Lessons

Lesson Info

Street Photo

Welcome to a new Lightroom Photo editing session. This one is of the street photo and the inspiration was magical bike ride. I really wanted to take this photo on the left and make it look more magical, more fantastic and hopefully you agree that this is the result and it looks okay or it looks good. I really like it actually. So if you want to follow on, make sure that you download the street photo and let's open lightroom and get going. So I'm going to go into this photo, you can tell that it's a crazy difference from this to that starting with the crops. So we're gonna take our crop, we're going to crop in really so that this person on the bike is using the rule of thirds, he's got his reflection down there and also so that we can just crop out some of this area on the right hand side that's not really adding to the photo, it's just distracting. I want to get as much of this reflection and as much of the sky that's in the reflection as possible. It creates this nice balance on the t...

op left and the bottom right. So that's pretty good. Next along with crop. I'm going to use the upright tool to straight in our building. So going down to the transform tools, clicking our upright tool, we're just going to click and find a couple of lines, we're going to click down and when I do that, notice what what I see right there. I see some chromatic aberration along the edges. So I'm going to actually make sure I fix that as well. We're going to do that. We're going to go find this line right here. See there, you can really see that sort of magenta and green right there. That's what chromatic aberration is and drag down. We're going to constrain crop right there. Then we're gonna pick one more right here and go down trying to get it perfect one more right here. So getting all these buildings straight and for this edit, I don't mind as much if it looks a little bit warped. I actually don't think it will. That looks pretty good actually all those lines are pretty straight now. Okay, click done Now I want to make sure that I turn on chromatic aberrations. So turn that on right there under lens corrections. If I zoom in, let's see if you can see off. It's hard for you to see. But look right here where my hand is on off on. So that definitely adds and helps. Alright, so this is the problem with this photo is that it's super contrasting this setup. You've got this bright sky in the background, you've got this dark foreground. So we've got a boost those shadows a lot to make sure everything is exposed more properly. Sometimes when I boost my my shadows too much or enough I have to bring back down my blacks just a little bit. I'm paying attention to the history graham up here. I don't want to get too much into the blacks like this where I'm losing information but just some of it touching is fine with me now. The whites are a little bit too overblown there too Overexposed. I can bring down the whites here, I can bring down the highlights a little bit and we actually do have some information in the clouds and so that starts to help like so and that's really going to start to help when we start adding some color to the sky. Now speaking of color, I am going to play around with color right here in this image but with the overall settings but using the H. S. L. Panel. So first I'm going to take my saturation selector, I'm going to pick the blue sky and increase that and notice that brings up the blue in the window reflection as well, which I like. Next. I'm going to try to bring out some of the red in this brick building so I could go in here and click up and that actually works or I could have just gone to the red slider because I know it's the red part of those buildings that I want to increase. Not any color other colors within their. So that's starting to look pretty good. I'm noticing my crop, there's a couple of things I'd like to crop out, see this little bar right here. I don't know if that's like a trash can or a pull. I want to crop that out. So I'm gonna go back, it looks like a street sign or banner. I'm going to go in crop a little bit more and something like that's pretty good. Cool. So one thing that can make this photo or any photo a little fantastical, a little magical is to decrease clarity just like that, See what happens when I do that to this. It actually adds a little bit of blur. It makes things look if you go too far, it looks a little bit too dreamy but in the middle it adds this sort of dreaminess to it. Cool. So I actually want to jump straight to this puddle down here. So I'm going to use the graduated filter tool and create a filter along the edge of this puddle. Something like that pressing. Oh I can see what I'm selecting. I also want to use a range mass to select mostly the blues of this. So I'm going to take my range mass select color. Use my color selector to pick the blue and now if I press, oh, you'll notice that it's different than before. So if I actually turn this off, see how much is selected and then I turn it on and already has that blue selected. That's pretty good. And now I'm gonna, I can increase or decrease this. I'm just going to increase it back a little bit more. So with this I'm going to add some warm tones and the reason is because I'm going to basically fake a golden hour situation where the sky or the sunset would be setting over these buildings in the distance. So adding warm temperature helps, but I'm also going to add color here, starting with this yellow, moving in a little bit more orange, maybe a little less saturated again, going for that sort of magical feeling. Now if I do this and I feel like this is a good color, which I like the color, but it's too much, I can bring down my range mask amount so that it only really applies to more of the sky parts and maybe not so much of the building or so down there. Another thing that I want to do is bring up the saturation, actually, I want to bring up the overall saturation or maybe just bringing up the shadows here will help, nope, I'm gonna use another tulle masks so I'm going to click new just like, so now I'm just going to bring up the overall exposure just a little bit so we can see more in that puddle. Bring up the shadows as well. Now, whenever I do this, it's these edits end up being a little bit different than what I edited before as the practice, but sometimes they actually get better. So that's a good thing too. So already from before, if we do um the reset button down here, we can see the before image to this, we can see a lot more in this image, a lot more in this puddle, which I think makes it more magical. All right, So next we're going to edit the sky up here. So first we're going to boost the blue even more. So I'm going to take my graduated filter again. Actually I'm going to do a brush filter for this one. This is going to be better. Auto mask will leave on and then we're just going to start in the sky. Make sure we have our mask overlay on so I can see what I'm actually doing and selecting, I'm just gonna paint over the sky here. I don't mind if I don't select the sky down here because I'm going to actually want that sky to be warm. So I don't want to accidentally make it cool with this filter with range mask, I'm going to select color, make sure I pick the blue and that looks pretty good. So let's turn that off. Let's make it a little bit more blue. Hey, look at that. That's really good. I like that blue sky. Cool. So now let's use another brush actually, yep and I'm going to select the clouds over here. Auto mask, we can leave on because I don't want to select the buildings down here and I think the auto mask will help me do that. That's pretty good. Pick that blew up there. Let's make it a little smaller. Let's just get little details down here and it does a good job at not selecting that building. Now, the reason I want to make this look like the sunsets, the golden hour is because we've added gold to this puddle. Where is that coming from? Well, ideally it's coming from the sunset that's setting over these buildings. So we're gonna do our typical thing, we're going to add warmth here. We're also going to add a little bit of D haze to try to get some detail back into these clouds. And when you do that, you actually get more color as well. And now if I bring down the whites or maybe the highlights will also get a little bit more color and wow, that was a little bit too much. Now we're going to leave that as is now with the color, we're also going to add some warmth again. You might want to start and go high with the saturation to get the color you want when you're happy with the color and this, this is when you can actually go down with the saturation and tone it back a little bit. So I'm actually pretty happy with this, it's not too intense. But the problem I don't like is that we've got this bit of clouds that's selected, it kind of has a sharp edge at the top and then also I would expect the buildings down here to be a little bit warm as well. And so I'm going to use the brush and brush it onto other parts of this image. So if I press oh and increase the size of my brush and then turned down density, Something like 30 and then turn off auto mask. Now if I brush onto the street, let's undo that. Let's turn down flow as well, just a little bit. So it doesn't select as much kind of painting on slowly and then just painting up here as well into these clouds, go over it again. Now if I turn off the mask overlay, we can actually see what this is doing. So if I go over one more time, maybe maybe over the top of these buildings right here where the sun would be hitting a bit more. Now we're getting there. Cool. So let's actually just delete this single one so you can see what it would look like without. And then with, you see, pay attention to these buildings right here, delete it again, very, very subtle but it's those details that really can make an image like this look a little bit more realistic even though this is so fantastical. Lastly we're going to create a new brush, we're going to brush on our cyclist who's getting lost in everything. So we're gonna turn back on auto mask, we're going to make it super small, turn our flow and our density back up and we're going to just paint over our cyclist, we're just going to try to make him pop out just a little bit with some exposure and perhaps some contrast or clarity. So if we boost exposure when we boost overall exposure it helps. But then it starts to look a little bit faded out. So we're going to bring down the blacks to bring back that detail and then also boost the clarity a little bit as well. So we can see again to lean the single one subtle but it kind of helps spotlight this guy right here. Maybe add a little bit of warmth to this guy as well as if the light was shining and reflecting around from the puddle all around him. Maybe even sharpen a little bit because he is a little bit blurry as he's biking by, wow, I think this is it and I am pretty happy with this edit. Of course you can go through and make more changes if you want. So this is the version and I like the new edit actually a lot better. This one was a little bit too much. I think one thing I did with the last one overall was I went back and at the very end, I buy boost the overall exposure and that kind of looks kind of cool to have like this kind of overexposed look and yeah, actually I kinda like it, I like the colors of this new edit a little bit better. So if you're following along, I would definitely use the new edit Better. And with this previous one I can see that now that I look at it, the clouds just look a little bit too unrealistic. So good job for Phil for doing this again. The crop is slightly different as well, but I like it. Um And yeah, I think the colors look a little bit more natural, awesome. If you have any questions, please let me know. Otherwise we'll see you in another tutorial.