let's try the color and I'm going to select the clouds themselves. Now, turning on mask overlay, let's see what is selected. That looks pretty good. We can change the amount slider so we get less of the sky and just the clouds itself, that's looking pretty good. And now I'm going to turn on the D haze filter to get details in just the clouds, Not so much in the sky. Let's play around with the color of the cloud. So if we bring down the temperature of the temperature now I don't, I want the sky to be warmer but I don't want the clouds to be warmer. So that's another reason why I'm actually going to use to graduated filters one where I'm just affecting the clouds one where I'm just affecting the sky without the clouds. So for this one, since we're just affecting the clouds, I'm going to make actually this the clouds a little bit bluer and I'm also going to boost the clarity just a little bit so that's starting to look pretty good. Let's go ahead and click the graduated brush again. Or just click the new brush and we're going to create a new filter. That is basically the same thing. But this time we're going to pick luminescence and we're going to select just the highlights. So with my mask overlay on, we're going to click the range and bring the range up until we just have mostly the sky Now smoothness. We might want to turn down something like that is looking pretty good. Now let's play with the color. So we're going to actually increase the temperature. Let's play with bringing down the exposure we bring down the exposure. We get a lot of details back into those clouds, into the sky. Now we don't want to go too far, especially with the whites because when you bring down the whites, things start to look a little bit awkward. It's almost as if you have a negative and because you are making the brights and the whites darker, that's what could happen. So let's go to our edited version and see where we're at so far. So this is the one we're working on Here is the edited one. We're looking pretty darn good. The next thing we want to do is actually boost the orange in just this part of the sky. So what I'm going to do is use a brush. So I'm gonna take this brush filter, drag it down just a little bit. I am going to turn auto mask on because I want to choose just the white parts and not the clouds. I'm just going to brush over this way like so now I could use the auto mask, I could use the range mask as well or I could use both. So let's go ahead and brush over this. Make sure we get all these parts of the clouds or of the sky without the clouds, something like that's pretty good. I'm also going to turn on range mass color and choose just the background. Let's blend it a little bit more so I'm going to choose them, increase the amount. That's pretty good now for this part, what I'm going to do is really crank up that temperature, make it a lot warmer. That's pretty good. Or we can add some color with this color picker, something like that. Maybe decrease the saturation, you make it a little bit more red and pink, something like that's pretty good. Now I might want to brush over the clouds just a little bit so we get, it looks a little bit more natural right now, it's very sharp lines where the sky has color than the clouds don't. So I'm going to turn off auto mask, I'm going to decrease the density, something really low, turn off my range mass color selector and knowledge is paint over everything now it's really subtle and I could do this a couple of times and if I turn on my mask overlays, you'll start to see that the sky is selected, but also some of the cloud is selected as well. Now if I delete this, you'll see what's actually happening. So let me delete it. So it's very subtle, but that's good. We don't want it to be too extreme, but it definitely adds a lot of warmth in there. We can make it even warmer. Maybe awesome. That's looking pretty good. Now, I think the most dramatic thing I did to this photo that really takes it to the next level was completely changes the changing the color of the water here. And the reason why I did that was I wanted to blend the orange of the sky more into the water. So I did that with a graduated filter. So I took a graduated filter. I said it to just the bottom half of this image just to the water. Something like that. And then I chose to use a color range mask, pick the color or pick the blue, make sure I could see what I'm doing with my mask overlays on and then I included a little bit more so I can get some of this blue down here, but I don't really want any of the rock as much so that something like that looks pretty good. And then what I did was just cranked up the temperature trying to make it match the sky. And then I also added some saturation, he added some color, we drop down the exposure and the saturation of the color just a little bit and that's starting to look pretty good. We can also play around with the exposure and contrast. Sometimes bring down the exposure will add more color which is pretty cool. So let's click done, let's see our previous edit and this edit. Now, I actually like how this edit is going because I like that the rocks aren't getting as warm as in the previous edit, but we also still have some of this blue down here which I actually don't mind, I don't mind having some of this blue in this version of the edit. Now, if I didn't want this to be blue, what I could do is I could go back into this setting right here, make sure I see my mask overlay and maybe I would need to or not that one it was go into, I believe it was this one, nope, this one, Alright, so sometimes you get mixed up with which filters you're using, so now I want to make sure that this more of this is selected so I would probably increase the amount here and that would add more warmth to the water down here, so it's kind of your style what you're going for, I kinda like the ingredient that goes from blue to orange back to sort of a more blue. Alright, so next thing I wanna do is with the brush tool enhance the rocks themselves. I am going to turn on auto mask, turn on my mask overlay so I can see what's happening and I'm just gonna paint over these rocks density, I'm going to have all the way up. That's one thing I actually always forget to do, I want the density to be all the way up. Something like this, this rock down here, this rock down here and that's starting to look pretty good, awesome. So let's turn off our mask overlay. We want to increase the exposure of this, so I'm going to boost the exposure just a little bit using the keyboard arrows, also clarity I'm going to boost as well. So we're adding more of that HDR effect to the rocks in the foreground, perhaps bringing up the shadows just a little bit, I don't want to go too much, but something like that is starting to look really, really good in my mind anyways. And yeah, that's pretty good, we might want to drop the tint down, make things a little bit more green. This is also something we can do back in our basic tab, we might want to go down to our H. S. L. Panel and just increase the saturation of green just to give it up that pop of color. Alright, I'm actually pretty happy with this edit, let's go ahead and see the before and after again. So this is the edit we did previously on the right, this is the edit we did together right here on the left, I'll let you decide which one you like. I think what I added a little bit too with that other edit as well was warmth overall to the entire image. So if we go into this photo and we add some warmth overall, we'll get some nice warm tones a little bit, blending everything together a little bit more. Now when I do that, the water might becoming get be getting a little bit too warm so we might want to go back into our adjustment layers or graduated filters and tone down that saturation of this part of the water but I'm actually liking it a lot. And so if I press the backslash key you can see here is the other edit. Here's this edit. Oh, there is one thing that I did. I see that I noticed that I fixed the lens. So on this edit, let's go down to lens corrections. Let's choose, enable profile corrections. If you were using a typical modern camera with a lens that is native to that camera lightroom will know which lens you're using and by ticking on enable lens corrections it will get rid of any distortion or vignette ng that naturally occurs when using that lens and that's kind of a personal preference, you might not have noticed anything but it does get rid of a little bit of that warp and it kind of straightens out things in the horizon as well. Awesome. Thank you so much for watching. If you have any questions, please let me know, I would love to see your edit of this photo. So if you have a chance, make sure you edit it, post it to the course or post it to the video school online facebook group or really anywhere so that we can check it out. Thanks so much for watching and have a great day.