Lessons

Lesson Info

Travel

Welcome to another full editing demonstration this time we're taking this shot right now which is kind of like a travel shot something you would capture when you're out traveling or if you live in a beautiful place like this and we are taking this photo on the left which is pretty, pretty awesome. Already in turning it into something that's a little bit more, wow, a little bit more artistic on the right. If you want to follow along, make sure you open up the travel photo file and as always make sure your updated to the latest version of Lightroom. We are on the currently while I'm recording this CC 2018 The 7.3 .1 release. So if you have that version or any new version, you should be fine opening and using these files awesome. So let's get into it. So I'm going to go into the photo the un edited photo. Now first things first I always crop in and in this photo it's relatively good. But the only thing I don't like are these plants on the right hand side. Sometimes I like plants surroundi...

ng my photos to frame a subject or to frame the photo but in this case I think they're just mostly distracting. So I'm just going to crop in. I'm actually going to set this To a 16 x nine edit. I personally like a lot of 16 x nine edits just because it's good for a desktop backdrop for a screen saver for the screensaver on my phone or something like that And I'm just going to leave it right around there. I am centering this right in the middle. If you want to go rule of thirds, you might want to do something like that. But I'm just going to leave it centered. Cool. So now the next thing I'm going to do is play with the exposure before we get into the color. Now the color is something that was done mostly with brushes and adjustment filters and the graduated and radial filters will get into that first with the overall exposure. Basically I want to silhouette the people in here and I want to bring down some of these slider. So I'm going to bring down the blacks. I'm gonna bring down the shadows, going to bring down even the highlights to get a little bit more information in that sky. Now with the whites, I'm just going to kind of boost them just a little bit to bring back some of that contrast. Now the people in here in the boat, they aren't perfectly silhouetted, but this is an amazing photo. This one's from, we saturate dot com a great place to find photos to practice editing with and they perfectly timed the shot of the fishermen throwing out their net and you can still see them in the boat. It's, it's quite amazing. So this is already a cool photo. You might want to just boost the warmth and then call it a day. We're gonna go a little bit more experimental. I can tell that the sky is blue. It's just the fact that it's early morning that it's a little overexposed that we don't have that blue in the sky. So we're going to bring that back also with the water. We might want to bring back some of that blue as well. So first things first, I'm going to use a graduated filter. I'm just going to click and drag over and I don't mind that I'm getting some of the mountains because I'm going to use a range mask. Turn the range mask onto luminescence. Now let's make sure we have our show selected mask overlay on that's o on your keyboard. And if we just bring up the range, I want to make sure that I'm just selecting mostly the sky. I don't mind if I get a little bit of the mountains, especially the ones in the distance because whatever I, due to the sky, it's nice to have it blends sort of gently into the mountain as well. So you can adjust the smoothness to get super sharp or a little bit smoother to increase the blend just a little bit great. So with this one I'm going to turn the D haze up so I get a little bit more information and then I have two options for adding blue to the sky. I can first take my temperature slider and drag it to the left, which does a little bit, but I might also have to go into my color and choose to add some color this way. So I'm going to do that, pick something a little bit darker blue, something right about there when I have the hue down, that's way too purple. When I have the hue down, then I can play with the saturation, bring that up, bring it down. Now this is looking pretty good, but it's not as strong as I would like. I can do a couple of things to try to increase the saturation. I can bring down the overall exposure a little bit, maybe just bringing down the highlights a little bit just to bring out more of that detail in the sky. And also that in turn makes this color and temperature affect more of the sky. So that's starting to look pretty good. Next things I'm going to do the same for the water down here. I kind of want to get some blue into the water in the foreground. So what I'm gonna do is with these settings, I'm just going to click and drag up and look at that. Now that is way, way, way, not what I want. So I'm going to turn on my range mask, I'm going to turn on luminescence, press o to see what I'm selecting and then I'm just going to drag, let's see actually I'm not exactly sure if I want the highlights or the shadows. So if we just have the highlights or just the shadows more, I think I more want the shadows in this shot or in this part of the frame so that's looking pretty darn good. Cool. So that's starting to look good. If I want more blue which is something that you might want. I'm going to try using a radial filter so I'm gonna choose the radial filter, going to click and drag it over our boat, something like that, we are selecting everything on the outside and then again I'm going to just drop the temperature up here. Now this starts to really, really add blue a lot because we're doubling it. So what you might want to do is decrease the saturation a little bit or just tone back, dial back the temperature adjustment. I might just try d haze just to see what the ads. So it's doubling the D. Haze that we added on top. Maybe just a little bit cool. I might erase a little bit of this so I'm gonna take my brush, we're gonna go to the eraser, gonna turn down my flow and I'm just going to erase a little bit down here because I don't really want it as strong on the bottom as I would on the top, Something like that looking pretty good. Alright next I'm going to use my brush and I want to brush on and really make the fishermen silhouetted. If I zoom in here, you can see that, you can still see a little bit of detail, which maybe you want. But I want this to be completely silhouetted. So I'm just going to brush over without auto mask on. I'm going to brush over here and then I'm going to turn on my luminous mask. Let me press o to see what I'm selecting and then I'm just going to set it. So I'm selecting just the fishermen. Something like that's pretty good. Let's increase or decrease the smoothness actually something like that. And then I'm going to erase this part right here in the top left because I don't really want to select that. Turn up the flow so that it really erases it. So now let's start making adjustments. So I'm going to turn off the overlay and I'm just going to bring down the shadows, bring down the blacks and you can see that really starts to silhouette the fishermen. Now I might go in and increase the range, maybe increase the smoothness so it looks a little bit more natural, something like that looks pretty good. Cool. So that's starting to look good. One thing that I also want to do is really make these hills a little bit more silhouetted so I'm gonna click new. I'm gonna brush over these hills in the background and the foreground, the foreground hills are pretty dark already I'm going to turn my range mask on. Let's try color and see what that does press oh to show selected mask overlay. Let's choose this color right here. See how it does, It does a really, really good job. I'm going to leave my settings as is press oh, so it turns it off and now I'm just going to bring down my shadows a little bit more and made the blacks so it's really just making that part of the photo more contrasting more silhouetted. The last thing I'm going to do is add a little bit of more warmth to these clouds are the mist on the water and have it also come down here on the reflection of the water. So with my new brush, auto mask is off, going to make the size a little bit smaller. Turn on selected mask overlay. I'm just going to brush over the mist like so and then up here into the water, something like this. Now if I want, I can erase parts of this that I don't want to be affected really. You can also turn down the flow and a race and that kind of is like a half breath brush stroke. It's kind of less opaque and it kind of blends it in more. Now we haven't really done anything yet. We're just making our selection. Okay looking good. Okay, so now if I play with the warmth, see how that's starting to work. Now this is looking pretty good. I might go back into our brush actually turned down the density and then just brush over here. Just a little bit just to actually bring a little bit of warmth back. I know I use the radio brush to add some coolness and some blue to the water, but just kind of blending it in just a little bit more. Now if I turn off all my brushes, you can see what's happening. So this is the brush that silhouetted the fishermen. It added warmth to the mist and then it also silhouetted these mountains just playing around with, if you want it to be a little bit more pink. Nah, I like that. More yellow, standard warmth. Cool. So let's see the before and after backslash button before after. Before after. Now, it's good to go back, look somewhere else, go get a snack, take a break and then come back to this photo and see does it look natural to you now? It might be a little bit over edited in the sense that it might not look completely natural. But does it look good to you? Does it look like a piece of art now for this one, I would probably spend a little bit more time just making subtle adjustments to the way the sky looks to the colors themselves so that perhaps it's not as punchy. Perhaps it's a little bit more subtle. One quick way you can do that with an overall adjustment is bringing down the saturation overall or bringing down the vibrance overall. Something like that because when you start adding all this color, it's natural for you to just be like, wow, this is looking cool. But then you look at it overall and it might start to look a little bit unnatural or maybe you come back and you're like, oh maybe I do want some warmth to the whole photo anyways, I think the best advice I have is to go back, look at it, take a break and see if there's any changes you want to make before you export and share it with the world or print it. Alright, I hope you enjoyed this fun travel photo. Let me know if you have any questions. Otherwise, we'll see you in another lesson.