in this lesson, we're going to learn about adjusting exposure. So I've brought open this long exposure night shot, which I think will be a fun creative one to play around with. In most editing applications, there will be multiple ways to adjust the exposure of an image. Sometimes with sliders, sometimes with a curved tool, sometimes with what's called levels with lightroom. The easiest way is under these basic adjustments with this group of adjustments for tone. You've got exposure contrast and then you have these other sliders down here which adjust individual parts of an image. So let's go through them so I can show you what's actually happening exposure Now, you know, or as you should know, if you've taken this class is the overall brightness of your image. So by dragging to the right, you're going to make all areas of the image brighter, dragging to the left will make all images darker. So everything from the dark to the highlights. And I love light room because there's this great ...

hissed a gram at the top that you can see. Remember when we learned about history rams on the left. You have the blacks going into the shadows and the mids over on the right, you have your highlights and then pure whites. Your blacks are your pure darks. Your whites are your pure whites and those are over exposure and under exposure. And sometimes it's okay if you have some of that here, we have a little bit of complete white overexposure. That's where the the headlights of this light. We're so if we adjust the entire exposure, everything moves to the left or to the right double clicking to get reset, that I'm going to skip contrast for now with highlights. Shadows, whites and blacks so we can adjust individual parts of our image. So if we just want to adjust the highlights so this area up here, we can use this slider to bring down and you can see in our image that it's bringing down and bringing back some of the information of the road. Down below are light streak. If we want to adjust the shadow, maybe bring up some of the shadows so that we get more information in these trees, then we can bring that up. Blacks are the darker parts even darker than the shadows and whites are the pure whites, brighter than the highlights and that might be some of these stars and you can bring those up or bring those down. Contrast is something we've probably covered in this class before too. But basically what that is is the ratio between the darks and the bright. So a very contrast e image will have very dark darks and very bright, bright. So if I increase the contrast slider you can see and looking at the history Graham is a good option. You can see that the darks in the darks kind of spread out. Whereas if we drag this to the left, everything comes into the middle becoming less contrast. E everything is more along the mid range of exposure. So that's what contrast is. And generally when you're editing raw photos that come in, sort of flat and not contrast. E you want to add contrast. We've already done that though a little bit by blowing, bringing down the blacks and bringing up the whites. We added contrast. If we want to make it even more crazy, we'd actually bring down the shadows and bring up the highlights. This is super duper, extremely crazy contrast city. And you can see here in the history Graham, it's all blacks and all whites basically. So let's go back to resetting everything. And with this image, what would we actually want to do? Well, I think basically what we did, we want to bring down the highlights. So we get more of that information down under the street. I don't necessarily need to bring up the shadows. I might actually bring down the shadows a little bit, Make the sky a little bit more punchy. The blacks, I might bring down a little bit as well. The whites might bring down a little bit as well. So, I'm actually bringing everything down quite a bit when I do that. Maybe I'll bring up the shadows just a little bit. So that's looking like a better exposure for the style. I'm going for this, this photo. Well, let me bring in this photo right here, which is one of our examples, not the greatest portrait in terms of composition, because we've got this big bright background, that's super distracting this line going through Will's head. It's not that good of a composition or framing. But with editing we can fix some of these things, make it a little less intense. So this is a highlight up here. So what would we adjust? Either the highlights or the whites? You got to sort of play around some of it might be the highlights. And if I drag this to the left, you can see I get some of that information back. Now let's try the whites. And yeah, dragging the whites all the way down does help you get some of that brown of the ground and it's not completely pure white. Now our history Graham is relatively better. A big hill in the middle rather than having things over on the right hand side. So that's pretty good. And you can see that. Watch the History Graham, watching the top, right, as I drag this to the right, see the triangle on the top, right, go from yellow and red. The white when it says read, it's like warning you. Like, hey, you're about to get too over exposed part of your image. If it's in the white, it just means that there's a lot that's already over exposed. So generally you don't necessarily want it hitting the white, maybe part of the red, but for this image we want that part to be exposed a little bit more properly. And so that's why I would bring down the whites there. So that's how you adjust the exposure in lightroom Classic CC. We're going to continue with the next lessons on some of the other adjustments like color and saturation at the end of this section or after the saving, saving an export lesson. We're going to walk through some complete edits and I'll show you more of what I would actually do while I edit an entire photo, which might be good. These lessons are more for you to just learn, here's how you do it and then later on we'll put it into practice in one whole demonstration.

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Philip Ebiner

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Exposure in Lightroom Classic CC

Exposure in Lightroom Classic CC

Lesson Info

9. Exposure 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

White Balance in Lightroom Classic CC