Lessons

Lesson Info

Lightroom CC - Mobile: Color and Brightness

We're gonna go on the iPad, because I wanted to show you something that we didn't do earlier. We went, I'm gonna go, here let's... So one of the things that I was super excited about is seeing the Northern Lights. I was so excited about it, and the first day I was there, I was searching around for it, and I was driving up to the tops of mountains and so I didn't sleep all the first night that I was there because I was searching for these Northern Lights, and it was so dark out there that I couldn't tell that there just was clouds. It was just, 'cause it was clear when it was light, and then by the time it got dark, it was just cloudy and I couldn't see the Northern Lights, and so I kept driving around looking for breaks in the clouds and so anyway, so I finally, I didn't get to see 'em the first night, but I finally got to see 'em the second night. Okay, so there's my Northern Lights, and I was super excited. So I was sitting at, I think they call it Iceberg Lagoon, and there's just al...

l this ice around and people are driving up and looking at that and then someone screams, "Look at the sky!" And there's these weird shapes just kind of floating through the sky, and I was so excited, and everybody's down by their cars looking up, trying to see it, and you know, if you have lights around you, you can't see 'em, because they're really kinda dim and they're not bright like big bright lights, they're dim. And so everybody's like standing around their cars looking up there. And so I see this hill, so I run up the hill and I set up my tripod and I start photographing, and then about, I don't know, maybe a half hour into photographing, people have looked up the hill and they realized there's guy up there with a tripod, and like a serious camera. And so they're like, that's where we should be. So then all of a sudden, everybody from their cars comes up to the top of the hill and they're all around me, and they're trying to take pictures with their flashes on, and they're, and I'm like, "Guys!" So I had to have a little teaching session up there, like, okay, everybody on this hill. Turn off your phones and turn off all of your lights and don't use your flashlights, and stop using flashes 'cause it's not gonna help you on that. So then I was teaching them, like, slow your shutter speed down. So we had a little makeshift lesson on taking pictures of the Northern Lights. So anyway, so this is the image that I want to work with, and interestingly enough, by the way, those of you who've never seen the Northern Lights, and I think they get more intense, this is the first time I've ever seen 'em, but they are very dim green. They're not like a bright green. You look at 'em and you can see that there's a bit of a green to them, and then when you take the picture that's when the green really shows up. So it's the camera that shows 'em better than your eye does. But I'm told that if they're really intense sometimes you'll actually see the lights just, and you'll see the green and all that. So anyway, I'm gonna go in here and we're gonna adjust this image from the Northern Lights. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the exposure down a bit. I'm gonna take the shadows up, 'cause I want that mountain in the background, I want to see some, see how the background is kind of glowing, we're getting a little bit of detail in it. I don't want it to be great detail, but I do wanna see that there's some difference between the kinda mossy grass in the foreground and the mountain itself and whatever this dike is that's kinda traveling right around there. I wanna see that there's some difference there, so I'm gonna make sure that I brighten that up enough to see it, and then I'm gonna go into my effects, because this is where clarity is really gonna help separate out some of those dark areas and some of those clouds and stuff like that. So I'm gonna just grab that and I'm gonna increase, see how it's doing a good job at increasing the contrast in those midtones and those darker areas. So I've got all of that done. So now the rest of this image is all about how bright do I want those Northern Lights to show up? So I'm gonna go back into the light area and I'm gonna work on say my whites, and you can see how bringing up the whites really helps you with those Northern Lights. They just kinda, see how they're pulsing? So I'm gonna bring them up just a little bit, and now it's all about color. So now I just have to play with the color. I could also come into the curves by the way, and I could work with the curves, and that might help, you know, see how I can brighten up the brighter areas in the photograph, but I can then darken up the rest of the photograph so it's back where it was, and even the midtones, bring those down so that there's really just a lot of brightness. And then I want to play with those colors, so I'm gonna go into the color area, and when I click on this little wheel here, I'm gonna get my color mix, and remember I told you that the color mix wasn't very useful in kind of a monotoned image like that foggy beach, right. So instead, this is a great place to use it, and I can do several things. I can either say I want this to, like I want the greens, or the yellows, so I could click on Yellow, and then I could try and oversaturate the yellow, or I could play with it, but that's a little bit difficult to figure out 'cause you only have yellow or green, but this is green and yellow together. So instead, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click on this little guy right up here, it's got that four arrows and a dot in it. So when I click on that, I get to choose either Hue, Saturation or Luminance. So let's first start with Luminance, and I want to take the center of that green down a little bit in luminance, 'cause it's a little bit too bright. So I can just grab all greens, and I can bring 'em down just a little but, but notice that it's working on the greens and the yellows, because that's not just green and it's not just yellow. So as I go down, it darkens it, as I go up it brightens it, so I can just kinda work with it until I like the way it looks. Then I can go to the Saturation, and let's go to this purple that's up here in the sky, and I'm gonna brighten the saturation of the purple. See how I'm working with purple and magenta together. And there. So now I'm gonna go to the Hue of the green, 'cause I probably could change that a little bit. So I'm gonna go to the Hue, and I'm gonna click on the green-yellow, and I'm just gonna shift it and see, oh there's some, that's not the Northern Lights, that's like alien invasion. And then this is like someone peed in the sky, (audience laughs) and so like we just gotta find the right thing, and so I'm just trying to remember what they looked like, and I think that it's about... There. So now they kind of feel a little bit more like what I was seeing when I was there. So you get the sense of how much control you have because you can actually click on that exact color and move it up and down, and it gives you the ability to change the hue, the saturation or the luminance, which is really helpful, especially when you're going into let's say, let's leave this image and go to an image of, oh I promised that I would edit this photo, not that photo, they say I I look mean in that photo. I don't look mean, I look serious, but this one. So I'm gonna work on this photo here, but I want to, I'm gonna zoom in so you can see my face. So this is me in front of this amazing little cavernous canyon there, I loved it, it was fantastic. You can see I took the picture with my drone, see that? So that's my DJI Mavic Pro drone right there, I'm taking the picture with that, so it's a really intense selfie. You've gotta have a helicopter take your selfie nowadays. So anyway, I'm gonna work on that, but if I come into the effects, or not the effects, but the color panel here, and I go into that same color wheel, this is where I can just point at my face, and I can kinda play around with just the brightness of my face, because my face has a very unique color tone in comparison to the rest of it. Now there is some yellow in the green and there's stuff like that and there's some orange in that green, but most of it's gonna be just in my face, because of the rest of the image it's all, there's a lot of greens. The yellow back in the background might change a little bit, but we're gonna find out, so we're gonna click on here like this, and then we're gonna go to Luminance, 'cause I want my face to be a little bit brighter, and then when I go like this, see, see how it's hardly change, it's changing just, you can see in the very background, some of the lighter areas are going up and down, but I can change my facial tones just a little bit so I can brighten 'em up just a little bit, and then, actually did I brighten it up? I'm not sure, let's see. Yeah, let's go up just a little bit. And then I can take the saturation on my face and I can either increase it or decrease it, so I could go completely black and white. (audience laughs) Don't do that. Or I can go up a little bit, warm it up a little bit, and then I can do the hue. So this is where it really is helpful when you have someone with like a overly red face. You can click on that red, 'cause you don't know what it is, like, say their nose is like real bright red, magenta, whatever, and so you can click right on their nose and you can click on that with the hue, and you can click on it and change the hue so that they're like green, or that they're magenta, but really you're just kind of shifting the tones so there's a little bit more orange in their face, or a little bit less orange in their face. So then once you're done with that, oops, oh that's not the way to do that. I just started playing with... Okay. Shoot, turn that off. There we go. Okay, I've really messed up the colors 'cause I was trying to pinch, and so I ended up with all sorts of, but you can see how the colors, you're working on those colors, and I'm gonna actually reset all of this because I totally messed up whatever I was doing there. And you can see how I was messing all of these up. Now, here's a little flaw and that is that you have to go through all of these and reset them like this, because they should have a reset right here, but there's not a reset just for this panel, so it's unfortunate, but that's how you would work with a person and target their face and brighten up or darken or, so. The color mix is very helpful when it comes to faces and people, things like that. Okay, one last image. I'm gonna go in and play with, let's say this image right here. So this is a good example of a opportunity to do some of that color adjustment as well as some more burning and dodging on this image, because you can see that there are clouds, so we've got all the clouds that we need in this. So you can see like the Histogram here, that sky right here is right here. So the sky is perfectly exposed, it's all the data's there, it's just a matter of tweaking it. So this is a great example of a good exposure that needs to be worked on in order to kinda come up with the final version of that image. So what we're gonna do is we're go into our basic exposure first, and we're gonna actually bring the exposure down just a little bit until our main area looks right for us. Then we're gonna go into the black, and we're gonna bring that down, so that up here is a little more rich, and then we're going to go into our color and I want to, I really, the main subject of this is the grass and then that hill with the moss on top of it. So I want to work on that until I've got the right amount of warmth to it, and the right amount of green in it, and then I'm gonna take the vibrance up quite a bit. I'm not gonna bring the saturation. But that means that I've got all of this correct, here, here, here, but I don't have the sky correct. So at this point, then I'm gonna go in with my color adjustment, 'cause I need to do something about the sky and I need to do something about the water. So I'm gonna go into the sky, and I'm gonna go into Luminance, which is right here, and then I'm gonna go and look for the blue in the sky. So I'm just gonna click right next to the blue here, and then I'm gonna bring the luminance down, and you can see how the structure in the clouds are starting to kinda come up because I'm bringing all blue down. And then I'm gonna come over here to Saturation, and I want this water to start to perk up a little bit so that it looks a little bit more interesting. So I'm gonna click on the water, and then I'm going to increase the saturation, and look, it looks like there's a little bit of green and yellow in it. That actually might not be great for me. So I'm gonna do it a different way because that water needs to be a little bit more bluish-looking. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go into my localized adjustments, and I'm gonna create a gradient, and we're gonna start the gradient up here, and work on the clouds up there. So we're just gonna go like that, and bring it down to say, like that, and then we're gonna go into our lights and we're gonna take the highlights down a bit, and we're gonna bring... So this is, when you're trying to fix a sky, you don't wanna take, if you take the exposure down, what happens is the sky gets gray, it looks ugly. So you don't wanna do that because it creates kind of just a, it looks like you just painted gray on top of the sky. So what you want to do is you bring the lights down a little bit so that you can see the quality of the clouds, you can see the actual undulations in the clouds. But really what you want to do is take the shadows down because those are like the undersides of clouds and the definition in the clouds is in the shadows, and also in the blacks. So those will create more interest in your clouds than anything else. Then once you've got that, go into the color, and just simply grab your temperature and lower the temperature of the sky, and you can see how now it's starting to look more like a sky, because it's blue. We're just getting rid of some of the temperature, so now we have a little bit more definition in the clouds. We can even come down and take the highlights down just a little bit more, and maybe even the whites down a little bit, so that we have information in the sky. It's still a bright sky, but now you actually see clouds up in there and it's more information in the clouds. Now, if I went in and really worked on that sky and said I want to also add some blue in that sky, and I want to add some saturation to that sky and bring it even more under control, see how I'm getting a lot of blue up in the top of that sky now? So I've got all of that but my problem is, is that if I click on that you can see the mountain is gonna get blue too. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go and hit Erase, and I'm gonna go into my eraser here, and I'm gonna choose how small it's gonna be, and I'm gonna choose that it's not gonna be super feathered, and it needs to even be smaller, and it needs to be pretty full, like that. So then I can come in here and just kind of erase out so that that is not getting as much. See that? So I'm erasing out that sky, whoops. There. So that I'm not getting a whole green or a whole blue over that mountain. Once I've done with that, then I want to do one more, and I'm gonna add a brush, and this brush, I'm gonna make my brush effect before I paint it in, because I want to see what I can do to that actual water. So I'm just gonna take the temperature down, and see how the water's starting to look a little bit more like water now? It's looking a little bit more blueish, just like that. And I'm going to add a little bit of a... So inside of my color here, I'm going to add a little bit of saturation to it. So now, I've got my color effect, so now I'm just gonna paint in my color, and you can see that that portion of the water is a little bit more blue than the rest of the water, so I can just kind of color in my water, and I can take the size of it up a little bit so that I can do this faster. But then as soon as I get to the edge of that water, I need to take the size of it down again, so that I can go right along the edge there, and then let's take it down just a little bit further, and finish that up. You guys aren't seeing the size of that brush 'cause I'm using that, showing you where I'm painting, but there we go. So now, once I've done that, I can go in and really play with that, and obviously that's way over the top, but just adding a little bit more blue to that water helps it feel different than the rest of it, 'cause before it was kind of a gray. But when I'm looking at it, when I took the picture I was like, "Wow, that's amazing!", you know, there's all this green grass and this blue water, but it just doesn't turn out that way because I have reflections from the sky and it's turning out to be kinda gray. So, once we're done with that, now all those changes are going out to the cloud, and then they will show up over here. In Lightroom, do you use lens profile corrections or just your digital camera photos or for your iPhone photos or can you use lens profile corrections for both devices? That was worded poorly, but. So if you turn on lens profile corrections inside of, so if we're in Lightroom CC, if you go to the major normal corrections, so let's we'll just look at this photo, say. If you go to Optics, and you turn on the lens profile corrections, you'll see that it actually has a specific lens in there, 'cause it knows that I shot this with the Canon 24-70 2.8 Mark II lens, and I can choose whether I want a little bit more distortion or less lens correction, et cetera and stuff like that. So it turns it on, and it knows what lens and what camera I've worked with. But if you shoot it with an iPhone, it knows that you shot it with an iPhone and it will correct for that. There's a little bit more ability to play around with things in Lightroom Classic on lens correction and stuff, 'cause there's a lot more detail to it, there's a whole manual panel that you can play with, but this is reading the lens. If it doesn't have a lens, like let's say you're shooting with a Fuji camera with like an old manual lens or something like that, if you're doing that it won't be able to read the lens and so then it will just do nothing. On Lightroom Classic, you can actually profile that lens and put the profile into Lightroom Classic and then it'll read it. It's not gonna see that here. So I don't know if they'll allow you to put those corrections in there at some point, so that you can take all of your lens corrections that you've made and put 'em in here, but I don't actually know how many people are doing that anyway. So probably someone who's really serious about their whatever old lens, maybe they'll do that, but most people I think are just depending on the lens corrections that are automatically put into Lightroom. Okay. Darlene asked, "Does loading your files in your iPad "use all the storage on the iPad, and also the Apple Cloud?" So if you're using photos in Light... That is a good question. So, here's what happens. When the image goes into your phone, like if you take the picture with the Apple camera, it would go into the Apple iPhone, into what's called the called the, it's called the Camera Roll. So it goes into the Camera Roll, and then a copy is placed into Lightroom's repository or disk space. So there are two copies of that photo. So every photo that I take, there's two copies of it, unless I take it with Lightroom's camera, then it goes into Lightroom, and it's not necessarily on the Camera Roll. But there's always two copies. But Lightroom has its own copy. So if you always have Add Photos to Lightroom, then you can always delete any photo out of Apple's Camera Roll and you know that the other one's in Lightroom, and you also know it's in the cloud, and you know it's over here. So you can just, on occasion, go in and just highlight all your images from the Camera Roll on Apple and delete 'em, because they're not the same as the photos in Lightroom's disk space. So that's an important question to know, because you could fill up your device really fast 'cause you've got twice as many photos. But if you just constantly use Lightroom to record it, then you can delete everything from your phone, and by the way, Apple, there's a very easy way to go in and clear out your device every once in a while. You just simply plug it in by cord to your Apple computer, and then you go to the Preview, there's an app called Preview which most people use to look at PDFs and stuff like that, and when you plug it in, you can actually see your entire iPhone's photos and videos and all that kind of stuff in it, and you just simply select the ones you want to delete, and hit Delete, and it deletes them all. So it's very easy to see what's in your computer, you don't have to go through and do the process, 'cause otherwise you have to like, click, delete, click delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, and it's a lot, it's like, when you're at the Department of Motor Vehicles and you have nothing to do, that's what you do, (audience laughs) you delete stuff off your phone. This allows you to do it really fast. You can highlight everything and delete it all at once. Awesome. But don't delete the videos, 'cause they're not automatically added unless you tell it to, and I'm not always adding that, so I just make sure I don't automatically delete the videos because there's some pretty cute stuff of kids that I don't want to delete. I think that tip right there is probably worth the cost of the course. (laughs) Yes. If anybody's ever sat and tried to delete photos one by one That's right. If you're on Apple, go to the Preview program, plug your device in, and then that program will allow you to see everything in your phone. So I'm gonna just do one or two other little things with it before we finish, and one of the things that I want to do is I want to create a gradient in that sky, 'cause it's a little too bright. So I'm just gonna quickly, and you've seen me do this, so I'm not gonna explain it all that well while I'm doing it, but I'm just gonna add that gradient in there and I'm going to come into the light area and I'm gonna bring down the highlights just a bit, and I'm gonna go into the color, and I'm gonna turn it to blue so that it's got a little bit more blue sky on there, and maybe even bring down some shadows and some blacks so that we have a nice sky behind me. Now, one thing that I can't do currently inside of Lightroom Mobile, is I can't remove things, and in that photo, I actually want to remove some people. So as this comes down, I'm gonna get the adjustments and you'll see that my gradient is now there, and I can come into that gradient, and this is really important to remember, that even if you just have a gradient that you did earlier somewhere else, you can always come back into Lightroom CC and you can come in and say, I want to then adjust that gradient and change it. So I'm gonna go into my gradient, click on that gradient, and I'm going to click on the Erase tool there, and I'm going to change the size of my brush. I can also drop that down and change feather, flow and density, all that kind of stuff, but also notice that there's an Auto Mask option there, and so I don't want to have that hill inside of the gradient, but naturally you see the gradient come down and I'm going over the top of all of this stuff. So if I pull this down, see how it's getting darker, but it's also darkening up all of this area here. So I don't want it to darken up my hills, I just want it to darken up the sky itself. So I'm going to go into my gradient, and I'm going to turn on the eraser, and then I'm gonna come over to this hill, and I'm just going to erase out from the hill, and what you're not really seeing right now is that this eraser is following the hill itself. So now, if I were to take that gradient and turn it like super blue, and then go up to, let's say, go to the exposure and bring it way down like that, you see how... I want you to be able to see it. So the gradient itself, I can erase from the hills and it doesn't spill over into the sky, it just erases, so see how that hill is not blue. And let's do the flow at 100%. See how I can erase, and it's erasing from the hill, but it's not erasing from the sky. See how it's just skipping the sky? So I can actually do all of my erasing here, and get rid of that, and still the sky is perfectly exposed, it's exposed the way I want it to be, but the hill is now erased, so it's not part of that gradient. So that auto masking feature is really important piece of Lightroom CC that allows us to work on things. So what I'll do is I'll sketch stuff here, and I'll get it real close, and a lot of the times I can share it the way it is, but if there's something complex that I want to erase around or like a person that I want to erase around, then I can simply go over into Lightroom CC and finish it, or into Lightroom Classic and finish it, because I have that Auto Mask option available to me. So now I need to go back into that same mask and not be so crazy about the sky. So I'm just gonna click on that mask, and I'm gonna bring the sky back up to a normal look. That's better. And not quite so blue. There. Okay, the other thing that I can't do in mobile just yet, is the Healing Brush, because I want to get rid of these annoying people. There we go, oh. But I have my opacity. So now they're ghosts. So I can, like this person is gonna be like a kind of a ghost so you can barely see him. I'm gonna do the opacity at 100% here. Click on this one, bring it there. So now I have got rid of my people in the shot. Now, it's important to recognize then, that if I do that, remember that the opacity and the Auto Mask feature is not inside of Lightroom Mobile, but if I go back to Lightroom Mobile, and I wait for it to synchronize, so we just gotta wait for this to synchronize down. So right now it's gotta synchronize these guys up, and then once it's synchronized up, you can see it synchronizing right now. Once it's synchronizes up, then when we come over to Lightroom Mobile, then those people will be removed in Lightroom Mobile even though the tool is not inside of Lightroom Mobile. So that's a really useful thing as well, because anything that you do across any of these, even if the feature's not available inside of the particular tool you're using, it still works and so if I brush something, it'll brush over here. Here we go. So if we go back you can see that they just disappeared. So the people are gone now from my shot. So I can use that shot for anything.