Lessons

Lesson Info

Advanced Adobe Camera Raw Part 2

All right now let's look at some other settings we can use first I'm gonna show you what one setting was kind of designed to be used for and then I'll show you where I use it for something else that you might not always think about so first uh here we have ah a kuala and its not a quality bear they're not bears justly they already calls in that but this one if I turn off this kind of black and white effect I have I'll turn it off then I'll show you how it was applied in the first place okay if you look at the original I thought the color that was in the original wasn't really doing much for the picture most of the color was in the background which if anything was a distraction to the subject and so any time that's the case where the color within the image just isn't a big essential part of it I'll think about converting to black and white so you can concentrate on the general forms and tones and the image and to convert to black and white there's a couple different ways but in general ...

you goto a tab over here that's called the h s l tab and under the hs l tab that sends for hugh saturation and lightness by the way we'll get into that later on there's a check box called convert to grayscale I'll try it on then it automatically moves thes sliders here to control how bright areas that used to be red are in areas that used to be green and so on. If this is a really colorful image, like a shot of flowers or something, I could say, hey, there's, some red flowers in here let's make the reds brighter. Let's make what used to be red and if there's a blue sky aiken say, darken up the blue sky by moving these those kinds of things in this particular case, the color was more subtle and it wasn't blatantly distributed in various areas, so these don't really matter. But when you turn on convert to gray scale, you get a strict black and white picture where there is no color whatsoever, and I find when I print those I don't like him as much is some images that I see that our tone where they have a little warmth to him for a little coolness to them, so to add color back in. Once we've taken the color out, I go to a different tab threat next door it's this one it's called the split toning tab. What split toning does is it allows you to put two different colors in the bright party or picture different colors in the dark part of your picture. So here is his highlights which is what color is going to go in the bright part of my image and down here so shadows which is what color will go in the dark part and let's take a look at this first it's kind of hard to pick the color you want by just moving the slider around because the image doesn't change yet because I haven't told it how much of the color should go in the saturation slider determines how much of that color goes in and it said it zero so I don't see it yet but here's a trick if you hold on the option qi which is all time windows it's gonna act as if the saturation slaughter's been turned up to one hundred percent to show you a really strong version of whatever color this is so what shall hold on option off click here and I'll just move this surrounded decide what color do I think I'd like in my highlights and I want kind of yellowish brown we're about there and then I'll let go then I could bring up the saturation toe actually decide how much of that color do I want in my highlights and I just want a little subtle amount of it then I got on shadows and with this slider again I can't see what's happening because saturation controls how strong is it in its senat zero so it's not being applied yet but if I hold on the option key when I click here, it will show me and I'm going to now choose what color I think the dark part of the image should be just looking at what I think would look nice and probably somewhere in here I kind of like it then I could bring up saturation to control how strong is it? So you know, I usually make it more subtle than you think you know, like bridge where you like it and then back off because usually people overdo this I'm going to bring it down maybe about there then we have one of the control which is called balance in balance means where the highlights end and the shadows began how far should this color that's called the highlights extend in towards the mid tones of the picture and how far should the shadows? So I just take balance and if you move it all the way one way you'll find that now we have a lot more blue in the image because the shadows are extending way into the rest of the image into the brighter tones but move in the opposite direction you're going to find the yellow that's in the highlights is extending further into the image instead it's a matter of figuring out the right balance here well, you like the look and I'm thinking somewhere right about there where? The highlights field yellowish in the shadows field. Cool, it's. A personal choice. Everybody has a different idea of what they like. So that's what I ended up getting now that's what this is really designed for split toning is designed for toning a black and white picture. That's. A lot of people use it for that's. What? When you see demos for it, they use it for. I'm gonna click down here, though. And let me show you some things that I use it for. That you might not think of here's. A picture I took about two months ago, the sydney opera house. And when I was done with this particular image, we show you what it looked like by moving all the sliders around under the basic tab, which is where you do most of your adjustments. This is what I ended up with. And I wanted this to look warmer here in the bright part of the image. Now, usually I can do that with temperature and tent. Do you see with temperature? If I slide this slaughter towards the right, I get it makes me much more yellowish. But if I end up moving it towards the right there, I might not like what happens to the blue in the sky I don't if you can see it very well in screen here but if I move this to the right the blue in the sky ends of shifting over and I don't like so the blue sky it's really a purplish blue sky? Barely any color in it is a dark part of the picture, isn't it? The opera house the part where I wanted to look more yellowish is a bright area of sky so you can say I want the highlights to be more yellow I don't want to change the shadows well isn't that what split tony does is put a color in the highlights or a color in the shadows so I just go over here to split toning and I hold on the option key and I say what color would look best in there? What would look most natural? I have never seen something lit quite with that color not quite that color but you know when you see normal lighting it somewhere maybe about in there then I can bring up saturation to say house how much of it should I force in there? So I bring it up, bring it up, bring up two high first you see you see what it looks like, then back off on it usually just a little less than you really think it needs because most people overdo it then I could move balance to say how much should that extend into the rest of the picture? And so I move it this way. There is very much limited in the on ly the absolute brightest highlights would get it. Bring it the other way and see how far I bring it up too far. The sky might start to change something that's gonna experiment there. So if you want to see the difference, I'll double click on the saturation slider to reset it. Zero there's without and then I'll click one more time, which will bring it right back to where my mouse's there's with. Do you see that little, uh, color is supposed to be able to push in there? Sometimes I do that and it's on like a sunset picture. The brightest part of the sunset or the darkest part needs something. Another example. Uh, here I felt that this dark area, especially over in here, was getting to be too blue often times that's. True of shadows. Because what happens is any area that's not being lit by the sun? The sun is nice and warm. Um, but areas that are not being lit directly by the sun are being lit by the sky itself, not the ball of the sun. But the sky the sky is usually blue sky and so your shadows air usually much more blue than things that air hit getting lit by direct sunlight that make any sense blue skies filling in the shadows. So hear what I'm going to do is go to the shadow slider and every color has an opposite and that's something that I think we covered in the first three day course. But if you don't remember, what I mentioned is, I think you can open the info panel and it tells me the opposite of red, green and blue at least the opposite of red is sayin the opposite of green is magenta. The opposite of blue is yellow, so I don't want to push more blew into my shadow. Somehow I want to absorb blue to absorb blue. You figure out what's the opposite color and you push it into your image. So letter b over here stands for blue what's directly across from it is its opposite color, which is yellow it's like a seesaw. Are teeter totter or whatever you call it when one side goes up and the other goes down automatically. If we have too much bloom my image. All I needed to do was take its opposite color and increase it increase it it's automatically in a decrease the other and it's on ly once we've absorbed all of the opposite that you would actually see the yellow appearing in the image so let's go to that image I'm gonna go to split toning and in the shadows I'm going to hold down the option key click on the hue and I'm going to find the opposite of blue which is yellow see if I can get in there and it might not be the option key that doesn't it might be visually looking over here that c that is pointed at yellow and then I'll bring up saturation and now pushing yellow in there is going to absorb its opposite so let's see if right in here you notice anything now it's also you know effect areas in here where it's dark but this is the part of thinking about because the bluish tint that's in their fathers me so I'll bring up saturation can you see how it's becoming less blue it's blue then we can adjust the balance to say how far should that extending the rest of the image because at some point if I bring it way up here the sky might change bring it down in the sky or the other way around bringing down the sky will change I want to make sure it doesn't go too far out of the shadows so many about there. If you want to see the difference, I'll double click on saturation here, so brings it to zero you see how blue that area was? Not sure how much is showing up on the broadcaster compared to bring it up, absorb some of the blue, so sometimes they'll use that deep blue, the shadows dark part of the image so that it's split town ing usually used to tent black and white photographs but can be used for many other things and often times I use that to shove a color into the brighter or darker parts. My picture whenever I don't like the way they are looking let's look at some other features we haven't talked about yet with this image. Uh, let me turn off one particular feature and then show you what it's doing to this image, and then I'll describe what I use it for just going to reset a few sliders. This is what the city looked like when I was done processing and there's one thing I didn't like about it if you can't tell what it is or not, but I can see a lot of blue showing up near the edges of these branches. In other things I don't know if that happens to be a blue sky that was out there I don't think so it looks kind of overcast but I have this all sorts of blue in here that I just distracts my eye did you see what I'm talking about now when I look at the rest of the image though I don't see blue anywhere else in the picture and so if there's any way I can isolate the blues and the picture and just adjust those I think of my people to deal with that issue so in this case what I'm going to do is with these little tabs I'm gonna go to that hs l tab it's the same town where we had that check box to convert to black and white what hs l stands for his hugh saturation in lieu eminence luminous just means brightness in saturation means how colorful and hugh means what color is it? Blue is a green is it yellow so let's see what we can do well in here if I gotta hugh there's a slider here for blues I could take everything that is currently blew in the image in shifted towards a different color so do you see how the blues within the picture of shifting around? I don't know if I could move it far enough though to make them green no not quite but I could shift the color what I might want to do is go here to saturation, which means how colorful is the image and I'll take the blue slider and I'm going to bring it down to just say it make it less colorful, and when I do that, then I don't mind it so much that makes sense, but I think looking at those areas that usedto look bluish, I think they might look better if they were darker, so I'll cook on the tab called liu eminence, and I'll take a blue slaughter and bring it down, and it will darken the things that were blue in the picture where I could brighten them up to make him try to disappear. It's up to me, may I want to break them up like that, but I can target individual colors, but you don't have to come in here and figure out exactly what slider to move. There is a choice near the upper left in your tools this thing that's the targeted adjustment tool when you click on it, if the adjustment you're working with is one where there's a feature that where you can click on your image and it can figure out what sliders to use that's exactly what it will do, so I'm gonna go over here and go to hugh. I mean, basic color. I'll click here on this snail and I'll drag right within my image towards the right or towards the left. You can see how I'm controlling what color that snail is. Maybe I find it looks better if it's a little more orange ish. And what it does is it doesn't move just one slider. It might think in this particular case that that snail is yellowish orange. It's, mainly yellow. But it's got a hint of orange in it. So it moves both sliders one just a little bit, the other a lot. And so I could come in here and find two in the color of the green leaves now. Okay, then I could go over here to saturation. And maybe I make the snail more colorful by clicking on it and moving towards the right. He and I make the leaves less colorful by moving towards the left. Left means less right means more. And therefore the snail might jump out more. I could go toe luminant ce and maybe make a snail brighter. It's not just adjusting the snail, though. It's adjusting everything of the same color. Then I go to the leaves and make them darker to really make that pop out. Seeing to see how it moved all these sliders for me I didn't have to figure out which ones to dio in sometimes it moves more than one so that nice so let's leaving find another image where that might be useful here's a picture of hong kong uh and in here let's say that let me see if I've already moved him no I haven't yet okay let's say in here I make this image very colorful in fact that's what's happened here I've turned up vibrance a tremendous amount and I turned up saturation a tremendous amount let's see what it looked like before doing so so I said hey let's really amped that up let's amp it up even more well sometimes you end up making things much more colorful and it's just like one or two colors that go overboard in this case there's a red light on the left side of the picture that bothers me my eyes drawn to it and I just don't like it also the yellows in here and I just might want to tone them down a little bit maybe you want to find two in the blues well that's when I go to the hs l slider and I grabbed the targeted adjustment tool remember that icon on upper left and now let's talk about saturation which is how colorful things are I'll click on the red object and I'll drag the left lessen it to mellow it out but no it's not just that object it's anything that includes a hint of red is going to become less colorful but I think right about there I no longer have my eye drawn to that area I go to the yellows oranges within the image where the buildings are and let's see what happens if I make it less or more colorful I confined to knit me you want the sky to be even more colorful then I can go toe lieutenants and maybe I tried darkening the blues or lighten them just fine tune it however I'd like you want to brighten up those yellowish orange is killing more in those but you confined tune the individual colors which I think is rather nice I could go to hugh and maybe I want this orange ish area to look more yellowish or something else more greenish I confined to knit so oftentimes when I'm done adjusting a picture one particular color might bother me oftentimes what happens is if you ever bring up a slider called vibrance the vibrant slider has a tendency of darkening blue because it thinks you have blue skies and your picture in blue skies look better when they're darker and so that's built into the vibrant slider and sometimes I have blues that don't aren't part of the sky it's like there is no sky in my picture anywhere and the blues or just looking ridiculous and so I'll go to the sl sliders and all this moving around but in this case I just have something here and I want to find tune it so I'll go to saturation click on the target and adjustment tool and I was coming here and say I want to make this reddish stuff if you want to make it more vivid think I also want to goto luminant ce and make the reddish stuff darker then I'll go to saturation and I'll make the greens more colorful because usually if I end up using the saturation were the vibrant slider that you adjust that affects the entire picture but if you're under the hs cell area it's gonna isolate individual colors eso it could be nice for fine tuning let me know if there's any questions about h s sell sliders it's okay, if you don't have any yes is there a way in light room to use the that targeted is there like an actual tool for that? Two were wondering uh and here when you have that little button with the targeted selection this dude yeah brother, something like that in late room. Yeah, there is uh in light room. What you're going to do is where you see these sliders for under h s l you're going to find something that looks like a doughnut it's like right over here to show you just got a light yeah, I don't know. It's, um, it's going to make sure we're look at who's. Okay, um, and if I take an image now, the I'll have to grab an image that I actually have with me because otherwise it won't let me in. Just these take me just a moment to do so little zippy is amy on my hard drive and let's see if these have smart previous or not. Okay, you over here on the right side? If I goto h s l do you see the little donut it's right there? Click on that. And now you have that thing turned on. So if I click on my picture in drag, it would be able to adjust it this particular picture. I don't have the actual sees his file could not be found. I don't have the hard drive that contains it, but that's, the icon you want to look for, it looks like a tiny little donut. Before we had talked about adjusting images where in the previous three day course where we did basic adjustments using the basic panel in most of the time, those sliders air enough, too, do what you need, but on occasion, some of these sliders don't do quite what you want and here's an instance in this case, um I wanted to make sure I had good shattered detail because the subject matter that's here the tires are part of that and if they're looking completely black or something just I wouldn't like the look of it so I wanted to be very careful that I got a shattered detail what school here is do you see these little comte red and yellow kind of containers that are actually made out of the tyres they're like the tires somehow turned inside out and then bent someway or whatever uh that's actually a tyre that's been turned into this and painted uh so let me show you a little thing it can help out if you've already adjusted all the sliders in the basic area and you want to get a little more out of it so first let me show you what this image looked like with default settings to get a sense for what the camera captured and you can't really see the guy that's inside and I don't know it just doesn't look all that interesting to me afterwards it's different um everybody has a different idea how they like their images so either you love it or hate it kind of thing uh but this is what I liked so let me show you how part of it could be done in here notice that in my basic sliders when I just this picture the shadow slider get turned all the way up to brighten the dark part of my picture a considerable amount and in doing so that was attempting to bring out detail here where you can see this guy and where you can see some detail in the tires but the shadows slider has been maxed out as high as it can go here's a trick if he ever end up with the shadow slider as high as it can go and you still need more after you're done adjusting the basic sliders you have all these tabs one of the other tabs is a curve there are two kinds of curves in raw there's one called a point curve which is much like curves that you have in photo shop where you can manually add your own points the other is called a parametric curve and that's where you don't have direct access to the curve instead you adjusted by moving sliders and that's not a bad way to get started if you're not overly comfortable with curves if you're you want to get the advantage of curves which is the most powerful adjustment and photo shop but you're not completely comfortable with the concept yet so this just helps you out by allowing you to control it with sliders so let me set these to their default positions and we'll see what the much looked like when I was done adjusting it using the basic sliders and I wanted to get a little bit more here's what it was like when I was done with those basic sliders. Now if you look at the tires they're pretty darn dark some are looking rather black so I came over here to the shadow slider in this allows me to get even more out of my shadows. I already have the shadow slider that's in the main area of camera under the basic tab maxed out this will allow me to get more I brought it up somewhere around here. Then I could come over here and grab the lights if I want to work on the bright airy maybe the the sky in this image and bring it down maybe just found the mai I was being drawn to those bright areas like right over here in things and I wanted to mellow him out so I can either go with lights or even brighter would be the highlights see the sky changing so in here it's going from the out the brightest areas which would be highlights to semi bright areas which would be the lights two semi dark areas which should be the darks to really dark areas which should be the shadows and you can find tune it there I mainly do this when I'm already done processing the image under the basic tab that general sliders are used on every image and I just couldn't get what I wanted this the sliders they're starting to get maxed out and I need to push them even further. Then I'll come over here to the curve and I will start tweaking too. Get a little bit more out of my shadows or my highlights I can also, if I happen to be comfortable with photo shop use what's known as the point curve. Let me see if I have an image where I have I'm not sure if this yes, I have. All right, um, this is primarily for people that have already taken a class and curves you already know how to think about it. We did cover that in the last three day course, but, uh, let me see if I can show you in general here I'll get rid of some dots here on. All right. So this is what this image looked like when I was done using the basic sliders, the ones that usually adjust your image with I can show you what the default image, uh, settings looked like just so you know what we started with that was look right. It was adjusted to get to hear I wanted it to go even further, so these sliders I got as much as I could out of the image, then I came over here to the curve. We have two kinds of curves, remember we have a parametric which is the one where it helps me a lot by just giving you some sliders which are easy to understand because they're named nicely and then there's the point curve that point curve is only for people that are curves junkies and if you took the last three day class and we actually used what we did you're probably curves junkie by now uh but if you didn't take that last class then I would ignore this part let's take a look remember that target adjustment tool that's up there it actually could work with more than one kind of adjustment and if you look there's a down pointing arrow there just like there's a down pointing era where the crop tool is anytime you see a down twenty narrow it means there's a hidden menu there if I click and hold on the crop tool you see the menu that appears I knew that menu was there because of the little triangle anytime you see a tiny triangle in photo shop it means click here there's something hidden. So with this there's something hidden if I click in the hold on it it tells me what kind of adjustments I could apply. If I chose this it would automatically send me to the hs l sliders and it would choose the area called hugh to adjust but you notice it works with a parametric curve as well so just so you know, you don't have to work with the sliders that air called highlights light starks and shadows you could work with this tool and it would figure out what uh this is is this a dark areas that's a shadow area? You wouldn't have to figure it out, but when it comes to the point curve you have to know a little bit more would you have to know is what the point curve if that's what you're into you could move your mouse on top of the image and hold on the command key control on windows and with that I could click on a dark part of this building and if I command click it allowed a point to my curve now I'm not going to move that point right now by just adding it and not moving it I'm locking in the brightness of what I clicked on I clipped in the dark part of the building so it should stay dark then I'm going to go toe a bright part of the building like over in here, if I get a bright area, I'll command click and then I'll, uh get that mark and if I make it steeper between these two, I'm gonna have more contrast between the two let's see what happens if I move this straight up, then I could go to another area let's say this mountain and if it's in a different area and in this case it's not when I move my mouth on top of it do you see a circle in curves it's right on top of a dot that's already there which means this area here is exactly the same brightness is something else I'm already adjusting but if it was in a separate us part of the curve I could adjust it separately in this case I couldn't but I could come in here and make it steeper between these two and by doing so I get more contrast between the two areas so I was clicking on I clicked on a dark part of the building I clicked on a bright part of the building let me see what this image looked like when I first opened it I'll just go reopen it I've done too much to it let's see the curve that was there so I ended up having a total of three dots one was for the bright portion of the building to brighten it up one was for the dark portion of the image or the building it got moved down to darken and then my guess is the dark part of the photograph got too dark so I clicked down and here where there was a dark area and I prevented it from going too low if I get rid of these dots let's see if you couldn't see the difference is it slowly makes the adjustment go away in the image looks a bit more hazy, so for those that like curves you can get it in camera sometimes it's useful for tweaking things a little bit more unusual. But most of the time when I use curves, I like doing photo shop because I find I have much more control in the fact that I can paint on a mask in photo shop. Tow limit word affects the image, whereas in camera always affects the entire picture and therefore I find it to be dramatically more limited in what it's capable of. So I primarily use photo shop on curves in the main part of photo shop, but on occasion and camera just a slight little tweak can be nice. All right, ready for a couple questions shortly before he breaks. Yeah. Okay, so this one this question is from eric the clown, the club and says, what key did you have to press to get the slider toe work on the picture when you were adjusting fluminense? I'm assuming he was talking about when I was moving the hs cell sliders. What I needed to do is when I was in the hse cell area on the upper left you have a bunch of tools and what I needed to do is click on this tool right here it's called the targeted adjustment tool great and that's what allowed me to click within my picture? And when I clicked, I could drag left and right, and it will move, uh, the slider that would affect whatever color my mouse is on top of. So I believe that's what they're referring to, I believe so, and we can get verification later. If not, and then do you mind going into the little bit of for blue sims? What the difference between saturation and luminant ce sure, the difference between saturation and lou eminence is that saturation treats all colors equally, so when you increase saturation, everything, your picture will become more colorful and it's not going to treat one color differently than another, with vibrance it's quite different in that you're still going to make your image more colorful when you increase it, but it's going to concentrate on the mellow colors in your picture, the areas that are not all that colorful to begin with are going to get the largest boost biggest change. It is going to affect your image less and less and less as it gets into the mork colorful areas. So if you have a picture of flour and you bring up vibrance, the dirt that's surrounding that's, not very colorful will become more colorful. The flower will be come just a little bit more colorful. But there's a little bit more in vibrance, in that it darkens blues, because it thinks that all blues or skies, whose guys usually better when they're darker. And it doesn't make skin tones all that much more colorful. Because if you did that, people look sunburnt really fast. So things that are similar to skin tones it doesn't deal with as much. So a lot of people replaced saturation with vibrance. Justus, a general concept. But I used both, uh, depends on the image.