after I crop a photo. The first thing that I tend to do is fix the white balance of an image and first really the reason why I cropped first is so that I don't have to worry about anything that ends up being outside of my crop. In terms of editing and making look better. For example, maybe there was a big red ball over on the side that I cropped out and I would have had to play around with to make look good while editing. But since I cropped it out first, I don't have to worry about it. Okay, so in terms of white balance, the easiest way to do that is under our basic options. And so there you have in this first sort of block right here are white balance options depending on if you shoot in raw or jpeg and you're editing a raw or jpeg, you'll have different options, sort of presets up here in the top. Right. I believe that Sam mentioned something about how if you are shooting in raw things like editing color or applying color filters or styles or presets while shooting in camera doesn't...

matter as much because you can adjust everything later and that's true. And this is an example of where we can use the as shot white balance or we can choose one. This was kind of in the shade. So let's see what that looks like. It makes everything a little bit too warm. So that's not right, daylight might look a little bit more natural compared to what was as shot as shot looks a little bit cool. So maybe daylight or you can use an auto selection that lightroom has that tries to make it look proper. Sometimes these don't look good and there are a couple more keyboard shortcuts that I want to teach you right now, that will help you out. one is the back slash, button it's the backslash, not the forward slash. A lot of people get confused and they email me and say fill. This doesn't work. It's the backsplash where you see the before and after before after before while I'm pressing it down. The other is l which allows you to get sort of a simple view of your photo without any distraction. So if I do that then before and after with the backsplash, that's an easy way to see more clearly. You can also use these buttons at the bottom of this window to do comparisons of actually this one, let's do before and after and then you can kind of just click through and you can change the view, split screen or side to side going back here to see the full screen. Okay, so those are the presets. Now, none of those were really working that well for me, so I can do a custom white balance with these sliders. The way that sliders work in lightroom is you can either click and drag to the left or right to adjust them. You double click to set it to what it originally was or you can hover your mouse over the slider and use your arrow keys going up or down to jump the slider up or down. And this is a good way to make kind of fine tune your adjustments. So that's how the sliders work. Or you can actually click within the number and type in a specific number. Say you know that, Okay, we want this to be at 3200 or whatever. Then that's going to give you put the white balance temperature. The light saying that this light was 3200. Obviously it wasn't because that looks too blue, it was probably more around 5600 or something like that and that looks better. So this first slider is with the temperature. And so what does that make you think of? Well you're lighting, scale your warmth, your coolness, your kelvin temperature and so if you go to the left, it's going to make it more cool, go to the right, it's going to make it more orange and warm. So let me undo that. You also have this tint which goes from green to magenta. So sometimes depending on the light source that you're using or even in this example where we were surrounded by green trees and green leaves, it gave sort of a green tint, which you might like, but it might not look so natural. So you might have to combat that by adding some magenta or maybe you're under some sort of weird fluorescent light. It gives that green tint, know that the tint slider is where you can fix that. Okay, so if I was doing this myself on this photo, I would probably slide to the right just a little bit to get back some of that warmth and then maybe play with the tint just a little bit going from right to left. Sometimes I like going extreme and then dialing it back so that I can really see what I'm doing and then say, oh that's way too much. Let's go back. I don't even know where it started. It started at 19 so just a little bit might help and again we can do the backslash before after that looks more natural to me. The other option for selecting your white balance is with the white balance eyedropper right here. If you click this, what you're supposed to do is then find something that is white or neutral without colors in your image. Something that is like a gray that has no color because then you're telling Lightroom that what I'm clicking on is supposed to be white and then all the other colors around it adjust to that white balance or that white point that you set. Now this isn't going to work in this image because there's nothing really white. If I click on the green trees, for example, what's going to happen is everything gets really pink and magenta ish because what we told lightroom was that this green trees should be white, it should be neutral, it should be de saturated and so it makes everything else pink accordingly. It drags it up that tint slider. I'm going to undo that with command Z. If I click say, I think my teeth are perfectly white, it's it's close but everything gets a little bit too cool. So this is not a good example for this photo. Let's see if there's another photo with something that is more white. This one, I mean the color, the problem is that the white balance auto setting was really good for all of these photos so you don't really need, I mean this might be the best option. If I click the eyedropper, click somewhere on the street right here and that looks better. So if I do before after and the reason why I click down here on the street rather than somewhere in the light right here, which is pure white and you can see when I click that it says cannot set the white balance here. Please click on a darker neutral area because if your image is overexposed, that's not necessarily white, that's just overexposed and there's not really any information in that part of the image for lightroom to see and to use similar to down here on this photo. If I click up here, nope, it's too bright, it's overexposed. So you need something that is well exposed, white or gray to use this color picker if you are, you know, holding up a white piece of paper even here actually, this is a good example. This wall is white behind us and because of the vignette and the lighting it looks great, but if I click here it'll make everything look better. It will make the background look white, actually neutral gray and then all the other colors kind of fall in line. And that's a perfect example of where this looks a little bit too green and a little bit too blue. But using the white balance picker and picking the blank neutral wall behind will looks a lot better. So that's how you adjust and fix your white balance. In the next lesson, we'll be looking more at adjusting and fixing exposure.

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White Balance in Lightroom Classic CC

White Balance in Lightroom Classic CC

Lesson Info

8. White Balance in Lightroom Classic CC

Lessons

Class Introduction

Importing

Organizing with Collections

Rating, Flagging, and Filtering

Face Tagging

Quiz: Importing, Organizing and Filtering

Crop and Rotate in Lightroom Classic CC