Lesson Info
85. Adjusting Exposure
Summary (Generated from Transcript)
In this lesson, the instructor discusses adjusting exposure in photography. He explains how to brighten up underexposed images and warns against purposely underexposing as it can lead to a loss of detail and increased noise. The instructor also discusses the use of histograms to analyze exposure and the different controls available in editing software. He demonstrates how adjusting contrast, shadow detail, whites, and highlights can enhance the overall look of an image. The lesson also covers local adjustments, such as graduated filters and radial filters, to selectively darken or lighten specific areas of a photo. The instructor emphasizes the ease and flexibility of digital editing compared to traditional darkroom techniques.
Lessons
Class Introduction
23:32 2Photographic Characteristics
06:46 3Camera Types
03:03 4Viewing System
22:09 5Lens System
24:38 6Shutter System
12:56 7Shutter Speed Basics
10:16 8Shutter Speed Effects
31:57Camera & Lens Stabilization
11:06 10Quiz: Shutter Speeds
07:55 11Camera Settings Overview
16:12 12Drive Mode & Buffer
04:24 13Camera Settings - Details
10:21 14Sensor Size: Basics
18:26 15Sensor Sizes: Compared
24:52 16The Sensor - Pixels
22:49 17Sensor Size - ISO
26:59 18Focal Length
11:36 19Angle of View
31:29 20Practicing Angle of View
04:59 21Quiz: Focal Length
08:15 22Fisheye Lens
12:32 23Tilt & Shift Lens
20:37 24Subject Zone
13:16 25Lens Speed
09:03 26Aperture
08:25 27Depth of Field (DOF)
21:46 28Quiz: Apertures
08:22 29Lens Quality
07:06 30Light Meter Basics
09:04 31Histogram
11:48 32Quiz: Histogram
09:07 33Dynamic Range
07:25 34Exposure Modes
35:15 35Sunny 16 Rule
04:31 36Exposure Bracketing
08:08 37Exposure Values
20:01 38Quiz: Exposure
20:44 39Focusing Basics
13:08 40Auto Focus (AF)
24:39 41Focus Points
17:18 42Focus Tracking
19:26 43Focusing Q&A
06:40 44Manual Focus
07:14 45Digital Focus Assistance
07:35 46Shutter Speeds & Depth of Field (DOF)
05:18 47Quiz: Depth of Field
15:54 48DOF Preview & Focusing Screens
04:55 49Lens Sharpness
11:08 50Camera Movement
11:29 51Advanced Techniques
15:15 52Quiz: Hyperfocal Distance
07:14 53Auto Focus Calibration
05:15 54Focus Stacking
07:58 55Quiz: Focus Problems
18:54 56Camera Accessories
32:41 57Lens Accessories
29:24 58Lens Adaptors & Cleaning
13:14 59Macro
13:02 60Flash & Lighting
04:47 61Tripods
14:13 62Cases
06:07 63Being a Photographer
11:29 64Natural Light: Direct Sunlight
28:37 65Natural Light: Indirect Sunlight
15:57 66Natural Light: Mixed
04:20 67Twilight: Sunrise & Sunset Light
22:21 68Cloud & Color Pop: Sunrise & Sunset Light
06:40 69Silhouette & Starburst: Sunrise & Sunset Light
07:28 70Golden Hour: Sunrise & Sunset Light
07:52 71Quiz: Lighting
05:42 72Light Management
10:46 73Flash Fundamentals
12:06 74Speedlights
04:12 75Built-In & Add-On Flash
10:47 76Off-Camera Flash
25:48 77Off-Camera Flash For Portraits
15:36 78Advanced Flash Techniques
08:22 79Editing Assessments & Goals
08:57 80Editing Set-Up
06:59 81Importing Images
03:59 82Organizing Your Images
32:41 83Culling Images
13:57 84Categories of Development
30:59 85Adjusting Exposure
08:03 86Remove Distractions
04:02 87Cropping Your Images
09:53 88Composition Basics
26:36 89Point of View
28:56 90Angle of View
14:35 91Subject Placement
23:22 92Framing Your Shot
07:27 93Foreground & Background & Scale
03:51 94Rule of Odds
05:00 95Bad Composition
07:31 96Multi-Shot Techniques
19:08 97Pixel Shift, Time Lapse, Selective Cloning & Noise Reduction
12:24 98Human Vision vs The Camera
23:32 99Visual Perception
10:43 100Quiz: Visual Balance
14:05 101Visual Drama
16:45 102Elements of Design
09:24 103Texture & Negative Space
03:57 104Black & White & Color
10:33 105The Photographic Process
09:08 106Working the Shot
25:29 107What Makes a Great Photograph?
07:01Lesson Info
Adjusting Exposure
With exposure, modern cameras are very lenient with getting the wrong exposure, and so there's a lot of tools in here that you can use for correcting them. So first off, sometimes images just aren't bright enough. We do want an image that's nice and easy to see, and in some cases it's just raising the exposure. And this is just ... I missed the exposure by a stop when I actually shot this. And if you miss it by a stop ... wrong ... Don't do it again. But you can fix it. It's not that big a deal. One stop is not that big a deal to deal with. But once again, you don't want to go out and purposely, or unnecessarily, underexpose your images because if you try to brighten them up afterwards, you're trying to brighten up areas that don't have a lot of information, and you're gonna get a ton of noise. If you had just shot it properly, it's gonna look a lot cleaner. So you should always be striving for the proper exposure when you're out in the field in this case. Looking at your histogram, th...
ere's gonna be different controls, and the exposure is not necessarily the best because what's it's doing is it's moving all the pixels darker and all the pixels brighter, and so it's a little bit crude in that regard. It's a global adjustment. It's adjusting everything that's going on. These other adjustments are gonna target one area, and they'll have what I like to call a rubber band effect on everything else. And so, maybe the whites get moved up brighter. It's gonna bring up the exposure part just a little bit, and it's gonna hardly touch the ones at the other end of the spectrum. At the top of the histogram in Lightroom is an area for turning on the clipping where you can see areas that had been lost in highlights and shadows. And that might give you some direction when it comes to how much an image needs to be processed. Now this image here just has some areas of brightness and darkness that are very, very extreme. And it's perfectly okay. There's just not that much information in the highlights. And deep in those shadows, there's not a lot of information that we're realistically gonna get out of this image. And so that's the type of thing that you can click on and off to really check out your image in another way. How much information have you lost? And you can leave this turned on as you're making your adjustments to see how much information you are rescuing at that particular time. And so the histogram is an important tool to keep open and looking at. And so an image like this in the desert, you'll notice the histogram down here. It's a relatively small exposure range. We're not even close to the edges with the blacks and the whites. And so we can add a little bit of contrast to this. We can increase the whites. We can decrease the blacks. And when we get a little bit more contrast, our picture has a little bit more snap to it. It's got a little better look to it, a little better contrast and color to it. And it's a good improvement that, I think, helps these types of images. And so playing with that contrast, if it's a relatively even tone, and doesn't have a wide range is an easy first step to go with. Probably my favorite slider is shadow detail. And what this does is it targets areas in the shadows, and tries to make them lighter without affecting too many of the other things in the photograph. And so let me go back and forth between the original photograph and one where I just adjusted the shadow detail. And so bringing up those highlights in the middle brings our eyes more in to the people that we want to see in the middle of the frame. And so what we're doing in this is we're just raising the shadow levels up. And it's looking over the entire frame right now at the shadows. So it is what's considered a global adjustment. And it's just looking at that darker area which happens to be in the middle there 'cause it's kinda in between to doors of light. So this picture was a little bit on the dark side, and I needed to do a number of things to adjust it. But it was the shadow recovery that gave me the most amount of information back on this. And so I did have to adjust the exposure, but it was that shadow slider that I really had to crank up, in this case, to get some more detailed information in those side buildings which was lost in the shadows. Shooting portraits can be challenging 'cause you want the entire face to look good. Over on the left-hand side of the screen we have a few too many highlights on the forehead and on the face. And so to fix that up, what I've done is I've gone into the whites, which is the brightest of lights, and then there's highlights right after them. And drag those down a little bit to the left to make the highlights darker so that the skin tone is a little bit more smooth there, and we don't have those glossy reflection areas to some degree. And so a little bit of adjustment when you get those bright spots. And that can happen in portrait photography. It can happen in landscape photography. Up at the top of Mount Rainier there, there are some glaciers that are really reflecting off a lot of light. And when you shoot with a raw image, you are collecting a lot of data that you can work with, and you can pull that back a little bit going to the whites and the highlights, and pulling those back a little bit. Hopefully you don't have to pull them back too far. But you can pull them back a little bit. Local adjustments are not to the whole frame. They're to a certain area of the frame. And there's a number of adjustments that you can make in this regard. One of them is the graduated filter. And I try not to use this as a substitute to the real filter out in the field because if you don't use this out in the real world, you might end up with completely overexposed sky. And if it's blown out pure white, there's no resurrecting it. If it's just a little bit brighter than you would like, you can tone it down a little bit, and you basically get to choose everything above a certain line or range of a line, and it can all be darker. For instance, in the image on the right, we just darkened it by about one stop or so to give it a little bit more color and detail. In this case, I actually used it reverse 'cause I wanted to lighten up the foreground so that you could see the foreground a little bit more easily. I got the background correctly Just wanted a little bit more light in the foreground. And so these local adjustments can be used for touching up images quite easily. And it's so much easier these days. I remember back many, many years ago in the darkroom, trying to figure out exactly how many seconds I was burning in this and dodging this area here. And then once you got it right once, and you wanted to make another print, you'd have to remember exactly what you did during that two-minute exposure. And now we can replicate ourselves and record what we do so easily, it's fun. Alright, so with a portrait photograph, what I'm often doing is doing a vignette in some ways. And this is a different way of doing a vignette is with a radial filter. And what I'm doing is I am keeping the brightness of her face the same, and I'm darkening in everything else around that oval. And you can create any size circle, any size oval where you want it. And it does this nice soft graduate filter out there. And I like it 'cause it's just barely detectable that you used it at all, and it just makes the photo read a little bit more simply and cleanly. In this case I wanted to adjust my image just a little bit more on this. And the pathway in fills up a lot of the frame, and it's actually the flowers, but I liked the symmetry of this shot. And so what I did, I just wanted to choose this pathway and darken it a little bit and just tone it down. And so what I did is I selectively used a brush to brush in the area of that pathway just to darken it a little bit. I felt it looked a little bit better. It drew your eyes over to the flowers a little bit more. And so those are types of adjustments that I make on photos on a fairly regular basis. I don't usually do that much that much of the time. But just a little bit here and there, just edging your photos to one direction or the other can have a big improvement on them.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
Love love all John Greengo classes! Wish to have had him decades ago with this info, but no internet then!! John is the greatest photography teacher I have seen out there, and I watch a lot of Creative Live classes and folks on YouTube too. John is so detailed and there are a ton of ah ha moments for me and I know lots of others. I think I own 4 John Greengo classes so far and want to add this one and Travel Photography!! I just drop everything to watch John on Creative Live. I wish sometime soon he would teach a Lightroom class and his knowledge on photography post editing.!!! That would probably take a LOT OF TIME but I know John would explain it soooooo good, like he does all his Photography classes!! Thank you Creative Live for having such a wonderful instructor with John Greengo!! Make more classes John, for just love them and soak it up! There is soooo much to learn and sometimes just so overwhelming. Is there anyway you might do a Motivation class!!?? Like do this button for this day, and try this technique for a week, or post this subject for this week, etc. Motivation and inspiration, and playing around with what you teach, needed so much and would be so fun.!! Just saying??? Awaiting gadgets class now, while waiting for lunch break to be over. All the filters and gadgets, oh my. Thank you thank you for all you teach John, You are truly a wonderful wonderful instructor and I would highly recommend folks listening and buying your classes.
Eve
I don't think that adjectives like beautiful, fantastic or excellent can describe the course and classes with John Greengo well enough. I've just bought my first camera and I am a total amateur but I fell in love with photography while watching the classes with John. It is fun, clear, understandable, entertaining, informative and and and. He is not only a fabulous photographer but a great teacher as well. Easy to follow, clear explanations and fantastic visuals. The only disadvantage I can list here that he is sooooo good that keeps me from going out to shoot as I am just glued to the screen. :-) Don't miss it and well worth the money invested! Thank you John!
JUAN SOL
Dear John, thanks for this outstanding classes. You are not only a great photographer and instructor, but your classes are pleasant, they are not boring, with a good sense of humor, they go straight to the point and have a good time listening to you. Please, keep teaching what you like most, and I will continue to look for your classes. And thanks for using a plain English, that it's important for people who has another language as native language. Thanks again, Juan