Lessons

Lesson Info

Editing: Adobe Lightroom Basics

And we're back. That was the most surreal experience to be on the shoreline with like 17 seals, and one strange one, which we later found out is actually a grey seal, that was pretty interesting. After viewing the shots from the seal shoot, I've actually discovered that it's the simplest edit from all the shoots that we've done in this workshop. So it's the perfect chance to give you a nice breakdown of Lightroom itself. (Instructor clearing throat) And some of the things about Lightroom that I find really useful, and some of the things that have made my workflow as efficient as it is today. So to begin, we're going to look at the import module briefly and what I use for my imports to streamline the process of backing up and moving catalogs and raw files around together. So I've opened the import dialogue here. And of course, there's so much information about these things online, but there's a few things that I use very specifically, and that is the way that I place my raw photos with ...

the catalog on my hard drive or in its source destination. And that is by this top panel here, you can just bring the drop down and then you can select a destination. So I have my hard drive here. I have the workshop and then I've made a file called raw. An inside Lightroom has automatically placed all of the shots. So let me just cancel that. And then we have the date ordered import, which is very simple. I just find it's quite clean to do it that way. And that's basically all that I do. And again, a lot of people do this in a bunch of different ways. This is just the way I've found works for me. So that's what I'm gonna keep doing. I'm gonna cancel this little import dialogue now and move into the library module, where we have a bunch of little seal heads. I've found one that I really like. And the way that I got to finding this one is simply by going through, just looking at everyone going next, next, next, next, till I find one that I like, the composition, the light, everything is lining up how I want. The sharpness is good. So I'm often zooming in actually. And you can see in the top corner on the left, these different levels of zoom on your image as a preview. So one to one, it's gonna give you the full size image and you can really check the sharpness. This particular image, I was at 560 millimeters, which included that 1.4 times converter. So it's a little soft, but it's not the end of the world, we can work with this. And we're going to now begin to rate them. So I've already rated these with the red color, I guess you could call it, and also with a star. So I tend to be quite messy with this. And also because my girlfriend, Amy, helped me sometimes. We're working together, so she might message me and say, "Oh, I've made a red selection for a specific shoot." And then I know straight away, boom, just opened the reds and we are away. So if I then look in the collections part, I've actually recently discovered that Lightroom has these smart collections and can give me everything that I've rated with red in one click. It can be done from also up here as well when you go to the rated and then you have this additional options, but I find this quite useful. Okay, so here we have the seal, let's dive into it, just like they wanna dive underwater. I'm gonna open the develop. And just to keep it clean, I've made a little selection for each image we're gonna look at. This is probably the easiest way for me to navigate this. I've made a raw version and an edited version because if I didn't do the edits ahead of time, I think we'd be sitting here for days and days trying to get this across nicely. It has worked out really well to just prepare a little bit so I can easily explain to all of you what went into making these photos. Develop, hitting a little D just to quickly move into this tab. And on the left, you can see I've reset a bunch of things, but this is the most simple edit that I have done. So perfect to explain the sliders. Let's dive into this. So I'm gonna recreate the edited version of this shot. We can see to begin with, the white balance. Now, of course we're shooting in raw. So we have the option and flexibility to adjust the color, temperature and tint of our images. Being Mr. Blue, I tend to have some sort of, I don't wanna say the word hatred, but let's be honest, it kind of is hatred against the pink and magenta colors of the white balance. So I'm always looking to make my images a little bit more on the green, blue side of things. Now, by balancing this photo very quickly, we're gonna set a nice space to begin the edit. I want to now look at the crop module. This is probably what I would do next in my edits. I'm just gonna look at the horizon line of the iceberg behind, also where the eyes are sitting and just set something that, and of course we can come back to it if we're not happy after a little while, but I'm finding this is quite straight, horizon matches up. It's looking good in here. You can just click down and you can get this comprehensive view. So boom, we're underway. Now we're gonna look at exposure. So that's obviously next in line. And I think what is gonna work best here, rather than actually editing this right now, I'm just going to literally slide each slider and explain what it is. So exposure is going to manipulate the light of the entire image. It is similar to what the camera would do when you're changing either three of the shutter speed, ISO or aperture. And it is intrusive. Of course, it's going to blow out or crush the blacks as you slide up and down. I think for this image, we are good to just brighten a little bit and then bring the highlights details back. So contrast, contrast is pushing the edge brightness from the darks and the lights. So the further we push it, the brighter the whites are gonna get, the darker the blacks are gonna get. And the edges of things will be more defined as it does when you sharpen an image. So you can see that, we get this flat look and this harsh look with a lot of crushed things going on. Seals don't like to be crushed, so let's not crush 'em. All right, highlights. Well now looking at bringing just the lighter details in the bright end of the exposure. So if you look the top right, we can actually hover over the image and we can see these values changing. We have RGB, obviously, red, green, blue, and we have 97, 97, 97, which means this is quite even white. If the red, the green or the blue is higher, it is going to be hued more to that color. So if I go over the blue, we have 30% blue, 25% green and 18.5% red, which means this is primarily blue area as it is in the image. So I'm using this to gauge the edit. So looking back in the highlights now, we've explained the RGB and understanding the levels of brightness and color hues a little bit. And now I'm going to actually adjust the highlights just to bring the intensity down. And of course, I'm coming back to all of these things. It's not like a once done thing to slide the exposure or the highlights. I'm maybe adjusting them 30, 40 times, going back and forth until I'm happy with the overall sense of exposure and just the direction of the light, the overall appearance of the image, it's changing as I edit. So I'm going back and just manipulating little things. Once we've set our highlights, then we're gonna look at the shadows. These two in particular I come back to a lot actually, because these sliders are global and by global I mean they affect the entire image. It's like setting your canvas for me. So I've set a base level of detail with the shadows here. And then maybe I'm gonna later paint in a little bit of light to create some directional shadows and highlights on maybe the eye or something. Next we have the whites and blacks, blighters that I rarely use actually, because I find they are just the ultimate crush men. They really crush everything about the photo. And I use them as a last resort just to make sure that there is other ways to get the whites and the blacks manipulated in an image. And this is just so generalized. It doesn't give any particular focus on a specific area of brightness. It's just too vague for me. So I'm gonna always come back to that as a large resort if I need. But to explain they boost the whites, every white, and the blacks, boost the blacks, every black. And we're not gonna touch that for now. Clarity is going to seriously push the edges in a similar way to the contrast, but it's also going to change the saturation quite a lot. And it it's really evident when a clarity slider has been used a lot because it gives this desaturated appearance to an image. And there is other ways to get to this look without needing to just slide this slider and be evident that this is all you've done. I'm going to maybe just add a little bit for now, but nothing major. Dehaze is a very intense tool. This is like the death metal music version of the clarity slider. This is like full on. So this is really enhancing every single pixel in the image. Look at all these dust spots on my sensor. So as I've explained in the packing section, I like to clean my sensor a lot. And in this case, I'd left my air pump back in the car and was very needed. So we're going to get rid of some of these dust spots quickly using the clone stamp in just a minute. But yeah, Dehaze, rarely use it because images in general for me just have enough contrast and I can paint in some extra light or detail if I need. But yeah, it's just too intense. But there is some scenarios where it is useful and we'll get to that in later images. So just gonna leave that alone for now. Vibrance and saturation. Also things I don't really use too much. Vibrance is working with the colors that are already apparent in the image. And it is not really pushing them too far beyond what they are. It's just giving them a little bit of vibrance. Saturation on the other hand will literally change the hues completely. And it can really screw up a photo. We've all seen, like if you go on Google, you'll find images like HDR especially where the colors are just so screwed up. And when you push that saturation to the full level, it is just so obvious that you've done it because you can see all of these strange colors that it's creating, especially like look at the seal here, it's got some weird sickness because he's green almost. The background has gone purple and I really don't like that color. So let's just remove that 'cause it's driving me nuts. So there is other ways to manipulate the color and that is using the HSL, which we'll look at in a minute. Next in our list is the tone curve. And this really is where I make my contrast happen for an image. It is very flexible, it allows you to really pinpoint specific areas of an image in terms of brightness, upon which you want to increase or decrease. So we're going to set points based on the histogram beneath the image. If you're not familiar with histograms, it is basically the spread of light from 100% black to 100% white. And also in the top of Lightroom, giving you a color reading, which if you are grading a video is pretty important, but for photos, I just rely on my eyes. So I'm looking less at the actual color spread of a histogram and more just the actual spread of exposure. And I think a lot of people fail to understand exactly what the tone curve is using for its basis of manipulating contrast. And it's actually working with this histogram underneath, and this should tell you where to put your points. A lot of people just go the one, two, three, and then begin to go up and down. And yes, that is a good way to look at it because you're just pulling the bright parts up and the dark parts down to push the contrast further in your photo. But if you forget to look at actually what the histogram is showing you underneath, maybe you're going to be basically not taking full advantage of this tool. So in this image, we can see a huge spike in the whites. And that's because we had this bright light coming down from the sun and it is illuminating all of the snow that was on the ice. And luckily the seals, because we're using the shadows, we're playing around trying to get flat exposure when we're out in the field, we've been able to succeed with that, but of course still we have these brights. So if we put a point actually where that bright section is, it's giving us ultimate flexibility for that given region of the photo. So I've just taken a breather because I realize how passionate I am about the tone curve and start to speak really fast about it. So I'm gonna try and just be a little more chillman, and help you guys learn steadily. And we're gonna begin by placing some points in the correct parts of the curve based on the histogram beneath. So if we put a point on the highlights where they appear in the image, we are going to really push everything that is white in this photo, because it is aligned perfectly with where those parts of the image are. And that is working with, you can see 95.3% white-ish. And it was at 90.6 before. So of course we don't really wanna push it that far. So then it begins to just be a process of sliding it around until we find an area that works visually, 'cause it is about just the visual appearance. And maybe we bring the darks down a little bit, creating the classic S shape that gives you contrast in an image. Pull the blacks down, pull the whites up and you have contrast. So if I just manipulate this a little bit. And of course, as I've said, all of these things, we come back to quite a lot in an edit, 'cause right now this is looking pretty silly and there's a few things that I'm going to do in order to get it to not look like that. And that is with some of the selective tools at the top. But just for the purpose of explaining all the sliders, we're going to continue down the list. I just have to pull these highlights down more because I brought them up in the tone curve. Now I'm just gonna bring them down a little more in the highlight section just to balance it for now. Now we have the HSL and this is really where your style can come to life. This is where you can refine your colors, you can balance across your images. If we talk about creating a unified aesthetic, this is where you really can hone in on the colors that maybe mean a lot to you, your favorite color, maybe that's what you're gonna focus on in your photos. For me, that is in the winter here, of course, blue and white, we have a lot of blue and white. So that is pretty much the color scheme for our entire workshop right now. And I'm pretty stoked with that. So to begin with, the hue. We have all these different color channels. And one thing that I like to do is either to just maybe slide them all if there's an image with a lot of color and see how it's affecting it. Of course we have such limited colors in this. We do have some green and yellow channels here in the seal's skin, I guess you would call it. But this little dot here, this allows you to actually hover over your image, click and move up and down in any given area to access the colors that are present in that location. And with the ease of just sliding up and down, you're able to affect multiple sliders and give a very stable and uniform adjustment to that given color. So you'll find in most of my images that they are slightly pulled to the left on the blue channel, just to really give that interesting greeny blue color, but not too far green, because I want it to look somewhat natural to what my eye was seeing and what my vision of Icelandic landscapes and of the Arctic are. And that is this very specific blue color. So we'll leave it at this for now because there is minimal color, we don't have much to edit. The saturation, I'm just drawn to really bring this down in the seal here. And that is again, with this little tool to move over the photo, click and drag up and down. And it's just going to pull those colors down the green, especially and some aqua. So we have to be careful in this case because it's actually adjusting the background colors as well. So just don't look only where you are focused, but also come in and take a second to look at the entire image to just understand how each slider is working across the frame. So by removing the greens a little bit, we are in a pretty good place with skin tones, funny talking about skin tones while we're looking at a seal. I'm just affecting the hue for a second to just see if that, because we're working with some really cool colors like balancing orange, reds against the blues and greens. We can get some nice distinction and maybe even draw the eye further towards the seal. And that is pretty cool if we can do that. So almost happy, it's looking a little green. I think that the overall tint is what's getting me. So I've just gone a little too far. I'm gonna just go back towards zero, a little more on the blue side. Begin to look out our before and afters. So when I do this, I'm like, "Wow, that's green." Maybe I've gone too green on him. Go towards the zero. We're starting to get somewhere with this. Next we have the luminance of specific colors in an image and by bringing them up and down, with this dot again, I really like the way this works by having the selective tool and being able to go over the image and just immediately it'll hover and highlight this specific color that is being accessed in that given area. So you can see it move between the green and aqua and blue as we go around a different parts, and that's cool, I think. So by pulling up the luminance, we are adjusting the brightness of a given color. Saturation, just to reiterate, is going to affect the actual intensity of a color in whichever color channel you are harnessing at the time. And we are looking at the blues. So we're just gonna leave a little bit of desaturation there and maybe pull up the brightness or darken depending on what is working. In this case, we wanna just bring the eye to the seal without causing any of the image to blow out too much. So I'm thinking maybe just a little bit of brightness is gonna help you. But we're getting somewhere. And I think for most people, looking at this at this point, they're gonna be a little bit scared that it's just blown out and why would I leave it blown out? Why would I make the image so bright? And my eye is drawn to the subject, Mr. Seal or Mrs. Seal, I guess you can't really tell, at least I don't know. We're having some pretty good staring competitions right now. I think that I'm losing there. So my eye is drawn to this area and the rest can be sculpted. It doesn't have to be these global adjustments to get to our final product. We're gonna use a bunch of these other things in a basic way, of course, for this image, because it is quite standard, this type of edit. There's not a whole lot we can do. So basically we're looking at just a complete image of bokeh, of blur, with one tiny part of the image in focus. So we're just working with colors here. That's basically all it is. There's no details to really change or anything like that. It's just about drawing the eye to the subject and not blowing out anything and really just enhancing the overall visual of this image and working towards that unified aesthetic that I've been talking about. And of course, you won't be able to really gain a sense of that until we've covered each image, and then looked back on the final collection to see how the colors translate across the images, but we will get there. So next we're looking at the split toning module, which is beneath the HSL and what I would use after I have looked at editing the HSL section, we're going to look at the highlights. I tend to use highlights more than I would do with shadows. The only times I would really use the shadow tint is perhaps if I was dealing with the sunset and I wanted to replenish that neutral cold look to the rocks. Sometimes this does help quite a lot to just bring a little bit of blue and slide them in. In this case it's just meaning that the entire image becomes too blue. So I don't really wanna play with that right now. I'm just gonna leave it as it is, but maybe I'm gonna bring in a little bit of blue to the highlights to just give a little bit less of a harsh distinction between the snow and the ice in the background. I tend to work between the regions of 190 to 215 on the hue, which is of course like this blue, green type of area. Maybe I'm gonna push the balance to affect, more so the highlights than it would do of the shadows. And just something very minor. You have to push it quite far for it to have a big effect. But a lot of the things I do in my edits are so minimal that it's just a few increments, maybe one, two or three even is enough just for me to feel like it has that look that I'm going for. Of course there are some more things down here, but we will get to these as they come up. They're less used for me than the HSL and the tone curve, for example. The last thing we're gonna really touch on here is the detail and the lens corrections. Next up, we're gonna look at the sharpening module, and so something that people tend to misuse, I think. And the main reason is that generally when you sharpen without masking anything, you're sharpening both the noise, any types of fine grain, or any texture basically in the image is amplified via the sharpening tool. So there is a slider called masking. And if we hold option down, we can open this and it's going to show us the fine level edge contrast between everything in the image. And obviously the things that are the strongest being the things in focus will survive even when the slider is pushed almost to the end. So the only drawback is, the further you go, the less that is being sharpened and it can have this chalky appearance. So it is cool to both hold option down and then let go and then use both methods to refine and work out exactly the level of sharpening that you want to apply. We do of course have both the radius and detail as well. And in this case, I'm just going to set my amount. I'm just looking at the face of our friend here and now I'm going to look at boosting that radius a little bit, because it was quite soft, shot on the 560. If I just bring that radius up, it's just gonna create a little bit more of a harsh edge on the seal. The detail's gonna try and pull back the fine details that we might lose when masking. And this one is just ad hoc, just do it as you need. And then we have the noise reduction, which I guess this module is called the detail or this panel, so it's a detail panel. And with noise reduction, we can counter any of these small flaws that the ISO of is giving us in this frame. And of course we were starting out at around one 500th of a second and ISO 500, I believe. And as the hours went by, then we're starting to get darker and boosting up our ISO so we can retain that fast shutter, and thus we have some noise. So we're just going to apply a small amount of noise reduction to the image. And basically we just want to zoom in and see actually what it's doing to the photo. Of course, it's also removing detail from the in focus area of the seal's face, which is a negative thing because we want it to be sharp, we want it to look crisp and nice. But sometimes having a clean background is more important than the ultimate sharpness. So you can of course go further into Photoshop and do some masked sharpening in these types of things that way. But for this panel, we are looking at just the basic understanding of these sliders. So detail is going to try and pull back any detail that you lost when using the noise reduction luminance slider. And same for contrast, I'm gonna try and return some of the contrast that may become slightly hazy when you apply the luminance. Color noise is very apparent when you boost the shadows in a dark photo and it doesn't have the data to actually create the detail that was there in the shadows. So by sliding the color noise slider up, you can try and remove the actual color noise and just replace it with maybe more of a neutral color noise essentially. Same goes for the detail as above. I'm trying to preserve detail in those areas. And smoothness will try and actually smooth out the grains of noise to try and give it a more uniform appearance. I think that from this point on, the others panels in this area are quite advanced and we will cover those as they come up in our edits. But there's one thing that's been really annoying me in this shot, and that is all the dust. So it's time to open up our clone stamp. Now, I do really like to use Photoshop for the heavier clones, and actually replacing areas where there's some big distraction or something. But in this case, we're just dealing with tiny dots and there's quite a few of them because I don't think I had brought my air pump down that day. And I ran out of fluid for my sensor swab. So I had a lot of dust on the sensor. And of course, sometimes you don't know until after. So I'm just dealing with that. It does suck, but that is why we have the clone stamp. So I'm just gonna get it done. I'm just beginning to look for the dust on the sensor. And one thing that is quite cool that I do, and I know it's gonna look really bad at the time, but the dehaze slider, if we push that to the max, we can actually see the spots. And we also have a secondary tool here called Visualized Spots, which we can apply. And it's gonna show us all the noise. But I find you need a balance of both of these to really get all the noise out, oh, sorry, all the dust out. So in this case, I'm gonna start with it on, and I'm just going to run over with a high feather on the clone stamp. I'm going to use the heel. The clone option will literally just copy an area and place it over the selected target without any sort of calculation of whether that actually fits or not, versus the heel, which will actually work out what the edges should look like in order for it to blend nicely into that given region. So if we just begin to apply with the heel, we can manipulate the size, of course, so that it fits perfectly around any dust spots. This does hurt my soul, but we just have to deal with it. The fact that there's so much noise, sorry, so much dust on this. I know a lot of people are thinking, what the hell? Now that I'm working on the water, I trust my eye more than the visualized spots. So I'm just gonna go out of that, open up the image, as it normally looks with the dehaze applied, which just enhances every sense of the contrast and really shows you where those dust spots are, not very conventional method of doing it, but works for me. Just a few more, this is really mirrorless camera life. All right, so now we're getting somewhere. So that is basically a very brief description of the clone stamp. And the last things we're gonna do after removing that really annoying dehaze, there we go. Okay, now we're just going to briefly run through the selective edit panels, which of course, as we progress through the images, we're going to begin to understand more and more about these and how they're useful. And in this case, I'm just going to get rid of this distraction in the top right of the frame by using some negative dehaze, boom, it's gone. We could also clone it. I'm just trying to mix it up for this. And there we basically have it. So just by blurring out the detail, by smoothing out the contrast in that area, we're able to essentially remove the darkened area. I guess it was a part of the iceberg up there. I also want to drag one up from the bottom and I'm just gonna darken it a little bit. So if you double click on effect, the word effect is going to reset all the sliders in this panel. So we're going to darken a little bit, just like that, and you can tap O it will show you, oh, I tapped L, let me get back, tap O, and it's going to reveal the mask, being the affected area for that given brush or radial or graduated filter. In this case, we don't really want to affect the seal. So I'm just going to work with the actual feather amount, which is the top line. And this will show you how much that filter is being basically spread across that region. If you move the middle, it then takes that amount of feather and then move the whole filter up or down. I'm also thinking it's a little bright in the top. So one more at the top, just to darken from the top down. Next up, we're gonna use the Radial Filter. Basically this tool is a circular adjustment, which you can also feather. And this one is great for really sculpting the light. I use them a lot on my photos. And I just think that they give a really neutral and not really noticeable result, which is great because the last thing we want is to see this really apparent circle where your edit is for that part of the photo. So if I tap O again, the mask is gonna go away and we're gonna get some brightness in the seal's face. And really just draw the eye into that part of the photo. We can use any of these sliders in this panel. It is really powerful what you can do, really useful for things like really bringing in the light from one direction, for example. You can just create a few series of Radial Filters to just like shine down, it's quite cool. In this case, it's just a little bit of brightness on the face is all we needed. And lastly, we just need a couple of brushes and then we'll look at just the overall edit for a minute. And I think we're getting pretty close to being good with this one. So for the brush, we obviously have this circular adjustment that can be increased or decreased in size. And we have the flow and the density, which basically affect the strength of the brush. So the flow is essentially, imagine a pencil and you're scribbling, it gets darker and darker and darker. That's what the flow is. And the density will set the limit upon which that brush is being applied. So no matter how hard you scribble, it will only be a certain level of darkness or brightness. So I'm happy, I usually work with maybe something like 50 and 80, but of course, if I need an intense brush, then I might put them both to 100 and the feather up. But for now this will be really good. I'm just gonna bring in a little bit of additional light here. It's gonna show me the point. If I tap O again, it's gonna reveal that, just like that. And then I'm going to darken the back of the head. This guy is so chill there, looking at us. Now that I've done that, I see that the eye itself needs just around the edge, just a little bit of brightening. And of course we can use the highlights. We can use the shadow sliders. It's such an amazing tool to really just edit selected areas in your images. I also think now that this color could be slightly desaturated, so one method would be to brush over it and then just desaturate in the brush. Otherwise we could go into the HSL as they've explained, and just remove that color channel from the image. In this case, I think this will work quite nicely. Now, stepping back, just taking a look at the photo. I think it's still a little too bright, so I'm just gonna darken it a little bit. I'm gonna push the contrast ever so slightly using the tone curve and actually mute the whites. So this is something we will cover more when we are looking at balancing the whites in our photos. But if I just bring this top right dot down, something like 96, it's going to give us more of a gray color across the photo and just help give that uniform appearance. So I think we're getting close now. Maybe it's a little too green, so we can go back to our HSL and just pull that across, clicking on the area of the color we wanna select and just dragging up and down. A little too saturated. One trick for the HSL, if you hold Command, Option and Shift, and then tap H, S or L, you can stay on the image with the dot and it will actually move between hue, saturation, and luminance. So in this case, I've tapped S, holding them down still, and then I can change the saturation, maybe the luminance, holding all of those Command, Option, Shift and L, and now I'm up with that or down with that. And there we have it. So Lightroom is a complicated system. It's gonna take a while to get an understanding of this. The best ways to just get out and shoot, grab a bunch of photos and just do some trial edits, run through every slider, see how it's affecting your shots. And of course, by the end of this module, I'm hoping that you'll have a pretty well rounded understanding of how you can use this as a creative tool and really push your edits. Not so that they're noticeably edited, but just creating an atmosphere that's closely aligned to your own interpretation of the scene. It's really fun, I'm super excited. So let's jump into the other field locations and other images and get started.