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Retouching Landscapes

Lesson 15 from: Lightroom Desktop for the Photo Enthusiast

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

15. Retouching Landscapes

Learn how to use the healing brush on your Landscape photos to remove large and small distractions from your photos.
Next Lesson: Retouching People

Lesson Info

Retouching Landscapes

let's talk about the basics of retouching. Now I'm starting off with an image that has no adjustments to it and I'm going to quickly go through this. So I want you to see the process of going through several images quickly rather than going through every single point of the developed area inside of lightroom. I would rather you see a practical use of all of these tools. So the first thing that I'm going to do on this image is I'm just going to choose a profile and so I'm going to go to the profile selection area and I'm going down to my black and white because I want this to be black and white and I'm just cycling through and I like I like this blue effect so I'm gonna click on blue and then I can change the amount slider. Did you see that? I'm just just changing the amount until I like the way that looks. So I think that's probably about right. And then once I've got that I'm just going to hit the back button and now I want to go in and just play with the exposure on this. So I don't ...

need it to be much any brighter I don't think. But I do need the black to come down a little bit and I do need those whites to come down just a little bit. I need it to be a little softer, I think that's about where I want to be and I might have to come back to that in a little bit. So now I'm going to go down to the effects panel because I need this to have a lot more texture to it. So I'm gonna take the texture and I'm gonna bring it up so I'm zooming in so that I can see this texture and I don't need to be zoomed in that much there. So I'm zooming in enough to see the texture and I'm just going to increase the texture until I like the way that looks. And I'm also going to zoom out enough that I can see the clarity because I want to increase the clarity there there. Okay so now I've got a nice clear picture of this tree and of these branches or the of this foliage. I've also still got that misty water. Um So I like what I've got there. Now what I need to do is I need to go into the crop tool and I need to straighten this image so I can either just grab the edge so you see how my cursor has turned to like a little circular arrow. So I click on that and just drag and try and eyeball the the lines against the horizon. So that gets me into that zones where it's it's an even horizon. I don't want the horizon to kind of be skewed one way or the other. Um And then once I once I'm done with that I can just turn off the crop. But first let me make sure that I'm all the way to the right and all the way to the bottom, turn off the crop. Now I've got that crop locked in but I still need to remove some other stuff because I don't like what I'm seeing here um inside of the branches area. I want I want to see water, I don't want to see this kind of stuff but I can't crop in. If I were to crop in on this photograph like this, you see how if I lose that bush down there, I end up losing the tree. So I'm not interested in doing that. I've got to do something about this bush and so the best way to deal with that. And actually I probably need to click on the reset button so that I can see the entire bush and then we'll crop it afterwards. So I'm gonna go to the healing brush tool and I'm gonna make sure that I'm at 100% opacity and I'm going to um take the feathering down quite a bit so that I'm not creating too much of a feather as I work on stuff. And then I'm actually going to use um my my pen tool so that I'm much more accurate and I'm going to zoom in a little bit and if I hold the space key down and move I grab I can, it's a little hand, it makes a little hand so now I'm going to change the size of my brush and I'm just gonna paint over something like this that I want to remove. So I got to remove this little bush here or this branch. Okay, so that chose a spot way up there in the sky, which is the wrong place to choose because it's too flat. So I need to bring it down here a little bit and I'm just going to find the right spot in the water so that it is the same as what I'm seeing here there. Okay, so that did a pretty good job of selecting. You can see some errors right here, but that's no big deal because now I can come in and just grab that little part. I've gotten rid of that and then I'm gonna come down and I'm just gonna work on this little edge right here, but see how it keeps popping in the way. So as I try to get these this one pulls up and then I would be selecting that one. So that's it's really difficult to work that way If I'm in a position where I want to get underneath this one that I've already done. The best way to do that is just to go and right, click that and say overlay off that way I can get underneath it without it popping up. So I'm just going to go like this and then see how I've got that and now I've got to turn that overlay back on and then I'm just going to grab it and move it over somewhere close where it can actually steal from some other pieces of bush. So I just have to find something that's similar and maybe I made that too long. So if I if you make it too long, you can simply click on the pen and hit delete and it removes it and then it's just a matter of coming back in and do it again. So let's right click this and turn off that overlay. And then I'm just going to get like that area and that worked just fine on its own. I'm gonna get that area, it worked fine on its own, get that area. Okay, So that's looking much better. So now I'm going to zoom back out just a little bit and I've got to get this area right here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to come in with a bit bigger brush and I'm going to just start painting in this area here, just like this. And the thing is you've got to color the whole area in, you've got to make sure you don't miss any spots. So a lot of overlap. And then I'm going to let go now again, it chose the wrong area, but that's okay because we can zoom out and we can find the area that it chose right click show the overlay and let's grab that area and bring it down so that we see a much better version of that. And let's just go to say I'm just trying to choose the best possible and we can fix some of it later too. So we're just trying to choose the best spot possible. And I think that's probably pretty good there. So now that's a little bit better. So now what we're gonna do is we're gonna come in and we're just going to select this area here and we're gonna try and select oh there, that was pretty good. So let's just move it over a little bit. We get a little bit more rock, we get some bush there, that works pretty well. And then I want to kind of ease into these rocks. So I'm gonna kind of go like this and I'm just gonna select some rocks along that way and then we'll move that over. Maybe like that. See how we're kind of building in a new version of that edge. And I need to increase this. And now I'm going to go in and play around with this transition a little bit. It keeps choosing the wrong thing because it has no idea what I'm trying to do. So it's it's pretty confused by my efforts here, but that's okay. I'm the human, I know what I'm doing. It's the computer. So in this one I want to slowly transition over. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the opacity down quite a bit that way. It's just changing from darker gray to lighter gray over here and I might be able to just burn and dodge that in as well. But now I can zoom out and that looks pretty good other than the fact that I just need to darken things down. So now I can, I've got a pretty good look there and then it's just a matter of going back in, I'm gonna do my crop there, I've got my crop actually wanted to be right there and we'll turn off that crop. That looks pretty good. And now we can go in and start working on burning and dodging. But you can see how retouching uh in a landscape area doesn't require Photoshop, we can we can do all of this stuff right here inside of lightroom. And the beauty is is that it's also on my ipad, it's also on my phone. And so and when I'm finished with this, it just shows up inside of my ipad and I can either share it from there or I could continue to edit it. I could do the burning and dodging there, or I could have done this on my ipad and then it would show up on my on my desktop. So all of these tools are available in all versions of lightroom. Well, in all of the mobile and the desktop versions of Lightroom not available on the web. And so uh that is retouching huge things inside of Lightroom. So there's a lot that we can do inside of lightroom to work and fix our photos without ever going to Photoshop. Lightroom is pretty much the only tool you really need as a, as a photo enthusiast. Um, so just get in there and play because the great thing is that it's a raw image and so no matter what I do to it, I can always hit reset and just go back to normal so I can take the same thing and just go to the triple dot button and I can just tell it to reset all of my edits and go right back to normal and start over again. So you can't mess anything up.

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Ratings and Reviews

Jean McMillan
 

Thoroughly enjoyed your class, have learned so much about how take my Ipad to another level, now can't wait to put it all into practise!

Red Tulip
 

Sometimes it's hard to know what the instructor is pointing to so it's easy to get confused. Better job is needed in explaining what you are pointing to.

a Creativelive Student
 

This course is Apple centric. If you're an Android owner, be aware that the arrangement of Preferences and some other settings are different and you'll need to explore the menus (lines & dots) on your device to find the equivalents.

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