Lessons

Lesson Info

Post Demo

if you see here that I have my little card reader icon here, this is the card that we shot earlier and I'm going to click on it and I see that here's my files and this E. O. Is 55 D. File is the one that has all my files in it and I can click it open and you can see that there cr two files. That means camera raw, that's what that stands for. And I'm going to drag this folder into Light room right here so light room is going to open up. Okay? So at the top before I even start to look at these photos, the first thing I'm gonna do is de select everything so it doesn't copy everything I want and I look and I see okay it's coming from the right file. What I wanted to do is copy as a DMG. So that's because that's my workflow, that's what I'm comfortable with. And then I'm gonna look over here and it says Macintosh hard drive which is the hard drive that I'm saving to in this particular instance and it's got me my desktop and cl picks. So this is the cl pics folder that I created. Now I'm gon...

na when these copy in they're gonna copy in as a DMG. So what I want to do is quite possibly double click and see how it has a little folder there that says the N. G. That's where that's where they're gonna end up and that's where I want them. Okay so remember I d selected this so I don't have everything selected. So now I'm gonna flip through and I'm only gonna pick one today. We're not going to do a full edit. So I'm gonna flip through and I already kind of had my eye on one from earlier and I think it was that one. So it was one of the last cupcake shots that we did. So I selected. So I put a little check mark on it and from here, what I want to do is I want to this now. Okay, let's assume that this is my final edit. This is I've chosen all my pictures and whatever and this is what I want to do. So from here, what I want to do is I want to work in camera raw. I'm comfortable in camera. Raw. But I will show you something in light room. You can have the you have the option of I'm in the developed mode. Right? So I have the option to go down here. And I got file renaming, you can rename the files, you can apply these kind of developing settings directly to the full the files before you even report them. So if you have like a standard kind of steps that you put in, you can actually pop them in. So now I'm back to my main menu. Right? So I'm back in the library menu and from here, I highlight this and I can go open in camera Raw from here somewhere. Where is it at all? Right, well, this is being problematic. So I'm gonna drag it right in. That's what that's the beauty of all these these things. Is that whether or not you're comfortable in them, they're fairly intuitive and there's a million ways to do everything. So, these kind of these programs are kind of an abyss. There's so many ways to do everything. There's a million tabs is a million shortcuts. There's all these different things that you do. So the idea is that you find the workflow that you're comfortable with, so that when you're doing this every single day you're you can repeat it and do it all over. Okay, so here we are. And what's the first thing I notice about this image is it's a little dark. So I'm going to try to correct a little bit by pulling up my exposure. Okay, So we're almost we're almost a full stop off on that, Right? Because we were shooting. And we were looking at that screen and that's what happens sometimes when you tethered as well. So we're gonna pull that up a little bit. Now, here's some of the basic stuff that I do, I have like a kind of a we're going to go and you kind of do a little push and pull with these. I like to look and see, pull them all the way up and pull them all the way back and try to find a spot that catches my eye Again. This is sort of interpretive in a way, right, and I pull it up to where it catches my eye and then I usually back it off by about 10% and I get to someplace where I want to be now my shadows on this so you can see how they come in and out when you pull it up and back and you have a lot of control there. So I'm gonna I wanna be a little bit moodier, so I'm gonna pull it, it caught my eye all the way up, so I'm gonna pull it back, I'm gonna pull back halfway. Okay now your whites, this is where you get that pop and the brightness and your blacks. Now sometimes you run into a problem with these things when you don't have a black point to work from when you don't have a lot of black in your image. So you have to kind of have a push and pull on the feel of that. Like some people actually take a little piece of black tape sometimes and put it in the frame. Use especially when it's a lot of white so that you can click on that when you're editing and then you can take it out and post or crop it out for sure. Okay so now this is that's the regular tab and now let's just talk about the light temperature a little bit. So this says 46 50 and we can as we get bigger and closer and we get past daylight, It starts to get kind of yellow and orange and if we move back this way it gets kind of blue. So that's the kind of range of the color temperature that we're talking about. So where we were talking about earlier, about 2800, obviously that's way too blue. And then if we go up to 5500, we're still I'm still not comfortable with that. I still think that's a little too, that's a little too warm. So I'm gonna pull it back To about 5000. I think we're comfortable there. Now you can work with the curve if you're really comfortable with the curve or you can work with the sliders that adjust the curve. So now you can see if we pull up on these highlights, it gets a little crisper. So I caught my eye at around 50. So I'm going to back it off and do about half of that. And again, the lights, I'm gonna keep it up around the darks. You go in the other direction. Now we start to see that contrast popping out. So now those really vibrant highlights are kind of becoming more defined because we're adding a little contrast. So you could see that if you pull it all the way down and then just try to inch it back until it starts to feel natural and again, this isn't this is an interpretive kind of art you and your style will dictate how you do the post production? I'm looking at this and I'm finding that maybe it's a little too shadowy, maybe I'm not as clear about what I'm seeing on my screen as I want to be. So I want to bring, I'm gonna keep it there, but I'm gonna come up to my highlights, I'm gonna push it up just a little bit more so maybe there. Okay, so now Sharpening and detail. These are already pre set at 25 and 25. Typically what I do is I popped them up to 50 and 50, that's my particular workflow, that just about all of my pictures, I do the same thing, whether it needs it or not. Okay, now this the hue and saturation. Now, I don't go too crazy with this because the idea is that this is where your pictures can start to look over processed, where you start to encounter colors that are not normal in nature or not normal in food. Um and you start to be able to be recognisable as highly processed. Now, we have a lot of other things here and here's another way to kind of play around with the hue and the saturation levels. Like I said, these computers, these programs are sort of an abyss, You can get the deeper, you go down the rabbit hole, the more and more you're losing touch with what you did in the camera. So why, why? Why I say, I want to use a light touch with these things because they're necessary and they're really important to your workflow, but don't go down the rabbit hole because you will definitely start to get into all kinds of crazy things that take you further and further away from being a photographer and more and more about being a technician. So I think that again, my perspective on it. Okay, see this here down here, this is the color profile and what for the web in particular, you want to be at S RGB? Um if you're shooting for print, these adobe and Pro photo Rgb s are usually the kind of standard you need to ask your client a lot of times what they want in color profile, if they even know, because it's a it's a fairly technical thing to ask, but some of them will know and they will say I would, and if you know, it's a web only client do S RGB because that's the only colors that the web can read the Adobe RGb and the Pro RgB, it's information that's not even necessary because the web can't read it. Okay, so now we're in Photoshop. So now we've jumped from light room to camera, Raw to Photoshop. All adobe interconnected programs. So now from here, I can do what I want to do as far as my final image. So all I'm gonna show right now is I'm going to create a new layer, duplicate layer. So now of creating the same layer of what I've just worked on. So now I'm work, this is my edit layer, so I'm gonna do whatever I'm gonna do to this file now on this layer. So now let's say I make a mistake or I don't like what I did, I could throw the whole layer away and I still have the original. If you work on your original in Photoshop and you make a mistake then you gotta go back. Now the program makes it easy enough to go back but it's better to work in layers and then at the end you flatten the image so that everything that you've done is all consolidated into one thing. Okay, so we've got this. So now what I typically like to do is go back and check my white points and my black points so I get exactly what I want. So this is command m and I go to my curves and I go to my white point and I find the whitest white in the in here, this is kind of what I look for and believe it or not that that whitest white might even be here in the pink somewhere and you see how It reads. Now you make that one little half step away and it becomes something else, but there are wider whites in here. Okay, so I'm kind of comfortable with that and then I go to my black point. Now this might be more difficult because I don't see a lot of black here. I see some right there. So what I might want to do is zoom a little right, well I'm gonna go to it. Whoa, that's crazy. We don't want to do that. So again, this is where one of those cases where you can always go back from where you were. Oh, you got to get out of this first. Okay. But the idea is that this is where that little piece of black tape might come in handy where you want to tap on the black, but I'm comfortable for the most part with the black that I've I have here. Okay, everything looks a little green to me. I don't know if it's just the screen or whatever so I can go back and check that white 0.1 more time and just see and make sure that if I click around, if it doesn't change at all, see that is a little better to me, click around on the white points that you see. Okay, so we're not gonna I'm not gonna spend all day working this particular image to make it exactly perfect for what I want. But the idea is that this is where we're at. I want to go to my filter here and I'm going to go to a high pass filter. This is the one I was talking about how this is affecting the background copy of what I made. So now this gives you this kind of gray looking thing that goes over the image and you can see sort of the pics elation and you can see that it starts to bleed through a little bit, you can kind of see the edges and that's kind of like where you wanna be, where it doesn't get too crunchy, where you can kind of just barely make out the image underneath it. See like if you push this up really hard, it goes a little slow. That's the whole thing, hold on, you can see that you see how it's kind of like ghosting through. That's kind of you want to just kind of barely see that. So something like for like four or 4.5 pixel radius in this particular image is going to be sort of where we want to be. So you click Ok And then you go here and you click on overlay and this overlays that filter right over the top of the picture. And then from here I go to image. I'm sorry, where is it layer others more Here. There we are. We go to flatten image. So now what this does is it merges the two images, the background copy and the one that we worked on and puts them together and now it's one complete background picture again. So now from here we go sit I go save as I want to change it to a J. Peg. I want to find the folder where I want to put it. Here it is. Cl picks and we're going to save it. Going to save it at the maximum file size. And then when I'm done with this, I'm going to close it, I'm going to quit and now back in light room.