The Basics - Details and Sharpening

Lesson Info

The Basics - Details and Sharpening

move down here to detail. So details gonna be your your sharpening section sharpening and noise removal. Okay, You're not really going to see it unless you're zoomed into 100%. So what we will first want to do here is go to my navigator and you see you got fit. Fill 1 to 1, and then you got one that lets you change it here. So 1 to 1 would be 100% and then 4 to 1. I can actually change that to be whatever I want that will really zoom in. But I'll just go one toe one here and if you guys are looking at this So this is an interesting an interesting example here, Uh, I think we've become obsessed with sharpness, Right, Everybody, everybody in the watching live can see, but the audience just kind of chuckled, but I think we've become obsessed with sharpness and and so true story. I'm walking through the airport yesterday and I was walking past the store. Is was in the Minneapolis airport. I was walking past the store, actually had some prints in one of the gift shops, and they stopped me. ...

I was walking at a distance. It was probably at least from me to you guys and they stopped me. I came closer to the window. I'm looking at the prince was a pretty cool, you know, I actually wanted to see, like, the locations. If I ever go to Minneapolis to shoot that, I'd have something to go shoot. So I walk in the store and I do what every photographer does. That's right. It's not good enough to stand at an arm's length away from the photo. You have to put it up against your nose, and I put it up against my nose like every photographer should. And it wasn't tax sharp. You know, their sex ed a lot of blurred to it. There was a lot of blurred. There's a lot of noise, but you know what? When I'm walking past a store and at a normal distance most and standing there looking at it, I didn't see it. So if you look at this photo, the whole point of that is that if you look at this photo, it is not by any means tax. Sharp reason being is because there's like 25 mile an hour wind gusts up on top of this hill and I could not stabilize my tripod. I'm hanging the bag off of it, and I have the bag laid on the ground, so it's not swinging, but I'm hanging my bag off of it. I'm like, I'm basically ready to hang off my tripod. I could not stabilize it, That's how like I'm looking through the viewfinder and I see it going like this. And here I am in this, like great place and I'll never I'm not gonna be there again for God knows how long I can't get a sharp photo. And so I just tried something. I put, um, vibration reduction on my lens on which are usually supposed to turn off when you put it on tripod because that can create vibration. But because my camera was moving, vibration reduction actually work that I was able to get a mostly sharp photo. So is it tax sharp? Like I think we've we've become to think we need today. No, but it's pretty close. A little tip for you if it's ever so windy that your tripods moving turn vibration reduction on. All right, so we're gonna crank up the amount slider here and the amounts lateral do that's really gonna give us a good And there's a lot of detail we can pull out of this photo. You know there's no skin, there's no sky toe over texture. So if I look at before and by the way, if you guys didn't know, um, every light room palette has that little, uh, toggle switch in it, so I can click on that and get the before in the after I'll crank my radius up for most of our high megapixel cameras. We have today, you know, megapixel. 1.5 is a good radius. You want to make sure is you don't go too high cause you start to see halos around everything in the photo on detail. I'll get away with a lot of detail on this again. There's no there's no sky or smooth areas that Aiken texturizing this, and that's when I want to stay away from it. So I get away with quite a bit of sharpening. Um, if you look, that's the before, and that's after all, Zoom way way. That's too far. We'll just have to stay there. So that's our That's our sharpening phase noise reduction. I don't really have any noise t removed from here for most of our landscape work, we're gonna be on a tripod, and for most of those times, we're not gonna have the need to crank up our I S O so were generally not gonna have super noisy photos. But if I did at this fate, this is the spot where I would do noise reduction, cause I'm right here. Um, but again, we just We generally don't have much of that problem with landscapes. Alright. Ah, let's see. Lens corrections. This one's pretty easy. Guys don't do a whole lot with my landscape work with lions corrections. This comes into play more with architecture. There's a little check box here, enable profile corrections. It's under the basic panel and I'll turn that on and you'll see it kind of did two things kind there's not. This is a very wide angle photo, so it's not doing too much kind of unwarranted a little bit, but it just gets rid of a little bit of that edge. Vignette ing. Okay. And there's a different here goes in a second. You're going to see me ad have been yet back to this vignette we get from lenses is usually not pleasing. It's usually like like hard little vignettes right on on the edges. Here, what will usually do after that is go down to the effects panel and I'll add a vignette, and that's a little bit more, please, not just meant to kind of draw your attention into the photo. Generally, we're not putting really important things at the edges of our photos. So generally most of the important stuff is going to be toward the center ish area in the vineyard. Just kind of helps you settle in, so I'll darken it a little bit. I'll take my midpoint and I'll make it encroach and you can see it. I can put it toward the outside. That's like, what lens vignette? It looks like, right, those hard, little things on the outside. I'm gonna bring this in toward the center and then the key here because what's gonna happen is I'm not gonna keep it this dark, but you can tell it's been vignette ID. The key is is to open up that feather and then pull back on some of the darkness here because what that will do is smooth out the transition in the bin yet get you one second. Um, all right, so just kind of throw that on there. We usually want to go dark. You don't go light, no matter how much you're tempted. You ever hear the saying nothing? Says 1985 like a white vignette like glamour, glamour shots all over again. So we have just had a little bit of a vignette there, and ah, and that will pretty much take care of it. So what I'll do is in a photo a little larger on screen and you can take a look. So that's Ah, that's our before photo. And that's our after before after cool. We got a question. Yeah, I had a question about the feather function. So I've noticed that when I take the feather function in the vignette about 3/ of the way, it looks what I typically see and other photographers work. But when you take it all the way, it does something kind of weird where it goes in every which direction. I'm just wondering. I mean, usually you're not supposed to take the slider all the way to the right. I know that. But I'm just wondering what it's doing. And I just if there's a function, and would you ever use that for anything? Feather or roundness? Feather feather. Okay, So not quite sure. I mean, the best way to explain what feather does is really let me just crank up the darkness. So if you look, if I take feather all the way to zero, that's what it would look like. And then in kind of see, it just kind of smooths out just kind of fade. That transition from from where ever that line would kind of be kind of fades it on either end. So I don't think you're doing anything wrong. It sounds like it's working right. But we chat after, if you I mean, thank you. Your Okay. Uh, so that is that's example one. So let's let's kind of pick it up a notch here to take it to another example. I'm gonna usually hide the left hand side. What I what? I do have that. Then this really depends. This depends on your workflow. So this is this is a basics class. Um, And as I start to even as when I'm working on something. I'm quick adjustments. But even sometimes as I work toward larger adjustments, sometimes I have I have presets. I have a preset workflow. So things like what we just did here, especially if you're starting out, that's a good time to consider creating presets. You know, I find that a lot of times, you know, I moved the shadows. I moved the highlights. I had clarity. I had a little saturation vignette, those air, those air great things to, you know, to go through here and, you know, move the highlights. Move the shadows. Maybe warm the photo a little bit. A little bit of clarity. Throw vignette. I'm not gonna go too much into it, but go to your preset section. And if I can give somebody starting out, any advice it would be makes him presets for this stuff because it just makes the development process easier. So you gotta do is just click on that little when you make changes is click on that little plus sign and just call it, You know, basic adjustments. What I'll usually do is I'll do like light, basic adjustments and like heavy basic adjustments, and I can kind of click between the two. But all you do is just turn on the settings that you just changed. What else did I do? Been getting? You just create a preset. Just turn on the settings that you just change and it saves it. It's like a little formula here so that I can just go back and I can click on it. But I have some Have some I I have something I call in my workflow presets, but what I usually do is I just kind of click through. Um, look at the daylight cloudy shade. Do exposure changes. I can go brighter, darker. I want to go darker, toning. Remember what we did before. So they're subtle toning. There's normal toning, normal with lighter shadow, so you can kind of move through and start to work through as you create your preset arsenal. That would be the best way that I would do it. So I mentioned this for two reasons. One, because I do think presets are good workflow, especially for people that are starting out, too. I showed you what I created a preset. If you're the lazy type if you go over to matt. K photo dot com. I've got all these brushes and Grady INTs for the sky and presets and stuff like that. So Matt k M a T t k photo dot com and it's like the whole But I Whenever I come to creativelive, I do it for, like, 70% off so we can go buy the whole bundle there. So either way, whether you buy him, I have no problem showing you what's in them. But I think that's a good workflow, especially when you're starting now. Um, okay, So as another example here, let's let's start to work through this photo What I do overall exposure and contrast. You know why I bring the exposure down? That's not what I want. So cranky exposure up a little bit. Here, bring out some of the shadows. Ah, highlights. So highlights is a new one. We really didn't. We didn't see highlights in its true what I think of the way that I use it mostly in the last photo, but see what it does to the sky. Okay, so highlights will let us tone down the sky a little bit and we can even make. We can go to exposure, make it a little bit darker. And I think what you'll find sometimes guys is sometimes this is pushing pole. You know, I'd love to say I do this, this, this and this. But the reality is is I do this, this this and then sometimes I go back and I have to tweak it. It is a lot of push and pull. When we're in the studio, we can control these things. When you're out here, you can't control. You can't control the shadows. You can't control the light. You're not gonna not gonna blow a flash onto the trees and be able to get a balanced exposure. So we have to push and pull a little bit. Now it can open up my shadows a little bit, and what you'll see is it's doing it a very large sweeping way. And that's okay. You'll get great results from this later on. In the advanced class, I do talk about what we we get advanced where we start to go in a photo shop when we start making selections and we start really precisely attacking parts of those photos do I do that on every photo? No, I only do that on, like, the best of the best, but I think this is gonna be a photo on a print. I'm gonna print that big, and it's a big portfolio piece of mine. I'll spend extra time, but most of the time I do what we're doing here. All right? Whites and blacks option are all click did that before? Get a white point. Now, that cloud I'm going to say I'm gonna push it just to about White Black. Same thing Option are all click and drag it to the left. I get a good black point. Clarity. Clarity will push a little bit of contrast in their force again. You know, I don't think I need any saturation in this photo. I think I think we're pretty well saturated, So not gonna tweak that at all here. Hs l saturation weaken. I can experiment. I might want toe punch up the blue just a little bit. And that's one of the reasons why I didn't do the saturation slider, cause that just blasts colored everything. But I don't mind kind of punching up the blue a little bit. And then under Luminant, I might pull back on the blue just a bit, almost as if you had a polarizer, you know, kind of darkens the sky bit. All right, so that's Rhs. L will go down here to detail again. I will zoom in and crank up my mount slider radius again. 1.41 point five. Knowing you have to think about it, just do it and then detail. We add a little bit more texture in there. I'm kind of check out the trees. I think that's gonna be a pretty key area. All right. Now, let's take a look at that masking slider, cause it'll it'll affect what we're doing here on a zoom in a little bit more. Remember, in the last image, I was talking about the texture that you'll start to get in smooth areas, skin skies, that's that texture than talking about going to enhance it just so we can really, really see it. All right, so now you can see that texture. We start to get in the sky. If you see that you can always go to your masking slider and it will pull it out of there see a difference. So generally leaves it over everything else, All the textured stuff. But it's gonna pull it out of most of the sky area. The higher you go, the more it'll clear from the sky. But then you start to clear it from some of the other areas, too. Now, I'm not gonna go that high because we don't have to go that high with it. But I just wanted to show you what the difference Waas.

Class Description

Lessons

1. The Basics - Toning Your Photos
2. The Basics - Details and Sharpening
3. Landscape Image Cleanup
4. Stylizing and Coloring Your Photos
5. Make Your Skies Look Awesome
6. Use Brushes in Your Landscapes