Lessons

Lesson Info

Preparing Image in Lightroom

So there are times when light room is not going to get you as far as you need to go because there's more power in editing and Photoshopped because there's just more tools, more selection capabilities, layering those kind of things. And so, um, I wanted to go over the workflow of going to photo shop first, and that's really important. So the first rule is this. Go a Sfar, as you possibly can go inside of light room first because it's a nondestructive editor. So you're editing in the raw special. Obviously, you need to be working in raw imagery in order to have that non destructive capability. But if you're shooting raw imagery and you're working inside of light room, you are non destructive, and so you're gonna have a better quality file if you can take it as far as you can go. So don't I don't think I'm gonna go to photo shop anyway. And so I'll just leave this image kind of finished and then start burning and dodging inside a photo shop because once you're in photo shop you're actuall...

y destroying the pixels. You're moving them around, and you just don't have the raw capability that you had back in light room. So do your burning and dodging. Do your brightening. Do your recovering highlights all that kind of stuff as far as you can go inside of light room. Once you are done in light room and you can't go any further, then you can go to photo shop and there's going to be what we call a round trip, and we're going to show you how to round trip to photo shop while we're showing you a couple really cool tools that you can use quickly inside a photo shop. And this is definitely not a photo shop class. This is a light room class, how to use it with photo shop for the things that you really need to do in photo shop. So I'm really interested in the things that I can't do in light room or that a really clunky and light room, and I want to go to photo shop to get something done quicker and maybe better. So the first thing that comes to mind is sometimes I'm in an image like this, which I really love this image. But I don't necessarily like all of these extra people here. I want this guy because I think he's interesting is a shadow. But I don't want any of these people here, and so I can go in with with light room and and use in the develop module. I can actually go into the spot tool and with the spot tool, I can zoom in and I can remove people from this image. But it's a little bit dicey is toe whether it's actually gonna work, because I can't get that guy. And so then I start to get these odd little lines and shadows and stuff like that. So the computation inside of light room for getting rid of major things, especially when there's a lot of detail around them, is a little bit dicey. So I'm I'm going to go to photo shop in order to get better power in my editing. But before I go there, I'm going to quickly do a little bit more adjustment on this file. So have exactly the way I want it to be, So I'm just gonna brighten it up just a tad, and then I'm gonna take the shadows up because those trees need a little bit more information in him. Actually, you know what I see When I do this, I'm getting too much brightness in the cloud. So I want to keep it that way, and I will actually do a little burning and dodging here inside the trees just with my brush tool. So I'm gonna take the shadows up, and then I'm just gonna come in here and paint in. My flow needs to be a little bit higher. I'm gonna just paint in on these trees so I get a little bit more information in the trees and because I have the capability to range masking here in light room, which I don't have that capability inside of Photoshopped, not as easily. And so I'm going to go in and do a range mask for a color. And Onley have it do green. So that way, if you look at the mask, you can see that them once. I once I give it a color, see how it masks out the sky so I don't spill into the sky. It's really easy to get really specific and very, very accurate inside of light room on your burning and dodging. So I would always do my burning and dodging here inside of light room first. And now that I have that all the way I want it, Um, and I'm gonna add just a little bit more texture, a little bit more clarity, and now I can actually bring that exposure back down because my trees air nice and bright, and I like that kind of dark moodiness of the photograph. So now that I'm ready to go, I'm going to. There's two different ways to do this. You can hit shift Command E, and that's export. So this is if you need to. Let's say you're doing a album for a client, and you need to send out 30 images Toe Photoshopped, because you're going to go on do some major retouching on all of these images. What you would do is you would export the images, and you would export them as photo shop. So in the export dialog box, you would go and create Photoshopped documents. 16 bit pro photo RGB. Now there's a lot of people who tell you Oh, just exported J Peg because it's smaller and it's faster and it's easier to edit and all that kind of stuff, but a J peg is not a quality file. J pegs should be considered print on Lee files. I would never edit a J pick. There's just not enough bit depth in it, so I want to keep it as close to raws possible. So I would do a a photoshopped document. Some people like tiffs. You could do it if Pro Photo RGB has the most color depth of any of those color spaces. So I'm going to choose that and then 16 bit that way, I have the most data I can possibly have. So when I'm doing that destructive editing and I'm moving those pixels around, they're not going to deteriorate as fast. So once I have that at the very top, I'm gonna add it back to this catalogue, and I'm gonna tell it to put it in the same folder is the original, and I'm gonna ask it to stack it with the original image putting the original below are above. I want that to be above the original. So now I'm gonna have a stack, and I can just simply export this file. And when I do that, it's going toe export the file and I'm doing it now. So it's exporting the file. And once it's done exporting this PSD, it's going to then add it back into the catalogue and it's gonna put it in a stack above the original so that I will always be looking at the original. So, um, if I look, if I right, click this and show it in the library now I have a PSD right here that's over the top of the original image. So I've got. And this is another tiff that I've edited already. So here's the PSD, and here's the raw and they look exactly the same because we haven't done anything to the PSD yet. So, um, that's one way to accomplish a round trip, so you can You can leave the room and you can export as many files is you need to edit and then they're going to come back in the light room. Now the reason that we put them back in light room is because light room is our digital hub. It's the place where all of our images should cyst sit and rest and wait for us so that we can find him again, Um, so I want to open it from light room and And to do that, I would just simply right click it and say, Edit in photo shop, or you can just hit Command E. And when you hit command E, it's gonna ask you whether you want to edit the original, whether you want to edit a copy or if you've done some adjustments over the top of of a Photoshopped document cause you can do that, you can go into the develop module after you've made a PSD. And that image also has the ability to be edited as well, although at that point you're now being destructive because it's not a raw image. So I have the ability to right click this edit in photo shop, and I can choose whether I want to include the adjustments I've made on top of the photograph, whether one edit a copy of it. So I make a duplicate or edit the original, so that's one way to do it. And the only the only reason you would ever do it that way is if you needed to do a whole bunch of them. Um, but if you are going to be editing just the one, um So I'm gonna go back here to my my collection. If you're just gonna be editing one image, this is the one image you want to edit. All you need to do is go to the raw image and click command E. And it's going to open it in Photoshop. So it's going it right now. It's preparing it to be edited. It made a copy, set it right next to the original, and now it opened it in photo shop so that we can edit that image.

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