Lessons

Lesson Info

Workflow and Lightroom

So I thought what I would do is start with an overview of what we're going to do today uh yesterday I was intending the day to be for people that maybe hadn't really tried retouching or maybe they just really basics thought that they should blur the skin or knew a little bit about the clone stamp today I'm going to cover a few more advanced techniques and I'm going to start with one of the images that I took yesterday in the last segment and retouch it the way that I would if I were propping it for publication or to be printed somewhere and so it's kind of a summary of everything that we did with a few more techniques and then I'm going to retouch the portrait that we took but I'm going to show you guys how to use a more advanced skin softener technique and you may have heard of it if you've heard of frequency separation once you know how to do it it's not too complicated there's a lot of different things you can tweak if you want to know beyond this even there are definitely things on...

youtube if you want to know different ways to tweak the technique but that's it will cover and that's just the morning right after lunch what we do or right after this kind of morning retouch we're going to jump into creativity so I'm going to talk about selective colorization and we're going to talk about making photos look old and adding textures and fake hdr and then once you get back from lunch is going to be the two most requested how to things that anybody ever asked me how I d'oh which is the porcelain skin how to get that completely smooth creamy porcelain skin and then also displacement maps which is adding patterns that wrap around the body around the form so those air kind of the big ones and then well and I'll do a couple other create techniques and we end the day with a fun halloween shoot because today is halloween we thought we'd keep this applicable for everybody was watching whenever you watch but we'd end the day with a little bit of extra fund so um without I'm just going to jump into answering a few questions and then do my beauty retouch what I'll let you know it is a bit of a summary but I also do of some more advanced but it'll probably be something that if I were retouching this beauty shot I probably would in reality spend about forty minutes on it getting it just perfect I'm going to treat that this as if it were a kind of cosmetic advertisement what would I need to do in that instance? And then again we'll go to our portrait so I'll just get started there um I start pretty much every photo that I ever have begins in light room um I bring in light room and that's where I make my initial global adjustments and so before you ever go ahead and retouch anything you need to make sure that your exposures correct your contrast is correct and the white balance is correct and that's why typically in a shoot I start with a color checker kind of the passport make sure I have something to judge my white balance off of my exposure off of but when I'm doing something creative a lot of times I tweak it anyway uh you know I have a shoot that I did the theme was ice queen and it made it really really blew so of course you'd ignore in that case and then when I make white out skin the skin is not correct skin tone whatsoever so it's depending what your end uses I just wanted to give you guys an idea of how I used light room and this just be really quick of kind of high goethe their photos it's one of two ways I shoot when I shoot editorials I shoot three thousand pictures a day I should a lot and that's just I enjoy it but a lot of times it's a fraction of a second between when the dress was falling perfectly when it looks like a mess or when you're photographing you know professional athlete it might be just a slight look of their eyes a little bit different that captures kind of a mischievous personality versus somber it's it's totally different so I think a lot of pictures on but I'll d'oh most of the time and this is, uh this is my happy home by the way photo that yesterday. Um but usually what I dio is I flipped through the photos in one of two ways. Sometimes I'll double click and then just using my arrow key in light room all this click over and any time that there's a photo that I would consider I three star it just any time I'm considering photo and I click and I don't go slow it's like it's all about impact and so would say okay that I consider that one and that one um if it's not having, if the photo doesn't have impact, then why would you choose it? That's one of the biggest tips I could give people out there were unrelated to photo shop is when someone's looking at your portfolio if they're flipping through the images and they're all really pretty and very nice if they're not memorable, you won't be memorable and you won't get hired, so I'm always looking to pick images with impact and also my concept as well, so I also threw that's one way that I might do it as well, okay? Another way that I sometimes would do this is there something called survey mode, and I can click on a photo pulled the shift key, click maybe six or seven or eight photos over, and then the shortcut for this is n and so it'll bring up these photos. And so I convene a chunk of images at once, at one at a time kind of like this in light room hot works is there's a photo I don't like, I can click the x, it doesn't delete it, it just takes it out of survey mode. So it's kind of like saying of cards in front of you now throwing away the card, you're just maybe moving that card out of out of your hand there so I can kind of x them out and it will narrow it down. And so maybe what I often do is put up. I know ten images and then try to narrow it down to which one I think is strongest. There are definitely other tools. There's the compare mode is a lot of ways to narrow down your credit, but whatever one you like best, you can click on and starr same thing is before, so I will do that one or the other you flipping through each one are flipping through trunks at a time and narrow down my images and let's just assume I'm did editorial with three thousand images in general is kind of at first pick through, I get down to about two hundred to two, fifty things that I would consider if once you've started them, so I have them label to three stars fight come down here to the bottom, right where it says filter if you guys don't see this, you might have one of your options turned off. Um, you want to make sure that you're looking at the rated images because if it says, if you might say no filter and our flag, but if I hit three stars, it's going to show me anything that I labeled with three stars, and so if in that case, maybe it was the two hundred images and I'll do the same thing, and I'll go back through and anything that I say, okay, no, this isn't the one from thes similar sets of images, for example, I'll bring up these images and hit the key, so I'm looking at the mall and I would say, okay, well, I know I don't want this one, so if I give it a two star, it downgrades, it puts it out of the selection I could do the same thing all right? I don't think I want a smiling shots and I think I like this because it shows her jaw line better and that's how all narrow it down um my final final selects this is me personally is I select them and give them a six which labels them red this is not an equation that everybody has to use by any means for example why three and not five and going down why not for why do I not use green? It doesn't really matter. The key is that you have a system and you stick to it so that later on when somebody says to me you know I did the shoe I want to see another edit of it or I want to see different selection you know how to go back and not to have to edit through the entire shoot and you know, okay red meant that you like them. Um just is a signed note for images. Once I have re touched them I select them and then get a nine which makes them blue so I know the ones that have been retouched versus the red means to retouch but they were a select uh if I'm shooting that people ask me, how is thomas men retouching so in general I could do an image most my images and fifteen to forty minutes some place in that time frame depending on how much retouching it needs um but usually what I'm thinking is a day's shooting is an equivalent of I probably have to do a day very touching something like that so I'd have to edit down through them pick my select to my skin softening, but I never look at my images just once usually what I'll do is I'll bring them here in light room, I'll make my tweaks, I'll make my changes, my global adjustments my, um my white balance must contrast all that I open him up in photo shop and I doing at it and I don't try to get to a no and focused about it. I tried to just make it look good and then I put it away and I'll go through the rest and then maybe midday I have my lunch or I have dinner or whatever it may be and I made you have gone through all of them and then I come back and take my second look because then you can tell if you've gone too far or you'd say, oh my gosh, how did I miss that wrinkle? How did I miss whatever and so it is good to take breaks, so typically it'll be a day's shooting and then I'll spend the day retouching and try to get that all taken care of right, so that's roughly how used light room I am going to show you just want to give you guys take a look at the screen. Uh, this is where we started with the image and what we'll do in a re touches move kind of in the direction of that. So I mean this you can see fixing the lips, making the eyes brighter, giving more shape to the face, cleaning up the hair, getting rid of the strap. So those are some of the things that we will do in our beauty retouch, and then I'll also show you how to make the porcelain skin out of this image, but that will be later in the day. Um, another thing that I wanted to touch on is most people when they think of retouching and creative effects, they're assuming okay it's photo shop in its textures and in three touching but there's a lot that you can actually do in light room. And if somebody's not proficient in photo shop out there, there are a lot of light room plug ins that you can use, but even beyond that there's a lot of creativity that you, khun do just working in camera raw or in this case, and develop module for light room. So if I look at let's, say this image, okay, looking at this photograph and so what I was trying to say with the photo and I mean that loosely what I was trying to give you feeling of two sisters lost in the desert and it's, you know, getting towards sunset, and I wanted to be kind of romantic and beautiful, and this just looks flat to me. I think that it looks your eye doesn't exactly know where to go, and it doesn't feel like a really pretty sunset picture in case anybody missed my last creative live the haze and the bottom is not added in photoshopped this is the raw image it's by holding ornaments in front of my lands. This is actually a looks like a flower, and it was it's like a christmas ornament, this one's a spring ornament. I'm not sure why they're spring ornaments, but they create them on it's basically something that's colored and translucent. You can stick in front of the lens and it fakes lens flare. So I've been looking at this scene and I wanted it to feel like a sunset, and it wasn't feeling that way, so what I'm going to do is show you how I might spruce this up, make it a little better without even having to go in photo shop. But it's a creative element if I go over into develop module here and so kind of clicked over develop this is where you make all of your changes if you guys don't know about light room and how it works I know that creative live has a few classes on it I use light room for every single photo I ever process for many different reasons but when you go into develop module this is basically camera raw like adobe camera if you shoot raw but it's in light room and if you don't shoot raw you should you absolutely should you have so much more information you can plot your files I haven't shot a jpeg image on purpose on dh honestly probably seven or eight years even longer than that so looking at this image and my brain says to me okay one of the first things I don't like is that it's not warm enough it supposed to feel like sunset so I can warm up the color balance the color to bounce and temperature here and so I could make it really really warm and I look at that my brain is telling me okay it's probably a little bit too warm and so I know from experience I have these little formulas that I like for processing images and you tend to develop that as well I'm going to talk about presets in a second but I like to warm up my images and then come down and pull out vibrant or saturation so what it does, it doesn't make it so saturated of a warm color, but it's it's kind of a soft warm throughout the picture, so for example, if I pull out saturation here, you can see in the before and after already that it's started to look more like a sunset photographed and it's really warmed it up uh, I still think it looks a little bit flat so I can go ahead and play with clarity what clarity is is it's kind of ah smart contrast if you drag contrast in general, so I just dragged a contrast tool what it does is it darkens the shadows and it lightens the highlights, but we'll do is it'll make white highlights go over exposed and dark shadows go completely black clarity just grabs the mid tones of a photograph and pops the contrast there, and so in effect it looks like you're increasing sharpness even though it's not technically sharpening so I would pump up the clarity a little bit and you can see just from that it adds contrast to the photo it makes it look sharper gives a little bit of punch to it, so that makes a big difference there's a lot of other little tweaks that you could make it well, maybe I want to add a little pink um you could add of and yet dark and down the edges if I didn't think that there was really if you look up here at the history ma'am I have a white point uh if you mouse over the triangle there in the top right it will show you what in your picture is over exposed well it's a bald sky I'm signing psychos when I'm watching for what I don't want is their skin to go over exposed I don't want their dress so what that point is that's totally fine I can leave it that right? But if you notice over here on the left of the history graham I have no black point now if you're going for selling it's supposed to look like like had a lens flare like a shooting son a lot of time so those are low contrast but I think I want my photo have just that much more punch to it so I need to introduce a black point all I need to do is come over here to run blacks are and dragged the blacks a little bit so left and again when I mouse over I'm not really clipping anything of important what would pop up if I am clipping something let's go extreme is it pops up blue and so these are warnings to let you know when you're losing information so I don't need to go that extreme but I want a little bit more of a punch so is you can see here the white balance isn't correct but it's expressing the mood that I'm trying to achieve and I didn't have to do anything in photo shop I was able to achieve everything just in camera or light room all right so when I'm shooting an editorial or a theme of photos I'll get kind of a form you like this that I really really like um uh this is beautiful and I want all of my images to have that same field so let's say that you do an engagement shoot you shoot the engagement shoot and you want them to also like the show at the same time so you want them to the same white balance and you want them to have the same color and contrast so what you can do is you can save your light room adjustments as a pre set so I'm still here in the developed module and there's something going forward about there's something called pre sets on the left hand side and present there basically recipes or formulas for all the changes you've made in develop module if I click on the plus we'll do is we'll bring up a dialog box and you're looking through all of these different changes you can make and anything that's checked it will save in this recipe and formula so in the future all I have to do for that that engagement session or fashion editorial whatever I did is hit one button, so I'm just going to call this creative life pretty color because that's what I think it's pretty color and I wanna hit create, and it puts it at the bottom underneath usurp recess. So if I go over and select another photo that I've taken and I hit the same thing, creative, live pretty color, it'll make those changes, but I'm looking here and I think that it's too pink and I think there's several things that I don't like because it wasn't shot at the same time. Well, it's not like it's a recipe that supplied permanently, I could go back here and pull out some of the pink and I can back off some of my black point and I can fill in the shadows a little bit and I could make it a little less yellow, so you're not locked into a change and the reason I want to show you guys this is a lot of times I can do a lot of changes just in raw. It kind of depends on whether you want to do these changes before or after your retouch here's the thought process behind it. If you do these changes before your retouch, you can't go back. If you go ahead you open up in photo shop with this color you do your retouching for example you know you do retouching into your liquefy you do all of your changes you can't go back and tweak that color later however if you were adjustment that you're making is affecting the exposure of the photo so maybe it's going to make it really, really bright on the skin well, that actually changes how you to retouch the photo because different blemishes would be visible or not visible so it depends on kind of how you're approaching it for example, if you want apply this effect for client they come back later and like no, we don't like that well, now you have to go back and make those changes so it's it depends on what's going to work for you for most of the time umm if it's a client shoe I do all the effects after the fact if it's a creative shoot for me beforehand I'll do it before and I'll work with it in light room as well, so I just wanted to cover that you guys have any general light room questions if you don't have light room, you can do this an aperture if you don't have ac richer or light room it's adobe camera you just need to shoot raw images, right? Well the internet has questions as always taken great absolutely all right, so in terms of your workload dennis dixon is wondering, do you keep all of the rejected images or when do you discard the rejects good question and this depends drastically from person to person uh, I keep most things pretty much anything that I started something of interested in I keep and something that was a consideration, but what ends up happening is it takes me to look I'll keep it for a while and it takes me too much time to go back and like, okay, filter and then delete them but I want to triple check that I'm not the leading the wrong stuff, so I usually just let it sit there and I just have a lot of hard drive's not saying that's the best solution, but since I have my catalogs up to date and well organized, I can always find anything everything's it's not like I'm searching through millions of photos uh I just feel safer not the leading things might be like my own cd personality or something it's possible do you use keywords to go back and to search through all of those catalogs and or how do you join that? And I'll say in general for keywords key words are important depending on the type of photography do for example, if you shot a lot of four footed journalism or newspapers or stock images, you have to use your key words most the time what I dio is when I do a shoot when I imported directly into the light room, you have a prompt where you can add your key words up front and they're going to be just general, like, what was the client who's a client for this shoot? What magazine was it going in? What was the same? Some key words for maybe colors or location? Something like that. And honestly, because of managing my time and how you use it, I used to supply the keywords everything it's imported for that shoot will have it. I seldom go back and do individual photos unless I know there's a very specific reason. It's just not typically worth my time for the type of photography that I do. You have another question from june. Do you set the exposure on color balance based on light room? My experience has been that when I make light room adjustments and export to s rgb, then post the web, it seems darker and more saturated in his suggestions. Okay, the changes that you would make there is more in the conversion of how you've send it to the web. I'll still make the changes based on what I'm seeing here in light room because I work with a sixteen bit raw file and that's. That's exactly what you want to dio eso it's more in the output options that you're sending to the internet, and you might wantto tweak things but that's more of export, preset problem vs working in light room or not a cool question from cesar calderon, would you edit and this image would you edit edit these faces in photo shop? Yesterday you were you were showing us faces that you're editing, but these air so small, would you do those in photo shop or just here in my room? So I did edit this shoot, and the reason I opened up in light room in photo shop, as I did a couple things in post, uh, something we'll talk about later is I pulled out a little bit of grit in the car and the truck, so I pulled out a little bit of detail in the rest and that's something. There are some plug ins that you could do it a little bit in light room, but it was easier and had more control in photo shop, and I did retouch their faces. There was very minimal, and if you notice another thing that we'll talk about later, it's not really focused so that's, something that I had more control of fixing in post, but I cleaned up the bags under her eyes, but the main reason that I did it opened up in photo shop is I did liquefy a little bit I kind of moved her arm and her waist in a little bit here and I pulled her waist in I lowered her shoulders I think I gave her a little bit more shaping her jawline and at this point you can't do anything even close to liquefy even with plug ins in light room so if somebody is and I run this all the time people that do almost everything and light room because there are so many plug ins you can accomplish a lot but that's the one big differences you know, the fact that I can have my huge liquefy brush and all the controls over in photoshopped question lindsay when you take it out of here and you go into photo shop and then it saves it back in the light room right just how do you because I'll end up with you know that it if one additive to you know if I go back and fourth ill but can you talk about how you do that to keep it with some organization to it um okay so a couple things for the organization so when I save the file in let's open up and save it in photo shop or whatever by default it's supposed to bring it back into light room if you're saving it in the same place in the same kind of hierarchy if not for anybody if you're interested if you're like wow why isn't my photo showing up if you right click on any of these folders it'll give you the option to synchronize the folder and I believe that's also an option uh if I got a full screen um you can synchronize your folder and what it will do is it will say okay, I'm gonna scan this folder see if there's anything missing or anything additional that was added and it brings it back into the catalog uh the difference for you is if every time we're opening it up you're going to save it as a new version or you want to save it as a new version or if it's flattening it it's when you open it up um if you actually open up in photo shop we'll pick one photo edit in um you need to make sure you're opening it with all the layers but you should be able just open it up, make your changes save it make sure you open it with the layers instead of opening as flat because you have to keep saving different versions of it okay? Awesome so that's pretty much all I won in such on with light room but it's definitely important part of how I work and most plug ins have plug inversions for light room especially if you just think that that's how you can keep organized that's what I'd recommend