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Step-by-Step Flambient Editing Process

Welcome to this section on Flam Bant editing. So this is a very specific process for how to edit real estate photos. And as we've learned, you need a few things. First, you need photos with the ambient lights on, you need photos with the flash on highlighting different parts of the room. Sometimes this is one photo, sometimes this is multiple and then you'll need a window pull if there is something in outside the window that you want to see. So I'm gonna show you how to do this with the office photo. I've also included a document with step by step instructions for the flam bent editing process. I've broken it down to every single step. Sometimes in some situations you won't do all of these, but I'll include this in the previous lessons resources. So you have it. And I think for the first time going through this though, it'll make more sense if you watch the video and you what look at the instructions at the same time, it'll be hard just to follow these instructions. So watch the tutori...

al and use these, maybe print them out and that might be helpful. So the first thing we're going to do is in lightroom, apply basic color and exposure adjustments and specifically for window pos you wanna make those adjustments thinking about what's outside of the window. So in lightroom, what we're going to do is do our basic adjustments. I'm just going to do this really quickly, but you would go through and do all of your adjustments to your, your photos for color and exposure, not thinking about transforming or cropping or anything just for color and exposure, maybe bring up my saturation just a little bit and I'm going to copy this copy, remember, check none and then just choose basic and go over to this photo and do the same looks pretty good. We don't wanna make these photos too dramatically different because we're blending them and then go to the next one. I'm gonna paste the same. But really what we're worried about is what's outside the window. And so what's outside the window? We might actually bring up our vibrance or our saturation even more, maybe make it a little bit more green. I don't know, depends on what you want warm. I'm just looking at what's outside the window, maybe the original is fine so you can make all your adjustments. If it's a big window with a better view, then it might change. Now, the next step is send photos to Photoshop as layers. So to do this, I'm going to select three, these three photos, right? Click edit in and open as layers in Photoshop. This is going to open up Photoshop and it's going to open up these photos in your layers panel. I'm going to change my layout. So it's the s it should be the same as yours. I'm using Photoshop tw 2023 but go up to window workspace essentials and this is what it should look like if it doesn't go to arrange or workspace rather and reset essentials. And I'm going to open up my layers panel and make it bigger as big as possible. All right. So now what I need to do is reorder layers in Photoshop from top to bottom. So the top is going to be a repair photo. So this is if you have any reflections issues with reflections, which I don't have in this photo, then we're going to have our window pull. I should make this optional. So now we have our window pull. So let's put our window pull at the very top and I'm going to rename it by clicking into the title, double clicking. I'm going to call this window pull. You don't need to do this. But I think for this following along, it'll make it easier. Then we have our ambient shot. So this is the one without the flash. So that's this one right here. Office one and then the last one at the bottom is our flash shot and you can turn these on or off to view them with these little eyeballs on the left of the name. There's so much in Photoshop, we're not going to cover it all. Again, I have a Photoshop course similar to the lightroom that covers everything you need to know about Photoshop. I'm just showing you this process for flambe editing. So hopefully you can follow along and get comfortable with this process. The next step is to align the photos. So even if you're on a tripod, I think it's important to align the photos to make sure that they match these ones, turning them on or off. They look pretty darn similar. But if they don't go up to select all three of them or all of your photos and go to edit auto align images, choose auto and just click. OK? And if it did anything, it would make minor adjustments to move them around, rotate so that they are aligned and you'll notice this. If you were pho photographing something like in handheld, for example, you'll see them move around and get fixed. The next step. This is optional and I'll cover this in a demo later on. If you have multiple flash photos, then you'll need to blend those photos together. We'll cover that in a future lesson. So we're gonna skip that and we're going to go to set ambient photo to luminosity mode at 50%. So I'm gonna turn off the visibility of our window, pull select our ambient later layer and then change to luminosity blend mode, which is this drop down at the top of the layer panel luminosity at is at the bottom. So what this does is it brings in some of the colors and the lighting of your ambient photo, but it blends it together with our flash photo. And if we drop our opacity to 50 this is a good starting point and I can turn this on or off, you could see that it kind of fixes some of the flash areas with this off. You can see there's some harsh light on some of these objects on the bookshelf and adding back some of that ambient lighting helps quite a bit. And then from here, you can adjust the opacity up or down to get more or less of that ambient photo back in there. So for example, for this photo, I think like boosting it up to 75 actually looks pretty good. So subtle adjustment, we're just sort of blending the ambient photo with that flash photo. So this is looking pretty good. So far, the next step is to mask our window pull. So the first thing is to switch the layer to darken mode. This technically doesn't have to be first, but I like to do this. And what this does is it removes the over exposure. So if I select the window pull layer and again on our drop down of blending modes, switch to darken, you'll see that it automatically actually removes the bright parts of the image and we can see the darker parts which is what's in this window. But you can still see me holding this flash on the right hand side, this weird sort of flash bubble around my window. So what we need to do is remove everything outside of what's in the window. So to do that, what we're going to do is first we can create a layer mask. So to do this, the first thing I'm going to do is option click and drag this down to this layer mask button. That's this button down here that looks like the rectangle with the dot in the middle. And by holding the option or alt if you're on a PC, it removes that image and you can see that with this black box here. Layer masks are ways to paint in and out a photo. Let me just show you something. If I undid that and I just drag this down into the layer mask, it would be in white and we see this photo still undo that drag it again, option drag. So it's a negative layer mask and it removes it. And then from here, what you typically do with editing layer masks is take your brush which is B on your keyboard. You can make all the adjustments to the size of the brush up here. The hardness of the edge or control option and drag left or right on your keyboard to make it bigger or smaller up or down to make it harder or less hard. That would be command alt, I believe on a PC. And then here we can paint in and here's where we choose our colors. We have black where you click this and you select a different color. But for layer masks, we're just painting in black or white. Since it's all black, we need to paint in white. So we can switch this by clicking this button here, this little arrow which selects the first color or the secondary color or you can press X on your keyboard to switch those. So I have white now. And if I start painting this in, you can see that it starts painting in areas of this photo. And then here in the layer mass in the panel, you see that that black starts to turn white where I painted in. If I've painted too much, I can press X to switch to the black brush and I can paint out. Remove that. I'm adding, I'm removing from our layer mask that we created, right? So you could manually do this and paint in the window, but there's an easier way to do this. So I'm just going to delete that layer mask by selecting it and pressing the the backspace button on my keyboard. I'm gonna start over. So I'm going to option drag it into the layer mask button. So that was just a little bit of a detour of layer mass just to teach you how to do that. And then the next thing I need to do is with the polygonal lasso tool mask around the window. So back here here is your polygonal lasso tool. This tool you just click, click, click and it sets boundary points and you wanna do this around your window. Now with the layer mass selected, so you don't wanna have the photo collected, you wanna have clicked or selected, you wanna have the layer mass selected. You also wanna have your color set to black. So if this is not set to black, you wanna press the X key to make it black or click in here and make sure it's set to black. We've already selected our layer mask clicking here, then we press delete on the delete key. And what happens is we're actually deleting the black from what's inside this mask. Now, I can click, take my rectangular marquee tool and just click anywhere to get out of that selection. It was still had that little marquee around our window. And from here we can go in, we could take our brush tool, press be on the keyboard, make it smaller, we can brush in the edges or out the edges depending on if we want to fix things, make it a little bit cleaner. But that does a really quick job at making this window pull add to this photo. And with the darken mode, if it wasn't in darken mode, the edge of this photo or this window frame, see how overexposed it is and it's it looks funky. You even get this top right corner, let me zoom in. So you can see it just doesn't look good. But with it being in darken mode, it removes all of the bright parts of that image, which is why we use the flash to overexpose the edge of this window frame. And really the benefit of doing it this way with the polygonal lasso tool to make that selection of the mask is say you had a window or a door with five or six windows in it with little edges. You wouldn't want to do that with a brush. It would take too long to create those individual masks. And by using the darkened blend mode with this polygonal lasso tool, it does it all within a couple quick steps. So this is looking pretty good, right? We can turn this on or off and you can see what happens with that when they pull the next thing you would do is if you do have any reflections in your window, you would repair that. We'll see that in a future demo. But with this photo, we're just gonna skip that because we don't need to do that. Next we're in Photoshop, we're going to flatten and merge this photo. So what we're going to do if we're happy with this, how it looks is select all three shift, click to select from bottom to top. And then we're going to right click and choose merge layers. And the reason we wanna do this is because there's some stuff that we are going to do in Photoshop to fix the ceiling that has to be done with that the with this being one layer now it saves it as window pull. We could rename this to merge or whatever if we save this at this point, let me just save it. It's going to save a version of it back in lightroom that we could check out. So now here in lightroom, we have this photo up here, I'm gonna flag it. So we know that this is the one we're working with, which is the combination of these three photos. Let me go back and Photoshop because this photo that's in my room is still connected to this file that we're working with in Photoshop. So the next step of my flaming editing process is to fix the ceiling sometimes with the flash and the ambient lighting, you get some funky looking ceilings with different color casts. And so generally we want to desaturate the ceiling so that the ceilings are pure white, which is unless your ceiling is a different color would it's really what most ceilings look like. There's a couple ways to do this one is we can duplicate the layer and make edits to that layer just for parts of the ceiling or we can do a specific adjustment layer for saturation. And I'm going to show you that method, which I think is the typical method I use. So in Photoshop you click this little button right here, which is our different adjustment layers. And I'm going to choose hue saturation right now. It's making adjustments to the whole image and the properties of this effect are up here. So up here in the properties panel, if I take the saturation down, see how it adjusts the whole saturation of the whole photo. So now we just need to select our ceiling to do that. It's similar. We're going to use the polygonal lasso tool. We're going to take that tool, we're going to click around the edge of the ceiling. You can go outside of the canvas here and that doesn't matter. And then you just have to finish that connection so that we're making this selection. Now, an important thing that we're gonna do here is modify it to have a little bit of a feathering to this selection so that the adjustment we're making isn't so sharp from saturated to desaturated. So we're going to go to select modify feather in here. I think that 10 pixels is fine and we're also gonna apply effects at the canvas bounds. So we're gonna click. OK. So now there's a little bit of feathering. You can't even see it, but that what's going to happen with our adjustments, going to to do that. All right. So then the next thing is to delete our selection from the layer mask. So back in here, we have our selection with our here. Now we're actually going to change our color to white and then delete. So what we have now is actually the opposite of what we need. We need our layer mask to include our ceiling and not the room. So let's go back. We're gonna take our marquee tool, just click out. And now what we can do is with this layer mask selected, we can press command I to invert it. So this is a little bit different than before with the window pull where I option click this and added a layer mask because it was a an adjustment layer already that has a layer of mass, we had to invert it. So now if we make an adjustment to our ex our hue and saturation by clicking on the hue saturation effect, bringing up our properties, we can drop our saturation and you can see we can make our ceiling perfectly white or gray. We might even bring up the lightness just a little bit. But what I don't like is that we lose a little bit of that color from our light, which is natural to have some of that warmth from the light. And maybe I pushed this a little bit too far, something like this might good, be good. But what we can do is erase a little bit of this mask with a brush to get some of that color back. So we paint back anything with, with our brush so we can press B on our keyboard. Now, what I like to do is drop our opacity to something like 25%. And what will happen now is if we have our eraser or really not eraser, but our black brush, we can paint over this light and it does it sort of in layers rather than in one full blast brush. And we can kind of get the amount that we want in a little more subtle way. So now if I turn this on or off, you can see that it's just applying to our light. The 10 pixels on this photo might have been a little bit much for the feathering of this mask. I feel like it drops a little bit of below the edge of this line on the ceiling. So I might actually go in here and erase it just a little bit more with this brush, just a subtle fade which makes it look a little bit better. And then once we're done with all of these adjustments, we're gonna save it again, take it back into lightroom, those save it, those changes will apply here to this photo as well. And then we'll continue to make all of our final adjustments here with our straightening of lines uh using the upright tool cropping and things like that. Any last adjustments in the rest of this class, I'm going to show you a bunch of demonstrations for all of these other photos that you have here walking through the process. Because with each of these examples, there's some differentiations in how I would edit them or different things that I would do. For example, in this photo, there's going to be multiple window poles that we'll need to work with. We'll also need to remove some items in this photo. In other ones, I'll show you a different process for editing our ceilings in lightroom rather than using the method taught in this lesson in Photoshop. There's going to be examples here where I'm standing in the frame and we're doing multiple flash photos and we need to blend these together before we do some of the different steps. So continue watching the different demos to learn some more advanced ways to do flambe editing. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in another tutorial.