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Maternity Couple Photo

Welcome back to the Lightroom course and this video, I'm going to show you how I edit this maternity session photo. This was actually my own maternity photo with my beautiful wife Isabel. We were pregnant or currently while I'm recording this, we still are pregnant with our twin boys. And by the time you watch this maybe they'll be around. But we went to this giant tree, which is a beautiful setting for photos and we basically love them. And so I edited this photo and I just wanted to show you how I did a more creative edit for this class using all the techniques we're learning so far. So let's dive into it. This is the maternity photo. If you want to follow along, go ahead and do that. So basically you can see this is the original photo. This is the one that is edited. I made the exposure a little bit better. Try to get the focus on us because there are so many sort of distractions and also played around with the colors a little bit. So first things first we're going to leave the crop...

as is, I'm happy with this crop. I might go in and just make sure we are pretty much completely centered, which we are. So something maybe just a tiny bit in like that might look a little bit better. Then I'm going to bring up these shadows overall. That's one thing that I think can help. There's a lot of, we are kind of in the shade down here. So bringing up the overall shadows helps bringing up the overall highlights and then maybe just bring back down the blacks a little bit to keep that contrast overall. I am going to actually boost no, I'm not gonna do clarity yet, I'm gonna leave clarity as is vibrant and everything. I'm going to leave as is too, because I'm going to go down to H. S. L. To play with my colors. Now I do want to click here to the saturation, boost the saturation of Isabel's dress and then also of my shirt and then also I'm going to go in specifically to the green slider and bring up the greens. Now you've probably seen this before in another edit where I don't go straight into the tree and click and drag up to bring up the green of the leaves and now that's because there's a lot of yellow and orange. Now if I bring up the orange even more start to notice what happens, our skin tones get a little bit wonky. So I'm actually gonna bring back down this, get the orange a little bit leaving the red as is which is what her shirt mostly is. Alright, so that's pretty much all I'm going to do with the colors and I'm gonna move on to some more specific adjustments. So first off, I am going to go in with a radial filter, I'm going to create a circle around us around this sort of shaded area, press o to see your selection and we're going to click invert right here to make sure it's selecting just us. So press Oh, so that's turned off now, I'm going to boost the overall looks exposure. Bring up the shadows especially maybe bring down the highlights actually because there are some highlights and some white part whites that are a bit overexposed and then the blacks, I might not need to bring up the overall exposure. I can just bring up the shadows even more. So now I feel like the exposure on us matches more of what the exposure is on the tree up above. So I think that looks a little bit better. Next I'm going to create another actual filter and we're going to create a circle around us again. So I just started up above, move it down. But this time I want to select everything outside of us. Now you could do a couple of things. One thing that would focus more attention on us is dropping the sharpness, dropping the clarity. That is a more creative edit. But because this tree is so cool, this is one instance where I want the tree to actually be in focus, but in this instance, what I wanna do is I actually want to just boost the overall exposure and specifically more so the shadows. So actually, even though we brought up the over all exposure of us right there to match everything else I am going ahead and I'm bringing up the exposure of everything else around us, notice though, some things start to get pretty overexposed. See the parts of the tree down here that are completely blown out. I am actually okay with that. I can go in here with the brush. I could paint over this area down here. Maybe turn off auto mask and try to bring back some of those whites and highlights to see if there's any more detail. But this was a very contrast e situation. Now, I want to be careful over when I get over here to the edge because they definitely don't want to get this car right here because what I'm actually gonna do is completely blow out the background right here, which I find a little bit distracting. So now with all of the selected down here, don't want to get her leg. Actually, let's see if there is any information in these trees. So let's bring down the whites when you bring down the whites. If it's overexposed, you can tell because it starts to make everything gray. So there's not much information in there. The highlights though, bringing down the highlights does help just a little bit. So that's a quick trick if you bring down the whites and it starts to look gray, that means it was overexposed and the only thing lightroom can really do is make it more gray. It's not going to bring back any more information, but I do like having, especially the parts right around us a little bit more exposed properly. I actually want to go into this selection, the one where it's the radio filter filter around us and just bring up the clarity just a little bit. Usually I do not like adding clarity around people or two people, but because we are so far from the camera, I don't mind, it maybe bring up the sharpness as well. Now when I'm zoomed in, you can start to see the noise is added. But when we're zoomed out, it's pretty good. Cool. So now I'm going to take a new brush, let's go to our brush filter, click new. And I'm actually going to select everything in the background behind the tree. So I'm gonna choose auto mask press Oh, so I have my mask overlay on so I can see what I'm doing. And I'm just going to select all of this and what I'm really doing is I'm just going to completely overexpose it. Now, some of this, I don't need a mask overlay the auto mask on. I want this photo to look like we are not in the middle of civilization in the sense of there's this car right here, that, that was actually our car. This was a mistake that we made with our car in the background. Without that. It doesn't look too bad. You see a couple of cars and buildings maybe in the background over here, but it's not that distracting. But I personally find that this car right here, our car is distracting. So I'm just going to basically make everything white. So I'm bringing up the blacks bringing up the shadows, making everything white. Now I might have to go in here and brush in a little bit more. That's fine. Now one thing I noticed is that this tree right here, you see this tree trunk and it's like, where is the rest of that tree trunk? So I'm just going to paint that out like, so see this wire right here going across. Cool. So to me right now I'm like, wow, this photo looks kind of weird now because it's completely white over here. But my hope is that if you see this for the very first time, it doesn't look too weird that it, it just looks like it's overexposed, but you're not really bothered by it. Cool. So that's looking pretty good. Really? The last thing I want to do is play around with the color of the leaves. So I'm actually going to use a graduated filter. I'm going to set it like this. So it's selecting the top. I really just wanted to select the top above us and then I can actually brush in pressing oh to see our selection and then I'm going to brush in some of these leaves down here and then we're also going to use a range mass to select the color that we want because we don't want to apply the filter that I'm going to apply to everything, especially the tree trunk right here. So let's go ahead and turn on range mass. Let's do color. Let's pick one of these leaves up here. That's probably a pretty good one. Press O to see our selection Now, that's pretty good. We could adjust the amount to get a little bit more particular now because there is a big trunk right here. We can go ahead and use an eraser and just erase that part of the trunk because we know we don't want this selected turn off auto mask. We can do this ourselves. I am just trying to get the leaves. So wherever there's trunk, I'm going to turn off now, I could have done this with a brush instead of the graduated filter, but I found the brush or the graduated filter just to be a little bit faster. Okay, cool. So now we have that selection of the leaves. Now let's play around with it. So one thing we can do is move the tint down, make it a little bit more green which starts to look good or we can add color with this color picker and just pick something like, so now if you go a little bit too high, you can quickly make it look completely unnatural. So when you're adding a tint, especially in this situation, we're just going to be very, very subtle with it. See my saturation is down 20%, very very low and that looks pretty good actually. So let's turn this on and off off on. Just makes it a little bit more green And again when you're looking at this right now by yourself or when you're editing you might say okay well this looks a little unnatural to me but go back, go out, look at something else, get away from your computer and then come back to an N. C. Does this look natural to you? And hopefully it does, if it doesn't then you can go back and start to tweak your edits and the colors and things like that. But the goal for me is to make this a creative edit but still look natural, I don't want something to look completely abstract. Cool, so now if we see the before and after, let's just click the reset button before after, I think it looks pretty darn good, you might want to come back to your overall adjustments. Now, maybe you want to add a little bit more contrast, maybe you want to add a little bit of clarity or sharpening or maybe you're bothered by the noise that you're getting in some of these details. Now we added clarity to our faces. So adding noise reduction kind of combats that so you kind of have to decide which one you want to add but if you're kind of worried about that, you can turn on some noise reduction so overall it loses it. Okay, cool. So this is a maternity photo, a portrait of two people, just a fun edit. Uh more creative edit as well with colors and things like that. And lastly, the thing that you might want to go into, which I haven't done much of it is into the color profiles. You might want to see if one of these artistic color filters looks good. This might be something you want to do before you start playing with the colors. But they do have some cool ones here, especially for a colored photo under artistic and under modern. Again, if you haven't played around with these, make sure you watch the lesson that's earlier on in the course about using color profiles. Cool, thank you so much for watching this lesson. If you have any questions, let me know otherwise we'll see you in another tutorial by